Divine Life in Human History

In which I raid the pantries of Kant, Cicero, and Gregory of Nyssa, Gordon Ramsey finds himself unsatisfied, I continue to propound a pompous and overblown theory in the history of philosophy, and David Foster Wallace proves once again that he is always right about everything—damn him.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Culture grows like a medieval city—chaos and cannibalism are the only laws of its development. Disordered impulses expand to fill available space, assimilating old forms and applying them to novel ends. Looking forward, what came before is nothing but the yielding raw material for what will come afterward. Looking backward, the shape of what has been governs the shape of everything that will be. Humanity adapts to unfamiliar conditions and unprecedented aspirations by raiding our past, applying the tools and traditions of our ancestors in ways that would horrify and bewilder them—or perhaps delight them—who can say? 

This at any rate, is my exonerating prelude to a post that hijacks old models of reality and applies them to ends their creators would never have approved. This week, I raid the intellectual pantry of three historical notables—Immanuel Kant, Marcus Tullius Cicero, and Gregory of Nyssa—to elaborate on some points I made two weeks ago. If you have not read that post ("The Sacrificing Animal") it may be worth your time to do so now, but the present post will still make sense without it. 

By way of a brief review, I have outlined a theory of how we can model the thoughts and behaviors of historical and fictional human actors using something I call "The Laws of Divine-Humanity". The theory itself is pompously swollen and overcomplex, but the phenomenon it attempts to explain is really quite simple: A biological organism that is not satisfied with biological homeostasis. Previous thinkers have tended to define the human experience with reference to our capacity for complex cognition and language, but I am more interested in our desperate and unreasonable drive to subordinate or sacrifice our own homeostasis in the name of particular substances, activities, people, social roles, states-of-affairs, or transcendent ideals. This is the most curious feature of human waking life—not our ability to employ language and abstract reasoning in our pursuit of these goals. The ends are more interesting than the means. 

If you recall, the Laws of Divine-Humanity are as follows:

1. Humanity is finite.

2. The human being is a sacrificial animal—a sacrificing animal and a sacrificed animal.

3. Human communities are founded on the sacrificial act.

4. Divinity reveals itself within us and without us.

5. Divinity is infinite.

6. Divinity cannot be demonstrated or destroyed—it can only be feared or loved.

Thus far, I have been primarily concerned to outline my understanding of divine-human relations: the interaction between finite human actors and the invincibly ephemeral entities that frame and populate our orienting horizons. This week, I want to spend a little more time explaining how I understand these entities—the unseen pantheon that structures human aspiration.

Immanuel Kant and the Kingdom of Ends

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is best known for his attempt to provide an unshakeable foundation for moral behavior and moral reasoning. In my own opinion, his project was a glorious flop—(of course to be fair I think any project aiming at "unshakeable foundations" for anything will be a glorious or inglorious flop)—but Kant certainly made an admirable go of it, and every first year philosophy student is soon acquainted with the way he chose to do so: the categorical imperative. Kant grounded morality in the absolute value of moral intent, as opposed to moral action, the essential criterion for utilitarian moral systems. The categorical imperative is thus a law meant to organize our relationship with our own intentions—thereby allowing us to evaluate whether our motives for action in any given situation are moral or immoral. There are three formulations of the categorical imperative, but I am at present only interested in the second: 

"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end."

Contra Hamlet, most of the humans, most of the time, do not feel any immediate need to justify treating ourselves as ends in themselves. Fighting, fleeing, feeding, fucking—the most basic methods of maintaining and propagating our biological homeostasis—come very naturally, and thank goodness they do. We do not generally require any metaphysical grounding for why our own existence is worth preserving in order to go about the business of ensuring that it is. For Kant, the creation of the moral actor is the emergence of a willingness to extend that same courtesy to others. It's an elegantly structured theory, but personally, I don't encounter it as anything beyond a professorial reformulation of Christ's Second Great Commandment, which I suppose puts me in a camp with Arthur Schopenhauer:

“I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife.” 

(His wife being, in this case, Christianity).

That being said, I think there is really something crucial in the notion of the "end in itself" for understanding the human condition, and I'm very fond of the phrase Kant uses to express his vision of an Enlightenment utopia where all people adhere to the categorical imperative: "The Kingdom of Ends". So I am going to raid Kant's pantry and use the former concept and the latter phrase for my own dark purposes: In the present case, to explain my understanding of humanity's aspirational pantheon.

As much as human beings are marked by a propensity to pursue the perpetuation of our own self as an end in itself, we are equally and more distinctively marked by our need to consecrate ourself bottomlessly to a something-or-other. This something-or-other may be a substance (alcohol, gold, twinkies), an activity (sex, boxing, Starcraft), a person (lover, friend, Führer), a social role (wife, husband, therapist), a state-of-affairs (black-belt, world peace, PhD),  or an ideal (God, nation, world peace, scientific understanding). Collectively, these something-or-others—(to which no human being has ever been or will ever be entirely immune)—constitute the divine realm. They are the infinite aspirations to which we consecrate our finite persons.   

This, I think, is the more interesting and more accurate meaning of the Kingdom of Ends. The Kingdom of Ends is populated by every substance, activity, social role, state-of-affairs, and transcending ideal that any single human being has ever pursued as an end-in-itself. I have no comment to make on any biological foundation or philosophical justification that might underpin the existence of the Kingdom of Ends, but it seems self-evident to me that its omnipresence and omnipotence is the elementary fact of daily human life. Even the lowest and most selfish human specimen seems compelled to consecrate itself to self-destruction at the expense of self-perpetuation. David Foster Wallace had it:

"In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."

Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Natura Deorum

I am less concerned with Marcus Tullius Cicero's (106-43 BC) peculiar perspectives on the nature of the gods—(of which his famous work is notably bare anyway, being primarily an imaginative dialogue between different philosophers)—and more interested in him as the most notable representative of Greco-Roman polytheism in its developed form. This was, above all, a model of reality that admitted the presence of conflict and tension within the divine realm. Rich, educated, philosophical men like Cicero and his contemporaries were compelled to minimize this fact by emphasizing the unity and simplicity that crowned the pyramidal structure of ancient polytheism—the Platonic Good, the Stoic Logos, the Plotinian One—but neither Cicero nor his fellows ever banished conflict from the divine realm entirely.

The tragic sensibility of Greco-Roman drama and epic, the foundation of Mediterranean poetic and political culture, was established on the humming foundations of this creative tension. The heroes that shaped the ethos of Greece and Rome—Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas, Orestes—even Alexander—were defined by the sacrifices thrust upon them by the reality of conflict in the divine realm. Rome was built on the pyre of Dido, Achilles chose immortal fame over temporal happiness and Alexander made the same choice, Orestes was trapped between the kinship imperatives of the ancient Furies and the impersonal justice of Apollo, and had no recourse to any power that could banish that essential contradiction—(only to a curiously unsatisfying compromise engineered by Athena that left the conflict simmering just under the surface of things, waiting to erupt).

I think there is much to be said for reclaiming this tragic sensibility: it is one of my primary objectives in this blog. The human being as a sacrificial animal is predicated on the fact that we cannot have it all, that every actuality burns the flesh of an infinity of potentialities. The structure of worship established in the ancient Mediterranean by this fractured conception of the divine realm provides the most perfect model that I am aware of for describing the sacrificial condition—our ongoing relationship with the Kingdom of Ends. I have already touched on some ways that this is so in my earlier post; in this post I would like to focus on the different classes of relationship that are possible for us with the Kingdom of Ends. There are essentially three classes of relationship in developed Greco-Roman polytheism: the worshipper, the devotee, and the initiate.   

The worshipper does due diligence—no more, no less. Although the Kingdom of Ends is populated by every social role, every activity, every ideal that any human being has ever regarded as an end in itself, each human being regards almost all of its inhabitants with hostility or indifference. I once met a man with a genuine and bottomless passion for accounting: his eyes would actually light up when he talked about it. I can almost guarantee that no one who reads this post will ever have that relationship with the god of Accounting. That being said, I can also guarantee that all of my readers will be compelled to offer regular votives at Accounting's altar. Life in industrial society is almost impossible for someone who cannot make their accounts balance—not to speak of running a business. Most small business owners do not have a passion for Accounting, but if they do not offer sacrifices to him, their enterprises will collapse in disarray. 

The role of the worshipper stems from the fact that our relationship with the Kingdom of Ends is communal as well as personal—our societies coordinate their collective efforts by reference to the Kingdom of Ends. How many 18th century Swedes were internally devout Lutherans?—far less than vehemently professed themselves to be so. How many modern Americans are fire-breathing nationalists who would gladly storm a second Omaha beach for the sake of Liberty?—far less than beat their chests at 4th of July barbecues. The worshipper worships out of instrumental necessity, not out of inherent necessity—through obligation and not desire—the smoke of his votives is lifted up as a means, and not as an end. 

That being said, I think that most Americans are devotees of the angel Columbia, the image and idea of their nation. Their relationship with this deity goes beyond due diligence: it has ingredients of real passion. The devotee is born when someone can at least comprehend treating a deity as an end in itself, when they have experienced the spark of passion that comes upon us suddenly and changes how we look upon a god forever. You will often see it with children: the boy who has never given two figs for Sunday services, but suddenly feels powerful and useful as he helps to set up tables for Friday supper—he experiences a spark of self-transcendence that gives birth to a new relationship with his Church. Elementary school teachers live in hope of these moments, when the girl who has glowered in the back of the class all semester is suddenly seized by the elegance of Euclid's proofs. I can almost guarantee that most of my readers are devotees of Food and Sex (you are free to contradict me if you wish), and dozens of other things. Most people have a personal pantheon of people, ideals, activities, and social roles which—if they gave you an honest answer about why they choose to perform in service to them—could say "because X is awesome" rather than "because I need to do X in order to eventually do Y". 

People often fail to realize that the ancient world had an analogue to the Abrahamic model of complete devotion directed to the end of ultimate salvation: mystery cults and philosophical schools. Their adherents—men like Marcus Tullius Cicero and Marcus Aurelius—did not neglect the cultus deorum "care of the gods", but they subordinated those relationships of worship and devotion to the higher obligations thrust upon them by initiation. To be initiated into a philosophical school like Stoicism was to accept the necessity of a total change of life, a conversion in favor of a transcendent end: devotion to the Logos, the guiding Reason that steered all of Nature to its own wise purposes. A Stoic governed every aspect of his life in harmony with the imperatives of the Logos. Likewise, to be initiated into a mystery cult like that of Mithras or Isis was to accept a supreme authority accompanied by its own peculiar purity requirements. Your reward? Salvation, eternal life, something above and beyond the temporal inducements extended by other Greco-Roman gods.

In my limited experience of twenty-three years, everyone I meet is either an initiate or looking to become one. We seem compelled to find a deity that is not only worth pursuing as an end in itself, but can bestow the gift of salvation upon us, some mysterious tertium quid that escapes us in our normal daily lives, some ultimate meaning and purpose for our homeostatic condition. We search for something that will give us a hitherto unknown peace within the walls of our own skull, and we are willing to structure our entire life around this unknown thing. We are most of us devotees of Food, but for someone like Gordon Ramsey, Food is a cult into which he has been initiated—his passion for food structures every aspect of his life and lends to it its ultimate meaning. I believe Hitler felt the same way about Germany, that Kurzweil feels this way about the Singularity, that numberless heroin addicts feel this way about the needle. Do people make unwise or destructive choices in the cult into which they choose to initiate themselves? I think so, but I think so from a particular perspective, a perspective created by my own initiate status. There is no Martian perspective to be had in this country.

Gregory of Nyssa and the Ascent of Epektasis

There is one final pantry we must plunder if we are to comprehend the life of the initiate: the theology of Gregory of Nyssa (335-395), one of three Cappadocian Fathers in the Greek Orthodox Church. Gregory was a mystical theologian, concerned in all things to illuminate and facilitate the individual soul's transforming progress into the being of God. He was also one of the first Christian theologians to emphasize that God was a being absolutely infinite, and thus beyond comprehension or circumscription. From this thesis, and from his concern to illuminate the soul's upward progress in devotion, Gregory derived his thesis of Epektasis "Perpetual Progress": The soul will never be satisfied with its share of God—rather, every new revelation and deeper participation will only enlarge its appetite and spur it on to greater heights, because God is infinite. Between what is finite and what is infinite there can be no real ratio, no final fulfillment, no terminal termination—only an eternal upward ascent, where greater joys spur grander appetites.

I don't believe there is a god in the Kingdom of Ends that fails to accomodate this relationship. Every deity is potentially infinite. Gordon Ramsay will never find a restaurant without room for improvement, no heroin addict will never have enough, Hitler would never have achieved sufficient Lebensraum. Whether an individual Epektasis is liberating or immolating is not for me to say. I can only point out that the ubiquity of this condition is an obvious fact about the world we live in, and that the behaviors of the historical and fictional actors I examine in this blog make little sense without it. This is as Martian a perspective as I have.

Housekeeping

I hope that you are not finding the amount of time I am spending on philosophical groundwork tedious. The objective in these past few months has been to create an operating analytic paradigm and a glossary of "buzz words" that I can use to unpack historical and fictional narratives in an illuminating way. The payoff is meant to be a unique way of looking at history, at speculative fiction, and at the people you meet in everyday life. The words you've been seeing in bold are going to recur—in bold—more and more as I go forward, as a kind of shorthand for how I understand the constants I see in human behavior. Do let me know if this strikes you as utter tripe, but that remains the goal.

Special thanks this week to Kevin May for your kind encouragement, and to KL Cooke, my dauntingly well-read perpetual commenter—I spent all last week trying to reply to that little gem of a quote, and decided that I have more growing up to do before I will have anything interesting to say about it. 

Last and least important, a heads up that I will be posting every Sunday from here on out, not every Saturday, to better accommodate my anticipated schedule in graduate school.