VPM

By Vwadek P. Marciniak

Many subjects are inherently taught in a participatory manner, from chemistry to biology and music to the plastic arts, enough to make your eyes blurry.  As a natural methodology for both sciences and the arts, it is assumed that engagement is an appropriate pedagogical means to convey the maximum understanding in an exemplifying presentation.
This interactive idea often does not enter into the classrooms of what some characterize as less physically engaging subjects, from history and philosophy to literature and theology.  If this particular approach works so well in some disciplines then why could it not find an application for the humanities?
I have found this is not only possible but overwhelming advantageous.  There is no question that a student who engages their studies personally is more readily and completely involved and interested in a more comprehensive educational experience.
The ancient Latin word educate implies “to lead out” in opposition to training which has no inherent interior opportunities for the growth of the emotions and intellect of the students to face the complexities of the real world.  Training tends to be more attuned for regurgitation and testing while education, that more subjective experience, is beyond accurate testing.  One can never offer a test to tell anyone including the testee what has been absorbed.  The idea of “Involve me, I understand” is found in the thinking of John Dewey and can be traced to Rousseau’s Emile where the child is educated regarding the concept of growth and development with their hands planting and nurturing seeds which, beyond the simple and obvious implications, offers a psychological parameter and expansion of understanding about living.
An appropriate attempt in enlarging this point would be to draw a distinction between the gathering of data and personally gaining comprehensive knowledge, an interior understanding.  We know the first step in learing is the gathering of facts, of becoming informed regading a given topic.  But knowledge requires integration and assimilation as anyone who has written a worthy term paper can attest.  The computer is a very handy tool for gathering and organizing data but does not possess knowledge or understanding.  Ideally when the paper is written, a certain knowledge is acquired and the basis for expanding understanding, which may take years, can occur.  One can be informed as to what a metaphor is but only in time can actually grasp the implications of that knowledge and thus understand the implications of such data.  An accountant need only organize the data while others may be able to transform it into something deeper.
The humanities are not simply about dates or data.  It is about relationships, implications and impact.  The study of history, literature and philosophy requires at some point a transformation of a student’s assumptions, thinking and general understanding of living.  Its teaching requires not simply information or even knowledge, but more importantly, some inner personal understanding, giving it an interior home not unlike one’s own memory - which itself without reflection and introspection - is not very meaningful.  Information as knowledge followed by understanding is more complete and fulfilling than any manipulatable nonsense supporting pre-conceived notions that expand prejudices - it takes serious understanding to alter our pre-conceived perceptions.  We moved from the caves not only by processing data but more importantly by means of developing our comprehension of any and all nuances.  After all, the expanding of horizons can also imply an expansion of consciousness and there is no simple road map for such an expansion.
How to do this, or better, what process can we develop that may aid in such a development of an educationally driven experience where discovering and internalizing our heritage is a natural experience?  For my students the answer was The Voices of Time.
This is not an original idea but a personal adaptation drawn from an educational television show created and produced by Steve Allen called The Meeting of the Minds.  His creation was a television talk show with actors portraying famous historic figures where each reflected their own unique historic view as well something of their experiences.  A reading of these shows can be found in his book, Meeting of the Minds which could be an aid for those inclined to participate in such an academic exercise.[2]
Since context for historians is everything, it is important to understand what follows was created in an environment totally dedicated to the undergraduate’s general education at a major university.  Normally, when considering a liberal arts experience, we are attracted to an appropriate small liberal arts college with the exception of Michigan State University which decided in the 50’s to create a remarkable and rare pedagogic experience: it offered students a college totally dedicated to all undergraduates with nothing other than required basic educational experiences.
The creation of a non-degree granting college was a commitment to the first two years of a student’s basic liberal arts experience.  These four departments were basically for freshmen and sophomores, and were populated with highly qualified doctorates from prestigious universities.  There were no advising staff since qualified scholars teaching under-grad education were more than qualified to advise.
The four departments which all undergraduates were required to attend were American Thought and Language, Natural Science, Social Science and my own Humanities which at its peak had some 58 doctorates on staff.  The established syllabus when I arrived in 1966 possessed a unified syllabus, readings and exams for all sections.  Later the program was expanded with faculty choices of whole work readings in place of an anthology with our own exams followed with a fourth term elective dedicated exclusively to contemporary humanities.
It was the combination of these two forces, Steve Allen’s work and my experience in the Humanities Department, that made possible the creation of The Voices of Time.  Because of access to Public Television these shows were made available to a larger audience besides those in the live production since they could be aired.  Shows produced reflected  Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation, the Scientific Revolution with the Enlightenment and finally Modern.  Each was a product of dedicated students who were guided through the production including the making of their own t.v. recordings.
One of the largest shows was that of the ancient world where the setting was a café with live music that students had created and performed.  The technique applied was simple; students at the beginning of the term were asked of their interest in participating in the project.  First they were organized into small groups of from three to eight who picked a particular figure, such as Plato, Augustine, Marcus Aurelieus, Aristotle or Lucretius.  The idea was to choose those who had written materials that students were responsible for studying as primary sources, thus acquiring a better sense of their thinking and culture in addition to learning the distinction between primary and secondary sources.
Once research was gathered and used in structuring the historic figures they worked with those representing other figures in order to create a scripted discussion to carry the show for about an hour or hour and a half.  When this was finished each group would pick one of their own to represent their famous historic personalities.  After the script and casting was completed rehearsals began until the pattern of a substantial and accurate presentation was created.  Costuming and make-up was added by class-mates and after approximately 10 to 14 weeks the show was put on tape for the television studio to use.  For their efforts extra credit was awarded for participation, although for those who wished to not participate standard testing was available.
Since I had three sections to teach with as many as forty plus students in each it was no problem for students majoring in business, engineering, accounting and other disciplines to engage in a genuinely exciting participatory learning experience of western history.  From Aristotle to Dante, Machievelli to Locke and from Rousseau to Nietzsche as well as many others, a permanent impression of an historic genius was created, something living and lasting.
On three occasions, additionally, an enlargement of research, study and presentations occurred.  The original cause célèbre was the release of the movie Hair which disappointed because having seen a road company out of New York presented in Detroit it did not relate to the movie.  The disparity between movie and theatrical production was so great that when it was mentioned in a Contemporary Humanities class, students asked if we could create a more accurate rendering of this countercultural event.  Answering in the affirmative, we created a large outdoor presentation (cast, musicians and support of about 30) with live music at my farm on Memorial weekend where there was an audience of about 180 in attendance.  Two other outdoor shows were created over the next decade, including the writing of plots and scripts (a copy of one can be found in the State of Michigan Library).  It is hard to believe that these students did not take home a meaningful experience that will live with them notwithstanding their occupations.  (The leading musician went on to Pepperdine for a law degree.)
There are other examples from other pedagogues that should be
noted, two specifically, although different and for younger students, which are here being given credit and encouragement.
The first was an exercise in participatory education by the author-educator Albert Cullum.[3]  He made clear that “… if I’m not having fun in class, none is having fun.”  According to the article here cited, “…his students were treated to a decidedly unconventional approach to academia, routinely engaging in such imaginative activities as swimming up a giant paper facsimile of the Mississippi River; re-enacting the Lincoln assassination and the Cuban missile crisis; operating on ‘bleeding’ nouns in a ‘grammar hospital’; and,” lest we are remiss, “most impressively, reading and performing a raft of classic literature - from the Greeks to Shakespeare - in off-site settings as exotic as an actual forest.”
Making central our relationship to language, the fundamental seed for education and understanding our history, he offered an enlarged world of linguistic comprehension: “…boys and girls articulately defend their choice of history’s “best writers” - Shakespeare, Sophocles or Shaw - is a reminder of kid’s impressive ability to grasp the intangible and elusive, and how the path to success needn’t always wind through the times-tables.”  If a student at any level of their education is not expanding their literary horizon they mentally are starving for language which is central for the existence of our community: “The civilization which loses its power over its own language has lost its power over the instrument by which it thinks.”[4]
This last activity is striking since it runs parallel to the Voices of Time experience, demonstrating that Steve Allen’s principle could be exercised in high schools as well as colleges.  Cullum’s attitude regarding the ubiquitous pre-occupation with tests inform us that “…decent argument about the potential myopia of modern-day standardized testing, which customarily cleaves to math and grammar as the true litmus of our kids’ smarts.”  It can take time to learn the tricks of how to take exams and thus do well on exams which is not indicative of anything more than the ability to conform to the rules of the game.  The key is to go beyond exams and learn the language of the geniuses from whom we can expand our vision.
Cullum understands the importance of “…giving each child the gift of believing in him or herself - whether by challenging them to collect hundreds of new vocabulary words over the course of the year, or casting them in theatrical roles that promised a kind of field-trip to the unknown.”  To lead out and not indoctrinate, that is the purpose and challenge for an educator.
One other recent example of the role of direct engagement of students, in this case regarding the subject of history has recently been noted in the press regarding a YMCA program at Camp Cosby near Birmingham, Ala., one of several nationwide, where they learn directly about slavery.  In this case some 50 children, “one of whom is black, were experiencing the cruelties inflicted upon slaves who tried to escape north thorough the Underground Railroad.”  This may be traumatic but real learning often is.  This actually offers something of “a realistic perspective about slavery to fourth- and fifth-grade students by dressing as slave traders, bounty hunters and abolitionist and sending students on a risky journey through the dense woods surrounding the camp.”  To add further to the experience, they included a slave auction to begin the camp’s program.[5]
While there is nothing easy in learning important lessons at any age, it would be instructive if we could acquire a collection of various examples such as here mentioned that have been attempted.
There is one last fact that must be confronted.  Today there is the problem for higher education that should be mentioned by those of us who reaped the benefits of learning from the other side of the podium with the arrival of a democratization of higher education which has been suggested is disappearing.
Professor Andrew Delbanco has commented in the New York Times,  “Colleges: An Endangered Species?”[6] that the contemporary condition of higher education that universities have gone through phases from a relatively non-democratic institution to more representative and now less democratic.
As he put it: “At the turn of the century,…fewer than a quarter-million Americans, or about 2 percent of the population between eighteen and twenty-four,attended college.  By the end of World War II, that figure had risen to over two million.”  This was of course a result of the G.I. Bill that facilitated so many more potentially promising students.  As he further noted, by 1960, the “University of California at Berkeley was challenging Harvard in accomplishment and prestige, and…other state universities such as Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and, more recently, Texas and North Carolina joined the ranks of the world’s leading institutions.”
This is relatively well known but what is “less well known is the most recent chapter, which tells of a slow-down, if not reversal, of the trend toward inclusion.”  It turns out that “Over the last twenty-five years, as the tax revolts of the 1970s (starting in 1978 with California’s Proposition 13) became chronic tax resistance, state support for public universities has sharply fallen.  Public funds now cover less than one third of expenses at public universities…”  Things have never been the same starting with the Reagan years and the anti-economic support for state institutions.
Even the Michigan State Humanities Department no longer exists since graduate assistants now teach the history of the western world, politically, economically, artistically, as well as our heritage in literature, theology, and philosophy.  The qualified PhD spent years not only studying and teaching from their dissertation but then found themselves learning additional subjects beyond their own doctoral discipline.
We are losing our best to a narrowing of horizons, limiting of imagination and shortness of vision.  Who out there is fighting the good battle against ignorance to counter this condition?  It is time to participate.
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[1] Lederer, Richard.  The Miracle of Language. Pocket Books, Simon     & Schuster NY 1991 p. 183
[2] Allen, Steve.  Meeting of the Minds.  Hubris House L.A. 1978
The scripts of Mr. Allen’s shows can be found in the Michigan     State Library, East Lansing, Mi.
[3] Kluger, Bruce.  USA TODAY March 24 2005 “…A Touch of Greatness, and available on video and DVD this month … author-educator Albert Cullum,…”
[4] Quote from Henry Beston found in Lederer, p. 209
[5] This from Samira Jafari.  AP El Paso Times “ALPINE, Ala.”
[6] Delbanco, Andrew.  “Colleges: An Endangered Species?”  NYTBR
March 10 2005

PAX/LOVE

Here there is little difference between an entertaining movie or a film.  One cannot use this tradition to delineate the film from the movie.  Again, with art one will have to wait for analysis and further reviewing to reach such a determination.  These five films appear to match the reviewing criteria for this writer.  But only time and historic judgement will make the final determination; remember, as an example, that Telemann was the great composer of his age while Bach was not at the same time.
Even beyond choral and musical framing, the earliest of these films, Chaplin’s silent work, was not so silent since he cognitively introduced a limited sound track he thought relevant, thinking it an appropriate use of the tune Smiles.  The story begins with workers coming out of a subway by way of large clocks telling then to rush to work and where the clocks are clearly in charge.  Trapped in a routine and repetitious factory job, Chaplin is driven over the edge by his  greedy boss and his own perverted games with clocks.  After becoming  trapped in the gears of the very machinery that has locked him into a closed mental state of existence, he moves on to a more personal sense of motion with roller skates as a night watchman and then as a waiter looking for something more fulfilling in keeping alive during the depression years.
At one point he meets his love while she is eating a banana (symbols abound).  We then find him fantasizing in a kitchen with a fresh glass of milk drawn directly from a live cow outside the back door, reminding us of our detachment from a natural life style in an expanding industrial age.  In the end we find him hand and hand with his love, Paulette Goddard, walking into the sunset.
Wild Strawberries is about a retired professor traveling to receive an honorary life time reward for outstanding service.  This too is not unlike Modern Times although a Swedish ‘50s film.  Here we find our ego driven aging gentleman, Isak Borg, coming to the end of his life on his drive for final recognition.  Here irony moves in ways that always offer more than the surface.
It begins with him having a dream where he is walking on an empty street with a hanging clock over head(again measuring time)without hands while a hearse without a driver arrives, flips over to reveal a casket dropping off and holding his own body.  Beyond this dream, this senior gentleman is found driving to his destination for the award presentation for a life time of achievement.  Traveling with his daughter-in-law offers interest in their being not only of different ages and sexual identities, but different worlds that only adds to the mystery as interesting events along the way, such as occur when they witness an accident and meet a couple with a high-strung women offering a sub-theme.  They also pick up a young threesome, two males and a female, when they stop at the land of Strawberries of his youth. Later he visits his mother for a rather cool moment and then flashes back to where he used to go with his family dominated by females who pick wild strawberries.  The dominant persona here and in a dream he has is the role of various females, a quest for warmth, beginnings of relationships and perhaps even love although we find his deceased wife and he were not close.  He seems to have trouble with women as well with any heart driven relationships - the opposite of Chaplin.
The professor’s son, upset with his wife for being pregnant (the future?) and who would just as soon be dead, offers an idea somehow always present, from clocks without hands to family ties: death is so appealing.  Professor Isak Bork survives in the end as he enters his bed to sleep, from whence we began; we can only wonder - will he wake up just as we wonder if Chaplin will find anything beyond his final walk?  Wild strawberries applied more to the female than Bork.
Clocks with and without hands and the end of time introduces what we might call a question of reality clearly raising its substantive head.  Moreover, the idea of what is put between the beginning and end is offered as little more than ambiguous.  There is little between the opening and closing scenes much like life except perhaps some comical relief as in Modern Times.  In this there is a sense of lacking existential freedom, even with Chaplin’s ambiguous denouement.  We end with wonder if life has no point other than seeking fillers.
This could precisely be what the fantastically inexpensive film Easy Rider offers us as an alternative since it begins with some quick money made through a drug deal and where we find Peter Fonda throwing away his watch and dependance on mechanical time as he and Dennis Hopper begin their trip on chopped motorcycles looking for what might have been Chaplin’s dream and whatever Bork’s was lacking, the idea of a future hope as a really free individual.
Adding impressive scenes with Jack Nicholson getting high on joints, these travelers meet the counterculture in a commune and return to nature, followed later by a deep anguish in a semi-real graveyard, again with nature and death, and additionally with required rock music.  From Chaplin and the cow to the scene of wild strawberries we find in these three something of a sense of the importance in moving contrary to the mechanized world we find ourselves in.  Did these two bikers make it, whatever they sought? - Hopper offers yes while Fonda says no: freedom is a state of mind and not a place.
This crossing the line into an alienating mechanical and estranged world, the world of the clock, can also be experienced in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange with Malcolm McDowell and the color orange representing the alternative of passion to the cold clock.  Here the high strung youths push criminality as hot-headed psychopaths in a very indifferent and deteriorating futuristic society.  With the song Singing in The Rain Alex enters the world of rape and then the ultimate act of murder (killing a woman artist with a large sculptured penis).  He is to be brought back to some “normal” state by applying behavioral modification by him looking at films of crimes while hearing his favorite music, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.  The metaphor of the passions of violence beyond romantic and emotional music (orange) which Alex loves and the cold machinations of being irrationally in control in a society that is offering alienation and estrangement marks this science fiction masterpiece.  In the end, there is always some limits to social/political control.
The final film is a picture within pictures. Blow-Up by Antonioni, centers around a professional photographer.  What is to be blown up we will leave for the artist and imagination, for now we have an artistic personality, David Hemmings, discovering and using the clock in his dark room to offer more than we may - or may not - have actually seen.  Is a print or motion film reality?  This becomes more explicated when we find the photographer bored by his work shooting models, and thus turning to enjoying photographing mine-laborers (reminding us of the opening of Modern Times); only later on a trip into a park does he discover with photos what appears as someone dead.  When entering a rock concert where the audience is bored and the musicians become busy destroying their instruments we wonder where the reality of all the mechanics are taking us, and what the potential of the  counterculture might offer - the very nature of our perspectives.
At issue is what these films have in common that give us a direction for meaning or understanding.  The answer must be drawn from elements which each offers and perhaps ties them to a particular and collective perspective, from any newer sense of freedom, it’s burden, potential and limitations as well the implications of our acts within the context of inherent restraints in our modern social order.
This dream of a more natural life drove the new long hairs towards a future seen too often to be suits adding more clocks.  These were the transitional figures between the beat movement and the coming of the early hip generation that followed.  So when Fonda takes off his wrist watch and throws it away it symbolizes the trap people find themselves in, those little boxes with maldistribution of wealth and power where even if you do make money it serves little purpose but to raise your tax bracket and status with others of similar attitudes locked into an image compartment.
When they take off on their chopped motorcycles, again the symbol of drop-outs, and hit the road, they remind us of Jack Kerouac and his counterculture novel.  After several experiences including the commune we find they finally do drugs in a graveyard, literally and symbolically, reminding us and them of our inherent terminal condition, a certainty in an uncertain world awaiting us with those clocks that cannot alter the end of the pre-fixed reel.  They prefer the out-of-doors for camping rather than a motel, classic back to earth environmentalists of the counter-culture.  And their being shot and killed at the end only offers symbols of a boxed in life that reminds us of the shortness of it all and that there is no point other than what we put in between.
When McDowell and his two fellow criminals in their nihilistic world create excitement with drugs, cars and break-ins he still turns back to the Ninth Symphony where the seventeenth century rational Baroque (clock) meets the nineteenth century Romantic heat (orange) which in some ways is what this movie is all about.  These “droogs”  appear romantic and like some elements of a century out of hand when witnessed by the law:  As criminals they keep crossing the line  finally going too far in taking a life.  “Fixed” through government brainwashing from the mechanistic world which in someways appears to be how he got here in the first place, he is no longer supposed to be alienated.  He now finds he is not only altered but freed only to be  physically damaged by his one time cohorts who are now cops (no surprise there) and finds himself back in the home where he once committed rape against a family who had been of decent heart until they too were behaviorally altered by his crime.  Being tortured again with the Ninth Symphony he again cracks up, tries to commit suicide and ends in a hospital where the government agent that once led to his first alteration appears to aid now in pandering to him in offering food that he takes in like a bird with mouth opening to again ingest, but now with a mocking and knowing smile.
That he and his allies once had a gang fight in a closed theater that only could be called a ballet of action only dramatizes the theatrics of all this, raising the question as to what is the time factor in behavioral modification.  It is hard to know what Kubrick intended to say with his adaption of a controversial novel but we are offered one interpretation - the power and contradictions that inhere between mechanization and emotions.
Blow-Up, as the title suggests, is about what a photographer as artist working with his negatives, hopefully wishes to make of  pictures he shoots, rather interesting, informative as well artistic. The photographer, Hemmings, acting for us as a voyeur, takes a shot of a couple in the park which starts his drive to know more.  His real love is taking honest pictures that capture the hard working miners in their suffering which is an attempt to transcend his lively-hood that depends on the empty act of photos of models.  When pursuing the park where he makes the accidental but interesting photo of the couple he first purchased a large propeller blade which could be a representation of his desire to move on.
Hemmings looking for excitement beyond his crotch returns to the park to see and take a picture of what appeared to be the body of the man from that earlier couple shot.  When he sets his clock to develop his picture for conformation he is satisfied enough to return to the park to find no body there.  His photos then disappear from his studio, leaving him no evidence of someone dead.  The true high for this film came at the end when walking through the park he meets a group of hippy clown/mimes he had run into before now playing tennis.
They look at him indicating that their ball went over the fence  not speaking, they pantomime for him to get the ball and return it even if none us can see it.  He walks into the open field, bends over to pick up what none see, throws “it” back as they then continue to play although we now HEAR the ball bounce.
What is that reality we live by, nothing but a picture based upon developments determined by clocks?
The end of time and what we might want to call reality appears as a theme throughout these five films.  Moreover the idea of what is focused between the beginning and end is more than a little ambiguous.  Fact is there is little between the opening and closing scenes, like life in our modern times, without a sense of existential freedom.  Denouement is often hidden in so much of modern life.
There is only one answer for meaning beyond the clocks and time which is the space as expressed as a more postmodern psyche that takes each moment as the first and last.  Perhaps we should remember that what we mean as real is only the reel in the can waiting to be run for exploration and discovery.
The term postmodern is difficult at best and confusing at the least.  Several points should be offered, however: First, it is natural that history is full of occasional examples of absurd thinking although today this is now normal since all is seen as absurd as with thinking like machines in the machine age as with Chaplin.  Conforming without engagement and commitment of love makes no sense.  And how do two men gain freedom while sitting on chopped motorcycles?  Zen says we are as free as the shortness of the list of our possessions.  Another characteristic of this strange idea of postmodernity is that we are now living in a global not a western nationalistic world which now includes the violence of indifference.  To environmentally make young men alienated and estranged and after their violence to violently alter them to decency, well, that works in a fun house.  Finally, where is the ball we play with when we think we are playing?  Also to be added is that there seems to be appearing even inside a world of growing individuality and chaos some sense of meaningless.
Since context is everything for this work, a little help might be gained by putting these films into some historic frame.  Changes that have occurred and are still occurring this past century and a half have had a profound effect on our ability to take in and retain images primarily by way of visuals rather than by way of rhetoric.  These films demonstrate the idea expressed by the new writers, poets and artists at the beginning of the twentieth century.  As one writer noted in 1902, there has been a progressively developed sense of alienation that has been part of the rising modern style and which has motivated the rejection by so many writers and artists of conventional forms.  Surrealism and dadaism did not grow from unfertile ground. Faith in language as meaningfully revealing has gradually waned as the writer noted: as he stated, “spirit, soul, or body …. the abstract terms … crumbled in my mouth like rotting mushrooms”.  We now live in a land of individualism and as this author noted, “Language and individuality are opposed.”  And as a man of letters, Dwight McDonald, once said to me, that of the arts, language, because of its lineal nature, would not be able to follow the other art forms for the freedom of unrestrictive constructive order, this notwithstanding works like Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur or Becket’s Waiting for Godot.
The language here used to expand some notes on these five films are more than inadequate, they are a disservice even if they just
might encourage a reader to go back to these art pieces and partake in their  creative insights.  One could only hope for no more.

NOTE: The quotes above are from the writer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his “A Letter”.

The following is drawn from Sean Healy’s Boredom, Self, and Culture (1984) using quotes from him while concepts analysis and interpretations are this writer’s responsibility.

“The center will not hold,” as William B. Yeats stated, while vidiots sit in front of the tube stunned by the department of redundancy department enveloping us in order to leave one so redundant as to look to redundancy for answers.

Is there a more boring topic to analyze than boredom? As J. Heller put it, a world empty of “meaning seeks to escape from the infinite boredom of its meaninglessness by the magic of words without flesh, and forms without content.”

If you feel jaded or are sitting with cabin fever are you bored? An article in Reader’s Digest a few years back on “How to Cope with Boredom” read in part: “Despite its extraordinary variety of diversions and resources, its frenzy for spectacles and it feverish pursuit of entertainment, AMERICA IS BORED.” Continuing, it stated that “The abundance of efforts made in the United States to counter boredom have defeated themselves, and boredom has become the disease of our time.”[89]

Are there paradigms for such grit? We throw “boredom” around as though it was a child’s toy without concern for meaning or appropriate application. Words too often can create more problems than resolutions and boredom can fit that niche. Placing it in historic context, therefore, is one issue here confronted. What follows may be aggravating and pointless but words need space to face meaning for our times.

Early hermits in Lower Egypt used a term like “noonday devil” while fourth century Greeks referred to the “tedium or perturbation of heart”.[16] During the Middle Ages sloth as well spiritual laziness came close to our understanding. Around the thirteenth century the root for the French ennui appeared while Petrarch suggested “melancholy” for what he perceived as “hatred and contempt” being part of the “human condition.” This was a pre-cursor of the English “bored” when Robert Burton wrote in 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy.(18-19) Shakespeare used “weary” some twenty times.

The French jumped on this issue earliest with ennui which in a seventeenth century French/English dictionary was listed as synonyms with “annoy; vexation; trouble; disquiet; molestation; sorrow; grief; anguish; wearisomeness; tediousness, irksomeness; importunity; a loathing, …; discontentment, or offence, at.”[19] Where is there clarity for understanding?

In France the “inner, deep-seated changes in the psyche during the early seventeenth century, occurred.”[20-1] Pascal wrote of “the state that defines man’s structure” in noting “ennui had become no longer a problem of existence, it had become man’s problem.” His contemporary, la Rochefoucauld, observed that hanging at court was an endurance of boredom. Voltaire found ennui the most horrid of conditions, and spoke of it as being “the abyss of eternal nothingness.”(23) France being at the beginnings of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment, was on the cutting edge that some might wish never occurred. A comforting faith driven religion was being replaced with a faith in divisive and confusing reasoning where each would create their own path to understanding.

Blaise Pascal, one of the first modern writers to expatiate on boredom, suggested that “justice does not lie in these customs but resides in natural laws common to every country” where the joke “is that man’s whims have shown such great variety that there is not one.”(77) The more exciting aspect of Pascal’s position was that he was not speaking of the “actual condition of his fellow men of the seventeenth century, but as a prophet (an early-warning system to put it in modern terms), acutely sensitive to changes still so subtle and undeveloped as to be quite invisible to be undetectable by the vast majority of those around him at the time.”(54-5)

It was at the University of Paris where late Medieval intellectual advances challenged tradition notwithstanding objections from the Church. There was an explosion of population, growth of cities, revival of trade, and the circulation of new ideas (a smaller version of what we now see), both exciting and profoundly disturbing. Intellectual growth can create contempt, especially for a declining church where this new faith in reason was finding fruitful soil.

Later we have Flaubert offering not only suggestions for this anxiety but who also was one of the first to draw a distinction “between occasional boredom and more chronically fixed boredom which he referred to as ‘modern boredom’ or what might be labeled as ‘hyper-boredom’ a ‘deep-seated agony recognized only by its effects.’” The idea of some form of painful circumstance, something of an existential experience, began making an early appearance.(28)

It was “Baudelaire who most acutely captured the morbid richness of l’ennui moderne. He too points to the blankness of the state and to its sweeping extent …. he is in himself one the great prophets of the malady” since raising this above all other vices or painful conditions.(29)

We arrive at the English word bored around 1766(24) when an English philologist noted that what we have is “the curious class of verbs and adjectives which describe not so much the objective qualities and activities of things as the effects they produce on us.”(24) While accurate it also demonstrates a fundamental problem when discussing bored, a subjective experience looking for an objective definition. As for leisure as a cause, it suggested “For the vast majority, the tediousness of life is experienced as boredom (or boredom 2), the common or garden variety that tends to afflict any leisure class.” Since contrived busyness is tied to leisure it lies at the heart of this manifestation.(66) And for the “British Isles we discover those who tended to be morose, sullen, phlegmatic, and generally private, in contrast with the forms it assumed on the Continent, where it had fast become fulminating, virulent and destructive”(27)although this delineation between cultures is more apparent than real.

Entering our own era, Kierkegaard offered that “Boredom depends on the nothingness which pervades reality.”(15) He further suggested that boredom is the root of all evil,(26) demonstrating how lost one can get in trying to pin down this all too common condition. On more solid ground he noted “that everyone who feels bored cries out for change…. One tires of living in the country and moves to the city; one tires of one’s native land, and travels abroad;…”(26) This is a classic example of not only seeking busyness but equally avoiding productive work because we’ve arrived where nihilism, nothingness, is a void today’s mind all too willingly grasps.

For Emile Durkeim, suicide reveals this deep crisis in modern society. This sense of something not holding together was also recognized by Flaubert who recollected “how he and his friends had ‘lived in a strange world … we swung between madness and suicide.’”(33) As the song states: “Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes.”

Some could suggest that a person bored by work is too busy most of the time to realize it and therefore it is not leisure but its recognition that creates boredom. But we could echo Baudelaire in saying that “one must work, if not for taste then at least from despair, or, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.”(86) Work unlike leisure or busyness offers creative opportunities for expansion of the self beyond the world of the bored.

Lewis Mumford suggested that “those who have great wealth, that minority with privilege, commanding all that the heart desires, could be classic examples of those who suffer from chronic disaffection, malaise, anxiety and psychotic self-destructiveness.”(96) While this may appear rather cavalier, when things do become too easy there is more room for boredom thanks to technology.

This raises an interesting issue of how much and of what importance the development of the modern self has or has not contributed to this pervasive sense of boredom now running rampant. The answer is no more clear than defining what it is to be an individualized self. The appearance of the modern individual has contributed to the birthing of the contemporary self where increasingly the center of the universe has found its discoverer. It is not the ego which asks “look at me” but rather one’s inner becoming where there are beginnings of opportunities that only end when the curtain is drawn.

The individual is now where today’s boredom can find comfort, blossoming unless the self creates an openness, that place where freedom finds fertility. The difficulty for most is that this is a huge personal burden that one would just as soon ignore. To look in the mirror and see the beginning and end of all of the best and worst looking back at you is not a popular sport. Yet this authentic privacy stands against that which is more than an escape from a public commune that we all belong to. Beginning alone is an early positive step—when properly embraced—towards the eventual communion with fellow travelers. Thus the self-conscious being is freed (not politically liberated)to enter the next expansive opening.

To note: “… there was one characteristic common to all instances of boredom, present and past, namely the loss of personal meaning, whether in relation to a particular experience or encounter.” This loss could be occasioned by the absence of something comforting like religion, for where doubt and hypocrisy find a berth so might boredom. And today’s idea of human nature does not offer supportive roots for a place in a community beyond doubt. Where was “some objective reality corresponding to the term ‘human nature’” when the line between objective and subjective is blurred. Having “inauthentic selves, to be untrue to their perception of their own nature as human beings”(101)is deception and boredom awaiting us. This is just one more reason for suggesting that individuality is where a self finds authentic expression which is far more complicated and difficult than one may wonder. Today we find an increasing collapse in modernity and its blind optimism in the rational and progressive nature of humankind. Since this pattern of a breakdown of the older order has taken hold, the counter- culture developed a youth driven revolution for those unwilling to be bored or conform, often two sides of the same coin.

Many drop-outs, literally and figuratively, do so because of a boredom with our systems - schools, industry or corporations. The certitude inherent in religious faith is now replaced by a faith in a collective reasonableness that has lead to a post-boredom where space and time is now torn apart beyond our traditional expectations. Two phenomena confront us as we transmigrate through and beyond the modern world. We have the evolving modern and high-tech maturation based upon the developmental roots of the late enlightenment. Now comes the surreal and fresh arts referred to as “absurd,” new physics beyond order and unheard of destructive planetary wars as well as the view of a rationally ordered world now seen as challenging. Consciousness within a growing self should now begin to find some central birthing.

We note that “The difficulty of finding an answer is only compounded when, on closer inspection, it becomes evident that it is actually not rationality as such that lies at its root but the immense and it would seem irreversible growth in consciousness and self-consciousness (reflexivity) which is dialectically related to that rationalism.”(166) Also it is that “greater consciousness and deliberation had ‘completely upset the balance between conscious and unconscious forces operating in our society,’”(108) The more actively we apply conscious states to given circumstances the more one exercises a self outside the mainstream of traditional assumptions.

Sometimes we must reach beyond the familiar in risking our understanding in order to embrace a new road. While no certain definition fits terms like boredom and consciousness, the more forceful element, the voice of post-modernity further adds to this confusion. Elements of post-modernity include that no inherently rationally organized universe exists, that art defies simple definitions given our inherent uncertainty; we now have extreme meta-fiction, fragmentary, full of a discordant genre mixture, lacking any hierarchy of discourse, and we now possess self-contradictory and unresolved uncertainty as a basis for living. There is a beginning and end but what is between is the existential burden of what is partly an absurd existence. It has even been suggested for boredom that “the world is eaten up by boredom … you can’t see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice.” This same commentator also noted that boredom “is like a fermentation of a decomposing Christianity”, what could be called a legacy of a materialistic and mechanistic world.

When signs of post-modernity appeared we hear Kafka’s voice offering feelings of “absolute indifference and apathy.” It was as if “A well gone dry, water at an unattainable depth and no certainty it is there.” Here we find something more than boredom as “Nothing, nothing…. The present is a phantom state form…a Nothing, nothing. Emptiness, boredom, no, not boredom just emptiness, meaninglessness, weakness.”(35) And Beckett’s Waiting for Godot offered boredom as a central point of interest.(35)

The population today is more than 300 million versus some 92 million a century ago; average age now in the 70s versus the 30s, while relationships to speed dramatically altered our sense of time and space. Our agrarian rural society is now urban where living, sleeping and eating is performed by the power of mechanical time which is fixed outside London by an atomic clock. While divorce is common and wars are as insane as one can make them, the planet is smaller, polluted and dependent on electronics, our new deity. Dissonance applies in music, painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and even in some ways politics. This is not the time to be looking for order or a sense of harmony but one for hiding. Erich Fromm, in Sane Society stated: “one of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with one’s self and one’s life.”(55) What then is the choice?

The following by Rollo May adds that “while one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of people a decade or two ago, the emptiness has for many now moved from the emptiness of boredom to a state of futility and despair” which is followed by a sense of “nausea, disintegration, and to the terrifying situation in which even ‘evil itself bores.’”[86] When Mersault in The Stranger was asked if he regretted committing murder he responded that “what I felt was less regret than a vague boredom” (”un certain ennui“). Today we embrace phrases like “bored to death”, “crushingly bored” or “out of one’s mind with boredom.”

This was expressed in part by Alan Watts’ “divided mind,” suggesting that as “long as the mind is split, life is perpetual conflict, tension, frustration, and disillusion. Suffering is piled on suffering, fear on fear, and boredom on boredom.”(63-4) Mersault noted that they are “not having any feelings, of being blocked emotionally, being frozen, of feeling the self to be unreal, in a word, apathy.” All these are “affective states and states of mental inhibition.”(49) Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur has a salesman leaving a ship again and again and again. As Susan Sontag explained it, the brutal nominalism of the artists as minimal has replaced the place for detailed and lengthy visual explanations of what is perceived. The world like art is reduced to the point of lacking definable clarity.(71)

Only when man is seen as Dasein, as a being whose essence is a function of Being-in-a-world, is there found a resolution of the riddle as to what is the crises for a generalized ennui.(64) The German term Dasein implies man in context.(64) William Barrett’s Irrational Man stated that “words like dread, fear, guilt and boredom are not merely mental figments, but… modes of man’s Being-in-the-world”[72], a none enviable position. Heidegger offered that this mood that assails us “comes neither from ‘inside’ nor from ‘outside,’ but arises out of the Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being.” As with anxiety, boredom has no special object.(65)

If a prime function of culture is to provide meaning, and if the incidence of boredom (the result of an unaware realization of the collapse of meaning) greatly increases, then it follows that there is something gravely amiss within such a culture, something seriously disordered at its deepest and least accessible level. We may wonder about the act of living while not understanding it with no heaven or hell, or reason or progress. Thinkers like Rilke and Nietzsche were early in pointing to our being worn-out of things and of the words attached to them, a process that has accelerated enormously since.(68) “As has been made clear, the sheer number of things has depreciated any particular one of them” while “our reckless destruction of things has sundered us from them in spirit.”(68) The irony of all this is that things are no longer precious (however expensive they may be). For Rilke, the sharing of lives, the preciousness of our lives and of others has been diminished.(68)

We have gained much outside around us and lost much inside us. We run away from ourselves with useless busyness. So much of our social activities are nothing more than an avoidance of our threatening boredom and the fear of it. And one may add that “as the meaning continues to be eliminated from the world and from man (meaning in the sense of an answer to Heidegger’s question, … `why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?’)” what is called hyper-boredom, “will become increasingly powerful forces in Western culture.”(69) The “Great Chain of Being” has been reduced to a heap of links unattached to one another or anything other than redundancies. (70) Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse stated that “there are times when a whole generation is caught between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself, and has no standard, no security, so simple acquiescence.”[60] Only with individual and personal work do we find dignity.

We live in two worlds beyond a faith in religion, one a belief in the tradition of utilitarian modernity and the other an unknown post-modernity appearing on the horizon. This idea of transition between these two epochs can be found as early as in Hegel: “The spirit of the time growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of the structure of its previous world.” He died in 1831 while the Great War did not begin until 1914 when technology became the dog and human reason the tail—simple rationalizations. Little wonder that the idea that “frivolity and again ennui, which are spreading in the established order of things, the undefined foreboding of something unknown,” has “betoken that there is something else approaching.”[61] For those of the world of hyper-boredom, “they have merely let the sense of vacuity ensuing from the collapse of the ‘traditional paradigm’ break through.”(88) An early poet of our era, T. S. Eliot, suggested that “We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men/ Leaning together/ Head pieces filled with straw. Alas!”(90)

As our sources have noted: “boredom is the inevitable accompaniment of the absence, or even serious uncertainty about the stability and reliability, of values, purposes, meanings and commitment.”(91) What is there when there is nothing but the “nihilism of the masses; the largely unconscious, unacknowledged sense that the bottom has fallen out of the world.”(91) Boredom exists because “our present temporarily schizoid existence” is centered “in the two cultures—vacillating between dead purposes and deadly devices to escape boredom,”[77] one leading to the other!

We’ve arrived full circle where modernity bumps against the wall of this strange and ill-defined post-modernity that demands more of the individual, that inner self trying to create focus where once it was a given. There are forces to face and keep in mind that delineate these two eras as Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (p284) suggested that we now need a “new theory of personality” to take account of the novel type of man already coming into existence. He further admits that “the multiplication of life styles challenges our ability to hold the very self together.”[43] Distractions are comfort blankets to hide beneath when boredom knocks at your door.

Self is what has let go of the familiar collective that hides the pain that rains when the ego is the star attraction. The self is the existential becoming rather than traditional religion or some rational ego dominating force, a recognition that only between birth and death is where one’s own loving works. The self cannot be discovered, it can only be created by effort.

This changing horizon also offers freedom from the burden of uncertainty and its fear in a world no longer providing meaning with its response of boredom. This is not just a subjective reaction since the world of mechanics and consumption is boring (except for workers).(93) Selves live by judgements of correct and incorrect rather than ancient metaphors of right and wrong secured in righteousness that can transcend fearful moments and leave boredom for the boring.

But then this is only a beginning.

PAX/LOVE

 Arriving late at the conference and finding it crowded with a group of illustrious scholars and writers on stage addressing the topic of consciousness, I was able to garner a seat and hear the opening remarks of the moderator. After each guest gave their opening comments, I began reviewing my notes during the question-answer period and realized I was more confused than when I entered. The attempts offered to define the consciousness left me uninformed since what was offered was an undifferentiated explanation, so general or obtuse as to leave one empty without satisfactory clarification. The well known names, from Searle to Churchland and Koch, ‘Dennett to Baars, Chalmers and Burrows, offered their thoughtful insights but there still remained little light as to agreed meaning. It was clear that simply equating consciousness with awareness would not do, even if it would follow a Cartesian base.

While this conference is fictional, the named thinkers are not, for consciousness remains one of the most discussed and confusing terms to attract intellectual interest this past half century. Further compounding these difficulties there has been an increasing if meaningless applications as in “absolute” consciousness, “wake” consciousness, “alternate”, “collective” or “class” consciousness among too many others that further expand a descriptive but confusing collage of this subjective, amorphous but significant idea. What is the meaning in speaking of black or national consciousness? Do we have a better understanding when we have an offering of feminist or gay consciousness? Does one wake up one morning and suddenly discover that they are female or black? It is never helpful when the answers are more confusing than the question. This should not be an Hegelian intellectual homecoming. Even John Locke expanded Descartes’ definition to include memory and thinking which at least is a step in the correct direction. This introduces how all three offer a time frame with aware as the present, memory for past and thinking the future.

The concept of consciousness deserves more consideration than these examples of an over-worked and over-distorted term now run amok in a mental mind-field. Part of the problem may be that those most concerned are too unwilling to take an historic approach, locking themselves into a fixed psychological exercise with philosophical definitions for a mental activity that is pure subjectivity and more dynamic complex which is still evolving than too often is not granted.

Given this situation, it would not be inappropriate to question from where consciousness arrived, how it may have evolved and what could be some of its roots? What in our historical mental transformation made it possible, at least for those who have experienced what may be called conscious states of mind, i.e. achieving a fully conscious experience? This last statement further implies that we have not always been conscious, that it may possible that it has not been necessary to be conscious. And finally, it may not be an absolute but rather occasional activity. It’s presence as a mental activity is only one of degrees, appearing rather recently and with relatively modern and postmodern beginnings, at least if we are cautious in our historical analysis.

The central tendency in defining consciousness as awareness poses, as noted, more problems than solutions. Animals and plants are capable of a certain type of awareness. One could call it an instinct but it still is a capacity to “know” that the animal should not jump from cliffs that most plants should not open their buds in the winter months. Even our genes have some type of awareness as to what is appropriate or not for both health and growth. Being aware may possibly be a component of consciousness, but it is not to be equated with consciousness. Awareness is too general and amorphous to offer meaningful clarification. Defining a confusing concept with another adds to the blind spots. For those who experienced this unique phenomena, especially to a high degree, equating it with awareness is more confusing than enlightening.

The concept consciousness has a history and since history and language are companions in their respective altering of our own understanding, a review of the history could offer some potentials for clarification. That the conceptual root of the historic term consciousness can be traced as far back as the Roman Empire further expands the potential for confusion. Those oriented toward the power of the word, the literary character of language, are more concerned with the relation of each of those words to each other as was originally used in documents and for creative purposes. Historians, on the other hand, are attracted more to the cultural relationship of a word to its own era as well as to the future usage as both a potential cause and effect for later adaption. Since “conscious” is itself the third incarnation from its original roots, its historical transition can reveal some basic fundamentals towards attempting clarification. A source for a clearer historical understanding can be found in the writings of C. S. Lewis who discovered its roots through scholarly analysis. The earliest documental appearance arrived around the first or second century A.D. with the marriage of two Latin terms, con and scire together giving us conscire and from which we acquire the noun conscientia. Allowing for difficulties that exist in all translations and therefore interpretations, especially when the term is so ancient, it is suggested that in the tying of the `with’ or con to that of scire or `know’, implies meaning knowledge between two parties, specifically, some form of secret knowledge. The idea of hidden information, that which is possessed exclusively by two parties, may well have been appropriate during the Roman Empire as it moved towards instability where increasing numbers of important and powerful citizens worked in secret with others to create family and clan stability. What is significant is that this is a knowledge that is anything but public which was an original and fundamental frame for all human references in the ancient world. Roman society, like the earlier Greeks, were dedicated to public life where citizens possessed duties rather than rights; this was a world without individuality as we now understand the concept. In Rome, a citizen was defined as being a member of a clan, a family and a community. The very modern concept of an individual self will take centuries before developing and will mature along side any modern concept of consciousness.

This is an appropriate and mandatory mental backdrop, especially when considering a world so distant and unlike our own. When discussing the vast difference between our world and where we have come from, it is necessary to comprehend how this distant world may have existed as a contribution to defining our present psychological pattern of existence. This understanding can be offered in contrast to the growing individuation and decline of the collective that now inheres in our modern lives since clans, tribes and family dominated our traditional frame of reference. There was no inner alienation or estrangement in a world without any inner self burdened by daily living. The mind of antiquity demanded nothing resembling any of the extreme complexities or abstractions of our world. The earlier the languages we examine and study, the more this is clearly expressed in its comparative simplicity. The organic and collective world of antiquity is now replaced by one of complex machines, singularity, estrangement and even isolation.

The change from its original meaning while retaining the rather unique sense of a secret but shared knowledge soon began to enter a theological metamorphosis into even more remarkable secret knowledge now tied to the Christian acquisition of an inner immortal soul that was indispensable for the Medieval Christian sense of salvation. This was a creative weaving of a new cloth to cover the old meaning which now became a unique and applicable activity in the form of “conscience”. What had been secret knowledge hidden from others and primarily passive was now radically transferred into an active transcending communion of secret knowledge between the Christian soul and an active God. This was more than secret knowledge, for now there was a reflection tied to the inner soul, hidden from all others since the issue was one of sin, a reflectively soiled soul only known to God. While the appearance of conscience in the Christian world was slow in developing, it found full birthing and given a central role in the new canonical rules of the early Fourth Latern Council of the Thirteenth Century when the confessional was made a mandatory annual sacrament.

Priests now found they needed training as to how to aid a penitent to review their secret knowledge (con\scire) of sin (conscience) and reflect upon a knowledge exclusively known by God which now would be revealed to the His intermediator, one’s confessor. Without reflection it would be impossible for the penitent to make a complete and satisfactory confession of their sins. This was so new that many generations will pass for the confessors (priests) to begin understanding this original and very strange phenomena of inner reflection. An inner examination, a turning into oneself as a primitive form of introspection began slowly, while it increasingly impacted on the late medieval psyche. The sinner and God (with the priest-church acting as intermediary) now have a shared secret knowledge that are confessed in order to return to the good grace of the Savior. In addition, this was clearly less a typically passive situation since these secrets must be activated and accepted first through the inner reflection followed by an open and voluntary expression of that newly acquaired knowledge. Both a more active and more inner state of thought was becoming a fundamental part of a changing western mentality.

This was not the only beginning steps of the idea of an inner and hidden existence since the very idea of a Christian inner being, a soul, already implied the creation of such a phenomenal condition. This soul retained a passive existence, however, since all moral acts, according to Augustine, the official theologian of the medieval church, were only attributable to the infinite grace of the Lord. Still, the interior soul and personal conscience would now run parallel to the revolutionary new mentality of a Christian communicant, creating an inner identity, one where consciousness will eventually find a home.

What was more striking was this movement towards an inner existence now manifested and supported by changes in the art of writing and reading, especially the newly discovered art of silent reading, followed by the creation of the printing press, making religious script even more personal and increasingly an inherently private activity.

Language originally being an oral experience from its earliest roots had naturally always been intended to be heard. The ears, not the eyes, were the natural organ for experiencing language. Early copy rooms in monasteries were known as mumbling rooms since monks read out loud whatever they were copying. But several medieval changes did begin to impact. First came our present written script, the Carolingian, which originated in the court of Charlegmane somewhere around the beginnings of the ninth century. This was followed by the monks in Ireland expanding the accessibility of writing by separating words into sentences, eventually creating punctuation marks; both of these additions contributed to the general comprehension for those other than professional scribes and making possible the delineation of sounds in order to facilitate one’s ability to join the world of the literate. This last component, the birth of silent reading which evolved throughout the High Middle Ages with its impact on enlarging our inner voice, cannot be overestimated, along with the earlier contributions of the concept of a soul or inner conscience.

When we can establish the existence of an intimate relationship with “The Word”, an individualized one in the interior of the mind, we have an arrow pointing to what will eventually be known as a “private” act as we take our first steps into the earliest hints of modernity. It was the Catholic confessional combined with the birth of a conscience and the skills of silent reading that made possible an early and enlarged reflectivity, our inner introspective mentality, one of the first contributions in creating the modern distinction between objective and subjective experiences.

The creation and acceptance of a nonmaterial but uniquely personal immortal soul with the development of one’s own hidden conscience, an inner place where the voice of a righteous god could reside privately along with the ability to read silently, removed western humanity from an exclusive dependence upon audio experiences. These are three early meaningful steps driving our mental capacities into breaking from ancient and early medieval frames of thought and a traditional understanding of our sense of reality. While there were earlier but more shallow roots, these three created a road map marking the unique historic events from the Renaissance and Reformation to the Scientific Revolution which for consciousness would find a powerful impetus in the writings of René Descartes.

Three early events, important pieces of this puzzle, occurred during the Renaissance: first the printing press with the other arriving from the hands of the artists who entertained the idea of foreshortening or depth of field, a radical new realism being expressed by the artist’s control of a visual and a human sense of place and time. Add to this the artists new practice of signing their art works in this revolutionary age of fine art and you have the beginnings of artists expressing their personal tie to their work and commiting the number one of the seven deadly sins - pride. While many have suggested that the printing press was the most important of invention for the topic of consciousness, it is suggested here that rather than the printing press, it was silent reading that may have played a far greater role since it was this process that offered a new parameter for understanding time and space, an inner and revolutionary new subjective ontology.

The leaders of the Reformation also added to this expanding horizon of self discovery in their demand that followers of the Protestant communion with Christ first develop this personal relation with His Word by their private reading of the newly accessible Bible. This was Protestants replacing the Roman Church with a new intermediary between the faithful and their Lord - God’s holy word. To bring conscience into an active state would require not the church but rather the interiorization of the Holy Word read in the silence of one’s growing personal space where the mind could embrace and absorb the message of salvation. The guide for moral conduct was becoming both more personal and private. This was the early foundations upon which the individual (public) and the self (private) could be framed to hold one’s personal consciousness.

The concept and creation of realistic rendering in the plastic arts meant among other things that one could now perceive an image with depth, that is, a rationally controlled sense of space and time, a spacious entity set in a specific time where we, the audience, are uniquely separated and yet in a certain sense a singular part of that very space. We look at a painting and see “it” standing with us “here” and this increasingly became the accepted view of an expanding Renaissance realism: The space in the painting is placed for us here in our eyes with the space we are residing in at a particular moment. This was not yet the modern notion of a clear distinction of subjective and objective but it was an important contribution to that soon to be an articulated discovery during the Scientific Revolution.

With the combination of the inner word with our new sense of space, a radical changing or our undestanding of our humanity, a new meaning could be found in the significant and brilliant genius of historic and humorous settings created by William Shakespeare. Such theatrical poetry is traditionally to be heard, to be approached with the ears, rather than simply read. It is common for students to be told that if they are to read an assigned poem they should do it orally, to hear its lyricism. Audiences in Elizabethan England enjoyed an audiovisual experience. Recent scholarship supports the concept that today one can acquire a great deal of pleasure and knowledge by simply reading Shakespeare quietly, visualizing and hearing inside one’s own mental home this profound theatrical and rhetorical experience, assuming we have such a capacity. If this were not the case one would be hard pressed to explain why it would be difficult if not nearly impossible to enter a book store and not find works of the Bard on the so many shelves.

Clearly, there has been an expansion in our ability to absorb and internalize aesthetic as well as practical experiences. The subjective inner life, the early stages of a developing self, our own subjective “here” versus the objective that is observed “there” did become a central contribution from and for the creation of modern science most clearly in the writings of Francis Bacon. His idea of “disengagement”, the separation of the observer from the observed, is a touchstone for the birth of the modern notion of objectivity without which science could not exist. If we can better know something by standing back from what it is we study, we can make ourselves an observer and by implication, someone unique as a thinker to match our unique soul or conscience. It was in this context that Descartes - defeating his doubts - made his contributions. His work as well as that of contemporaries, John Locke and Isaac Newton, created a radical new vision of space, time and motion which completely undermined traditional assumptions.

Offering more confusion than clarity, Descartes equates consciousness with the Germanic term of awareness. This had been an extremely important concept for Descartes since he made consciousness in our thinking a central component of his cogito. In other words, for cogito ergo sum to work, our being aware of our particular active cogito is required. The act of thinking is made part of our awareness in order to make those thoughts operational and useful. To have a thought is only the first part of the process of thinking for it is also necessary to make conscious that thought. A baby may have a thought but simply cannot bring it to a conscious state and thus for all practical purposes is without that very thought except perhaps for a non-reflective moment. What is all too often overlooked regarding Cartesian philosophy is that this idea of being conscious means an awareness of thinking what it is that we are actually thinking. This was the path which Descartes took to arrive at a new form of certainty that he hungered for. If I think and can be conscious of that thought I must be alive and so must exist. This was the key to his secular dualism that began to replace religious dualism. It is his “conscious” embracing of the implications of his cogito that gave him some comfort in a world that appeared to be increasingly flowndering in uncertainty. Which was the true religion? What to think of nascent new national governments. How to deal with religious wars? The times were changing and his thinking proved significant in the secularizing of the western mind, especially in turning away from an exclusive dualism of God and Satan or Heaven and Hell, those long held assumptions that had so underlined if not dominated our pre-modern psyche.

This newly evolved mental construct, methods for discovering our ability to think, reflectively aiding in createing something that we label with the term consciousness now made its appearance in England. John Locke expanded this new topical term by exploring many similar ideas from a more empirical rather than metaphysical assumption, creating a radical change in the understanding of how we know what it is that we know, and what knowing and knowing we know is all about. He also raised the bar for our understanding of consciousness by adding to Cartesian awareness our personal memory and the very act of thinking. Locke agreed in principle, therefore, with the earlier writings of Descartes that there was a consciousness, now a term established in English lexicography, and that what we mean by aware was in part a necessary component for any definition of consciousness.

The expansion of our vocabulary, writings, historical knowledge and printed works created a frame whereby remembering along with the act of thinking naturally added to awareness. This Lockean contribution created, therefore, more than a singular term offered in defining consciousness. That memory, thinking and awareness would dovetail into consciousness, created a serious expansion of meanings, since the activation of awareness implies that memory and thinking inhere at the moment of that activation. Memory implies a frame of reference drawn from our past and added to our present observations just as our aware state of mind must imply something that is equally believed to be presently activated. Here, memory is awareness of our experiences driven from a more passive to more cognitized state.

If Cartesian awareness is to be applied to our act of thinking, thinking in part inheres in the act of memory. It now becomes very difficult to separate awareness, memory and thinking, just as it becomes clear that there is something integrative here, something we could generally label as the act of being conscious as distinct from being cognitive.

A very odd and significant occurrence followed when Locke’s consciousness was translated into French early in the Enlightenment. Whether because Descartes used the medieval Latin term along with his French for consciousness, or if for some other reason, the French translator decided Locke’s English consciousness should appear as sentiment in French. Western mentality had long been very concerned with how to appropriately restrain people’s more anti-social or sinful behavior. From the role of the Church to the use of the Bible, restrictions applied; but now, in the growing secular world, how to pressure people to behave in an appropriate manner became an important issue. The traditional dualism of good vs. evil, God vs. Satan and life vs. death, had remained a central issue for western values. While deism and theism grew in popularity, however, the issue of a working guide for proper conduct remained an issue. Sentiment could play such a role to some extent since it implied for Eighteenth Century philosophes that human beings had an inherent capacity to sympathize and even empathize with others and thus would offer a secular but ethical frame for behavior. Could not this new rational approach replace the religious theology as social guidance?

As failures within the paradigm of rationality began to appear at the end of the Enlightenment, and serious reservations of Cartesian metaphysics and Lockean empiricism made their presence felt, what loosely was labeled the Romantic century began. Now the more contemporary meaning of sentiment began to apply to correct human behavior. Along with these caveats regarding human rational capacity, radically new scientific, political and economic ideas began pushing our thinking into a genuine break from Medieval residuals along with questioning simple blind trust in reason. This was a modern (post-modern?) world that would give us another problematic term - i.e. existential.

Whether it was reservations regarding the use or meaning of consciousness by Frederick Nietzsche or the question of its existence as once was suggested by William James, consciousness was now becoming an intellectual issue. With the mental creation of logical positivism and the later writings on behavioralism by thinkers like John B. Watson, consciousness fell out of favor since subjectivity was not a measurable phenomena. With the arrival and dominance of the social sciences and its child, behaviorism, there was little room for such an abstract and subjective idea as consciousness, making it relatively irrelevant for the first half of the twentieth century. Only after the experiences of massive world conflicts did the concept return and come to dominate so much of our psychological, neurophysiological and philosophical studies.

What began in antiquity as little more than a secret shared knowledge finally became an intellectual issue of great import for understanding the inner and subjective state of our mental activities. This now proved to be truly shared secret knowledge, so secret in fact that there have been and still remain some serious thinkers who raise the interesting question as to how can something even exist that is so non-observable.[1] Others raise questions as to this being a state of mind existing only occasionally or only present in various degrees depending upon the person and/or circumstance.[2] And finally, it has also been suggested that machines will some day be conscious while others suggest this is a term we will never be able to definitively explain.[3] This brief historical journey does disservice to this confusing concept but necessary in order to support a more historical approach to something so complex and evolving.

If we are capable to some degree to make conscious choices, and only at certain times and only historically more recently, the question also needs to be asked as to whether there is any point for such a capacity.[4] Professional athletes, musicians and actors would find being conscious an interference to their performance. Those making very quick and difficult decisions under pressure would also find reflective conscious choices irrelevant if not a potential hindrance. It is easier to argue against rather than in favor of its existence, at least from a practical point of view. From the pragmatists to the utilitarians, one can only wonder as to what the point of consciousness could be. We can reflect and introspect within our inner selves, taking an existential position at the moment, but is it necessary to also be conscious in doing so? Jean Paul Sartre appears to have thought so and there are others who would agree. Nietzsche also had earlier raised serious questions in this regard, and we now find ourselves with more wonder than answers.

Perhaps one of the results of this transformation of such a fundamental concept has been the challenge it offers to traditional conflicting dualistic assumptions that has so powerfully driven much of western thought. We may have entered an age so complex in its technical changes including a life potentially lived in outer-space that the very idea of simple good versus evil and right versus wrong has become rather antique absolutes if not potentially quaint.

For the average citizen, this may not be applicable. But what of those more rare individuals; the artists and intellectuals who push the envelope of understanding and creativity beyond the horizon of everyday functional existence? Are the great geniuses by nature closer to the edge of conscious and subjective reality, somehow transcending the mendacity of daily living? Is creativity the space that appears between those times of deep conscious reflective existence? And, finally, are some people capable of being more than singularly conscious, moving into a new realm of multi-consciousness, as perhaps in poly-consciousness?

Beating old dead horses of equating consciousness with awareness will not enlighten. The roots and complexities are necessary components in any eventual clarification if it is to come.

Individuation, the singularity of the self and the isolation of the individual is a burden that the lone voice expresses within the mind, that interior conversation we alone have remaining private and hidden; this is our own phenomenal mental reality that no one else can ever come to know.

I would suggest that the concept of consciousness is so large and dynamic as both a topic for consideration and an activity exercised, that for it to be left only to the most narrow scholarly fields of study notwithstanding whatever contributions their’s have been or might be is inadequate.

FOOTNOTES

1. This idea of consciousness being unmeasurable being totally subjective is a position for those dusk

behind behavioralism

 ”Between Saying and Doing has two central topics.  The first is the relation between the meaning of expressions and their use, which Brandom sometimes articulates as the relation between what is said and the activity of saying it.  The second is the relation between the classical project of philosophical analysis and pragmatism, which he portrays as a confromtation between a project primarily concerned with logically elaborating the meanings of expressions and an approach which focuses more on the use of expressions, the primacy of their practical significance, what they are for.  These topics are related in their turn: the first is the battleground for the second.

“Not all are prepared to recognize pragmatism as a challenge to analytic philosophy, but those who do tend to assume that the outco me must be disastrous to the latter.  They thing what pragmatic cnsiderations show is that one ought to stop theorizing in terms of the meaning of expression altogether, and concentrate instead on their use.  Whether this pragmatist turn could lead to more than piecemeal idagnosis of philosophical confusion is something Brandom appears dubious about.  He is more scathing about the common alternative strategy: to ignore pragmatism altogether, refusing to recognize a challenge to analytic philosophy from considerations which imply the primacy of practical signficance.  His option is to chart a course between these extremes, retaining due appreciation of pragmatism’s power to discomfort without seeking the destruction desired by some who wield it.  His core proposal is that we reconceive the pragmatist challenge so that it becomes the long-sought instrument that renews and regenerates analytic philosophy. 

“But it is a description of the promised land…. “Between saying and doing, many pair of shoes is worn out” (Italian proverb). …  Amid the heavily technical discussion of automaton theory, computational inguistics, modal semantics and consequence-intrinsic logic, it is possible to discern something like the following picture.  Pragmatism ought to be able to see its way through to a milder form, one that retains its insistence on the primacy of use, but is prepared to accept the possiblity that this might be consistent with the systematic analysis of meaning.  conversely, analytic philosophy ought to be able to see its way through to a broader base, on that retains its focus on semantic theorizing, but accepts that an appeal to the meaning of expressions gets its point and purpose from attempts to codify and explain their use, and that only their use explains the expression on meanings.”

The earlier ego appeared in ancient Rome where loosely it translated with the later English “I” which Romans could not prefer. Romans did not accept the modern concept of individuality that would inhibit one being identified as Roman. One did not say “I am going to the baths” but rather “Going to the baths.”

The idea of not expressing the subject “I” continued throughout the Medieval Christen world since ego dominating as an “I” could not replace the dominance of God, the creator and center of everything and everyone. The favorite term for an interior drive was soul, the place where the divine gifts and dynamics of how one should live by good or evil shaped the finality for those gates opening up or down. This inner force, our soul, could be cleansed after the thirteenth century with a confessional demonstrating the power the church placed on this interior force for one’s identity. This term would continue to be used in the early modern world when the beginning idea of an individual made an appearance with the arrival of the Renaissance. The word ego would continue along with soul until finally the developing term of self began in early modernity with postmodernity embracing its implications.

Egoist, egotistical, egoism, egoistic and six more are examples in the New World dictionary demonstrating both breath and depth of meanings. The reason for this may be that the ego is what we are born with and is transferred into fully developed humans. A new born baby has an ego ready to fly while the un-recognized “I” is applicable for simple health reasons - the baby cries for food and for the cleaning of waste - an instinctual drive. This key element for the operation of the fundamental ego demonstrates how basic it is. There is inherently nothing cognitive when a child’s ego is operational. The pain of one sort or other exists and the baby seeks relief until a response is offered. The ego is simply inherent and bio-chemical.

This changes somewhat and somewhere around the age of approximately eight months depending on each babies chronological development. About now the baby notes a distinction between their own hand from others and the ego begin its own psycho-dynamics in public exposure. This continues as the child now discovers crying and making a scene calling for attention the ego seeks. By approximately six or seven the child has a primitive understanding of an abstraction such as love followed by about age eleven or twelve when the ability to join two abstractions arrives, as with love and death. Most of the cognitive potential appears by the age of pubescence with the final maturation of the brain occurring around twenty-five. The form is finished and the ego finds a place in matured young adults which inherently looks for re-assurance and gratification from the outside world with no two people having the same quantity of an ego drive.

Sports and theater are gratifying for some, playing the game, cheer leader or stage hand, the closer to the applause the better. The conflict, competition for friends and being liked by fellow students cam border on a pathology for a few, perhaps as much a conceit, unless one finds a means to short-circuit the ego. How pathological depends upon one’s egocentric nature, especially where poverty dominates and where there are few outlets for either males or females except as groupies, thugs or in gangs. A sense of power is one means of compensation for a sense of emptiness that may result from feelings that one”s ego has not received the kind of attention it craves.

Vanity may be an example of the ego in action - “look at me” which can mean that no one else matters. Vanity has long been condemned even by those who practice it. This blends in with those who are sinfully vain in offering something for those who feel no inner value - the extreme egoist. Moreover, during the time of the church, God was the only number one and no one could get near him except saints.

An early ego was expressed in the Renaissance when various artists like Leonardo and Michelangelo were expected to place their names on their art. This was only enhanced by the arrival of the printing press at the end of the fifteenth century. When turning to the written word we find Montaigne who created the art form of the Essay and was considered by his peers to be driven by his ego. Here the problem of these two terms becomes interesting because artistic personas generally have both a strong ego and strong sense of self.

This apples to an ego vs. self in Montaigne ( Donals Frame, “The Complete Essays of Montaigne” 1943) as witnessed from the following passage : “And if no one reads me, have I wasted my time, entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts? In modeling this figure upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself for others, I have painted inward self with colors clearer then my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me - a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self , as integral part of my life, not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books.”(p. 504) While at best confusing in the us of the term “self” that the translator applied to this sixteenth century essay, it may apply because this genius possessed both. His use of “I” is appropriate as it now came into play. His reference to “painting myself” also applies in the revolutionary visual arts. In both cases the temptation is to wonder whether this is not the ego and not singularly some pure expression of the self speaking. One page earlier he said: “Others have taken courage to speak of themselves because they found the subject worthy and rich; I, on the contrary, because I have found mine so barren and so meager that no suspicion of ostentation can fall upon my plan.” As the brilliant inventor of the modern Essay his ostentatiousness has an odor of ego - “I found mine so barren and so meager…” Yet there is the inner potential of the self in the artist.

It is little wonder that in the later Romantic era, Flaubert, who loved Montaigne’s Essays, once noted “his own flintiness in the Essays …, and the reading notes record careful scrutiny of the `egoiste’ Montaigne.” After all, Flaubert was detailed in his notes as he embraced the Essays. As one romantic noted, Montaigne had “been led astray in his youth by`that false philosophy, that finds happiness in selfishness [”I’egoisme”] and wisdom in insensibility.” It is not surprising “for the Romantics…, Montaigne had for some years provided an antitype of generous emotion - the classic` egoiste.” [p.26T.L.S. 10/2/09] Yet how to judge a giant who would offer this title for one of his chapters: “That to Philosophize is to learn to die” (1572-74)? Here one must offer again a voice of caution if not a caveat: Great artistic and brilliant minds who have left us so much to contemplate and share are not easily categorized as either ego or self driven - genius as they are.

It may be easier to look at a fictional but reliable example of an active ego for guidance in making judgements as can be seen from the informative, interesting and remarkable master of great theater, William Shakespear and his infamous egotist Iago, Hamlet’s ultimate manipulator. This is a convenience from which we see if clues can offer distinctions between where the ego and then the self dominate. We all have egos including great artists as well any genius; that is not the issue, the issue is which is dominant at any one time. Iago wins but Hamlet has character. The more inside one’s inner being the more likely the self , the more the outside, the ego. Again we have both potentially: did Iago have both?

The ego survival is revealed by the many in the public eye who cannot live without accolades for their significance. This should not seem strange to anyone since we all have this inherited characteristic, although some with a great deal more, others with only a small amount and many in between. Those of little or less egos could become saintly, dedicated givers to the poor and disadvantaged. The issue is not in having an ego but rather is there more. The more competitive the more one panders to the ego, not a bad thing in itself - competition does have its place, but only in a limited and channeled expression of that potential. . Even here it should be noted that the self can come into play, even in a small way as one listens to successful actors or actresses when you sometimes hear the self behind the ego. It was for the first time in 1828 the term ego in England began not being equated with the term of self, both becoming separate but confusing at best and at worst distracting .

While the ego is given dominance the self is too weak or undeveloped. The first is a life of social images whereas the self is more interested in an inner becoming and imagination, a process rather than a static state. While the ego is something that is a given, the self is earned through effort, time and introspection. There is no free lunch when it comes to the self just as there is no way one can avoid the inherent ego each has. As the ego suffers from a sense of vulnerability the self has the ability to transform the fearful into an opportunity for discovery and growth - a moment for inner reflection. With imagination the image regarding others’ judgements means little or nothing. The self is what can short circuit the burden that inheres in the ego if one should decide that this should be viewed as a distraction. Many if not most, especially those of great ambition, want this ego as a motivator and touch stone in expanding control and measuring success in their own and other’s eyes. There are too many social activities that could not function without powerful egos from sports and entertainment to politics and being a C.E.O. Basically there is nothing here in itself that needs condemnation. What we should recognize is that our language has greatly been damaged with sloppy and careless usage. The self is the light to glow beyond the ego, to expand one’s inner identity without an audience applauding you. All great artists and thinkers, notwithstanding the size of their particular ego, are driven by something from the inside, by something other than audience approval. Picasso created for himself as did Miles Davis, even with the dynamics of an audience. The singular act of creation is personal and private, satisfying in and of itself. There are many as these although only a few become noticed historically. It is true that most can live without any strong sense of self but none can live without an ego so this is not to say that even famous artists are not in some ways and in various degrees partially driven by their ego. The painter S. Dali was well known for his ego games as were many others - but there is that other side, the creative self, that is of interest. It is suggested here that while we cannot live without an ego, we cannot grow without a self. May the two find a joy together with the self in charge and where the ego does not interfere.

What is it then when speaking of the self? We have self-destructive, self-indulgent, self-negating, self-aware and, of course, self-consciousness. If not enough, there is self-fulfilment, self-expansive, self-reflective and self-introspective as well many more. While the term ego has one expression for expansion, the self expands by adding many other addenda. Ego and self are confused so regularly that it can make anyone constipated pleased. What are some marks for clarity, some space or juxtaposition for these?

Ego is more a public frame whereas self is more the hidden individual. This is why the self is more recent since the idea of individuality with its earliest hints in the Renaissance did not blossom until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the self being more modern while the ego has remained classic. The ego inherently seeks out others to bounce off and is also more appropriate for a sense of the collective or community which has been disappearing this past century. Since the self is more independent, given more to individualized demands and not dependent on the judgements of others, it is not only very modern but equally postmodern. For this reason the ego is of a traditional public state of being while the self is a more private process that inheres in the existential.

So where does the self arrive from, where is it’s root and what offers the opportunity for those so drawn to explore it as an inner potential? The title of this essay suggests an answer. A crack can occur for some in their ego, that reflective moment when you open yourself to new questions; when that happens there is a sense of a phenomena deeper, wider and more curious calling for discovery and exploration. This could be called the beginning of the self, although only a beginning. Reflection and introspection can then arrive requiring serious activation of inner expressions and expansion of whatever is behind that curious door. Note the word curious must be an handmaiden of that inner becoming arriving out of the crack of discovery that challenges areas exposed. Born with the ego, we are only offered the potential for becoming self directing. Also note the active verbs used since we speak of an ongoing process and not blind stops on the highway of life.

The inner discovery can occur a variety of ways, one of which is inner conversations where the thinker is talking to themselves about something personal, taking positions as say the pro - say me - then the con - say myself - and then the observer - I - experiencing thoughts of three beings: I was listening to me talk to myself . This break from simplistic dualism offers entry into a more complex triad that potentially exists in someone becoming - past, present and future at once. When this triad is realized the potential for a human triune is made accessible, a human coin where the three sides makes a whole but ever changing value. This is but a beginning, for wherever one is as a self it is always a beginning towards one’s last breath, and even at that very last moment it is still only a beginning.

Is there a tool in all this that can aid this crack to grow into this powerful sense of an individualized self? Perhaps. Along with the coming of a self out of the crack there is the mental state of unbelievable proportion arriving in wait to be used by this new becoming. Consciousness, not just awareness, or having a memory or thought, but something larger than the collective of these ideas, becomes so introspective that the center of the universe is inside a transcendence that has gone beyond the everyday. In every way it enters new realms of becoming, an existential freedom so pure that nothing can touch that moment so personal and yet so powerful that anyone and anything outside are just that, outside, only relevant by choice. This has been called a form of madness for some people who use the term “self-conscious” when really meaning “ego-awareness” unless they were to have an understanding of both these terms with deep introspection.

The New World Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, lists ego and another nine various expressions of it, four versions noted. For self, there were 144 citations of various forms some mentioned including three additional not mentioned in the dictionary, i.e. self-engaged, self-expansion and self-developed, all evident in meaning. These three reflect an inner becoming that can be processed. Self-conscious is also self-evident as are all the rest. Self-fulfilled, self-expressed , self-explanatory, and self-devotion require something other than an ego as does self-determination , self-definition , self-esteem , self-expression and self-contained. To have an inner self with consciousness means self-control without any self-deception which could end in self-defeating which is only avoided by working on one’s inner self-definitions with self-defense. One could go on but this picture has enough paint to fill the canvas with clarification and confusion as well self-presentation. The self is a big word because it is the center of the modern and postmodern psyche along with consciousness.

To finish with an example we have a contemporary of note who may demonstrate the power and danger of the ego, the discovery of the self and the usefulness of consciousness. Because his “Red Book” is being made available there is an introduction to it (N.Y.T. Mag. 9/20/09) by Sara Corbetto titled “The Holy Grail of the Unconscious. What the Unearthing of Carl Jung’s Red Book is Doing to the Jungs and the Jungians (and maybe YOUR DREAMS)”. Our interest is in the insights regarding his transformation from having major mental problems to coming into the open with a stronger interior and relative balance.

What first must be understood are elements of the language in this piece regarding Jung and his own proclivities which the author offered: “Man skids mid life and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure - taking place in his head.”(p.36) While the use of the term “soul” was favored by Jung it should be understood to mean his inner being since his idea of soul was not Christian. Perhaps this curious use of soul was a precursor for the creation of self. This raises an interesting thesis as to whether the ancient soul that dominated western religious thought regarding the change and value of behavior, good and bad, was the early beginnings of a contemporary self. Did each historic change move metaphorically first from ego followed by memory or past history with inner moral discoveries - the soul, eventually offering a basis for a mature identity following and flowing through the self? Is this but another door to the postmodern world? It could be that most thought in terms of a soul throughout history until the idea and word self began to offer a relevant and dynamic alternative. How interesting if not enlightening it would be if someone wrote a scholarly study analyzing the evolution of this transformation from historic literature to our own era. Would the dynamics of the soul tied to a deity when released from that deity be seen as a change in living behavior, more earthly than otherworldly, and thus a self in the making, an inner being becoming? Perhaps instead of going to church to pray at the cross and later the confessional to talk to our lord in order to confront and understand our soul, we today could look in the mirror to contemplate that inner dynamic that seeks understanding and expansion. As the postmodern world evolves we use the term soul in many new ways including “soul brothers”, “soul mate”, “soul music” and “soul food”. What was a Christian icon now becomes a hip term not unlike “cool”.

When Jung went through his mental crises which he records in his “Red Book”, he looked primarily to his dreams, a form of a mirror for him, to see moments of his anxious state as well any clues beyond. The language used here from the essay offers an opportunity to review the confused state and language of a genius who wandered from a dominance of his ego to the creation, expansion and intellectual exploitation of his self and his growing health supporter - self-consciousness.

The term consciousness like that of self are huge in being misused terms carelessly applied and thus more confusing then enlightening. Most people using conscious states mean aware or cognitive states. Jung seems to have crossed over although he still subscribed to “sub-conscious” for habitual but non-cognizable thoughts, memories or impressions.

It is remarkable that we grew from the ego in antiquity even before the term appeared. Egyptian kings being too important were immortalized with life after death followed by the Roman ego then soul. From here is the long story of the growth of individuality to self. Jung appears to have noted some part of this when it was mentioned according to the Times essay that followers of Jung had “goals of self-discovery and wholeness - a maturation process Jung himself referred to as `individuation.’ Perhaps as a result, Jungian analysis has a distinct appeal to people in mid-life.” The points to draw here are profound in that Jung recognized at least two components having to do with developing one’s own sense of inner self : “individuation” or full blown individuality, plus breaking from the traps of ego which are more likely in middle age (”mid-life”), a change in life’s stage where we discover the shortness of the future and arrival of that final curtain for one’s termination. An important caveat: today’s youth, with a history of a growing self- awareness, impacts upon an educational system that operates on the assumption we are all behavioral, thus leaving behind those students who are genetically thoughtful with potentially richer authenticity in that crowded classroom. Each student becomes increasingly more an individual needing special encouragement in the development of their unique self..

There is in Jung’s thinking a break from the modern and an opening to a more postmodern perception of entering our potential realities. His “Red Book” has as its’ “central premise,… that Jung had become disillusioned with the scientific rationalism - what he called `the spirit of the times’ - … he comes to know and appreciate `the spirt of the depths,’ a field that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors delivered by dreams.” The enlightenment glorification of reason has been collapsing and he appears to have found this from his own inner struggling turmoil. The idea that all answers do not come from some form of unified reasoning is a postmodern liberation he began to uncover as he turned to his dreams for answers to dilemmas discovered.

Ego though more applicable for the younger, weakens as we age, facing as adults our shortening development with an expanding history. The self offers a new life no matter what the age.

The crack can come at any time and is an opportunity to discover the basis for a self with the tool of consciousness; the question is when and for whom this may apply.

PAX \ LOVE

by Vwadek Marciniak

The new millennium sits uncomfortably on our doorstep while offering expanded insights from complex philosophical perspectives to diverse cultural analysis. This a glorious beginning for students of history, philosophy, literature, art and our social condition. Welcome to the funny farm of the bizarre.

If we go back to the road that brought us here we could find many elements we might not want to own up to and yet find trapping us. Without dragging us too far back we could trace the madness that took hold with Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and now continues in various degrees in places like Serbia, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Welcome to the mad century even in the new millennium.

The issue of intelligence versus stupidity or sanity versus insanity appears to dominate the global picture. Polarization has become the norm. We could discus Korea or Vietnam to no avail as we could discuss the number of countries that have recently appeared and are now members of the U.N. And there is urban decay with collapsing school systems while universities become trade schools for training rather than institutions for higher learning.

Where is the mental and emotional stability out there? Our economic system has been consumed by greed. Michael Moore’s latest movie makes this point clearly. In this and the past millennium we have had wars upon wars we do not pay for because the rich, especially since their Reagan’s tax cuts with the abbreviation of tax rates, have no intention of paying for wars they make a profit from. For the rest, they earn less to take home - if they still have a home. What has become all too normal is the use of lies to expand people’s anxiety and thus gain further power and control.

A little background might offer context, especially when considering how often it has been in the West that political and economic bitterness has led to major disasters and transformations of historic significance based on irrational fear, noting that today as many as forty million may be born anxious, ready to be pushed over the edge. (R.M.Henig, N.Y.T Mag.10/4/09)

In the Seventeenth Century the English were the first Western civilized country to behead their legitimate king only to allow the monarchy to re-appear a decade later. The French followed at the end of the Eighteenth century only to re-establish the crown early the following century. Anxiety followed by popular bitterness often leads to a level of fear and anger that can point to disastrous results. Fear on top of anxiety is the operational psychological tool for those wheeling and dealing power. Without this sense of latent and activated feeling of fearfulness much of the worst of our historic past could not have occurred. Turn to the Boston Tea Party where colonists’ fears about taxes paid to England helped begin a revolution that contributed to the eventual demise of the British empire. Our own civil war was predicated on a fearful assumption that President Lincoln would be a disaster for the slave owners in the south.

More recently we discover the beginnings of the Second Chapter of the Great War with Germany’s attack on Poland on the pretense that Poland attacked Germany first, causing fear among Germans which was created by this successful lie that ended in an unsuccessful war. In this century we had a our own cause celebre of fear, 9/11, which was expanded to include a theory that there were threats from Iraq which supposedly had weapons of mass destruction and left us with a need for a destructive and pointless war. After Berlin we have Washington D.C. as another peace maker.

At times it would appear that instead of operational political voices being concerned with the three principles of governance - Policy, Politics and Power - those voice are slipping into a crippling two - Politics and Power. I am sure that if we could find a better way to waste money and power we could invent it by using the basic rhetoric for creating anxiety, fear and mass hysteria.

The issues of fear and the root of anxiety can appear relatively minor although still of little value especially when tied to lies. We should question what was gained by Father Caughlin’s irrational attacks on F.D. Roosevelt’s presidency, or McCarthy’s attacks on Eisenhower with the aid of the extreme right led by the John Birch Society accusing him of being a communist sympathizer? Attacks on President Clinton and Bush served no purpose other than to keep a small group excessively wired with increasing deception, anxiety, fear and even hatred for some.

Today’s economic conditions have deteriorated given the polices begun by president Reagan and carried on by those who followed, Democrats and Republicans. Incomes are now driven for and by the wealthy while credit rather than manufacturing dominate, waiting a short time to explode as a bubble. But this is not the real issue which is pointing deceptive fingers of fear at whomever one can blame and then letting it get so out of hand we begin to wonder how much we wish to follow the earlier English and French models of frustration, hatred, madness and sometimes destruction. History has much to teach: one reason this topic is so unpopular in this country is because looking at lessons learned from the past is not always pleasant.

A key component for deceptively driven fear are serious changes, especially those directed at some massive unknown, even when there is a desperation out there for a need to improve our economic and cultural circumstances. Entering the unknown breaks down a sense of control and thus a sense of secured freedom. Something unknown, other than our positively colored memory (or history), is followed by that overwhelming and comforting power of an optimistic present, one offering the promise of a predictable tomorrow and anticipation for a better future. The real problem with this abstract explanation is that it doesn’t factually fit the basic psycho drama of most people’s everyday lives given their tendencies to hold optimistic perceptions as a source for tomorrow’s certainty. Look at the number of people who still cannot accept that they might or even have lost their job!

We already have a future to fear in the form of technical changes from electronic computers, the internet, handheld devices and a plethora of explosive information, so much of it wrong for this confused society lacking critical skills to edit through this maze. Anxiety inheres both in people biologically and culturally. A recent article in USA TODAY by Theresa Howard(10/1/09)noted that “The Anti-Defamation League, which monitors hate speech on the Web, says complaints are up this year more than 200% through July, to 1,152 complaints. `This whole era of cyber-hate is one of the biggest challenges we face,’ says Deborah Lauter, civil rights director of the league. `We’ve gotten to a place where we made it unacceptable for haters to hate in the public space.’” Little wonder “they turn to the Web, where they can be anonymous.” New technological is always unfamiliar and potentially dangerous.

The philosopher Hegel once suggested that it is the image of our future that dictates our perceived past in the present we now live in. We see this application in how people assume a future predicated on their understanding of past memories. But here is the problem: memories we now know are very unreliable in that they offer us wishful thinking. We often think of our past in ways that conform to what we anticipate it might bring - “I’ve been lucky, I may win the lottery”; or “people always said I had a nice smile so I know I could make it in sales”; and again, “I have always been flexible, even adaptable, and therefore should get that promotion upstairs.” We create myths by those images that we have lived by and in so doing ignore not only the variables of future possibilities but the here and now for all that it might offer. Our memory is a convenient tool of escape: “A man’s memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interests in the present” as George Santayana so clearly expressed. We do not want to threaten images of the future with any alteration of our inventive and comfortable memory of days long gone. As Caesar stated it: “Men quite gladly believe what they want to believe.” And as the philosopher Francis Bacon added: “Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true”.

We construct an assumptive past, a certain history, in order to offer a convenience of assumptions for some mythical future to alter the coloration of our present. Little wonder that Americans hate to study the past; it would undermine the lies now lived. Fear drawn from apprehension and bitterness is always potentially dangerous if not a basis for disaster. There is no room with the economic, political and military crises we now are exploring for anything but the coolest heads combined with reflective thinking. Convinced that abortion is evil a man chooses to go to a church to shoot and kill a physician who performs abortions.

Little wonder that this era demands humor on a large scale. It was George Carlin that suggested that American’s favorite passtime was bending over and grabbing their ankles, to wit, I would add that it should read grab their ankles and then say thank you. From Carlin to the “Cuckoo’s Nest” we witness the recognition of a breakdown of anything we could call an order of sanity on a massive although entertaining scale. We see a man shoot a black guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington to make some point…?

Perhaps we should look into the poor mental habits of those problematic areas of economics, drugs and political policies, not neglecting issues of education and the environment, especially the latter with forest fires and melting ice caps that expand the evidence on how we are incapable of honoring our insights or sanity. The nut house is for those in lock-ups and not for those with radio and televison shows - except in the U.S.A. Did hate, in general, and on the radio or T.V. have anything to do with Timothy McVeigh destroying lives at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma? It is too easy to move from being stupid to mentally unbalanced, even crazy at various times given the circumstance of some irrational fear pushing one to anger then hate that can open the door to an unbalanced paradigm.

When the English were beginning to face their monarchial crisis the brilliant physician, William Harvey, a contributor to the scientific revolution, noted “he had met with more disease generated from the mind than from any other cause.” Not surprising a “similar observation was to be made about the French Revolution.”[p.9H.IO] How many have crossed the line today and where are we going? Is this what is wanted for this country with wars, economic collapses and shortness of civility? Changes, past and present, requires dreamers and leaders not negativity.

Perhaps a more revealing expose of this nightmare would be to look first at the role of fear, its potential to lead to anger, then hatred and often some degree of mental instability.

Fear is the most powerful emotion according to University of California professor of Psychology, Michael Fanselow (Las Cruces Sun-News of Oct. 31 09). “When it comes to ruling the brain, fear often is king, scientists say.” From the same paper(Sept. 7 2009), in a column by Claudette Oritz, it was suggested “we do have a lot more fear. Fear is capitalized on in our country, It sells. We pay.”[p.120] How bad can it get? This same writer noted that when attending a gun show in Denver she found two books for sale entitled “Basement Nukes” and “Life After Doomsday.” To her credit she also noted that “…laughter helps chase fear back into its natural boundaries.”[p.120]

So what would an analysis of fear offer us? Of the types, two stand out. First we have the occasional and brief where a gun may be drawn or a car slides off the highway. These are usually short and to the point - sometimes only seconds long. The other is more complicated since it is an accumulated fear often based on anxiety accumulating to higher and higher states of anguish and terror driving the mind off the road into a mountain of panic. This was the kind of fear that many Europeans for good reason experienced during the Second Chapter of the Great War. These kinds of crises can push those more susceptible beyond simple fear. The Great Depression pushed some in that direction as has the Great Recession. There are no easy fears to deal with because they can lead to even deeper and more problematic emotions. For many, 9/11 still marks such a demarcation as well as an expansion of this fear’s hand maiden, ideology.

Where there is this fear and ideology there also can follow serious anger where hate sits in the back room waiting to open the door. This anger is equally a relative term and, again, in one sense can be but a brief moment, not of great concern except where accumulative. Like fear, anger held onto too long, in distorting attachments, can lead to more serious and even criminal activity. The prisons are full of those who moved beyond a small momentary feeling of anger. When hatred enters the picture any sense of rational thinking is out the window even when there are no windows.

It is short trip, hardly a sneeze, to go to war and eventual annihilation. Look at the beginning of the Thirty Years War or more recently consider some U.S. soldiers who fought natives in our western lands.

What happens if we travel from fear to anger to hatred? Mental instability is not far from a simple case of some petit negativity driven to fear and all that might follow. Being nuts comes to dominate, whether for a moment or longer, with roots often in the lands of economic and political crisis where the most unstable can become potentially dangerous, no longer part of a civil dialogue but rather a bitterly driven disagreement.

One can march on Washington, New York or even Athens as some of us did for peace and an end to atomic threats. The difference between the past and contemporary marches is that these are filled with a diet of hatred for the president expressed on a level of anger that is only heightened and vented. We should be glad we see no guns emptied at Town Hall meetings.

We are walking a line where the unknown has never been a greater mystery, especially when it comes to domestic economics in a global economic world. Stresses are huge for many if not overwhelming for some, and with good reason since this economy we inherited in the late 1940s with roots in the Nineteenth Century is now disappearing. This is especially difficult for those who have no other living models other than increasing consumption to the point of addiction and for the younger who cannot imagine another life style; this is a major cultural crisis introduced yet unexplored.

Mental instability whether calling it nuts, crazy or insanity could well be the roadway we are laying for tomorrow. We have witnessed since the Bush/Cheney bankruptcy through war on top of Reagan’s reforms for the rich and his credit dreams, a collapse of a manufacturing order that once seemed comforting. Get a job, get married, buy a house, have children, get promoted then retire on easy street - a dream expressed in movies and TV for many years now disappearing. There is no blame since this dream could never have lasted in any case. These historic changes and challenges with little imaginative leadership give no cause for optimism. The unknown may be great for a hip counterculture and a curious postmodern mind but what about the average Jane and Joe?

Looking at other causes for fears with at least theoretical responses we discover billions of dollars wasted based on a fear our society is addicted to, that of illegal drugs and its users. Not tobacco, no, not booze, caffeine or sweets, no, only those illegal today. This ironically may prove to be the easiest problem to deal with while at the same time offering a blessing for the strained economy. In the Guardian (9/3/09 p.1) the author Simon Jenkins stated that “The greatest social menace of the new century is not terrorism but drugs,… It fills jails, corrupts politicians and plagues nations. … It is utterly mad” Did he find an answer, yes, but in another land where “Last week the Argentine supreme court declared in a landmark ruling that it was ‘unconstitutional’ to prosecute citizens for having drugs for their personal use.” The court further asserted that “`adults should be free to make life style decisions without the intervention of the state.’” If we look at the logic behind this failed if not peculiar war we discover that “The underlying concept of the war on drugs, initiated by Richard Nixon in the 1970s, is that demand can be curbed by eliminating supply. … This concept marries intellectual idiocy… with practical impossibility.”[p.2] We did this in outlawing booze and now find that “Making supply illegal is worse than pointless. It oils a black market, drives trade underground, cross-subsidizes other crimes and leaves consumers at the mercy of poisons. It is the politics of stupid.” This is as generous as there is in stating the case.

But the deeper, more lengthy and challenging problem is the ending of and transferring from the old economic order to something yet unknown while allowing for a promise of economic survival. The fear implodes upon all, even the rich and powerful who normally pedal such fears. How the tables are turning. An introduction go the issues is found at what Paul Krugman noted in his NYT piece (9/6/09) in explaining “How Did Economists Get it So Wrong?” His comments are simple and direct: “…they turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts.” To clarify, “…, they will have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior,…” The point drawn is that people do not live by the assumptions of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment which had it all wrong - people are not inherently rational as fear only makes too clear. Most newspaper and magazine articles along with cable and radio network news are not necessarily here to support this revelation but rather have a tendency to cover up the grasping wealthy in this outdated system.

Looking for exceptions we find the following: “The incomes of the young and middle-aged especially men - have fallen off a cliff since 2000, leaving many age groups poorer than they were even in the 1970s,” as a USA TODAY analysis of new census data found.[9/18-9/09] We also have “People 54 or younger losing ground financially at an unprecedented rate in this recession, widening a gap between young and old that had been expanding for years.” Older workers are not retiring which is not promising for the young. Then there is the story in USA TODAY (9/21/09) telling us that “More skilled immigrants are giving up their American dreams to pursue careers back home raising concerns that the U.S. may lose its competitive edge in science, technology and other fields.” Now “`what was a trickle has become a flood,’ says Duke University’s Vivek Wadhawa,…” One can add as the article states that “the U.S. economy will suffer without there skilled workers.” - Anyone for watching Catch 22?

Add to this the housing crisis, increasing unemployment, much of it permanent and a health care disaster where we see the slaughter of so many at a cost that continually expands while we do nothing and end with this picture, this horror movie we would just as soon miss.

What is needed, it has been suggested, is a more earth driven economy. As Berry Wendell suggested in his September(09) “Progressive” article(p.18): “I would put nature first, the economics of land use second, the manufacturing economy third, and the consumer economy fourth.” The world driven by materialistic and pointless consumption is coming to an end. As one other commentator put it, the “…last thing we need is to re-employ the flawed economic thinking that brought us to this point.”

While the data is huge on this last subject we should also note one last comment on fear and hatred which has been directed and well covered by the media where it was announced that “On Saturday the 12 of Sept. 2009″ a crowd of Tea Party followers marched on Washington to complain about Obama on a variety of items from Birthers to health care to communist. One sign read:

O pressive

B loodsucking
A rrogant

M uslim

A lien

We are still engaged in a shrinking-stinking ideological race war with hatred to match. The same can be said of the anger at Town Hall meetings - expanding divisions galore. Still if you are going to have anything resembling a democratic society you need people and groups of people in the streets marching and at meetings asking difficult questions of those in power, even if one does not always agree with their varied points of view.

We have a long way to go but first we must define the problems and let powerful negative emotional responses abate regarding these misunderstood and confusing issues now coming into the open. Coming together may be too late - but we still could explore new approaches to political and social order, and expand our collective political, economic and cultural horizons.

PAX/LOVE