pshaw_raven | Deep Sunday Thoughts

I've recently been reading Mystics & Zen Masters by Thomas Merton, and I'm now at his essay, "The Other Side of Despair: Notes on Christian Existentialism." It first appeared in 1965 but it obviously still has a great deal to say to us today, despite the fact that at the time, many of the philosophers Merton cites were actually his living contemporaries. You've often throughout history had people who warn against the dangers of the herd, or the public, or the collective mass of minds which forms "society." As in the odious phrases "productive member of society," or "fitting in," or "being well adjusted." In this essay, Merton is addressing a particular sort of existentialism, which isn't nihilism or pessimism necessarily, but the philosophy of a person who comes down on the side of existence, as in the experience and life of individual people, rather than the collective experiences of society or the public, which often aren't experiences at all but are filtered, packaged entertainments.

The entire essay is posted online, here, and it's a long one. Pour a cup of coffee and get comfortable if you want to read the whole thing at one go. Long as it is, the main reason I'm posting any of this today is to call attention to a passage that I feel is worth quoting at length - italics are mine.

The objective truth of science remains only half the truth – or even less than that – if the subjective truth, the true-being (Wahrsein), of the subject is left out of account. This true-being is not found by examining the subject as if it were another object. It is found in personal self-realization, that is to say, in freedom, in responsibility, in dialogue (with man and God), and in love. Existentialism is, in other words, concerned with authentic personal identity, and concerned with it in a way that behaviorist methods and psychometry can never be. (The tests are neither interested in nor capable of finding out who thinks, only with describing how he reacts.) The chief complaint that sets existentialism over against positivism in diametric opposition is this: the claim of science and technology to expand the capacity of the human person for life and happiness is basically fraudulent, because technological society is not the least interested in values, still less in persons: it is concerned purely and simply with the functioning of its own processes. Human beings are used merely as means to this end, and the one significant question it asks in their regard is not who they are but how they can be most efficiently used.

At this point, we might go back a hundred years to consider a prophetic page of Kierkegaard’s, from The Present Age. Here he describes the process of “leveling” and of “reflection,” related to what has come to be called “alienation” and “estrangement” in more recent existential thought.

The process which Kierkegaard calls “leveling” is that by which the individual person loses himself in the vast emptiness of a public mind. Because he identifies this abstraction with objective reality, or simply with “the truth,” he abdicates his own experience and intuition. He renounces conscience and is lost. But the public mind is a pure abstraction, a nonentity. “For,” says Kierkegaard, “the public is made up of individuals at the moments when they are nothing,” that is to say, when they have abdicated conscience, personal decision, choice, and responsibility, and yielded themselves to the joy of being part of a pure myth. The mythical being which thinks and acts for everybody, and does the most shameful of deeds without a moment of hesitation or of shame, is actually no being at all. Those who take part in its acts can do so insofar as they have abstracted themselves from themselves and have surrendered to the public void, which they believe to be fully and objectively real: this collective self whose will is the will of nobody, whose mind is the mind of nobody, which can contradict itself and remain consistent with itself. “More and more individuals, owing to their bloodless indolence, will aspire to be nothing at all – in order to become the public.” Therefore, Kierkegaard concludes, the public is an “abstract whole formed in the most ludicrous way by all the participants becoming a third party (an onlooker).” This process of leveling, of self-abandonment, of abdication of identity, in order to dare what nobody dares and to participate in the unthinkable as though one were an innocent bystander, sweeps through the world as a “hopeless forest fire of abstraction.” The individual no longer belongs to God, to himself, to his beloved, to his art or his science; he is conscious of belonging in all things to an abstraction to which he is subjected by reflection (estrangement) just as a serf belongs to an estate. The abstract leveling process, that self-combustion of the human race produced by the friction which arises when the individual ceases to exist as singled out by religion, is bound to continue like a trade wind until it consumes everything.”

The existentialist is aware of this danger above all. He tirelessly insists that it is the great danger of our time, since it is completely prevalent both in the capitalist positivism of America and in the Marxist positivism of the Communist countries. For this reason, the existentialist is condemned everywhere for a wide variety of reasons which usually boil down to this one: he is a rebel, an individualist, who, because he withdraws from the common endeavor of technological society to brook on his own dissatisfactions, condemns himself to futility, sterility, and despair. Since he refuses to participate in the glorious and affluent togetherness of mass society, he must pay the price of fruitless isolation. He is a masochist. He gets no better than he deserves.

And now for something completely different, later today I'll tackle the last of the three random topics I was given - architecture. It turned out to be a rabbit hole I went down after innocently Googling Frank Lloyd Wright and now I really want to go to Chicago for a week or so.