Berdyaev & Modern Anti-Modernism – Bertonneau

Nicolas Berdyaev and Modern Anti-Modernism

By Thomas F. Bertonneau

 

A paradox of modernity is that, from its beginnings in Eighteenth Century rationalism, it has been accompanied by a veritable polyphony of dissent. The advocates of rationalism – and of progress – have inveterately denounced this heterogeneous arousal of dissident judgment under the sweeping term reaction; but that term, reaction or reactionism, applies much more appropriately to the Enlightenment itself than it does to the critique of the Enlightenment, or to the critique of the Enlightenment’s swift self-transfiguration into Revolution.

Already in the early Nineteenth Century various strands of Romanticism partook in the gathering critique of rallying progress. The development of a poet like William Wordsworth from a youthful admirer of the Jacobins to a Tory, whose ballad-like poems celebrate tradition against the encroachments of method, offers a case in point; and Wordsworth’s French contemporary Alfred de Vigny despised the Revolution as a recrudescence of primitive violence springing from hatred of all dignity and form. Deeply rooted custom is not necessarily arbitrary. On the contrary, tradition implies wisdom beyond the reductively rational for which method, political or technical, is a paltry and counterproductive substitute. Community likewise differs from and comes prior to the state, which in comparison to the community is abstract and even alienating. While it is true that there was a decidedly leftwing Romanticism – Percy Shelley in England and the “Junges Deutschland” poets in the German principalities – largely the movement was, in its context, traditionalist, sometimes stridently so.

The same could be said for the mid-Nineteenth Century developments of Romanticism. Charles Baudelaire was not a liberal and neither was his Danish contemporary Søren Kierkegaard. Friedrich Nietzsche early associated the modern world with superficiality and mediocrity; later, modernity appeared to him as active nihilism.

The Western European response to the burgeoning rationalization and politicization of life had echoes in the East. Alexander Pushkin took repeatedly as his theme the chaos, psychological and moral, that results from the modern abolition of custom and form; the same could be said of Mikhail Lermontov, whose medium was prose, and whose archetypal anti-heroes, most notably Pechorin in A Hero of our Time (1840), body forth the symptoms of modern anomie. Pechorin has no place in the rational, bureaucratic Russia of his time, but he also lacks the resources of traditional form and custom: Pechorin becomes demonic; he can believe in nothing outside himself, while that very self remains unformed, immature, and incapable of supporting an existence of the disposition, mens sana in corpore sano. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s demonic men all resemble Pechorin, being the orphaned offspring of a stricken world. When Russia “received” Nietzsche in the 1890s, the rich Slavic soil was well prepared. None received the Götzendämmerung-message so eagerly as Nicolas Berdyaev (1874 – 1948). As Lesley Chamberlain writes in Motherland (2007), Berdyaev was “the Russian Christian answer to Nietzsche,” who “believed in the spiritual benefits of culturally nourished imagination.”

I. In Chamberlain’s seemingly positive judgment, Berdyaev “was terribly necessary in Russia,” a crisis-wracked nation fated to live out its version of the Western crisis in an exaggerated, parodic, and tragic form. Chamberlain reminds her readers that Berdyaev “fought Communism in Russia as a moral evil much as Nietzsche battled against herd mentality and cultural leveling in the West.” Berdyaev also paid the price for his outspokenness, when Lenin exiled him in 1922 along with a boatload of philosophers and intellectuals. Chamberlain concludes, however, that, despite Berdyaev’s insight that, “knowledge and ethics have to be created for the good of mankind,” and despite his insistent critique of pragmatism and utilitarianism, he should “be stripped of an unconvincing attempt to rank himself alongside Plato and [Immanuel] Kant.” Chamberlain charges Berdyaev with “vagueness” and “extreme reluctance to be pinned down.” She borrows Berdyaev’s own qualified term “mystical anarchist” to describe the philosopher tout court, linking him, beyond Nietzsche, with Angelus Silesius and Jakob Boehme, and implying a kind of nebulous religiosity. Not incidentally, Berdyaev himself acknowledged the Boehme and Silesius connections and frequently justified them. Chamberlain’s remarks communicate with a second-hand idea of Berdyaev as prolix and unsystematic writer in whose rambling books self-opinion ran too high.

As for Berdyaev in Berdyaev’s eyes, the autobiographical Self-Knowledge (opus posthumous, 1950) declares him stylistically an aphorist. The truth lies somewhere between the modern, skeptical writer’s casual pejoratives and Berdyaev’s own sometimes wishful self-estimate. Aphorisms appear in his work, but they take their place in a species of prose that never exactly hurries to put a period. Blame in these matters lies more with modern impatience than with Berdyaev’s manner of exposition. With Berdyaev, patience pays off.

Chamberlain rightly recommends Self-Knowledge, which she refers to under its British title of Dream and Reality, as the best introduction to Berdyaev. In Self-Knowledge, Berdyaev writes of his intellectual Pilgrim’s Progress and he confesses his intellectual debts. In the chapter that Berdyaev devotes to his tentative Marxism and his subsequent deliberate break with revolutionary circles, he acknowledges his relation both to the Romantics, Russian and otherwise, and their successors. “What does romanticism really mean,” Berdyaev asks. He answers, “If it is the opposite of classicism I must undoubtedly style myself a romantic.” Dissociating himself strongly from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Berdyaev nevertheless considers that “romanticism stands for everything that is human” insofar as it constitutes an intuitive critique of imperious rationality, dogmatic method, and abstract system. On the other hand, Berdyaev does not want anyone to mistake his own Romanticism for “high-pitched and spectacular emotionalism,” or “self-indulgence in the imaginary depths of life,” which is how he evaluates the author of the Confessions.

Being a Romantic means for Berdyaev that one takes a transcendental perspective. “I proceeded from Kant in my conception of the theory of knowledge,” Berdyaev writes; yet Berdyaev is also a Platonist, who thinks that, with respect to the noumenon or “thing-in-itself,” “Plato is right whilst Kant is wrong”: Direct knowledge of the “thing-in-itself” is possible, according to Self-Knowledge.

Berdyaev adds another twist when he avers that, “Kant is a profoundly Christian thinker, more so than Thomas Aquinas,” presumably more so than Plato despite the assimilation of Plato in Patristic writers like Justin Martyr and Augustine. Above all, however, and because Berdyaev has “put Freedom, rather than Being, at the basis of [his] philosophy,” he regards himself as a Christian philosopher, or more particularly as a Christian Existentialist. In an aphorism: “The mystery of the world abides in freedom: God desired freedom and freedom gave rise to tragedy in the world.” It is the case, according to Berdyaev, that, “freedom alone should be recognized as possessing a sacred quality, whilst all other things to which a sacred character has been assigned by men since history began ought to be made null and void.” It follows that Berdyaev, in his role as philosopher, sees himself “as pre-eminently a liberator,” Christianity itself “Having called upon my allegiance as emancipation.” Berdyaev even ventures a paradox, writing that, “a Russian bishop once said of me that I was ‘the captive of freedom.’” Remarking Berdyaev’s dedication to his singular principle, one easily sees how, at first, he could embroil himself with Marxists and revolutionaries and how, inevitably, he would revolt against them and reorient himself spiritually and intellectually.

In sum, if a summary were possible, Berdyaev stands in a Romantic tradition and in a contemporary relation to a species of Existentialism stemming from Kierkegaard, with further antecedents in Plato and Augustine, and his thinking is strongly yet qualifiedly flavored by Nietzsche’s critique of modernity.

Like Plato and to some extent like Kant, like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and even like Marx, Berdyaev thought that philosophy might exercise its emancipating power through the revelatory clarification of ideas, by a gesture that amounts to epistemological shock therapy. Like Plato with his opposition of opinion to truth and like Marx with his assignment of truth to the cognizance of a particular social class, Berdyaev begins his philosophical analysis by discerning types of awareness. “I came to assume,” he writes, “a ‘primary’ and a ‘secondary’ form of knowledge and, correspondingly, a ‘primary’ and a ‘secondary’ consciousness, from which knowledge springs.” Whereas the “primary consciousness” relates to the existing subject, with the individual, and with an accessible world in which the individual participates, the “secondary consciousness” relates to “the process of objectification, whereby reality is seen as broken up into the realms of subject and object.” In Berdyaev’s later work another term, “estrangement” (ostrananie), comes into usage in connection with the term “objectification.”

As the narrowly scientific or experimental view of the world extends its sway, as it insists on treating everything as though it were an object, people, in imitating and internalizing the false conviction, experience alienation from the world. The assumption that people are cut off from the world sure enough mucks up their relation to that world so that they experience a feeling of isolation and forlornness. For Berdyaev, “the objective world is the product of estrangement: it is the fallen world, disintegrated and enslaved.” Berdyaev uses what, even for conservatives today, is an aggressively religious vocabulary.

Life in revolutionary circles heightened Berdyaev’s own sense of estrangement. In Self-Knowledge, Berdyaev remarks how “the revolutionary intelligentsia seemed to live all the time under the shadow of military discipline… But I preferred to fight on my own, and would not agree to accept military orders or organized group-morality.” Although exiled by the Czarist regime to Siberia along with others adjudged guilty of insurrectionism, Berdyaev could not identify with the radicals. What he calls “their asceticism, their narrowness, their moral rigorism and their stuffy political religiosity” repelled him. He concluded that, “every political revolution is doomed and becomes stupefied by its own surfeit,” and that, ‘the subject of true revolution must be man, rather than the masses or the body politic.” Indeed, in the passage, Berdyaev amends his own vocabulary, prescinding from the categorical man to the unique instance of the person: “Only a personalistic revolution can properly be called a ‘revolution.’” In a similar formulation he writes, “I understood that ‘spirit’ signifies freedom and revolution, while ‘matter’ spells necessity and reaction, and spreads reaction in the minds and hearts of the revolutionaries themselves.”

Berdyaev foresaw as early as 1917 that the Bolshevik revolution would demand the humiliating “sacrifice” of all individual prerogatives and every speck of actual political or any other kind of freedom.

II. While piling up names perhaps discommodes the reader, it seems not impertinent to mention how harmoniously Berdyaev’s thinking chimes with that of others who began to make themselves known in traditionalist-conservative circles the West in the 1920s, in the aftermath of the 1914-1918 War and the Wilsonian, “progressive” agenda for reconstructing the world. Berdyaev records his perception, at that time, of a shattered cosmos. So too in The Waste Land, published in the year when Berdyaev arrived, a refugee, in Berlin, T. S. Eliot portrayed a frgmented world and an atomized, estranged humanity, living anxiously in want of the spiritual nourishment, the redemption, that only the inherited forms of tradition, now obliterated, might have supplied. So too Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (1919 & 1922) and René Guénon in The Crisis of the Modern Age (1927) wrote of the dominion of technique, which reductively understands everything on the model of billiard-ball mechanics and under the sign of pure quantity. In Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923), George Santayana, a former teacher of Eliot, defended the value of custom and faith in the conduct of life.

Berdyaev belonged to that prophetic moment. Looking back on his career in June 1940 – when, as he wrote, “whole worlds are crashing in ruin, and other worlds, unknown and predictable, are coming into being” – he questioned “whether this fallen and stricken world, which paralyses and crushes man by its inexorable necessities, can be possessed of true, original reality,” or “whether man is not driven by the very nature of things to look for a reality that transcends this world.”

Berdyaev inclined to answer yes to his own question. His career consisted of four decades of contemplation, in preparation for writing, for the purpose of filling in the details of his answer. In Self-Knowledge, on which the labor seems to have been long, he tells of his recognition that for him the religious impulse would be fulfilled in Russian Orthodoxy, while yet he suspected, rather as Kierkegaard had, that Christendom, Orthodox or otherwise, had “become a sociological phenomenon,” and as such dispirited and denatured. Nor does he spare the clerisy from criticism: Priests being men, they are fallible; some are even obnoxious, and bishops are intolerable bores. For Berdyaev: “God is freedom” and “God never operates through necessity, but always through freedom; and he never forces recognition of himself.” That is an observation more apt in our time even than in the 1940s. “It is a grave fatal error,” Berdyaev writes, “to ask for and rely on safety devices and infallible criteria in our religious life, since this life involves all the boundless possibilities, risks and insecurities of freedom.” In Self-Knowledge, Berdyaev also conveniently nominates five of his books that best complete his intention to explain himself: The Meaning of the Creative Act (1914), The Destiny of Man (1937), Solitude and Society (1934), Spirit and Reality (1946), and Slavery and Freedom (1939).

The Meaning of the Creative Act was Berdyaev’s second book, written during the declension of his revolutionary period, partly in Italy, where he traveled with his companion Lydia just before the outbreak of the war. Berdyaev devotes a chapter of Self-Knowledge to summarizing this ambitious authorial sally and to critiquing it for attempting too much. In Berdyaev’s improvisatory, non-systematic, worked-out-over-a-lifetime philosophy, creativity maintains an indissoluble bond with freedom. Creativity, not limited to the obvious forms of artistic creativity but best exemplified by them, works by spontaneous volition. The creator chooses to create. He chooses to work in reference to the plastic canons of esthetic law; so while creation is not a spasm, it is also not a mechanical act. In the retrospective discussion of The Meaning of the Creative Act in Self-Knowledge, creativity finds a place in the tension between Romanticism, with which Berdyaev qualifiedly identifies, and Classicism, for which he lacks sympathy.

The “gift of creativity” having its source “from God,” man exercises that gift “by virtue of his freedom, and in his capacity of creator”; never is man as creator a “mere passive object in the hands of God.” Creativity maintains relation also to “redemption and salvation,” and not only because it is a type of Imitatio Dei. According to Berdyaev, the “fallacy of classicism,” recognizable as the fallacy of the Enlightenment and its utopian offshoots, consists in the mania for “perfection in the finite, within this contingent and fallen world of ours.”

For the Romantic, by contrast, “the creative act… is eschatological,” pointing to that which lies beyond finitude. The sagacious mortal creator, knowing that flaws and incompleteness will mar his creation, reconciles himself to this knowledge. Berdyaev developed his “eschatological” view of existence, in which a transcendental orientation conditions the sense of life and informs the principled indictment of objectification, in one of his last books, The Beginning and the End (1947; English edition, 1952).

Berdyaev sometimes called himself a “Personalist” and his philosophy, insofar as it cohered, “Personalism.” A creator, artist or otherwise, must first of all become a person. A person, moreover, defines himself at first by negation, through specifying his difference from the cue-seeking masses; and that differentiation is itself a witting, creative act. In The Beginning and the End, Berdyaev writes, “He who is most individualized comes tumbling down into the conditions of socialization at its maximum,” entering the realm of “coercive objectiveness.” Berdyaev assumes always a fallen world. Because society belongs to the world, society too is fallen. Modern man especially “lives in a disintegrated world” where an artificial and enslaving “collectivism” or “sociomorphism” has imposed itself in default of a vanished “true community,” which oriented itself to “the Kingdom of God.” For the self-aware person, solitude beckons urgently. Solitude, “a late product of advanced culture,” operates in the modern context as monastic asceticism did in the medieval context.

In solitude the individual person overthrows “sociomorphism” and rediscovers the grace of his freedom. The “Personalist” will therefore also be an aristocrat, a label that Berdyaev never rejected, but that indeed he applied unapologetically to himself even though critics held it against him.

In The Meaning of the Creative Act, before the worst of the cataclysms that impinged on his life, Berdyaev had written concerning the Renaissance of the Quattrocento that, “in it Christianity encountered paganism, and this encounter deeply wounded the spirit of man.” The earlier Renaissance of the Trecento was, by contrast, “all tinged with Christian color,” as in Giotto and the religious painters and the philosopher-mystic Joachim di Fiora. For Berdyaev, that early Renaissance was not only Christian, but by virtue of its Christianity, “Romantic”: It bodied forth in plastic and in thought the Christian-Transcendental impulse – the infinity-seeking impulse – that the Gothic Middle Ages derived from the Gospel. The sudden welling-up of antique motifs therefore suggests to Berdyaev a catastrophic diremption. Indeed, he sees the Quattrocento as the beginning of modernity precisely in the sense that it is the beginning of a whole series of cultural fault lines, which thereafter proliferate and widen in the fractured substrate of Western life. The Pagan, for Berdyaev, is much more of this world, of finitude and limitation, than the Christian. The Christian would overcome nature through spirit; the Pagan would accord itself with nature.

In a fascinating analysis of Sandro Botticelli, Berdyaev remarks how his Venuses ascend towards heaven while his Madonnas descend to the Earth, an irresolvable contradiction: “In the whole life work of Botticelli there is a sort of fatal failure.” If the viewer cannot but approach Botticelli’s canvasses “without a strange inner trepidation,” that is because Botticelli’s is an art of trepidation, in which the “canonical” takes fright before the spirit’s soaring impulse, preventing that impulse from fulfilling itself. Rationality strangles creativeness in its crib.

III. Implicit in Chamberlain’s characterization of Berdyaev is the sameness of his books, a characterization that the books themselves swiftly belie. The Beginning and the End is abstract, avoiding specific references; The Meaning of the Creative Act is replete with specific references. Self-Knowledge, although reticent, is personal; The End of Our Time (1924; 1933) and The Meaning of History are historically specific, immersed in the actual. While Berdyaev’s themes persistently recur in book after book, his total range of knowledge, interest, and reference might easily humble his readers. His range approaches Spengler’s range of knowledge, interest, and reference. Like Spengler, Berdyaev never earned a degree; he kept failing his examinations and eventually abandoned the attempt to pass them. He nevertheless knew more than his professors, as The Meaning of the Creative Act showed just before the outbreak of the Great War. Berdyaev was a philosophy faculty, a literature faculty, and an art-history faculty bodied forth in one perpetually self-educating and slightly eccentric person. In his appreciation of the French Symbolist School in poetry, for example, he anticipates the vindication of those artists in the best of their post-World War Two exegetes, such as Anna Balakian and Robert Greer Cohn. When Berdyaev makes a late-in-life appearance (posthumous, in fact) in Jean Wahl’s Short History of Existentialism (1949) as a respondent to Wahl’s lecture, he ventures a sharp assessment of the formidable figure of Martin Heidegger, whose philosophical ancestry in Kierkegaard Wahl had proposed.

Berdyaev denies that Heidegger stems from the Dane. As for Heidegger, he aimed at a “rational ontology,” whereas Berdyaev praises Kierkegaard because “he did not wish to create an ontology or a metaphysics.”

Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and the Symbolists – it is dizzying. Berdyaev’s name remains bound up with Russia, however, with the agony of the Revolution, and with the betrayal of freedom in the Soviet Union under the Communist Party. Berdyaev’s discussion of these matters has naturally attracted most of the attention that commentators have directed to him over the years. Although Berdyaev ended up a victim of Bolshevism (not as abjectly as some did, of course), yet in his exile he refrained from contributing to overt public condemnation of the Soviet Union and, while criticizing the Communists, argued that the Party, almost despite itself, represented the Russian and affiliated peoples. Yet Berdyaev devotes much of The End of Our Time (three out of five chapters) to the USSR, and comments unsparingly. Berdyaev sees the Marxist regime not as an isolated phenomenon but rather as one instance of the staggering cultural and spiritual corruption of the West in the aftermath of the Renaissance and the Reformation.

In The End of Our Time, Berdyaev writes: “The Renaissance came to nothing, the Reformation came to nothing, the Enlightenment came to nothing; so did the Revolution inspired by the Enlightenment. And thus too will Socialism come to nothing.” Again, “Bolshevism is rationalized lunacy, a mania for the definitive regulation of life, resting on the elemental irrationality of the people.” This last phrase should be considered in connection with Berdyaev’s skeptical judgment of Heidegger. A “rational ontology” is for Berdyaev necessarily a “rationalized lunacy”; a “rational ontology” is a betrayal of freedom. Consistent with the idea that the Will to Power is pathological and demonic is Berdyaev’s assessment of revolutionary egalitarianism: “When societies begin to hanker after equality any kind of renaissance and harvest of creation is at an end. For the principle of equality is the principle of envy, envy of the being of another and bitterness at the inability to affirm one’s own.” What Berdyaev writes about the Bolsheviks applies with equal validity to any ideological faction then or now because each one is nothing less than “an envious denial of the being of another.”

What Berdyaev calls envy Nietzsche called ressentiment; and ressentiment, or envy, is ultimately, for Berdyaev, a satanic principle. The notion that revolution springs from the “Satanism” of envy unalloyed, a type of cosmic resentment, a world-hatred founded in the subject’s outrage that, in the issue of creation, the deity never consulted him: This notion permeates Berdyaev’s comments on Bolshevism and Communism in Russia in The End of Our Time. The revolutionary regime behaves, in Berdyaev’s coinage, in “the muzhiko-military style”; the regime, “brutal and ferocious in its methods, has declared war on all quality in favour of quantity,” a fact that assimilates it to trends in industrial capitalism in the West. No less than industrial-capitalist society, Soviet society sets itself implacably against “all fine culture.” Soviet – or let us say, Communist – society is the paradoxical triumph of bourgeois philistinism.

The pre-Bolshevik elites of Russia are, in this, for Berdyaev, as blameworthy as the Bolsheviks for the Revolution; the elites were weak and out of touch equally with the people and with Truth, by which Berdyaev always means first and foremost the Truth of the Gospel. “Bolshevism corresponds to the moral condition of us Russians and displays outwardly our inward crisis, our loss of faith, our religion in danger, the hideous weakening of our moral life.”

The Russian Revolution represents for Berdyaev, as the French Revolution represented for Joseph de Maistre, something “visited on the people for their sins.” This implies not, however, that the Revolution lies beyond moral judgment. On the contrary, all responsible people, especially all responsible followers of the Gospel, must judge it. How much of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is prefigured in Berdyaev? A great deal. Berdyaev, acknowledging the prophetic power of literature, writes: “The Russian revolution has turned out just as Dostoyevsky foresaw.” Dostoyevsky went to the heart of the matter in The Devils: “He understood that Socialism in Russia was a religious matter, a question of atheism, and that the real concern of the pre-revolutionary intellectuals was not politics but the salvation of mankind without the help of God.”

So too Communism: This godless cult mirrors religion atheistically, and with Manichaean ferocity. Communism, fundamentally a doctrine of covetousness, as befits a pure materialism, “is warfare against the spirit,” and therefore against the freedom that corresponds to spirit. In Communism, “envy, that black passion, has become the determining force in the world.”

Berdyaev nevertheless disdains strident counter-revolutionary rhetoric. With de Maistre, he urges only “a peaceful and bloodless, even a gentle counter-revolution.” He hopes that the post-revolutionary society will emphasize spirit over matter and, while restoring property, will not make it life’s grand fetish. (This did not happen.)

The final chapter of The End of Our Time bears the title, “The ‘General Line’ of Soviet Philosophy.” Berdyaev added it to the book for a revised edition in 1933. The comments that Berdyaev makes on “Soviet Philosophy” are trenchant, coolly observed, and – once again – broadly applicable to all ideological discourse, whether of 1930 or the 2011. “Soviet philosophy is a theology,” Berdyaev writes; “it has its revelation, its holy books, its ecclesiastical authority, its official teachers [and] it supposes the existence of one orthodoxy and innumerable heresies.” The central thesis of the Marxist-Leninist “revelation” is the famous dialectic of materialism, which Berdyaev, in his brilliant analysis, shows to be unable to define itself; but the orthodoxy is less important in the discourse of “Soviet philosophy” than are the deviations from it: “Marx-Leninism has been transformed into a scholasticism sui generis, and the defense of orthodoxy, of eternal truth in its integrity, and the distinguishing of heresies has attained a degree of refinement difficult for the uninitiated to imagine.”

IV. An earlier estimate might be revised. Berdyaev is not merely a writer whose case calls for patience and who rewards patience modestly. He is a compelling writer, a Nietzschean whose critique of Nietzsche is sharper than a blade, an anti-Communist who is equally scathing in his critique of the capitalistic-industrial order, and a Christian who is capable of asserting that moral norms are tyrannical. (He means, of course, the “sociomorphic” norms; and he is arguing an ethics of Gospel-centered social non-conformism.) The Destiny of Man and Slavery and Freedom, his two most ambitious works, as challenging as they are, belong under the generalization. The Destiny of Man is Berdyaev’s ethics, but it is also his meta-ethics, his critique of historical and reigning ethical theories. An example of Berdyaev on Nietzsche will give some of the flavor of Berdyaev’s modus operandi in criticism. “Suppose I say that good is not good… that it is evil,” as Nietzsche asserted in The Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere; “that will mean that I make a valuation of the ‘good,’ and distinguish it from something which I oppose to it.” But this gesture now entails that, “I distinguish between the higher and the lower.” Thus: “Nietzsche was a moralist, though he denied it.” Yet Berdyaev stands with Nietzsche in the conviction that, “true morality is not the social morality of the herd.”

In The Destiny of Man, Berdyaev distinguishes between three hierarchical levels of ethics. Beginning with the lowest, these are “the ethics of law,” “the ethics of redemption,” and “the ethics of creativeness.” Law, which distinguishes sin from righteousness, results, Berdyaev argues, from “the Fall”; good and evil come into existence with “the Fall.” Law is necessarily “sociomorphic,” coercive, and in its dudgeon tyrannical. Law encourages mere individualism, that is, the responsibility of the individual to observe the law at all times; but law hinders personality, a higher value than individuality. Law expresses the collective mentality of the aggregate, the Nietzschean “herd.” Law is not unjustified; it is merely morally limited, as the Crucifixion, perfectly legal, showed. Redemption, in existential terms, manifests itself at first as the individual’s recognition in law of a makeshift at the lowest level and as his insight that personality, which partakes in grace, finds no nourishment there.

In striving for redemption, however, the individual easily distorts the grace to which his struggle responds; he then becomes a Puritan, like Henrik Ibsen’s priest-fanatic in Brand, or like convinced Communists and multiculturalists. As Berdyaev remarks, Jesus kept company, not with the perfecti, but with taxmen, tavern-keepers, harlots, and thieves.

The applicability of Berdyaev’s line of thinking to the contemporary liberal utopia will be evident in an aphoristic construction like this one: “Absolute perfection, absolute order and rationality may prove to be an evil, a greater evil than the imperfect, unorganized, irrational life which admits a certain freedom of evil.” Creativeness, in contrast both to law and redemption, admits of imperfection; it also always traffics in freedom. Creativeness often expresses itself in love, and love must contradict itself whenever it admits of coercion. The codification of polities partakes originally in creativeness, which is why the codifiers find their place in myth, but when once the code has fossilized and become an end rather than a means, it has ceased to be creative. Tragically, however, all human creation invariably falls back into this world. Failure is this worldly; and this world is a fallen world. The very failure of enterprise tempts men to employ coercion.

Slavery and Freedom likewise develops Berdyaev’s tragic optimism and his notion that clarification in eschatology is necessary for clarification in ethics. Personality remains, for Berdyaev, the highest value; personality, which has its source outside the dominion of objectivity and causality, never becomes integrated in any natural or social hierarchy. “God is always freedom,” writes Berdyaev; and “God acts, not upon the world order as though justifying the suffering of personality, but in the conflict, in the struggle of personality, in the conflict of freedom against that world order.” In the utopian idea of “world harmony,” as well as in the parallel theological idea that pain and humiliation belong to God’s plan, Berdyaev sees a character “false and enslaving.” Whether as atheistic collectivism or as theocracy, the vindication of force and suffering through reference to Being or Unity strikes Berdyaev as, itself, irremediably evil.

Berdyaev also anticipates the tyranny implicit in the “green” or environmentalist utopia. “Cosmicism,” as Berdyaev calls this type of idolatrous “pandemonism,” so fervently “exalts the idea of organism and the organic” that in its insistence “man becomes a mere organ” of nature and “the freedoms of man… are abolished.”

Every doctrine, environmentalism no less than socialism, has society as its context and tends more or less strongly to seek the total ordering of society under its precepts. Doctrines or ideologies belong with “sociomorphism,” that demand of the collectivity that everything personal should subordinate itself. Berdyaev quotes with agreement Alexander Hertzen’s assertion that “the subjection of personality to society… is an extension of the practice of human sacrifice.” The cases of Socrates and Jesus supply the prime historical examples of the Hertzen-observation but the dramatic scenarios of Ibsen must also have occurred to Berdyaev in this regard. Dr. Stockman in Enemy of the People comes to mind, as does pathetic little Hedvig in The Wild Duck, the victim of Gregers Werle’s beautiful vision for the Ekdal family. In the analysis in Slavery and Freedom, the West has been moving in the direction of totalitarianism since the Sixteenth Century at least, just as it has been moving ever further into the de-spiritualized state of “objectivization.” As applied science seeks sovereignty over nature, the realm of objects, politics seeks sovereignty over humanity; the state thus makes relentless war on personality.

Berdyaev offers no political program or scheme – that would contradict his elevation of personality to the highest value. But Berdyaev does make consistent statements that converge with the minimalist formula for a polity, such as that promulgated by America’s Founding Fathers. The calling of the personality is to exercise itself in creative acts, by which it fulfills itself, or, as the Preamble to the Constitution puts it, pursues happiness. The wisdom of the Constitution and of Berdyaev is the same: A man must be free to pursue what he can imagine, but once any external agency presumes to guarantee to him the possession of what he pursues, he has sold his birthright. He is enslaved. It is true that Berdyaev regarded America with suspicion. On the other hand he admired England, on whose common law tradition the American minimalist formula for a polity arose. The politically centripetal America of the 1930s that Berdyaev disliked had already, itself, betrayed its own minimalist foundation.

Berdyaev remains today one of the most radical of Twentieth Century philosophers. He must offend liberal and libertarian, militant atheist and Christian literalist alike. For all that Berdyaev shares with Nietzsche, he will offend those, and they are many, who have turned Nietzsche into one of the idols of the Götzendämmerung. Veteran anti-Communists and Cold Warriors will meanwhile undoubtedly take exception to Berdyaev’s occasional ameliorative attitude to the Soviet Union, which peremptorily exiled him in 1922. The offended parties should, however, strive to reconcile themselves with the man’s Christian Existentialism, or Christian Anarchism, the latter of which might be a better description of his attitude. I was struck, in reading Berdyaev’s exposition of personality and freedom as the true vocations of man, by its echoes in Geert Wilders’ summary of his defense before the faceless judges who, at last, on Wilders’ second trial, acquitted him: “We must live in the truth… Truth and freedom are inextricably connected. We must speak the truth because otherwise we shall lose our freedom.”

Who knows whether Wilders has any consciousness of so recondite a figure as Nicolas Berdyaev? Why should he? Nevertheless, Wilders’ words resonate with the radical, uncompromising paean to conscience and freedom that is the work of Nicolas Berdyaev.

—————-

Bertonneau, Thomas F. “Nicolas Berdyaev And Modern Anti-Modernism.” The Brussels Journal, 12 August 2011. <http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4768 >.

 

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Paganism & Vitalism in Hamsun & Lawrence – Steuckers

Paganism & Vitalism in Knut Hamsun & D. H. Lawrence

By Robert Steuckers

Translated by Greg Johnson

 

The Hungarian philologist Akos Doma, educated in Germany and the United States, has published a work of literary interpretation comparing the works of Knut Hamsun and D. H. Lawrence: Die andere Moderne: Knut Hamsun, D. H. Lawrence und die lebensphilosophische Strömung des literarischen Modernismus [The Other Modernity: Knut Hamsun, D. H. Lawrence, and the Life-Philosophical Current of Literary Modernism] (Bonn: Bouvier, 1995). What they share is a “critique of civilization,” a concept that one must put in context.

Civilization is a positive process in the eyes of the “progressivists” who see history as a vector, for the adherents of the philosophy of Aufklärung [Enlightenment], and for the unconditional followers of a certain modernity aiming at simplification, geometrization, and cerebralization.

But civilization appears as a negative process for all those who intend to preserve the incommensurable fruitfulness of cultural matrices, for all those who observe, without being scandalized, that time is “plurimorphic,” i.e., the time of one culture is not that of another (whereas the believers of Aufklärung affirm that one monomorphic time applies to all peoples and cultures of the Earth). Thus to each people its own time. If modernity refuses to see this plurality of forms of time, it is illusion.

To a certain extent, Akos Doma explains, Hamsun and Lawrence were heirs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But which Rousseau? The one stigmatized by Maurras, Lasserre, and Muret, or the one who radically criticized the Enlightenment but without also thereby defending the Old Regime? For this Rousseau who was critical of the Aufklärung, this modern ideology is in reality that exact opposite of the ideal slogan that it intends to universalize though political activism: it is inegalitarian and hostile to freedom, even as it proclaims equality and freedom.

For Rousseau and his proto-Romantic followers, before the modernity of the 18th century, there was a “good community,” conviviality reigned among men, people were “good,” because nature was “good.” Later, in the Romantics, who were conservatives on the political plane, this concept of “goodness” was quite prominent, whereas today one attributes it only to activists or revolutionary thinkers. Thus the idea of “goodness” was present on “Right” as well as on “Left” of the political chessboard.

But for the English Romantic poet Wordsworth, nature is “the theater of all real experience” because man is really and immediately confronted by the elements, which implicitly leads us beyond good and evil. Wordsworth is certainly “perfectibilist”: man in his poetic vision reaches for excellence, perfection. But man, contrary to what was thought and imposed by the proponents of the Enlightenment, is not perfected solely by developing the faculties of his intellect. The perfection of man happens mainly through the ordeal of elemental nature.

For Novalis, nature is “the space of mystical experience, which allows us to see beyond contingencies of urban and artificial life.” For Joseph von Eichendorff, nature is freedom, and in this sense it is a transcendence, as it allows us to escape from the narrowness of conventions, of institutions.

With Wordsworth, Novalis, and Eichendorff, the themes of immediacy, of vital experience, the refusal of contingencies arising from the artificial conventions are in place. From Romanticism in Europe, especially in Northern Europe, developed a well thought out hostility to all forms of modern social life and economics. Thomas Carlyle, for example, praised heroism and disdained the “cash flow society.” This is the first critique of the rule of money. John Ruskin, with his plans for a more organic architecture and garden cities, aimed to beautify the cities and to repair the social and urban damage of the rationalism that had unfortunately arisen from Manchesterism. Tolstoy propagated an optimistic naturalism that owed nothing to Dostoevsky, the brilliant analyst and dramatist of the worst blacknesses of the human soul. Gauguin transplanted his ideal of human goodness in the islands of Polynesia, to Tahiti, among flowers and exotic beauties.

Hamsun and Lawrence, unlike Tolstoy or Gauguin, develop a vision of nature without teleology, without a “good end,” without marginal paradisal spaces: they have assimilated the double lesson of pessimism from Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Nature, for them, is no longer an idyllic excursion, as in the English Lake District poets. It is not necessarily a space of adventure or violence, or posed a priori as such. Nature, for Hamsun and Lawrence, is above all the inwardness of man; it is his inner springs, his dispositions, his mind (brain and guts are inextricably linked together). Therefore, a priori, in Hamsun and Lawrence, the nature of man is neither demonic nor pure intellectuality. It is rather the real, as real as the Earth, as real as Gaia, the real source of life.

Before this source, modern alienation leaves us with two opposing human attitudes: (1) to put down roots, a source of vitality, (2) to fall into alienation, a source of disease and paralysis. It is between the two terms of this polarity that we can fit the two great works of Hamsun and Lawrence: Growth of the Soil for the Norwegian, The Rainbow for the Englishman.

In Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, nature is the realm of existential work, where Man works in complete independence to feed and perpetuate himself. Nature is not idyllic, as in some pastoralist utopia. Work in not abolished. It is an unavoidable condition, a destiny, an essential element of humanity, whose loss would mean de-humanization. The main hero, the farmer Isak, is ugly in face and body. He is crude, simple, rustic, but unwavering. He is completely human in his finitude but also in his determination.

The natural space, the Wildnis, this space that sooner or later will receive the stamp of man, is not the realm of human time, that of clocks, but of the rhythm of the seasons, of periodic rotations. In that space, in that time, we do not ask questions, we work to survive, to participate in a rhythm that surpasses us. This destiny is hard. Sometimes very hard. But it gives us independence, autonomy; it allows a direct relationship with our work. Hence it gives meaning. So there is meaning. In Lawrence’s The Rainbow, a family lives on the land in complete independence on the fruits of its own crops.

Hamsun and Lawrence, in these two novels, leave us with the vision of a man rooted in a homeland (ein beheimateter Mensch), a man with a limited territorial base. The beheimateter Mensch needs no book learning, needs no preaching from the media; his practical knowledge is sufficient; thanks to it, he gives meaning to his actions, while allowing imagination and feeling. This immediate knowledge gives him unity with other beings participating in life.

In this perspective, alienation, a major theme of the 19th century, takes on another dimension. Generally, the problem of alienation is addressed from three different bodies of doctrine: (1) The Marxists and historicists locate alienation in the social sphere, whereas for Hamsun and Lawrence, it lies in the inner nature of man, regardless of social position or material wealth. (2) Alienation is addressed by theology and anthropology. (3) Alienation is seen as a social anomie.

For Hegel and Marx, the alienation of the people or the masses is a necessary step in the gradual process of narrowing the gap between reality and the absolute. In Hamsun and Lawrence, alienation is more fundamental; its causes are not socio-economic or political; they lie in our distance from the roots of nature (which to that extent is not “good”). One does not overcome alienation by creating a new socioeconomic order.

According to Doma, in Hamsun and Lawrence, the problem of the cut, of the caesura is essential. Social life has become uniform, tends toward uniformity, automation, excessive functionalization, while nature and work in the cycle of life are not uniform and constantly mobilize vital energies. There is immediacy, while everything in urban, industrial, modern life is mediated, filtered. Hamsun and Lawrence rebelled against this filter.

In “nature” the forces of interiority count, particularly for Hamsun, and to a lesser extent for Lawrence. With the advent of modernity, men are determined by factors external to them, such as conventions, political agitation, public opinion that gives them the illusion of freedom while it is in fact the realm of manipulation. In this context, communities are breaking up: each individual is content with his sphere of autonomous activity in competition with others. Then we arrive at anomie, isolation, the hostility of each against all.

The symptoms of this anomie are crazes for superficial things, for sophisticated garb (Hamsun), signs of a detestable fascination for what is external, for a form of dependence, itself a sign of inner emptiness. Man is torn by the effects of external stresses. These are all indications of loss of vitality in alienated man.

In the alienation of urban life, man finds no stability because life in the metropolis resists any form of stability. Such an alienated man cannot return to his community, his family of origin. For Lawrence, whose writing is more facile but more striking: “He was the eternal audience, the chorus, the spectator at the drama; in his own life he would have no drama.” “He scarcely existed except through other people.” “He had come to a stability of nullification.”

In Hamsun and Lawrence, Entwurzelung, Unbehaustheit, rootlessness and homelessness, this way of being without hearth or home, is the great tragedy of humanity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To Hamsun, place is vital for humans. Every man should have his place. The location of his existence. One can not be cut off from one’s place without profound mutilation. This mutilation is primarily mental; it is hysteria, neurosis, imbalance. Hamsun is a psychologist. He tells us: self-consciousness from the start is a symptom of alienation.

Already Schiller, in his essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung [On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry], noted that agreement between thought and feeling was tangible, real, interior for natural man, but it is now ideal and exterior in cultivated humans (“the concord between his feelings and his thoughts existed at the origin, but no longer exists except at the level of the ideal. This concord is no longer in man, but hovers somewhere outside of him; it is no more than an idea that has yet to be realized; it is no longer a fact of life”).

Schiller hoped for an Überwindung (overcoming) of this caesura, for a total mobilization of the individual to fill this caesura. Romanticism, for him, aimed at the reconciliation of Being (Sein) and consciousness (Bewußtsein), fighting the reduction of consciousness solely to rational understanding. Romanticism values, and even overvalues what is “other” to reason (das Andere der Vernunft): sensual perception, instinct, intuition, mystical experience, childhood, dreams, pastoral life.

The English Romantic Wordsworth deemed this desire for reconciliation between Being and consciousness “rose,” calling for the emergence of “a heart that watches and receives.” Dostoevsky abandoned this “rose” vision, developing in response a quite “black” vision, in which the intellect is always a source of evil that led the “possessed” to kill or commit suicide. In the same vein, in philosophical terms, G. E. Lessing and Ludwig Klages emulated this “black” vision of the intellect, while considerably refining naturalist Romanticism: to Klages, the mind is the enemy of the soul; to Lessing, the mind is the counterpart of life, born of necessity (“Geist ist das notgeborene Gegenspiel des Lebens”).

Lawrence, in some sense faithful to the English Romantic tradition of Wordsworth, believes in a new adequation of Being and consciousness. Hamsun, more pessimistic, more Dostoyevskian (hence his success in Russia and its impact on such ruralists writers as Belov and Rasputin), persisted in the belief that as soon as there is consciousness there is alienation. Once man begins to reflect on himself, he detaches himself from the natural continuum, in which he should normally be rooted.

In Hamsun’s theoretical writings, there is a reflection on literary modernism. Modern life, influences, processes, refine man to rescue him from his destiny, his destined place, his instincts which lie beyond good and evil. The literary development of the 19th century betrays a feverishness, an imbalance, a nervousness, an extreme complexity of human psychology. “The general (ambient) nervousness has gripped our fundamental being and has rubbed off on our feelings.” Hence the writer now defines himself on the model of Zola, as a “social doctor” who describes social evils to eliminate disease. The writer, the intellectual, and develops a missionary spirit aiming at a “political correctness.”

Against this intellectual vision of the writer, Hamsun replies that it is impossible to objectively define the reality of man, for an “objective man” would be a monstrosity (ein Unding), constructed in a mechanical manner. We cannot reduce man to a catalog of characteristics, for man is changing, ambiguous. Lawrence had the same attitude: “Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the part.” Hamsun and Lawrence illustrate in their works that it is impossible to theorize or absolutize a clear and distinct view of man. Thus man is not the vehicle of preconceived ideas.

Hamsun and Lawrence note that progress in self-awareness is not the process of spiritual emancipation, but rather a loss, a draining of vitality, of vital energy. In their novels, it is the characters who are still intact because they are unconscious (that is to say, embedded in their soil or site) who persevere, triumphing over the blows of fate and unfortunate circumstances.

There is no question, we repeat, of pastoralism or idyllism. The characters of Hamsun’s and Lawrence’s novels are traversed or solicited by modernity, hence their irreducible complexity: they may succumb, they suffer, they undergo a process of alienation but can also overcome it. This is where the Hamsun’s irony and Lawrence’s notion of the phoenix come in. Hamsun’s irony ridicules the abstract ideals of modern ideologies. In Lawrence, the recurrent theme of the phoenix indicates a certain degree of hope: there will be resurrection. Like the phoenix rising from the ashes.

The Paganism of Hamsun and Lawrence

If Hamsun and Lawrence carry out their desire to return to a natural ontology by rejecting rationalist intellectualism, this also implies an in-depth contestation of the Christian message.

In Hamsun, we find the rejection of his family’s Puritanism (that of his uncle Hans Olsen), the rejection of the Protestant worship of the book and the text, i.e., an explicit rejection of a system of religious thought resting on the primacy of pure scripture against existential experience (in particular that of the autarkical peasant, whose model is that of Odalsbond of the Norwegian countryside).

The anti-Christianity of Hamsun is rather non-Christianity: it does not give rise to religious questioning in the mode of Kierkegaard. For him, the moralism of the Protestantism of the Victorian era (in Scandinavia, they called it the Oscarian era) is quite simply an expression of devitalisation. Hamsun does not recommend any mystical experience.

Above all, Lawrence is concerned with the caesura between man and the cosmic mystery. Christianity reinforces this wound, prevents it from clotting, prevents it from healing. However, European religiosity preserves a residue of this worship of the cosmic mystery: it is the liturgical year, the liturgical cycle (Easter, Pentecost, Midsummer, Halloween, Christmas, Epipany).

But these had been hit hard by the processes of disenchantment and desacralization, starting with the advent of the primitive Christian church, reinforced by Puritanism and Jansensim after the Reformation. The first Christians clearly wanted to tear man away from these cosmic cycles. The medieval church, however, sought adequation between man and cosmos, but the Reformation and Counter-Reformation both clearly expressed a return to the anti-cosmism of primitive Christianity. Lawrence writes:

But now, after almost three thousand years, now that we are almost abstracted entirely from the rhythmic life of the seasons, birth and death and fruition, now we realize that such abstraction is neither bliss nor liberation, but nullity. It brings null inertia.

This caesura is a property of the Christianity of urban civilizations, where there is longer an opening to the cosmos. Thus Christ is no longer a cosmic Christ, but a Christ reduced to the role of a social worker. Mircea Eliade spoke of a “cosmic Man,” open to the vastness of cosmos, the pillar of all the great religions. From Eliade’s perspective, the sacred is reality, power, the source of life and fertility. Eliade: “The desire of the religious man to live a life in the sacred is the desire to live in objective reality.”

The Ideological and Political Lessons of Hamsun and Lawrence

On the ideological and political plane, on the plane of Weltanschauungen, Hamsun and Lawrence had a rather considerable impact. Hamsun was read by everyone, beyond the polarity of Communism/Fascism. Lawrence was labeled “fascistic” on a purely posthumous basis, in particular by Bertrand Russell who spoke about his “madness” (“Lawrence was a suitable exponent of the Nazi cult of insanity”). This phrase is at the very least simple and concise.

According to Akos Doma, the works of Hamsun and Lawrence fall under four categories: the philosophy of life, the avatars of individualism, the vitalistic philosophical tradition, and anti-utopianism and irrationalism.

1. Life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) is a polemical term, opposing the “vivacity of real life” to the rigidity of conventions, the artificial games invented by urban civilization to try to give meaning to a totally disenchanted world. Life-philosophy appears under many guises in European thought and takes shape beginning with Nietzsche’s reflections on Leiblichkeit (corporeity).
2. Individualism. Hamsun’s anthropology postulates the absolute unicity of each individual, of each person, but refuses to isolate this individual or this person from any communal context, carnal or familiar: he always places the individual or the person in interaction, in a particular place. The absence of speculative introspection, consciousness, and abstract intellectualism make Hamsun’s individualism unlike the anthropology of the Enlightenment.

But, for Hamsun, one does not fight the individualism of the Enlightenment by preaching an ideologically contrived collectivism. The rebirth of the authentic man happens by a reactivation of the deepest wellsprings of his soul and body. Mechanical regimentation is a calamitous failure. Therefore, the charge of “fascism” does not hold for either Lawrence or Hamsun.

3. Vitalism takes account of all the facts of life and excludes any hierarchisation on the basis race, class, etc. The characteristic oppositions of the vitalist movement are: assertion of life/negation of life; healthy/unhealthy; mechanical/organic. Thus one cannot reduce them to social categories, parties, etc. Life is a fundamentally apolitical category, because it subsumes all men without distinction.
4. For Hamsun and Lawrence, the reproach of “irrationalism,” like their anti-utopianism, comes from their revolt against “feasibility” (Machbarkeit), against the idea of infinite perfectibility (which one finds in an “organic” form in the first generation of English Romantics). The idea of feasibility goes against the biological essence of nature. Thus the idea of feasibility is the essence of nihilism, according to the contemporary Italian philosopher Emanuele Severino.

For Severino, feasibility derives from a will to complete a world posited as being in becoming (but not an uncontrollable organic becoming). Once this process of completion is achieved, becoming inevitably ceases. Overall stability is necessary to the Earth, and this stability is described as a frozen “absolute good.”

In a literary manner, Hamsun and Lawrence have foreshadowed such contemporary philosophers as Emanuele Severino, Robert Spaemann (with his critique of functionalism), Ernst Behler (with his critique of “infinite perfectibility”), and Peter Koslowski. Outside of Germany or Italy, these philosophers are necessarily almost unknown to the public, especially when they criticize thoroughly the foundations of the dominant ideologies, which is rather frowned upon since the deployment of an underhanded inquisition against the politically incorrect. The cells of the “logocentrist conspiracy” are in place at all the publishers in order to reject translations, keep France in a state of philosophical “minority,” and prevent any effective challenge to the ideology of power.

Vitalistic or “anti-feasibilist” philosophers like Nietzsche, Hamsun, and Lawrence, insist on the ontological nature of human biology and are radically opposed to the nihilistic Western idea of the absolute feasibility of everything, which implies the ontological inexistence of all things, of all realities.

Many of them — certainly Hamsun and Lawrence — bring us back to the eternal present of our bodies, our corporeality (Leiblichkeit). But we can not fabricate a body, despite the wishes reflected in some science fiction (and certain projects from the crazy early years of the Soviet system).

Feasibilism is hubris carried to its height. It leads to restlessness, emptiness, silliness, solipsism, and isolation. From Heidegger to Severino, European philosophy has focused on the disaster of the desacralization of Being and the disenchantment of the world. If the deep and mysterious wellsprings of Earth and man are considered imperfections unworthy of the interest of the theologian or philosopher, if all that is thought abstractly or contrived beyond these (ontological) wellsprings is overvalued, then, indeed, the world loses its sacredness, all value.

Hamsun and Lawrence are writers who make us live with more intensity than those sometimes dry philosophers who deplore the wrong route taken centuries ago by Western philosophy. Heidegger and Severino in philosophy, Hamsun and Lawrence in creative writing aim to restore the sacredness of the natural world and to revalorize the forces that lurk inside man: in this sense, they are ecological thinkers in the deeper meaning of the term.

The oikos and he who works the oikos bear within them the sacred, the mysterious and uncontrollable forces, which are accepted as such, without fatalism and false humility. Hamsun and Lawrence have therefore heralded a “geophilosophical” dimension of thought, which has concerned us throughout this summer school. A succinct summary of their works, therefore, has a place in today’s curriculum.

Lecture at the Fourth Summer School of F.A.C.E., Lombardy, in July 1996.

Analysis: Akos DOMA, Die andere Moderne. Knut Hamsun, D.H. Lawrence und die lebensphilosophische Strömung des literarischen Modernismus, Bouvier, Bonn, 1995, 284 p., DM 82, ISBN 3-416-02585-7.

————

Steuckers, Robert. “Paganism & Vitalism in Knut Hamsun & D. H. Lawrence.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 16-17 July 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/hamsun-and-lawrence-part-2/ >.

Note: This article was originally published in French as “Paganisme et philosophie de la vie chez Knut Hamsun et David Herbert Lawrence ” (Synergies Européennes, Vouloir, August, 1997). It was republished online at Centro Studi La Runa, 26 March 2009, <http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/paganisme-et-philosophie-de-la-vie-chez-knut-hamsun-et-david-herbert-lawrence.html >.

 

Structure of Myths – Eliade

The Structure of Myths

By Mircea Eliade

For the past fifty years at least, Western scholars have approached the study of myth from a viewpoint markedly different from, let us say, that of the nineteenth century. Unlike their predecessors, who treated myth in the usual meaning of the word, that is, as “fable,” “invention,” “fiction,” they have accepted it as it was understood in archaic societies, where, on the contrary, “myth” means a “true story” and, beyond that, a story that is a most precious possession because it is sacred, exemplary, significant. This new semantic value given the term “myth” makes its use in contemporary parlance somewhat equivocal. Today, that is, the word is employed both in the sense of “fiction” or “illusion” and in that familiar especially to ethnologists, sociologists, and historians of religions, the sense of “sacred tradition, primordial revelation, exemplary model.”

The history of the different meanings given to the word “myth” in the antique and Christian worlds will be treated later . . .. Everyone knows that from the time of Xenophanes (ca. 565-470)—who was the first to criticize and reject the “mythological” expressions of the divinity employed by Homer and Hesiod—the Greeks steadily continued to empty mythos of all religious and metaphysical value. Contrasted both with logos and, later, with historia, mythos came in the end to denote “what cannot really exist.” On its side, Judaeo-Christianity put the stamp of “falsehood” and “illusion” on whatever was not justified or validated by the two Testaments.

It is not in this sense—the most usual one in contemporary parlance—that we understand “myth.” More precisely, it is not the intellectual stage or the historical moment when myth became a “fiction” that interests us. Our study will deal primarily with those societies in which myth is—or was until very recently—”living,” in the sense that it supplies models for human behavior and, by that very fact, gives meaning and value to life. To understand the structure and function of myths in these traditional societies not only serves to clarify a stage in the history of human thought but also helps us to understand a category of our contemporaries.

To give only one example—that of the “cargo cults” of Oceania—it would be difficult to interpret this whole series of isolated activities without reference to their justification by myths. These prophetic and millennialist cults announce the imminence of a fabulous age of plenty and happiness. The natives will again be the masters in their islands, and they will no longer work, for the dead will return in magnificent ships laden with goods like the giant cargoes that the whites receive in their ports. It is for this reason that most of the “cargo cults” demand that, while all domestic animals and tools are to be destroyed, huge warehouses are to be built in which to store the goods brought by the dead. One movement prophesies Christ’s arrival on a loaded freighter; another looks for the coming of “America.” A new paradisal era will begin and members of the cult will become immortal. Some cults also involve orgiastic acts, for the taboos and customs sanctioned by tradition will lose their reason for existence and give place to absolute freedom. Now, all these actions and beliefs are explained by the myth of the destruction of the World, followed by a new Creation and the establishment of the Golden Age. (We shall return to this myth later.)

Similar phenomena occurred in the Congo when the country became independent in 1960. In some villages the inhabitants tore the roofs off their huts to give passage to the gold coins that their ancestors were to rain down. Elsewhere everything was allowed to go to rack and ruin except the roads to the cemetery, by which the ancestors would make their way to the village. Even the orgiastic excesses had a meaning, for, according to the myth, from the dawn of the New Age all women would belong to all men.

In all probability phenomena of this kind will become more and more uncommon. We may suppose that “mythical behavior” will disappear as a result of the former colonies’ acquiring political independence. But what is to happen in a more or less distant future will not help us to understand what has just happened. What we most need is to grasp the meaning of these strange forms of behavior, to understand the cause and the justification for these excesses. For to understand them is to see them as human phenomena, phenomena of culture, creations of the human spirit, not as a pathological outbreak of instinctual behavior, bestiality, or sheer childishness. There is no other alternative. Either we do our utmost to deny, minimize, or forget these excesses, taking them as isolated examples of “savagery” that will vanish completely as soon as the tribes have been “civilized,” or we make the necessary effort to understand the mythical antecedents that explain and justify such excesses and give them a religious value. This latter approach is, we feel, the only one that even deserves consideration. It is only from a historico-religious viewpoint that these and similar forms of behavior can be seen as what they are–cultural phenomena–and lose their character of aberrant childishness of instinct run wild.

Value of “primitive mythologies”

All of the great Mediterranean and Asiatic religions have mythologies. But it is better not to begin the study of myth from the starting point of, say, Greek or Egyptian or Indian mythology. Most of the Greek myths were recounted, and hence modified, adjusted, systematized, by Hesiod and Homer, by the rhapsodes and the mythographers. The mythological traditions of the Near East and of India have been sedulously reinterpreted and elaborated by their theologians and ritualists. This is not to say, of course, that (1) these Great Mythologies have lost their “mythical substance” and are only “literature or that (2) the mythological traditions of archaic societies were not rehandled by priests and bards. Just like the Great Mythologies that were finally transmitted as written texts, the “primitive” mythologies, discovered by the earliest travelers, missionaries, and ethnographers in the “oral” stage, have a “history.” In other words, they have been transformed and enriched in the course of the ages under the influence of higher culrtures or through the creative genius of exceptionally gifted individuals.

Nevertheless, it is better to begin by studying myth in traditional and archaic societies, reserving for later consideration the mythologies of people who have played an important role in history. The reason is that, despite modifications in the course of time, the ‘myths of “primitives” still reflect a primordial condition. Then, too, in “primitive” societies myths are still living, still establish and justify all human conduct and activity. The role and function of these myths can still (or could until very recently) be minutely observed and described by ethnologists. In the case of each myth, as of each ritual, it has been possible to question the natives and to learn, at least partially, the significance that they accord to it. Obviously, these “living documents,” recorded in the course of investigations conducted on the spot, do not solve all our difficulties. But they have the not inconsiderable advantage of helping us to pose the problem in the right way, that is, to set myth in its original socioreligious context.

Attempt at a definition of myth

It would be hard to find a definition of myth that would be acceptable to all scholars and at the same time intelligible to nonspecialists. Then, too, is it even possible to find one definition that will cover all the types and functions of myths in all traditional and archaic societies? Myth is an extremely complex cultural reality, which can be approached and interpreted from various and complementary viewpoints.

Speaking for myself, the definition that seems least inadequate because most embracing is this: Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial Time, the fabled time of the “beginnings.” In other words myth tells how, through the deeds of Supernatural Beings, a reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the Cosmos, or only a fragment of reality–an island, a species of plant, a particular kind of human behavior, an institution. Myth, then, is always an account of a “creation”; it relates how something was produced, began to be. Myth tells only of that which really happened, which manifested itself completely. The actors in myths are Supernatural Beings. They are known primarily by what they did in the transcendent times of the “beginnings.” hence myths disclose their creative activity and reveal the sacredness (or simply the “supernaturalness”) of their works. In short, myths describe the various and sometimes dramatic breakthroughs of the sacred (or the “supernatural”) into the World. It is this sudden breakthrough of the sacred that really establishes the World and makes it what it is today. Furthermore, it is as a result of the intervention of Supernatural Beings that man himself is what he is today, a mortal, sexed, and cultural being.

We shall later have occasion to enlarge upon and refine these few preliminary indications, but at this point it is necessary to emphasize a fact that we consider essential: the myth is regarded as a sacred story, and hence a “true history,” because it always deals with realities. The cosmogonic myth is “true” because the existence of the World is there to prove it; the myth of the origin of death is equally true because man’s mortality proves it, and so on.

Because myth relates the gesta of supernatural Beings and the manifestation of their sacred powers, it becomes the exemplary model for all significant human activities. When the missionary and ethnologist C. Strehlow asked the Australian Arunta why they performed certain ceremonies, the answer was always: “Because the ancestors so commanded it.” [C. Strehlow. Die Aranda-und-Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien, vol. III, pi; Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La mythologie primitive (Paris, 1935), p. 123. See also T.G.H. Strehlow, Aranda Traditions (Melbourne University Press, 1947), p. 6.] The Kai of New Guinea refused to change their way of living and working, and they explained: “It was thus that the Nemu (the Mythical Ancestors) did, and we do likewise.” [C. Keysser, quoted by Richard Thurnwald, Die Eingeborenen Australiens und der Südseeinseln (=Religionsgeschichtliches Lesebuch, 8, Tübingen, 1927: p. 28.] Asked the reason for a particular detail in a ceremony, a Navaho chanter answered: “Because the Holy People did it that way in the first place.” [Clyde Kluckhohn, “Myths and Rituals: A General Theory,” Harvard Theological Review, vol. 35 (1942), p. 66. Cf. Ibid. for other examples.] We find exactly the same justification in the prayer that accompanies a primitive Tibetan ritual: “As it has been handed down from the beginning of earth’s creation, so must we sacrifice. . . . As our ancestors in ancient times did—so do we now.” [Matthias Hermanns, The Indo-Tibetans (Bombay, 1954), pp. 66ff.] The same justification is alleged by the Hindu theologians and ritualists. “We must do what the gods did in the beginning” (Satapatha Brahmana, VII, 2, 1, 4). “Thus the gods did; thus men do” (Taittiriya Brahmana, I, 5, 9, 4). [See M. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York, 1954), pp. 21 ff.]

As we have shown elsewhere [Ibid.,pp 27f.], even the profane behavior and activities of man have their models in the deed of the Supernatural Beings. Among the Navahos “women are required to sit with their legs under them and to one side, men with their legs crossed in front of them, because it is said that in the beginning Changing Woman and the Monster Slayer sat in these positions. [Clyde Kluckholn, op. cit., quoting W.W. Hill, The Agricultural and Hunting Methods of the Navaho Indians (New Haven, 1938), p. 179.] According to the mythical traditions of an Australian tribe, the Karadjeri, all their customs and indeed all their behavior, were established in “dream Time” by two supernatural Beings, the Bagadjimbiri (for example, the way to cook a certain cereal or to hunt an animal with a stick, the particular position to be taken when urinating, and so on). [Cf. M. Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (New York, 1960), pp. 191 ff.]

There is no need to add further examples. As we showed in The Myth of the Eternal Return, and as will become still clearer later; the foremost function of myth is to reveal the exemplary models for all human rites and all significant human activities—diet or marriage, work or education, art or wisdom. This idea is of no little importance for understanding the man of archaic and traditional societies; and we shall return to it later.

“True stories” and “false stories”

We may add that in societies where myth is still alive the natives carefully distinguish myths—”true stories”—from fables or tales, which they call “false stories.” The Pawnee “differentiate ‘true stories’ from ‘false stories,’ and include among the ‘true’ stories in the first place all those which deal with the beginnings of the world; in these the actors are divine beings, supernatural, heavenly, or astral. Next come those tales which relate the marvellous adventures of the national hero, a youth of humble birth who became the saviour of his people, freeing them from monsters, delivering them from famine and other disasters, and performing other noble and beneficent deeds. Last come the stories which have to do with the world of the medicine-men and explain how such-and-such a sorcerer got his superhuman powers, how such-and-such an association of shamans originated, and so on. The ‘false’ stories are those which tell of the far from edifying adventures and exploits of Coyote, the prairie-wolf. Thus in the ‘true’ stories we have to deal with the holy and the supernatural, while the ‘false’ ones on the other hand are of profane content, for Coyote is extremely popular in this and other North American mythologies in the character of a trickster, deceiver, sleight-of-hand expert and accomplished rogue. [R. Petrazzoni, Essays on the History of Religions (Leiden, 1954), pp. 11-12. Cf. Also Werner Müller, Die Religionen der Waldlandindianer Noramerikasi (Berlin, 1956), p. 42.]

Similarly, the Cherokee distinguish between sacred myths (cosmogony, creation of the stars, origin of death) and profane stories, which explain, for example, certain anatomical or physiological peculiarities of animals. The same distinction is found in Africa. The Herero consider the stories that relate the beginnings of the different groups of the tribe “true” because they report facts that really took place, while the more or less humorous tales have no foundation. As for the natives of Togo, they look on their origin myths as “absolutely real.” [R. Petrazzoni, op. cit.: p.13.]

This is why myths cannot be related without regard to circumstances. Among many tribes they are not recited before women or children, that is, before the uninitiated. Usually the old teachers communicate the myths to the neophytes during their period of isolation in the bush, and this forms part of their initiation. R. Piddington says of the Karadjeri: “the sacred myths that women may not know are concerned principally with the cosmogony and especially with the institution of the initiation ceremonies. [R. Piddington, quoted by Lévy-Bruhl, p. 115. On initiation ceremonies, cf. Eliade, Birth and Rebirth (New York, 1958).]

Whereas “false stories” can be told anywhere and at any time, myths must not be recited except during a period of sacred time (usually in autumn or winter, and only at night). [See examples in R. Pettrazzoni, op. cit., p. 14, n. 15.] This custom has survived even among peoples who have passed beyond the archaic stage of culture. Among the Turco-Mongols and the Tibetans the epic songs of the Gesar cycle can be recited only at night and in winter. “The recitation is assimilated to a powerful charm. It helps to obtain all sorts of advantages, particularly success in hunting and war. . . . Before the recitation begins, a space is prepared by being powdered with roasted barley flour. The audience sit around it. The bard recites the epic for several days. They say that in former times the hoofprints of Gesar’s horse appeared in the prepared space. Hence the recitation brought the real presence of the hero. [R.A. Stein, Recherches sur l’épopée et le barde au Tibet (Paris, 1959), pp. 318-319.]

What myths reveal

This distinction made by natives between “true stories” and “false stories” is significant. Both categories of narratives present “histories,” that is, relate a series of events that took place in a distant and fabulous past. Although the actors in myths are usually Gods and Supernatural Beings, while those in tales are heroes or miraculous animals, all the actors share the common trait that they do not belong to the everyday world. Nevertheless, the natives have felt that the two kinds of “stories” are basically different. For everything that the myths relate concerns them directly, while the tales and fables refer to events that, even when they have caused changes in the World (cf. The anatomical or physiological peculiarities of certain animals), have not altered the human condition as such. [Of course, what is considered a “true story” in one tribe can become a “false story” in a neighboring tribe. “Demythicization” is a process that is already documented in the archaic stags of culture. What is important is the fact that “primitives” are always aware of the difference between myths (“true stories”) and tales or legends (“false stories”). Cf. Appendix I (“Myths and Fairy Tales”).]

Myths, that is, narrate not only the origin of the World, of animals, of plants, and of man, but also all the primordial events in consequence of which man became what he is today—mortal, sexed, organized in a society, obliged to work in order to live, and working in accordance with certain rules. If the World exists, it is because supernatural Beings exercised creative powers in the “beginning.” But after the cosmogony and the creation of man other events occurred, and man as he is today is the direct result of those mythical events, he is constituted by those events. He is mortal because something happened in illo tempore. If that thing had not happened, man would not be mortal—he would have gone on existing indefinitely, like rocks; or he might have changed his skin periodically like snakes, and hence would have been able to renew his life, that is, begin it over again indefinitely. But the myth of the origin of death narrates what happened in illo tempore, and, in telling the incident, explains why man is mortal.

Similarly, a certain tribe live by fishing—because in mystical times a Supernatural Being taught their ancestors to catch and cook fish. The myth tells the story of the first fishery, and, in so doing, at once reveals a superhuman act, teaches men how to perform it, and, finally, explains why this particular tribe must procure their food in this way.

It would be easy to multiply examples. But those already given show why, for archaic man, myth is a matter of primary importance, while tales and fables are not. Myth teaches him the primordial “stories” that have constituted him existentially; and everything connected with his existence and his legitimate mode of existence in the Cosmos concerns him directly.

We shall presently see what consequences this peculiar conception had for the behavior of archaic man. We may note that, just as modern man considers himself to be constituted by History, the man of the archaic societies declares that he is the result of a certain number of mythical events. Neither regards himself as “given,” “made” once and for all, as, for example, a tool is made once and for all. A modern man might reason as follows: I am what I am today because a certain number of things have happened to me, but those things were possible only because agriculture was discovered some eight to nine thousand years ago and because urban civilizations developed in the ancient Near East, because Alexander the Great conquered Asia and Augustus founded the Roman empire, because Galileo and Newton revolutionized the conception of the universe, thus opening the way to scientific discoveries and laying the groundwork for the rise of industrial civilization, because the French revolution occurred and the ideas of freedom, democracy, and social justice shook the Western world to its foundations after the Napoleonic wars—and so on.

Similarly, a “primitive” could say: I am what I am today because a series of events occurred before I existed. But he would at once have to add: events that took place in mythical times and therefore make up a sacred history because the actors in the drama are not men but Supernatural Beings. In addition, while a modern man, though regarding himself as the result of the course of Universal History, does not feel obliged to know the whole of it, the man of the archaic societies is not only obliged to remember mythical history but also to re-enact a large part of it periodically. It is here that we find the greatest difference between the man of the archaic societies and modern man: the irreversibility of events, which is the characteristic trait of History for the latter, is not a fact to the former

Constantinople was conquered by the Turks in 1453 and the Bastille fell on July 14, 1789. Those events are irreversible. To be sure, July 14^th having become the national holiday of the French Republic, the taking of the Bastille is commemorated annually, but the historical event itself is not reenacted. [Cf. Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, pp. 30 ff.] For the man of the archaic societies, on the contrary, what happened Ab origine can be repeated by the power of rites. For him, then, the essential thing is to know the myths. It is essential not only because the myths provide him with an explanation of the World and his own mode of being in the World, but above all because, by recollecting the myths, by re-enacting them, he is able to repeat what the gods, the Heroes, or the Ancestors did ab origine. To know the myths is to learn the secret of the origin of things. In other words, one learns not only how things came into existence but also where to find them and how to make them reappear when they disappear.

What “knowing the myths” means

Australian totemic myths usually consist in a rather monotonous narrative of peregrinations by mythical ancestors or totemic animals. They tell how, in the “Dream Time” (alcheringa)—that is, in mythical time—these Supernatural Beings made their appearance on earth and set out on long journeys, stopping now and again to change the landscape or to produce certain animals and plants, and finally vanished underground. but knowledge of these myths is essential for the life of the Australians. The myths teach them how to repeat the creative acts of the Supernatural Beings, and hence how to ensure the multiplication of such-and-such an animal or plant.

These myths are told to the neophytes during their initiation. Or rather, they are “performed,” that is, re-enacted. “When the youths go through the various initiation ceremonies [their instructors] perform a series of ceremonies before them; these, though carried out exactly like those of the cult proper—except for certain characteristic particulars—do not aim at the multiplication and growth of the totem in question but are simply intended to show those who are to be raised, or have just been raised, to the rank of men the way to perform these cult rituals.” [C. Strehlow, op. Cit., vol. III, pp. 1-2; L. Lévy-Bruhl, op. Cit. P. 123. On puberty initiations in Australia, cf. Birth and Rebirth, pp. 4 ff.]

We see, then, that the “story” narrated by the myth constitutes a “knowledge” which is esoteric, not only because it is secret and is handed on during the course of an initiation but also because the “knowledge” is accompanied by a magico-religious power. For knowing the origin of an object, an animal, a plant, and so on is equivalent to acquiring a magical power over them by which they can be controlled, multiplied, or reproduced at will. Erland Nordenskiöld has reported some particularly suggestive examples from the Cuna Indians. According to their beliefs, the lucky hunter is the one who knows the origin of the game. And if certain animals can be tamed, it is because the magicians know the secret of their creation. Similarly, you can hold red-hot iron or grasp a poisonous snake if you know the origin of fire and snakes. Nordenskiöld writes that “in one Cuna village, Tientiki, there is a fourteen-year-old boy who can step into fire unharmed simply because he knows the charm of the creation of fire. Perez often saw people grasp red-hot iron and others tame snakes.” [E. Nordenskiöld, “Faiserus de miracles et voyante chez les Indiens Cuna,” Revista del Instituto de Etnologia (Tucumán), vol. II (1932); p. 464; Lévy-Bruhl, op. cit., p. 119.]

This is a quite widespread belief, not connected with any particular type of culture. In Timor, for example, when a rice field sprouts, someone who knows the mythical traditions concerning rice goes to the spot. “He spends the night there is the plantation hut, reciting the legends that explain how man came to possess rice [origin myth]. . . . Those who do this are not priests. [A.C. Kruyt, quoted by Lévy-Bruhl , op. cit., p. 119.] Reciting its origin myth compels the rice to come up as fine and vigorous and thick as it was when it appeared for the first time. The officiant does not remind it of how it was created in order to “instruct” it, to teach it how it should behave. He magically compels it to go back to the beginning, that is, to repeat its exemplary creation.

The Kalevala relates that the old Väinämöinen cut himself badly while building a boat. Then “he began to weave charms in the manner of all magic healers. He chanted the birth of the cause of his wound, but he could not remember the words that told of the beginning of iron, those very words which might heal the gap ripped open by the blue steel blade.” Finally, after seeking the help of other magicians, Väinämöinen cried: “I now remember the origin of iron! And he began the tale as follows: Air is the first of mothers. Water is the eldest of brothers, fire the second and iron the youngest of the three. Ukko, the great Creator, separated earth from water and drew soil into marine lands, but iron was yet unborn. Then he rubbed his palms together upon his left knee. Thus were born three nature maidens to be the mothers of iron.” [Aili Kolehmainen Johnson, Kalevala. A Prose translation from the Finnish (Hancock, Mich., 1950), pp. 53 ff.] It should be noted that, in this example, the myth of the origin of iron forms part of the cosmogonic myth and, in a sense, continues it. This is an extremely important and specific characteristic of origin myths, and we shall study it in the next chapter.

The idea that a remedy does not act unless its origin is known is extremely widespread. To quote Erland Nordenskiöld again: “Every magical chant must be preceded by an incantation telling the origin of the remedy used, otherwise it does not act. . . . For the remedy or the healing chant to have its effect, it is necessary to know the origin of the plant, the manner in which the first woman gave birth to it.” [E. Nordenskiöld, “La conception de l’âme chez les Indiens Cuna de l’Ishtme de Panama,” Journal des Américanistes, N.S., vol. 24 (1932), pp. 5-30, 14.] In the Na-khi ritual chants published by J.F. Rock it is expressly stated: “If one does not relate . . . the origin of the medicine, to slander it is not proper.” [J.F. Rock, Na-khi Nāga Cult and related ceremonies (Rome, 1952), Vol. II, p. 474.] Or: “Unless its origin is related one should not speak about it.” [Ibid, vol. II, p. 487.]

We shall see in the following chapter that, as in the Väinämöinen myth given above, the origin of remedies is closely connected with the history of the origin of the World. It should be noted, however, that this is only part of a general conception, which may be formulated as follows: A rite cannot be performed unless its “origin” is known, that is, the myth that tells how it was performed for the first time. During the funeral service the Na-khi shaman chants.

Now we will escort the deceased and again experience bitterness;
We will again dance and suppress the demons.
If it is not told whence the dance originated
One must not speak about it.
Unless one know the origin of the dance.
One cannot dare.

[J.F. Rock, Zhi-mä funeral ceremony of the Na-Khi (Vienna Mödling, 1955), p. 87.]

This is curiously reminiscent of what the Uitoto told Preuss: “Those are the words (myths) of our father, his very words. Thanks to those words we dance, and there would be no dance if he had not given them to us.” [K.T. Preuss, Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto, vols. I-II (Göttingen, 1921-23), p. 625.]

In most cases it is not enough to know the origin myth, one must recite it; this, in a sense, is a proclamation of one’s knowledge, displays it. But this is not all. He who recites or performs the origin myth is thereby steeped in the sacred atmosphere in which these miraculous events took place. The mythical time of origins is a “strong” time because it was transfigured by the active, creative presence of the Supernatural Beings. By reciting the myths one reconstitutes that fabulous time and hence in some sort becomes “contemporary” with the events described, one is in the presence of the gods or Heroes. As a summary formula we might say that by “living” the myths one emerges from profane, chronological time and enters a time that is of a different quality, a “sacred” Time at once primordial and indefinitely recoverable. This function of myth, which we have emphasized in our Myth of the Eternal Return (especially pp. 35 ff.), will appear more clearly in the course of the following analyses.

Structure and function of myths

These few preliminary remarks are enough to indicate certain characteristic qualities of myth. In general it can be said that myth, as experienced by archaic societies, (1) constitutes the History of the acts of the Supernaturals; (2) that this History is considered to be absolutely true (because it is concerned with realities) and sacred (because it is the work of the Supernaturals); (3) that myth is always related to a “creation,” it tells how something came into existence, or how a pattern of behavior, an institution, a manner of working were established; this is why myths constitute the paradigms for all significant human acts; (4) that by knowing the myth one knows the “origin” of things and hence can control and manipulate them at will; this is not an “external,” “abstract” knowledge but a knowledge that one “experiences” ritually, either by ceremonially recounting the myth or by performing the ritual for which it is the justification; (5) that in one way or another one “lives” the myth, in the sense that one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events recollected or re-enacted.

“Living” a myth, then, implies a genuinely “religious” experience, since it differs from the ordinary experience of everyday life. The “religiousness” of this experience is due to the fact that one re-enacts fabulous, exalting, significant events, one again witnesses the creative deeds of the Supernaturals; one ceases to exist in the everyday world and enters a transfigured, auroral world impregnated with the Supernaturals’ presence. What is involved is not a commemoration of mythical events but a reiteration of them. The protagonists of the myth are made present; one becomes their contemporary. This also implies that one is no longer living in chronological time, but in the primordial Time, the Time when the event first took place. This is why we can use the term the “strong time” of myth; it is the prodigious, “sacred” time when something new, strong, and significant was manifested. To re-experience that time, to re-enact it as often as possible, to witness again the spectacle of the divine works, to meet with the Supernaturals and relearn their creative lesson is the desire that runs like a pattern through all the ritual reiterations of myths. In short, myths reveal that the World, man, and life have a supernatural origin and history, and that this history is significant, precious, and exemplary.

I cannot conclude this chapter better than by quoting the classic passages in which Bronislav Malinowski undertook to show the nature and function of myth in primitive societies. “Studied alive, myth . . . is not an explanation in satisfaction of a scientific interest, but a narrative resurrection of a primeval reality, told in satisfaction of deep religious wants, moral cravings, social submissions, assertions, even practical requirements. Myth fulfills in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man. Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or an artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom. . . . These stories . . . are to the natives a statement of a primeval, greater, and more relevant reality, by which the present life, facts and activities of mankind are determined, the knowledge of which supplies man with the motive for ritual and moral actions, as well as with indications as to how to perform them. [B. Malinowski. Myth in Primitive Psychology (1926; reprinted in Magic, Science and Religion [1948; reissued 1992 by Waveland Press, Inc., Prospect Heights, Illinois] pp. 101, 108.)]

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Excerpt from: Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. New York: Harper & Row, 1963, pp. 1-20.

Note: See also the Key Excerpts from The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion by Mircea Eliade: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/sacred-profane-eliade/ >.

 

Interview with Venner – L’action française 2000

L’action française 2000 Interview with Dominique Venner

 

Translated by Giuliano Adriano Malvicini

L’Action française 2000: You define yourself as a “meditative historian.” What precisely do you mean by this term?

Dominique Venner: To meditate is not to daydream, but to intensely fix one’s thoughts on a precise object. I have always been astonished by the fact that people are so little astonished. Above all when it comes to history. And yet, astonishment is the first condition of thought. In the conventional interpretation of History, one describes a succession of events as though they were necessary or self-evident. But that’s false.

Nothing is ever necessary or self-evident. Everything is always held in suspense by the unforeseeable. Neither Richelieu nor Mazarin, for example, neither Caesar nor Octavius, nor the Chinese emperor Shi Huangdi, the great founder, were necessary or pre-ordained by Providence. They could all have never existed or have died before completing their work. In the face of facts and unforeseeable historical events, I ask myself the questions that lazy history doesn’t ask, I meditate.

For example: Louis XIV was called le Roi Très Chrétien (“the Most Christian King”). Despite this, he had Versailles and his park built as a hymn to the divinities of ancient paganism. Surprising, isn’t it? And the source of new reflections on the representations of the king and the religion of his time, which has nothing to with the pious story invented in the nineteenth century.

Let’s dwell for a moment upon the Great King, who witnessed the English Revolution and the execution of Charles I, in January 1649. An astonishing revolution! In the following century, Edmund Burke could oppose the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the French Revolution of 1789. Why did a “conservative revolution” take place in England and a destructive revolution take place in France? That’s a good question, and there are a hundred answers. There’s something to meditate upon.

Moreover, since I was born in troubling times for a Frenchman and a European, a time that has seen the collapse of our old power and the destruction of certainties that were considered eternal, I meditate by studying History outside of all conventions. Following the example of Ulysses, I believe that thought is a prerequisite for action. I even believe that it is action.

AF: Europe today is “dormant,” as you nicely put it. Why is that?

DV: When I think of Europe, I’m not thinking about political or technocratic structures. I’m thinking of our multi-millenial civilization, our identity, a certain “European” way of thinking, of feeling and of living, across time. Yes, Europe is historically “dormant.” Since when? Since the second half of the twentieth century, after the catastrophe of the two wars that started in 1914 and ended in 1945. When the universal exhibition opened in Paris in 1900, Europe was the intellectual and spiritual center of the world. She dominated everything, almost everywhere. The United States was still only a marginal power. Fifty years later, everything was reversed! After Yalta, a Europe bled of its strength was divided up between the two new powers that had emerged in the Century of 1914: the United States and the USSR. Two messianic powers that wanted to impose on her their models: Americanism and communism. I might add that Europe has not only lost its power and its colonies, worse still, it has lost faith in itself, eroded by an unheard of moral crisis and manipulation by guilt. She is “dormant.”

AF: You are nevertheless optimistic with regard to her identitarian awakening. So what are, this time, the reasons for hope?

DV: Those reasons are above all connected with the “shock of History” that we are currently experiencing without knowing it. This “shock” heralds a new era. It began with the collapse of the USSR and of communism in 1989. At the same time, old powers and old civilisations, previously thought to be dead, went through a spectacular revival, China, India, Islam (despite its conflicts), South America, to speak only of large entities. The unipolar world that the power of the dollar wanted is being replaced by a multipolar world, and that will give Europe its chance. However, she is confronted with a huge and unprecedented historical danger, the mass immigration of populations that bring with them another civilization. Mass immigration is producing, on European soil, a shock of civilizations that could end up being deadly. But, in an astonishing historical surprise, it could also reveal itself to be our salvation. From the alterity represented by the immigrant populations, their customs, and their treatment of women, which deeply shocks us, we are seeing a new awareness being born among Europeans of their identity, an awareness that they rarely possessed in the past. Let me add that in spite of all these dangers, I also believe in the survival of the fundamental qualities of energy and innovation that are characteristic of Europeans. For the moment, they are not being exercised in the realm of politics, which is why we can’t see them.

AF: How may the lessons of the great masters of the dawn of European civilization, Hesiod and Homer, be salutary for us?

DV: Homer has bequeathed to us, in its pure state, the model of a specific mental morphology — our own — prior to the distortions of contrary influences. We need to impregnate ourselves with it if we are to be spiritually reborn, as a precondition to other forms of renaissance. The consequences of the Century of 1914 have cast the French and Europeans into an immense disorder. Nothing escapes it. This disorder affects both churches and laymen. So much so that we we are witnessing apparently bewildering attempts on the part of the upper hierarchies of the church to come together with the Islam of the immigrants. These attempts rightly shock many Catholics. They go beyond the “obligation of hospitality” invoked by the pastoralism of submission, and also have to do with a kind of solidarity between monotheistic “believers” in the face of the growing religious indifference of society. That is the explicit meaning of meetings like the one in Assisi. In short, when disorder has become general, you have to go back to what is completely pure, to the fundamental sources of our civilization, which go back much farther than Christianity, as Benedict XVI reminded us in his Regensburg speech. That is why we have to go back to Homer and the granite foundations of our founding poems, nature as a bedrock, excellence as a goal and beauty as the horizon. That’s a truth that Charles Maurras had seen clearly since his youth.

AF: You speak, not without admiration, of the “intractable character” of Maurras. Did he influence you intellectually?

DV: I have never concealed my admiration for Maurras’ bravery in the face of hardship. But I have also been a close reader of his early writings and an observer of his development. Just recently I read the correspondence between Charles Maurras and the Abbé Penon (1883-1928), published by Privat in 2008. It’s a primary source. As you know, Abbé Penon, who later became the bishop of Moulins, had been the private tutor and later the confessor of the young Maurras. He saw his task compromised by development of his pupil and the inflexible autonomy of his mind. The Abbé had introduced the boy to Greek and Roman literature, which little by little turned him away from Christianity. The young Maurras’ stay in Athens on the occasion of the first Olympic games in 1898, completed the transformation. It’s all summed up in a letter of June 28, 1896, which I can quote for you: “I return from Athens more remote, more hostile to Christianity than before. Believe me, it was there that the perfect men lived . . .” After having referred to Sophocles, Homer, and Plato, the young Maurras concludes: “I am returning from Athens as a pure polytheist. All that was still vague and confused in my thought has become sparklingly clear . . .” Right until his death in 1928, the Abbé Penon tried to make Maurras go back on this conversion. All he could get out of him were purely formal concessions, but also Maurras’ argument that in his eyes, the Catholic church had once corrected, through its principle of order, the pernicious nature of primitive Christianity.

AF: You are a Jüngerian practitioner of the “recourse to the forest.” Have you found peace there, or a way to prepare for the wars of the future?

DV: Before writing so many books, Ernst Jünger started out by living, in the trenches of WWI, certain ideas that he later articulated. Jünger was authenticated by his life. That made me take his writings seriously. I should also add that the image of the “recourse to the forest” resonates very strongly with me. I don’t see it as an incitement to go underground, but to discover the noble spirituality manifested in trees and nature, or as Bernard de Clairvaux said: “You will find more in forests than in books. The trees will teach you things that no master will speak to you of.” That’s proof that in him, the spirituality of his Frankish and Gallic ancestors was still alive. That is what I call tradition. It makes its way through us, unbeknownst to us.

French original: http://www.dominiquevenner.fr/2011/12/entretien-avec-louis-montarnal-publie-dans-laction-francaise-2000-n-2827-du-3-au-16-novembre-2011/

—————

Venner, Dominique. “L’action française 2000 Interviews Dominique Venner.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 24 September 2014. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/09/laction-francaise-2000-interviews-dominique-venner/ >.

 

Intro to Ludwig Klages – Pryce

On The Biocentric Metaphysics of Ludwig Klages

by Joe Pryce

 

Without a doubt, “The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul” by Klages is a great work of philosophy. — Walter Benjamin

Out of Phlegethon!
Out of Phlegethon,
Gerhart
Art thou come forth out of Phlegethon?
with Buxtehude and Klages in your satchel… — From Canto LXXV by Ezra Pound

Oliveira said, “Let’s keep on looking for the Yonder, there are plenty of Yonders that keep opening up one after the other. I’d start by saying that this technological reality that men of science and the readers of France-Soir accept today, this world of cortisone, gamma rays, and plutonium, has as little to do with reality as the world of the Roman de la Rose. If I mentioned it a while back to our friend Perico, it was in order to make him take note that his æsthetic criteria and his scale of values are pretty well liquidated and that man, after having expected everything from intelligence and from the spirit, feels that he’s been betrayed, is vaguely aware that his weapons have been turned against him, that culture and civiltà, have misled him into this blind alley where scientific barbarism is nothing but a very understandable reaction. Please excuse my vocabulary.”
“Klages has already said all of that,” said Gregorovius. — From Chapter 99 of “Hopscotch” by Julio Cortázar

Ludwig Klages is primarily responsible for providing the philosophical foundations for the pan-Romantic conception of man that we now find among many thinkers in different scientific disciplines, for example, Edgar Dacqué, Leo Frobenius, C. G. Jung, Hans Prinzhorn, Theodor Lessing, and, to a certain extent, Oswald Spengler. — From “Man’s Place in Nature” by Max Scheler

In the field of scientific psychology, Klages towers over all of his contemporaries, including even the academic world’s most renowned authorities. — Oswald Spengler

“The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul” by Ludwig Klages ranks with Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and Hartmann’s “The Foundation of Ontology” as one of the three greatest philosophical achievements of the modern epoch. — Erich Rothacker

Klages is a fascinating phenomenon, a scientist of the highest rank, whom I regard as the most important psychologist of our time. — Alfred Kubin

Ludwig Klages is renowned as the brilliant creator of profound systems of expression-research and graphology, and his new book, entitled “Concerning the Cosmogonic Eros,” possesses such depth of psychological insight and so rich and fructifying an atmosphere, that it moved me far more deeply than I have ever been moved by the writings of men like Spengler and Keyserling. In the pages of this book on the “Cosmogonic Eros,” Klages almost seems to have found the very words with which to speak that which has hitherto been considered to be beyond the powers of speech. — Hermann Hesse

When we survey the philosophical critiques of Nietzsche’s thought that have been published thus far, we conclude that the monograph written by Ludwig Klages, “The Psychological Achievements of Nietzsche,” can only be described as the towering achievement. — Karl Löwith

 

Prelude: The Intellectual Environment

DURING THE CLOSING YEARS of the 19^th century, the limitations and inadequacies of the superficial positivism that had dominated European thought for so many decades were becoming increasingly apparent to critical observers. The wholesale repudiation of metaphysics that Tyndall, Haeckel and Büchner had proclaimed as a liberation from the superstitions and false doctrines that had misled benighted investigators of earlier times, was now seen as having contributed significantly to the bankruptcy of positivism itself. Ironically, a critical examination of the unacknowledged epistemological assumptions of the positivists clearly revealed that not only had Haeckel and his ilk been unsuccessful in their attempt to free themselves from metaphysical presuppositions, but they had, in effect, merely switched their allegiance from the grand systems of speculative metaphysics that had been constructed in previous eras by the Platonists, medieval scholastics, and post-Kantian idealists whom they abominated, in order to adhere to a ludicrous, ersatz metaphysics of whose existence they were completely unaware.

The alienation of younger thinkers from what they saw as the discredited dogmas of positivism and materialism found expression in the proliferation of a wide range of philosophical schools, whose adherents had little in common other than the will to revolt against outmoded dogma. “Back to Kant!” became the battle-cry of the neo-Kantians at Marburg. “Back to the things themselves!” proclaimed the “phenomenologist” Edmund Husserl; there were “neo-positivists,” “empirio-critical” thinkers, and even the invertebrate American ochlocracy lent its cacaphonous warblings to the philosophical choir when William James proclaimed his soothing doctrine of “Pragmatism,” with which salesmen, journalists, and other uncritical blockheads have stupefied themselves ever since.

A more substantial and significant revolt, however, emerged from another quarter altogether when several independent scholars began to re-examine the speculative metaphysical systems of the “philosophers of nature” who had flourished during the Romantic Period. Although the astonishing creativity of these men of genius had been forgotten whilst positivism and materialism ruled the roost, of course, men like Nietzsche, Burckhardt, and Bachofen had preserved elements of the Romantic heritage and had thereby, as it were, already prepared the soil in which younger men would sow the precious seed of a Romantic Revival. By the turn of the 20^th century the blossoms had emerged in the form of the philosophers of the “vitalist” school. In France, Henri Bergson became the leading proponent of philosophical vitalism, and his slogan of élan vital as well as his doctrine of évolution créatrice thrilled audiences in the salons as well as in the university lecture halls. In Hungary, the astonishingly gifted philosopher and physicist, Melchior Palágyi—a thinker of an altogether higher order than the superficial Bergson—conducted profound research into celestial mechanics, which clearly anticipated the theory of relativity; he developed the theory of “virtual” movement; and his critical powers enabled him to craft a definitive and withering refutation of Husserl’s pseudo-phenomenology, and his insights retain their validity even now in spite of the oblivion to which the disciples of Husserl have consigned them.

In the German-speaking world the doctrines of Lebensphilosophie, or “philosophy of life,” achieved academic respectability when Wilhelm Dilthey became their spokesman. Sadly, candor demands that we draw the reader’s attention to the troubling fact that it was Dilthey who inaugurated a disastrous trend that was to be maintained at German universities for the next hundred years by such able obfuscators and logomachs as Heidegger and his spawn, for, to put it as charitably as possible, Dilthey was the first significant German philosopher to achieve wide renown in spite of having nothing significant to say (that is why, perhaps, Dilthey and Heidegger furnish such mountains of grist for the philosophical proles who edit and annotate and comment and publish and—prosper).

Among these “philosophers of life,” there were “amalgamists,” among whom we find Hans Driesch, who sabotaged his own project by indulging in futile attempts to combine the irreconcilable doctrines of Kantian idealism and vitalism in his theory of the “entelechy,” which, although he proclaimed it to be a uniquely vitalistic notion, is always analyzed mechanistically and atomistically in his expositions. The profound speculative metaphysics of Houston Stewart Chamberlain also succumbed to the Kantian infection, for even Chamberlain seems to have been blind to the ineluctable abyss that divides vitalism and Kantianism.

Finally, and most significantly, we encounter the undisputed master-spirit of the “vitalist” school in the German world, the philosopher and polymath Ludwig Klages, whose system of “biocentric” metaphysics displays a speculative profundity and a logical rigor that no other vitalist on the planet could hope to equal.

The Early Years

Ludwig Klages was born on December 10, 1872, in the northern German city of Hannover. He seems to have been a solitary child, but he developed one intense friendship with a class-mate named Theodor Lessing, who would himself go on to achieve fame as the theorist of “Jewish Self-Hatred,” a concept whose origins Lessing would later trace back to passionate discussions that he had had with Klages during their boyhood rambles on the windswept moors and beaches of their Lower Saxon home.

In 1891 he received his “Abitur,” and immediately journeyed to Leipzig to begin his university studies in Chemistry and Physics. In 1893, he moved to Munich, where he would live and work until the Great War forced him into Swiss exile in 1915.

Klages continued his undergraduate studies in Chemistry and Physics during the day, but at night he could usually be found in the cafés of Schwabing, then as now the Bohemian district of Munich. It was in Schwabing that he encountered the poet Stefan George and his “circle.” George immediately recognized the young man’s brilliance, and the poet eagerly solicited contributions from Klages, both in prose and in verse, to his journal, the Blätter für die Kunst.

Klages also encountered Alfred Schuler (1865-1923), the profoundly learned Classicist and authority on ancient Roman history, at this time. Schuler was also loosely associated with the George-circle, although he was already becoming impatient with the rigidly masculine, “patriarchalist” spirit that seemed to rule the poet and his minions. Klages eventually joined forces with Schuler and Karl Wolfskehl, an authority on Germanistics who taught at the University of Munich, to form the Kosmische Runde, or “Cosmic Circle,” and the three young men, who had already come under the influence of the “matriarchalist” anthropology of the late Johann Jakob Bachofen, soon expressed their mounting discontent with George and his “patriarchal” spirit. Finally, in 1904, Klages and Schuler broke with the poet, and the aftermath was of bitterness and recrimination “all compact.” Klages would in later years repudiate his association with George, but he would revere Schuler, both as a man and as a scholar, to the end of his life.

The other crucial experience that Klages had during this last decade of the old century was his overwhelming love affair with Countess Franziska zu Reventlow, the novelist and Bohemian, whose “Notebooks of Mr. Lady” provides what is, perhaps, the most revealing—and comical—rendition of the turbulent events that culminated in the break between the “Cosmic Circle” and the George-Kreis; Wolfskehl, who was himself an eyewitness to the fracas, held that, although Franziska had called the book a novel, it was, in fact, a work of historical fact. Likewise, the diaries of the Countess preserve records of her conversations with Klages (who is referred to as “Hallwig,” the name of the Klages-surrogate in her “Mr. Lady”: she records Klages telling her that “There is no ‘God’; there are many gods!” At times “Hallwig” even frightens her with oracular allusions to “my mystical side, the rotating Swastika” and with his prophecies of inevitable doom). When the Countess terminated the liaison, Klages, who suffered from serious bouts with major depression throughout his long life, experienced such distress that he briefly contemplated suicide. Fate, of course, would hardly have countenanced such a quietus, for, as Spengler said, there are certain destinies that are utterly inconceivable—Nietzsche won’t make a fortune at the gambling tables of Monte Carlo, and Goethe won’t break his back falling out of his coach, he remarks drily.

And, we need hardly add, Klages will not die for love…

On the contrary: he will live for Eros.

Works of Maturity

After the epoch-making experiences of the Schwabing years, the philosopher’s life seems almost to assume a prosaic, even an anticlimactic, quality. The significant events would henceforth occur primarily in the thinker’s inner world and in the publications that communicated the discoveries that he had made therein. There were also continuing commitments on his part to particular institutions and learned societies. In 1903 Klages founded his “Psychodiagnostic Seminars” at the University of Munich, which swiftly became Europe’s main center for biocentric psychology. In 1908, he delivered a series of addresses on the application of “Expression Theory” (Ausdruckskunde) to graphological analysis at one such seminar.

In 1910, in addition to the book on expression-theory, Klages published the first version of his treatise on psychology, entitled Prinzipien der Charakterologie. This treatise was based upon lectures that Klages had delivered during the previous decade, and in its pages he announced his discovery of the “Id,” which has popularly, and hence erroneously, for so long been attributed to Freud. He came in personal contact with several members of rival psychological schools during this period, and he was even invited—in his capacity as Europe’s leading exponent of graphology—to deliver a lecture on the “Psychology of Handwriting” to the Wednesday Night Meeting of the Freudian “Vienna Society” on the 25th of October in 1911.

The philosopher also encountered the novelist Robert Musil, in whose masterpiece, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Klages appears—in caricatured form, of course—as the eerie and portentous prophet Meingast, that “messenger from Zarathustra’s mountain.” The novelist seems to have been most impressed by the philosopher’s speculations in Vom kosmogonischen Eros concerning the ecstatic nature of the “erotic rapture” and the Klagesian “other condition” (andere Zustand). Paradoxically, however, Musil’s novel presents Meingast [Klages] as a manic and domineering worshiper of power, which is quite strange when one considers that Klages consistently portrays the Nietzschean “Will to Power” as nothing but a modality of hysteria perfectly appropriate to our murderous age of militarism and capitalism. Anyone familiar with the withering onslaught against the will and its works which constitutes the section entitled Die Lehre der Wille in Klages’s Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele must, in addition, feel a certain amazement at Meingast’s ravings concerning the necessity for a “determined will”! Another familiar (and depressing) insight into the resistance mounted by even sympathetic writers to the biocentric philosophy can be derived from a perusal of Musil’s Tagebücher, with its dreary and philistine insistence that the Klagesian rapture must at all costs be constrained by Geist, by its pallid praise for a “daylight mysticism,” and so on. Admittedly, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften will remain an astonishing and beautifully-crafted masterpiece of 20th Century belles lettres, in spite of its author’s jejune “philosophical” preachments.

During this same period, Klages rediscovered the late-Romantic philosopher Carl Gustav Carus, author of the pioneering Psyche: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Seele (“Psyche: Towards a Developmental History of the Soul”) in which the unconscious is moved to center-stage (sadly, the Jung-racket falsely credits their master with this discovery). The very first sentence of this work indicates the primacy attributed by Carus to the unconscious: “The key to the understanding of the conscious life of the soul lies in the realm of the unconscious.” During the Romantic Revival that took place in the Germany of th 1920s, Klages would edit a new, abridged version of Psyche, in which Carus is purged of his logocentric and Christian errors. Klages, however, fully accepts Carus’s definition of the soul as synonymous with life, a formulation that he rates as epochally significant. He finds Carus’s statement to be as profound as the aphorism of Novalis in which he locates the soul at the point of contact between the inner and outer worlds.

In 1913, Klages presented his Zur Theorie und Symptomatologie des Willens to the Vienna Congress of International Societies for Medical Psychology and Psychotherapy. In that same year, Klages delivered an address entitled Mensch und Erde to a gathering of members of the German Youth Movement. This seminal work has recently received its due as the “foundational” document of the “deep ecology” movement when a new edition was published in 1980 in coordination with the establishment of the German “Green” political party.

In his Heidnische Feuerzeichen, which was completed in 1913, although it would not be published in book form until 1944, Klages has some very perceptive remarks on consciousness, which he regards as always effect and never cause. He cautions us to realize that, because our feelings are almost always conscious, we tend to attribute far too much importance to them. Reality is composed of images [Bilder] and not feelings, and the most important idea that Klages ever developed is his conception of the “actuality of the images” [Wirklichkeit der Bilder]. He also savages the insane asceticism of Christianity, arguing that a satisfied sexuality is essential for all genuine cosmic radiance. Christ is to be detested as the herald of the annihilation of earth and the mechanization of man.

The pioneering treatise on “expression theory,” the Ausdruckskunde und Gestaltungskraft, also appeared in 1913. The first part of his treatise on the interpretation of dreams (Vom Traumbewusstsein) appeared in 1914, but war soon erupted in Europe, swiftly interrupting all talk of dreams. Sickened by the militaristic insanity of the “Great War,” Klages moved to neutral Switzerland. In 1920 he made his last move to Kilchberg, near Zurich, Switzerland, where he would spend the rest of his life.

The first substantial excerpt from the treatise that would eventually become his Hauptwerk (Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele) was published as Geist und Seele in a 1916 number of the journal Deutsche Psychologie. He soon turned his attention to the more mundane matter of the contemporary world situation, and in 1918, concerned by the spread of “One World”-humanitarianism and other pernicious forms of “humanism,” Klages published the classic Brief über Ethik, in which he re-emphasized his opposition to all ethical and individualistic attempts to improve the world. The modern world’s increasing miscegenation has hatched out a horde of mongrels, slaves, and criminals. The world is falling under the dominion of the enemies of life, and it matters not a bit whether the ethical fanatic dubs his hobbyhorse Wille, Tat, Logos, Nous, Idee, Gott, the “Supreme Being,” reines Subjekt, or absolutes Ich: these phrases are merely fronts behind which spirit, the eternal adversary of life, conducts her nefarious operations. Only infra-human nature, wherein dwells a principle of hierarchical order in true accord with the laws of life, is able to furnish man with genuine values. The preachers of morality can only murder life with their prohibitive commands so stifling to the soul’s vitality. As Klages’s disciple Hans Prinzhorn cautions us, the vital order “must not be falsified, according to the Judæo-Christian outlook, into a principle of purposefulness, morality, or sentimentality.” The “Letter on Ethics” urges us to avoid all such life-hostile values, and to prize instead those moments when we allow our souls to find warmth in the love which manifests itself as adoration, reverence, and admiration. The soul’s true symbol is the mother with her beloved child, and the soul’s true examples are the lives of poets, heroes, and gods. Klages concludes his sardonic “Letter” by informing the reader, in contemptuous and ironical tones, that if he refuses to respond to these exemplary heroes, he may then find it more congenial to sit himself down and listen, unharmed, to a lecture on ethics!

In 1921, Klages published his Vom Wesen des Bewusstseins, an investigation into the nature of consciousness, in which the ego-concept is shown to be neither a phenomenon of pure spirit nor of pure life, but rather a mere epiphenomenal precipitate of the warfare between life and spirit. In this area, Klages’s presentation invites comparion with the Kantian exposition of “pure subjectivity,” although, as one might expect, Klages assails the subjectivity of the ego as a hollow sham. The drive to maximize the realm of ego, regardless of whether this impulse clothes itself in such august titles as “The Will to Power” (Nietzsche), the “Will to Live” (Schopenhauer), or the naked obsession with the “Ego and its Own” (Stirner), is merely a manifestation of malevolent Geist. Klages also ridicules the superficiality of William James’s famous theory of “stream of consciousness,” which is subjected to a withering critical onslaught. After James’s “stream” is conclusively demolished, Klages demonstrates that Melchior Palágyi’s theory more profoundly analyzes the processes whereby we receive the data of consciousness. Klages endorses Palágyi’s account of consciousness in order to establish the purely illusory status of the “stream” by proving conclusively that man receives the “images” as discrete, rhythmically pulsating “intermittencies.”

We should say a few words about the philosopher whose exposition of the doctrine of consciousness so impressed Klages. Melchior Palágyi [1859-1924] was the Hungarian-Jewish Naturphilosoph who was regarded as something of a mentor by the younger man, ever since 1908, when they first met at a learned conference. Like Klages, Palágyi was completely devoted to the thought-world of German Romantic Naturphilosophie. Klages relied heavily on this thinker’s expert advice, especially with regard to questions involving mechanics and physics, upon which the older man had published outstanding technical treatises. The two men had spent many blissful days together in endless metaphysical dialogue when Palagyi visited Klages at his Swiss home shortly before Palágyi’s death. They were delighted with each other’s company, and reveled even in the cut and thrust of intense exchanges upon matters about which they were in sharp disagreement. Although this great thinker is hardly recalled today even by compilers of “comprehensive” encyclopedias, Palagyi’s definitive and irrefutable demolition of Edmund Husserl’s spurious system of “phenomenology” remains one of the most lethal examples of philosophical adversaria to be found in the literature. Palágyi, who was a Jew, had such a high opinion of his anti-semitic colleague, that when Palágyi died in 1925, one of the provisions of his will stipulated that Ludwig Klages was to be appointed as executor and editor of Palágyi’s posthumous works, a task that Klages undertook scrupulously and reverently, in spite of the fact that the amount of labor that would be required of him before the manuscripts of his deceased colleague could be readied for publication would severely disrupt his own work upon several texts, most especially the final push to complete the three-volume Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele. One gets the impression that Klages felt the task that had been imposed upon him was also one of the highest honors, and Klages’s high regard for Palágyi’s thought can best be appreciated when we realize that among the numerous thinkers and scholars whose works are cited in his collected works, the contemporary philosopher who is cited most frequently, and at the greatest length, is none other than Melchior Palágyi.

Klages published his influential anthropological-historical study, Vom kosmogonischen Eros, in 1922, and in the Selbstbericht which serves as an introduction to this work he details the points of agreement and the points of disagreement between his views and those of Friedrich Nietzsche.

In 1923 Klages published his Vom Wesen des Rhythmus (a revised edition of which would be issued in 1934). Then in 1925, two fervent admirers of Klagesian biocentrism—one was Niels Kampmann who would go on to publish some of Klages’s works in book form—brought out the first issue of a scholarly journal, the brilliant Zeitschrift für Menschenkunde, which would continue to publish regularly until the rigors of war eventually forced the editors to suspend publication in 1943 (eight years after the end of the war, the journal began a new career in 1953.)

A revised and enlarged edition of the treatise on characterology appeared in 1926 with the new title Die Grundlagen der Charakterkunde. Klages also published Die psychologischen Errungenschaften Nietzsches in this same year, a work which, more than a quarter of a century after its initial appearance, the Princeton-based Nietzsche-scholar Walter Kaufmann—surely no friend to Klages!—would nevertheless admire greatly, even feeling compelled to describe Klages’s exegesis of Nietzsche’s psychology as “the best monograph” ever written on its subject.

A collection of brief essays entitled Zur Ausdruckslehre und Charakterkunde, was brought out by Kampmann in 1927; many of them date from the early days of the century and their sheer profundity and variety reinforce our conviction that Klages was a mature thinker even in his twenties.

The first two volumes of his magnum opus, the long-awaited and even-longer pondered, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, finally appeared in 1929. One year later the Graphologisches Lesebuch appeared, and the third and final volume of Der Geist hit the book-shops in 1932, a year that seems to have been a very busy one indeed for our polymathic philosopher, since he also found time to revamp his slender monograph entitled Goethe als Naturforscher, a short work that can only be compared to the Goethe-books of H. S. Chamberlain and Friedrich Gundolf for breadth of scholarship and insight into the creativity of a great seer and scientist (this study was a revised edition of a lecture that had originally been published in the Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts in 1928).

Hans Prinzhorn, the psychologist, translator of D. H. Lawrence and compiler of the landmark treatise on the artistry of the mentally-disturbed, had long been a friend and admirer of Klages, and in 1932 he organized the celebration for the sixtieth birthday of the philosopher. The tributes composed the various scholars who participated in this event were collected and edited by Prinzhorn for publication in book-form, with the title Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag.

National Socialist Germany, World War II, and their Aftermath

Shortly after the NSDAP seized power at the beginning of 1933, one of Klages’s disciples established the Arbeitskreises für biozentrisches Forschung. At first the German disciples of Klages were tolerated as harmless philosophical eccentrics, but soon the Gestapo began keeping a close eye on members and contributors to the biocentric circle’s house organ Janus. By 1936 the authorities forcibly shut down the journal and from that time until the fall of the regime, the Gestapo would periodically arrest and question those who had been prominent members of the now-defunct “circle.” From 1938 onwards, when Reichsleiter Dr. Alfred Rosenberg delivered a bitter attack on Klages and his school in his inaugural address to the summer semester at the University of Halle, the official party spokesmen explicitly and repeatedly condemned Klages and his friends as enemies of the National Socialist Weltanschauung.

Klages traveled widely during the 1930s, and he especially enjoyed his journeys to Greece and Scandinavia. In 1940 he published Alfred Schuler: Fragmente und Vorträge. Aus dem Nachlass, his edition of Alfred Schuler’s literary remains. The “Introduction” to the anthology is a voluminous critical memoir in which Klages rendered profound tribute to his late mentor. However, in the pages of that introduction, Klages introduced several statements critical of World-Jewry that were to dog his steps for the rest of his life, just as they have compromised his reputation after his death. Unlike so many ci-devant “anti-semites” who prudently saw the philo-semitic light in the aftermath of the war, however, Klages scorned to repudiate anything that he had said on this or any other topic. He even poured petrol on the fires by voicing his conviction that the only significant difference between the species of master-race nonsense that was espoused by the National Socialists and the variety adopted by their Jewish enemies was in the matter of results: Klages blandly proclaims that the Jews, after a two-thousand year long assault on the world for which they felt nothing but hatred, had actually won the definitive victory. There would be no re-match. He sneered at all the kow-towing to Jewry that had already become part of the game in the immediate post-war era, because, he reasoned, even as a tactical ploy such sycophantic behavior has always doomed itself to complete and abject failure.

In December of 1942, the official daily newspaper of the NSDAP, the Völkischer Beobachter, published a vicious and ungracious attack on Klages in the edition that appeared on the philosopher’s 70^th birthday. During the war years, Klages began compiling notes for a projected full-dress autobiography that was, sadly, never completed. Still, the notes are fascinating in their own right, and are well worth consulting by the student of his life and thought.

In 1944, Barth of Leipzig published the Rhythmen und Runen, a self-edited anthology of Klages’s prose and verse writings stemming from the turn of the century (unfortunately, however, when Bouvier finally brought out their edition of his “Collected Works,” which began to appear in the mid-1960s, Rhythmen und Runen, along with the Stefan George-monograph and such provocative pieces as the “Introduction” to Schuler’s writings, were omitted from the set, in spite of the fact that the original prospectus issued to subscribers announced that these works would, in fact, be included. The reasons for this behavior are—need we say?—quite obvious).

When the war ended, Klages began to face true financial hardship, for his market, as well as his publishers, had been devastated by the horrific saturation bombing campaign with which the democratic allies had turned Germany into a shattered and burnt-out wasteland. Klages also suffered dreadfully when he learned that his beloved sister, Helene, as well as her daughter Heidi, the philosopher’s niece, had perished in the agony of post-war Germany, that nightmare world wherein genocidal bestiality and sadistic cruelty were dealt out by occupying forces with a liberal hand in order most expeditiously to “re-educate” the survivors of the vanquished Reich. Although Klages had sought permission from the occupying authorities to visit his sister as she lay dying, his request was ignored (in fact, he was told that the only civilians who would be permitted to travel to Germany were the professional looters who were officially authorized to rob Germany of industrial patents and those valiant exiles who had spent the war years as literary traitors, who made a living writing scurrilous and mendacious anti-German pamphlets). This refusal, followed shortly by his receipt of the news of her miserable death, aroused an almost unendurable grief in his soul.

His spirits were raised somewhat by the Festschrift that was organized for his 75^th birthday, and his creative drive certainly seemed to be have remained undiminished by the ravages of advancing years. He was deeply immersed in the philological studies that prepared him to undertake his last great literary work, the Die Sprache als Quell der Seelenkunde, which was published in 1948. In this dazzling monument of 20^th century scholarship, Klages conducted a comprehensive investigation of the relationship between psychology and linguistics. During that same year he also directed a devastating broadside in which he refuted the fallacious doctrines of Jamesian “pragmatism” as well as the infantile sophistries of Watson’s “behaviorism.” This brief but pregnant essay was entitled Wie Finden Wir die Seele des Nebenmenschen?

During the early 1950s, Klages’s health finally began to deteriorate, but he was at least heartened by the news that there were serious plans afoot among his admirers and disciples to get his classic treatises back into print as soon as possible. Death came at last to Ludwig Klages on July 29, 1956. The cause of death was determined to have been a heart attack. He is buried in the Kilchberg cemetery, which overlooks Lake Zurich.

Understanding Klagesian Terms

A brief discussion of the philosopher’s technical terminology may provide the best preparation for an examination of his metaphysics. Strangely enough, the relationship between two familiar substantives, “spirit” [Geist] and “soul” [Seele], constitutes the main source of our terminological difficulties. Confusion regarding the meaning and function of these words, especially when they are employed as technical terms in philosophical discourse, is perhaps unavoidable at the outset. We must first recognize the major problems involved before we can hope to achieve the necessary measure of clarity. Now Klages regards the study of semantics, especially in its historical dimension, as our richest source of knowledge regarding the nature of the world (metaphysics, or philosophy) and an unrivalled tool with which to probe the mysteries of the human soul (psychology, or characterology [Charakterkunde]). We would be well advised, therefore, to adopt an extraordinary stringency in lexical affairs. We have seen that the first, and in many ways the greatest, difficulty that can impede our understanding of biocentric thought confronts us in our dealings with the German word Geist. Geist has often been translated as “spirit” or “mind,” and, less often, as “intellect.” As it happens, the translation of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes that most American students utilized in their course-work during the 1960s and 1970s was entitled “The Phenomenology of Mind” (which edition was translated with an Introduction and Notes by J. B. Bailey, and published by Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1967).

Lest it be thought that we are perversely attributing to the word Geist an exaggeratedly polysemic status, we would draw the reader’s attention to the startling fact that Rudolf Hildebrandt’s entry on this word in the Grimm Wörterbuch comprises more than one hundred closely printed columns. Hildebrandt’s article has even been published separately as a book. Now in everyday English usage, spirit (along with its cognates) and soul (along with its cognates) are employed as synonyms. As a result of the lexical habits to which we have grown accustomed, our initial exposure to a philosopher who employs soul and spirit as antonyms can be a somewhat perplexing experience. It is important for us to realize that we are not entering any quixotic protest here against familiar lexical custom. We merely wish to advise the reader that whilst we are involved in the interpretation of Klagesian thought, soul and spirit are to be treated consistently as technical philosophical terms bearing the specific meanings that Klages has assigned to them.

Our philosopher is not being needlessly obscure or perversely recherché in this matter, for although there are no unambiguous distinctions drawn between soul and spirit in English usage, the German language recognizes some very clear differences between the terms Seele and Geist, and Hildebrandt’s article amply documents the widely ramified implications of the distinctions in question. In fact, literary discourse in the German-speaking world is often characterized by a lively awareness of these very distinctions. Rudolf Kassner, for instance, tells us that his friend, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, inhabited a world of soul [Seele], not one of spirit [Geist]. In speaking of Rilke’s world as that the soul, Kassner is proclaiming the indisputable truth that Rilke’s imagination inhabits an innocent, or pagan, world, a realm that is utterly devoid of such “spiritual” baggage as “sin” and “guilt.” Likewise, for Kassner, as for Rilke, the world of spirit is the realm of labor and duty, which is ruled by abstractions and “ideals.” I can hardly exaggerate the significance of the spirit-soul dichotomy upon which Kassner has shed so much light in these remarks on Rilke as the man of “soul.” If the reader bears their substance in mind, he will find that the path to understanding shall have been appreciably cleared of irksome obstacles.

Therefore, these indispensable lexical distinctions are henceforth to function as our established linguistic protocol. Bearing that in mind, when the reader encounters the Klagesian thesis which holds that man is the battlefield on which soul and spirit wage a war to the death, even the novice will grasp some portion of the truth that is being enunciated. And the initiate who has immersed his whole being in the biocentric doctrine will swiftly discover that he is very well prepared indeed to perpend, for instance, the characterological claim that one can situate any individual at a particular point on an extensive typological continuum at one extreme of which we situate such enemies of sexuality and sensuous joy as the early Christian hermits or the technocrats and militarists of our own day, all of whom represent the complete dominance of spirit; and at the opposite extreme of which we locate the Dionysian maenads of antiquity and those rare modern individuals whose delight in the joys of the senses enables them to attain the loftiest imaginable pinnacle of ecstatic vitality: the members of this second group, of course, comprise the party of life, whose ultimate allegiance is rendered to soul.

Before we conclude this brief digression into terminological affairs, we would advise those readers whose insuperable hostility to every form of metaphysical “idealism” compels them to resist all attempts to “place” spirit and soul as “transcendental” entities, that they may nevertheless employ our terms as heuristic expedients, much as Ampére employed the metaphor of the “swimmer” in the electric “current.”

Biocentric Metaphysics in its Historical Context

Perhaps a brief summary will convey at least some notion of the sheer originality and the vast scope of the biocentric metaphysics. Let us begin by placing some aspects of this philosophical system in historical context. For thousands of years, western philosophers have been deeply influenced by the doctrine, first formulated by the Eleatic school and Plato, which holds that the images that fall upon our sensorium are merely deceitful phantoms. Even those philosophers who have rebelled against the schemes devised by Plato and his successors, and who consider themselves to be “materialists,” “monists,” “logical atomists,” etc., reveal that have been infected by the disease even as they resist its onslaught, for in many of their expositions the properties of matter are presented as if they were independent entities floating in a void that suspiciously resembles the transcendent Platonic realm of the “forms.”

Ludwig Klages, on the other hand, demonstrates that it is precisely the images and their ceaseless transformations that constitute the only realities. In the unique phenomenology of Ludwig Klages, images constitute the souls of such phenomena as plants, animals, human beings, and even the cosmos itself. These images do not deceive: they express; these living images are not to be “grasped,” not to be rigidified into concepts: they are to be experienced. The world of things, on the other hand, forms the proper subject of scientific explanatory schemes that seek to “fix” things in the “grasp” of concepts. Things are appropriated by men who owe their allegiance to the will and its projects. The agents of the will appropriate the substance of the living world in order to convert it into the dead world of things, which are reduced to the status of the material components required for purposeful activities such as the industrial production of high-tech weapons systems. This purposeful activity manifests the outward operations of an occult and dæmonic principle of destruction.

Klages calls this destructive principle “spirit” (Geist), and he draws upon the teaching of Aristotle in attempting to account for its provenance, for it was Aristotle who first asserted that spirit (nous) invaded the substance of man from “outside.” Klages’s interpretation of this Aristotelian doctrine leads him to conclude that spirit invaded the realm of life from outside the spatio-temporal world. Likewise, Klages draws on the thought of Duns Scotus, Occam and other late mediæval English thinkers when he situates the characteristic activity of spirit in the will rather than in the intellect. Completely original, however, is the Klagesian doctrine of the mortal hostility that exists between spirit and life (=soul). The very title of the philosopher’s major metaphysical treatise proclaims its subject to be “The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul” (Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele).

The indivisible body-soul unity that had constituted the living substance of man during the “primordial,” or prehistoric, phase of his existence, in time becomes the focus of spirit’s war against life. Spirit severs the vital connection by thrusting itself, like the thin end of an invasive wedge, between the poles of body and soul. History is the tragic chronicle that recounts the ceaseless war that is waged by spirit against life and soul. When the ever-expanding breach between body and soul finally becomes an unbridgeable abyss, the living substance is no more, although no man can predict how long man may endure as a hollow shell or simulacrum. The ceaseless accumulation of destructive power by spirit is accompanied by the reduction of a now devitalized man to the status of a mere machine, or “robot,” who soullessly regurgitates the hollow slogans about “progress,” “democracy,” and the delights of “the consumer society” that are the only values recognized in this world of death. The natural world itself becomes mere raw material to be converted into “goods” for the happy consumer.

A Unified System of Thought: Graphology

Let us now turn to a more detailed survey of the elements that comprise the biocentric system of metaphysics. The thought of Ludwig Klages comprises several structural components, which form a series of interdependent and increasingly comprehensive fields of research. Although each component may be profitably examined as a discrete entity, we can only grasp the full grandeur of Klagesian thought when we study the various components in the context of their interrelationships within the comprehensive system that the philosopher has constructed, for it is only when we view his thought as a unified system that we can comprehend its truly unsurpassed metaphysical profundity. Thus, graphology constitutes one element of expression-research, which, in its turn, constitutes one element of characterology. Characterology, finally, is the indispensable element that enables us to formulate a coherent interpretation of the nature of the universe, viz. philosophy in the strict sense.

Although graphology didn’t initially interest the “natural science” psychologists, the investigations that were conducted by Klages eventually evoked the interest of psychiatrists and applied psychologists, who would eventually incorporate some of his teachings in the curriculum of German universities. Graphology was also utilized in such fields as child-guidance and clinical psychology.

Klages was preceded in this field of research by a host of investigators, most of whom relied on intuitive guesses and inspired leaps of deduction in developing their own, occasionally quite profound, theories. Klages, in fact, pays explicit tribute to these pathfinders in numerous of his graphological publications. (Americans might be startled to learn that Edgar Allan Poe himself has an honorable place in the illustrious line of graphological prophets!) Nevertheless, it was only at the end of the 19^th century that the interpretation of written script was erected upon an enduring scientific foundation by the Frenchman J.-H. Michon and the German Wilhelm Preyer.

The most renowned of Klages’s contributions to graphology is his idea of the Formniwo, or “style-value.” With the aid of this tool, the researcher can discriminate between various exemplars (handwritten samples) under examination, and can apply a general overall evaluation (negative, positive, or, even, ambiguous), without the guess-work and shoddy formulations of earlier students, who relied on “isolated signs” to guide them. Klages employs this concept of “style-value” to examine organic, or “holistic” entities, and his evaluation proceeds from a global perception of the personal expression through to a more detailed scrutiny. The procedure begins with an analytical inspection carried out on three levels: 1. the person’s driving-forces or motivations (“interests”); 2. the person’s creative impulses and level of intelligence; and 3. the person’s civic or political virtues. Klages tells us frankly that if we are aware of a person’s emotional makeup, the degree to which he or she is a productive and community-minded member of the polis, and how creative the person is, we know pretty much how that person will react to a life-situation.

We can best understand a person’s emotional life and the level of his intelligence through an analysis of the characteristic rhythm that his handwriting displays. Rhythm is manifested in the harmony of spaces and forms, as evidenced in the margins, the spaces between the lines, and between the letters and words. Here we find the most accurate indications as to the nature of the inner life of the person, and how rich or poor is his thought. The creative elements are best observed in the simplification and improvement that we find in the person’s handwriting. Just as mankind is dependent upon the creative genius for improvements in the cultural and technological fields, and upon the simplifications in technique that are brought about by the inventor, so too will these characteristics be evident in an individual’s handwriting. The creative person is always interested in improving his “tools,” as it were. The degree to which the person will be a coöperative and responsible member of the community is reflected in the legibility and fluency of his handwriting. The legibility of a man’s exemplars is obviously going to indicate his ability to communicate successfully. The fluency will demonstrate the person’s level-headedness and sincerity.

The five keys to the evaluation of style are: 1) Rhythm. Klages tells us that there are inherent rhythmic patterns that govern the universe. We are able to recognize and gauge these rhythms in the spatial patterns of a person’s handwriting by examining whether the margins are contextually harmonious, viz., we must scrutinize a particular exemplar with an eye to determining the natural configurations (structural harmonies) formed by the gaps that intervene between the lines, between the words, and also between the individual letters. Because disharmonies are arresting—they “leap to the eye,” as it were—we have no difficulty in establishing the grade of spatial rhythm in an exemplar. The rating of handwriting’s rhythm is more a matter of insight and intuition than of expert reasoning. 2) Symmetry. In a harmonious exemplar we find that the person does not overdevelop one zone at the expense of another zone; i.e., we do not find the bottom loop of a q to be exaggerated as against the upper zone stroke. In short, where we find such a deviation, or loss of proportion, we must assign the exemplar a low grade. An examination of the individual character’s height (as from the bottom of the q to its summit) cannot furnish us with a sufficient basis upon which to evaluate the overall symmetry of a person’s handwriting. Where we find excessive width, pressure, slant, loops, bars, dots, flourishes, or any other such deviation, we must recognize a disturbance of symmetry. The letters, whether they are capitals or minimum letters, must be well developed in a gradual fashion, avoiding a deflated narrowness as well as an inflated width. In short a character is to be judged both on its height as well as on the amount of space that it covers. Wide lower zone loops in an overall narrow handwriting or conjoined with deflated small letters, indicate a lack of symmetry; and unevenness of pressure or slant belong as well to the category of disproportions. 3) Creativeness. Although very few people exhibit a high degree of symmetry in their handwriting, it is a fact that even fewer display creativeness. Most people will not be grieved by this fact, as most people would rather belong to the bovine throng than to the creative elite—even in their handwriting! Only perhaps one in a thousand are willing to become heretics, to break away from the sweaty masses, to display the slightest signs of independence and boldness, to write an individual hand. In fact, only a genius is capable of inventing new and finer characters and connections, even though such creations might make for easier writing without impaired or compromised legibility. However, we must realize that an original hand and a creative hand can be two different things, for an original scribe is not always creative, but a creative person always will compose an original script. An original script must merely avoid the existing patterns; but an original script must add something to the already existing fund of patterns. A creative script must facilitate writing, and only he who writes a great deal, one who must confront and develop his ideas on the wing, as they come and go, will desire more easily written characters, and will experience the urge to create them. Such a person is ordinarily well educated, and will continue to improve his script throughout his life because he is demanding and discriminating. Klages emphatically asserts that eccentricity alone cannot indicate the creative scribe. All innovations in script will be simpler and easier to write—purpose is the rule for the creative scribe, and not merely unnaturalness. 4) Legibility. A letter is written in order to be read, obviously, and any letter that cannot be deciphered by the addressee has clearly failed of its purpose. We do not normally read from letter to letter, or from word to word. Instead, we read from cluster to cluster of words and only stumble when we come across an unfamiliar expression, or an illegible one. In consequence, the only method that we have to establish objectively the legibility of an exemplar is to remove words at random from their context and scrutinize them. Very often, the most intelligent writers will not pass this test. 5) Speed. The elementary law of creativeness is violated if the sample has not been written spontaneously, if it has required an inordinate amount of time in which to be produced. What is needed here is time saving simplicity. In fact, slowly produced writings often give evidence of criminal tendencies in the scribe. Although such scribes will attempt to furnish a genteel, legible, and conforming script, they often attempt to patch up their initially unworthy efforts by closings open letters, by straightening out faulty strokes, and by re-crossing their t-bars. The overall impression such exemplars give is one of uncleanness. A fluently produced sample, on the other hand, will show a right-slanted writing, with irregularly placed i-dots, with most dots placed ahead of the letter itself, with other letters and letter connections with garland shapes rather than angles or arcades, with the left margins tending to widen as the scribe reaches the bottom of the page, with smooth, light, and unbroken strokes.

Klages definitively refuted the doctrine of “fixed signs,” which had so misled his predecessors, who erroneously ascribed “atomistic” character traits to discrete signs without perceiving the contextual matrix from which the signs are born. The biocentric investigator does not concern himself with expressive fragments: for life can only be found in organic wholes. To summarize: idiosyncratic traits are revealed in such formal elements as evenness, regularity, tempo, distribution, pressure, breadth, consistency, variety, connectedness, “angle of incidence,” and initial stress of the handwritten sample, which is a permanent record of expressive gesture, a residue of living being, an examination of which can eventually enable us to embark upon ever more profound investigations of the inner life of man. (The major graphological texts published by Klages are: Die Probleme der Graphologie [“The Problems of Graphology”], published in 1910; the Handschrift und Charakter [“Handwriting and Character”], of 1912, which has gone through 26 editions; and the Einführung in die Psychologie der Handschrift [“Introduction to the Psychology of Handwriting”], which appeared in 1928.)

A Unified System of Thought: Expression Analysis

From this brief glance at the narrow field of biocentric graphology, we now proceed to a more comprehensive division of the Klagesian system of thought, viz. the “analysis of expression” (Ausdruckskunde). According to Klages, the larger part of our knowledge of the inner life of those around us stems from our ability to comprehend the meanings inherent in each person’s gestures and facial expressions. This knowledge is not mediated by consciousness, for we must grasp the inner life of another directly, if we would grasp it at all. Every expressive movement is the precipitate of a lived impulse, and, unlike the viewpoint advanced by certain “behaviorists,” these impulses are not reducible to the simple antithetic pair: pleasure or pain. Every expressive movement can be interpreted so as to reveal the form, duration, and sequence of the inner impulses. Klages subtly differentiates between several types of movements: the expressive movement, the mechanical movement, and the volitional movement. The expressive movement is regarded as one aspect of the impulse movement; the reflex movement is regarded as an element of the expressive movement; the mechanical movements earlier existed as impulse movements and are to be grouped under this head; volitional-movement is an impulse-movement controlled by the will. The types of movements are differentiated by their relationship to their aims. Volition movements are shaped by expectations of successful outcomes. Expressive movements are symbolic enactments; thus, the facial expression that embodies terror is the symbolic performance of the motions that represent the actions of one who would escape from a situation that evokes terror.

Klages rejects the Darwinian theory of expression, which interprets all expressive movements as the rudimentary remains of actions that once were purposive. This view reflects Darwin’s insistence on rationalizing the “mechanisms” of nature, in spite of the obvious fact that expressive gestures have their origins in the subjectivity of the organism in which they arise. Pace Darwin, Klages insists that the living being never responds to the same stimulus with the same response: it responds to similar impressions with similar reactions. Instincts are similar only in species that are similar, and the process of individuation can only be consummated after the development of judgment and will. The will is not rooted in the affects, for its task is to bind, or repress, the affective life. The power of the will can be expressed as a quantum of driving force that is non-qualitative. It harnesses life in order to direct it to a goal, and the regulation of volition-movement is completely different from expressive movement. The expressive movement has no aim other than itself; the impulse-movement derives its aims from its environment; and for the volitional-movement, the conscious willing of the aim is of the essence. Actions (in contrast to pathic, dream-like states) are volitional movements (handwriting belongs under this head). Since the personality comprises a constellation of dynamic relationships, every movement expresses personality in its essential nature, for the character of an individual is revealed in every action. However, one must study aspects of expression that are outside the realm of volition, not subject to the control of consciousness, and beyond the governance of intention and learned skills. Volitional movement expresses the personality of the willing person; it does not originate in vitality, for it is chained to the causal nexus originating in the conscious mind. By itself, the volition is not expressive; the important thing is the individual course of the movement. There is present in all of an individual’s expressive movements a unity of character, and any movement on the part of a person will assume that type or manner of movement which is characteristic of that individual. Klages asserts that the writing movement, for instance, is the manifestation of the will to express oneself with the aid of a certain writing system, the volition, which is the current state of some personality. Therefore, handwriting is a volitional movement and carries the idiosyncratic stamp of any personality.

Volitional movements cannot exist without impulse movements, but the impulse movement can exist without the volitional one. Every state of the body expresses an impulse system, and every attitude finds its appropriate expression. Every movement of the body is a vital movement that has two constituent parts, the impulse and the expressive. Therefore, an expressive movement is the visible manifestation of the impulses and affects that are symbolically represented in the vital movement of which it is a component part. The expression manifests the pattern of a psychic movement as to its strength, duration, and direction.

Now how is it possible for human beings to perceive, and to interpret, the expression of the soul? Klages answers this by explaining that the capacity for expression is coördinated with the human being’s capacity for impression. Impression is split into two functions: a passive (“pathic”) one, which receives the impression; and an active one, which makes it possible for one to become aware of one’s own nature as well as that of others—only through this objectification can expression have meaning. It is the very foundation of all genuine research into the study of expressive gestures.

Klages cautions the student to avoid all vain quests after qualitative states of expressive movement; instead, we must examine vital “essences,” because, in the end, isolated segments of expression must not be divorced from their organic matrix. This point of view recapitulates Klages’s criticisms of the graphological theory of “isolated signs,” which can never reveal the global structure that embodies the elements of personality.

The study of expressive movement does not derive its findings from the analysis of purely “objective” states, for the entities examined by the biocentric researcher are experienced as living beings. Klages’s affirmation of the value of expression is in perfect harmony with his high evaluation of the pathic or ecstatic abandonment of the ego in a surrender to the actuality of the living images. We can locate an individual’s capacity for such self-abandonment on a continuum that is graduated according to the living content. According to the entity in which it occurs, each rhythmic pulsation gives birth to another and yet another vital content, whether it is manifested as a faint arousal of the soul or as pathic frenzy. Paradoxically, one person’s rage may be shallower and feebler than the mere breathing of another person. The man who able to observe this, and who is thereby enabled to understand the implications of his observations, so that he can distinguish authentic personality from the mere precipitate of its psychic activity, such as a handwritten exemplar, has perceived the agency through which each formal, or functional, element alternately expresses a ‘minus’ character or a ‘plus’ character. He is able to determine, as between one instance of expressive movement and another, whether he is witnessing the strength of a vital impulse or the weakness of an antagonistic inhibition, and can then correctly evaluate the character’s true traits.

The power of creativity, or formative ability [Gestaltungskraft], which is the measure of one’s capacity for enhanced intensity of expressive force, has its only source in nature. However, every vital impulse is impeded by certain binding forces, or inhibitions. This duality is referred to by Klages as the “dual significance of expression.” Thus, if we witness an individual’s performance of a violent act, this act may be the result of the attractive force of the goal towards which he is aiming; or it may, on the other hand, indicate merely a lack of inhibition on the part of the person in question. The will to domination may indicate strength of will, of course; but it may also indicate an embittered affective life. Likewise, sensitivity may arise from emotional delicacy; but it may also be the result of emotional irritability. Such judgments can only be validated on the basis of a global examination of the individual under review.

As we shall see shortly, Klages’s philosophy holds that the historical evolution of culture can only be interpreted as murderous record, a chronicle of ever-mounting horror in the course of which the vital power of expressive forces recedes before the soulless world ruled by the will, most perfectly embodied in the all-powerful state. But the enlightened biocentrist will turn from this dead Dingwelt (thing-world) to seek refreshment in the en-souled Ausdruckswelt (expression-world).

A Unified System of Thought: Characterology

From the study of expressive movement we proceed to characterology (Charakterkunde). Just as graphology led to the more comprehensive science of expression, the science of expression, in turn, provides the fund of empirical observations that supports the biocentric characterology. Klagesian characterology, in fact, constitutes the most comprehensive study of the human being that has ever been formulated. (Characterology, in its turn, constitutes the indispensible structural component of the biocentric scheme of metaphysics).

The Grundlagen der Charakterkunde presents Klages’s system of psychology in great detail, and because his psychological exposition in that treatise is so intimately interrelated with the philosophical exposition contained in Der Geist and in his other philosophical publications, we will treat the characterology and the metaphysics as indivisible aspects of one vast symphony of thought. However, we will say a few words at this point about the most original feature of biocentric characterology, viz., the presentation of character as a dynamic structural system, comprising such elements as the material (Stoff), the structure (Gefüge), the specific type or idiosyncratic quality (Artung), the architectonics (Aufbau), and the constitutional disposition (Haltungsanlagen).

The material comprises such innate capacities as recollection, cognition as it is embodied in conceptual thought, critical “penetration” (or acumen), intensity, sensibility, and many other capacities, all of which are innate, i.e., conditioned by the genetic endowment of the particular character. From the outset, Klages rejects with some contempt the inadequate “tabula rasa” tradition of British empiricism, which he correctly traces back to its source in Locke and his school. This innate material occurs in various combinations that vary from person to person, and although Klages ordinarily voices opposition to methodologies that are based upon quantitative “formalism,” he agrees that the material is measurable in at least a metaphorical sense, for it constitutes our personal possession, the “capital,” as it were, with which we are equipped.

The structure comprises such differentiations as: temperamental or reserved, wandering or fixed, emotionally stable or unstable. Within each personality there is a unique tempo of affective excitability that can be analogized to an emotional wave, whose quantum of reactivity is functionally related to an individual’s internal organic processes. Unlike the purely innate capacities, the characteristics can be adequately expressed as a correlation between the magnitude of an impulse and the force of resistance to that impulse (we had occasion earlier to refer briefly to this relationship as it pertains to the analysis of expressive gestures).

The quality relates to the formal aspects of volition and the tendencies of the affects, which unite to form the system of drving-forces or “interests.” Specific driving-forces are by their nature directional, as we can see by examining the different goals toward which a greedy person or domineering person seem to be impelled. Architectonics constitutes the correlated interrelationships that weave all the other elements of the character together.

Finally, the dispositions (or attitudes) comprise those traits that are obvious even to the cursory glance of an external observer, and among these traits we find courage, talkativeness, diffidence, and obnoxiousness.

However, the most important of all the elements that make up the character is the qualitative estimation of an individual’s capacities of feeling and volition. Volition is a limited instantiation of the will, and the will is of the very essence of spirit; in fact the will is the darkest and most destructive of spirit’s manifestations, the demon of negation, the very essence of the void.

The constellation of the driving-forces constitutes the personality, and these driving forces are as diverse and multiform as life. The drive is manifest as an urge that issues in a movement, and that movement is generated under the influence of the non-conceptual, vital experience of a power to which Klages has given the name symbol. The driving-forces are polarized, for a drive that has its source in an excess of energy (thus entailing an impulse to discharge energy) must be contrasted with the drive that arises out of a lack of energy (which will give rise to the attempt to recoup energy). There are drives that can be stirred without regard to time, as well as drives that manifest periodicity

The instincts are opposed to the will. The will devises conscious, purposive projects that are in conflict with the immediate desire for gratification of the instincts. In opposition to the world as it is felt, the will erects conscious purposiveness and the life-hostile, moralistic codes of ethics. The authentic content of the personality is drawn from the living world, but the will ruthlessly imposes form upon that content by constricting, inhibiting, directing, or suppressing the instincts and affects. The will possesses no original, creative power of its own. The will is incarnated in man as the ego, which can be expressed metaphorically as the rudder on a vessel whose only function is controlling the vessel’s course. The will-as-ego is characterized by self-awareness and insistent activity. The instinctual drives, on the other hand, give birth to an unconscious, “pathic” surrender to the living cosmos. The instincts and affects are revealed in the love for knowledge, Eros, the quest for truth, and the admiration of beauty. The will reveals its nature in duty, conscience, ambition, greed, and egomania. The will seeks to repress or extirpate the vital impulses, and the destructive effects of the will in action can even be fatal to the organism, as we can see in the case of the political revolutionary who embarks on a fatal hunger-strike. The shattered health and twisted mind resulting from the obsessive asceticism of the religious zealot is too familiar to require further elaboration.

Philosophical Works

The strictly philosophical writings of Ludwig Klages comprise a wide range of materials. In length they range from pithy articles contributed to various lexicons and encyclopedias, through extended essays and revamped lectures, and culminate in his full-dress, formal treatises, the most comprehensive of which is the epochal Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele [3 volumes, 1929-32]. Der Geist contains an astonishing 1500 pages of text as well as an elaborate scholarly apparatus devoted to source notes and ancillary material, the closely-printed text of which would make a fair-sized book on its own!

One of his shorter essays, the Brief Über Ethik, which was published shortly after the German defeat in 1918, is of exceptional interest to the student of race. Unlike many of his optimistic contemporaries, Klages viewed the catastrophic mongelization that was poisoning the Aryan race as an ineluctable doom, the fatal and irremediable dissolution of life under the savage assault of triumphant spirit. In the Brief, his intense study of the psychological aspects of man’s disastrous evolution, enabled him to trace the 20^th century’s accursed proliferation of “slave”-types and men without character to a single poisonous source, for the production of such wretched types, he proclaims, “has arisen, arises now, and will arise, always and everywhere, as the direct result of racial bastardization and pollution of the blood!” On similar grounds, he excoriates the modern world’s monstrous plague of moralistic fanaticism in the Brief, asserting that the rapidly increasing legions of ethical preachers constitute one more manifestation of the dysgenic breeding that is destroying our culture. The moral maniac’s twisted psyche within as well as his distorted physiognomy without clearly demonstrate that such a creature “is merely the spiritual expression of tainted blood!” Because the modern world regards the man of ethics, will, and reason as the sole proper vehicle of ego and spirit, no one should be surprised that traditional and healthy value must go to the wall. Race, breeding, nobility, depth of soul, beauty, courage, and blood, are one and all devoid of substance to the moralist and the egalitarian crusader. To them, man is his mind, his morals, and his ego, and the man who has given his sole allegiance to ego and spirit, has simultaneously surrendered all interest in the particular man. Henceforth he compulsively devotes his attentions to man as generality. Klages ridicules all respect for “humanity,” that ghost of an abstraction, as a willful repudiation of every vital power of discrimination, and he who stubbornly refuses to immerse himself in the undiffentiated ochlocratic mob will always be assailed as an enemy of “mankind.” This humanitarian insanity is, paradoxically, also the root of the murderous career of Christian and post-Christian civilization, for those who preach so incessantly of “love” and who babble so cretinously of “compassion,” have but one response to those who do not endorse their “spiritual” values: that response is murder. The egalitarian can never face the obvious fact that wherever and whenever you order a man to love, you have guaranteed that he will respond with hate.

The racialist theoreticians whom Klages most admired and cited most pertinently in his collected works were Gobineau, Ludwig Woltmann, and L. F. Clauss. Klages’s analysis of the racial dimension of the science of expression is indebted to the analytical studies of race and expression published by Clauss, especially in the formulation by Klages of what we will call the racial continuum of expression and excitability. No objective observer would wish to deny the obvious fact that the Mediterranean division of the Aryan race is typically characterized by a greater ease of expression than is found in the Nordic Aryan. Klages enforces the validity of this truth quite vividly through the ingenious use of national stereotypes as illustrative heuristic expedients; thus, his typological extremes extend from the Italian, in whom we find the maximum ease of expressive gesture as well as the greatest degree of temperamental excitability, passes through the various intermediary increments, and arrives at the opposite extreme of the racial continuum of expression, where Klages situates the only possible candidate for title of least expressive and most temperamentally reserved of European Aryans, viz., the Englishman.

In his critical exposition of the doctrine of the “temperaments,”Klages extends his investigation of individual differences to encompass an analysis of the capacity for stimulation of the will that is peculiar to the different races. Several qualities that are falsely considered by many researchers to be permanently and deeply rooted in man, e.g., the tendency to seek for perfection and the adoption of an “idealistic” point of view, vanish almost completely in the course of a lifetime. On the other hand, the least variable property of a character is this “capacity for stimulation of the will,” which Klages calls the “constant of temperament.” The magnitude, or degree, of the capacity for such stimulation varies significantly between the races as well, and because it constitutes a temperamental “constant,” it provides a permanent index of racial differences. The Oriental race, for instance, is characterized by a will that is far less excitable than the will of the Aryan, and Klages draws upon the great Count Gobineau for an illustration: “Consider…buying and selling as they are practiced in an Oriental bazaar. An Oriental will bargain for the same article with perfect equanimity for days on end, whereas the European loses patience after an hour, and often much sooner. Joseph Arthur de Gobineau makes a fine artistic use of these differences of character in his Nouvelles Asiatiques.”

Like Gobineau, Woltmann, and Clauss, Klages was a universal scholar who possessed the same wide-ranging vision and the treasures of living wisdom that all of these men shared. And we can be apodictically certain that every one of these scholars would have rejected with utter scorn the narrow-minded theory, endorsed even by many modern writers who consider themselves to be the true heirs of the great racialists of yore, which holds that the quality of a man can be reduced to a mathematical expression. Without a doubt, Klages would have felt that the egalitarian lunacy that now rules the world is only slightly more ludicrous than the attempts that are made by modern anti-egalitarians to reduce man to his IQ. And when certain writers attempt to place characterology on a “scientific” basis through the use of factor-analysis—in other words, by pouring even more formalistic mathematics into the sauce!—we can imagine his ironic smile as he whispers: sancta simplicitas!

Klages traces the origins of the modern, mongrelized world’s moralistic fanaticism and criminality back to its source in another devastatingly ironic essay, Das Problem des SOKRATES, in which he dismantles the beloved figure of Socrates as if he were a defective toaster-oven. Because Socrates is regarded by Klages as the very antithesis of the true philosopher, we will examine in some detail this unconventional and irreverent analysis of Socrates and his thought. Without qualification or proviso, Klages launches his attack. He sees Socrates as an utter fraud, a dissembling hypocrite, a complete ignoramus in scientific matters whose arrogance and lack of curiosity are truly astonishing. Why did Socrates ignore the truly epochal cosmological discoveries that were being made by the Hylozoists? A true philosopher would have been enthralled by the discoveries of these great scholars, but Socrates could care less. Heraclitus, Protagoras, and the Hylozoists were the true philosophers, not this rachitic ghoul, this professional sponger and house-guest, this most sophistical of sophists who habitually sought to diminish the genuine achievements of his hated contemporaries, not by surpassing them, but by dismissing them instead as contemptible—sophists!

No figure in the intellectual history of Greece had a more skilful touch when it came to lodging dust in his spectators’ eyes. We witness the Socratic gambit par excellence when this logomach employs the most childish word-games conceivable in order to transform his blatant lack of creative talent into that which he has successfully persuaded all subsequent generations was, in reality, the most dazzling array of talents ever united within one mortal frame. Socrates obviously couldn’t master science: therefore science is an unworthy avocation! A prominent Sophist has arrived in town, and the word is out that he has prepared his lectures with a scrupulous care for formal elegance and a proper observance of the canons of logic: therefore, says Socrates, he’s nothing but logic-chopping hustler with a fancy prose style and a yen for a fast buck! From the dawn of time this has been, is now, and ever will remain, the bitter complaint leveled by the work-shy parasite against the gainfully employed citizen.

In addition to his other dubious gifts, Socrates is also an unparalleled expert at forestalling criticism, for his hidden motivation seems almost childishly transparent when we find him assuring his audience, with all the candor and guilelessness of a Uriah Heep, that the only thing that he knows is that he knows nothing! And this pish posh and flummery is still luring philosophical yokels to the Socratic side-show 2,400 years later!

In fact, the whole repertoire of Socratic methods is exactly what Hegel and Klages say that it is: a bare-faced and unworthy swindle. Furthermore, although hardly any commentator has drawn attention to the fact, Socrates was completely successful in one of his more sinister ploys, for his most subtle dialectical maneuvers can even be said to have ominous political implications in addition to their philosophical ones. We are alluding to the sly manipulation whereby Socrates assures his auditors that the truths that they seek are already within them, for his seemingly innocent claim conceals the fact that by this very means Socrates is engineering a monstrous and underhanded tyranny over naïve youths who can scarcely realize that, invariably, everything that they will “discover” within them has already been planted there by an autocratic and mendacious charlatan!

But what of the great martyr to “free thought,” the plaster bust whom endless generations have been taught to revere as a saint and genius? Nonsense, says Klages. Not for the first, and certainly not for the last time, Klages confounds our expectations by explicitly endorsing his predecessor Hegel’s view, for Hegel effortlessly proved that Socrates got just what what coming to him. Hegel found that the conduct of the court during the trial of Socrates was legally unimpeachable and he wholeheartedly endorsed the verdict of the court. Klages also draws on Hegel’s account when he directs our attention to this charlatan’s truly mortal offenses against Athens, for who among this sophist’s accusers could forget for one moment the brutal crimes that were committed against the citizenry of Athens by Kritias, who in addition to being one of the the dearest pupils of Socrates, was also the bloodiest of all the Thirty Tyrants? And was not another cherished apostle—and, perhaps, a bit more—of Socrates, i.e., the slimy Alcibiades, known by both court and citizenry as the conscienceless traitor who bore the ultimate responsibility for the defeat and downfall of Athens in the Peloponnesian War? This obvious truth was disputed by no sane Athenian.

No Greek thinker known to history, in fact, has a flimsier claim to the august title of true philosopher than this mongrelized gargoyle whose moral mania and theatrically grandiose death anticipate both the ethical idiocy and the shabby demise of the founder of the Christian cult, and Klages explicitly speaks of Socrates as the ancient world’s first Christian martyr. In the end, the only genuine achievements that can be credited to Socrates, Klages insists, were in the fields of epistemology and philosophical linguistics. And in all candor, who would seek to challenge the view that Socrates had about as much capacity for meaningful metaphysical speculation as your average floor-polisher? The rest is smoke and mirrors, a petty swindler’s sleight of hand.

Another brief philosophical text by Klages has become his best-known and most controversial work. In 1913, publisher Eugen Diederichs and the organizers of the anniversary celebration of the “Battle of the Nations” (which had taken place at Leipzig during the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon) invited the philosopher to address the representatives of the German Youth Movement. He delivered his Mensch und Erde, a stunning and prophetic attack on the enemies of Mother Earth, which was later published in a commemorative volume featuring a striking piece of cover-art by the neo-pagan painter Fidus. This seminal work has only recently received its due as the first statement of the philosophy of “deep ecology” when a new edition was published in 1980 in coordination with the establishment of the German “Green” political party. In this “roll-call of the dead,” Klages laments the destruction of wildlife and landscape by encroaching “civilization,” and, in attacking the very idea of “Progess,” Klages praises the chthonic gods who have been driven into the underworld. He deplores the extinction of animal species and their wild habitats, the loss of ancient forests, and the annihilation of aboriginal peoples. He condemns Capitalism, Christianity, and utilitarianism as weapons aimed at the destruction of the ecology. Even tourism is excoriated as just another agent of environmental destruction, and Klages laments the murder of the whales long before such a concern was widespread .

“Without a doubt,” Klages says, “we are living in the age of the waning of the Soul,” and he insists that when Spirit has finally silenced the “primal song of the landscape,” the earth will be converted into “one gigantic Chicago interspersed with agriculture.” Our machines are attended by machine-men, whose noisy and glittering amusements are unable to conceal the fact that the world has been stripped of all life-enhancing symbols and ritual observances. Our hearts are barren, and “their inner rivulets can no longer water the blossoms of song and holy feasts; there remains only this bleak and grey workaday world,” in this age of soul-destruction.

“Progress” is simply an “unfettered lust for murder,” and all of nature must perish “before its poisonous breath.” Our age has lost all “knowledge of the world-creating, world-weaving force of all-unifying Eros.” “Originating with Socrates and coming through Kant all the way down to the present age, the hoarse demand of the Will resonates in every one of the refractions, disguises, and transformations assumed by our ethical systems, that it is the duty of man to control himself, to subject his desires to the rule of reason, to moderate his feelings when he can’t manage to exterminate them entirely.” Moralistic preachers, devoted to the “improvement” of man, are nothing but criminals against life, whose immunity to the lessons of experience is reflected in their oblivion to the data of our historical experience. The “inborn” conscience, as a matter of fact, is not at all an original fact of existence, for it cannot be found anywhere else in the animal kingdom; conscience is merely spirit’s poison at its work of destroying the soul of man. Under this influence, the soul can no longer dwell amid the pulsating flux of images, for a despotic rationality, in tandem with this moral mania, finally substitutes for the endless “becoming” of the actuality of the world of nature, the disconnected, dead world of “being.” “Whatever falls under the ray of intellect is immediately turned into a mere thing, a numbered object of thought connected only mechanically with other objects. The paradox enunciated by the modern sage, ‘we perceive but what is dead’, is a lapidary formulation of a profound truth.” Klages tells us that Life must soon perish, “for the hour of returning has been missed.”

The philosopher’s meditations on the myths and mysteries of the ancient Mediterranean world form the substance of the treatise entitled Vom kosmogonischen Eros, which appeared in 1922. Paradoxically, perhaps, in view of the anti-Socratism that we’ve been discussing, Klages follows the classic Platonic exposition in the “Symposium” regarding the nature of Eros, which is held to be compounded of antitheses such as wealth and poverty, fullness and emptiness, possession and want. This insight accounts for the dual nature of all striving, for every impulse and every desire arises from a lack of something that we yearn to possess and perishes at the moment when that which we have yearned to possess falls into our hands.

The duality that constitutes the substance of man is also clarified in the Eros-book. In primordial ages, man’s nature comprised the connected poles of body and soul, whose vital bonds it is spirit’s mission to sever from the moment that man enters into the realm of recorded history. Klages also clarifies the unique status of the image in his course of his exposition of biocentric phenomenology: “Wherever we find a living body, there we also find a soul; wherever we find a soul, there also we find a living body. The soul is the meaning of the body, and the image of the body is the manifestation of the soul. Whatever appears has a meaning, and every meaning reveals itself as it is made manifest. Meaning is experienced inwardly, the manifestation outwardly. The first must become image if it is to communicate itself, and the image must be re-internalized so that it may take effect. Those are, in the most literal sense, the twin poles of actuality.” (Klages’s exposition had, for once, been anticipated by Friedrich Paulsen, in whose textbook, “An Introduction to Philosophy,” we find the following remark: “Either we must regard the entire body, including the nervous system, as a system of means external to the soul, or we must regard the entire body as the visible expression, or physical equivalent, of life” [emphasis added]).

Life is not governed by spirit, for “the law of spirit” demands that spirit divorce itself utterly from the “rhythms of cosmic life.” Only the living image possesses a truly vital autonomy, for the image alone is independent of spirit. The image remains totally unaffected by whether or not the receiver of the sensuous image recollects its visitation afterwards. The thing, on the other hand, is thought into the world of consciousness. It exists as a dimension of a person’s inwardness. Life is not directed towards the future, for the future is not a property of actual time. The great error of Promethean man was in his elevating that which was to come to the same stage of actuality as the past. The “man of ‘world-history’” is a man dedicated to voids. He has annihilated and is annihilating the actuality of what has been in order to devote himself more completely to the projects of a hallucination called the future. He insists on shattering the fruitful connection of the near and the far in order to erect in its place the present’s Wandering Jew-like fascination “with a distant phantasm of futurity.” Actual time is a “stream coursing from the future into the past.”

This “cosmogonic Eros” of which Klages speaks is the life-creating son of the Mother Goddess of the prehistoric Ægean world, and must not be confused with the vapid cupids that can still be found on ancient Roman frescoes, whose pale plaster descendants so gaudily adorn the walls and ceilings of the palaces of rococo Europe. A more authentic incarnation is found in the Theogony of Hesiod, in which the poet calls Eros one of the first beings, born without father or mother. Likewise, in the Orphic hymns, Kronos is his father; Sappho calls him the offspring of Earth and Heaven; and Simonides traces the descent of Eros to the union of Aphrodite and Ares. Hesiod’s treatment, by far the most profound, portrays Eros as the force of attraction upon which the very existence of the material world depends. When Hesiod makes Eros the offspring of the rainbow and the westwind, he is indicating, by the use of metaphor, that spring, the season in which they prevail, is the time of love. For Hesiod, Eros is “the most beautiful of all the deathless gods.” The historical aspect of Klages’s text is largely an apologia for the Weltanschauung of Bachofen, with its forthright celebration of the “world of woman” and the life of “primitive” peoples (his most elaborate presentation of the Magna Mater and her world will appear in the crucial chapter on the “Great Mother” in Der Geist, which bears the telling subtitle “Marginal Observations on Bachofen’s Discoveries”).

Eros is to be distinguished from “love” and “sex,” both of which are tied to that obnoxious entity the “self” (Selbst), which tends to become the center of gravity in the life of man as history progressively tears his soul from the earth, turning the richly-endowed individual into a hollow mask and robot, divorced from Eros and earth. All Eros is Eros of distance (Eros der Ferne), and a moment’s reflection will suffice to demonstrate that nothing is more characteristic of our modern planetary technology than its tendency toward the annihilation of distance. Likewise, the will-to-possesion, the impulse for domination, and the thoughtless addiction to “information” that characterizes modern man are all condemned by Klages as attempts to lift the veil of Isis, which he sees as the ultimate “offense against life.” “The intellectual will to power is the crime against life itself, causing man to meet life’s vindictive retaliation.” For behind the veil, there is “nothingness,” which is to say spirit and the will to desubstantialize the cosmos. This “modern man” has traveled very far indeed from the Naturvölker, who prefer life to cogitation, and who experience the erotic bond without commingling their precious egos, whose desire is impersonal and not focused upon an insane idealization and apotheosis of the loved one. For Klages, the most vital manifestation of Eros is not the “love unto death” of sentimental “tragedy,” but is, instead, a surrender of the will to the impersonal forces of the cosmos. There is an Eros of the home as well as of the homeland, an Eros of the implement that we have fashioned with our own hands as well as an Eros of the art work that we have created with the implement’s aid. Eros inhabits, in fact, any object of perception to which we feel intimately connected, and all such objects and events become living symbols of our joys or of our sorrows. The ego has nothing to do with these erotic bonds, anymore than it has anything to do with maternal love.

Soul and Spirit

The very title of Klages’s metaphysical treatise, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, “The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul,” refers to the ceaseless and savage battle waged by spirit against the soul. The mounting onslaught of spirit against the living soul has constituted the innermost essence of the life of man. Whereas spirit once existed in a temporary and uneasy symbiosis with the soul, in the course of human history spirit’s destructive power waxes ever stronger, until spirit eventually abandons the symbiotic compromise that endured whilst the powers of life were still exalted, and erupts into the waning empire of the living soul as a savage and unyielding dæmon whose malevolent career reaches its grisly climax in our apocalyptic age of “virtual” reality, compassion-babble, hydrogen bombs, and racial chaos.

But just what is this “soul”? In the first place, the soul is not something exclusively human, for all phenomena possess soul, viz., the sea, animals, mountains, the wind, and the stars. In fact, all phenomena are “en-souled.” Now the soul possesses two poles, the archetypal soul and the substantial soul, or, to look upon these matters from a slightly different angle, a passive receptor pole and an active effector pole. The passive receptor pole is, in the thought of Klages, the truly characteristic aspect for the soul’s life. From its birth, the soul leads a pathic, or passive, dream-existence, in which its life is filled with visionary images. The soul only becomes released for activity in the phenomenal world when the bearer of that soul is confronted by the polarity of another soul, which forces each soul to reveal its nature to the other. The original characteristics of the soul are night, dreaming, rhythmic pulsation, infinite distance, and the realm of the unconscious.

The “elementary” substances that constitute the earth originated under the complex influence of telluric and cosmic forces, and the symbiotic interaction of all telluric phenomena was required in order to bring the animate world into being. According to the doctrine of the “actuality of the images,” the plant represents the transitional stage between the element and the living creature. (The botanist Jagadis Bose performed experiments that he felt conclusively demonstrated the capacity of plants to experience pain). The plant experiences life in the form of growth and maturation, as well as in the creation of offspring through the processes familiar to natural science. Spontaneous movements of various kinds are characteristic of plant-life, viz., the turning of the leaves and buds to the light, the sending of the root-system into the soil in order to extract nourishment from the earth, the fixing of supportive tendrils to fixed surfaces, etc. Klages draws our attention to the fact that there are several varieties of plant that are indubitably capable of self-motility. There are, at this threshold of another realm of being, organisms such as sea squirts, mussels, oysters, sponges, and zoophytes, which become fixed in their habitat only after the early stages of the lives. (When Verworrn published his experiments on the psychical life of the protista in 1899, he attributed sensation to these organisms, a position that certainly has much to recommend it. But when he attempted to demonstrate that even the will is in evidence at this stage of life, one can only shake one’s head in disbelief, for that which this author adduces as evidence of volition in the protista is the simple phenomenon of reaction to stimuli! Thus, Verworrn equates the reactive responses in the protista to the action of the will in man, in whom the “volitional” processes are more highly developed. This is certainly a case of blindness to a difference of essence.)

In the next developmental stage, i.e., that of the animal, the soul is now captured in a living body. The drives and instincts make their first appearance during this phase. The characteristic functions of the creature comprise physical sensation (as represented by the body-pole) and contemplation (the psychical pole). The living body is the phenomenon of the soul, and the soul is the meaning of the living body. However, in opposition to the realm of the lower animals, wherein sensation dominates contemplation, we find that in the higher animals, contemplation is strengthened at the expense of the physical sensations, as the result of spirit’s invasion of the life-cell, which occurs at this time. Now if one were to consider “the waking state” to be synonymous with consciousness itself, than one must consclude that consciousness is present in animal and man alike. According to Klages, however, it is only the capacity for conceptual thought that characterizes consciousness, so that we must attribute consciousness proper only to man. In the animal, the image cannot be divorced from the sensory impression. In man, on the other hand, the content of the visual image can be separated from the act of perception that receives that content throught the sensorium. Therefore, although the animal undoubtedly possesses instincts, only man is truly conscious.

The biological processes that constitute plant life and animal life are also operative in man, but with the intervention of spirit (at least during the initial phase of development, during which spirit and life maintain some kind of balance), he is capable of creating symbolic systems of communication and expression, viz., art and poetry, as well as myth and cult. The processes of life establish the polar connection between the actual images of the world (or, the “macrocosm”) and the pathic soul that receives them (or, the “microcosm”).

The human soul comprises the totality of the immediate experiences of man. It is the soul that receives its impressions of actuality in the shape of images. “The image that falls upon the senses: that, and nothing besides, is the meaning of the world,” Klages insists, and one such immediate act of reception can be seen in the manner in which one comprehends the imagery employed by a great poet or the skillfully drawn portrait executed by a gifted artist. The actualities received by the “pathic” soul are experienced in the dimensions of space and time, but they have their coming-to-be and their passing-away solely within the temporal order. In sharp contrast to the traditional Christian insistence that virtue constitutes a valorization of the “spirit” at the expense of a denigrated body, Klages sees man’s highest potential in the state of ecstasy, i.e., the privileged state of rapture in which the connected poles of body and soul are liberated from the intrusive “spirit.” What the Christian understands by the word soul is, in fact, actually spirit, and spirit—to simplify our scheme somewhat for the sake of expediency—is the mortal adversary of the soul. Another way to express this insight would be the formula: spirit is death, and soul is life.

Spirit manifests its characteristic essence in formalistic cognition and technological processes and in the hyper-rationalism that has pre-occupied western thought since the Renaissance. Both mathematical formalism and “high” technology have reared their conceptual skyscrapers upon a foundation formed by the accumulation of empirical data. Spirit directs its acolytes to the appropriation and rigidification of the world of things, especially those things that are exploitable by utilitarian technocrats. Spirit fulfils its project in the act, or event, that occurs within the spatio-temporal continuum, although spirit itself has its origin outside that continuum. Spirit is manifest in man’s compulsive need to seize and control the materials at hand, for only “things” will behave consistently enough for the spirit-driven utilitarian to be able to “utilize” them by means of the familiar processes of quantification and classification, which enable “science” to fix, or “grasp,” the thing in its lethal conceptual stranglehold.

We must draw a sharp distinction between the thing and its properties on one side, and the “essence” (Wesen) and its characteristics on the other. Only an essence, or nature, can be immediately experienced. One cannot describe, or “grasp,” an essence by means of the conceptual analysis that is appropriate only when a scientist or technician analyzes a thing in order to reduce it to an “objective” fact that will submit to the grasp of the concept. The souls of all phenomena unite to comprise a world of sensuous images, and it is only as unmediated images that the essences appear to the pathic soul who receives their meaning-content. The world of essences (phenomena) is experienced by the pathic soul, which is the receptor of the fleeting images that constitute actuality [Wirklichkeit der Bilder]. These images wander eternally in the restless cosmic dance that is the Heraclitean flux. The image lives in intimate connection with the poles of space and time.

The world of things, on the other hand, is rationally comprehended as a causally connected system of objects (noumena). In the course of historical time man’s ability to perceive the living images and their attendant qualities is progressively impoverished until finally spirit replaces the living world of expressive images with the dead world of mere things, whose only connections are adequately expressed in the causal nexus, or, to use the language of science, the “laws of nature.”

In the final act of the historical tragedy, when there is no longer any vital substance upon which the vampire spirit may feed, the parasitic invader from beyond time will be forced to devour itself.

Paradise Lost

We see that the philosophy of Klages has both a metaphysical dimension as well as a historical one, for he sees the history of the world as the tragic aftermath to the disasters that ensued when man was expelled from the lost primordial paradise in which he once enjoyed the bliss of a “Golden Age.” When man found himself expelled from the eternal flux of coming-to-be and passing-away of the lost pagan paradise, he received in exchange the poor substitute known as consciousness. Paradise was lost, in effect, when man allowed his temporally-incarnated life-cell to be invaded by the a-temporal force that we call spirit.

Klages is quite specific in putting forward a candidate for this “Golden Age” which prospered long before spirit had acquired its present, murderous potency, for it is within the pre-historic Ægean culture-sphere, which has often been referred to by scholars as the “Pelasgian” world, that Klages locates his vision of a peaceful, pagan paradise that was as yet resistant to the invasive wiles of spirit.

Now who are these “Pelasgians,” and why does the Pelasgian “state of mind” loom so largely in Klages’s thought? According to the philosopher, the development of human consciousness, from life, to thought, to will, reveals itself in the three-stage evolution from pre-historic man (the Pelasgian), through the Promethean (down to the Renaissance), to the Heracleic man (the stage which we now occupy). For Klages, the Pelasgian is the human being as he existed in the pre-historic “Golden Age” of Minoan Crete, Mycenean Hellas, and the related cultures of the Aegean world. He is a passive, “pathic” dreamer, whose predominant mode of being is contemplation. He consorts directly with the living Cosmos and its symbols, but he is doomed.

The “Pelasgians” occupy a strategic place in the mythos of Ludwig Klages, and this “Pelasgian Realm” of Klages closely resembles the mythic Golden Age of Atlantis that looms so large in the Weltanschauung of E. T. A. Hoffmann. But who, in fact, were these Pelasgians? According to the pre-historians and mythologists, the Pelasgians were an ancient people who inhabited the islands and seacoasts of the eastern Mediterranean during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. Homer, in a well-known passage in the Odyssey (XIX, 175 ff), places them on Crete, but another writer, Dionysius Halicarnassus, could only tell us that the Pelasgians were autokhthonoi, or “indigenous” throughout Hellas. Homer also refers to “Lord Zeus of Dodona, Pelasgian,” in the Iliad (II, 750). Plutarch says of them that “they were like the oak among trees: the first of men at least in Akhaia,” while Pliny believes that Peloponnesian Arkadia was originally called Pelasgis; that Pelasgos was an aristocratic title; and that the Pelasgians were descended from the daughters of Danaos.

The most famous Pelasgian settlement was at Dodona, and Thucydides (we discover with relief) informs us that all Greece was Pelasgian before the Trojan war (approximately 1200 B. C.): “Before the Trojan War no united effort appears to be made by Hellas; and to my belief that name itself had not yet been extended to the entire Hellenic world. In fact, before the time of Hellen, son of Deucalion, the appelation was probably unknown, and the names of the different nationalities prevailed locally, the widest in range being ‘Pelasgians.’” (Book One of the “History of the Peloponnesian War,” Oxford text, edited by H. Stuart-Jones; translated by Arnold J. Toynbee). Homer mentions them in the Iliad (ii, 840), and, in the Odyssey (xix, 172-7), the poet describes them as “divine.” Racially, there seems to be no doubt that the Pelasgians were an Aryan people, and physical anthropologists inform us that the twenty skulls discovered at the Minoan sites of Palakaistro, Zakro, and Gournia turn out to be predominantly dolicocephalic, with the cranial indices averaging 73.5 for the males, and 74.9 for the women (Prehistoric Crete, by R. W. Hutchinson, London, 1962). The historian Herodotus, like Thucydides, groups all of the pre-classical peoples of the Hellenic world under the name Pelasgian: “Croesus made inquiries as to which were the greatest powers in Hellas, with a view to securing their friendly support, and, as a result of these inquiries, he found that the Lacedaemonians and the Athenians stood out among the people of the Dorian and Ionian race respectively. Of these people that had thus made their mark, the latter was originally a Pelasgian and the former a Hellenic nationality….As regards the language spoken by the Pelasgians, I have no exact information; but it is possible to argue by inference from the still-existing Pelasgians who occupy the city of Creston in the hinterland of the Tyrrhennians; from the other Pelasgians who have settled in Placia and Scylace on the Hellespont; and from the various other communities of Pelasgian race which have changed their national name. If inferences may be legitimately drawn from this evidence, then the original Pelasgians were speakers of a non-Greek language, and the Athenian nation must have learned a new language at the time when they changed from Pelasgians into Hellenes. At all events, the inhabitants of Creston and of Placia, who in neither case speak the same language as their present respective neighbors, do speak the same language as one another…In contrast to this, the Hellenic race has employed an identical language continuously, ever since it came into existence. After splitting off from the Pelasgian race, it found itself weak, but from these small beginnings it has increased until it now includes a number of nationalities, its principal recruits being Pelasgians It is my further opinion that the non-Hellenic origin of the Pelasgians accounts for the complete failure of even this nationality to grow to any considerable dimensions” (Herodotus, Book I, chapters 56 to 58; translated by Arnold J. Toynbee). The rest, as they say, is silence (at least in the Classical sources), and we can see why this obscure people should appeal to the mythologizing “Golden Age” bent of Klages. Modern authorities regard the Pelasgians as inhabitants of a purely Neolithic culture pertaining only to the area of Thessaly bounded by Sesklo in the east and the Peneios valley in the west (the area which is now known as Thessaliotis).

Although the philosopher’s alluring portrait of the Pelasgians was formulated before modern archaeology had completed our image of Ægean prehistory, the picture which Klages paints, in the Eros-book and in the “Magna Mater” chapter of Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, of a vibrant, healthy, and physically beautiful people, in touch with the gods and with Nature, requires little—if any—correction in the wake of the new researches. The figures who move so gracefully through the enchanted atmosphere of the Palace frescoes at Knossos, as they carry their brightly-colored gifts of vase, flowers, and pyxis, to the Goddess, are straight out of a poet’s dream. The young women walk barefoot, and wear hip-hugging, flared skirts to which flounces are attached at knee and hem; their long raven-tresses are worn in a chignon, adorned with red and white ribbons, and their jackets are brightly colored, usually pink or sky-blue. The gifts that they bring to the Mother Goddess are also brilliantly colored: a porphyry pyxis; poppies of red and white, and a bottle striped with silver, gold, and copper bands. They wear bracelets and necklaces dressed with strands of beads. They appear graceful and serene with their white breasts in profile in the tholos tombs as well.

This Minoan, or “Pelasgian,” world was characterized by a dialectical fusion of two strains of religiosity: on the one hand, we meet with the Ægean worship of the Mother Goddess, with all that that entails with regard to ritual and style of living; and, on the other, we confront the Indo-European sky-god, or Father God, and the two strains seem to co-exist in an uneasy, unstable—but certainly fruitful—truce. Mythologists tell us that this heritage is reflected in the tales that indicate the marriages between the Indo-European sky-god Zeus with various incarnations of the Ægean Mother-Goddess (in some of the myths, Zeus is, himself, born on Crete!). In time, of course, the Father God will achieve dominance in the Hellenic world, but Klages is more interested in traces of the religion of the Goddess as it survives from the Stone Age into the world of the second millennium B.C. Our philosopher, in effect, merges the misty Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of the ancient Aegean into a single magical world-space, wherein an innocent race lives at one with Nature and the Goddess. Klages treats the Pelasgians as the primeval Hellenes, who worshiped the Goddess, as she was embodied in female idols in the form of figurines of the famous steatopygous Fertility-Goddess type, with huge belly and swollen buttocks (even though this iconographic image, represented most clearly in the “Venus of Willendorf,” proceeds from a much-earlier cultural stratum, the Palaeolithic. The later Greeks celebrated Demeter, the Life-Mother, in the Eleusinian mysteries). The Palace Culture of Minoan Crete would exemplify the matriarchalist style of the (late) Pelasgian world, especially as prehistoric Knossos had a far more sophisticated attitude toward women than did, say, the later Periclean Athens. For instance, in the legend of Ariadne, the fact that her presence is indicated at the funeral games shows us that women were free to mingle with men at their will, and the version of the myth which shows Ariadne as in charge of the palace in her father’s absence shows the great value which the Cretans placed on women. This centrality of woman is indicated in all of Minoan art, which depicts her as beautifully-animated; in fact, one of the most elegant of the ebon-tressed, slim-waisted, and crimson-lipped women depicted on the frescoes on the Palace of Knossos, was nicknamed La Parisienne by a French visitor at the turn of the century! Klages is drawn more toward the “pacifist,” thalassocratic (sea-ruling) aspect of the Minoans of the second millennium B.C., than toward the covetous Bronze Age Greeks of the mainland with their heavily-fortified cities and unending wars (the Bronze Age mainlanders seem to have loved war for its own sake; another troubling element in their civilization is their reliance on slavery, especially of women). These are the Mycenaeans, who would eventually sack, and destroy, the Minoan Culture. It is a notable fact that most of our evidence about the “Pelasgian” religious beliefs and practices stems from Minoan Crete: very little material survives from Mycenae and the other mainland sites. On Crete, however, we find the dove-goddess image and the snake-goddess image, the stepped altars and shrine models, in religious sanctuaries overflowing with such sacred items. Clearly, the Goddess ruled on Minoan Crete, and, in fact, the Goddess Potnia, whose name crops up repeatedly in the Linear B tablets, might indeed be the “Lady of the Labyrinth,” which is to say, the Lady of the Place of the labrys, or the double ax—the Palace of Knossos itself. Another Knossos cult-figure was the anemo ijereja, of “Priestess of the Winds”; there is also qerasija, which could well mean “the Huntress.” According to some historians, offerings to the Goddess were entirely bloodless, and were usually gifts of honey, oil, wine, and spices like coriander and fennel; sheep and their shepherds were associated with Potnia, but certainly not in the aspect of blood-sacrifices. On the mainland, however, we find the Mycenaeans slaughtering rams, horses, and other animals in their vaulted tombs. We also find the cult of the Goddess on the Cycladic islands (to which “Greek islands” American “millionaires” and other arch-vulgarians habitually cart their flatulent girths on “vacations”). The famous Cycladic figurines represent the Mother Goddess as well, under the aspects of “the divine nurse” or the “Goddess of Blessing.” In these figurines the Goddess is almost invariably represented with the pubic delta and the stomach emphasized. I will have more to say about this religion of the “Mother Goddess” later on, in the section devoted to the ideas of Bachofen, but for now I’d like to note that in the early phase of Minoan religion, the relationship of ruler and deity was not that of father-and-son, but of mother-and-son. For Minoan Crete, the Mother Goddess was represented on earth by the priest-king. Some lovely manifestations of this reverence for the Goddess can be found in the faience statuettes of the bare-breasted Mother Goddess which were found by Sir Arthur Evans in the Palace of Knossos: one of them shows the Goddess holding up a serpent in each of her hands; the other statuette shows the snakes entwining themselves around her arms. These figures appear in both “peak sanctuaries” and in household shrines, and have been designated by pre-historians as the “Snake Goddess” or the “Household Goddess.” The “Household Goddess” is often associated with the motif of the double-axe, the emblem of the Palace at Knossos, and also with the horns-of-consecration, which associate her with the sacred bull of the Palace of King Minos.

One inhabitant of the Palace of King Minos was the princess Ariadne, to whom we alluded briefly above. After the loss of Theseus, the fate of Ariadne would be intimately intertwined with that of Dionysus, the problematical Greek divinity whose cult excited so much controversy and such fierce opposition among the Greeks of the Classical Age. Dionysus was the orgiastic god in whom Klages, following Nietzsche, locates the site of an untrammeled sensuous abandon. This Thraco-Grecian deity, whose nature was so brilliantly interpreted by Nietzsche in the latter half of the 19^th century, and by his worthy successor Walter F. Otto in the first half of the 20^th century, becomes in the Klagesian view the ultimate symbol of heathen life, the epiphany of that frenzied ecstasy that the god’s followers achieved by means of the drunkenness and wild dancing of the maenads, those female adherents of the god of the vine, who experienced genuine enthusiasm, i.e., “the god within,’ as they followed the progress of their far-wandering god, who gave to man the inestimable gift of wine. These maenads celebrated their secret Dionysian cultic rituals far from the accustomed haunts of man, and any man was slaughtered on the spot if he should be apprehended whilst illicitly witnessing the ceremonies reserved for the gods’ female followers. These maenads were alleged to be in the possession of magical powers that enabled the god’s worshipers to bring about magical effects at great distances. And “all Eros is Eros of distance!”

Philosophical Roots and Biological Consequences

Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele contains a comprehensive survey of the philosophical literature that relates to “biocentric” concerns, and in these pages Klages closely scrutinizes the troubled seas and fog-shrouded moorlands of philosophy, both ancient and modern, over which we, unfortunately, have only sufficient time to cast a superficial and fleeting glance. We will, however, spend a profitable moment or two on several issues that Klages examined in some detail, for various pivotal disputes that have preoccupied the minds of gifted thinkers from the pre-Socratics down to Nietzsche were also of pre-eminent significance for Klages.

One of the pre-Socratic thinkers in particular, Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 536-470 B.C.E.), the “dark one,” was looked upon by Ludwig Klages as the founding father of “biocentric,” or life-centered, philosophy. Klages and Heraclitus share the conviction that life is ceaseless change, chaos, “eternal flux” [panta rhei]. Both thinkers held that it is not matter that endures through the ceaseless patterns of world-transformation: it is this ceaseless transformation itself that is the enduring process, which alone constitutes this ever-shifting vibrancy, this soaring and fading of appearances, this becoming and passing away of phenomenal images upon which Klages bestowed the name life. Likewise, Klages and Heraclitus were in complete accord in their conviction that natural events transpire in a succession of rhythmical pulsations. For both thinkers, nothing abides without change in the human world, and in the cosmos at large, everything flows and changes in the rhythmical and kaleidoscopic dance that is the cosmic process. We cannot say of a thing: “it is”; we can only say that a thing “comes to be” and that it “passes away.” The only element, in fact, in the metaphysics of Heraclitus that will be repudiated by Klages is the great pre-Socratic master’s positing of a “Logos,” or indwelling principle of order, and this slight disagreement is ultimately a trivial matter, for the Logos is an item which, in any case, plays a role so exiguous in the Heraclitean scheme as to render the notion, for all practical and theoretical purposes, nugatory as far as the basic thrust of the philosophy of the eternal flux.

Another great Greek philosopher, Protagoras of Abdera (c. 480-410 B.C.E.), is fulsomely acclaimed by Klages as the “father of European psychology and history’s pioneer epistemologist.” When Protagoras asserted that the content of perception from moment to moment is the result of the fusion of an external event (the world) with an inner event (the experiencing soul), he was, in effect, introducing the Heraclitean flux into the sphere of the soul. No subsequent psychologist has achieved a greater theoretical triumph. The key text upon which Klages bases this endorsement is Sext. Emp., Pyrrh. I (217): “…matter is in flux, and as it flows additions are made continuously in the place of the effluxions, and the senses are transformed and altered according to the times of life and to all the other conditions of the bodies.” (218) “Men apprehend different things at different times owing to their differing dispositions; for he who is in a natural state apprehends those things subsisting in matter which are able to appear to those in a natural state, and those who are in a non-natural state the things which can appear to those in a non-natural state.” Thus, the entire sphere of psychical life is a matter of perception, which comprises the act of perception (in the soul) and the content of perception (in the object). This Protagorean insight forms the basis for the distinction between noumenon and phenomenon that will exert such a fructifying influence on Western thought, especially during the period of German Romanticism.

Greek thought has a significant bearing on crucial discoveries that were made by Klages. We have learned that there are two forces that are primordially opposed to each other, spirit and life; in addition, we have seen these forces cannot be reduced to each other, nor can they be reduced to any third term; body and soul constitute the poles of unified life, and it is the mission of spirit to invade that unity, to function as a divisive wedge in order to tear the soul from the body and the body from the soul. Thus, spirit begins its career as the disrupter of life; only at the end of history will it become the destroyer of life. We find a piquant irony in the oft-expressed view that accuses Klages of inventing this “spirit” out of whole cloth, for those who have sneered at his account of the provenance of spirit as a force that enters life from outside the sphere of life, dismissing the very idea from serious consideration by reducing the concept to a caricature (“Klagesian devil,” “Klages with his spirit-as-‘space-invader’,” and so on), offer quite an irresistible opening for a controversialist’s unbuttoned foil, because such statements reveal, at one and the same time, an ignorance of the history of philosophy in our professors and commentators that should curdle the blood of the most trusting students, as well as an almost incomprehensible inability, or unwillingness, to understand a scrupulously exact and closely-argued text. This intellectual disability possesses, one must confess, a certain undeniable pathos. As it happens, the question as to the provenance of spirit has always enjoyed a prominent position in the history of philosophical speculation (especially in the narrow field of epistemology, i.e., the “theory of cognition”), and the Klagesian viewpoint that has been so ignorantly and persistently excoriated is explicitly drawn from the philosophy of—Aristotle! It was Aristotle, “the master of those who know,” who, in discussing the divided substance of man, discovered that he could only account for the origin of one of the components, viz., spirit [Gk. nous], by concluding that spirit had entered man “from outside”! Likewise, the idea of a “tripartite” structure of man, which seems so bizarre to novice students of biocentrism, has quite a respectable pedigree, for, once again, it was Aristotle who viewed man as having three aspects, viz., Psyche-Soma-Nous (Soul-Body-Spirit).

The speculations of the Greek philosophers who belonged to the Eleatic School provided the crucial insights that inspired Klages’s masterful formulation of the doctrine of the “actuality of the images.” The specific problem that so exercised the Eleatics was the paradox of motion. The Eleatics insisted that motion was inconceivable, and they proceeded from that paradoxical belief to the conclusion that all change is impossible. One of the Eleatics, Zeno, is familiar to students of the history of philosophy as the designer of the renowned “Zeno’s Paradoxes,” the most famous of which is the problem of Achilles and the Tortoise. Zeno provided four proofs against the possibility of motion: 1) a body must traverse in finite time an infinite number of spaces and, therefore, it can never ever begin its journey; 2) here we have Zeno’s application of his motion-theory to the “Achilles” problem that we’ve just mentioned—if Achilles grants a lead or “head start” (analogous to a “handicap”) to the tortoise against whom he is competing in a foot-race, he will never be able to overtake the tortoise, because by the time Achilles has reached point A (the starting-point for the tortoise), his opponent has already reached point B. In fact, Achilles will never even reach point A, because before he can traverse the entire distance between his starting-point and point A, he must necessarily cover one-half of that distance, and then one-half of the remaining distance, and so on and so on ad infinitum, as it were! 3) the arrow that has just been launched by the archer is always resting, since it always occupies the same space; and 4) equivalent distances must, at equivalent velocity, be covered in the identical time. But a moving body will pass another body that is moving in the opposite direction (at the identical velocity) twice as quickly as when this body is resting, and this demonstrates that the observed facts contradict the laws of motion. Betraying a certain nervousness, historians of philosophy usually dismiss the Eleatics as superficial skeptics or confused souls, but they never condescend to provide a convincing refutation of their “obvious” or “superficial” errors.

Klages, on the other hand, finds both truth and error in the Eleatics’ position. From the standpoint of an analysis of things, the Eleatics’ are on firm ground in their insistence on the impossibility of change, but from the standpoint of an analysis of appearances, their position is utterly false. Their error arose from the fact that the Greeks of this period had already succumbed to the doctrine that the world of appearances is a world of deception, a reservoir of illusory images. This notion has governed almost every metaphysical system that has been devised by western philosophers down to our own time, and with every passing age, the emphasis upon the world of the things (Noumena) has increased at the expense of the world of appearances (Phenomena). Klages, on the other hand, will solve the “Problem of the Eleatics” by an emphatic demonstration that the phenomenal images are, in fact, the only realities.

During the Renaissance, in fact, when ominous temblors were heralding the dawn of our “philosophy of the mechanistic apocalypse,” there were independent scholars (among whom we find Giordano Bruno and Paracelsus) who speculated at length on the relationship that exists between the macrocosm and the microcosm, as well as on the three-fold nature of man and on the proto-characterological doctrine of the “Temperaments.”

But the key figure in the overturning of the triadic world-view is undoubtedly the French thinker and mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650), who is chiefly responsible for devising the influential schematic dualism of thinking substance and extended substance, which has dominated, in its various incarnations and permutations, the thinking of the vast majority of European thinkers ever since. Descartes explicitly insists that all of our perceptions as well as every “thing” that we encounter must be reduced to the status of a machine; in fact, he even suggests that the whole universe is merely a vast mechanism (terram totumque hunc mundum instar machinæ descripsi). It is no accident, then, that Cartesian thought is devoid of genuine psychology, for, as he says in the Discours de la méthode, man is a mere machine, and his every thought and every movement can be accounted for by means of a purely mechanical explanation.

Nevertheless, there have been several revolts against Cartesian dualism. As recently as two centuries ago, the extraordinarily gifted group of “Nature Philosophers” who were active during the glory days of German Romanticism, pondered the question of the “three-fold” in publications that can be consulted with some profit even today.

We have seen that the specifically Klagesian “triad” comprises body-soul-spirit, and the biocentric theory holds that life, which comprises the poles of body and soul, occurs as processes and events. Spirit is an intruder into the sphere of life, an invader seeking always to sever the poles, a dæmonic willfulness that is characterized by manic activity and purposeful deeds. “The body is the manifestation of the soul, and the soul is the meaning of the living body.” We have seen that Klages was able to trace proleptic glimpses of this biocentric theory of the soul back to Greek antiquity, and he endeavored for many years to examine the residues of psychical life that survive in the language, poetry, and mythology of the ancient world, in order to interpret the true meanings of life as it had been expressed in the word, cult, and social life of the ancients. He brilliantly clarifies the symbolic language of myth, especially with reference to the cosmogonic Eros and the Orphic Mysteries. He also explores the sensual-imagistic thought of the ancients as the foundation upon which objective cognition is first erected, for it is among the Greeks, and only among the Greeks, that philosophy proper was discovered. During the peak years of the philosophical activity of the Greek thinkers, spirit still serves the interests of life, existing in an authentic relationship with an actuality that is sensuously and inwardly “en-souled” [beseelt]. The cosmological speculation of antiquity reveals a profound depth of feeling for the living cosmos, and likewise demonstrates the presence of the intimate bonds that connect man to the natural world; contemplation is still intimately bound-up with the primordial, elemental powers. Klages calls this “archaic” Greek view of the world, along with its later reincarnations in the history of western thought, the “biocentric” philosophy, and he situates this mode of contemplation as the enemy of the “logocentric” variety, i.e., the philosophy that is centered upon the Logos, or “mind,” for mind is the manifestation of spirit as it enters western thought with the appearance of Socrates. From Plato himself, through his “neo-Platonic” disciples of the Hellenistic and Roman phases of antiquity, and down to the impoverished Socratic epigones among the shallow “rationalists” of 17^th and 18^th century Europe, all philosophers who attempt to restore or renew the project of a philosophical “enlightenment,” are the heirs of Socrates, for it was Socrates who first made human reason the measure of all things. Socratic rationalism also gave rise to life-alien ethical schemes based upon a de-natured creature, viz., man-as-such. This pure spirit, this distilled ego, seeks to sever all natural and racial bonds, and as a result, “man” prides himself upon being utterly devoid of nobility, beauty, blood, and honor. In the course of time, he will attach his fortunes to the even more lethal spiritual plague known as Christianity, which hides its destructive force behind the hypocritical demand that we “love one’s neighbors.” From 1789 onwards, a particularly noxious residue of this Christian injunction, the undifferentiating respect for the ghost known as “humanity,” will be considered the hallmark of every moral being.

The heirs of the Socratic tradition have experienced numerous instances of factional strife and re-groupings in the course of time, although the allegiance to spirit has always remained unquestioned by all of the disputants. One faction may call itself “idealistic” because it considers concepts, ideas, and categories to be the only true realities; another faction may call itself “materialistic” because it views “things” as the ultimate constituents of reality; nevertheless, both philosophical factions give their allegiance, nolentes volentes, to the spirit and its demands. Logocentric thought, in fact, is the engine driving the development of the applied science that now rules the world. And by their gifts shall ye know them!

The bitterly antagonistic attitude of Klages towards one of the most illustrious heirs of Socrates, viz., Immanuel Kant, has disturbed many students of German thought who see something perverse and disingenuous in this opposition to the man whom they regard uncritically as the unsurpassed master of German thought. Alfred Rosenberg and the other offical spokesmen of the National Socialist movement were especially enraged by the ceaseless attacks on Kant by Klages and his disciple Werner Deubel. Nevertheless, Kant’s pre-eminence as an epistemologist was disputed as long ago as 1811, when Gottlob Ernst Schulze published his “Critique of Theoretical Philosophy,” which was then, and remains today, the definitive savaging of Kant’s system. Klages endorses Schulze’s demonstration that Kant’s equation: actuality = being = concept = thing = appearance (or phenomenon) is utterly false, and is the main source of Kant’s inability to distinguish between perception and representation. Klages adds that he finds it astonishing that Kant should have been able to convince himself that he had found the ultimate ground of the faculty of cognition in—cognition! Klages cites with approval Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil,” in which Kant is ridiculed for attempting to ground his epistemology in the “faculty of a faculty”! Klages shows that the foundation of the faculty of cognition lies not in cognition itself, but in experience, and that the actuality of space and time cannot have its origins in conceptual thought, but solely in the vital event. There can be no experienced colors or sounds without concomitant spatio-temporal characteristics, for there can be no divorce between actual space and actual time. We can have no experience of actual space without sensory input, just as we have no access to actual time without thereby participating in the ceaseless transformation of the phenomenal images.

Formalistic science and its offspring, advanced technology, can gain access to only a small segment of the living world and its processes. Only the symbol has the power to penetrate all the levels of actuality, and of paramount importance to Klages in his elaborate expositions of the biocentric metaphysics is the distinction between conceptual and symbolic thought. We have previously drawn attention to the fact that drive-impulses are manifest in expressive movements that are, in turn, impelled by the influence of a non-conceptual power that Klages calls the symbol. Likewise, symbolic thinking is a tool that may profitably be utilized in the search for truth, and Klages contrasts symbolic contemplation with the logical, or “formalistic,” cognition, but he is at pains to draw our attention to the errors into which an unwarranted, one-sided allegiance to either type of thought can plunge us. Although Klages has been repeatedly and bitterly accused by Marxists and other “progressives” as being a vitriolic enemy of reason, whose “irrationalism” provided the “fascists” with their heaviest ideological artillery, nothing could be further from the truth. On occasions too numerous to inventory, he ridicules people like Bergson and Keyserling who believe that “intuition” lights the royal road to truth. His demolition of the Bergsonian notion of the élan vital is definitive and shattering, and his insistence that such an entity is a mere pseudo-explanation is irrefutable and might have been published in a British philosophical journal. In the end, Klages says, “irrationalism” is the spawn of—spirit!

Our ability to formulate and utilize concepts as well as our capacity to recognize conceptual identities is sharply opposed to the procedure involved in the symbolic recognition of identities. The recognition of such conceptual identities has, of course, a crucial bearing on the life of the mind, since it is this very ability that functions as the most important methodological tool employed by every researcher involved in the hard sciences. Symbolic identification, on the other hand, differs widely from its conceptual counterpart in that the symbolic type derives its meaning-content from the “elemental similarity of images.” Thus, the process of substantive, or conceptual, identification confronts its opposite number in the “identity of essence” of symbolic thought. It is this “identity of essence,” as it happens, which has given birth to language and its capacity to embody authentic meaning-content in words. Jean Paul was quite right, Klages tells us, in describing language as a “dictionary of faded metaphors,” for every abstraction that is capable of verbal representation arose from the essentiality of the meaning-content of words.

He draws a sharp distinction between the true symbol (Gk. symbolon, i.e., token) and the mere sign whose significance is purely referential. The true meaning of an object resides in its presence, which Klages refers to as an aura, and this aura is directly communicated to a sensory apparatus that resists all purely linguistic attempts to establish formulas of equivalence or “correspondence.” The sensual imagination participates in an unmediated actuality, and intuitive insight (Schauung) allows us to gain access to a realm of symbols, which rush into our souls as divine epiphanies.

Life resists rules, for life is eternal flux. Life is not rigid being, and therefore life will always evade the man-traps of mind, the chains of the concept. Life, comprising the poles of body and soul, is the physical event as phenomenal expression of the soul. There can be no soul-less phenomena and there can be no souls without (phenomenal) appearances, just as there can be no word-less concepts and no words without meaning-content. The physical world is the image-laden appearance (phenomenon) that manifests a psychical substance. When the dæmonic object encounters the receptive, or “pathic,” soul, the object becomes a symbol and acquires a “nimbus,” which is a pulsating radiance surrounding the moment of becoming. This nimbus is referred to as an “aura” when applied to persons, and both nimbus and aura represent the contribution of the object to the act of perception.

Non-symbolic, formalistic thought, on the other hand is irreverent, non- contemplative, and can best be characterized as an act that is enacted in the service of spirit, which imperiously and reductively ordains that the act of perception must also be an act of the will. Thus the will attains primacy even over the de-substantialized intellect, and Klages—who has persistently been dismissed as an obscurantist and irrationalist—never misses an opportunity to re-iterate his deep conviction that the essence of spirit is to be located in the will and not in the intellect.

As we’ve seen, Klages holds that the living soul is the antithesis of the spirit. The spirit seeks to rigidify the eternal flux of becoming, just as the soul, in yielding passively to the eternal flux, resists the raging Heracleic spirit and its murderous projects. Body and soul reach the peak of creative vitality when their poles are in equipoise or perfect balance, and the high point of life is reached in the experience of sensuous joy. Spirit’s assault upon the body is launched against this joy, and in waging war against the joy of the body, spirit also wages war against the soul, in order to expel the soul, to make it homeless, in order to annihilate all ecstasy and creativity. Every attempt that has been made by monistic thinkers to derive the assault on life from the sphere of life itself has misfired. Such troublesome anomalies as the supernatural visions and cases of dæmonic possession that transpired during the Middle Ages, as well the crippling cases of hysteria so familiar to psychologists in our own time, can never be satisfactorily explained unless we realize that the souls of these unfortunates were sundered by the acosmic force of spirit, whose very essence is the will, that enemy and murderer of life. The conceptual “Tower of Babylon” reared by monists in their ludicrous efforts to derive the force that wages war against life from life itself is no less absurd than would be the foredoomed attempt of a firefighter to extinguish a blaze by converting a portion of the fire into the water that will extinguish the fire!

There is, however, one privileged example of a manifestation of the will in the service of life, and this occurs when the will is enlisted for the purposes of artistic creation. The will, Klages insists, is incapable of creative force, but when the artist’s intuition has received an image of a god, the will functions “affirmatively” in the destructive assaults of the artist’s chisel upon the marble that is to embody the image of the divinity.

Actuality (the home of the soul) is experienced; being (the home of spirit) is thought. The soul is a passive surrender to the actuality of the appearances. Actuality is an ever-changing process of coming to be and passing away that is experienced as images. Spirit attempts to fix, to make rigid, the web of images that constitutes actuality by means of conceptual thought, whose concrete form is the apparatus of the scientist. Cognition represents identical, unfaltering, timeless being; life is the actuality of experience in time. When one says of time that it “is,” as if it were something rigid and identical behind the eternal flux, then time is implicitly stripped of its very essence as that which is “temporal”; it is this temporal essence which is synonymous with becoming and transformation. When one speaks of a thing or a realm that is beyond, i.e., that “transcends,” the unmediated, experienced actuality of the living world, one is merely misusing thought in order to introduce a conceptual, existential world in the place of the actual one, which has the inalienable character of transitoriness and temporality.

It is within the “pathic” soul that the categories of space and time originate. Acosmic spirit, on the other hand, invaded the sphere of life from outside the spatio-temporal cosmos. Klages scorns the schemes of philosophical “idealists” who attempt to ground the structures of space and time in some transcendental world. He also distinguishes a biocentric non-rational temporality from “objective” time. Biocentric thought, true to its immanentist (“this-worldly”) status, recognizes that the images that pulsate in immanentist time are excluded by their very nature from any participation in objective time, for the images can only live within the instantaneous illumination of privileged moments. Klages savages the platitudes and errors of logocentric thinkers who adhere, with almost manic rigidity, to the conventional scheme of dual-axis temporality. In ordinary logic, time is viewed as radiating from the present (that extension-less hypostasis) backward into time-past and forward into time-to-come: but the whole scheme collapses in a heap as soon as we realize that the future, the “time-to-come,” is nothing but a delirious void, a grotesque phantom, a piece of philosophical fiction. Only the past possesses true actuality; only the past is real. The future is merely a pale hallucination flitting about in deluded minds. True time is the relationship that binds the poles of past and present. This union occurs as a rhythmical pulsation that bears the moment’s content into the past, as a new moment is generated, as it were, out of the womb of eternity, that authentic depository of actual time. Time is an unending cycle of metamorphoses utterly unrelated to the processes of “objective” time. True time, cyclical time, is clocked by the moments that intervene between a segment of elapsed time and the time that is undergoing the process of elapsing. Time is the soul of space, just as space is the embodiment of time. Only within actual time can we apprehend the primordial images in their sensuous immediacy. Logic, on the other hand, can only falsify the exchange between living image and receptive soul.

Let us examine the biological—or, more properly, ethological—implications of the doctrine of “primordial images” [Urbilder]. Bear in mind, of course, the crucial distinction that is drawn by Klages between the science of fact (Tatsachenwissenschaft) and the science of appearances (Erscheinungswissenschaft): factual science establishes laws of causality in order to explain, e.g., physiological processes or the laws of gravitation; thus, we say that factual science examines the causes of things. The science of appearances, on the other hand, investigates the actuality of the images, for images are the only enduring realities.

The enduring nature of the image can be seen in the example of the generation of a beech-tree. Suppose a beech-tree sheds its seed upon the forest floor, in which it germinates. Can we say of the mother-tree that it lives within the child? Certainly not! We can chop down the mother tree and burn it to ashes, whilst the offspring continues to prosper. Can we say that the matter of which the old tree was composed survives intact within the younger tree? Again, no: for not an atom of the matter that made up the seed from which the young beech grew exists within it. Likewise, not an atom of the matter of which a man’s body is composed at the age of thirty survives from that same man’s body as it was on his tenth birthday. Now, if it is not the matter of which the organism is composed which endures through the ages, what then is it that so endures? “The one possible answer is: an image.” Life and its processes occur outside the world of things. On the contrary: life comprises the events in the world of the images.

Thus, we see that the doctrine of the “actuality of the images” [Wirklichkeit der Bilder] holds that it is not things, but images, that are “en-souled” [beseelt], and this proposition, Klages tells us, forms the “key to his whole doctrine of life [Lebenslehre].” Things stand in a closed chain of causality, and there is no reciprocal action between the image and the thing, no parallelism, and no connection, and the attempts that have been undertaken by various philosophers to equate the thing and the image merely serve to rupture the chain of causality in its relevant sphere, i.e., the quantitative scientific method. The receptive soul is turned towards the actuality of the image, and when we say on one occasion that an object is “red,” and on another that this same object is “warm,” in the first case the reference is to the reality of things, whereas in the second case the reference is to the actuality of images. By using the name of a color, we indicate that we are differentiating between the superficial qualities, or surface attributes, of things; when we say that a colored object is “warm” or “cold,” on the other hand, we are pointing to the phenomenal “presence” that has been received by the pathic soul. In fact, there are a whole host of common expressions in which this attribution of subjective, psychical states to visible phenomena occurs. We say, for instance, that red is “hot” and that blue is “cold.” In the Vom Wesen des Bewusstseins (1921), a treatise on the nature of consciousness, Klages adduces an astonishingly vast inventory of words that are routinely utilized in descriptions of subjective as well as perceptual phenomena. Someone will speak of his a “bitter” feeling of resentment at some slight or injury. The expression that love is “sweet” occurs in almost every language. Likewise, joy is often described as “bright,” just as grief or sorrow are often referred to as “dark.” We also have “hot” anger (or the familiar variant, the “‘heat’ of the moment”).

Images are the charged powers, or natures, that constitute the basis of all phenomena of cosmic and elemental life as well as of cellular, organic life. All that exists participates in the life of the images. Air, fire, earth, and water; rocks, clouds, planets and suns; plant, animal and man: all of these entities are alive and have souls that share in the life of the cosmos. It isn’t matter that constitutes the stuff of reality, for matter perishes; but the image, which remains alive as it wanders through the rhythmically pulsating cosmos, never dies. It changes through the processes of maturation and growth in the organism, and it transforms itself through the millennia in the species. The images alone have life; the images alone have meaning. The souls of those who now live are images that are temporarily wedded to matter, just as the souls of the dead are images that have been released from matter. The souls of the dead revisit us in their actual form in dreams (Wirklichkeitsform der Traumerscheinung), unconstrained by the limitations of material substance. The souls of the dead are not expelled from the world to live on as immortal “spirits” housed in some transcendent “beyond”; they are, instead, dæmonically vital presences, images that come to be, transform themselves, and vanish into the distance within the phenomenal world that is the only truly existing world.

The human soul recalls the material palpability of the archaic images by means of the faculty that Klages calls “recollection,” and his view in this regard invites comparison with the Platonic process of “anamnesis.” The recollection of which Klages speaks takes place, of course, without the intervention of the will or the projects of the conscious mind. Klages’s examination of “vital recollection” was greatly influenced by the thought of Wilhelm Jordan, a nineteenth century poet and pioneer Darwinist, whose works were first encountered by the young philosopher at the end of that century. In Jordan’s massive didactic poem Andachten, which was published in 1877, the poet espouses a doctrine of the “memory of corporeal matter.” This work had such a fructifying influence on the thought of Klages, that we here give some excerpts:

It is recollection of her own cradle, when the red stinging fly glues grains of sand into a pointed arch as soon as she feels that her eggs have ripened to maturity. It is recollection of her own food during the maggot-state when the anxious mother straddles the caterpillar and drags it for long distances, lays her eggs in it, and locks it in that prison. The larva of the male stag-beetle feels and knows by recollection the length of his antlers, and in the old oak carves out in doubled dimensions the space in which he will undergo metamorphosis. What teaches the father of the air to weave the exact angles of her net by delicate law, and to suspend it from branch to branch with strings, as firm as they are light, according to her seat? Does she instruct her young in this art? No! She takes her motherly duties more lightly. The young are expelled uncared-for from the sac in which the eggs have been laid. But three or four days later the young spider spreads its little nest with equal skill on the fronds of a fern, although it never saw the net in which its mother caught flies. The caterpillar has no eye with which to see how others knit the silken coffins from which they shall rise again. From whence have they acquired all the skill with which they spin so? Wholly from inherited recollection. In man, what he learned during his life puts into the shade the harvest of his ancestors’ labors: this alone blinds him, stupefied by a learner’s pride, to his own wealth of inherited recollections. The recollection of that which has been done a thousand times before by all of his ancestors teaches a new-born child to suck aptly, though still blind. Recollection it is which allows man in his mother’s womb to fly, within the course of a few months, through all the phases of existence through which his ancestors rose long ago. Inherited recollection, and no brute compulsion, leads the habitual path to the goal that has many times been attained; it makes profoundest secrets plain and open, and worthy of admiration what was merely a miracle. Nature makes no free gifts. Her commandment is to gain strength to struggle, and the conqueror’s right is to pass this strength on to his descendants: her means by which the skill is handed down is the memory of corporeal matter.

The primordial images embody the memory of actual objects, which may re-emerge at any moment from the pole of the past to rise up in a rush of immediacy at the pole of the present. This living world of image-laden actuality is the “eternal flux” [panta rhei] of Heraclitus, and its cyclical transformations relate the present moment to the moments that have elapsed, and which will come around again, per sæcula sæculorum.

Thus we see that the cosmos communicates through the magical powers of the symbol, and when we incorporate symbolic imagery into our inmost being, a state of ecstasy supervenes, and the soul’s substance is magically revitalized (as we have already seen, genuine ecstasy reaches its peak when the poet’s “polar touch of a pathic soul” communicates his images in words that bear the meaning of the actual world within them).

When prehistoric man arrives on the stage, he is already experiencing the incipient stages of the fatal shift from sensation to contemplation. Spirit initiates the campaign of destruction: the receptor-activity is fractured into “impression” and “apperception,” and it is at this very point that we witness, retrospectively, as it were, the creation of historical man. Before the dawn of historical man, in addition to the motor-processes that man possessed in common with the animal, his soul was turned towards wish-images. With the shift of the poles, i.e., when the sensory “receptor” processes yield power to the motor “effector” processes, we witness the hypertrophic development of the human ego. Klages is scornful of all egoism, and he repeatedly expressed bitter scorn towards all forms of “humanism,” for he regards the humanist’s apotheosis of the precious “individual” as a debased kowtowing before a mere conceptual abstraction. The ego is not a man; it is merely a mask.) In the place of psychical wishes, we now have aims. In the ultimate stages of historical development man is exclusively devoted to the achievement of pre-conceived goals, and the vital impulses and wish-images are replaced by the driving forces, or interests.

Man is now almost completely a creature of the will, and we recall that it is the will, and not the intellect, that is the characteristic function of spirit in the Klagesian system. However, we must emphasize that the will is not a creative, originating force. Its sole task is to act upon the bearer of spirit, if we may employ an analogy, in the manner of a rudder that purposively steers a craft in the direction desired by the navigator. In order to perform this regulative function, i.e., in order to transform a vital impulse into purposeful activity, the drive impulse must be inhibited and then directed towards the goal in view.

Now spirit in man is dependent upon the sphere of life as long as it collaborates as an equal partner in the act of perception; but when the will achieves mastery in man, this is merely another expression for the triumph of spirit over the sphere of life. In the fatal shift from life to spirit, contemplative, unconscious feeling is diminished, and rational judgment and the projects of the regulative volition take command. The body’s ultimate divorce from the soul corresponds to the soullessness of modern man whose emotional life has diminished in creative power, just as the gigantic political state-systems have seized total control of the destiny of earth. Spirit is hostile to the demands of life. When consciousness, intellect, and the will to power achieve hegemony over the dæmonic forces of the cosmos, all psychical creativity and all vital expression must perish.

When man is exiled from the realm of passive contemplation, his world is transformed into the empire of will and its projects. Man now abandons the feminine unconscious mode of living and adheres to the masculine conscious mode, just as his affective life turns from bionomic rhythm to rationalized measure, from freedom to servitude, and from an ecstatic life in dreams to the harsh and pitiless glare of daylight wakefulness. No longer will he permit his soul to be absorbed into the elements, where the ego is dissolved and the soul merges itself with immensity in a world wherein the winds of the infinite cosmos rage and roar. He can no longer participate in that Selbsttödung, or self-dissolution, which Novalis once spoke of as the “truly philosophical act and the real beginning of all philosophy.” Life, which had been soul and sleep, metamorphoses into the sick world of the fully conscious mind. To borrow another phrase from Novalis (who was one of Klages’s acknowledged masters), man now becomes “a disciple of the Philistine-religion that functions merely as an opiate.” (That lapidary phrase, by the way, was crafted long before the birth of the “philosopher” Karl Marx, that minor player on the left-wing of the “Young Hegelians” of the 1840s; many reactionaries in our university philosophy departments still seem to be permanently bogged down in that stagnant morass—yet these old fogies of the spirit insist on accusing Fascists of being the political reactionaries!)

Man finally yields himself utterly to the blandishments of spirit in becoming a fully conscious being. Klages draws attention to the fact that there are in popular parlance two divergent conceptions of the nature of consciousness: the first refers to the inner experience itself; whilst the second refers to the observation of the experience. Klages only concerns himself with consciousness in the second sense of the word. Experiences are by their very nature unconscious and non-purposive. Spiritual activity takes place in a non-temporal moment, as does the act of conscious thought, which is an act of spirit. Experience must never be mistaken for the cognitive awareness of an experience, for as we have said, consciousness is not experience itself, but merely thought about experience. The “receptor” pole of experience is sharply opposed to the “effector” pole, in that the receptive soul receives sensory perceptions: the sense of touch receives the perception of “bodiliness”; the sense of sight receives the images, which are to be understood as pictures that are assimilated to the inner life. Sensation mediates the experience of (physical) closeness, whilst intuition receives the experience of distance. Sensation and intuition comprehend the images of the world. The senses of touch and vision collaborate in sensual experience. One or the other sense may predominate, i.e., an individual’s sense of sight may have a larger share than that of touch in one’s reception of the images (or vice versa), and one receptive process may be in the ascendant at certain times, whilst the other may come to the fore at other times. (In dreams the bodily component of the vital processes, i.e., sensation, sleeps, whilst the intuitive side remains wholly functional. These facts clearly indicate the incorporeality of dream-images as well as the nature of their actuality. Wakefulness is the condition of sensual processes, whilst the dream state is one of pure intuition.)

Pace William James, consciousness and its processes have nothing to do with any putative “stream of consciousness.” That viewpoint ignores the fact that the processes that transpire in the conscious mind occur solely as interruptions of vital processes. The activities of consciousness can best be comprehended as momentary, abrupt assaults that are deeply disturbing in their effects on the vital substrata of the body-soul unity.These assaults of consciousness transpire as discrete, rhythmically pulsating “intermittencies” (the destructive nature of spirit’s operations can be readily demonstrated; recall, if you will, how conscious volition can interfere with various bodily states: an intensification of attention may, for instance, induce disturbances in the heart and the circulatory system; painful or onerous thought can easily disrupt the rhythm of one’s breathing; in fact, any number of automatic and semi-automatic somatic functions are vulnerable to spirit’s operations, but the most serious disturbances can be seen to take place, perhaps, when the activity of the will cancels out an ordinary, and necessary, human appetite in the interests of the will. Such “purposes” of the will are invariably hostile to the organism and, in the most extreme cases, an over-attention to the dictates of spirit can indeed eventuate in tragic fatalities such as occur in terminal sufferers from anorexia nervosa).

Whereas the unmolested soul could at one time “live” herself into the elements and images, experiencing their plenitudinous wealth of content in the simultaneous impressions that constitute the immediacy of the image, insurgent spirit now disrupts that immediacy by disabling the soul’s capacity to incorporate the images. In place of that ardent and erotic surrender to the living cosmos that is now lost to the soul, spirit places a satanic empire of willfulness and purposeful striving, a world of those who regard the world’s substance as nothing more than raw material to be devoured and destroyed.

The image cannot be spoken, it must be lived. This is in sharp contradistinction to the status of the thing, which is, in fact, “speakable,” as a result of its having been processed by the ministrations of spirit. All of our senses collaborate in the communication of the living images to the soul, and there are specific somatic sites, such as the eyes, mouth, and genitalia, that function as the gates, the “sacred” portals, as it were, through which the vital content of the images is transmitted to the inner life (these somatic sites, especially the genitalia, figure prominently in the cultic rituals that have been enacted by pagan worshipers in every historical period known to us).

An Age of Chaos

In the biocentric phenomenology of Ludwig Klages, the triadic historical development of human consciousness, from the reign of life, through that of thought, to the ultimate empire of the raging will, is reflected in the mythic-symbolic physiognomy which finds expression in the three-stage, “triadic,” evolution from “Pelasgian” man—of the upper Neolithic and Bronze Ages of pre-history; through the Promethean—down to the Renaissance; to the Heracleic man—the terminal phase that we now occupy, the age to which two brilliant 20^th century philosophers of history, Julius Evola and Savitri Devi, have given the name “Kali Yuga,” which in Hinduism is the dark age of chaos and violence that precedes the inauguration of a new “Golden Age,” when a fresh cycle of cosmic events dawns in bliss and beauty.

And it is at this perilous juncture that courageous souls must stiffen their sinews and summon up their blood in order to endure the doom that is closing before us like a mailed fist. Readers may find some consolation, however, in our philosopher’s expressions of agnosticism regarding the ultimate destiny of man and earth. Those who confidently predict the end of all life and the ultimate doom of the cosmos are mere swindlers, Klages assures us. Those who cannot successfully predict such mundane trivialities as next season’s fashions in hemlines or the trends in popular music five years down the road can hardly expect to be taken seriously as prophets who can foretell the ultimate fate of the entire universe!

In the end, Ludwig Klages insists that we must never underestimate the resilience of life, for we have no yardstick with which to measure the magnitude of life’s recuperative powers. “All things are in flux.” That is all.

 

—————-

Pryce, Joseph. “On The Biocentric Metaphysics of Ludwig Klages.” Revilo-Oliver.com, 2001. <http://www.revilo-oliver.com/Writers/Klages/Ludwig_Klages.html >. (See this essay in PDF format here: On the Biocentric Metaphysics of Ludwig Klages).

Note: This essay has been republished in print as an introduction to the Ludwig Klages anthology The Biocentric Worldview (London: Arktos, 2013).

Another good overview of Klages’s thought in English was made in Lydia Baer, “The Literary Criticism of Ludwig Klages and the Klages School: An Introduction to Biocentric Thought.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Jan., 1941), pp. 91–138.

In the conclusion of her essay, Lydia Baer summarises her studies of Klages’s theories thus (quoted from pages 137-138):

Biocentric criticism in literature rests on the philosophic and psychological background established by Ludwig Klages. It is proud to call itself romantic and it disdains every humanistic premise. It enlists under its standards, however, poets and writers who have stood preponderantly for the humanistic tradition, determining, much in the fashion of the classic romantic controversy, the biocentric and the logocentric traits. Very roughly speaking, the alleged antithesis biocentric-logo centric corresponds to the claim of romantic-classic polarity; however, Klages has exercised extreme selective care in formulating his definitions of romanticism, and all the values lie on that side. The enthusiasm of his followers, which he himself deprecates as at times “over-zealous” in drawing hasty conclusions, carries biocentric criticism to the point of excess and sometimes misinterpretation of the founder.

In its essence biocentric criticism is vitalistic. It glorifies Life, as carefully distinguished from mere Existence,158 but it is not necessarily optimistic in its outlook.159 It is non-moral and non-ethical, its religion is paganism, its mysticism is thorough-going. Its standard of perfection is the completeness of soul content (meaning) of the work of art, its birth in fire, flame, and intoxication, thus constituting its own reason for being. In judging it, the biocentric critic demands that neither the author nor the work be a product of reasoned reflection; neither must have been dominated by volition or activism, nor manifest a high degree of consciousness or personality. “Live dangerously” and “surrender yourself to the cosmos” are keynotes of biocentric criticism. The proof of value lies in successful symbolic thinking, that is, wealth of imagery. The great standards of Wonder, Love and Example are unceasingly symbolized in the infinite variety of the Cosmos, in the constantly recurring pattern of the Mother and the Child, and finally in the continued re-appearance of poets, gods, and heroes.

The biocentric quest leads to “Kulturpessimismus,” to a longing for a Golden Age, primitive forms of life, and unconscious modes of living.

Eliade’s Religious Thought – Durac

Mircea Eliade: The hermeneutics of the religious phenomenon

By Livia Durac

“The only purpose of existence is to find a meaning for existence.” (Mircea Eliade)

General Considerations

On February 28th, 1907 in the capital of Romania was born the man who was going to become the worldwide-known scientist and writer whose Renaissance-like personality has built the background of his becoming. When we speak of Mircea Eliade we think of the historian of religions, the Orientalist, the ethnologist, the sociologist, the folklorist, the essay, short story, novel and memoirs author, the playwright Mircea Eliade, if we are to stop at enumerating the defining dimensions of his monumental activity. He became an outstanding specialist in the history of religions in 1925-1926, an obviously early stage of his life for such a bold enterprise; topics such as orthodoxy, Taoism, Buddhism, Orphism, Tantrism have been a concern even since before the “Indian experience” that systematized and deepened his knowledge. For this great Romanian thinker, the history of religions is a complete discipline, which he places in the foreground of cultural life; linguistics, literature, etymology, ethnology, the philosophy of history, esthetics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, all combine in harmony, synchronically, to complete the field of the history of religions.

From his concerns with the field of the history of religions could not miss the “working” coordinates necessary to the specialist in the mentioned field. Therefore, the historian of religions must recompose, first of all, the history of religious forms, and only afterwards develop the social, political and cultural context of each of these forms. Without exaggerated claims, we can state that the historian of religions is, from certain points of view, an anticipator in the field, since he observes the results of the research of Orientalists and ethnographers, as the great Asian religions or the religions of people without a writing system represent important sources for the culture of humanity. Religious phenomenology must be placed outside the sphere of the specialist’s concerns with the history of religions, and we refer to the phenomenology of the sacred, and respectively with enlarging the research sphere from the known important religions to archaic religions.

Another significant specific element that characterizes a historian of religions is the fact that he has to place the religious phenomenon within the spiritual field, identifying that “something” that the religious act denotes as trans-historic. This clearly refers to hermeneutic research that consists, on the one hand, in the understanding of the message by the religious person, a witness to the hierophantic experience, and on the other hand in the message that the religious person transmits to modern world. Explaining the encounters of man with the sacred, starting from pre-history until present – as a way of solving the requirements promoted by contemporary history – the cultural and spiritual invigoration of the peoples of Australia, Africa and Asia, all are included in the subject field of the history of religions.

The Hermeneutic Perspective of the Renewal of the Religious Phenomenon

In a work published in Paris in 1971, Mircea Eliade tells us that the religious phenomenon should use complete hermeneutics. He considers necessary for the activity of the historian of religions to be based on both the phenomenological and the hermeneutical approach: “Concerned with, and often overwhelmed by collecting, publishing and analyzing religious data, a work without any doubt both urgent an indispensable, scientists have often forgotten to study their meaning. But this data is the expression of varied religious experiences; in a final analysis, they represent positions and situations assumed by man during his history. Whether he likes it or not, the historian of religions has not completed his work after having retraced the history of a religious form or after having determined its sociological, economical or political context. Apart from all these, he must understand his own meaning – in other words – identify and clarify the situations and positions that made possible his appearance or triumph in a specific moment of his history”. [i] The fact that the author adopts such explicit positions places him in favor of a unitary approach, and within this frame, phenomenology fulfills one of the most important functions.

The author believes in the necessity of renewing the religious phenomenon from a hermeneutical perspective; although he does not minimize any of the scientific fields accessory to religion, acknowledging the applicability of each of them, Eliade states however that, irrespective of the nature of the information provided by one or another of these fields, it cannot account for the religious phenomenon as a whole. Therefore, a hermeneutic of the religious phenomenon would be characterized mainly by the fact that, by studying the variety of religious aspects, the discipline of religions must identify the universal religious configurations whose action frame is represented by unique facts. It is necessary to mention that Eliade’s attempt to present the morphology of the sacred takes place beyond the religious phenomenon. Considering the efforts to grasp and understand meanings, Mircea Eliade’s exegesis intensifies, including the forms characterized by permanence and constancy, brought “to light” through myths and symbols. Eliade’s hermeneutics acquires a creative dimension as it allows speaking of a structure of the forms of religious expression; this poses the problem of presenting the stages in the individual’s trans-conscience, which “exhales” forms of religious expression. Actually, we can speak of a tremendous interest of the author in seeing and knowing homo religiosus. Starting with the Paleolithic until nowadays, symbols have offered to the religious person – who has lived the sacred dimension of his existence during all this time – an openness towards the trans-historical world, connecting him with the transcendent dimension. Moreover, Eliade considers that myth is a universal phenomenon on which reality is structured, detailing – at the same time – the existence of supernatural creatures.

Eliade faces the individual, as a subject of the religious experience, with the object of this experience, a context in which he speaks of hierophany or the manifestation of the sacred. The place of encounter of the religious person with the sacred is directly determined (conditioned) by the behavior of the religious persons themselves.

Julien Ries noted that all hierophany is based on three important elements: the natural object, placed (and mentioned) in its normal context; the invisible reality that forms the presented contents; the mediator, which is nothing else but the object consecrated through a new dimension, the sacred. [ii]

“1) The sacred is qualitatively different from the profane, however it can appear anytime anyhow in the profane world, with the power to transform any cosmic object into a paradox through hierophany (meaning that the object stops being itself as a cosmic object, but still remains apparently unchanged);

2) This dialectics of the sacred is valid for all religions, not only for the so-called “primitive forms”. This dialectics is verified both in the “worship” of stones and trees and in the scientific view on Indian metamorphoses or in the supreme mystery of incarnation;

3) Purely elementary hierophanies are impossible to find (…), they are combined with religious forms considered, from the evolutionary perspective, superior (Supreme Beings, moral laws, mythologies, etc.);

4) We can find everywhere, even outside these superior religious forms, a system in which elementary hierophanies are ordered.”[iii]

Douglas Allen believes that Mircea Eliade’s methodology is characterized by two essential ideas: “the dialectics of the sacred and the profane and the dominant character of symbolism or of symbolic structures.”[iv]

In his paper Introduction to the phenomenon of religion, the Spanish author J. Martin Velasco, referring to what is called interpretation, from the point of view of the analysis of the religious phenomenon, considers that a structure cannot be conceived if it is not evaluated, interpreted – and especially – understood from the inside. Therefore, phenomenological research has, implicitly, a hermeneutic component or dimension. Together with renown representatives such as J. Wach and G. Van der Leeuw, Eliade will contribute to enriching this approach: considering himself both a historian and a phenomenology researcher of religions, we can speak of a combination of the two perspectives, which defines the originality of his contribution to a fascinating field such as that of religions.

The Primordial Dimension of the Sacred in the Becoming of the
Human Being

The approach of religious phenomenology is, in its essence, a meditation as well as a reference to the idea of the time factor. We will find this meditation on time specific to Eliade in most of the work of the Romanian scientist, as the holistic reach o the meanings of the religious depends on it. Indeed, we can say that the problem of time dominates Eliade’s creations.

As we will demonstrate later, human objects and actions can represent hierophanies (ontophanies); what we wish to mention here is that not only they can acquire such an attribute, but also even space and time receive the valences of the sacred. For the man in archaic cultures, space is not homogenous, as it is the case for the space in which the modern scientific man lives, meaning that certain areas of this space differ from one another from a qualitative point of view. Sacred spaces exist and, therefore, there also exist significant non-sacred amorphous spaces, lacking structure and consistency. Moreover, this lack of spatial homogeneity determines the religious person to experience an opposition between the sacred, unique, real space, with a significant existence, and the completing amorphous ambient around it: “We will see to what extent the discovery, that is, the revelation of the sacred space has existential value for the religious person: nothing can start without a prior orientation, and any orientation implies setting a fixed point. This is why the religious persons strive to set themselves at «the Center of the world».”[v] The condition for us to be able to live in a world must be created, “and no world can be born in the «chaos» of homogeneity and relativity of the profane space. Discovering or designing a fixed point – «the Center» – means Creating the World.”[vi]

The phenomenological premise according to which the sacred is irreducible characterizes the work of Mircea Eliade, for whom the sacred imposes itself both as an explanatory principle of religion and as an absolute concept of a unique ontology, which we can also find in the religious act, irrespective of its nature: “But it is maybe too late to look for another word, and «religion» can still be a useful term, with the condition that we always remember that it does not necessarily imply the belief in a God or in spirits, but it refers to the experience of the sacred and is therefore related to the ideas of being, sense and truth.”[vii] Speaking in terms of the position of the sacred as an ontological basis, Eliade explains: “Through the exception of the sacred, the human spirit has apprehended the difference between what proves to be real, strong, rich and significant, and what does not have these qualities, that is, the chaotic and dangerous flow of things, their random and meaningless appearances and disappearances.”[viii]

All this leads to the idea that, if in the becoming of the human being, there is something with a primordial character, that “something” is, without a doubt, the appearance of the sacred; therefore, the sacred proves to be an immense force and its act, its manifestation, is included in the term hierophany. Actually, the evolution of the history of religions – from the most rudimentary to the most advanced ones – is made up of a large sum of hierophanies, that is, of manifestations of the sacred reality.

In this entire frame, what would be the role of phenomenology? Julien Ries offers a possible explanation according to which this role is played in understanding the religious structures and phenomena, in interpreting the meaning of each hierophany, as well as in extracting the revealed meaning and the religious sense.[ix] Anything that existed or still exists can be a receiver of the sacred: “After all, we do not know if there is anything – object, gesture, physiological function or game, etc. – that has never been transformed into hierophany, somewhere, during the history of mankind.”[x]

In the conception of Eliade, religious imaginary is wide open for any object of the cosmos or of human life, with the necessary and only condition that, during its evolution, it had been transformed into hierophany.

The religious person can become, systematically, contemporary with the gods, through myths and rituals; this occurs if the person is able to update the primordial Time when the divine works took place. We must remember that this rhythmical return to the sacred Time of origins does not represent a refuse of the concrete world, as it is neither an escape from dreams and imagination but, on the contrary, it is what Mircea Eliade pointed out as an essential characteristic of man in primitive and archaic societies, using the phrase ontological obsession.

If we start from the basic idea that everything comes down to an archetypal model, which appears in different avatars, the natural consequence is to compare these manifestations of the sacred. Hence we witness the creation of a structure based on this exact comparison as well as on the common elements with a repetitive character. For Eliade, structure is not the final consequence in the analysis of the religious fact; it is formed based on this comparison and is prior to the meaning that results from it. The meaning of hierophanies in the world has a transhistorical character; that is why, for the Romanian scientist, the primary role is played by meaning, which transcends time and history seen as an existential level of man, as well as a structure. Therefore, we can say that everything starts from historic facts, which are manifestations with a much deeper significance than a simple common apparition. We must also mention that history does not contradict the idea of reversibility, as the comparative approach sends us to very different moments from a chronological perspective. If we were to analyze the “consequences” of such a fact, we could state that the methodological dimension is actually manifested in a scenario of a real spiritual adventure. The ability to decipher a hierophany is beyond history, acquiring – in the case of Mircea Eliade – connotations that surpass habitual research. We should remember that the problematic of time is immanently related to the system of deciphering the meaning of all religious phenomena. In other words, meaning is – as the author himself explains – beyond time, and not in the actual historical time. In what concerns the historian of religions, this is just a starting point, and not a final result.

The aspiration of integration in the origin time is perfectly comparable to the aspiration of recovering a strong, ideal and ingenuous world, the world of illo tempore. Therefore, religious imagination is inspired from the thirst of being, from the ontological dominant of the archaic man, which determines the latter to sanctify religiously the entire universe, modeling its structure and symbolic consistency in a strict relation with the personal ontological need and to a re-dimensioning of space and time. But man does not ontologically sanctify only the universe, but equally himself, or some of his fellows.

Myth, a Connection between Present and Primordial Time

A good knowledge of myths and hence an exemplary accomplishment of rituals places the religious person at the beginning of time. The function of myth is of enthronement, as it makes a connection between the present and the primordial time, showing how present behavior should reanimate the primordial event. As Julien Ries pertinently states, Mircea Eliade “has truly renewed the study of myth”[xi].

Trying to define myth, Eliade says: “From my point of view, the definition that seems the least imperfect, since it is the broadest, is the following: myth tells a sacred story; it speaks about an event that took place in the primordial time, a fabulous time of the «beginning». In other words, myth tells about how, thanks to the actions of supernatural beings, a reality was born, either a complete reality, the Cosmos, or mere fragments: an island, a vegetal species, a human behavior, an institution. Therefore, it is always the story of a «birth»: we are told how something was produced, how it started to exist. Myth only tells about what has been completed. The characters of myths are supernatural beings. They are known especially because of what they did in the prestigious time of the «beginning». Consequently, myths present their creative activity and the sacred (not only «supernatural») character of their work. Actually, myths describe the various and sometimes dramatic bursts of the sacred (or supernatural) into the world. This very burst of the sacred is in fact the basis of the world and makes it what it looks like today. What is more: precisely as a result of the interventions of supernatural beings, man is what he is today, a mortal sexed and cultural being.”[xii]

The universe is compared to an aging organism that loses its vitality and becomes senile; this is the moment that demands destruction in order to be able to be born again as a young vigorous world. In this context we can point out the idea of a cyclic time previously mentioned by Eliade and related to other aspects that characterize archaic thought.

A significant part is played in this context by the ritual of initiation, which consists in the experience of death (be it that of the shaman or of the individual arrived at puberty, an experience followed by that of the rebirth at a new higher ontological level. For boys (and sometimes even for girls), puberty rituals presuppose completing an initiating period; this implies assuming death and requires the presence of signs that indicate the fact that they are dead: they live inside a forest, which is by definition a land of death and darkness, they paint their bodies using colors specific to corpses, or they are not allowed to speak or use their hands to eat, and in winter time they are willingly forgotten by their friends and families. Death is followed by rebirth at a new higher level. What is the role of this complex process, and especially why must the individual tend towards completing the initiation process, towards its end? Because, during initiation, the beginner has the chance to discover myths, respectively the sacred history of the world and of the community he lives in, of the origin of institutions and behaviors, discovers names of gods, and sometimes his own secret name.

An important result of the efforts made by the Romanian scientist in the direction of “perfecting” the field of the history of religions is to be found at the highest point of his career, between 1976-1983, when the author published in Paris, in three volumes, the work entitled Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses (The History of Religious Beliefs and Ideas). It represents a synthesis of the main actions of the religious person, starting from pre-history until present, and its incontestable originality resides precisely in its approach and in the perspectives it offers. Dedicated to the analysis of what represents the fundamental unit of religious phenomena, Mircea Eliade draws the reader’s attention to the infinite indivisibility of the expressions included in them. The famous historian of religion suggests a new mentality that explains the message based on the sacred and perceived through symbols and myths, and following this “path” he gets to the understanding of the religious person.

Mircea Eliade is the only historian of religions of his predecessors who wrote a history of religious ideas and beliefs. What differentiates him from the rest is that he makes a distinction between a history analysis lacking a generalizing perspective and a history of religious ideas, although we should remember that he was once criticized for being an anti-historian. The Romanian scientist, unlike his predecessors in the field, used a more detailed approach of history and therefore of time, far from satisfied with their being placed in parentheses and considering that this way he has fulfilled his complex mission. Eliade considers that it is not at all normal for the time when religious phenomena appeared to be ignored; on the contrary, the identification of the structures and meanings specific to religion requires them to be correctly placed in time and space. Adrian Marino’s work Hermeneutica lui Mircea Eliade (The Hermeneutics of Mircea Eliade) includes a very detailed analysis of Mircea Eliade’s relation to history. A. Marino stresses the hermeneutic character of Eliade’s approach, placing him on the orbit of the best known hermeneutic scientists.

***

As it happens with any representative name in a field, Eliade could not have stayed in the readers’ “reserve”. They have always existed and definitely will always exist; in the end nobody denies their value and usefulness. All in all, with criticisms and appreciations, Mircea Eliade’s work is one of reference for the science of religions, and his contribution to investigating the religious imaginary is – without a doubt – remarkable. We mention only Gilbert Durand, who, discussing the exceptional personality of the Romanian scientist, compared him to Henry Corbin: “The difficulty of historicist explanations of the sacred determined in the first years of our century an entire flow of «phenomenological» analyses of the sacred (that is, sticking to «the thing itself », to the object specific to homo religiosus). To this trend belong two of the main restorers of the role of imagery in religious apparitions / «hierophanies» in human thought: the Romanian Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) and the French Henry Corbin (1903-1978). [xiii]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Allen, Douglas, L’analise phénoménologique de l’experience religieuse in Les Cahiers de l’Herne – Mircea Eliade, Editions de l’Herne, Paris, 1978.
2. Durand, Gilbert, Aventurile imaginii. Imaginatia simbolica. Imaginarul, Nemira Publishing House, Bucharest, 1999.
3. Eliade, Mircea, Tratat de istorie a religiilor, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 1992.
4. Eliade, Mircea, Nostalgia originilor, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 1994.
5. Eliade, Mircea, Le sacré et le profan, Gallimard, 1996.
6. Eliade, Mircea, Tratat de istorie a religiilor, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 1992.
7. Eliade, Mircea, Aspecte ale mitului, Univers Publishing House, Bucharest, 1978.
8. Ries, Julien, Sacrul în istoria religioasa a omenirii, Polirom Publishing House, Iasi, 2000.
9. Ries, Julien, Histoire de religions, phénoménologie et herméneutique, in Les Cahiers de l’Herne Mircea Eliade, Editions de l’Herne, Paris, 1978.

ENDNOTES

i Mircea Eliade, Nostalgia originilor, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 1994 p.14
ii Julien Ries, Histoire de religions, phénoménologie et herméneutique, in Les Cahiers de l’Herne Mircea Eliade, Editions de l’Herne, Paris, 1978.
iii Mircea Eliade, Tratat de istorie a religiilor, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 1992, p.46.
iv Douglas Allen, L’analise phénoménologique de l’experience religieuse in Les Cahiers de l’Herne – Mircea Eliade, Editions de l’Herne, Paris, 1978, p.128
v Mircea Eliade, Le sacré et le profan, Ed.Gallimard, 1996, p.31.
vi Mircea Eliade, quoted work, p.63.
vii Mircea Eliade, Tratat de istorie a religiilor, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 1992, p.5.
viii Mircea Eliade, quoted work, p.6.
ix Julien Ries, quoted work
x Mircea Eliade, quoted work, p.25
xi Julien Ries, Sacrul în istoria religioasa a omenirii, Polirom Publishing House, Iasi, 2000, p.65
xii Mircea Eliade, Aspecte ale mitului, Univers Publishing House, Bucharest, 1978, p.5-6
xiii Gilbert Durand, Aventurile imaginii. Imaginatia simbolica. Imaginarul, Publishing House, Bucharest, 1999, p.172

 

——————-

Durac, Livia. “Mircea Eliade: The hermeneutics of the religious phenomenon.” Lecture delivered to the 4th International Conference on the Human Being in Contemporary in Philosophy, held at Volgograd, 28-31 May 2007. The original PDF file was found at: <http://volgograd2007.goldenideashome.com/2%20Papers/Durac%20Livia%20p%202.pdf >.

Note: On Eliade’s thought, see also “Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation” by David J. Levy and “Excerpts from The Sacred and the Profane” by Mircea Eliade.

 

Guenon’s Critique of Modernity – Bertonneau

The Kali Yuga: René Guenon’s Critique of Modernity

By Thomas T. Bertonneau

 

 

The Conservative critique of modernity is by no means a recent phenomenon; it begins rather with the responders to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Jacobin followers in the late Eighteenth Century. It is sufficient in this regard to mention the names of Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797) and Joseph de Maistre (1753 – 1821) and of their successors, S. T. Coleridge (1772 – 1834) and François-René de Chateaubriand (1768 – 1848), to suggest the range and richness of immediately post-revolutionary conservative discourse. In the Twentieth Century, José Ortega y Gassett (1883 – 1955), Oswald Spengler (1886 – 1936), and T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965), among others, continued in the line established by French réactionisme. In Ortega’s case and in Spengler’s this continuation entailed incorporating the iconoclastic skepticism of Friedrich Nietzsche into the discourse qualifiedly. In Eliot’s case, it meant rejecting Nietzsche’s atheism and taking up from Chateaubriand and Coleridge the apology for Christian revelation and for a theological, as opposed to a secular, view of existence. René Guénon (1886 – 1951) belongs by his dates with the generation of Ortega, Spengler, and Eliot; like Eliot, Guénon is a theist, but despite his favorable treatment of Catholicism he is less identifiably Christian than Eliot. Guénon sees Catholicism as the vessel of tradition in the West, but elsewhere tradition has other forms that are valid in their own contexts.[i]

Spengler’s Decline of the West undoubtedly made an impression on Guénon, much as it did on Guenon’s younger contemporary Julius Evola (1898 – 1974). Guénon and Evola knew each other and mutually influenced one other.[ii] Both Guénon and Evola together exemplify a branch of modern critical anti-modernism affiliated much more than casually with the Twentieth Century occult revival. Guénon at one time, in the 1920s, edited the chief French-language occult periodical, La Gnose or “Gnosis.” Yet Guénon, a fierce un-masker of religious mountebanks, can hardly be accused of employing mystic obscurantism to push a doctrinaire agenda. Guénon’s interest in occult topics, even more than Evola’s, strikes one as rigorous and objective. As for Guénon’s awareness of ideological deformations of reality, it ran to the acute. The driving force of deformation, in Guénon’s analysis as in Evola’s, is the stultifying massiveness of modern society, with its conformism on an unprecedented scale, and its receptivity to oratorical manipulation.

I. Guénon’s study Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion (1921) offers a useful entry into the man’s view. This comprehensive account of Helena Blavatsky (1831 – 1891) and her idiosyncratic cult also serves valuably as a study of modern ersatz-religion in general, delving as it does beyond Blavatsky and Theosophy into related sectarian developments, some of which exhibit a distinctly political character. Guénon never uses the term Gnosticism pejoratively in Theosophy, where it designates only a species of ancient theological speculation. Anyone familiar with Eric Voegelin’s usage of the same term will, however, recognize that Guénon frequently addresses the identical phenomenon of antinomian rebellion, motivated by libido dominandi and expressing itself in apocalyptic language, as addressed by Voegelin. Such self-aggrandizing rebellion, which would impose itself on the whole world, attempts to disguise its libidinousness under the banner of sweeping moral imperatives. Crusading slogans of this type make an appeal to the compensatory self-righteousness of the frustrated and resentful. According to Guénon, Blavatsky’s movement belongs generically to the revolt of distorted moral righteousness against nature; specifically it belongs to the type of destructive petulance that he denominates under the term mystic socialism, a peculiar development of Western civilization in the early Nineteenth Century.

The Blavatsky phenomenon thus serves for Guénon as a case study with broad implications beyond its peculiarities. In the chapter in Theosophy on “The Principle Points of Theosophical Teaching,” in a discussion of reincarnation in Blavatsky’s thought, Guénon writes that, “most revolutionaries [of the 1830s and 40s] were ‘mystics’ in the worst sense of the word, and everyone knows of the extravagances occasioned among them by the theories of Fourrier, Saint-Simon, and others of this kind.” Guénon echoes numerous others in his insight. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Anatole France, all note-worthily perceived the same overlap between radical leftwing politics and what Guénon calls “pseudo-mystical aspirations.” Hawthorne writes about political religiosity in The Blithedale Romance (1852); Conrad in Under Western Eyes (1911); James in The Princess Casamassima (1886); and France, using sacrificial terminology and borrowing not a little from de Maistre, in The Gods Will Have Blood (1912). The convergence of judgment bolsters the plausibility of the observation.[iii]

Where Voegelin, for his part, commented on a pronounced mystic strain in the writings of Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, and others Guénon commented on a pronounced political strain in modern mysticism, taking Theosophy as his main instance. Voegelin would have agreed with Guénon’s observation that a “restless and misguided religiosity,” coupled with evangelical “eagerness” to propagate doctrine, animates much of what is characteristically modern in both religion and politics, Voegelin having made similar observations in his own work. Guénon even anticipates Voegelin in his assertion that radical preaching, whether for the advancement of socialism or for the disestablishment of authority, invariably employs “a sentimental and ‘consoling’ moralism,” just as in modern liberal oratory, with its parade of alleged victims of iniquity. Such “moralism” finds fertile ground in the varieties of Protestantism, especially in its Puritan offshoots, like Unitarianism. “The modernist mentality and the Protestant mentality,” Guénon writes, “differ only in nuance,” both being directed at an ancien régime, or religious establishment, denounced as intolerable; both being moralistic; and both being politically messianic.

Theosophy, in Guénon’s analysis, exhibits in its organization the telltale features of a political cabal. Not only did Blavatsky and her collaborators conduct their activities in clandestine and conspiratorial ways, but also Theosophy articulated itself as the inner party/outer party configuration noticeable in Communist organizations. In this way, by recruiting a large exoteric enrollment, the actual ruling minority provides itself with an instrument of willing drones and propagandists. Idealism finds its locus in the movement in the large following. The inner circle, by contrast, aware of its own manipulative character and jealous of its privileges, quickly becomes cynical if it were not so from the beginning; it extracts money from the membership and delegates to volunteers the workaday and unsavory tasks that it prefers not to undertake directly on its own. In a chapter on “The Oath in Theosophy,” Guénon writes, “a secret society is not necessarily a society that conceals its existence or that of its members, but is above all a society that has secrets, whatever their nature.” The secrets might be absurdities, as was the case with many Theosophical secrets; but by pledging the inner-circle to keeping the secrets, on pain of denunciation, the organization inculcates obedience – the real objective of what otherwise might appear so much pointless flummery.

The heart of Guénon’s History of a Pseudo-Religion consists of its twenty-seventh through twenty-ninth chapters – “Theosophical Moralism,” “Theosophy and Protestantism,” “The Political Role of the Theosophical Society” – and its “Conclusion.” In these sections of the book, Guénon begins to abstract from the mass of details concerning the peccadilloes of Blavatsky, Colonel Olcott, Annie Besant, and the other capital mountebanks of the cult. Under the topic of “moralism,” Guénon remarks that while a vaguely Christian “universal brotherhood” had been a stated goal of Theosophical activity, Blavatsky steadily described her many social enterprises as incompatible with “confessional differences.” Blavatsky’s enterprises were nevertheless, as Guénon writes, “in direct competition with charitable institutions having a confessional character.” Theosophy resembles in its practical activity the socialism contemporary with it, not least in seeing itself as the opposition to constituted religion, from which it wishes to recruit away the membership; and after that in its aggressive and imperious character, expressed in crusades of shaming and prohibition.[iv]

According to Guénon, “Humanitarianism, pacifism, anti-alcoholism, and vegetarianism [are] ideas that are at root sentimental.” In appropriating these themes Theosophy shows itself to be thoroughly informed by “the essentially ‘moralistic’ mentality of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism,” just as Fabian socialism was. The modern moralization of politics undoubtedly runs in train with the modern politicization of religion. Theosophy reveals much about the generics of modern agitation and complaint: Modern sentiment-driven prohibition-crusades, Guénon writes, organize themselves for “puerile ends.” Yet the crusaders also expect, when they have succeeded in imposing their prohibitions universally, that the event will transform the world. One recalls Fourier’s belief that on the accomplishment of the global Phalanstery the seas would turn to lemonade. Such “pietism” reacts to principled resistance by amplifying its wont as an authoritarian stance.

Because Christianity is an ethos of freedom, all “moralist” – that is to say, “immanentist” – programs “must logically become anti-Christian,” hence also despotic. There is a syllogistic connection, Guénon argues, between a movement “which does not even admit the divinity of Christ,” and the “messianic and millenarist” themes that predominate among “contemporary pragmatists and intuitionists.” The first is the premise and the others are variants of the conclusion.

II. In the term pragmatist Guénon implicates the psychologist William James and in the term intuitionist, the philosopher Henri Bergson. That Guénon yokes James and Bergson with Blavatsky and Besant will outrage many a sensibility. Yet Bergson in fact yoked himself to James, whom he first met in London in 1908 and whom he had quoted approvingly as early as 1889 in Time and Free Will; James repaid that compliment twenty years later in A Pluralistic Universe. James’ best-known book, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), might seem somewhat anti-modern, validating as it does visionary events and a type of non-empirical knowledge. In Guénon’s view, however, as he expresses it in his keynote Crisis of the Modern World (1927) Jamesian pragmatism merely exemplifies the modern tendency to emphasize action over contemplation and instrumentality over knowledge. Guenon remarks how under the Protestant dispensation religion descends towards two privative states, “moralism” and “sentimentality,” until it dwindles down to jejune “religiosity.” Guénon writes: “To this final stage [of dispirited religion] correspond theories such as that of the ‘religious experience’ of William James, which goes to the point of finding in the ‘subconscious’ man’s means of entering into communication with the divine”; thus “a limited God [of subjective rather than transcendental experience] is stipulated as being more ‘advantageous’ than an infinite God.”[v]

As for Bergson, he too according to Guénon is “anti-metaphysical,” his “reality” corresponding blandly “to a vaguely defined sensory order… conceived as something essentially changing and unstable.” But if everything were “change” no possibility of knowledge would exist; nor could intuition have an object, not even itself.[vi]

Guénon wrote The Crisis of the Modern World to summarize his encyclopedic assessment, shared by such illustrious contemporaries as Ortega and Spengler, and canvassing every aspect of life, that Western civilization had entered a phase of terminal deliquescence. Guénon saw in the modern era not merely the age of the vulgate flouting itself en masse, as did Ortega, or of Culture fossilizing into Civilization, as did Spengler: He discerned the “Kali Yuga,” the “Dark Age” of willful havoc, borrowing the label from Hindu scriptures. Thus: “The human cycle [Sanskrit: Manvantara] is divided into four periods marking so many stages during which the primordial spirituality becomes gradually more obscured; these are the same periods that the ancient traditions of the West called the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages. We are now in the fourth age… and have been so already… for more than six thousand years.” (“The Dark Age” is the title of the book’s first chapter.)

The sequence of metallic ages comes from Hesiod’s Works and Days (Eighth Century BC). Hesiod laments having been born into the Iron Age, saying, “Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards”; Hesiod’s catalogue of prevailing evils encompasses the triumph of “envy” and the dissolution of justice in selfish claims.

Describing modernity in terms similar to those in Hesiod’s complaint, Guénon refers to such phenomena as “occlusion,” “dispersion in pure multiplicity,” and “progressive materialization” as traits of the times. Guénon traces the remote origin of the specifically modern crisis to the Greek world of two centuries later than Hesiod, particularly to the differentiation of philosophy (self-denominated and as such) from traditional wisdom. In its Pythagorean etymology, as the “love of wisdom,” philosophy connoted modestly “the initial disposition required for the attainment of wisdom,” a “preliminary and preparatory stage.” Soon, however, “the perversion… ensued that consisted in taking this transitional stage for an end in itself and in seeking to substitute ‘philosophy’ for wisdom.” Such arrogance generated “a pretended wisdom that was purely human and therefore entirely of the rational order, and that took the place of true, traditional, supra-rational, and ‘non-human’ wisdom.” These events reflect, in small, and likewise forecast the larger crisis, which Guénon characterizes as inevitable. “The reason [for their inevitability] is that the development of any manifestation implies a gradually increasing distance from the principle from which it proceeds.”[vii]

Tendencies like sophism (egocentric) and skepticism (epistemologically nihilistic) gradually undermined the foundations of Greco-Roman civilization, Guénon opines. Modern consensus-scholarship takes the dominance of Stoicism and Epicureanism over the views of the imperial upper classes as signifying progress in rationality. Guénon assesses the same transformation contrarily as showing “to what point intellectuality had declined.” He writes: “The ancient, sacred doctrines… had degenerated through… lack of understanding into [actual] ‘superstitions’ [that is to say] things which, having lost their meaning, survived for their own sake merely as manifestations.” When the Gothic tribes belatedly dismantled the western Imperium, they did little more in Guénon’s view than put the period to a sentence long completed. The ensuing Gothic Christianity represents for Guénon a temporary positive “readjustment” to tradition. The so-called Renaissance, which follows the Middle Ages “was in reality not a rebirth but the death of many things,” so much so that in respect of the medieval mind modernity is “unable to understand its intellectuality.” Together the Renaissance and the Reformation correspond with “the disruption of Christendom” and they therefore together mark “the starting-point of the modern crisis” in a “definitive rupture with the traditional spirit.”[viii]

Modernity invariably caricatures the Middle Ages as socially and technically stagnant, in contrast to itself, which it conceives as meritoriously active. The modern mentality chiefly demands “change,” which, in a mood of self-congratulation, modern people call dynamism or progress. But, as Guénon writes in the chapter on “Knowledge and Action,” “change, in the widest sense of the word, is unintelligible and contradictory”; thus no society can actually predicate meaningful order purely on “change.” Quite the opposite, constant “change” is indistinguishable from anarchy, toward which all agitating trends like “humanism,” “individualism” and “materialism” lead or so Guénon believes. In the chapter on “Individualism,” Guénon defines that sacrosanct term as, in fact, “the negation of any principle higher than individuality, and the consequent reduction of civilization, in all its branches, to purely human elements.” Individualism existed in ancient society without ever becoming the dominant ethos, but with humanism and Protestantism it broke its fetters and became the defining omniprevalent motif.

For Guénon, Florentine humanism corresponds to Luther’s schismatic rebellion with a Latinate accent – an insight, one might add, that a calm re-reading of Pico’s famous Oration will support. Both movements position themselves resentfully as anti-Catholic and anti-traditional. Florentine neo-Platonism is of the very late, magical variety. As for Protestantism as such, The Crisis classifies it under the formula of “individualism as applied to religion.” Guénon puts it this way: “Protestantism, like the modern world, is built upon mere negation, the same negation of principles that is the essence of individualism.”

III. Much of the refraichement in Guénon’s work comes from its author’s forthright judgment, his judgment of Protestantism furnishing a signal specimen. In The Crisis, Guénon goes on to say that, once it had undergone the Protestant transformation, “The modern outlook was bound to reject all spiritual authority in the true sense of the word, namely authority that is based on the supra-human order, as well as any traditional organization.” One can easily imagine the faculty of a contemporary philosophy department squirming in response to Guénon’s words or bursting into demonstration of outrage. The ire would be unanimous. But that is precisely the paradox that Guénon’s analysis of modernity reveals: In the vaunted individualism noticeable individuality swiftly ceases to exist; a welter of contending subjects replace it, who, in their egocentric contentiousness, soon resemble one another indistinguishably. Guénon has the temerity to write: “Protestantism denied the authority of the organization qualified to interpret legitimately the religious tradition of the West and in its place claimed to set up ‘free criticism,’ that is to say any interpretations resulting from private judgment, even that of the ignorant and incompetent, and based exclusively on the exercise of human reason.” Having validated the subjective, the Protestant or modern mind has no criterion by which it might reject any opinion; so it embraces the opposite and declares a regime of mandatory relativism in ideas and moeurs. From this turn-around arises the social, cultural, and epistemological chaos of the modern age.

Readers of The Crisis, especially of the chapter on “Social Chaos,” must remind themselves every few paragraphs that the writing dates from over eighty years ago, so aptly does it depict existing circumstances in 2010. Guénon denounces “the pseudo-principle of… ‘equality,’” which as he says, “almost all of our contemporaries blindly accept.” Along with pseudo-principles there are “pseudo-ideas” such as “progress” and “democracy,” which have “nothing in common with the intellectual order.” These “false ideas” are, properly speaking, “suggestions,” rooted in sentiment, whose “contagious” character endows them with propagandistic effectiveness; these “verbalisms” are the “idols” of the contemporary masses. As for democracy, “The higher cannot proceed from the lower, because the greater cannot proceed from the lesser.” Guénon’s analysis of mob-behavior (“a sort of general psychosis”) owes something to Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd (1895). Guénon would return to the basic plan of The Crisis in 1945, enlarging the scale of the presentation, with The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, reading whose pages is, if possible, an even more powerful experience than reading those of The Crisis.

The great “signs of the times” in 1945 offered themselves in the wrecked cities of Europe and Japan, the “liberated” concentration camps and POW camps, the presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe all the way to Vienna, and the new omen of the mushroom cloud. The world’s victorious governments and their eager servants, the agencies of the free press, hastened to call the concatenation of these things “peace” – a “verbalism” which when seen starkly against its background becomes suggestive of actual dementia. Guénon had written The Reign of Quantity during the conflict yet tellingly and deliberately the book barely mentions the war. Eschewing the topical, Guénon returns to his patient diagnosis of modern intellectual and cultural degradation, always keen to reveal the origin of modern perversity. Vital – which is to say, traditional – civilizations acknowledge quality as superior to quantity; such civilizations eschew quantity for its own sake and thus often appear to modern people to have lived in material poverty. The modern idea of the Middle Ages corresponds to this prejudice, which in its turn indicates the impoverishment of modern thinking.[ix]

For Guénon the idea of “democracy” belongs ineradicably to the mentality that values quantity over quality, so much so that it despises the latter – in the social, moral, and esthetic senses – for being incompatible with the so-called equality. It is this, equality, which supplies that mentality’s overriding desideratum. Guénon steadfastly refuses to allow any dignity to the word “democracy,” which he takes as synonymous with modernity’s mad insistence on equalizing all human achievement at the lowest level, the only level at which such a project could come near to completing itself. Thus in the chapter on “The Hatred of Secrecy,” Guénon addresses the pedagogical folly that tries to bring the totality of knowledge and every associated practice “within the reach of all.” Nowadays conservative commentary refers to such programs under the names of “dumbing down” and “affirmative action,” which it would locate as recent developments. Guénon sees the process as co-incipient with Protestant and Revolutionary spitefulness against constituted authority in any domain. Guénon writes: “The modern mentality… cannot bear any secret or even any reserve,” but “such things appear [to it] only as ‘privileges.’” The modern mentality again despises “any kind of superiority” of intellect or mastery because the fact that these things require preparation, capacity, and attunement “is just what ‘egalitarianism’ so obstinately denies.”

Guénon’s Reign makes a telling comparison with another apocalyptic book, H. G. Wells’ Mind at the End of its Tether, like The Reign written during the war and published in 1945. Wells (1866 – 1946), the great prophet of material civilization and “progress,” suddenly knows what Guénon has long known: “The writer finds very considerable reason for believing that, within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by aeons, there has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life, not simply human life but all self-conscious existence, has been going on since its beginning.” Wells writes of “the abrupt revelation of a hitherto unsuspected upward limit to quantitative material adjustability.” But Wells, militantly secular in his lifelong orientation, cannot grasp that his own sudden disorientation stems from the very attitude that his career successfully promoted. What dawns belatedly on Wells as a mysterious and abrupt alteration presents itself to Guénon only as the inevitable outcome of a long trend. An earlier book by Wells, The Work Health and Happiness of Mankind (1931), is an extravagant instance of what Guénon means by “The Reign of Quantity.”

In the chapter in The Reign on “The Illusion of ‘Ordinary Life,’” Guénon writes, “Materialists, with all their boasted ‘good sense’ and all the ‘progress’ of which they proudly consider themselves to be the most finished products… are really only [people] in whom certain faculties have become atrophied to the extent of being completely abolished.” What materialists like Wells call “normal” is, from a traditional perspective, quite paltry and abnormal. A world organized purely on material lines – as Wells and those of his convictions first prescribed and then realized – exists “as it were in an eminently unstable state of equilibrium.” Hence those mushroom clouds. Unsurprisingly then “the world has even now reached a point where the security of ‘ordinary life,’ on which the whole outward organization of the modern world has rested up till now, runs serious risks of being troubled by unanticipated ‘interferences.’” Those last phrases resemble the opening sentence from The Mind at the End of its Tether previously quoted, but the shock of an unexpected discovery is entirely absent from Guénon’s prose.

IV. Wells, about whom much in a positive way could be said, nevertheless serves as an exemplar of the modern, anti-traditional mentality and thus also as a useful counter-figure to Guénon; indeed, at the end of his life, Wells might be said to have encountered himself uncannily, with The Mind at the End of its Tether and the less pessimistic but equally quirky Happy Turning testifying to the event. Knowledge of Wells helps in understanding Guénon’s diagnosis of modernity in another way, for, having been raised by a Methodist mother, a good deal of righteous evangelism remained in Wells’ makeup even after he rejected any notion of God and adopted as one of his hobbies the making of nasty attacks on organized religion. Guénon argues that modernity is a deviation from but also a deviation of religion or at any rate from and of the “sacred” – the realm of the “profane” being the same as the realm of matter and of quantity. Several French contemporaries of Guénon saw socialism as a Christian heresy, not least Gustave Le Bon (1841 – 1931) and Henri de Lubac (1896 – 1991). Much more recently the American Paul Gottfried (born 1941) has argued that political correctness is a continuation of Protestant Nineteenth-Century social crusades. The distance between Gottfried’s view as expressed in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (2002) and Guénon’s view either in The Crisis or The Reign is hardly great; both men remark the intolerant, dogmatic character of “liberal” crusades and the appeal of those crusades to base emotions rather than to intellect.

The liberal professoriate, from which Gottfried is maximally distant, creates theories aplenty that have a superficially intellectual appearance and that deploy arcane terminology, but in the very thickness of the verbalism one can discern Guénon’s themes of “materialization” or “solidification” as keynote characteristics of the prevailing situation.

Wells’ bulking Work Health and Happiness again offers itself as emblematic: It is a two-volume bludgeon of statistics of its day with audacious quantitative prescriptions for realizing global socialism. In The Reign, in the chapter on “Cain and Abel,” Guénon lists, as figuring among the consequences that “materialization” and “solidification” have devolved on the social order, that regime “in which everything is counted, recorded and regulated,” as he writes. This “mania for census-taking,” which Guenon associates with the centrality of statistics in modern thinking, belongs to “the endless multiplication of administrative interventions in all the circumstances of life.” The sixty-five years since The Reign’s appearance have only strengthened the legitimacy of Guénon’s lexical choice of the term mania.” Thus whatever else they might be (articulating that would entail a long list of invidious motives), both “diversity,” on the one hand, and “climate change policy,” on the other, to name but two Twenty-First Century political programs, are maniacally quantitative and anti-traditional.

In describing bureaucratic number-fixation Guénon writes clairvoyantly that: “These interventions [in tradition] must naturally have the effect of insuring the most complete possible uniformity between individuals, all the more so because it is… a ‘principle’ of all administration to treat individuals as mere numerical units all exactly alike… thus constraining all men to adjust themselves… to the same ‘average’ level.”

The tyranny of quantity, it will be seen, overlaps in the Venn diagram of Guénon’s commentary almost entirely with the tyranny of equality; any manifestation of quality, as such, then looms as the enemy of both. Because an egalitarian dispensation can only be achieved at the price of quality in itself, all modern intellectual activity will be constrained by mandatory simplification toward numerical dumbness. This engrossment of thinking – indeed of the perception and experience from which thinking derives its material – is also a topic in The Reign. Traditional society, Guenon argues, being hierarchical is also initiatory. Entrance into the guilds and brotherhoods of traditional society occurs by rigorous selection and arduous training, thus assuring that those who fill the established offices are those best suited to discharge the work that their appointed stations entail. Guénon writes: “Initiation, in whatever form it may appear, is that which really incarnates the ‘spirit’ of ‘supra-human’ states.” For the rebellious mentality that spurns hierarchy, “initiation is the thing that must be opposed.” Modern society, in Guénon’s vocabulary, realizes its program through “counter-initiation,” which strives to effect “a change in the general mentality” and the concomitant “destruction of all traditional institutions.”

Protestantism (once again), rationalism, and humanism re-enter the discussion. Guénon sees them all as agitating, corrosive forms of “counter-initiation,” most obviously in the cases of Calvin and Luther, but no less perniciously in other later non-religious and anti-religious discourse. According to Guénon, “the most astonishing thing is the speed with which it has been possible to induce Westerners to forget everything connected with the existence of a traditional civilization in their countries.” The modern self-congratulatory enlightenment of the European and North American nations therefore corresponds, as Guenon observes, with “total incomprehension of the Middle Ages and everything connected with them.” This forgetfulness is not a spontaneous or natural development, but the result rather of deliberate hostility against the traditional past – of the propaganda, in the exercise of which modern movements, whether political, cultural, sectarian, or scientific excel.

The “Reign of Quantity” requires that its constituency live unconnected with any past in a kind of perpetual present, on the multiplying distractions of which the untutored mind remains stupidly fixed. Guénon remarks how industry fills life with things, objects and devices, which monopolize attention, and which assimilate individuals to the pattern of the consumer. In our own time the variety and fascination – and the idiocy – of these things have only increased. The trend toward “materialization” thus converges with the trend toward mental stultification and, in the stultifying vocabulary of modern politics, “democracy.” Having abolished the normal and the traditional, modernity offers counterfeits in the form of “pseudo-religion,” “pseudo-nature,” and even “pseudo-comfort.” Thus the modern regimes organize “civic or lay ‘pseudo-rites’ that… provide the ‘masses’ with a purely human substitute for real religious rites.” Such counterfeits include the reintroduction of “nature,” or what is supposed to be nature, as an object of worship. Guénon’s analysis of the counterfeit anticipates Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the Simulacrum although as far as I know no one has ever called attention to Guénon’s priority in this respect.

Many literate people nowadays have the gnawing sense that a crackup of the world is at hand. This sense too belongs to The Reign, in whose pages Guénon predicts repeatedly that the “descent” into the nullity of pure quantity is about to hit its lowest depth, its stopping point, at which moment the Kali Yuga will have completed its cycle and a new, opposite motion will begin. Reading Guénon, many literate people will very likely experience some nervousness about the mystic-mythic vocabulary with which he articulates his philosophy of tradition. It is significant, however, that someone as temperamentally opposite to Guénon as was Wells had, at the end of his life, a vision of modern fraudulence as stark as Guénon’s. Given then the total jejuneness of everything modern, including the scrubbed-clean, anti-transcendent vocabulary of positivism; given the vapidity and imposture of Foucault-speak and Derrida-speak, both designed to destroy thinking; given, I say, the rampant perniciousness of the socialistic-egalitarian experiment in all its guises – Guénon’s insistence on the archaic, the traditional language of symbol and myth begins to appear in a new light as both useful and urgent. Guénon displays a kinship in this regard with another explorer of tradition, Richard Wagner.

Notes

[i] Guénon was sympathetic with Islam, especially with the Sufi movement of Islam; he underwent initiation in Islamic mysteries and took an Arabic name.

[ii] Evola wrote a book about Guénon, René Guénon: a Teacher for Modern Times (1933). Other writers who have addressed Guénon are: Frithjof Schuon, Paul Chacornac, Robin Waterfield, and Jean Borella.

[iii] I am, of course, aware that France later became a Communist, an event proving only the vast capacity of human beings for self-delusion and oblivious self-contradiction. France’s novel La Revolte des Anges (1914) is explicitly Gnostic, using actual Gnostic nomenclature; but it is also Marxian and revolutionary, making it a complete turn-around from The Gods will have Blood.

[iv] In the United States, “Spiritism,” Feminism, and the Temperance Movement were all related; their chief personae were the same.

[v] I assess James more positively than Guénon does although I prefer the James of The Varieties of Religious Experience to the James of Pragmatism.

[vi] Hence in Heraclitus, the symbol of the river, ever-changing, on the one hand, and the symbol of the Logos, or eternal idea on the other, with the latter making it possible for the investigating subject to recognize that the river is one and the same even though it is always changing.

[vii] By “manifestation,” Guénon means revelation – of metaphysical truth, vouchsafed by the equivalent of deity, to truth’s original human codifiers. Spengler too wrote that every “Great Culture” begins in a mystic vision, but in Spengler’s scheme revelation is immanent, effective but subjective; for Guénon the source of revelation is living, an entity, and the basis of existence. It is quite real.

[viii] Spengler refers to the Renaissance as an “imbroglio.”

[ix] For Guénon, the Middle Ages represented the last normal phase of Western Civilization.

 

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Bertonneau, Thomas T. “The Kali Yuga: René Guenon’s Critique of Modernity.” The Brussels Journal, 13 December 2010. <http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4603 >.

 

Defining Paganism – Faye

Defining Paganism

By Guillaume Faye

 

Paganism: The philosophic and/or religious attitude, generally polytheistic and pantheistic, that is the antipode to the revealed salvation religions, to religious or secular monotheism, or to Western materialism.

For Christopher Gérard, one of the principal contemporary practicing authorities on the subject: ‘Paganism, as a coherent vision of the world … is faithful to an ancestry, considered part of a very long memory, enrooted in multiple terrains, opened to the invisible … an active participant in the world, a sought-after harmony between microcosm and macrocosm. Paganism in essence is a natural religion, the most ancient of a world “born” with its birth – if the world were ever born. Rather than an eccentric fad – or the elegant nostalgia of literary refugees from some mythic Golden age, I think paganism is on the way to becoming the first of the world’s religions.’ He mentions 1.5 billion pagans on five continents, which would make it the world’s largest religious group. Gérard adds, ‘Without being narrowly moralistic … a lived paganism seems to me incompatible with whatever makes man servile. As the exaltation of life – of the eternal élan – paganism refuses everything that debases man: drugs, dependencies, every kind of unhealthy life.’ A lived paganism, in other words, is not destructuring, nor linked to the permissive, anti-vitalist mores of the present West (as certain prelates would have us believe). Gay Pride has nothing in common with the pagan bacchanalia! Paganism, moreover, is neither superstitious nor vacuously ritualistic, in contrast to Islam (this belief system which is most opposed to it), for Islam is all these things to the highest degree.

Pierre Vial has written that paganism is not anti-Christian, but a-Christian and post-Christian. ‘To be pagan is to refuse the inversion of values that Nietzsche denounced in Christianity. It is to take the hero, not the martyr, as the model. Christian suffering has always repulsed me. To celebrate the redemptive value of suffering seems life a form of masochism.’ (Today, modern European Christians practice their ethno-masochism and culpability on the immigrant colonisers; in every domain they practice the ‘duty to repent.’) Vial continues, ‘To exalt wretchedness, suffering, and sickness is unhealthy and I much prefer the Greek ideal of transcendence or the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius. Paganism ought not, though, to be confused with anti-clericalism or atheism. Another point: a purely intellectual definition of paganism … won’t suffice. It’s perhaps necessary, but it doesn’t go far enough. For paganism to exist, it must be lived. Not simply in gestures, but in life’s most ordinary expressions. Paganism is defined primarily in reference to the sacred … It affirms the immanence of the sacred.’

For both Gérard and Vial, paganism the authentic ‘religion,’ for it ties men of the same community together and ties them to a cosmos in which the divine is everywhere, where the gods are not separated from, but part of, the profane world.

Similarly, Gnosticism, which inspires Freemasonry, has nothing to do with paganism. Paganism’s constituting traits are: the presence of the sacred and the supernatural within nature; a cyclical or spherical conception of time; the refusal to consider nature the ‘property’ of the men who exploit and thus destroy it; the coming-and-going of sensuality and asceticism; the unqualified apology of the life-force (the ‘yes to life’ and ‘the Great Health’ of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra); the idea that the world is ‘uncreated’ and corresponds to a river of becoming, without beginning or end; the tragic sentiment of life refusing all nihilism; the cult of ancestors, of the line, of our people’s biological and cultural identity; the refusal of all revealed and universal Truths and thus the refusal of all fanaticism, dogmatism, and forced proselytism.

We need to beware, though, of certain so-called pagans who hold that paganism stands for ‘absolute tolerance,’ in the name of ‘social polytheism.’ Such pagans, like the post-conciliar Church, support, for instance, immigration and Islam and refuse to struggle against the reigning social decadence. This pseudo-paganism of secular clerics gives the pagan spirit a Leftist slant. It’s a pseudo-paganism, in effect – purely negative and reactive, a hollow Judaeo-Christianity, an anti-Catholic fixation.

It’s not a philosophy of life, but an attitude of resentment. Besides, these pseudo-pagans, who lack true culture, have never been able to define nor positively live their assumed ‘paganism.’ In a totally absurd way, it’s even led them to a pro-Islam position (whose Qur’an considers pagans ‘idolaters’ – and whose lot is that of the Eid al-Adha’s slaughtered sheep) – and to the egalitarianism of absolute toleration for every form of deviance, justified in the name of a purely casuistic ‘social polytheism’ (hemophilia, antiracism, ethno-pluralism, tribalism, etc.) One doesn’t even have to criticise the Church to assume the position of Monsignor Gaillot and the post-conciliar humanitarians.

Against this, we affirm that paganism is in essence a partisan of social order – which it sees as reflecting the cosmic order, it equally opposes the fusion of peoples, random mixing, and thus a massifying individualism. The pagan vision of the world is holistic and organic and views its people as a hierarchical community of destiny. Like ancient Greek paganism, the notion of the City, inseparable from notions of patriotism and ethnic identity, is fundamental the pagan conception of the world. Similarly, Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power perfectly accords with paganism (to the degree it respects the natural, cosmic order).

In Europe, paganism – her ancient religion, far older than Christianity – has taken several forms: first there’s a ‘philosophical’ paganism (or neo-paganism), with Hellenic, Roman, Germanic, Scandinavian, etc., components, all of which hold no belief in anthropocentric gods, but rather in a sacred, polytheistic, and pantheistic vision of the world, in which the divinities are eternal allegories representing the multiplicities of life and cosmos; this paganism knows numerous communal rituals linked to the different stages of human life and to the seasonal cycles; it’s been evident in European art for centuries. There’s also a ‘wild’ paganism that stretches from the (pseudo-pagan) New Age to European Buddhism. Another false paganism is intellectualist paganism, which is often just a form of anti-Catholic hatred; what Gérard calls ‘salon paganism.’ And finally, there’s the latent or implicit paganism of traditional Catholicism and Orthodoxy, especially evident in their polytheistic cults.

There’s no pagan ‘Church.’ Paganism isn’t sociologically unified – one needs to speak of paganisms. The word itself is ambiguous, coined by Christians to designate the religion of peasants (pagani).

It might also be noted that sects belong neither to paganism nor its philosophy, but to derivations of the mystic monotheistic salvation religions.

Pagans today need to have the intelligence and wisdom to not – apriori – reject traditional Christianity, and vice versa, for the struggle against the common enemy is what’s most important. Not sectarianism, but a historic compromise, is needed here. No reconciliation, by contrast, is possible with the Judaeo-Christianity of the post-conciliar Left.

The main pagan reproach of Christianity (as made by Pierre Vial, Giorgio Locchi, and Louis Rougier) is its roots in universalism and egalitarianism and its progressive view of history; totalitarian ideologies of salvation, such as globalist liberalism, with its end to history and its disarming humanitarianism, are simply secularised forms of Christianity. Universalism, for example, has been transformed into a secular cosmopolitanism, and Christian charity into a masochistic humanitarianism. Universal charity, as it comes from Judaeo-Christianity and clashes with the pagan world vision, has been central to Europe’s moral disarmament, to its failure to resist the Third World’s colonising invasion. Similarly, in situating God outside or above the universe and declaring the latter profane, Judaeo-Christianity opened the way to an atheistic materialism. Following Augustine and Aquinas, traditional Christianity claimed that the equality and universality of men before God is destined not for the City, but for the beyond, following the Last Judgment.

We need, henceforth, to recognise that the egalitarian, universalist, and anti-nationalist virus of the early Christians, neutralised by the Medieval Church and by chivalry, has returned in force with the modern post-conciliar Church. Traditional Christianity, whether Catholic or Orthodox, incorporated important pagan elements, notably in the polytheism of the Holy Trinity, the cult of the saints and the Virgin Mary, etc. We might also mention Pelagius, Teilhard de Chardin, Giordano Bruno, or other Churchmen who attempted a synthesis of European Christianity and paganism.

The most important thing today is to confront the common enemy, Islam – the most abstract, the most intolerant, the most dangerous of the monotheistic religions (founding model of totalitarianism, even more so than Communism), with which, unfortunately, the Catholic hierarchy and our pseudo-pagan ‘ethno-pluralist’ intellectuals suicidally collaborate. In the course of the Twenty-first century, it’s not unreasonable to expect that authentic pagans in Europe and India will be the ones manning the front line in the struggle against the desert’s totalitarian religion – not the Catholic clerics or republican ‘secularists.’

It would be vain to instrumentalise paganism as a ‘political religion.’ For paganism is above all an attitude, a philosophical, spiritual positioning, a choice of values, and in no case does it have a vocation to institutionalise itself as a religion – as a ‘new Church.’ European Catholicism – before it was desacralised by Vatican II – included important pagan elements, to such a degree that certain modern theologians accuse it of having been a ‘pagano-Christianity’ – the same reproach Luther and Calvin made of it. Slavic-Greek Orthodoxy still retains many pagan remnants.

The historic alliance of authentic pagan philosophers (inspired by the heritage of Greece, Rome, and India) to traditional European Christianity is a prerequisite to the merciless struggle that is to be waged against the Masonic gnosis, the obscurantism of the Muslim colonisers, and the virus of materialism.

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Excerpt from: Faye, Guillaume. Why We Fight: Manifesto for the European Resistance. London: Arktos Media, 2011, pp. 205-210.

 

European Son – Interview with Benoist

“European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist” (PDF – 191 KB):

European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist

Additional document with portions of the original interview containing critical commentaries on Christianity and the Human Sciences which were cut out from the official interview in The Occidental Quarterly (PDF – 314 KB):

Interview with Alain de Benoist on the Human Sciences and Christianity by Bryan Sylvain

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Citation for the official The Occidental Quarterly interview: De Benoist, Alain. “European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist.” Interview by Brian Sylvian. The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Fall 2005), pp. 7-27. <https://www.toqonline.com/archives/v5n3/53-bs-debenoist.pdf >.

Citations for the original sources of the “Interview with Alain de Benoist on the Human Sciences and Christianity by Bryan Sylvain”: De Benoist, Alain. “Interview on Christianity, Part 1.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 28 January 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/01/interview-on-christianity-part-1/ >; “Interview on Christianity, Part 2.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 29 January 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/01/interview-on-christianity-part-2/ >; “Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 1.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 9 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-1/ >; “Benoist on Eugenics & Intelligence: Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 2.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 11 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/benoist-on-eugenics-and-intelligence-interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-2/ >; “Benoist on J. Philippe Rushton: Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 3.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 14 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-3/ >; “Benoist on Feminism, IQ, & the Wealth of Nations: Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 4.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 14 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/benoist-on-feminism-iq-the-wealth-of-nations-interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-4/ >.

 

Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation – Levy

Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation

by David J. Levy

 

The work of Mircea Eliade has found a ready audience among thinking conservatives ever since it began to be widely known in the 1950’s. It may seem strange that a current of thought rooted as self-consciously as conservatism in the distinctive religious and cultural heritage of the West should be so stimulated by the writings of this student of oriental and archaic religions. To understand the reasons for this is to grasp not only the meaning of Eliade’s work in the context of our present cultural plight but an important point about any coherent conservative philosophy. Let me label that point, the postulate of permanence. It may be expressed as follows: that coherent conservatism rests on the belief that what is permanent in the human condition, that is to say in human nature and in the enveloping reality in which we participate, is more significant for political philosophy than what changes. Eliade’s lifelong vocation has been to grasp and communicate the meaning of the symbols, rites and myths of cultures remote from our own. His insistence that these cultural expressions can and must be understood as an integral part of the human response to the mysteries of existence strikes a responsive chord in the conservative consciousness; just as the conservative emphasis on the unchanging character of man’s nature and status in the order of being finds a ready echo in Eliade’s work. For underlying the stress which he places upon the abiding truth to be discovered in the symbols of oriental and archaic, or non-literate, religions is the recognition that there is an order of being which persists through history – an order to which man responds through the creation of symbols allowing him to discover and express the meaning of his existence. Eliade’s voluminous writings and wide-ranging scholarship introduce the reader to unfamiliar facets of this process. Yet the shock of unfamiliarity is only the prelude to recognition. Exploration prepares the way for anamnesis in that the encounter with an apparently exotic world of thought and beliefs can restore awareness of truths that have slipped from Western consciousness. This is an integral part of Eliade’s purpose. As he conceives it, the history of religions, of which he is our foremost practitioner, is both a journey into strange territory and a long path home. The encounter with other, religiously centered cultures is meant to reawaken us to the spiritual sources of our own.

Eliade is a Romanian, born in Bucharest in 1907. After graduating from Bucharest University in 1928 he was awarded a scholarship by the Maharajah of Kasimbazar which allowed him to spend the next four years studying in India. This period of immersion in Hindu culture was enormously important for the development of the young scholar’s thought. In his experience of Indian life and religion lies the source of Eliade’s belief that the central meaning of religion is to be found in man’s effort to transcend his status as a historical being subject to change and decay and reach a realm of changeless perfection. “It is difficult,” Eliade writes, “to imagine how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly real in the world, and it is impossible to imagine how consciousness could arise without conferring meaning on man’s drives and experience.. . Through the experience .of the sacred, the human mind grasped the difference between that which reveals itself as real, powerful, rich and meaningful, and that which does not – i.e. the chaotic and dangerous flux of things, their fortuitous, meaningless appearances and disappearances.”[1] In Hinduism Eliade first saw something that he later found to be true of all religion – that the achievement of meaning in human existence and the experience of the sacred are intimately linked. Homo religiosus of whatever tradition catches and clings to intimations of the sacred in the profane course of events. What this means is not that the consciousness of religious man rejects the conditions of human existence as unworthy of his true spiritual nature, as the Gnostics would have us believe, but that he sees the world as itself symbolic, a universal cipher of a reality beyond. This according to Eliade is at the heart of every religious world view.

When he returned to Romania in 1932, Eliade found that his years in India   him a new capacity to sympathize with the popular the peasantry of his native land.Practices and beliefs that had earlier puzzled and even embarrassed him took on a fresh significance. He now understood, the religious function of the  icons so characteristic of Orthodoxy: “Before my stay in India,” he recalls, “I was rather disturbed by the fetishistic side of such an action, and I thought that ‘true religion’ was first of all contemplation and meditation, like any Christian who sees himself as an enlightened believer. But when I saw the extraordinary importance of symbolism for the Indian people, I realized that until then I had very much underestimated the existential scope of symbol and image.”[2] The power of the symbol, as object of veneration,to open the mind to awareness of the sacred was one of the most important lessons that Eliade learned in India.Another was the value of spiritual disciplines. For during his stay he not only learned Sanscrit and studied Hindu thought but spent some time practicing Yoga in the Himalayas under the noted master Swami Shivananda.

Yoga was the subject of the doctoral dissertation which Eliade presented in 1933. In the same year his first novel Maitreyi was published to great acclaim. The young university teacher became instantaneously a well-known figure on the Romanian cultural scene. Indeed, among his fellow countrymen his reputation as a novelist and teller of tales has always been at least as great as his name for scholarship. When a Festschrift, Myths and Symbols, was published in his honor in 1969 most of the Romanian contributors chose to write about his literary works which are, even now, scarcely known in the English speaking world.[3] In this they echoed Eliade’s own judgment of their importance. Reading his journal, it is clear that at times the demands of scholarship have seemed an almost intolerable distraction from the pursuit of his vocation as a novelist. Nor is this altogether surprising. Eliade comes from a culture in which the scholar, the poet, and the novelist were often one and the same. He sees the novel as a literary form occupying an essential place in modern Western consciousness. The novel is, we might say, the present incarnation of fable and, as such, a privileged ground for the survival of mythical themes and symbols which retain a compelling power over the human psyche. Eliade’s sense of the living force of symbol informs his literary no less than his scholarly work.

With the French publication of his book on Yoga in 1936 Eliade began to acquire an international reputation. In 1940 he was appointed cultural attaché to the Romanian legation in London, being transferred to Lisbon the next year. The years surrounding the war provide the setting for Eliade’s most ambitious novel The Forbidden Forest. It is a long book, almost six hundred pages in English translation, whose scope and manner invite comparison with Proust. Through the life of his central character, Stefan Viziru, Eliade explores a theme which is never far from his mind – man’s quest for an escape from time and “the terror of history.” The rise of Romanian fascism, the disastrous war against the Soviet Union and the subsequent communist invasion and takeover of the country form the terrifying backdrop to this epic of spiritual survival. Stefan Viziru is caught in the tragic rush of events and yet, as Virgil Nemoianu puts it, somehow distanced from them by his will “to capture or recapture a secret experience of ‘totality’ which partakes equally of an absolute love and of a revelation of the sacred in the profane. Ultimately this amounts to a stepping outside Time, which the individual has to attempt, not only for the sake of his personal redemption, but also as a matter of national concern: Romanians can survive only by boycotting History… , by evading its crushing hostility to them through some decisive ontological withdrawal.”

Nemoianu’s reference to Romanian history is appropriate. There is in every authentic thinker, every true philosopher or lover of wisdom, an intimate relationship between the challenge of life and the path of reflection. In Eliade’s case, the consciousness of Romania as a nation more often the victim than the maker of its destiny played an important, if largely covert part in the development of his thought, especially his opposition to every intellectual system that tries to identify ultimate reality with the course of history. If it was the Indian experience that formed Eliade’s conception of religion as man’s effort to achieve contact with an absolute reality beyond the ravages of time, then it was his consciousness of himself as a Romanian that opened his mind to such a view in the first place and later confirmed its truth in the harsh experience of personal exile and national defeat. Eliade knows as well as anyone that history cannot be ignored – the finger on the trigger is as real as the life it takes – and yet there is, he insists, something more, a realm of being revealed only in religious experience.

Since Eliade is sometimes accused of regarding history as unimportant it is worth quoting a passage in which he makes his position clear: “The expressions ‘history’ and ‘historic’ can occasion much confusion; they indicate, on the one hand, all that is concrete and authentic in a given human existence, as opposed to the unauthentic existence constituted by evasions and automatisms of every kind. On the other hand, in the various historicist and existentialist currents of thought, ‘history’ and ‘historic’ seem to imply that human existence is authentic only insofar as it is reduced to the awakened consciousness of its historic moment. It is to the latter, the ‘totalitarian’ meaning of history that I am referring when I take issue against ‘historicisms’. . . the authenticity of an existence cannot be limited to the consciousness of its own historicity.”[4] Eliade speaks of love, anxiety, melancholy and joy as fundamental experiences which together constitute the integral man “who neither denies himself to his historic moment, nor consents to be identified with it.” Historicism, as Eliade describes it, is mistaken because it identifies man’s essence with historical existence and does not see that history determines neither the nature of reality nor the consciousness which responds to it. Fundamental experiences of consciousness, love and anxiety, melancholy and joy, happen in history but they are not historically relative. Rather they represent permanent forms of human response. They are the precondition and not the product of history. While existing in the historical stream man never loses touch with that which is beyond history and it is the peculiar function of religious symbolism to express this relationship to the ground of his being – the ultimate reality that makes him what he is and gives meaning to his existence. Religious man, Eliade suggests, does not deny the truth of experience but seeks to grasp its covert meaning. Awareness of the sacred, the “wholly other” which may paradoxically manifest itself in the most familiar item of experience, is a matter of spiritual growth and not sensual atrophy. What Eliade calls “the dialectic of the sacred’ is the process by which a being or event becomes the cipher or symbol of something beyond without ceasing to be itself. Employing the vocabulary of Hinduism, Maya, the divine play or cosmic illusion of the passing world, is simultaneously Brahman, the sign of the absolute. As the Chandogya Upanishad put it, for the religious man, “Verily, this whole world is Brahman, from which he comes forth, without which he will be dissolved and in which he breathes. Tranquil, he should meditate on it.” Was Henri Bergson saying anything other when he declared in a lecture that enthralled the young Jacques Maritain: “it is in the absolute that we live and move and have our being”? As Eliade frequently points out, while the terms of religious discourse vary from place to place and time to time, the reality which they try to express is everywhere the same. The dialectic of the sacred expresses the mystery of the manifestation of eternal Being in time. It is small wonder if the effort to express it seems at times to break the bounds of what can be said. The inadequacy of expression to experience in the sphere of religion is a fact of life and quite beyond repair. We see through a glass darkly or not at all.

Eliade did not return to Romania after the war. He lived at first in Paris and then, since 1956, in Chicago where he succeeded Joachim Wach as Professor of the History of Religions. America is now his home but his sense of exile remains, giving a unique. personal tone to his continuing meditation on the meaning of religious experience in the frequently distressing course of life. This personal note comes out most clearly in the journal which Eliade kept between 1945 and 1969, a portion of which appeared in English translation under the title No Souvenirs. It is a work of the greatest interest to anyone wishing to understand the driving force behind his work, which is found in his belief in the enduring existential relevance of the material he studies. No Souvenirs records Eliade’s meetings with many of the significant figures in contemporary culture but, more than that, it provides a chronicle of his spiritual Odyssey through the postwar years. Eliade interprets his own fate and that of his nation in the light of his unequalled acquaintance with parallels and archetypes drawn from the full range of human experience. The tragic but not hopeless history of one man and people becomes exemplary for the understanding of permanent features of man’s being in the world.

“Every exile,” he wrote in 1960, “is a Ulysses traveling toward Ithaca. Every real existence reproduces the Odyssey. The path toward Ithaca, toward the center. I had known all that for a long time. What I have just discovered is that the chance to become a new Ulysses is given to any exile whatsoever (precisely because he has been condemned by the gods, that is, by the ‘powers’ which decide historical, earthly destinies). But to realize this, the exile must be capable of penetrating the hidden meaning of his wanderings, and understanding them as a long series of initiation trials (willed by the gods) and so many obstacles on the path which brings him back to the hearth (toward the center). That means: seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the sufferings, the depressions, the dry periods in everyday life. Seeing them and reading them even if they aren’t there; if one sees them one can build a structure and read a message in the formless flow of things and the monotonous flux of historical facts.”[5] Behind this passage lies a whole philosophy of man, a philosophical anthropology which stresses the need to find meaning in existence while resolutely facing the fact that there is no reassurance to be found in the temporal order of events. In other words, Eliade introduces his readers to the dimension of meaning conveyed by ancient myth while rejecting the specifically modern, historicist myth, the superstition of “progress” and “the meaning of history” which identifies temporal succession with ontological and ethical order. The experience of the historical disasters of the twentieth century has already done much to undermine this view and Eliade believes that we are now more likely than were our grandparents to understand the Weltanschauung of men for whom history was no freeway to redemption but a time of trial and terror. Indeed, he suggests that it is only insofar as we are able to do this that we will avoid the cultural despair typical of recent Western thought and art.

But how can this be done? The cultures of other times and places exist for us as complexes of symbols whose meaning is not transparent but demands interpretation. The theory and practice of interpretation – hermeneutics as it is often called – thus lies at the center of the history of religions as it must in every area where the works of man are the object of study. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur points out that Eliade’s approach to symbols stands in stark contrast to the hermeneutics of suspicion as practiced by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. While the latter, each in his fashion, aim to demystify symbolic expression in order to expose the harsh and unacceptable reality that lies beneath – class interest, the will to power, and infantile sexuality respectively – Eliade conceives his task in terms of the recollection of meaning, the deciphering of the truth of being embodied in the symbol and culturally maintained in myths and rituals: “Symbolic thinking,” he writes, “…is consubstantial with human existence, it comes before language and discursive reason. The symbol reveals certain aspects of reality – the deepest aspects – which defy other means of knowledge. Images, symbols and myths are not irresponsible creations of the psyche; they respond to a need and fulfill a function, that of bringing to light the most hidden modalities of being.”[6]

This tendency to treat symbols as coded truths rather than irresponsible fantasies or indices of cultural immaturity is characteristic not only of Eliade’s work but of much of the most fruitful scholarship in the humanities. Eric Voegelin, for instance, speaks of an equivalence between experience and symbols, meaning the way in which a certain type of symbol appears in history as a response to certain identifiable circumstances. Eliade for his part says: “The greatest claim to merit of the history of religions is precisely its effort to decipher in a ‘fact,’ conditioned as it is by the historical moment and cultural style of its epoch, the existential situation that made it possible.”[7] To understand the meaning of a particular myth or rite involves setting it in its context. The specific insight of men like Eliade and Voegelin is that there is more to this context than the transient or merely historical. Whatever the course of events that an individual or group endures, the structure of existence remains the same. Birth, copulation and death, the fact of coming into being and passing away, must be faced in a way consistent with the no less universal need of the psyche to see life as possessing a certain meaning or order.

In Eliade’s case the attempt to recollect and communicate the truths expressed in the symbolism of archaic and oriental religions leads him to reject many of the assumptions of previous scholars. Explicitly or not, most of his predecessors in the field have approached the data with minds conditioned by belief in the self-evident superiority of modem Western thought forms. Eliade’s opposition to historicism and sensitivity to the coherence of non-Western world views produces a radical questioning of all such complacency. Referring to the author of The Golden Bough, he writes: “Where a Frazer could see nothing but ‘superstition,’ a metaphysic was already implicit, even though it was expressed by a pattern of symbols rather than by the interplay of concepts: a metaphysic – that is, a whole and coherent conception of Reality, not a series of instinctive gestures ruled by the same fundamental ‘reaction of the human animal in confrontation with Nature.’”[8]

Eliade calls the implicit metaphysic of religious symbolism “archaic ontology.” However this is in one sense a misleading phrase, for the conception of reality involved is not confined to the religious universe of archaic, or non-literate, peoples. Rather, it is the living core of the religious view of the world as such, one which neither Indian speculation nor Judaeo-Christian revelation definitively transcend. Archaic ontology embodies the effort to express awareness of an ultimate reality beyond history and change. There is nothing intellectually primitive about it. When the intelligible essence of myth, rite and symbol is grasped what we find is not a shoddy tissue of superstition but a creative interpretation of human existence as participation in universal, cosmological order. Simply put, the fundamental problem which man faces is how he may interpret his existence as meaningful in spite of the disasters that befall him in life. Somehow the order to which the psyche aspires must be matched to the experienced nature of the cosmos. As Eliade puts it, the terror of history must be overcome, for history tears the fabric of meaning by bringing everything to oblivion.

Insofar as there is a historical dimension to archaic ontology it is a “sacred history.” Sacred history, in the form of myth, recounts the origins of the cosmos or any part of it. It tells how the world was made as it is by the gods and of the exemplary deeds of mythical heroes. Through myth man accounts for his own existence and nature as well as that of the cosmos. Myths tell him what he is and why. They “preserve and transmit the paradigms, the exemplary models, for all responsible activities in which men engage. By virtue of these paradigmatic models revealed to men in mythical times, the Cosmos and society are periodically regenerated.”[9] Myth recounts origins, in illo tempore, and this mythical time can be reactualized through the ritual repetition of archetypal gestures and events. To recollect or repeat is to reactualize a time when everything was new and uncorrupted. It is to participate in the renewal of the world through repetition of the original act of creation by which the order of the cosmos was brought out of chaos. This theme of the regeneration of the world is difficult for the modem Westerner to grasp. The image of the arrow of time which expresses the irreversibility of the historical moment is deeply etched in our consciousness. Nevertheless it is not impossible to understand the significance which the repetition of archetypal events and gestures has for archaic man. Our own ceremonies and celebrations – Christmas, Passover, or Thanksgiving for instance – recall culturally or spiritually significant events, while in at least one case, the celebration of Holy Communion, what is involved is nothing less than the reactualization of an event which, in terms of historical time alone, belongs irredeemably to the past. The sacred time of the Mass and the ever presence of Christ’s sacrifice within it testifies to a continuity between Christianity and the most profound conceptions of archaic ontology.

Eliade’s analysis of archaic ontology in The Myth of the Eternal Return is remarkably successful as an attempt to communicate the meaning of ancient myth and ritual to the modern reader. The universality of the ontology he discovers, as well as the possibility of making it comprehensible to his audience, is rooted in the unity of man as a symbol making animal and the permanence of the fundamental cosmic structures to which the human mind responds. From the conjunction of the two – the creative meeting of psyche and cosmos – there is born a coherent interpretation of existence which, to a unique extent, provides man with answers to the questions that trouble him most deeply. The symbols of religion reveal a continuity between the structures of human existence and those of the cosmos. In doing isolation in a cold and heartless universe, to see himself as a partner in a world that manifests order. When archaic man interprets his life and destiny by analogy with the repetitive and cyclical rhythms of nature he lays claim to a unity between psychic and cosmic reality that assuages the fear of oblivion. He is never far from death but he knows that when the moon vanishes from the sky the darkness is only a prelude to its return. The barren surface of the winter landscape is no more than a mask before the promise of spring renewal. As part of the cosmos, archaic man sees his life as participating in the same rhythms. No end is final. No merely historical disaster is more than moment in a process which renews and restores. “The religious symbols which point to the structures of life… unveil the miraculous, inexplicable side of life, and at the same time the sacramental dimensions of human existence. ‘Deciphered’ in the light of religious symbols, human life reveals a hidden side: it comes from ‘another part,’ from far off; it is ‘divine’ in the sense that it is the work of the gods or of supernatural beings.”[10] Thus religious symbols do not only bind the structures of psyche and cosmos in a tight web of meaning but also serve to link the limited space of experienced reality with the mysterious unknown out of which it emerges and into which it passes. What happened in illo tempore provides the mind with sufficient reason for the world we know.

Eliade believes that the history of religions can provide the foundation for a new humanism. The reflection of the West upon its own past, the core of traditional humanism, must be supplemented with a dialogue between East and West and a widening of the historical and anthropological horizon to include archaic cultures. “More than any other humanistic discipline,” he claims, “… history of religions can open the way to a philosophical anthropology. For the sacred is a universal dimension and… the beginnings of culture are rooted in religious experiences and beliefs. Furthermore, even after they are radically secularized, such cultural creations as social institutions, technology, moral ideas, arts, etc., cannot be understood correctly if one does not know their original religious matrix, which they tacitly criticized, modified, or rejected on becoming what they are now: secular cultural values. Thus, the historian of religions is in a position to grasp the permanence of what has been called man’s specific existential situation of ‘being in the world,’ for the experience of the sacred is its correlate. In fact, man’s becoming aware of his own mode of being and assuming his presence in the world constitute a ‘religious’ experience.”[ 11]

This emphasis upon the discovery of the religious dimension as original to and formative of man’s discovery of the truth of his being is certainly a major reason for Eliade’s appeal to conservatives. Even among those whose thought is not anchored in Christian or Jewish belief there is a natural affinity for a religious conception of the unchanging conditions of human existence. At the same time the breadth of Eliade’s horizon, his incorporation of the widest possible range of data, poses a special challenge. The symbols we encounter are strange and do not yield their meaning easily. As Ricoeur puts it, “Le symbole donne à penser”: symbolism invites thought, the symbol provokes philosophical reflection which extracts a meaning not visible to the initial glance. If appreciation of the permanence of the human condition is a central feature of any coherent conservative philosophy we can learn as much from other cultures as from our own past. To do this, however, we must first learn to decipher the symbols in which the men of other times and places have articulated their response to the tensions of existence. The sympathy which Mircea Eliade has brought to this task makes him a model for us all.

Notes

[1] Mircea Eliade: The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 1.

[2] Encounter, Vol. LIV, No. 3 (March 1980).

[3] The University of Notre Dame has recently, published English translations of two of Eliade’s novels. These are The Forbidden Forest (1978) and The Old Man and the Bureaucrats (1979).

[4] Mircea Eliade: Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (London: Harvill Press, 1961), pp. 171-2.

[5] Mircea Eliade: No Souvenirs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). pp. 84-5.

[6] 1mages and Symbols, p. 12.

[7] Mircea Eliade: “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism,” in The History of Religions, edited by Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 88.

[8] Images and Symbols. p. 176.

[9] The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History (Princeton University Press, 1954). p. xiv.

[10] “Methodological Remarks etc.” loc.cit., p. 98.

[11] The Quest, p. 9.

 

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Levy, David J. “Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation.” Modern Age, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Spring 1981), pp. 155-161. Retrieved from: <http://www.mmisi.org/ma/25_02/levy.pdf >.

Note: We also recommend to our readers the key excerpts from Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, made available on our site along with some information on further reading: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/sacred-profane-eliade/ >.