The blogging audience is the forgiving audience. Neither grammar nor ideas require the exactitude one would except to appear in a publication or paper. The misplaced comma or immature idea deserve absolution based on, or so we all feel, the belief that informal mistakes aren’t really mistakes so much as instances of intimacy between reader and writer. We all realize that these things are written too quickly and too enthusiastically to be taken too seriously. I hope that merely by mentioning this, I may forego your criticisms, and, more to my wishes, retain your attention as I blather on about myth-theory and Christianity. Forgive me, likewise, for failing to translate, as it were, what I am about to say. Big words and mention-making of foreign names and Latin phrases do not, as is commonly thought, reveal intelligence; they only show that a clear formulation has yet to fully developed, and provide evidence for a case charlatanism.
In psychology and myth-theory, the previous generation of professors dismissed the possibility of universals—not to mention what philosophers thought. One could not, or so they thought, subscribe the particular religious phenomenon of the Australian shaman under the same categories which apply to the Catholic priest, nor especially to every religious person throughout space and time—including hypothetical space and time. Attempts at universalization never do justice to the particularity of an individual phenomenology or historical events. These particularist should not, I don’t think, go unheeded. Categories are only useful insofar as they cultivate the intellectual environ. Where seeds cannot grow, what’s the use?
Still, we should treat the value of caution cautiously; this methodology tends, at least in the classroom, to indulge in that kind of unhealthy skepticism present only in internalists approaches to epistemology or, even worse, within reductionism and positivism. After all, we all really do think that in spite of particulars, there is a thing called a human being—and that, of itself, is a universal claim. (I would like, if I had space, to juxtapose pernicious caution of this type with the Classical menos, e.g. the mean between fear and recklessness, also called courage. There is probably, at least on the Christian model, a mode whereby one ought to enact his imaginative powers to begin formulating paradigms capable of explaining the human condition. So somewhere between skepticism and naivety, say, a word which would marry curiosity to epistemic humility. But all of that is a side note to universality.)
Plantinga does some good work in Warranted Christian Belief on the sensus divinitatis, postulating that an innate, metaphysical, human organ recognizes God’s handiwork in, to be scandalously brief, all axiological categories. Plantinga, Calvin, and Aquinas are all, to my knowledge, unabashedly concerned with demonstrating—whether in de facto or de jure terms— the existence of God via this model. My provisional concern with it at present does, eventually, have import on questions surrounding the existence of God, but I’m more curious about the inherent content of this supposed metaphysical faculty, that is, I want to know of what the thing consists, what is the sensus divinitatis? If I look at the sun, and I begin to think in causal terms, Plantinga and company, not to mention Solomon and Paul the Apostle, would say that I have likely and unconsciously initiated the sensus divinitatis. Likewise with ethical phenomenon, we instinctively feel that there is something objectively right or wrong, and that if there is a source, it would be sensible if it were Divine—C.S. Lewis’ formulation of Natural Law seems to me to instantiate this claim. But what I’m wondering, on a wholly different plain, is whether psychological phenomenon, things such as archetypes—as represented primarily in myth, secondarily in art, and lastly in laicized society—are expressions, not of the unconscious, but of the sensus divinitatis. In other words, I’m wondering if the sensus divinitatis not only includes properties associated with cosmogony (Plantinga) and morality (Lewis) but also of psychology and phenomenology—Freud, Jung, James, Eliade. Specifically, affective psychological and phenomenological dispositions.
I am beginning to think that all this psychological talk about a collective unconscious, or a universal Spirit, or what have you, is really only a modern formulation of the Medieval Christian sensus divinitatis. In order to explain the commonalities between individuals, thinkers like Freud, Jung, and James have developed the collective unconscious—innate and universal—, like the sensus divinitatis, out of which man expresses his innermost desires, meanings, and needs. Like Plantinga and company, they don’t really explain what exactly this faculty is, per say, only that it’s epiphenomenon seem at play with something fundamentally and unequivocally human.
Nietzsche, in his way, talks along the same lines. He insists upon the despair of the ancient Greeks, and says that the aesthetic reaction—the invocation of what he calls the Dionysian— mollified the ‘souls’ of the Greeks via participation in an ecstatic, primordial state of consciousness and/or being. In less ridiculously vague Nietzschian terms, man feels better when he is—in more reasonable Pascalan terms—distracted by entertainment. But this need for distraction is itself a demonstration that we think that things ought to be otherwise, or of the feeling that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. This desire for the original Dionysiac state, in other words, may be a sign of the sensus divinitatis.
Likewise Freud with his, for lack of a better term, colorful ideas surrounding the Oedipus and Electra complexes. Freud is doubtless a quack in universalizing his select few therapy cases, but he rightly shows that there were under-girding, unconscious activity playing a pivotal if not primary role in human thinking. Moreover, and more to the point, he shows that this activity exists within the dream: both night and day dream. The rhetorical force inherent to the dream/myth analogue remains to this day equitable. We dream because we need to, because we are dissatisfied with the world: ennui or trauma are not preferable to psychological health. Man still needs his distractions, man still, to include Eliade in the discussion, looks for the illus tempus, or Eden, or the Golden age—a phenomenon that truly IS universal in empirical time and space, and, more remarkably, hypothetical time and space. The purity of Eden, or the pleasantries of the Golden age, in Freudian terms, is the pre-natal or pre-traumatic period, when the man was untainted by the world, pure, and unharmed.
I would be remiss not to include Aldous Huxley’s breath-taking and prophetic dichotomy between the two mutually exclusive value sets of 1.) truth and beauty 2.) comfort and stability as presented in Brave New World. American man watches his television, facebook booms, and Hulu dominate, because man cannot stand the thought of self-reflection, cannot “sit quietly in his room.” He must invoke a Jungian Hero archetype to occupy his consciousness, he must kill time at work, he must escape from the present, he must pretend in order to feel good. Plato too, insists upon a kind of return to an original good—via the soul’s recognition of the Beautiful, to the forms. After all his disparagement of myth, Plato curiously invents his own myth in Bk. 10 of the Republic, and there, the soul remembers the Good, and desires to participate with it.
All of this distraction, by the way, is why Tolkien’s Middle Earth dominated the 20th century, and why, moreover, the gospel infiltrated American culture via the subconscious in the form of a preparatoria evangelica. Man, in trying to escape ‘the machine’ of Modernity, in trying to escape the dehumanization of the industrial and technological age, found himself with a predilection for Fantasy literature in it’s most extreme form. The only counter-balance to dehumanization was, and still probably is, a world within which to escape—not from the reality of work or of Starbucks, but of their unreality—out of the prison of a monotonous life and into the reality of the illus tempus, the traditional values, into Christianity. Frodo’s world is not fake, Frodo’s world is real, and the sensus divinitatis knows it.
All of this is highly confusing, and I could add names, and aggregate philosophies—I know nothing of Hegel, for example, but gheist seems to me--prima facie-- an facsimile (or just simile) of the collective unconscious. I wish only to mark the consistencies within the multifarious enterprises. Major psychologist, anthropologists, historians, philosophers, literarians etc all touch upon this remarkable phenomenon of affective dissatisfaction. The affective dissatisfaction seems to me, merely the negative logical equivalent of Classical Antiquities’ eudemonia. Man above all desires to be happy, BECAUSE he realizes that he is not!
But from where could a man recognize that he is unhappy if he did not have some notion of perfect happiness? One cannot logically infer immutable happiness from ephemeral happiness for the very same reason that you cannot infer steak from cake. The desire is specific to the object. From where could I know perfect happiness if I never had the experience? How can I have a desire for an object which does not exist within the peripheral of my experience when every other desire I have exists specifically because there are objects within my experience? I only desire cake because I have tasted it, I do not desire some tasty African dish for the very simple reason that I have no idea what it is. But how, and from where could I desire a perfect, immutable happiness if it lies beyond the bounds of my experience? Augustine was right, I think, and “our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee”— simply because we are made that way. “You have made us to praise You” suggest in very clear terms the inherent quality of a sensus divinitatis. I am hungry because I have a stomach. I desire the Good because I have the sensus divinitatis.
But if this is true, then that thing we call the unconscious, those universal phenomenon we call archetypes, are either the sensus divinitatis in function or its by products. Right? And if the phenomenon is, indeed, universal, wouldn’t that further corroborate the Christian notion that the sensus divinitatis is universal? Of course, the very existence of the different mythologies, religions, and values demonstrates that, given this model, the sensus divinitatis, like all other human faculties is fallen in different ways and to different degrees. But it would also explain the phenomenon that certain people are more spiritually clairvoyant than others—Christians and non-Christians alike. If man is made in the image of God, and the sensus divinitatis in some way reflects the divine nature, then given that all men are made in God’s image differently than others, different ontological powers will be possessed differently by different people.
No comments:
Post a Comment