Deus Ex Mente

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http://deoxy.org/alephnull/jaynes.htm

The Origin of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
by Julian Jaynes

In this book, Jaynes theorizes that ancient consciousness was radically different from modern consciousness. He suggests that ancient human beings had no sense of an interior, directing self. Rather, they accepted commands from what appeared to them to be an externalized agency, which they obeyed blindly, without question.

This externalized self was a consequence of the split between the two halves of the brain. Jaynes suggests that the left and right brains were not integrated—"unicameral"—they way they are today. Rather, the ancient brain was "bicameral," with the two brains working essentially independently of each other. The left half of the brain, the logical, language-using half, generated ideas and commands, which the right brain then obeyed. These commands were subjectively perceived by the right brain as coming from "outside"—as if a god was speaking.

Jaynes adduces evidence for this astonishing hypothesis from several sources. One is the "voices" heard by schizophrenic patients, which Jaynes interprets as a throwback to the bicameral mind of ancient times. Another is evidence from neurosurgery, where patients hear "voices" upon having their brains electrically stimulated. Another is the polytheistic gods of ancient civilizations, which spoke directly and intimately to individuals:

"Who then were these gods who pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips? They were voices whose speech and directions could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients...The gods were organizations of the central nervous system"(73-4).

Jaynes suggests that each person had his own individual "god", which always told them what to do. The theory further accounts for why the gods were so naturalistic and anthropomorphic, rather than supernatural and otherworldly.

Where did the gods go, then? Jaynes proposes that a series of unprecedented environmental stresses in the second millennium B.C. forced the two halves of the brain to merge into unicamerality. (This was a cultural, rather than a biological, transformation, Jaynes notes.) The stresses might have included natural disasters (the story of the Flood comes to mind), population growth, forced migrations, warfare, trade, and the development of writing. A common denominator among all these is the introduction of complexity and difference, things the bicameral mind deals with only with difficulty. Jaynes suggests, among other things, that traders in contact with other cultures might have been forced to develop a "protosubjective consciousness" to cope with the gods of unfamiliar people.

Jaynes suggests that the unprecedented stresses of the 2nd millennium B.C. forced the individual into isolation, within which a sense of I-ness appeared to fill the void left by the inadequacy of the god. This hypothesis posits a relatively homogeneous and stress-free existence prior to the development of consciousness. In short, Jaynes must posit that there really was an Eden, from which humanity Fell.

To establish the gods' disappearance, Jaynes cites a number of illustrations and cuneiform tablets dating from Sumerian times. He shows a stone-carven image of the King of Assyria kneeling in supplication before an empty throne, from which his god is conspicuously absent. The accompanying cuneiform script reads, "One who has no god, as he walks along the street,/ Headache envelopes him like a garment." Another tablet reads,

My god has forsaken me and disappeared,

My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance.

The good angel who walked beside me has departed.

Jaynes interprets this as evidence of a new subjectivity in Mesopotamia. The bicameral mind has begun to collapse into the modern unicameral mind of the self-willed, self-aware "I", and as a consequence the gods no longer speak to people, as they did in the days of old (223).

These lamentations sound remarkably like the nam-shubs mentioned in Snow Crash.

The nam-shubs also mourn something precious, and speak of confusion and loss. It is not at all hard to guess that the loss of bicameral tranquility may have been accompanied by unprecedented linguistic disruption (irrespective of any causal relationship between the two.) The Tower of Babel story—which the nam-shubs strongly resemble—may have happened at a time when bicamerality was breaking down.

Be this historical truth or not (and the thesis has not been widely accepted), Jaynes has fashioned a brilliant myth of human origins. Like the authors of Snow Crash and Macroscope, Jaynes reaches far back into the past for an authentic story of a Fall from wholeness. And like them, he reaches specifically for Mesopotamian myth.

ARTICLES BY JAYNES:
http://www.julianjaynes.org/articles.php

Dialogue about Romanticism

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Romanticism is indeed a descendant of protestantism for it is characterized by an excessive freedom of the individual. The Romantic is the 18th and 19th century revolutionary and reactionary. He is the Rousseauian collectivist, worshiping the possibilities of primitive man, of human rights, and of tolerance. He is the reactionary aristocrat, spurred to emotion by ancient ruins, tradition, and the possibility of metaphysical certainty.

That would explain all the Protestant humanists (an outlook generally opposed to Romanticism) on the one hand and all the collectivist, nationalist, and populist strains of Romanticism on the other. Seriously, as the book aruges above, romanticism, being a type of consciousness, couldn't be said to be a descendant of Protestantism and its individualism any more than it could be said to be a descendant of Catholicism and its sensualism. Romanticism as a child of Luther is far too facile.

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Neither the revolutionary nor the reactionary Romantic can ever have what he pursues.

As the saying goes, satisfaction is the death of desire. The romantic does not so much want what he pursues, or rather, he wants the “heroic” experience of yearning or striving towards something. It is similar, after a fashion, to Taoism in the east, where acquisition and attainment is “against the way of the Tao” but instead manifests in the “Sturm und Drang” manner of the European soul where one achieves “transcendence” not by freeing himself from attachment and desire but pursuing the unattainable with gusto.

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The Romantic is the one who revolves around himself as his own priest, hoping to make everything external to him an occasion for emotional experience.

All events and objects already contain subjective, emotional experience. Man experiences subjectivity in simply perceiving anything. Romanticism is an acknowledgement and celebration of this, and a call to experience with passion as above. Treating yourself as your own priest is simply removing the spiritual middle-man.

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Kierkegaard's aesthetes in Either/Or - both A and Johannes the Seducer - are archetypal manifestations of the Romantic. Faced with the despair inherent in a disinterested, scientific world view, they recoil into subjectivism, treating being as simply an occasion.

It would be more accurate to say that the romantics in general reject Being for Becoming, a la Heraclitus (see comparison with Taoism also again), instead of treating them as somehow failing to acknowledge Being properly. No one would understand Heraclitus or Lao Tzu if one adopted the attitude that they were reactionaries who disavowed Being somehow and going from there. This attitude is also too easy. Rather, the (German at least) romantics recognize the cosmos as flux and fire, and so ideologies are subject to the vulgarities of vicissitude as anything else, and so we should rather hold value to be in phenomena and experience itself.

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The actual skeptics of the enlightenment (and Hamann seems to be one of them) were realists. They easily detected the unrecognized metaphysical assumptions of the enlightenment - the latent subjectivism in the monumental abstractions of liberal politics.

Ah, a screed against liberalism, that's what we're on about here. . .

Quote:

Romantics certainly attached themselves to such reactions to the enlightenment, but they also attached themselves to the enlightenment (Rousseau). Thus, a definition of the Romantic must be divorced from either the counter-enlightenment, or the enlightenment; the definition must include subjective occasionalism. The Romantic attaches himself to numerous ideologies, positions, and attitudes for they are all equally valid in his eyes - they are only occasions for subjective play.

I disagree. It is not a question of all ideologies being equally valid. When one is playing, the question of validity has no meaning period. Children do not play for results but from an enthusiasm for life and desire to learn of life, and that is the essence of romanticism and hence its tendency towards vitalism, not a simplistic reduction to “subjective occasionalism” and a link to modern liberal politics, which I could just as easily argue (granted, I part with the author of the piece above here) from classicism and/or humanism.

As was stated by me though, holding value to be in subjective experience itself does not necessarily link to all interpretations, ideologies, attitudes, etc. being equal. The Romantics would not so consistently argue amongst themselves if they treated all the various of their own traditions as equally valid. Going from positions only being valuable if they are pursued with passion to all being identical is a non-sequitur.

I see your post as agenda-driven psychologizing here and it ultimately misses the point in my opinion.

The Roots of Romanticism

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s6544.html
IN SEARCH OF A DEFINITION

I might be expected to begin, or to attempt to begin, with some kind of definition of romanticism, or at least some generalisation, in order to make clear what it is that I mean by it. I do not propose to walk into that particular trap. The eminent and wise Professor Northrop Frye points out that whenever anyone embarks on a generalisation on the subject of romanticism, even something so innocuous, for example, as to say that a new attitude sprang up among English poets towards nature — in Wordsworth and Coleridge, let us say, as against Racine and Pope — somebody will always be found who will produce countervailing evidence from the writings of Homer, Kalidasa, pre-Muslim Arabian epics, medieval Spanish verse — and finally Racine and Pope themselves. For this reason I do not propose to generalise, but to convey in some other way what it is that I think romanticism to be.

Indeed, the literature on romanticism is larger than romanticism itself, and the literature defining what it is that the literature on romanticism is concerned with is quite large in its turn. There is a kind of inverted pyramid. It is a dangerous and a confused subject, in which many have lost, I will not say their senses, but at any rate their sense of direction. It is like that dark cave described by Virgil, where all the footsteps lead in one direction; or the cave of Polyphemus — those who enter it never seem to emerge again. It is therefore with some trepidation that I embark upon the subject.

The importance of romanticism is that it is the largest recent movement to transform the lives and the thought of the Western world. It seems to me to be the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred, and all the other shifts which have occurred in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear to me in comparison less important, and at any rate deeply influenced by it.

The history not only of thought, but of consciousness, opinion, action too, of morals, politics, aesthetics, is to a large degree a history of dominant models. Whenever you look at any particular civilisation, you will find that its most characteristic writings and other cultural products reflect a particular pattern of life which those who are responsible for these writings — or paint these paintings, or produce these particular pieces of music — are dominated by. And in order to identify a civilisation, in order to explain what kind of civilisation it is, in order to understand the world in which men of this sort thought and felt and acted, it is important to try, so far as possible, to isolate the dominant pattern which that culture obeys. Consider, for instance, Greek philosophy or Greek literature of the classical age. If you read, say, the philosophy of Plato, you will find that he is dominated by a geometrical or mathematical model. It is clear that his thought operates on lines which are conditioned by the idea that there are certain axiomatic truths, adamantine, unbreakable, from which it is possible by severe logic to deduce certain absolutely infallible conclusions; that it is possible to attain to this kind of absolute wisdom by a special method which he recommends; that there is such a thing as absolute knowledge to be obtained in the world, and if only we can attain to this absolute knowledge, of which geometry, indeed mathematics in general, is the nearest example, the most perfect paradigm, we can organise our lives in terms of this knowledge, in terms of these truths, once and for all, in a static manner, needing no further change; and then all suffering, all doubt, all ignorance, all forms of human vice and folly can be expected to disappear from the earth.

This notion that there is somewhere a perfect vision, and that it needs only a certain kind of severe discipline, or a certain kind of method, to attain to this truth, which is analogous, at any rate, to the cold and isolated truths of mathematics — this notion then affects a great many other thinkers in the post-Platonic age: certainly the Renaissance, which had similar ideas, certainly thinkers like Spinoza, thinkers in the eighteenth century, thinkers in the nineteenth century too, who believed it possible to attain to some kind of, if not absolute, at any rate nearly absolute knowledge, and in terms of this to tidy the world up, to create some kind of rational order, in which tragedy, vice and stupidity, which have caused so much destruction in the past, can at last be avoided by the use of carefully acquired information and the application to it of universally intelligible reason.

This is one kind of model - I offer it simply as an example. These models invariably begin by liberating people from error, from confusion, from some kind of unintelligible world which they seek to explain to themselves by means of a model; but they almost invariably end by enslaving those very same people, by failing to explain the whole of experience. They begin as liberators and end in some sort of despotism.

Let us look at another example - a parallel culture, that of the Bible, that of the Jews at a comparable period. You will find a totally different model dominating, a totally different set of ideas, which would have been unintelligible to the Greeks. The notion from which both Judaism and Christianity to a large degree sprang is the notion of family life, the relations of father and son, perhaps the relations of members of a tribe to one another. Such fundamental relationships — in terms of which nature and life are explained — as the love of children for their father, the brotherhood of man, forgiveness, commands issued by a superior to an inferior, the sense of duty, transgression, sin and therefore the need to atone for it — this whole complex of qualities, in terms of which the whole of the universe is explained by those who created the Bible, and by those who were to a large extent influenced by it, would have been totally unintelligible to the Greeks.

Consider a perfectly familiar psalm, where the psalmist says that `When Israel went out of Egypt ... the sea saw it, and fled: Jordan was driven back. The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs', and the earth is ordered to `Tremble ... at the presence of the Lord.' This would have been totally unintelligible to Plato or to Aristotle, because the whole notion of a world which reacts personally to the orders of the Lord, the idea that all relationships, both animate and inanimate, must be interpreted in terms of the relations of human beings, or at any rate in terms of the relations of personalities, in one case divine, in the other case human, is very remote from the Greek conception of what a God was and what his relations were to mankind. Hence the absence among the Greeks of the notion of obligation, hence the absence of the notion of duty, which it is so difficult for people to grasp who read the Greeks through spectacles partly affected by the Jews.

Let me try to convey how strange different models can be, because this is important simply in tracing the history of these transformations of consciousness. Considerable revolutions have occurred in the general outlook of mankind which it is sometimes difficult to retrace, because we swallow them as if they were familiar. Giambattista Vico — the Italian thinker who flourished at the beginning of the eighteenth century, if a man who was totally poor and neglected may be said to have flourished — was perhaps the first to draw our attention to the strangeness of ancient cultures. He points out, for example, that in the quotation `Jovis omnia plena' (`Everything is full of Jove'), which is the end of a perfectly familiar Latin hexameter, something is said that to us is not wholly intelligible. On the one hand Jupiter or Jove is a large bearded divinity who hurls thunder and lightning. On the other hand, everything — `omnia' — is said to be `full of' this bearded being, which is not on the face of it intelligible. Vico then argues with great imagination and cogency that the view of these ancient peoples, so remote from us, must have been very different from ours for them to have been able to conceive of their divinity not only as a bearded giant commanding the gods and men, but also as something of which the whole heavens could be full.

Let me give a more familiar example. When Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics discusses the subject of friendship, he says, in what is to us a somewhat surprising manner, that there are various kinds of friends. For example there is the friendship which consists in passionate infatuation by one human being with another; and there is also a friendship which consists in business relations, in trading, in buying and selling. The fact that for Aristotle there is nothing strange in saying there are two kinds of friends, that there are people whose whole lives are given to love, or at any rate whose emotions are passionately engaged in love, and on the other hand there are people who sell shoes to one another, and these are species of the same genus, is something to which, as a result, perhaps, of Christianity, or of the romantic movement, or whatever it may be, we find it rather difficult to acclimatise ourselves.

I give these examples merely in order to convey that these ancient cultures are stranger than we think, and that larger transformations have occurred in the history of human consciousness than an ordinary uncritical reading of the classics would seem to convey. There are of course a great many other examples. The world can be conceived organically — like a tree, in which every part lives for every other part, and through every other part — or mechanistically, perhaps as a result of some scientific model, in which the parts are external to one another, and in which the State, or any other human institution, is regarded as a gadget for the purpose of promoting happiness, or preventing people from doing each other in. These are very different conceptions of life, and they do belong to different climates of opinion, and are influenced by different considerations.

What happens as a rule is that some subject gains the ascendancy - say physics, or chemistry - and, as a result of the enormous hold which it has upon the imagination of its generation, it is applied in other spheres as well. This happened to sociology in the nineteenth century, it happened to psychology in our own. My thesis is that the romantic movement was just such a gigantic and radical transformation, after which nothing was ever the same. This is the claim on which I wish to focus.

Where did the romantic movement take its rise? Certainly not in England, although technically, no doubt, it did - that is what all the historians will tell you. At any rate, that is not where it occurred in its most dramatic form. Here the question arises: When I speak of romanticism, do I mean something which happens historically, as I appear to be saying, or is it perhaps a permanent frame of mind which is not exclusive to, is not monopolised by, any particular age? Herbert Read and Kenneth Clark have taken up the position that romanticism is a permanent state of mind which might be found anywhere. Kenneth Clark finds it in some lines of Hadrian's; Herbert Read quotes a great many examples. The Baron Seillière, who has written extensively on this subject, quotes Plato and Plotinus and the Greek novelist Heliodorus, and a great many other persons who, in his opinion, were romantic writers. I do not wish to enter upon this issue - it may be so. The subject with which I myself wish to deal is confined in time. I do not wish to deal with a permanent human attitude, but with a particular transformation which occurred historically, and affects us today. Therefore I propose to confine my attention to what occurred in the second third of the eighteenth century. It occurred not in England, not in France, but for the most part in Germany.

The common view of history and historical change gives us this account. We begin with a French dix-huitième, an elegant century in which everything begins by being calm and smooth, rules are obeyed in life and in art, there is a general advance of reason, rationality is progressing, the Church is retreating, unreason is yielding to the great attacks upon it of the French philosophes. There is peace, there is calm, there is elegant building, there is a belief in the application of universal reason both to human affairs and to artistic practice, to morals, to politics, to philosophy. Then there is a sudden, apparently unaccountable, invasion. Suddenly there is a violent eruption of emotion, enthusiasm. People become interested in Gothic buildings, in introspection. People suddenly become neurotic and melancholy; they begin to admire the unaccountable flight of spontaneous genius. There is a general retreat from this symmetrical, elegant, glassy state of affairs. At the same time other changes occur too. A great revolution breaks out; there is discontent; the King has his head cut off; the Terror begins.

It is not quite clear what these two revolutions have to do with each other. As we read history, there is a general sense that something catastrophic occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century. At first things appeared to go comparatively smoothly, then there was a sudden breakthrough. Some welcome it, some denounce it. Those who denounce it suppose this to have been an elegant and peaceful age: those who did not know it, did not know the true plaisir de vivre, as Talleyrand said. Others say it was an artificial and hypocritical age, and that the Revolution ushered in a reign of greater justice, greater humanity, greater freedom, greater understanding of man for man. However that may be, the question is: What is the relation of the so-called romantic revolution — the sudden breakthrough in the realms of art and morals of this new and turbulent attitude - and the revolution which is normally known as the French Revolution? Were the people who danced upon the ruins of the Bastille, the people who cut off the head of Louis XVI, the same persons as those who were affected by the sudden cult of genius, or the sudden breakthrough of emotionalism of which we are told, or the sudden disturbance and turbulence which flooded the Western world? Apparently not. Certainly the principles in the name of which the French Revolution was fought were principles of universal reason, of order, of justice, not at all connected with the sense of uniqueness, the profound emotional introspection, the sense of the differences of things, dissimilarities rather than similarities, with which the romantic movement is usually associated.

What about Rousseau? Rousseau is of course quite correctly assigned to the romantic movement as, in a sense, one of its fathers. But the Rousseau who was responsible for the ideas of Robespierre, the Rousseau who was responsible for the ideas of the French Jacobins, is not the Rousseau, it seems to me, who has an obvious connection with romanticism. That Rousseau is the Rousseau who wrote The Social Contract, which is a typically classical treatise that speaks of the return of man to those original, primary principles which all men have in common; the reign of universal reason, which unites men, as opposed to emotions, which divide them; the reign of universal justice and universal peace as against the conflicts and the turbulence and the disturbances which tear human hearts from their minds and divide men against themselves.

So it is difficult to see what the relation is of this great romantic upheaval to the political revolution. Then there is the Industrial Revolution too, which cannot be regarded as irrelevant. After all, ideas do not breed ideas. Some social and economic factors are surely responsible for great upheavals in human consciousness. We have a problem on our hands. There is the Industrial Revolution, there is the great French political revolution under classical auspices, and there is the romantic revolution. Take even the great art of the French Revolution. If, for example, you look at the great revolutionary paintings of David, it is difficult to connect him specifically with the romantic revolution. The paintings of David have a kind of eloquence, the austere Jacobin eloquence of a return to Sparta, a return to Rome; they communicate a protest against the frivolity and the superficiality of life which is connected with the preachings of such men as Machiavelli or Savonarola or Mably, people who denounced the frivolity of their age in the name of eternal ideals of a universal kind, whereas the romantic movement, we are told by all its historians, was a passionate protest against universality of any kind. Therefore there is, prima facie at any rate, a problem in understanding what happened.

In order to give some sense of what I regard this great breakthrough as being, why I think that in those years, say 1760 to 1830, something transforming occurred, that there was a great break in European consciousness — in order to give you at any rate some preliminary evidence of why I think there is even a case for saying this, let me give an example. Suppose you were travelling about Western Europe, say in the 1820s, and suppose you spoke, in France, to the avant-garde young men who were friends of Victor Hugo, Hugolatres. Suppose you went to Germany and spoke there to the people who had once been visited by Madame de Staël, who had interpreted the German soul to the French. Suppose you had met the Schlegel brothers, who were great theorists of romanticism, or one or two of the friends of Goethe in Weimar, such as the fabulist and poet Tieck, or other persons connected with the romantic movement, and their followers in the universities, students, young men, painters, sculptors, who were deeply influenced by the work of these poets, these dramatists, these critics. Suppose you had spoken in England to someone who had been influenced by, say, Coleridge, or above all by Byron — anyone influenced by Byron, whether in England or France or Italy, or beyond the Rhine, or beyond the Elbe. Suppose you had spoken to these persons. You would have found that their ideal of life was approximately of the following kind. The values to which they attached the highest importance were such values as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one's life to some inner light, dedication to some ideal for which it is worth sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and dying. You would have found that they were not primarily interested in knowledge, or in the advance of science, not interested in political power, not interested in happiness, not interested, above all, in adjustment to life, in finding your place in society, in living at peace with your government, even in loyalty to your king, or to your republic. You would have found that common sense, moderation, was very far from their thoughts. You would have found that they believed in the necessity of fighting for your beliefs to the last breath in your body, and you would have found that they believed in the value of martyrdom as such, no matter what the martyrdom was martyrdom for. You would have found that they believed that minorities were more holy than majorities, that failure was nobler than success, which had something shoddy and something vulgar about it. The very notion of idealism, not in its philosophical sense, but in the ordinary sense in which we use it, that is to say the state of mind of a man who is prepared to sacrifice a great deal for principles or for some conviction, who is not prepared to sell out, who is prepared to go to the stake for something which he believes, because he believes in it — this attitude was relatively new. What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.

No matter what it was: that is the important thing. Suppose you had a conversation in the sixteenth century with somebody fighting in the great religious wars which tore Europe apart at that period, and suppose you said to a Catholic of that period, engaged in hostilities, `Of course these Protestants believe what is false; of course to believe what they believe is to court perdition; of course they are dangerous to the salvation of human souls, than which there is nothing more important; but they are so sincere, they die so readily for their cause, their integrity is so splendid, one must yield a certain meed of admiration for the moral dignity and sublimity of people who are prepared to do that.' Such a sentiment would have been unintelligible. Anyone who really knew, supposed themselves to know, the truth, say a Catholic who believed in the truths preached to him by the Church, would have known that persons able to put the whole of themselves into the theory and practice of falsehood were simply dangerous persons, and that the more sincere they were, the more dangerous, the more mad. No Christian knight would have supposed, when he fought against the Muslim, that he was expected to admire the purity and the sincerity with which the paynim believed in their absurd doctrines. No doubt if you were a decent person, and you killed a brave enemy, you were not obliged to spit upon his corpse. You took the line that it was a pity that so much courage (which was a universally admired quality), so much ability, so much devotion should have been expended on a cause so palpably absurd or dangerous. But you would not have said, `It matters little what these people believe, what matters is the state of mind in which they believe it. What matters is that they did not sell out, that they were men of integrity. These are people I can respect. If they had come over to our side simply in order to save themselves, that would have been a very self-seeking, a very prudent, a very contemptible form of action.' This is the state of mind in which people must say, `If I believe one thing, and you believe another, then it is important that we should right each other. Perhaps it is good that you should kill me, or that I should kill you; perhaps, in a duel, it is best that we should kill each other; but the worst of all possible things is compromise, because that means we have both betrayed the ideal which is within us.'

Martyrdom, of course, was always admired, but martyrdom for the truth. Christians admired martyrs because they were witnesses to the truth. If they were witnesses to falsehood there was nothing admirable about them: perhaps something to be pitied, certainly nothing to be admired. By the 1820s you find an outlook in which the state of mind, the motive, is more important than the consequence, the intention is more important than the effect. Purity of heart, integrity, devotion, dedication — all these things which we ourselves admire without much difficulty, which have entered into the very texture of our normal moral attitudes, became more or less commonplace, first among minorities; then gradually they spread outwards.

Let me give an example of what I mean by this shift. Take Voltaire's play on Muhammad. Voltaire was not particularly interested in Muhammad, and the play was really intended, no doubt, as an attack upon the Church. Nevertheless Muhammad emerges as a superstitious, cruel and fanatical monster, who crushes all efforts at freedom, at justice, at reason, and is therefore to be denounced as an enemy of all that Voltaire held most important: toleration, justice, truth, civilisation. Then consider what, very much later, Carlyle has to say. Muhammad is described by Carlyle -- who is a highly characteristic, if somewhat exaggerated, representative of the romantic movement — in a book called On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, in the course of which a great many heroes are enumerated and analysed. Muhammad is described as `a fiery mass of Life cast up from the great bosom of Nature herself'. He is a man of blazing sincerity and power, and therefore to be admired; what he is compared to, what is not liked, is the eighteenth century, which is withered and useless, which to Carlyle, as he puts it, is a warped and second-rate century. Carlyle is not in the least interested in the truths of the Koran, he does not begin to suppose that the Koran contains anything which he, Carlyle, could be expected to believe. What he admires Muhammad for is that he is an elemental force, that he lives an intense life, that he has a great many followers with him; that something elemental occurred, a tremendous phenomenon, that there was a great and moving episode in the life of mankind, which Muhammad instantiates.

The importance of Muhammad is his character and not his beliefs. The question of whether what Muhammad believed was true or false would have appeared to Carlyle perfectly irrelevant. He says, in the course of the same essays, `Dante's sublime Catholicism ... has to be torn asunder by a Luther; Shakespeare's noble feudalism ... has to end in a French Revolution.' Why do they have to do this? Because it does not matter whether Dante's sublime Catholicism is or is not true. The point is that it is a great movement, it has lasted its time, and now something equally powerful, equally earnest, equally sincere, equally deep, equally earth-shaking must take its place. The importance of the French Revolution is that it made a great dent upon the consciences of mankind; that the men who made the French Revolution were deeply in earnest, and not simply smiling hypocrites, as he thought Voltaire to be. This is an attitude which is, I will not say brand new, because it is too dangerous to say that, but at any rate sufficiently new to be worthy of attention, and whatever it was that caused it, occurred, it seems to me, somewhere between the years 1760 and 1830. It began in Germany, and grew apace.

Let us consider another example of the sort of thing I mean — the attitude towards tragedy. Previous generations assumed that tragedy was always due to some kind of error. Someone got something wrong, someone made a mistake. Either it was a moral error, or it was an intellectual error. It might have been avoidable, or it might have been unavoidable. For the Greeks, tragedy was error which the Gods sent upon you, which no man subject to them could perhaps have avoided; but, in principle, if these men had been omniscient, they would not have committed those grave errors which they did commit, and therefore would not have brought misfortunes upon themselves. If Oedipus had known that Laius was his father, he would not have murdered him. This is true even of the tragedies of Shakespeare, to a certain degree. If Othello had known that Desdemona was innocent, none of the denouement of that particular tragedy could have occurred. Therefore tragedy is founded upon the inevitable, or perhaps avoidable, lack of something in men — knowledge, skill, moral courage, ability to live, to do the right thing when you see it, or whatever it may be. Better men — morally stronger, intellectually more adept, above all omniscient persons, who perhaps also had enough power — could always avoid that which in fact is the substance of tragedy.

This is not so for the early nineteenth century, or even for the late eighteenth. If you read Schiller's tragedy The Robbers, to which I shall return again, you will find that Karl Moor, the herovillain, is a man who avenges himself upon a detestable society by becoming a brigand and committing a number of atrocious murders. He is punished for it, in the end, but if you ask `Who is to blame? Is it the side from which he comes? Are its values totally corrupt, or totally insane? Which of the two sides is fight?' there is no answer to be obtained in that tragedy, and the very question would have appeared to Schiller shallow and blind.

Here there is a collision, perhaps an unavoidable collision, between sets of values which are incompatible. Previous generations supposed that all good things could be reconciled. This is true no longer. If you read Büchner's tragedy The Death of Danton, in which Robespierre finally causes the deaths of Danton and Desmoulins in the course of the Revolution, and you ask `Was Robespierre wrong to do this?', the answer is no; the tragedy is such that Danton, although he was a sincere revolutionary who committed certain errors, did not deserve to die, and yet Robespierre was perfectly right in putting him to death. There is a collision here of what Hegel afterwards called `good with good'. It is due not to error, but to some kind of conflict of an unavoidable kind, of loose elements wandering about the earth, of values which cannot be reconciled. What matters is that people should dedicate themselves to these values with all that is in them. If they do that, they are suitable heroes for tragedy. If they do not do so, then they are philistines, then they are members of the bourgeoisie, then they are no good and not worth writing about.

The figure who dominates the nineteenth century as an image is the tousled figure of Beethoven in his garret. Beethoven is a man who does what is in him. He is poor, he is ignorant, he is boorish. His manners are bad, he knows little, and he is perhaps not a very interesting figure, apart from the inspiration which drives him forward. But he has not sold out. He sits in his garret and he creates. He creates in accordance with the light which is within him, and that is all that a man should do; that is what makes a man a hero. Even if he is not a genius like Beethoven, even if, like the hero of Balzac's Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu, `The Unknown Masterpiece', he is mad, and covers his canvas with paints, so that in the end there is nothing intelligible at all, just a fearful confusion of unintelligible and irrational paint — even then this figure is worthy of more than pity, he is a man who has dedicated himself to an ideal, who has thrown away the world, who represents the most heroic, the most self-sacrificing, the most splendid qualities which a human being can have. Gautier, in the famous preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin in 1835, defending the notion of art for art's sake, says, addressing the critics in general, and the public too, `No, imbeciles! No! Fools and cretins that you are, a book will not make a plate of soup; a novel is not a pair of boots; a sonnet is not a syringe; a drama is not a railway ... no, two hundred thousand times, no.' Gautier's point is that the old defence of art (quite apart from the particular school of social utility which he is attacking — Saint-Simon, the utilitarians and the socialists), the notion that the purpose of art is to give pleasure to a large number of persons, or even to a small number of carefully trained cognoscenti, is not valid. The purpose of art is to produce beauty, and if the artist alone perceives that his object is beautiful, that is a sufficient end in life.

Clearly something occurred to have shifted consciousness to this degree, away from the notion that there are universal truths, universal canons of art, that all human activities were meant to terminate in getting things right, and that the criteria of getting things right were public, were demonstrable, that all intelligent men by applying their intellects would discover them — away from that to a wholly different attitude towards life, and towards action. Something clearly occurred. When we ask what, we are told that there was a great turning towards emotionalism, that there was a sudden interest in the primitive and the remote — the remote in time, and the remote in place — that there was an outbreak of craving for the infinite. Something is said about `emotion recollected in tranquillity'; something is said — but it is not clear what this has to do with any of the things which I have just mentioned — about Scott's novels, Schubert's songs, Delacroix, the rise of Stateworship, and German propaganda in favour of economic self-sufficiency; also about superhuman qualities, admiration of wild genius, outlaws, heroes, aestheticism, self-destruction.

What have all these things in common? If we try to discover, a somewhat startling prospect greets our view. Let me offer some definitions of romanticism which I have culled from the writings of some of the most eminent persons who have written on the subject; these show that the subject is by no means easy.

Stendhal says that the romantic is the modern and interesting, classicism is the old and the dull. This is not perhaps quite as simple as it sounds: what he means is that romanticism is a matter of understanding the forces which move in your own life, as opposed to some escape towards something obsolete. However, what he actually says, in the book on Racine and Shakespeare, is what I have just enunciated. But his contemporary Goethe says that romanticism is disease, it is the weak, the sickly, the battle-cry of a school of wild poets and Catholic reactionaries; whereas classicism is strong, fresh, gay, sound, like Homer and the Song of the Niebelungs. Nietzsche says it is not a disease but a therapy, a cure for a disease. Sismondi, a Swiss critic of considerable imagination, though not perhaps altogether friendly to romanticism, in spite of being a friend of Madame de Staël, says that romanticism is a union of love, religion and chivalry. But Friedrich von Gentz, who was Metternich's chief agent at this time, and a precise contemporary of Sismondi, says that it is one of the heads of a three-headed Hydra, the other two heads being reform and revolution; it is in fact a left-wing menace, a menace to religion, to tradition and to the past which must be stamped out. The young French romantics, `La Jeune France', echo this by saying `Le romantisme c'est la révolution.' Révolution against what? Apparently against everything.

Heine says romanticism is the passion-flower sprung from the blood of Christ, a re-awakening of the poetry of the sleepwalking Middle Ages, dreaming spires that look at you with the deep dolorous eyes of grinning spectres. Marxists would add that it was indeed an escape from the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, and Ruskin would agree, saying it was a contrast of the beautiful past with the frightful and the monotonous present; this is a modification of Heine's view, but not all that different from it. But Taine says that romanticism is a bourgeois revolt against the aristocracy after 1789; romanticism is the expression of the energy and force of the new arrivistes — the exact opposite. It is the expression of the pushing, vigorous powers of the new bourgeoisie against the old, decent, conservative values of society and history. It is the expression not of weakness, nor of despair, but of brutal optimism.

Friedrich Schlegel, the greatest harbinger, the greatest herald and prophet of romanticism that ever lived, says there is in man a terrible unsatisfied desire to soar into infinity, a feverish longing to break through the narrow bonds of individuality. Sentiments not altogether unlike this can be found in Coleridge and indeed in Shelley too. But Ferdinand Brunetière, towards the end of the century, says that it is literary egotism, it is stressing of individuality at the expense of a larger world, it is the opposite of self-transcendence, it is sheer self-assertion; and the Baron Seillière says yes, and egomania and primitivism; and Irving Babbitt echoes this.

Friedrich Schlegel's brother August Wilhelm Schlegel and Madame de Staël agreed that romanticism comes from the Romance nations, or at least the Romance languages, that it really comes from a modification of the verses of the Provençal troubadours; but Renan says it is Celtic. Gaston Paris says it is Breton; Seillière says it comes from a mixture of Plato and pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Joseph Nadler, a learned German critic, says that romanticism is really the homesickness of those Germans who lived between the Elbe and the Niemen — their homesickness for the old Central Germany from which they once came, the daydreams of exiles and colonists. Eichendorff says it is Protestant nostalgia for the Catholic Church. But Chateaubriand, who did not live between the Elbe and the Niemen, and therefore did not experience these emotions, says it is the secret and inexpressible delight of a soul playing with itself: `I speak everlastingly of myself.' Joseph Aynard says it is the will to love something, an attitude or an emotion towards others, and not towards oneself, the very opposite of the will to power. Middleton Murry says Shakespeare was essentially a romantic writer, and adds that all great writers since Rousseau have been romantic. But the eminent Marxist critic Georg Lukács says no great writers are romantic, least of all Scott, Hugo and Stendhal.

If we consider these quotations from men who after all deserve to be read, who are in other respects profound and brilliant writers on many subjects, it is clear that there is some difficulty in discovering the common element in all these generalisations. That is why Northrop Frye was so very wise to warn against it. All these competing definitions have never, so far as I know, really been the subject of a protest by anyone; they have never incurred that degree of critical wrath which might have been unleashed against anyone who had really produced definitions or generalisations which were universally regarded as absurd and irrelevant.

The next step is to see what characteristics have been called romantic by writers on this subject, by critics. A very peculiar result emerges. There is such variety among the examples I have accumulated that the difficulty of the subject which I was unwise enough to choose seems even more extreme.

Romanticism is the primitive, the untutored, it is youth, life, the exuberant sense of life of the natural man, but it is also pallor, fever, disease, decadence, the maladie de siècle, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the Dance of Death, indeed Death itself. It is Shelley's dome of many-coloured glass, and it is also his white radiance of eternity. It is the confused teeming fullness and richness of life, Fülle des Lebens, inexhaustible multiplicity, turbulence, violence, conflict, chaos, but also it is peace, oneness with the great `I Am', harmony with the natural order, the music of the spheres, dissolution in the eternal all-containing spirit. It is the strange, the exotic, the grotesque, the mysterious, the supernatural, ruins, moonlight, enchanted castles, hunting horns, elves, giants, griffins, falling water, the old mill on the Floss, darkness and the powers of darkness, phantoms, vampires, nameless terror, the irrational, the unutterable. Also it is the familiar, the sense of one's unique tradition, joy in the smiling aspect of everyday nature, and the accustomed sights and sounds of contented, simple, rural folk — the sane and happy wisdom of rosy-checked sons of the soil. It is the ancient, the historic, it is Gothic cathedrals, mists of antiquity, ancient roots and the old order with its unanalysable qualities, its profound but inexpressible loyalties, the impalpable, the imponderable. Also it is the pursuit of novelty, revolutionary change, concern with the fleeting present, desire to live in the moment, rejection of knowledge, past and future, the pastoral idyll of happy innocence, joy in the passing instant, a sense of timelessness. It is nostalgia, it is reverie, it is intoxicating dreams, it is sweet melancholy and bitter melancholy, solitude, the sufferings of exile, the sense of alienation, roaming in remote places, especially the East, and in remote times, especially the Middle Ages. But also it is happy co-operation in a common creative effort, the sense of forming part of a Church, a class, a party, a tradition, a great and all-containing symmetrical hierarchy, knights and retainers, the ranks of the Church, organic social ties, mystic unity, one faith, one land, one blood, `la terre et les morts', as Barrès said, the great society of the dead and the living and the yet unborn. It is the Toryism of Scott and Southey and Wordsworth, and it is the radicalism of Shelley, Büchner and Stendhal. It is Chateaubriand's aesthetic medievalism, and it is Michelet's loathing of the Middle Ages. It is Carlyle's worship of authority, and Hugo's hatred of authority. It is extreme nature mysticism, and extreme anti-naturalist aestheticism. It is energy, force, will, youth, life, étalage du moi; it is also self-torture, self-annihilation, suicide. It is the primitive, the unsophisticated, the bosom of nature, green fields, cow-bells, murmuring brooks, the infinite blue sky. No less, however, it is also dandyism, the desire to dress up, red waistcoats, green wigs, blue hair, which the followers of people like Gérard de Nerval wore in Paris at a certain period. It is the lobster which Nerval led about on a string in the streets of Paris. It is wild exhibitionism, eccentricity, it is the battle of Ernani, it is ennui, it is taedium vitae, it is the death of Sardanopolis, whether painted by Delacroix, or written about by Berlioz or Byron. It is the convulsion of great empires, wars, slaughter and the crashing of worlds. It is the romantic hero — the rebel, l'homme fatale, the damned soul, the Corsairs, Manfreds, Giaours, Laras, Cains, all the population of Byron's heroic poems. It is Melmoth, it is Jean Sbogar, all the outcasts and Ishmaels as well as the golden-hearted courtesans and the noble-hearted convicts of nineteenth-century fiction. It is drinking out of the human skull, it is Berlioz who said he wanted to climb Vesuvius in order to commune with a kindred soul. It is Satanic revels, cynical irony, diabolical laughter, black heroes, but also Blake's vision of God and his angels, the great Christian society, the eternal order, and `the starry heavens which can scarce express the infinite and eternal of the Christian soul'. It is, in short, unity and multiplicity. It is fidelity to the particular, in the paintings of nature for example, and also mysterious tantalising vagueness of outline. It is beauty and ugliness. It is art for art's sake, and art as an instrument of social salvation. It is strength and weakness, individualism and collectivism, purity and corruption, revolution and reaction, peace and war, love of life and love of death.

It is perhaps not very surprising that, faced with this, A. O. Lovejoy, who is certainly the most scrupulous and one of the most illuminating scholars who ever dealt with the history of the ideas of the last two centuries, approached a condition nearing despair. He unravelled as many strands of romantic thought as he was able to, and not only found that some of them contradict the others, which is patently true, and that some are totally irrelevant to the others, but he went further. He took two specimens of what nobody would deny to be romanticism, for example, primitivism and eccentricity — dandyism — and asked what they had in common. Primitivism, which began in English verse and to some extent in English prose at the beginning of the eighteenth century, celebrates the noble savage, the simple life, the irregular patterns of spontaneous action, as against the corrupt sophistication and Alexandrine verse of a highly sophisticated society. It is an attempt to demonstrate that there is a natural law which can be discovered best in the untutored heart of the uncorrupted native, or the uncorrupted child. What, asks Lovejoy quite intelligibly, has this in common with red waistcoats, blue hair, green wigs, absinthe, death, suicide and the general eccentricity of the followers of Nerval and Gautier? He concludes by saying that he really does not see what there is in common, and one can sympathise with him. One might say, perhaps, that there is an air of revolt in both, that both have revolted against some kind of civilisation, one in order to go to some Robinson Crusoe island, there to commune with nature and live among uncorrupted simple people, and the other in pursuit of some kind of violent aestheticism and dandyism. But mere revolt, mere denunciation of corruption cannot be romantic. We do not regard the Hebrew prophets or Savonarola or even Methodist preachers as particularly romantic. This is too wide of the mark. One does therefore have a certain sympathy with Lovejoy's despair.

Let me quote a passage which Lovejoy's disciple George Boas wrote apropos of this:


[A]fter the discrimination of the romanticisms made by Lovejoy, there ought to be no further discussion of what romanticism really was. There happen to have been a variety of aesthetic doctrines, some of which were logically related to others and some of which were not, all called by the same name. But that fact does not imply they all had a common essence, any more than the fact that hundreds of people are called John Smith means that they are all of the same parentage. This is perhaps the most common and misleading error arising from the confusion of ideas and words. One could speak for hours about it alone and perhaps should.


I should like to relieve your fears immediately by saying that I do not propose to do this. But at the same time I think that both Lovejoy and Boas, eminent scholars though they are, and great though their contribution has been towards illumination of thought, are in this instance mistaken. There was a romantic movement; it did have something which was central to it; it did create a great revolution in consciousness; and it is important to discover what this is.

One can of course give up the whole game. One can say, like Valéry, that words like romanticism and classicism, words like humanism and naturalism, are not names with which one can operate at all. `One cannot get drunk, one cannot quench one's thirst, with labels on bottles.' There is much to be said for this point of view. At the same time, unless we do use some generalisations it is impossible to trace the course of human history. Therefore, difficult as it may be, it is important to find out what it was that caused this enormous revolution in human consciousness which occurred in those centuries. There are people who, faced with this plethora of evidence which I have attempted to collect, may feel some sympathy for the late Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who said with typical British breeziness, `The whole pother about [the difference between classicism and romanticism] amounts to nothing that need trouble a healthy man.'

I cannot deny that I do not share this point of view. It appears to me to be excessively defeatist. Therefore I shall do my best to explain what in my view the romantic movement fundamentally came to. The only sane and sensible way of approaching it, at least the only way that I have ever found to be at all helpful, is by slow and patient historical method; by looking at the beginning of the eighteenth century and considering what the situation was then, and then considering what the factors were which undermined it, one by one, and what the particular combination or confluence of factors was which, by the later part of the century, caused what appears to me to be the greatest transformation of Western consciousness, certainly in our time.

Views toward Shamanism

Sounds like he's more into Zen than shamanism then. Maybe he's doing the former without knowing.

Anyway, on the topic, I don't think one can practice "shamanism" without being a member of an aboriginal culture and living, at least partially, "in nature". Most traditional cultures I am aware of would consider practicing "shamanic" rites for personal power to make you a sorcerer. The religion is built around the idea that man must be in accord spiritually with what he is taking from his environment, and if you're not hunting I don't see why you'd need to be appeasing the spirit of the deer or what have you. I suppose you could be trying to negotiate with all the spirits of the slaughtered factory farm animals you've consumed however, heh.

Ever-present origin

[I believe I saw Akhnaton mention this thinker in another thread somewhere. Here is some background in case anyone is interested.]

http://www.integraleweltsicht.de/Geb...ch-vorwort.htm
The Ever-present Origin. Part One
by Jean Keckeis

While completing his studies in Berlin during his mid-twenties - a time of precarious circumstances, as the inflation had abolished the family reserves - Jean Gebser wrote a poem entitled "Many Things are About to be Born," which begins: "We always lose our way / when overtaken by thinking . . . ," a thought which surely reflects a premonition of his later intellectual and spiritual journey.

Born in Posen in 1905, Gebser received his schooling in Königsberg and later in the renowned preparatory school in Rossleben on the Unstrut. He has left us a fine account of how he learned there to "swim free"; ever since a jump from the diving board "into uncertainty," he was in possession of something that he did not fully realize until decades after. "It was then," he wrote later, "that I lost my fear in the face of uncertainty. A sense of confidence began to mature within me which later determined my entire bearing and attitude toward life, a confidence in the sources of our strength of being, a confidence in their immediate accessibility. This is an inner security that is fully effective only when we are able to do whatever we do not for our own sake . . . ."

Following his first-hand experience of the Brown Shirts in Munich in 1931, Gebser left Germany of his own free will and went, penniless, to Spain. There the difficult decision to forego his mother tongue was rewarded by the "enriching knowledge of the Latin way of thinking, acting, and living." He became sufficiently familiarwith Spanish culture to hold for a time a position in the Republican Ministry of Culture and even to write poetry in the language of his friend Federico Garcia Lorca (Poesias de la Tarde, 1936). Twelve hours before his Madrid apartment was bombed in the Autumn of 1936 he again set out on the path of uncertainty.

By this time he had already formed the conception of his magnum opus. The Ever-Present Origin, a conception which matured during three years of privation in Paris during his association.with the circle around Picasso and Malraux. The necessary repose for completion of the work Gebser found in Switzerland; where he arrived near the end of August, 1939, two hours before the frontier was closed. He became a Swiss citizen in 1951. Unfortunately, Gebser was unable to assume duties associated with his chair for the Study of Comparative Civilizations at the University ofSalzburg; a progressively worsening case of asthma forced him to remain ever closer to his home in Berne and to avoid exertion. The flights of spirit of which he was then still capable are perhaps better known outside Switzerland; and unlike the Swiss, with their predilection for specialized knowledge as such, Gebser went on to transform a prodigious and multifaceted knowledge, gleaned with rare sensitivity from ancient to avant-garde sources, into Bildung, wisdom and sophrosyne. A glance at the Festschrift tocommemorate his sixtieth birthday, Transparent World (Transparente Welt, Berne: Huber, 1965) provides evidence of the universal emanation of his creativity, which is further attested to by his extensive list of publications.

Jean Gebser did not live to see the completion of a project close to his heart (he died on May 4, 1973 in Berne): the publication of his Ever-Present Origin in an inexpensive paperbound edition (Munich: DeutscherTaschenbuchverlag, 1973, three volumes). This edition was to make the work more accessible to students and other young people who have shown their concern with a new consciousness and a new orientation toward the world.

The path which led Gebser to his new and universal perception of the world is, briefly, as follows. In the wake of materialism and social change, man had been described in the early years of our century as the "dead end" of nature. Freud had redefined culture as illness - a result of drive sublimation; Klages had called the spirit (and he was surely speaking of the hypertrophied intellect) the "adversary of the soul," propounding a return to a life like that of the Pelasgi, the aboriginal inhabitants of Greece; and Spengler had declared the "Demise of the West" during the years following World War I. The consequences of such pessimism continued to proliferate long after its foundations had been superseded.

It was with these foundations - the natural sciences - that Gebser began. As early as Planck it was known that matter was not at all what materialists had believed it to be, and since 1943 Gebser has repeatedly emphasized that the so-called crisis of Western culture was in fact an essential restructuration. (It was in 1943 that hisTransformation of the Occident was first published [Zürich/New York:Oprecht; also Dutch, French, Italian, and Swedish editions], an estimation of the results of research in the natural sciences during the first half of the century.) Gebser has noted two results that are of particular significance: first, the abandonment of materialistic determinism, of a one-sided mechanistic-causal mode of thought; and second, a manifest "urgency of attempts to discover a universal way of observing things, and to overcome the inner division of contemporary man who, as a result of his one-sided, rational orientation, thinks only in dualisms." Against this background of recent discoveries and conclusions in the natural sciences Gebser discerned the outlines of a potential human universality. He also sensed the necessity to go beyond the confines of this first treatise so as to include the humanities (such as political economics and sociology) as well as the arts in a discussion along similar lines. This was the point of departure for The Ever-Present Origin.

Here a word might be in order about Gebser's "method." No later than during his sojourn in Spain he must have acquired the "Mediterranean way of thought" (as Ortega y Gasset might have called it) for which existence - the external, the concrete - is more important than the inward, the abstract, the mere awareness of being. What Gebser presents in The Ever-Present Origin was incubated, not in the study, but in the warmth of living contact with representatives of all disciplines. His examination of the present restructuration of reality and of the establishment of a new consciousness structure led him to discover earlier restructurations in mankind's consciousness development. Accordingly,the First partof the book (firstt published in 1949), based an research and insights of ethnology, psychology, and philology, uncovers the "Foundations of the Aperspectival World" in which we now find ourselves (although there is an unwillingness in certain quarters to accept this as a fact). We have evidence that human consciousness has undergone three previous mutations: from the archaic or primordial basic structure the magic, the mythical, and the mental (or rational) structures have emerged. The term "consciousness structures" is to be understood as nothing other than the visibly emerging perception of reality throughout the various ages and civilizations.

This does not imply, however, that the later consciousness structures obliterate the earlier - we retain in ourselves irrevocable magic and mythical elements, origin and the present -; nor is it to suggest that a given later consciousness structure is of greater "value" than the earlier, although man has demonstrated at all times the understandable weakness of overestimating and exclusively utilizing the most recent potentialities that manifest themselves in him. This is perhaps most clearly exemplified by the hubris still evident in many quarters that overemphasizes the ratio and attempts to subordinate all else to man's calculating reason and will.

During the interim between the publication of the first and second parts of The Ever-Present Origin - the second is an exploration of the "Manifestations of the Aperspectival World" - an important symposium was held at which prominent representatives of the various arts and sciences themselves presented the evidence of the contemporary restructuration which Gebser has demonstrated. Eighteen specialists presented two cycles of lectures at the Academy ofCommerce in St.Gallen, Switzerland (1950 51), on the subject of the "New Perception of the World" which were later published in the two volumes of Die neueWeltschau (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1952-53). A surprising unanimity of basic conception emerged from these lectures: an openness toward questions dealing with transcendence; a scepticism about a self-satisfied rationalism; and a courageous humility vis-à-vis insights into man's limitations of knowledge and perception - all of these being duly noted in the press accounts. It is such interpretation and sustenance of the life-affirming energies of our epoch that form the substance of the second part of The Ever-Present Origin.

The birth-pangs of the aperspectival, integral perception of the world began in the first decade of our century. The major and unique theme of our juncture, according to Gebser, is the irruption of time into our consciousness. It is a matter of our recognizing time as a quality and an intensity rather than as an analytical system of measurable relationships, its perverted and materialized form in the perspectival age. In the new modality of perceiving the world, time appears to be its fundamental constituent; time, being immeasurable and not amenable to rational thought, emerges ever more clearly as a liberation from previous time-forms. It becomes time-freedom. "Just as the conquest of space was accompanied by a disclosure or ‘opening up’ as it were of surface, of the unperspectival world, so too is today's emergent perception of time accompanied by an opening of space." Today, as the arational-integral begins to supplant the mental-rational, the exhaustion of values at the completion of each consciousness structure becomes evident in the exhaustion and quantification of thought,of our mental capacity, as exemplified by the robot-like thinking of our machines. Nevertheless, the "aperspectival" does not imply the exclusion of the perspectival, rather that its claim of exclusivity must be abandoned in favor of something more encompassing. Gebser has evinced the salient aspects of this new consciousness structure from numerous phenomena in the humanities, the natural and social sciences, and the arts.

In one of his most recent books, The Invisible Origin (DerunsichtbareUrsprung, Olten: Walter, 1970), Gebser has again made evident something hardly describable: "evolution as the realization of a pre-established pattern." Time and again, physicists, philosophers, psychologists, futurologists, artists, and poets have tried to express in words their intuitions of this ever-present origin. In the spring of 1960, the New Helvetic Society (Berne), with the cooperation of Studio Berne, presented a series of broadcasts with the general title: "Paths to a New Reality" (later published as WegezurneuenWirklichkeit, Berne: Hallwag, 1960). Besides Gebser, the participants included the physicist Houtermans, the biologist Portmann, the historian HerbertLüthy, and historian of law Hans Marti. Toward the close of the series, Gebser came to speak specifically about ideologies as typical outgrowths of a purpose-oriented, perspectivistic era, and demonstrated how these ideologies linger about in the world as lost causes, outdone only by the search for new or "counter" ideologies. Particularly anachronistic are the effects of Christian sects posturing like ideologies.

The following year Gebser published another group of essays which had evolved from lectures of his own entitled "Standing the Test, or Verifications of the New Consciousness" (In derBewährung, Berne: Francke, 1962). His next book, "Asia Smiles Differently" (Asienlächeltanders, Frankfurt and Berlin: Ullstein, 1968), based an his extensive travels in India, China, and Japan, shows yet another notable aspect of his integral "world perception." The book first appeared in paperback in 1962 under the title "Asian Primer" and was intended as a brief vade mecum for Westerners to aid in their understanding of the Asian mentality. (The augmented editon of 1968 followed yet another of Gebser's visits to India.) Both versions of the book document the considerable differences between Western and Eastern ways of thinking. The Asian, for instance, does not experience opposites as dualities or antinomies, as we do in the West, but as complementarities. And in Asia one can still encounter manifestations of what we in the Western world frequently reject as pre- or irrational malfunctions: the magic experience and mythical feeling of the world.

Gebser's later work further explored and elaborated significant aspects of The Ever-Present Origin. He defined polarity, for example, as "the living constellation of mutual complementation, correspondences, and interdependence," which he articulated to counter the deadening effects of dualisms. How many misunderstandings come about because we turn interdependencies into antagonisms! He also addressed the subject of "Primordial Anxiety and Primordial Trust," the subject of his last lecture in October, 1972 at a physicians' congress in Bad Boll (Württemberg). It is a reply from the profundity of wisdom to the three questions: Where do I come from? Who am I? and Where am I going? These and other essays are now collected in the eight volume edition of his works currently in publication in Switzerland (Schaffhausen: Novalis, 1975 1981).

From a poetic fragment written just three weeks before his death are the verses:

Entirely clear and serene

is the heaven within

and farther, in many ways,

the ascent to origin.

Were they a poetic anticipation of an experience of which he spoke in his last lecture: "Death, too, is birth"? Around 500 B. C., at the time of mutation from the mythical to the rational consciousness structure, Heraclitus had expressed it in the words: "The path of ascent and descent is one and the same." (1973)

Bourgeoisie will sell your nation if you let them

The following is an interesting article I found by Brether von Stroup.What I find interesting is that the same policy of gaining cheap labour is being implemented acroos the Western World, not just in America.This same corrupt policy is now found everywhere in the West and clearly illustrates that all Western Governments are really just the same New World Order Government.In Britain, tax money which should be spent on hospitals and the elderly is instead spent on immigrants.These people in Western Governments would sell their own grandmothers if it meant a quick profit:

"CHEAP LABOR......
The Big Corporations pay Bush to open the borders.
The Big Corporations rule, along with Bush.
Check out ...spp.gov

Bush doesn't care about America, he loves money too much.
Oh, yes. We should all follow the advice of the richest man on the planet. How do you think he got that way? He exploited others to become what he is today. There are plenty of qualified american workers unemployed at the moment to fill those jobs he says are so critical, but people like him are not willing to pay them a fair wage, they would rather hire from outside the country and pay less while he just keeps getting richer and richer.

And no, I am not ranting because I am jealous of his money. My family is doing just fine. But when you have enough money to almost singlehandedly wipe out the national debt, you would think he could put more effort into funding some of his ideals. I also understand that he and his wife give a lot to different charities, but when you still have a hundred billion dollars just lying around, doesn't it seem a little bit ridiculous?


This is one of those circular issues. First, Bill Gates is not talking about immigrants in most of his remarks. He's talking about jobs being exported. Look at computer programming. Programmers in the US were making BIG dollars for several years. As the Internet evolved, US business found it could save money by exporting that work to India where programmers demanded much less. Jobs started to dry up in this country so fewer people went to school to study programming. As a result, those skills are dwindling in America.

The same case can be made for machine shops and injection mold makers. Those jobs (and therefore skill growth) have been largely exported to China and other Pacific Rim countries that pay as little as two dollars per day to their workers.

The immigration problem tends to degrade job desirability in the US. The Government would like us to believe that illegal immigrants work ONLY jobs that Americans don't want. That's a two edged sword. That may be true in some agricultural jobs such as crop picking. But since the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1986 was not enforced, employers in construction industries started hiring more illegals. They are often paid cash at less than or right at minimum wage. Neither the employer nor the illegal pay taxes on the cash payouts. As a result trades that used to be good jobs (plumbing, framing, drywalling, etc.) have fallen off. Employers would rather pay an illegal six dollars with no payroll tax, than an American twelve dollars and have to pay the tax. The job, which is NOW undesirable was made undesirable by failing to enforce the law and allowing employers to hire the illegals without penalty.

American kids and parents know that CEO's want cheap labor for tech jobs. So does it make sense from an 18year olds standpoint and that of their parent to pay thousands of dollars to go to college for a degree that may not land them a job? Does it make sense to study in a very challenging field for 4 years or so, and yet your job could quickly be outsourced?

Well, it seems to me that there are very few of us who aren't qualified to harvest vegetables or work in the fast food industry. There are a lot of more skilled jobs that illegals are taking but I haven't heard of any illegal immigrant rocket scientists being rounded up by ICE.

There are millions of displaced several generational Americans. The phony 4.5 to 5% unemployment statistics ONLY represent who is collecting unemployment pay! Our actual unemployment is much higher nationwide! Detroit area over 40% New Orleans mostly wipe-out Not just major cites have high poverty so does the rural area's! This corrupt Capitalistic few are willing to go great lengths to screw over their fellow citizen! immigrants ARE taking our money/jobs/lifestyle while our ruling class "illegitimately" enjoys the conquer & divide tactic. I saw Gates on Cspan-2 he just became public enemy #1 with his pro immigrant brain drain fix plan!

Immigrants do not have to work in this country. They are supported with money that is stolen from US citizens by the organized crime syndicate in Washington.

Cheap is the name of the game. Either outsource for cheap or bring them in for cheap. I personally know people who were in the tech industry who had their jobs outsourced, so they went on to get educated for something else and ended up training their HB1 replacement, went on to something else that was supposed to be a hot job prospect that was then sold out to some other buyer.........

I honestly don't know what they want anymore. When my oldest daughter was in school they pushed big time the service industry....hotel motel management, culinary arts, nursing, teaching.....she made her choice and worked her way through college and they've made her job basicly a minimum wage job now.

With my degree I was getting 14 an hour, full benefits etc. back in the 70's and 80's. Now it's a tad above minimum wage, no benefits. But now they've added "must speak Spanish" to the agenda.

I have been an assistant manager and they dispensed with that position and decided to call it "key holder".....which ment you did the job of an assistant manager but you only got 6.25 an hour. You couldn't collect unemployment because they offered you the "key holder" position.

I've gone so far as to get other certificates etc. in other things that I may beat someone else out for the job but it doesn't mean more money for the added education.

I've done gold wire bonding for cell phone chips and the US office ended up closing in this "global" company......but it was in a state that could fire you for no reason which made it to where you couldn't qualify for unemployment so they weeded people out to a select few before they announced their closing to limit the unemployment claims.

Then there's the great trick of salary workers. Looks great at first......till it ends up your working twice as long and it balances out to not much more than minimum wage.

So there's no way that I believe we NEED more people for ANY level of work in this country. Legal or illegal. It just seems they want a cheap disposable population to keep
the wealthy pockets lined.

An education is great......just don't think for a second it is going to guarentee you a secure well paid job that will last throughout your life. Some are lucky and it does. Others are like me. Great piece of paper that gave me a temporary good time and even being flexible enough to do whatever was necessary in other jobs didn't pan out to any financial security. And now they want to put more limits for people who are more than qualified to work like "must speak Spanish".

Personally.....I've had enough of it.

BROTHER VON STROUP."

Semitic traditions on intermarriage

How Jews View Race-Mixing, according to their Book:
From the Book of Ezra in the Old Testament:

"...For we have forsaken thy commandments, which thou didst command by the prophets, saying, 'The land you are entering to possess is a land unclean with the pollutions of its peoples, whose abominations have filled it from end to end.Therefore give not your daughters to their sons, neither take their daughters for your sons, and never seek their peace or prosperity, that you may be strong, and eat the good of the land, and leave it for an inheritance to yout children forever.'And after all that has come upon us for our evil deeds, and seeing that thou, Our God, hast punished us no less than our inequities deserved, shall we break thy commandments again and and intermarry with the peoples who practice these abominations?

...Shecaniah the son of Jehiel addresses Ezra:
"We have broken faith with our God and married foreign women, but even now there is hope for Israel in spite of this.Therefore let us make a covenant with our God and to put away all these wives and their children, according to the counsel of my lord;....

Then Ezra the priest stood up."You have trespassed and married foreign women," he said to them, "and so increased the guilt of Israel.Now make confessions to the Lord, and dio his will; separate yourselves from the foreign wives."


From the Book of Nehemiah:

"In those days also I saw Jews who had married foreign women, and half of their children could not speak the language of Judah.I contended with them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair; and I made them take an oath, saying, "You shall not give your daughters to their sons, or take their daughters for your sons or for yourselves....Shall we then act treacherously against our God by marrying foreign women?".....then I cleansed them from everything foreign, and I established the duties of the priests and Levites."

From the Book of Malachi:

"Judah has been faithless, and abomination has been committed in Jerusalem; for Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord and has married the daughters of a foreign god.May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob any man who does this, even though he brings an offering to the Lord of Hosts."



Thus, presumably Jews need have no problem with the idea of race-mixing, according to the Bible, just so long as that race-mixing does not involve Jews.

---

No, this thread is about what is considered foreign (ie., ethnically and religiously distinct) in the minds of the Jews themselves, according to their own Book, as I have already explained.Hence, Jews description of non-Israelites (non-Jews)as "foreign" or according to another translation, "strange".

When Shechaniah said "We have broken faith with our God and married foreign women, but even now there is hope for Israel in spite of this,"
he means that the women are of another nationality (from Latin natus: race) hence the word foreign and of another Faith, thus he says they have broken Faith with their God.

Also, when Nehemiah says that "In those days also I saw Jews who had married foreign women, and half of their children could not speak the language of Judah ,"

If they were theologically Jewish or of the nation of Israel in a national/geographical sense then the offspring mentioned in the quote above would have been able to speak Hebrew/Aramaic (the language of Judah).This proves that the offspring were both ethnically different and Gentile also.Every ethnically Jewish male has to understand the tongue of Judah.

A Jew has to be of the Twelve Tribes of Israel (Judah), if not, then that person is not a Jew in any sense of the word.


The word “Gentile” is not even once used in any Hebrew manuscript of the Old Testament, for the good reason that there is no such word in Hebrew, nor any word which corresponds to it.
There is no such word as "Gentile" in the Torah as the word does not exist in Hebrew.The word "Gentile", whereever you find it in the Old Testament/Torah is a mistranslation of the word "Goy"."Goy" means "nation", and the plural of "Goy" is "Goyim".So why hasn't th eword been translated properly if it means "nation"?



In Genesis, the Jewish God said to Abram, “I will make of thee a great nation” which in Hebrew is, God said “I will make of thee a great GOY.” It doesn't make any sense to say:“I will make a Gentile of you,” so it was correctly translated as “nation.” Again in Genesis, Rebekah was pregnant with the twins, Esau and Jacob; and while still in her womb, her unborn children were struggling against each other; so she wondered at this, and asked her God what it meant. The Jewish God said to her, “Two GOYIM are in thy womb.” It wouldn't have made any sense for the the Jewish God to be telling her, “You are an adulteress, pregnant with two Gentile children, when your husband is not a Gentile.” God said “Two NATIONS are in thy womb,” and that is how it was translated; but it is the same word, “GOYIM,” which elsewhere they generally translate as “Gentiles.”


The word "Goy" is so often mistranslated as meaning "Gentile" when in actual fact it means "Nation," (Goy is correctly translated to meanGreek Ethnos) i.e. RACE.

---

On a different slant, there is one group that is both racially/genetically and theologically connected to the Jews, according to their own Book:


The Old Testament/Torah cites that the Jews and Arabs are descended from a single family, that of Abram.Yahweh, the Desert god, supposedly told Abram (later called Abraham) that his son Ishmael, by his female slave Hagar, would be blessed thus:
"I will bless Ishmael and make him fruitful; I will make him a great nation."
Yahweh allegedly said the same thing to Ishmael's slave mother, Hagar.
Furthermore, "he lived in the wilderness of Paran....his sons dwelt opposite Egypt in the direction of Assyria."

In other words, both the Jews and Arabs, according to their book, spring from one single family.They are all sons of Abraham, the only difference is, that the book says that the Jews are descended from Abraham's free wife, Sarah, whereas all the Arabs are descended from the Jew Abraham and his female slave, Hagar.Including Mohammed and his family.

There has always been a connection between Jews and Arabs, including the Arab Prophet of Islam, who was an Arab.

Omar Khayyam and Max Stirnir

http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/maxomar.html

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H. IBRAHIM TÜRKDOGAN


Omar Khayyam and Max Stirner



A BRIDGE
BETWEEN THE ORIENT AND THE OCCIDENT





Those who mean to understand
poetry will have to visit the land
of poetry.
Those who mean to understand
a poet will have to visit the poet’s land.

J.W. von Goethe


Preface

Maybe I already heard someone mention the name of Omar Chajjam while I was going to school in Turkey as an adolescent. Maybe, but I am not sure. I was rather familiar with such names as Rumi, Hafiz, Yunus Emre etc., strictly speaking, I met with Omar’s poems after reading Max Stirner’s book entitled “The Ego and its Own”, or let’s say while reading this book.

At once I sensed these two philosopher’s points of contact. However, at that time I viewed Stirner’s philosophy from a different angle, i.e. from a totally rationalistic angle. The same went for my reading Chajjam, because this study mode required little effort. It is basic to traditional methods of thinking and learning with which young people have to cope.

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At that time I came across a “comparison” between Stirner and Chajjam only once: The author named H. Stourzh once mentioned Stirner’s name in connection with Chajjam in his book “Max Stirner’s Philosophy of the Ego”, but he only did so very shortly and only in passing. I became aware of Chajjam, but as there was only little information about him available, I did not pursue the matter any longer. Then the problem of having to struggle with numerous social constraints arose and thus I refrained from this venture.

It was years later that I did not only begin to understand Chajjam as a poet, but also as a poet-philosopher. Naturally I also began broadening my knowledge of eastern and oriental philosophies as well as western philosophies. This enabled me to look through the traditional, i.e. strictly rational mode of thinking. Stirner had criticized this mode of thinking, which has no likes in occidental countries, yes it is in fact “the only one” of its kind, i.e. singular.

In his essay “Stirner’s Critics” he wrote, “What Stirner says is a word, a thought, a notion; what he says is not what he means, and what he means is inexpressible.”1 Thus Stirner had set a trap for himself, which he was unable to get out of easily and which he did not want to get out of either. But this unluckily kept everybody from defining the inexpressible. Stirner, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Scheler et al. did not suffer from the existing political and social laws. They rather suffered from the constraints of rational thinking whose laws had great power over people; what is more German philosophers were constrained by particular German ways of thinking. Nietzsche wrote, “To think German-style, to feel German-style — I can achieve everything, but this exceeds my strengths.”2 Stirner was right when declaring this nation to be one tyrannizing her children.

Those intellectuals knew very well that certain modes of thinking and certain theories enchained them, and they dragged those chains along with them all their lives, their books give evidence of the rigid and neurotic way in which they thought and felt. Heidegger subdued his drives by his articulateness and his linguistic sophistication, he literally drowned in an ocean of words. Social constraints are barriers built up by reason, which is considered to be omnipotent. Therefore each rationalistic alternative has been and will be an idea tied to reason, reduced to common logical principles, and it will be compulsive. This recognition was the one that made me devote myself to Stirner’s philosophy properly, it was then that I realized that man can be a prisoner of his reason. Heidegger called for help, shouting, and “We can only learn to think if we radically get rid of the nature of traditional ways of thinking!”3

1 Parerga. Kritiken. Repliken edited by Bernd A. Laska, Nürnberg 1986, p. 149
2 Ecce Homo. Edited by Kroener 1990, p. 339
3 Was heißt Denken. (Thinking: what does it imply?) Edited by Reclam 1992, p. 9

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It sounds very mystical and promising, but the sounds of his words suggested a golden cage, which was hard to escape from. Heidegger himself: something existi ng as an object turned into something existing as a thought, stayed there and did not proceed any further. And Heidegger himself, some being whose structure of existence being a limited One only amounts to Being-In-The-World. The basic structures of his concrete Ego as One in an objective world of things permit him to sneer at the animal inside himself in order to cope with it, in order to defeat it. The abstract object changed into a concrete subject by means of perpetual thought processes. It became a subject, which only vegetated as a prisoner of a particular logic in the dusk of occidental gods. The victory of the speaking animal, that deficient being, which is one of God’s misprints, too, over nature made it end up at the edge of its own abyss. It seems as if this was man’s special position in the universe, the climax of God’s creation. The animal-like, rational, reasonable beast, which “outdid” everything known so far, called for Superman’s lap both rather excessively and hysterically, and in the end, constructing something supernatural and posing as a metaphysical being, flew to the God of the almighty. A thinking being, which transcends itself — a person like Caesar endowed with Christ’s soul, a horrifying vision of an ideal type of human being determined by Christian and philosophical ideas assuming a typical occidental shape.

But though the attempt was made “to harmonize sufferings and happiness”, the western world failed completely in doing so. Finally, their children suffered from being turned into gods. Those fixed ideas have not been done away with yet. On the other hand the western world presented a special image to the rest of the globe coming as the result of its cryptic position, an ambivalent image, indeed. A great many people headed for that image to catch up with non-western ideas, sometimes overemphasizing the gap by integrating things alien too excessively and thus menacing to destroy what was alien to them. There is hardly any philosophical and literary evidence, which does not violate what is alien. Goethe may be a true exception to the rule in this respect. Yes, his “Divan” is indeed an unambiguous west-eastern one and free from any demands of a universally valid logic. This is the fundament on which I would like to introduce the reader to the following writings. Hopefully, the reader, too, will find something congenial in my lines.

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Omar Chajjam and Max Stirner
A Bridge between the Orient and the Occident

“Moreover I don’t want to keep this a secret:
My assessment of three Persian geniuses,
which I made on page 205
has shifted in favour of Omar Khajjam
after taking note of his writings in greater detail.
I regard Omar Khajjam as the most genuine of the three.”4

Ludwig Klages, German philosopher and psychologist Rubai: structural aspects

Omar’s Rubai: Structural Aspects

Omar’s verse has the form of a Ruba’i, pl. Rubaijat. A Ruba’i only consists of four lines. Each Rubai is an independent poem of its own. One of its typical features is its rhyme scheme: The first, the second and the fourth line end on the same rhyme, whereas the third is rhymeless. The fourth line frequently is the most important as it contains the poet’s message. It stresses an emotion, a concept that the poet only alludes to in the preceding lines. The Persian poet named Saeb once stated, “The last line of a Ruba’i hits your heart.” The first two lines must be considered an unfinished poem, the third line functions as a break to develop a new idea, which is an explosive one. Even though the third line suggests a synthesis, the fourth line may contain something deviating from this synthesis. That’s the essence of the art of making a Ruba’i. The fourth line can be a conclusion, or it may negate everything that is expressed in the preceding lines. It can end on a note suggesting meaninglessness, depression, sadness, though the first two lines express contrasting emotions. The concluding line always comes as a surprise, represents the climax, which completes the poem however contradictory the lines may appear.

Omar and Goethe

Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s “History of Persian Rhetoric” was available for Goethe when preparing his book “West-Eastern Divan” in 1819. Among those 200 poets introduced by Hammer-Purgstall there were “Omar Chiam’s” name quoted and his 25 Rubaijat. Joachim Wohlleben5, however, rules out the possibility that Goethe occupied himself with Omar intensely. It is an established fact that Goethe never made mention of Omar. We may assume doubtlessly that Goethe’s ignoring Omar when he wrote his “Divan” resulted in the fact that Omar remained unknown as a poet-philosopher in Germany. Joachim Wohlleben deeply regrets Omar’s unlucky meeting with German

4 L.Klages Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele Bonn, p. XI (The Mind As Soul’s Adversary)
5 J.Wohlleben Die Rubajat des Omar Chajjam und die deutsche Literatur. In: Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, Berlin 1973, p. 65 (Omar Chajjam’s Rubajat and German Literature. An Unlucky Encounter)

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literature and tries to appreciate his real significance for German literature by his own comprehensive work. Wohlleben states that after Goethe it has been Hafiz “who has been the most popular Persian poet. One could put it like that: Hafiz cast a shadow on Omar concerning the German interest in Persian literature.”6

Let me add some ideas that may help the reader comprehend why Omar did not arouse Goethe’s interest, given Goethe concerned himself with Omar at all. As I would like to point out some parallels of the spiritual relationship between Omar and Stirner, which I think to be important to the history of Stirner’s philosophy, this short introduction will be indispensable: Goethe will accompany us on a bridge linking the west with the east.

Hafiz’s poems evoke such passion in Goethe that Hafiz becomes the main character in his “Divan”. Hafiz and Goethe unite and become blood brothers. Goethe vents his enthusiasm for Persian poetry by making the following declaration:

“DO ADMIT IT! The oriental poets
are greater than us western poets.”7

“May the whole world fade away,
Hafiz, with you, with you alone
I want to compete! Let us share
Pleasure and pain like twins
To love like you, to drink like you,
This shall be my pride, my life.”8

To Goethe Hafiz is the incarnation of the Persian poet. According to Goethe Persian poetic language culminates in Hafiz’s poetry. What is the reason for Goethe’s indifference towards Omar? To my mind the main reason is the style and content of Hafiz’s poetry. Hafiz, one of Omar’s successors, followed Omar in many ways, but he primarily wrote ghazals. In contrast to Hafiz, Omar neither wrote ghazals nor arabesques, but only Rubaijat. Undoubtedly Goethe was especially susceptible to ghazals.

Ghazals are love poems and “devoid of” any philosophical content. Any kind of satirical, melancholic and depressive mood is alien to them. In the case of Rubaijat, however, we are dealing with purely reflective poems. What is more, in Omar’s poems the consumption of the world, indignation, rebellion, the autonomy of human willpower on the one hand blend with melancholia, resignation, desperation, pessimism, “fatalism” in a very unique way on the

6 pp. 65-66
7 J.W.Goethe: West-…stlicher Divan, Frankfurt 1998, p. 57
8 p. 25

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other hand. Omar’s basic attitudes towards life manifest themselves in these subjects as we shall see later. They signify his philosophical impulse and are a melting pot for his emotions and thoughts. To tell these apart and even categorize them to gain insight into Omar’s mind and to gain orientation in this world seems to be impossible for Europeans. Only an authority would be capable of putting Omar in a place that is worth his achievements, says Wohlleben. Goethe, however, was and still is such an authority.

But unlike Omar, who ended up in self-forgetfulness, Goethe did not resign. In his search of God Omar despaired when looking for a way to comprehend God and he becomes a blasphemer. During his satirical, melancholic conversation with God, Omar is definitely godless, and the nature of his poetic wittiness is determined by sarcasm and a type of humour that shatters everything one can imagine. Both seriousness and wittiness are characteristics of his humour. This can be derived from his basic philosophical attitude, which makes him declare everything to be vain and meaningless, while he continues to be able to laugh at everything simultaneously. Therefore he is a free spirit who is chain-breaking , a rebel who intoxicated by the consumption of wine can give way to his thoughts. He loathes any belief in love and the truth. He thinks the well-ordered world of religious and rationalistic dogmatism to be intolerable. Intoxicated by love, he mocks at any illusive security in life, Goethe, however, trustingly holds on to love and humanity. He is a critic who defends himself, Omar, a troublemaker, who acts quickly and aggressively. He is hostile to any type of authority. Scholasticism and the belief in progress become the targets of his mockery. To Omar everything is vain, nothing is truly meaningful; Goethe means to heal instead. In contrast to Goethe, Omar, disappointed and full of despair, forgets himself and does not believe in any state of human happiness. Goethe’s main characteristic is his ultimate truthfulness, whereas Omar is a skeptic with an agnostic frame of mind.

Nevertheless the kinship between the two poets is plain to see. Goethe created some poems, which do resemble Omar’s. In his poem Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas! (Everything on earth is vain.) Goethe’s message reads: “I don’t rely on anything mundane.” This motto was to be the gist of Stirner’s philosophy. Apart from the literary form the content of the poem clearly parallels Omar’s poetry. Being a loving and philanthropic man at first, Goethe gets involved in the worldly businesses of mankind, lives through this and that trouble, takes this road and that, overcomes a lot of obstacles before everything loses its meaning for him and as a consequence he does not want to rely on anything anymore. We may put it like this: I have tried my best in all fields of life, but nothing has been worth the trouble. This, too, is the essence of Omar’s philosophy.

Goethe’s poem conveys his frustrations and his sense of vanity; what Omar is profoundly convinced of and what Omar reveals as his basic attitude towards human life, however, appears to be only a superficial sentiment in Goethe’s case. Thus Goethe’s poem does not reflect any serious conviction, but merely a temporary “disturbance of his emotional life”, which can be cured. This

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shallowness becomes even more obvious in his “Tame Xenia”. But in contrast to Wohlleben I can spot parallels with Omar nonetheless. In some of his xenia Goethe at least expresses his complaints about that edifice called world; his criticism aims at Christian and rational dogmatism. But this only happens because his “bottled-up frustrations cannot be sublimated. Therefore the ‘Tame Xenia’ are hardly speculative in any way and much more realistic than Omar’s Rubaijat.”9 That explains Goethe’s shallowness, which is the product of a quickly developing and, as stated above, temporary disturbance of his mind and his emotional life. To put it in Wohlleben’s words: On the basis of this disposition Goethe’s attitude can be regarded as a defence strategy, Omar’s as aggressiveness. Omar attacks the whole world of religious and philosophical dogmatism and this attack will result in freeing his mind from logical thinking at all. But I’m going to concern myself with this later.

Omar and two of his critics:
Chesterton and Pessoa

“One of his critics, whose book I’ve read, is fool enough to label Omar an atheist and materialist. To be either this or that is almost impossible for an Oriental; the eastern world possesses too much expertise in metaphysics, so to maintain anything like will be absurd.”10

Thus Gilbert Keith Chesterton defends Omar’s orthodoxy. An Oriental like Omar will calmly take note of this statement, and laughingly he will pass the cup on to his adversary and will tell him:

Intoxicated by the magician’s wine, it’s me!
Heathen, disbeliever or idolater, it’s me!
Each sect bears its own hatred towards me,
I am my own master, I am what I am.11

These words do not tell anything about the painful bliss of Christian doctrines. Laughing and weeping as human features are attributed to the heart by Christendom, the heart being God’s and Morality’s home. Therefore Christians believe that “there is nothing else but religion that can make man happy.”12 In their opinion drinking wine is a “sacrament” and the ultimate happiness bestowed upon a Puritan soldier in his battle against men. Chesterton belittles Omar’s consumption of wine calling it a remedy for mental and psychical disorders; “Jesus did not make wine a medicament but a sacrament. Whereas Omar does not make it a sacrament but a medicament.”13

9 J.Wohlleben, p. 67
10 G.K. Chesterton: Ketzer (Heretics) Frankfurt a.M. 1998, p. 101
11 Wie Wasser stršmen wir. (We are like water, flowing) Die Rubaijat des Omar Chajjam, Erememiten-Presse 1984, Rubai No. 71
12 Chesterton, p. 105
13 Chesterton, p. 105

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Omar renounces God’s grace and renounces wine as a drug. Be it the Bible or cocaine, — that does not make a difference for Omar; he thinks both to be narcotics, which he renounces passionately. The purpose of Omar’s consumption of wine is neither to evoke happiness nor to kill time; he does not drink to forget about his grief or his doubts about the meaning of life. He does not drink for the sake of love, let alone for the sake of hatred.

Fernando Pessoa seems to have a better understanding of Omar’s philosophy of life than Chesterton does, the Christian does. Pessoa’s criticism makes us get closer to Omar’s views of everyday life; “He is content with looking at roses and drinking wine. A slight breeze, a random conversation, a cup of wine along with some flowers, it is those things that the Persian sage ultimately longs for.” 14 In these lines Omar’s spirit comes alive indeed; we might only add: a home of one’s own after the fashion, neither master nor servant.

However, it is the following in which Pessoa really grasps the true nature of Omar’s mind, “Khayyam’s dissatisfaction with life is not the dissatisfaction of someone who does not know what to do since he cannot really do anything or does not know how to do it. Such is the nature of the discontent of those who were born into this world more dead than alive, of those who legitimately depend on morphine or cocaine.”15

Pessoa finishes, saying, “It is the dissatisfaction of somebody who has thought things over very clear-sightedly and has drawn the conclusion that he is surrounded by darkness; who has reflected on all religions and philosophies and then has spoken in Salomon’s fashion: ‘I have realized that everything on earth can be summed up as vanity and a temptation of the human mind...’ “16 There is no doubt about it, Omar is the one who faces life without being blinkered, and he states: everything is transient, do not try to find the truth, that’s an impossible endeavour, it is futile, you will never know why we go from here and why we come here. For Dschemschid’s glass17 will be smashed to pieces in the end. That is why Omar hands us the cup and stresses the relish of drinking wine. Drink it! Drink it! he shouts, for:

These reflections of the world, they’re apparitions,
No sage here will consider them to be true visions
Of life. Enjoy, do drink this grape juice here and then:
all your illusions will become mere objects of derision.18

14 F. Pessoa Das Buch der Unruhe (The Book of Restlessness) Frankfurt 2000, p. 262
15 Pessoa, p. 261
16 Pessoa, p. 261
17 The legendary King Dschemschid owned a crystal chalice, in which the whole world was mirrored, and therefore it was the source of his wisdom.
18 Die Sinnsprüche Omars des Zeltmachers (Omar the Tentmaker’s Aphorisms) Publishers: Insel-Verlag, 14th edition 1998, p. 30

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The World as Will and Representation

Notions like pleasure and pain, optimism and pessimism stand for two different “outlooks on life” at first sight. Many philosophers reckon the difference to be very big. Epicurus e.g. explicitly represents eudaemonism and defines eudaemonia as the fulfillment of one’s desires and avoidance of displeasure, but he by no means teaches his fellow-men to give in to sensual pleasures unrestrainedly, because such behaviour might hit back on them and cause pain. In Omar’s case we cannot be certain which view of life he attributes more importance to.

Epicurus’ maxim “Live hidden away” is in accordance with Omar’s joie de vivre propagating the enjoyment of life and its realization in a circle of friends without claiming to change the world. On the other hand Omar cannot avoid pain either. He is not an innately melancholic person, but a frustrated one, who is a rebel on account of pain, but wanting to “overcome” his sufferings. In his book “Max Stirner’s Philosophy of the Ego” H.Stourzh wonders whether Stirner teaches optimism or pessimism. I think the answer also explains Omar’s view of life. Stirner’s eudaemonism, says Stourzh, “ if put into practice will not at all contradict an optimist’s view of and purpose in life, to him passing on life is only natural, nor does it contradict a pessimist’s to whom passing on life is the most fateful question despite all the beauty of life.”19 In fact we shall meet with these two attitudes in Omar’s poetry, too.

To add to a better understanding of the following, we would like to concern ourselves with another philosopher’s teachings, i.e. Schopenhauer’s.

Omar’s gloomy verse doubtlessly reminds us of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic views. Grief, pain, displeasure, hopelessness are fundamentals of Schopenhauer’s way of thinking, they are integral parts of an ideology. And this actually makes him move closer to Omar. In the Anglo-Saxon world philosophers very often even assert that the two are in total agreement. But if one has a closer look at things, one will see the difference, yes, even the incompatible differences between the two. In this context some explanations concerning Schopenhauer’s philosophy seem to be necessary.

Schopenhauer begins his book “The World as Will and Representation” by stating, “The world is only my idea (...) — Should there be any truth that can be pronounced a priori, it will be this.”20

First of all objects are given to us immediately in the form of appearances. The visible world therefore consists of an appearance of things, yes, a Maya. We do not know anything about a thing as such. The thing in itself that remains obscure in Kant’s works is now defined as the will by Schopenhauer.

According to Schopenhauer the will is not only “the world in itself” but also the origin of being human, the source of human existence. Therefore in reality each of our physical acts is a selfish act of our will. It is not his reason, his mind or

19 H.Stourzh, p. 95
20 A. Schopenhauer Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung 1st volume, publishers: Haffmann,1988, p. 31

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whatever idea governs man, but only his will. This is the chief and basic motivating force in man.

The will implies neither pleasure nor enjoyment, neither happiness nor love. In Schopenhauer’s works the will is synonymous with suffering and pain. Schopenhauer took an innate, painful will for granted.

In other words man is compelled to suffer. Struggling, fighting, grieving are part of human nature. Schopenhauer even asserts that those short moments of happiness only exist so as to increase our awareness of suffering. Schopenhauer compares his hopeless pessimism with Dante’s Inferno: “ Where else did DANTE find the subject-matter of his Inferno if not in our real world? However when he was confronted with the task of depicting heaven and its pleasures, he met with insurmountable difficulties; since our world does not offer any models for something like that whatsoever.”21 Schopenhauer thinks that the only purpose in life must be that of escaping the will and its painful strivings. The only final escape will be sheer extinction of the will. The three aids to salvation are asceticism, contemplation of the works of art, and sympathy for others. They are to redeem man from his misery.

Many of Omar’s verse, too, convey the impression that we only perceive appearances of a reality unknown to us. It is not in Omar’s interest to name the unknown hiding behind those appearances. Man is unable to figure out the secret of the objective world, to grasp the truth about it, to solve the puzzle. According to Omar scholars are quarrelling in vain about statutes and dogma. Omar’s skeptical conclusion reads: some believe in something, some reject something, but the secret reveals itself to nobody.

Moreover the enjoyment of life is at the center of his philosophy, whereas sadness — declared to be an absolute quantity by Schopenhauer — is fundamental to his teachings. Pain does not only originate in a temporary bad mood, as mentioned above, but penetrates all thought processes.

We also encounter psychical pain in Omar’s philosophy, but it is not fundamental, it is solely part of life. If there is anything that Omar teaches us, it will be pleasure in the first place and we find this teaching objective in Stirner’s work, too, but nowhere in Schopenhauer’s.

Omar can dedicate himself to life with a quiet laughter and a noisy groan. It is important to enjoy earthly life until we sink into eternal nothingness. Enjoying the short period of being human, he creates a paradise here and now. His enjoyment of life contrasts with Schopenhauer’s will , which condemns man to suffer. Because of his desire, which makes him restless, Omar becomes active, while Schopenhauer tries to “extinguish” the will. Omar tries to satisfy his hunger. He passionately yearns for peace, but does not find it; that is the cause of his restlessness. Therefore Omar does not develop a system of thought: to tie anybody to a certain concept is alien to him. It is only logical that Omar is a

21 p. 423

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rebel and not a fatalist putting up with pain. He does not believe that human life is predestined, and energetically refers to man’s free will, man’s self- determination and counters Schopenhauer’s determinism by stressing the freedom of will. The Omarian individual lives through the ardor of passions and desires and then slides into nothingness, where everything transient will end. As a poet of the nameless he permits himself to face God to demonstrate his grief, restlessness — this struggle for life and against death. It is an instance of recognizing enthusiasm and despair; an endless dialogue with God between equal minds — that means enjoyment and torture at the same time. All explanations are labeled: useless! by an unbelieving dervish, a scholar without a doctrine, “someone who senses the secret of nature”.

In Schopenhauer the will is a superior force, a malicious demon, which possesses man. Whatever resistance will be useless, man is exposed to it helplessly. Pessimism and misanthropy are characteristic of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, while Omar, though disappointed, but laughing sensually, is wrapped up by nothingness: “Only because of the brief illusion of non- existence! — This is the reason why wise men booze.”22

To use Stirner’s words: Schopenhauer describes his will because of an obsession, a fixed idea that is commonly instilled into men during their childhood. That accounts for perpetual suffering, constant psychical pain. Schopenhauer therefore wants to break man’s will, but Omar longs to be at one with his will.

Conclusion: While their depiction of the world show parallels, the two philosophers clash as to the essence of their philosophies. To Omar the will does not offer an answer to the puzzle named world, but it is the power of being alive that forms the center of his views in terms of an enjoyment of life and which comprehends suffering as being part of life. Omar is careful enough not to reduce the puzzle or man’s recognition of the world to a single concept. That is why he keeps from making any other than that mystifying statement, “each sect bears its own hatred towards me, I am my own master, I am what I am.” This statement takes us into the center of Stirner’s philosophy.

I Determined To Rely On Nothing!

1) A philosophy bordering on the limits of rational thinking

It is the indescribable ego and all its special characteristics that are behind everything. It is the focus of attention in Omar’s poetry as well as in Stirner’s works. Willpower, pleasure, good health etc. everything is part of its nature, but both do not define its nature in detail, i.e. they do not name it. The only motivating force that induces man to live and to develop is his egoism according to both Omar and Stirner, and his own free will, which adds to his uniqueness all

22 F. Rosen, p. 25

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his life. Suffering and happiness are results of the efforts of a creative human being, suffering and happiness depend on man’s creativity.

Both philosophers apply all those abilities they have been endowed with in search of the truth. They make use of the material world as well as the metaphysical world. Their philosophy of life cannot be captured by a generic term. The road they follow is not a straight one. It is not based on reason, intellect or religion. Whatever religious beliefs there may be, Kaaba and idolatry, holy cord, Tasbi, rosary and crucifix, they all truly mean slavery. Each individual person is given the opportunity to find himself/herself by detaching himself/herself from dogma and determination by others. Both philosophers represent the freedom of will and their own will opposes all gods and rulers. Consequently all ethical and social standards like right or wrong, good or bad are determined by the ego itself. No matter whether people are faced with religious laws or secular laws or scholarly principles, they all are foreign rules and may imply the oppression of one’s own decision.

Thus a passionate struggle begins against intellectual and spiritual rulers. No brilliant mind, no superior power can enforce limits on man’s thought process, his thoughts are his own and therefore cannot be controlled by anybody else. Each variant of control over the individual may become the target of harsh criticism, be it convictions or enforced philanthropy, fate or whatever state constitution, all those fixed ideas must not govern the individual’s thinking. “In cathedrals, mosques and synagogues man will be robbed of his peace of mind.”23 The individual is free from thought and thoughtful at the same time. Therefore the ego turns into a radical fighter for the freedom of thought. If a thought develops into a constant guiding principle, the individual will be drilled to behave or think in a narrow-minded way, but if a thought is a useful one, it will be welcome until it becomes useless. We, too, should remember that the belief in reason and common sense and its advocates must be strongly criticized after all. It is reason and the firm belief in reason that makes the Bible important to the Christian and the law important to the citizen.

As Omar sees the origin of all human evil in all those ideologies, which Stirner attacks heavily, too, he draws the conclusion that we have to get rid of those detrimental ideologies to create a world free from evil. In other words: the self-centered motivation of man’s own will has to be freed from such ghosts so that his individuality can evolve. An individual’s development does not require any standards foreign to its will, any type of upbringing, but it is to act according to its own free will and is to rebel against enforced organizations like the state and the church, against taboos and everything sacred. Up to Stirner’s time the western world had consisted of suffering and pain for nobody had criticized those standards as fundamentally as Stirner. Now a new era was to begin in which the enjoyment of life became the meaning of life to a greater and greater extent.

23 F. Rosen, p. 28

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2) The Inexpressible

In the following section we shall analyze the indeterminable world in which Stirner and Omar will meet once more. In doing so, we shall start out from a non-religious, “godless” mysticism.

According to my own knowledge Stirner was rarely associated with mysticism, while his role as a “social critic”, his “anarchism”, his “Gesellite” views have always been frequently discussed topics. In an industrialized world in which man’s mind is dominated by the mechanistic principles of efficiency his anti- pedagogic and psychoanalytic ideas were disdained.24 There may be some special reasons for this which we cannot discuss here.

After Stirner has denounced the whole world of explanations, of ideas, of philosophies, in short of ideologies as ghosts, as psychical disorders in men, he, to my mind, arrives at a problematic, i.e. empirically speaking very complex conclusion, “It is myself who is the criterion of truth, I, however, am no idea, but more than an idea, i.e. inexpressible.” 25 The living meaning the concrete Ego, body and soul, is, as we have pointed out above, the Ego with a self-centered motivation, with a will of its own, which because of his potential capacities can take possession of what it is capable of to satisfy its hunger with relish. But the indefinable Ego is something different, a phenomenon which cannot be grasped empirically, the all in all, the Ego’s creator; it is its creator and its creation in one. This Ego is identical with God: He is nameless, there is no word to denote everything that his divinity entails. This also applies to Stirner: no concept denotes his entire nature, nothing that he is characterized by is exhaustive enough to sum up his nature. Therefore Stirner consistently states, “I rely on nothing.”26

From this point on Stirner cannot be communicated to anybody anymore. After Stirner has completed his thought, he falls silent. Thus he becomes a mystic: an active individual turns into an inactive individual, the Ego, full of desire, turns into the Ego that dissolves — this is the world of “I am the inexpressible.”

Behind the physical I, which perceives itself and which turns itself into an object, the Ego’s sense of vitality is hiding. Therefore there may be something concealed behind all objects. This, however, is indefinable.

Fritz Mauthner writes about the dilemma of language, “I belong to the world of appearances; apart from that I am - though I am the only one who knows that — a thing in itself, a thing for me. Come on, out with it! What am I as a thing in itself, as a thing for me? Me, me, me! I am me. Language cannot go beyond this

24 Cf. Max Stirner und die Psychoanalyze (Max Stirner and Psychoanalysis) In: Der Einzige. (The Unique Ego) Vierteljahresschrift des Max-Stirner-Archivs Leipzig, Heft 1 u.2 Februar 2001 (Quarterly of the Max-Stirner- Archives Leipzig , issue 1 & 2, February 2001)
25 Max Stirner Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own) Stuttgart 1981, p. 400
26 p. 412

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silly tautology, this babble.”27 We have every right to wonder: Does Stirner manage to go beyond this “babble”? He at least realizes his linguistic limits and says that he relies on Nothing, thus facing the imperfection of language. Linguistically speaking that is the only logical consequence. So we are not amazed at the fact that Stirner called language a ghost, too. Mauthner saw that Stirner was a critic of language and wrote, “In a certain though limited way Stirner was the most relentless critic of language... But all misunderstandings concerning Stirner, who crushed the whole world, result from the fact that no language whatsoever can express whether the Unique Ego denotes a solipsist or man after all. This is not Stirner’s fault, but is due to language.”28 Let us unveil the secret. Referring to the Ego as “nothing” , Stirner touches upon a conceptual limit and leaves all ghosts behind.

Now he is sitting there like someone coming from nowhere, hiding his pain behind his laughter, he is smiling at mankind. He knows how to conceal his pain behind bold, cold and calculated words, “If I solely rely on myself, the unique ego, then I rely on something transient, the mortal creator of himself, who consumes himself.”29 The concept of transiency and mortality pervades Stirner’s entire work. But it seems as if he would proclaim transience while laughing coldly. I think his laughter conceals a deep-seated melancholy. The knowledge of the fading away of physical and mental energy, of the creative unique ego’s end, of the decline of all its creations and creativity — this knowledge causes a mysterious pain, which finds its expression in his laughing coldly. This, however, is not the only reason. We must focus on transience, too, because Stirner experiences it as something mystical, too. I’d like to quote Rolf Engert here, who already explained Stirner’s mysticism rudimentarily in 1931, “It is a mysticism of a personalized inner experience, which is caused by the fact that I am creator and creation to Myself and that my Ego can only comprehend the creator in Me, who never fully appears on the scene and will not fully manifest itself in his creations, and can only be experienced in an exceptional situation and can only be grasped by means of the concept of the ‘creative nothing’ “30 Following Mauthner’s example Engert tries to line Stirner up with the mystic Master Eckhart and “the vast religious eastern world”, but he does not explain his views. We will have to inquire into this to find out if it holds true, but I would like to restrict my inquiries to the problem of “godless mysticism”. The question how godless and religious mysticism, which may only be a semi-mysticism, can be combined with each other will be the subject-matter of another study. (In his “Dictionary of Philosophy” Mauthner, by the way, assembles a great many mystics under the heading of mysticism. There he

27 Fritz Mauthner Wšrterbuch der Philosophie (Dictionary of Philosophy) 2.Band (Volume II) Publishers: Diogenes, 1980, p. 373
28 Fritz Mauthner Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendland (Atheism and Its History in The Western World) 4. Band (Volume IV), Hildesheim 1963, pp. 216 - 217
29 M.Stirner p. 412
30 R.Engert in: Der Einzige , Vierteljahresschrift des Max-Stirner-Archivs Leipzig, No.4 (8) 1999, p. 12 (Quarterly of Max-Stirner-Archives Leipzig)

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speaks of “philosophical” respectively of “skeptical” mysticism. Thus he makes the inexpressible a subject-matter of philosophy in order to be able to communicate it.)

Well, the “creative nothing” as a concept, which we have shortly explained above, experiences its limitations and therefore an unknown type of existence, i.e. in an “earthly and heavenly sphere” (Engert) man experiences new creative “possibilities to enjoy his life”. Stirner’s egoism respectively the creation of his ego experiences a dissolution of the ego when faced with its limitations and the concept of “nothing”, whereby Stirner conceives himself as “ a transient, mortal creator who consumes himself.”

Stirner’s mysticism is neither a total negation of everyday life nor does it imply that the unique ego is reducible to its earthly existence. He does not negate the world and the mundane. Stirner does not attempt to reach God or the truth, he does not try to become part of God either, he is God and the truth: God on earth and God in heaven! For only the unique ego is the origin of his creation and mortality. God is the unknown quantity, silence, quietness, origin, creation, perfection, the unnamed. All this applies to Stirner, the unique ego. “No concept expresses what I am”31

Language always refers to objects. It also turns abstractions into objects. Images arising in man’s mind can only become objects of language in a minimalized form. They can and must be communicated within a frame, i.e. communicated as one unit. During this process various ideas come in to being unrestrainedly. The objects vary, too. Unity is a manifestation of order. The evolution of order can perhaps be explained by a very short story: Once upon a time man’s superstitious mind thought the world to be cosmic and to make this condition last eternally the world had to be protected against a demon who wanted to turn the world into chaos. So it was the fear of demons that evoked the unity of thought, that is to say reason. Whatever it was that caused order to develop, since its emergence the human mind has thought in categories and has identified words with objects at any rate. Mauthner tells us about Buddhism, saying, “even the most cryptic statement of Buddhist mysticism is hardly language at all, can hardly be categorized grammatically speaking.”32 This goes for Stirner, too: if we conceive Stirner’s philosophy of the unique ego as an object, then the unique ego cannot be rendered in words, cannot be communicated. If we thought in categories in this case, we e.g. would have to identify “identity” with “missing identity”. This would mean that the divine and the mundane are identical. And this would be a paradox, which we often encounter when analyzing language.

Language mainly consists of contradictions. It starts with the fact that man opposes language but speaks at the same time. To put it in Goethe’s words,

31 M. Stirner p. 412
32 F. Mauthner Lexikon der Philosophie (Dictionary of Philosophy), p. 120

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“You need not confuse your fellowmen by contradictions! As soon as you open your mouth you are mistaken.” 33 From Stirner’s point of view silence is a presupposition of being able to experience the ego in its entirety and not only fragmentarily. As soon as somebody enters the realm of silence to learn something fundamental, he will get rid of words and thoughts while experiencing his limitations, so as to be wrapped up by his ego, this “nonentity”. Being silent man undergoes a change, thus experiencing everything, because he strikes every chord in himself. It is then that he enters the realm of the inexpressible, the uncommunicable, the realm of mysticism. The realm of the unpronounceable differs from the realm of reason. A mystic’s empire is devoid of language.

Mauthner tries to explain the inexpressible by “paltry words”: “There is only one world. There is no God beside that world, there is no world beside God. This conviction used to be called pantheistic, strictly speaking: panentheistic (seemingly to preserve God as a person). Why not? It is only words... Why bother about words? ... My self-awareness, the individual’s oneness is a delusion ... Are those words merely philosophical collocations? Wordplays? No, they aren’t. What I can experience is real. And for a short period of time I can experience it, and thus I will forget about the ‘principium individuationis’ , and I will stop drawing a distinction between me and the world. ‘And I will be godlike.’ Why not?”34

On analyzing the words “And I will be godlike.”, we can render them in the following way: Everybody is his own creator. God exists because he does not exist above or outside the world, but in the world and therefore he lives in each human being. God and I are identical beings. The unique Ego is a god beside other gods. However difficult the interpretation of Stirner’s Ego and Omar’s criticism of reason and any search for God may be, both philosophers’ skeptical attitude towards the human mind and intellect, towards authority and whatever type of control of the individual does not only become manifest in their social criticism but also in their mystic experiences. Stirner does not only criticize the forces controlling the individual because of the anti-liberal attitude implied in them and because they are antagonistic towards the Ego. No, this is only the surface level of his philosophy. Stirner considers each word to be a ghost, since each word presents an obstacle to the creation of his ego. “The power of language over morals, over the commonest human habits has never been analyzed as furiously as by Stirner’s fiery speech in “The Ego and Its Own”. To Stirner all abstractions, truths, ideals, in fact all grand words are odious ghosts. He cannot help it, he is forced to hate ... language, too. Those terrifying words, by which Stirner aimed at something on a lower level primarily applies to language: ‘Digest the host and you’ll get it out of your system’. ‘Digest language and you will be free from it; digest all logical thinking, digest your

33 J.W. Goethe in L.Klages p.73
34 F. Mauthner Dictionary of Philosophy pp. 131-132

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own word.’35 Mauthner’s words evidently express great admiration for Stirner, though he criticizes Stirner’s “dogmatic view of the Ego”: “The objection that the Ego is an illusion would have severely damaged his edifice.”36 He even reproaches Stirner saying that Stirner does not understand his own conclusion. “He did not understand his own conclusion while laughing that coldly.”37 To summarize Mauthner’s views: On the one hand Mauthner accuses Stirner of not recognizing the ego as an illusion/ an illusionary one, although Stirner views everything else in that way, on the other hand he accuses him of not being aware of his mysticism. Before I try to prove Mauthner wrong, I would like to mention that Mauthner’s assertions are due to the fact that at Mauthner’s time Stirner was mainly regarded as an anarchist. On the other hand Stirner’s emphasizing and conceiving the ego is misleading, therefore Mauthner’s criticism and skepticism is intelligible.

The mortality and what is more the transience of Stirner’s Ego is the very sign of creating nothing. This Ego, this experiencing nothingness are neither part of this world nor of a spiritual world, just because it has given up the idea of its existence. The Ego does not mean anything, it is only an expression of an experience of infinite attributes. It is alive and experiences life. If man is obsessed with an idea, i.e. a fixed idea that is sickening, this will be caused by the domination of one thought. All ideas that take control of man are products of a mental disturbance. So what about the idea of the Ego? “The most modern ruler of this kind is our nature.”38 Stirner’s Ego is neither an object nor an idea, but inexpressible. Thus Stirner has got rid of his ghosts. He relies on nothing, i.e. he is egoless. Stirner’s identification of God and the Ego coincides with the elimination of the distinction between the Ego and the world. That is the experience of the nameless, the unique ego, the mystic. The Ego, God, has ceased to be an object. No ideas and laws, no rules and commandments are valid anymore. For: “All commandments impose laws at the same time, and each law implies the interdiction to overstep limits.”39 So overstepping limits means all laws become worthless. Omar summarizes it in the following way:

The raindrop cries, “The sea! So far away!”
The ocean laughs, “Your grief! So very futile!”
In fact we’re all identical, identical with God —
It is only a tiny dot that separates us:— Time — 40

Transgressing limits implies that words become unreal and concepts are no longer arbitrary. According to Omar the world of appearances is an illusion, it is characterized by emptiness, so what is hidden behind it cannot be grasped by reason. And as all abstractions ring hollow and do not permit transgressing

35 F. Mauthner Die Sprache (Language) 1905, p. 83
36 Mauthner p. 84
37 Mauthner p. 84
38 Stirner p. 400
39 L. Klages p. 609
40 F. Rosen p. 30

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limits Stirner and Omar declare them to be invalid. Concepts are subjected to logical thinking. Man’s real experiences are not logical ones. So they can only be communicated indirectly. The world of experiences differs from the world of concepts. Suzuki tries to explore this phenomenon. He writes, “In the western world yes means yes, and no means no. Yes never means no and vice versa. The eastern world allows yes to transform into no and no into yes; there are no rigid limits between the two words. The reason for this is the nature of life. Only logical thinking does not allow to remove limits. Logical thinking was created as an aid for useful purposes.”41 Whatever concepts rationalists may devise, they will be unable to outwit life. Moreover Suzuki tries to explain the failure of reason, which is in charge of the search for a definite answer, and arrives at a conclusion which coincides with mysticism, “The answer is buried deep below the lowest layer of our nature.”42 Below the surface there is the subconscious called Mu by Suzuki, i.e. the cosmic or ontological subconscious. To the mystic and the unique Ego it is their inner lives where they identify God and the world. That is the essence of Omar’s teachings: the concept of truth has to be eliminated, but not the truth itself. I can experience the truth by being myself, I am my creation, because I am the world. Thus the contrast or difference between me and the world is abolished and both parts are united and become an entirety. Concerning the inexpressible all beating about the bush will come to an end.

Omar leaves the world, which is full of conflicts, behind without explaining its riddle, without “pronouncing any profound word”. The world cannot be explained but only be experienced. We can consider these to be Omar’s and Stirner’s last words.