Disenchantment Course

Here's another clip that might be interesting. I talked about this last night at the viewing of Memento:

This interview with Christopher Nolan may or may not help you understand the structure of the Memento:

Week 9 Wrap: One thing that I hope is emerging for you is that there is a continuity in the Western tradition that links the Renaissance philosophers and artists with the Romantic philosophers and artists and now with the Modernist artists and philosophers, particularly Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. Nobody is sui generis, even the most original, and each is a product of his time and place and of the influences of his ancestors. Each cultural phase has pushed the limits of the social imaginary and these changes in the social imaginary have had an enormous impact in transforming the way everybody, first in the North Atlantic societies, but eventually every educated person in the world, imagines and thinks about the world, for better and worse.

In the last week we focused on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche who in their different ways have played a significant role in shaping the moral imaginaries of the twentieth century, whether people have read their books or not. I hoped to give you some feel for what the sources of their thinking were in German Romanticism even if they developed and emphasized earlier ideas in their own remarkable ways.

Kierkegaard's main contribution was to emphasize the importance of choice in living an authentic life, and while he was a Christian, I don't think you need to be relgious to appreciate the significance of his ideas. Good Will Hunting was Kierkegaardian through and through, and there was no religious reference in it.

Nietzsche's main contribution was to provide a way of living authentically that rejected not just faith but any and any other cultural supports in a way that was astonishing for its courage. I think that his influence in the 20th Century lies primarily in admiration people feel for that uncompromising courage in stripping away any kind of comforting Apolloinian idea, form custom that might filter his direct gaze into the abyss. I didn't have a chance to share this passage from his The Will to Power with you in class that describes what he saw when he looked into it:

I think it's important to read and understand this because it provides a much richer understanding about what N. meant by the Will to Power, which many people reduce to an idea of personal or political domination of others. It has more this idea of raw, amoral, chaotic, anarchic, purposeless energy that nevertheless could be channeled into purposes by the human being who is willing to open him- or herself open to its life-giving powers. The goal is not to dominate but to expand by opening oneself up as widely as possible to the amoral, impersonal power that seeks to express itself in indvidual human souls.

N is very much in that German tradition in which Schelling's Geist or Schopenhauer's Will becomes aware of itself in the human being. N sees it, however, as in itself purposeless, as having no goals or ends, and so the human project in its truest and highest form is aesthetic--to open oneself up to its magnificence, its sublime beauty and power, and to let it carry the human being wherever it might. And so one's joy in life is derived from those moments when the 'will to power' works through you, and the the great human being, the uebermensch, is the one who overcomes whatever personal limitations inhibits or filter the power of this will to work in you.

Heidegger follows more closely from Nietzsche than from Kierkegaard, and that's perhaps why he was so easily seduced by Nazism. Nietzsche's Will to Power becomes Being for Heidegger. In the Nietzsche/Heidegger stream, "beyond good and evil" means that there is no real distinction to be made between good and evil so long as one is living from these magnificent depths, and Heidegger, for a while at least--1933-34-- thought that Nazism was an expression of that magnificence. But he never renounced Nazism in a way that satisfied his friends Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers.

Traditional ideas of morality or decency are rendered irrelevant by the power of the Will to Power--and apparently by Heidegger's Being when it manifests in the Volk Spirit. Kierkegaard would not ever have been fooled by the Nazis. The young Nietzsche (circa 1870) I think would have been fooled.

There are elements in Heidegger's philosophy--the idea of alienation in what he called the "They" that many think should have prevented Heidegger from 'getting in step' with the Nazis. But I think that for Heidegger the 'They' manifests mainly in people who are themselves estranged from Being and are just going through the formulaic cultural motions. Nazism represented a breaking through of the power of Being, and early on I think that for him not to get in step meant to refuse the call of Being in that historical moment.

So this raises questions about discernment and judgment and the criteria one uses to make judgments. I think that for Nietzsche and for Heidegger the only ethical imperative was to submit or not submit to the Will to Power or to the call of Being respectively, and since both were amoral forces, other kinds of ethical considerations were irrelevant. So while there is much of value in Heidegger, I would not look to him as having anything useful to say about making moral judgments. I'll have more to say about this in class on Monday.

Someone like Sartre and particularly Camus, while they owe quite a bit to Nietzsche and Heidegger, owe more to Kierkegaard, because the individual moral choice--the Either/Or--was central for them in defiing a human life well lived. Both Sartre and Camus were atheists, but both had a deep love of the Good, and their lives are a testament to their moral commitments, i.e., their making choices that realized the Good in their own lives and in the lives of others. You don't see that desire for Goodness in Nietzsche and Heidegger. Camus and Sartre, whether you agree with their absurdist or nihilist metaphysics, are heirs of the Western Humanist tradition that both Nietzsche and Heidegger rejected, and there is an anti-humanism that develops out of Nietzsche and Heidegger in postmodern thought that I for one find quite disturbing and destructive.

And its that disturbing quality that we see on display in Fargo. The movie seems to be a phenomenological study of two fundamental ways we have become dehumanized. The first form of dehumanization is obvious--the kind of callous behavior of the four main villains--the two kidnappers, Showalter and Grimsrud, and Jerry Lundgard and his father in law, Norm. But second form is less obvious because we see it in Jean Lundgard, Jerry's kidnapped wife, Marge, and her husband, Wade whom we recognize as decent, normal people a lot like us.

I have no idea what the personal philosophy or beliefs of the Coens are. There are times when I think that they are themselves fashionable Nietzscheans in a postmodern key, but there are other times when I see them as moralists in the Kierkegaardian tradition who want to hold up a mirror to our contemporary world to show us the degree to which we are in despair. I have come to think that theirs is not is not a project in the service of despair, but rather one designed to awaken us so that we might start to make the choices that will move us to live something deeper, richer, more authentic.

In this movie, as in The Big Lebowski, there are traditional good guys and bad guys, some likable characters and others unlikeable, but is there anyone who is "authentic" in the Kierkegaardian sense? Marge is a formidable woman, remarkable for her competency, her shrewdness, her courage, and yet I come away from the movie wondering if there's anyone at home there.

She seems to be only her outside-in training, i.e., her cultural programming. She just got better programming than Jean who was incapable of responding to something that did not fit her coded housewife script. So the women differ because of the different roles they've been trained for, but in their cores, are Marge and Jean essentially any different? Is anyone, in the Kierkegaardian sense, there? In other words, is there any character in the movie who is not in despair? (I think that Kierkegaard if he watched the film would have the most hope for Mike Yanagita, the guy Marge meets for drinks. Do you know why?)

And so Marge, despite the horrors that she's seen, seems incapable of responding to any of it except as it's a part of her job. She is a decent, likeable person, but I wonder if the Coens are asking us--as they were asking us about the Dude--is that enough?

Conrad sent me this video about how right and left brain function. Complements the Iain McGilchrist video I showed earlier in the quarter and which is posted at 1/17 below.

I find this fascinating, and one of my summer projects is to get into this in a deeper way. The two things that I find most interesting are (1) that the right brain takes in a broader range of information than does the left brain and is the portal to those areas of experience explored by artists and mystics. This is the point of the McGilchrist video and of his book The Master and His Emissary. And (2) the right brain is mute--it is not capable of speaking up on its behalf and so depends on its connections to the left brain. MCGilchrist points this out as well, but it's vividly explained in this video.

The interesting question for me is whether the right brain is experiencing all kinds of things that are being filtered out by the left brain that in its effort to control the narrative, so to say, renders invisible and unheard what the right brain knows but cannot articulate.

Whatever the connection mechanism is between right and left seems to be the key. In more creative people there is a greater flow of information from right to left, and so the question is whether there are ways of opening up or closing off that information pipleline. We humans cannot deal with too much reality at once, so we need the filters, but my working hypothesis is that we "buffered" selves have filters that filter too much, and I have to wonder if opening things up somehow or another is the key to a cultural renaissance, if not an evolutionary move forward. Food for thought anyway.

Week 8 Wrap: This was a short week because of the holiday on Monday, so things were a little rushed, but we had time to focus on Kant and the remarkably exuberant school of philosophy that developed after him--the German Idealists--who built on his idea of the world-constituting, transcendental ego. These German thinkers had an impact on the European and world imaginary that is hard for us to fathom because so many of their ideas we take for granted today without understanding how it was they who first developed them.

There's no Derrida and Foucault without Freud, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, and no Freud, Heidegger, and Nietzsche without Schopenhauer, and no Schopenhauer without Fichte and Schiller. There'e no Lenin and Mao without Marx, no Marx without Feuerbach and Hegel, and no Hegel without Schelling--and none of the above without Kant. England gave us market liberalism, but these Germans gave us both Fascism and Communism. The English model dominates the elite social imaginary now, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Germans make a comeback--for worse, maybe, but possibly for better--if we understood them better. Their ideas were mostly misappropriated and misapplied in the 20th Century, imo.

But the Anglo-American world was deeply influenced by these Germans, too. The American transcendentalim of Emerson and Thoreau comes through the Scot Thomas Carlyle who was influenced by Fichte. And British Romanticism came mainly through Coleridge who was influenced by Kant and especially Schelling.

The relevancy of these ideas I hope I've been able to make clear in connection with the 'ethic of authenticity' that Charles Taylor argues is central to the contemporary social imaginary in North Atlantic societies. The idea of authenticity traces back to Rousseau and Herder, but was worked over by Kant, Schiller, and Fichte and then through Nietzsche and has become a commonplace in shaping our contemporary understanding about freedom and authenticity. Modern literature and film teems with heroes whose efforts to define themselves assume that such self-definition is not to be constrained by social convention. These 'no-rules' heroes create their own reality; they refuse to be shaped by it. This is a very German idea.

I assigned the Taylor "Malaise" lectures and Good Will Hunting this week in hopes of showing the link between them. As Taylor points out, there is a mistaken tendency to conflate the ethic of self-determining freedom, which everybody gets, with the idea of authenticity, which most people don't. Or perhaps more accurately, many people think they understand what it means to be authentic, but really don't. Isn't that Will's situation in the movie?

He thinks he knows what it means to be authentic, but he sees it mostly as defining himself over against elite phonies like the arrogant guy in the Harvard Bar or Lambeau's fancy psychiatrist friends, and even Lambeau himself. He says No to all of that, and good for him, and he also says yes to values like loyalty to his friends, and he affirms the value of humility and unpretentiousness in his refusal to forget the working class Irish roots he comes from. But the movie asks whether for Will this is good enough. Does this kind of life realize his full measure? Clearly it does not.

This is the most important takeaway from the Taylor "Malaise" lectures: It is a corruption of the authenticity ideal to think that whatever you choose is ok because you choose it. Our choices matter, deeply matter, but we do not make these choices in a vacuum. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to one another to challenge one another on issues that really matter.

Will and the Dude, when we meet them at the beginning of their respective movies, are likable, good guys living small lives. They differ at the end of those movies in that Will has moved into a fuller measure of himself, whereas the Dude has not. For the Dude it's back to the stoner status quo ante of bowling and White Russians and, you know, "abiding". Sure, there's nothing wrong with that if that's all there is in the Dude to be--but does anybody really believe that's his full measure?

And, sure, it's better to abide than to be a crazy, hyperactive blunderer like Walter, but it would be better yet if the Dude had people in his life like Skylar, or Sean, or Chuckie--or even Lambeau. Each of them in their different ways challenged Will to be bigger, to realize more the measure of himself. Through most of the movie Will like the Dude just wanted to 'abide', but the people who cared about him most wouldn't let him be satisfied with that. As Simone de Beauvoir says, “Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.”

In the end it's Will who has to choose the life he wants for himself--no one can or should force his or her agenda on him--but because Will is lucky enough to have people in his life who genuinely care about him and whom he cares about, he is empowered to make a choice that if he had been left to himself he probably would not have been capable to make.

Sean and Skylar represent the challenge to Will's inner life; Chuckie and Lambeau represent the challenge to Will's outer life in the world. Sean and Skylar challenge him--and more important model for him--what it takes to become vulnerable, to risk opening up, to face all that is truly frightening about what comes with the deepest kind of intimate love. Chuckie and Lambeau challenge Will to become someone who can use his talents in a way that will contribute something positive to the world. Both inner and outrer are important, but I think the movie is clear that inner comes first because if you're not right there, you probably won't be right in the way you work in the world.

If there is anything unrealistic or 'Hollywood' about this movie, it's not this truth to which it points, but rather that most of people are more like the fatuous characters who show up in Coen Brothers movies, not people like Sean or Skylar. And if we're honest, we have to admit we ourselves are more like Coens' characters, too.

A final thought about how German Idealism and Romanticism relate to the disenchantment theme that has been the overarching focus of this course. With the exception of Wordsworth, the Idealists and the Romantics in Germany and England were restless, alienated souls who were deeply infected by a longing for a lost sense of transcendence and enchantment. They were depressed by the soul-flattening effects of the buffered selves that modernity was producing. And they were repulsed by the utilitarian exploitiveness that was the driving force in the early stages of the industrial revolution. We'll be talking about Nietzsche next week, but this quote captures the mood of the Romantics:

Nietzsche is clearly in the view-from-Dover-Beach camp. But in the same way that Nietzsche's philosophy was the result of his own intensive effort to overcome his sense of alienation, fragmentation, disechantment, so was the poetry and the philosophy of his predecessors earlier in the century.

Their efforts were driven by an intense spiritual longing, and that longing for most people is more easily fulfilled with more tangible things, and so the period between 1850 and 1950 becomes the century of materialism. The restlessness remains strong, but it mostly gets channeled into working with the material world to transform the material world, and spiritual concerns become pushed to the margins--at least by the culture's elites in the media, and the political and economic spheres.

When Nietzsche announced that God is dead, he was simply announcing what he saw in the materialist social imaginary of his day. God seemed then to have no vital outside-in shaping effect on the imaginary. Even people who are religious found themselves living in a very secularized, buffered, disenchanted social imaginary.

But I wonder if Nietzsche was looking in the right place. Perhaps he hadn't realized that God had not died but rather had simply changed his address. I think the Romantics would point out that God had moved underground, that he's not found in the heights, but in the depths, not out there, but within. Because we humans have a tendency to look for Love in all the wrong places does not mean that love does not exist. And so perhaps the same could be said of Nietzche, a man driven by a profound spiritual longing: he was looking for God, but in all the wrong places.

Saturday, February 17, 2018

Week 7 Wrap: The lectures this week focused on providing a general overview regarding how the intense religious strife that engulfed Europe in the century between 1550 and 1650 engendered a reaction among elites who sought a cooler, more impersonal mythos, and how this played a significant role in hastening secularization.

The Enlightenment period, that we mark out in our simplified timeline from 1650-1750, is when modernity takes hold in shaping the social imaginary of European and American elites, and as I have suggested in lecture, it dominates the imaginary of North Atlantic societies at least until WWI in Europe and until the Vietnam War in the U.S.

This kind of historical generalization is arguable, of course. But it's useful for us to use these labels because it helps us to think about--and argue about--the significance about what's going on now and how we got here.

There are good reasons for thinking that North Atlantic societies entered into significantly altered social imaginary after WWII from the one that prevailed and energized the West since the mid-1600s. This alteration occurred a little earlier in Europe and later in America. But if modernity was characterized by its sense of optimism about an unlimited positive human future as humans threw off the shackles of the irrational, superstitious past as hard work, rationality, and scientific thinking came to supplant traditional thinking, few believe in that dream today.

Some may still hold on to it, but it simply does not shape the collective consciousness--what we've been calling a social imaginary--in the way that it had before the World Wars. In The Big Lebowski, for instance, the only character that seems to hold onto that Reaganite nostalgic dream is the Big L himself, and the movie is clear what a fraud he is.

Reaganism and much of the driving force of the cultural right in this country is born of a nostalgia for lost moral horizons, as Taylor describes it in his first Malaise of Modernity lecture. But nostalgia is the attitude of those who want to go native in the past, and that leads to a fantasy that almost always has destructive effects. The Dude in Lebowski correctly accuses Walter of living in the past, and Walter is an expemplar of the kind of misjudgments and blundering that follows from people who impose their past-driven fantasies on world the world around them.

Anyway, the goal this week was to show how elite revulsion at the brutal irrationality of the Wars of Religion and the Civil War in England understandably motivated elites to search for an alternative mythos/metaphysics that could provide a non-confessional, rational ground to legitimate changes in the social order that were being driven by the disruptions of early capitalism and the growing power of the emergent bourgeoisie.

We talked about how post-Reformation program of reform was facilitated by the supplanting of the old Aristotelian/Platonic ideas of embedded form so that both human beings and societies were imagined as malleable stuff that could be reshaped any way that the human mind could imagine it. If before reform meant to restore a degraded or corrupted thing to its healthy interior essence, now things had no interior, and so they could be molded from outside into anything the human mind could imagine as desirable.

We talked about how the Christian Neostoicism of Justus Lipsius laid a foundation for (1) an embrace of a trans-confessional understading of a rational God and (2) a justification for the aggressive reforms that enjoined civil authorities along with religioius reformers to bully the 'lower orders' to give up their customary pracitices, beliefs, and traditions, and how all this had a significant disenchanting/secularizing effect.

We talked about how in the 1600s two different philosophical schools developed that separated out according to whether Matter or Mind was the starting point for thought. In England there was a bias toward starting from the data given through the senses, and on the contintent there was a bias toward theory and to how the mind plays the primary role in shaping experience. The English philosphers were known collectively as the Empiricists, and the Continental philosophers as the Rationalists.

We talked about the signficance of these biases for political and economic theory and how there was a tendency in England after the failed Puritan experiment of the mid-17th century toward a more Libertarian outlook; whereas, particularly in France, following from Calvin and Lipsius, the idea of reform from top to bottom persisted. We talked about the difference between the French and American Revolutions, and why the American Revolution was never an attempt to re-engineer society as the French Revolution was so much as it was to continue local self-rule by removing top-down meddling from London once and for all.

And on Friday, before the discussion of The Big Lebowski, we talked about how the industrial revolution in America and the emergence of managerial liberalism in the early 20th Century in the U.S. created a top-downism inimical to American republican ideals. This top-downism was driven by runaway instrumental reason institutionalized by larger and more powerful corporate and governmental bureaucracies, especially in the period starting after WWI. Many Americans complained about how these institutional developments, especially in the workplace, had a soul-crushing effect on the individual and his capacity for free expression of the individual that typified the republican ideals of an America whose citizens were independent, self-employed farmers, small businessmen, and artisans.

One of the more interesting attempts to push back against this encroachment by technocratic instrumental reason was the student protests of the 1960s--the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964/5, but even earlier in the writing of the Port Huron Statement in 1962. It's interesting to read this excerpt from that statement in the light of the Taylor "Malaise of Modernity" lectures (see below) I asked you to listen to:

In other words, this is a call to Americans to retrieve the higher possibilities for the Ethic of Authenticity that is at the heart of the American Republican ideal.

Taylor's lectures echoes the Port Huron Statement in its call for a retrieval of the highest ideals of the ethic authenticity that trace back to the 1700s in Rousseau and Herder. We'll be talking about the roots of this ethic in Romanticism in the next week or so, but in the meanwhile I'd like you to think about whether The Big Lebowski's Dude, who claims to be one of the writers of the Port Huron Statement, exemplifies its ideals or its degradation.

I think that Taylor would reject the Reaganite Big L's critique of the Dude because it caricatures the critiques of conservatives like Allan Bloom and Christopher Lasch, which Taylor says are wrong. But Taylor (and I) would gently critique the Dude from within the ethic of authenticity by suggesting that he's not quite living up to its challenges. The Dude is not a phony, but his indolence is a failure to live something more--to realize the "full measure of his character" not by the Big L's standards but by what should be his own.

A few more thoughts about The Big Lebowski. As I said in class, the Coens are careful filmmakers, and there is nothing in their movies that is unintentional. But while they exercise considerable control in the making of their films, they don't control all the possibilities for their interpretation. As with any significant work of art, and I think that Lebowski qualifies as significant, there are several levels of things going on.

On one level it's an entertainment with really well-written comic dialog. On another level it's a political allegory that's making a statement about the bull-in-the-China-shop, militarist mentality of arrogant Neoconservatives (Walter) whom the anemic, feckless political Left (the Dude) is powerless to prevent from doing the damage they do. This movie came out in 1998, but it was remarkably prescient in predicting how the kind of over-the-top militarist mentality that Walter typifies was not all that different from the mentality of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and how their continuous misreading of the facts and blundering--Walter's, Cheney's, and Rumsfeld's--made things far worse than if they had just done nothing. Sometimes it's better not to be an "achiever".

But on another level this is a movie about the American male identity in a post-Vietnam, i.e., post-modern, milieu and his not knowing who he is anymore because the old social imaginary that gave men their identity and instructed them how to act has collapsed. "What is a man? the Big L asks the Dude. That's an open question I don't think the movie even attempts to answer, but the movie provides an interesting phenomenological description of the landscape of American masculinity in the 90s--from Jackie Treehorn and his thugs to Allan (the Dude's landlord) doing his shadow dance.

The cowboy Stranger is a creature of the old 1940s and 50s (no cussin' allowed) masculine imaginary who realizes that his time has past, and I guess, for want of a better model, sees the Dude as the new exemplar for American masculinity. I would find it hard to believe that the Coens aren't being acidly ironic about the Stranger's assessment of the Dude. The Dude is a likable, relatively decent guy, but to call him 'exemplary' is to stretch the meaning of the word beyond recognition.

Final thought: The guy in the iron lung, Arthur Digby Sellers (who is fictional), is attributed by Walter with writing most of the episode scripts for Branded, which was a real TV series about the American West that aired in 1965-66 starring Chuck Connors, a very manly man. The character he plays, Jason McCord, was a soldier wrongly accused of cowardice and courtmartialed. He's 'branded' as a coward, so the plots are driven by his need over and over again to prove his courage.

It raises a question for me about whether Walter wasn't in fact a coward in Vietnam, and if his antics and mentality are in some way his trying to prove himself he's not a coward. He finally proves his courage in his confrontation with the Nihilists, a fight in which Donny dies. I can't help but wonder if Donny is for Walter an image of what Walter fears he, Walter, is in reality--a mousy little nobody. Donny dies when Walter finally proves to himself that he's a 'real man'. Perhaps that explains why Walter was so uncharacteristically kind to Donny in the parking lot even before the fight began--and why he wept after distributing his ashes. He was saying goodbye to that nagging part of himself that he no longer had to say shut the fuck up to.

And we haven't even begun to talk about Maude, the Nihilists, and the significance of bowling. And what about the tumbleweed?

As we get ready to watch The Big Lebowski and other Coen brothers films, I will be approaching their interpretation from very much a Taylorite pov. I think that you'll find Taylor's 45-minute lecture below entitled "The Malaise of Modernity" illluminating about themes that the Coen brothers are exploring. I do.

This lecture was given in 1991 at exactly the time that the movie is taking place, which is early 1991 as the U.S. is gearing up for the first Iraq War known as Operation Desert Storm. This is the first of five lectures by Taylor, and all five are worth listening to over the next week or so. I'll be using it and the second one that's linked below to talk about Lebowski and to transition into our discussion of Romanticism next week.

So rather than give you more Taylor to read this week, I'm going to require that you watch these five lectures. They are much less dense than his writing, and they cover the same territory we'll be covering as we move through the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and into early existientialism, and then post WWII thought. Postmodern thought in the U.S. is very much a post-Vietnam phenomeno, and Lebowski is very much a reflection by the Coens about the post-Vietnam social imaginary.

When we discuss Lebowski on Friday we want to talk about how the people in it make interpretive judgments about what's happening in their world and how those judgments shape their actions--that's the epistemological and ethical dimension. But we need to understand it in the context of what's happening socially and politically in a post-Vietnam social imaginary and how that has affected the American mythos--the metaphysical dimension.

Week 6 Wrap: I chose the four Shakespeare plays we've studied over the last month because I think they show a fertile imagination engaged with a dramatic shift from the late premodern to modern social imaginary. We started with The Tempest, a story about a storm, a father and his daughter, and we end with King Lear, also a story about a father, his daughter, and a storm. And both stories echo the story told in Whale Rider between Koro and Pai.

Whale Rider and these plays are in their different ways about how the entrenched habits of an encrusted social imaginary smother life and so must be continuousy challenged and renewed. That renewal comes from outside the existiing social imaginary, and in literature this 'outside' is imaged as wilderness--the sea, the desert, the heath, a remote island. For some the wildenress is where you meet God, but more often than not you meet your demons. You are there alone, stripped of all your pretentions, and everything that propped up your identity when you played your role in society. That's what links Prospero and Lear, and the issue that each play addresses in my reading is whether each will succeed in ridding himself of those demons.

Prospero and Lear both have daughters, and both are essential for the success of their projects. Prospero's relationship with Miranda keeps him from hardening completely into bitter resentment and vengeful rage. On one level the central issue of The Tempest is whether Prospero will succeed in restoring himself to Milan and to unite Milan with Naples through the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda. But on a deeper level it's about whether he will use his superior powers to achieve his objectives in a spirit of justice and forgiveness or in a spirit of vengeful recrimination. He choses the former and then abjures his special powers. He will not use his magic back in the 'real world'; he will submit to the rules of the normal social imaginary. He returns to Milan not as a powerful magician, but as just a man. And in the end he is stripped down to essentials as Lear has been stripped. They have become each in their own way 'the thing itself'.

This is the central anagnorisis for both Prospero and Lear--the recognition of who they really are--just men, not the power that they have yielded. This anagnorisis requires a movment of descent. A different kind of anagnorisis occurs for Pai in Whale Rider, Neo in The Matrix, and Edgar in King Lear. Each 'ripens'; each comes into an awareness of his or her power and the important role each is called upon to play in their respective societies. As young people they are ascending into roles of power in constrast with Prospero and Lear, old people, who are descending into an awareness of being just human, reminded that their power, though having possessed prodigious amounts of it, is not central to their "essential" identity. It's just a role they were given to play on the world stage.

These are lessons, no doubt, that the three ascending characters will need to learn when they are at the end of their careers. And these are lessons also for us who watch these characters as they ascend or descend, as we try to understand who we are ourselves and how much of who we are is role playing and how much of it is essential--the real thing. How much of it is our grabbing for things that are not rightly ours, and how much of it is growing into what is right for us.

So how does all this connect to the enchantment/disenchantment theme that has been for us always in the background? In the first paperback edition of Barrett's Irrational Man, the cover shown below used Giacometti's statue entitled "Tall Walking Figure". Imagine Lear confronting this figure and saying "Thou art the thing itself." If this encouner with Edgar/Tom in the heath is the moment of Lear's anagnorisis, his first realization of who he really was, the Giacometti image is meant to provoke a similar anagnorisis in every one of us who look upon it.

Anagnorisis, it could be said, is the central theme for existentialist philosophy as contrasted with academic philosophy: What does it mean to be a human being? The protagonists in Barrett's story--Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus--are each in their own way Lear figures, people who strip themselves to the bare essentials so that they might recognize who or what is truly there. The characteristics of the late modern social imaginary force all but the most naive to see themselves in that stripped-down, denuded Giacometti figure and to ask themselves honestly what they see there.

In my reading of Shakespeare, I see him doing the same thing in his plays. We see it even in Love's Labor' Lost, even if there it's kinder and gentler. We encounter four naive young men who are full of themselves, and the play is about how the women come to town and cut them down to size for their own good. There is no physical wilderness in this play, but the women are its emissaries, and they come to break down the house of illusion that each of these men has built for himself. They do it by mocking them and confronting them with their foolishness, self-absorption, and hypocrisies. Their role in LLL is very much like Cordelia's in Lear. And by the end, the boys, because they are still boys, are quite sober, quite like Prospero and Lear near the end of their respective plays.

But these boys are still ascending. They are rather like the man-child Edgar at the beginning of King Lear, themselves man-children who don't have a clue. And so as Edgar must go out onto the heath, so must Navarre and Berowne go through a similar penitential test, not just to win the ladies but to learn who they really are. And it is sobering. There is no sign of the exalted divine human ideal here. We are no longer in the exuberance of the high Renaissance with these Shakespearean plays. That mood of sobriety at the end of the plays we studied (except Much Ado) links them all thematically. And it links Shakespeare to the Existentialist themes you have been and will be reading about in Barrett.

So we see in this time between Shakespeare and Giacometti the slow transformation of the social imaginary from one in which in Shakespeare's time the truth seeker still had to leave society to go into the wilderness to a social imaginary now in which the wilderness has come to us. The Age of Whatever is the wilderness, and we don't have any choice except whether we will wander in it unconsciously or consciously, and to live in it consciously means to confront ourselves similarly as the protagonists in Barrett's story have done--stripped of all the illusions, supports, all the enchantments, and distractions so that we might see with clarity what shows up.

But the question I would ask you to think about as we move forward is whether this stripping away is the end result of the post-axial disembedding process. If so, does it open up a way of understanding our time as having possibilities that the more nihilistic interpretation of it refuses? That's the same question I would put to you in your interpretation of Lear regarding whether you think the nihilistic reading of it is the strongest reading of it. I wonder if there is a more important question that each of us needs to answer for ourselves, but also if there is a more important question for your generation, which willl play a huge role as shapers of the "postmodern" social imaginary now inchoately forming.

There is no conscious, honest moving forward into the future without first passing through a testing of some kind in the wilderness. This I believe is what the Coen brothers at their best are trying to do in their films--they are wandering in the contemporary wilderness in the Age of Whatever to see what shows up in it. So next week it will be The Big Lebowski. As I suggested in class, if you have time, it would be interesting for you to see the Bogart/Bacall movie on which it's based, The Big Sleep.

For those of you who would like to watch Kurosawa's Ran on your own, here's the link to it on Amazon. I will be showing it tomorrow at 630 in Paccar 490, where we usually watch the movies.

Week 5 Wrap: The focus this week has been on the impact of Florentine Neoplatonism on the Eurpean social imaginary, at least among its educated elite. As the McGilchrist video argues, it was the last moment in the Latin West when there was a kind of balance between both the Left and the Right when it comes to the cognitive values of the brain. Right brain/Left brain, heart/head, guileless/shrewd, porous/buffered, idealist/realist are all complementary dyads that define tensions that shape human experience, and trouble comes when things get out of balance one way or the other. The Greek word for holding opposites together in creative tension is metaxis. My argument in this class so far has been that tragedy results from a breakdown in this balance, and that comedy is about its restoration.

The lectures this week sought to build on what we established about the cosmic and moral imaginaries that shaped medieval and renaissance elite understanding. And the reading I gave you by Nesca Robb about Ficino's Platonic Academy in Florence was meant to provide a supplement to support what I was saying in lecture. The main take away here is that the reintroduction of Plato through the translations of Ficino played a significant role in catalyziing a creative exuberance in the arts that we won't see replicated again until Romanticism bursts onto the scene three hundred years later. While there is much that that seems to us excessive, if not flaky, in the way people thought and talked about things during the Renaissance and Romanticism, there is no disputing the creative energy that was generated, and the quality of the work that was produced.

In watching Love's Labor's Lost, my hope was to show how these ideas--especially the ones that relate to the moral imaginary of ascent and descent and of the encounter with beauty and the medieval Religion of Love--culminates and deepens in Shakespeare. We tend to take love stories for granted because they are the most common, cliche-ridden theme you'll find in all levels of story telling, but I hope I've made the case that in this older tradition, and in Shakespeare, there is an attempt to explore what I'm calling the 'enchantment of eternity'.

While these are stories on one level about human beings like you and me, they are also stories about "potential" gods and goddesses. In the full flush of humanist exuberance these philosophers and artists believed that divinity was the deep truth about the human being--not that they were already gods and goddesses, but that they could be. I think that we tend to allow the way the love language of eternity, divinity, etc., has become such a cliche in literature, that we find it hard to appreciate how new it was then, and how inspiring for their moral and artistic imaginations.

Shakespeare clearly shares in the humanistic exuberance, and is one of its greatest exemplars. But he was not naive, and he was no flake. And I believe that he took this idea of the potential divinity of the human being very seriously. And his plays were an attempt on one level to portray existentially problematic human scenarios--healthy or unhealthy ambition, distinguishing between appearance and reality, falling in love or resisting or refusing love, etc.--and to give tests of different kinds to his characters to see how they do.

The results are sometimes tragedy, sometimes farce, and in some cases an apotheosis of the Divine Human. I think the last is clearer in a play such as As You Like It, which unfortunately we won't have time to watch. In plays like Much Ado About Nothing, and in Love's Labor Lost the journey toward apotheosis is at best just begun, and it's unclear whether success lies in the future for our heroes and heroines. But I don't think for a moment that Shakespeare didn't think success was a possibility, even if such success is rare and achieved only afer much difficulty.

And I think that this why that final scene in Love's Labor's Lost has such poignancy. As the masque spectacle is interrupted so abruptly in The Tempest, so is the song-and-dance spectacle performed by Cotard and the others in Love's Labor's Lost. Both interruptions are a splash of cold water, and both have an ominous memento mori effect. Sure, it's great fun to be pulled into this fantastic spectacle, but it's not real, and not to be taken seriously. Death is real. Obligations are real. And maybe love is real. And if love is real, I mean really real, then it partakes in eternity.

And if Love is real in this way, nothing should be taken more seriously, and so it must be rigorously tested. That's the point of the penances that the women impose in that final scene--most emphatically on Ferdinand and Berowne. Neither man is yet yet to be taken seriously, but it's possible that they might prove themselves serious. These penances are meant to purify and to test their 'constancy'.

But if in the foreground the drama is about whether Jack will eventually get his Jill, in the background is the drama about whether the original goal, wisdom, is attainable. The naive idealst Ferdinand's penance requires that he undertake a regime very much like the one that he swore to undertake in the pursuit of wisdom a few days earlier. But now this ascetic regime is undertaken not in the service of book learning, but in the service of Love, the true path to the attainment Divine Wisdom.

And the penance imposed on the serpentine narcissist Berowne requires a year of exercising his wit in the service of compassion, that is, to bring laughter to hearts who have little cause to laugh or smile. Rosaline says:

So these women are 'dual', they are themselves mortals, but also emissaries of the Divine Sophia, and their mission is to 'reform' the men so that they might be worthy of the kind of love that partakes in the enchantment of eternity. A year and a day is too long for a play, so the play ends inconclusively as to whether both or either will succeed.

Next week the lectures will focus on the most important factors that accelerated the continued disenchantment and disembedding of the Latin West. And so it's fitting that the last Shakespeare play we'll watch is King Lear, which is a story of a rich, powerful man being stripped naked, and as such is a story of radical disembedding.

BTW, I'm thinking of also showing next week Akira Kurosawa's Ran, which is his retelling the King Lear story but with substituting Japanese warlords for Celtic ones. I haven't seen it in years, but I was blown away by its sumptuous beauty when I did. I am going to watch it anyway, so I thought I'd do it with anybody else who's interested. So think about it, and I'll ask on Monday, and probably show it on Tuesday and then watch Lear on Thursday as usual.

The plot and characters for Lear get complicated, and if you're unfamiliar with it, watching Ran before Lear might be a good way to prepare for watching Lear. The language in Ran is much siimpler and easier to understand.

Enchantment of Eternity. During office hours today, it became clear to me that I haven't made as clear as I should have the distinction between the enchantment of the heath and the enchantment of eternity. The story that I'm trying to tell is one in which as the enchantment of the heath becomes less of an influence in shaping the imaginary of the cultural elite, the enchantment of eternity becomes stronger. It moves out of the monasteries and into the 'secular' society. It starts with the medieval romances, which are really allegories about the revelation of the divine feminine and of the awakening of spiritual or transcendent love.

We see a particularly powerful development of this tradition in Dante in the early 1300s. Then we see another development in Ficino's doctrine of Platonic Love in the late 1400s. The enchantment of eternity does not focus on the immanent spirits of the heath--the sprites, nymphs, demons, etc., but on the immanent presence of the transcendent, the divine essences that provide the infrastructre for all of creation.

This encounter is associated with a kind of divine madness, or as Ficino calls it furores. This is the suprramental infusion of energy that possess the great philospher or artist when he or she has an encounter with the hyper-real, the Deep Real that is the divine mind which provides the code that structures the created world. So the enchantment of eternity occurs when the transcendent is experienced in the immanent.

This encounter with the divine, even if it's only a momentary glimpse, most frequently occurs in our encounters with the divine in other human beings, but it can happen with any encounter in which the divine essence discloses itself. This was my reason for bringing in the 20th Century Jewish existentialist, Martin Buber, because I think he is pointing to something similar in his book I and Thou, where the Thou can be anything in which the divine presence inheres. Buber is basicallly pointing to a kind of porousness that he thinks is possible for modern/late modern humans that is similar to what the Florentine Neoplatonists were pointing to.

Marium sent me some examples 'qawwalis' a type of Sufi devotional music that I think expands the scope for our understanding of this kind of mystical love literature. Marium says that the poetry is understood to be spiritual, even though the lyrics can sometimes sound secular, and even hedonistic.

The Song of Songs in the Hebrew scriptures, written in the 500s BCE has the same kind of sensuous sexual imagery in its allegorical representation of spiritual love. Marium says that the central themes of qawwali are love, devotion, and longing of man for the Divine.

The qawwal in the Youtube below is called Aaj Rung Hai ("Today There Is Jubilant Color). It was composed in the late 13th century by Amir Khurso of Delhi, a Sufi musician and disciple of the Sufi saint, Nizamiddin Auliya. Khusro is credited with fusing the Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Indian musical traditions in the late 13th century to create the art form of the qawwali. That makes the composition of this song near contemporaneous with the writing of the Romance of the Rose.

The story of this qawwali is Amir Khurso telling his mother about the splendor and magnificance of Nizamuddin Auliya and his monastery.

I think you'll enjoy the energy and joyousness of this performance. Notice the repetitions and the way the music intensifies as it progresses. Make sure you turn on the closed captioning to see the lyrics in English.

Week 4 Wrap: I have a few things to say about Much Ado below, but I'll postpone other ideas about the play until we have more time to discuss it on Monday. But I do want to elaborate more on themes introduced in the past week that can be tricky to understand for the uninitiated. Explaining the idea of the Platonic essences/ideas/forms as they were understood by the medieval "realists" (really idealists) is a heavy lift, but it's important.

The medieval dispute between so-called realists and nominalists is also important, but I'm going to postpone discussing it until we talk about the scientific revolution and the shift to the Enlightenment in the 1600s. Nominalism wins that dispute, and western science becomes a possibility as a result. The victory of nominalism leads to the rejection of Aristotle and Plato. But before we explore why they were rejected, we need to understand what was being rejected.

Barrett's chapter "Hebraism and Hellenism", in which he talks about existence and essence, is a good place to start, but I think he somewhat misrepresents the Medieval Platonists and doesn't even talk about the Renaissance Platonists. You come away from reading that chapter thinking that the Platonic ideas/forms/essences were intellectual abstractions and nothing more. That's not what they were for people like Aquinas and Ficino.

What gives a thing its existence is its participation in the Divine Mind. As in the figure below, that participation happens when the essence of a thing as it exists in the Divine Mind penetrates the the formless (essence-less) chaos of matter, and in interacting with it creates a world of creatures--from angels to rocks.

It might help to think of the arrows in the figure below as a continuous process of the Divine Mind's strewing seeds into the chaos. The mind of God inseminates matter (Mater = Latin for mother) or the primordial chaos, and those seeds germinate in matter/mater and become the things they were intended to become in the divine imagination.

What makes a thing real--what gives it its existence--is its form, which originates in the mind of God. These forms or essences are, therefore, the most real thing about a thing. So the things in the world are 'real', i.e., densely existent, to the degree that they realize or actualize the idea/essence of it that originates in the Divine Mind.

Rocks have less complex forms than plants, and plants less than animals, and animals less than humans--so complexity of form determines a thing's place in the Chain of Being. Living things are entelechies, which means that their development into their full form or telos happens over time. Evil comprises the various entropic forces--the pull toward chaos--that impede that development.

So the forms exist in the mind of God, but they also exist as seeds, in potentio as the medieval Aristotelians would say, in the material world. These seeds have what we think of as code, The code that makes angels angels, rocks rocks, and in entelechies, i.e., living things--acorns into oaks and caterpillars into butterflies. This code, obviously, originates--was written, so to say--in the Mind of God. So I'll leave it to you to connect alll that to our discussion of the social imaginary as a cultural linguistic download and then how that connects to our discussion of The Matrix.

The Pre-Socratic philosophers through to the Stoics and beyond called this divine code the Logos, which means 'Word'. And the Christian and Jewish thinkers easily connected this Greek idea with the biblical idea of the creative Word that brought the world into existence as described in Genesis.

So the bottom line here is that the ideas/forms in the mind of God are not abstractions; they are hyper-real. They have to be because they originate in God's mind, and God is by definition the only thing that is fully, completely, densely real. And a creature is real to the degree that it fully realizes its form as it is imagined in the Divine Mind.

Human beings, like plants and animals, are entelechies who have the "DNA" that governs their biological growth, but they also have 'soul DNA' that can potentially grow the human soul into something divine. But unlike plants and animals, this is not an automatic process but one that must be chosen, This is central the the Renaissance moral imaginary. All human beings are potentially gods, but only if they allow Divine Love to draw them upward by surrendering to that Love. One becomes divine to the degree that one's soul has become love-saturated, which is the condition of all the great saints and mystics.

The story of Layla and Majnun that I gave you to read yesterday comes from a Sufi/Islamic source, but it's an allegory of the "porous" soul capable of being possessed by love in this way, and it resonates very much with what Dante and the Christian Neoplatonists were pointing to.

Divine love is often awakened by encounters with other human beings in whom we see the divine seed in potentia. But as Shakespeare is well aware, having a glimpse of eternity in the beloved is just that, a glimpse. Growing the seed of love that germinates in that moment is hard work. And so for Shakespeare 'constancy' becomes the most important virtue in love relationships. The poem recited by Beatrice in the opening of Much Ado talks about how difficult such constancy is to maintain, and clearly Claudio has none of it. (Constancy for Majnun, clearly, is not a problem.)

The point here is for women not to believe men when they profess their eternal love. They may have been quite sincere when they said it, but that moment of divine enthusiasm does not last, and men, because they lack constancy--i.e., the ability to remain faithful to the memory of what was revealed about the beloved in that glimpse of eternity--are never to be trusted. So if you have been deceived, shrug it off and be blithe and bonny. That's just the way it is. This sets up Love's Labor Lost, which we will watch next.

Shakespearean tragedy is the story of the downward trajectory toward chaos that ensues when divine love is rejected. That love is offered to the tragic protagonist Hamlet by Ophelia and to Othello by Desdemona. As Beatrice was for Dante, both Ophelia and Desdemona are more symbols of divine love than they are real people. Ascent was still a possibility for Hamlet and Othello, but descent became their inevitable fate as soon as they rejected the 'divine love' that was offered to them by these symbols of the divine feminine.

We don't have time to get into them, but like Claudio's story arc in Much Ado, there's a comic pattern in All's Well that Ends Well and The Winter's Tale where the protagonist rejects the feminine, spins toward chaos, but has a rebirth or awakening to his folly, repents, and so is "saved". This is the pattern for Scrooge in Dickens' A Christmas Carol and the pattern for Koro in Whale Rider. BTW I recoommend both All's Well and Winter's Tale for seeing Shakespearean women characters who are fully developed, powerful, formidable human beings. Like Beatrice in Much Ado, they are far more than Beatrician symbols.

Keep this in mind as you read the handout on the Florentine Platonic Academy I gave you yesterday. I also gave you "Bembo's Discourse" from Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, which you will immediately see derives from the Plato readings I gave you last week. But at this time, Europe's court and intellectual elite encountered Plato largely refracted through Ficino, and Bembo's Discourse is kind of "pop" Ficino. The Book of the Courtier was translated and published in England in the late 1500s and it's all but certain that Shakespeare read it and was influenced by it. When we talk about Romanticism later you will see that this same spirit animates the thinking and imaginations of people like Schiller, Novalis, and Shelley.

We'll talk more about how ascent becomes descent for the Renaissance artists next week. But the short handout I gave you about Leonardo and his sense of the artist as a divine being will give you a clue about where I'm going with this. Of course, this is all blasphemy for the Radical Protestant Reformers.

I'm not requiring it, but I recommend that you read Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, which was essentially the Renaissance Humanist Manifesto.

Required reading: Interesting article in today's NYT that looks forward to our discussion of postmodern thought toward the end of the quarter: Is President Trump a Stealth Postmodernist?

I think the statement in the article attributed to Daniel Dennett--“We’re entering a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we’ve not experienced since the Middle Ages,”--does an injustice to the middle ages. It belies the classic modern negative bias toward the premodern.

The question is not so much whether Trump is a stealth postmodernist, but whether our 'postmodern condition' has created the conditions for the possibility of a Trump.

Too Much of a Good Thing? Is it possible to be "too idealistic". Yes, when it becomes a kind of rigid, judgmental fanaticism. People like the inquisitors Torquemada, fanatics like Savonarola and Robespierre were all members of the Party of the Dove. They sincerely believed they were serving God or a higher truth in demanding that the world live according to the ideals that they were committed too, and had little compunction in sending you to the stake or to the guillotine if you disagreed. Rigid, "unbalanced" idealism is far more dangerous and destructive than unbalance in the Party of the Shrewd Serpent, but we tend to see the work of the Serpent as always dark and unsavory. It can be, but doesn't have to be, e.g., Severus Snape.

Pre-Axial/Post-Axial: Since for many of you, these concepts are unfamiliar, I thought a clarification here might help. Pre-Axial religions are generally those that existed before the Axial Revolution, which occured in Eurasia from Greece to China roughly from the 800s to 400s BCE. The chief characteristic was an awareness or focus among elites in these societies of a transcendent dimension--the idea of a heaven or eternity that transcended the immanent frame, which is the world of change, of life and death, growing and decaying that we as well as our ancestors experience as the world that presents itself to us immediately.

This insight influenced different societies in different ways. (BTW, this could be an interesting final project for some students to explore in greater detail.) The Pos- axial societies that most influenced the Latin West were Greece and Israel--and Islam after the Crusades in the 110os and the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

The Ancient Hebrews were the first society to forbid idolatry, superstition, and the use of magic, all of which were normal in the imaginaries of the societies that surronded them. This disembedded Hebrew society even though there was a tendency for them to fall back into the old idolatrous, superstitious practices. The prophets' job was to remind them of their covenant with the One God.

The Axial Revolution in Greece effected a disembedding that happened more on the level of intellectual reflection and speculation. Philosophers in the 500s BCE in western Asia Minor and then in Athens in the mid 400s BCE developed an idea of atimeless, changeless dimension in reality that existed outside and unaffected by the immanent frame. These ideas culminated in Plato and Aristotle whose thought has shaped the western intellectual tradition to this day. For them the goal of the good life was to ascend to a contemplation of timeless truth.

Hierarchical Complementarity: In some post-Axial societies, India and the Latin West in particular, a system developed in which a minority of people left the society shaped by the conerns of the immanent frame, and went into the wilderness or into monasteries to develop a spiritual practice that sought to transcend the concerns--i.e., ordinary human flourishing, live long and prosper,--of the immanent frame. The societies they left continued many if not most of the pre-axial practices--magic, polytheism, superstition--and remained largely embeded in the immanent frame .

The complementarity aspect derives from the relationship between those who continued to live within the largely pre-axial immanent frame and those who left the immanent frame to live according to the transcendent ideals of eternity. The former over time was influenced by the latter. In the Latin west this system continued throughout Europe until the Reformation in the 1500s when it was eliminated in the Northern European Protestant societies, but continued in the southern European Catholic societies and in the Eastern orthodox societies into the twentieth century when they were eliminated in the communist bloc countries.

Enchantment of Immanence vs. Enchantment of Eternity. I make this distinction to set up a theme that I hinted at in the Day 8 lecture. The enchantment of immanence and the enchantment of eternity lived together in a kind of equilibrium in societies with spiritual hierarchical complementarity. But in North Atlantic societies during the last 500 years, the enchantment of immanence has almost completely disappeared. The enchantment of eternity, however, lingers--among some poets and artists (e.g., Yeat's "Sailing to Byzantium") and in the Religion of Love that still lingers in contemporary secular society refracted through the lens of Romanticism, which we'll be looking at soon. The goal now is to see how this theme is an important presence in Shakespeare and the Florentine Neoplatonists for whom the task of the artist and philosopher is to seek eternity where it is immanentized in the experience of Love and Beauty.

Walter White Modern Day Hamlet? Interesting article in Vox yesterday about how the five-season TV show Breaking Bad used the Shakespearean (really Terentian) five-act structure. It's a relatively short article worth reading as we prep for Love's Labor Lost.

Map this against the five-act analysis of Hamlet that I gave you. We'll see how the five act structure works with comedy as well as tragedy when we look this week at Love's Labor Lost. The way the writer uses structure gives you a huge clue about authorial intent.

One of the criticisms of The Tempest is that there doesn't seem to be much dramatic tension. Prospero is the story's protagonist, but is there ever any real doubt that he will prevail? Were there ever any serious obstacles that could have thwarted him in achieving his objectives?

In a comedy you would expect a reversal of fortune in Act 3--Uh oh, it looks like the bad guys are going to win. In The Tempest, Act 3 begins with the betrothal scene, moves to Caliban's murder plot, and then to Ariel's Harpy speech to the King and his party. The structure demands that there should be some serious threat to Prospero or to the happiness of the young couple. Caliban's murder plot fits the bill in a formulaic sense: if successful, Stephano becomes king and he, not Ferdinand, marries Miranda. But no one sensible believes these clowns are a match for Prospero, and so there's never any real felt sense of threat.

In Act 4, you would expect the final conflict between the forces of life and the forces of death. Act 4 is taken up mostly with the Iris/Ceres/Juno masque scene, which seems to be a robust celebration of the forces of life. If you wanted some drama, why not have Caliban and his party attack the trio while they are distracted entranced by the masque? --Oh no! The bad guys fall upon the good guys! Oh No! Prospero can't find his staff, but Ferdinand rises to the challenge and proves he's worthy of Miranda's love and Prospero's respect--But it is Prospero himself who interrupts the masque, not Caliban. The purported reason for Prospero to end the masque is his remembering about the Caliban plot. Does the play expect us to take that plot more seriously than we do? Does Prospero take it seriously?

There are obvious dramatic possibilities there that just were not developed. In a movie you would cut back and forth from the party entranced by the spectacle to the plotters stealthily approaching--Oh no! Where's Ariel when you need him? Wake up, Prospero! Wake up, Ferdinand!

Maybe a scenario like that was in the first draft, and Shakespeare revised it to explore for him a more interesting possibility. Could it be that Prospero's recognition of his magic as a distracting vanity leads him to abjure it? It got him into trouble in Milan, and it almost got him in trouble again on the island. In other words is the "final conflict" something interior within Prospero's soul?

So where does the real threat or conflict lie? Does it come from the clowns or from Prospero's vain power trip, which makes him something of a fool or clown? What kind of self-respecting duke allows himself to be so easily overthrown? And so now on the island was history about to repeat itself? Was he so seduced by his spectacle that he lacked vigilance regarding the otherwise clownish threat? Is that why he was so upset when he called a halt to the masque? Did Caliban's plot remind him of Antonio's successful plot twelve years earlier? Didn't Antonio succeed because Prospero was distracted by his 'nutty-professor' magical studies? Is this deja vu all over again? What is the point of all this magic anyway? What has it got him?

My point in walking you through this is to give you a sense about how asking questions about what the plot requires and what the writer does with it raises some interesting questions that you might otherwise not think of. It enriches the possibilities for interpretation.

Week 3 Wrap: A few thoughts to connect The Matrix with The Tempest. We didn't have a chance in class to compare Neo at the end of The Matrix with Prospero as we find him at the beginning of The Tempest. Both found a way to transcend and subvert the rules that govern the conventional "social imaginary" in ways that advantage them over their enemies.

I described the social imaginary as a cultural linguistic download, and the 'code'--the streaming patterns of ones an zeros that create the simulation--is a metaphor for the linguistic coding that gives us the imaginary that shapes all of our experiences--except if we find a way to step outside of it by going out into the desert or wilderness. The 'desert of the real' in The Matrix = Prospero's Island insofar as both exist outside of the conventional world's social imaginary and its limitations.

For reasons that are never made clear except that he's The One, Neo is able by an act of will and with the help of Trinity's kiss to transcend the code, i.e., rules/natural laws, that govern the matrix simulation. (Was the kid who bent the spoon the key for Neo's understanding what he had to do? Maybe.) Similarly, Prospero's book gives him a 'code' or a language that when he learns it enables him to transcend the rules that govern the 'matrix' that determines the experience and perceptions of the others on the island.

Is the island a desert--as Adrian described it as seeming to be? It clearly appeared to be for the soulless villains Antonio and Sebastian. Or is it a utopic paradise as it appears to the noble, good-hearted Gonzalo? Or is everything that the shipwrecked party experiences simply determined by Prospero's prodigious illusionism? To what degree is the island truly enchanted and to what degree is people's experience of it the product of Prospero's art?

I think there is a difference, and the real charms of the island are found in Caliban's descriptions of it. For someone who thought the only benefit of language was to use it to curse, which he was very good at, he certainly was also capable of using it to describe the beauties and mysteries of the island as it 'disclosed' itself. (Reference aletheia in 'terms you should know' below.) His verbal virtuousity and his capacity for aletheia makes him educable and redeemable despite Prospero's saying that no nurture will stick to his nature.

And so why then did Prospero abjure his magic at the end of the play? There is a twilight of the gods feeling about the end of the play, in the sense that Prospero (& Shakespeare) seem to recognize that he was at the end of an era, the era of enchantment, and moving into the era of disenchantment. Juno and Ceres and their voluptuous, fertile energies fade away into the air, perhaps forever, and give way to another way of 'being in the world' that has no memory of them or any feeling of their loss or of needing them.

Prospero's giving up his magic also seems to be making a statement about the legitimacy of the power and authority that come with a particular kind of "power' knowledge. Does Prospero have the moral authority to wield such immense power over other humans? Prospero is a very morally ambiguous figure in this play. Most of you found him unlikable, and for good reason. He was master of the elements on the island, but was he master of his own soul? Does Prospero himself recognize this moral flaw in himself? This question about books and knowledge looks forward to the central theme of Love's Labor Lost, the next of Shakespeare's plays we'll be watching. So I'll leave it at that for now.

But one last point. The question came up in yesterday's class about the role of the clowns Trinculo and Stephano in the play, and everyone had perceptive and interesting to say about comic relief, the groundlings, etc. But I would like to add one other idea. They define an intermediate moral zone in the play. Living in the bottom zone are Atonio and Sebastian, whose cunning and ruthlessness seem to be beyond redemption. Then there is in Stephano and Trinculo who are a comic parody of Antonio and Sebastian. Both pairs want to murder their way to power, but for Stephano and Trinculo the whole scheme is a drunken lark. They are like puppies who cannot maintain focus on any project for more than a few seconds. As such they are incapable of the deed in a way that contrasts with the capability of Antonio and Sebastian. And it's their incapability and foolishness that makes them redeemable. There is a hard-heartedness in Antonio and Sebastian that makes such a redemption while possible, unlikely.

The Disenchantment of Sex--This excerpt below appeared yesterday in David Brooks's column in the NYT. I'ts a propos of themes that came up yesterday with regard to the medieval religion of love as it appears in The Romance of the Rose and in Shakespeare. It points to why a lot of people when they read about the treatment of love in these texts think it's complete nonsense. Sex is what all animals do; Eros is the gift to humans of the god so named.

Week 2 Wrap: The goal this week was to introduce the ideas about the Axial Age and 'disembedding' to further develop the idea of the social imaginary that was presented in Week 1. According to Taylor and others, disembedding took a dramatic transcultural turn in Eurasian societies from Greece to China in the mid centuries of the first millennium BCE. This turn, called the Axial Revolution by Karl Jaspers, introduced to these societies a new idea of a transcendent Real, a changeless, eternal dimension in reality that existed uninflucenced by all the "drama" that occurred within the sublunar "immannet frame". (See definitions below.)

That drama involved humans with an enchanted economy in which almost everything good or evil was a direct effect of the influences of the gods or other spiritual forces. So early--i.e., pre-Axial--religion concerned itself primarily with managing these spiritual forces through ritual practices designed to promote ordinary human flourishing--long life, bounteous crops, many children, victory over one's enemies. In other words, "Live long and prosper." The concepts 'right' and 'wrong' the way we think about them was not how they thought about them. Reread the story in Genesis 25 & 27 of Jacob's trickery in "stealing" his brother Esau's birthright and paternal blessing. Moses does not introduce his disembedding Axial law until several generations later.

In a future lecture (or in an essay I'll post here), I plan to develop further the idea that this shift, especially in the West, was related to increasing alphabetic literacy. I don't know if it's possible to overemphasize the 'disembedding' impact that the shift from orality to literacy has had. It has had and continues to have a significant shaping influence on brain function that in turn shapes what "shows up" (and doesn't) in a society's social imaginary. But for now the important point is that just introducing the idea of the transcendent disrupts the immanent frame and causes a breach between spiritual elites and everyone else.

The post-axial spiritual elites reorient themselves toward this transcendent Real, and everybody else continues to live circumscribed by the concerns of ordinary human flourishing within the immanent frame. But while the former pose a challenge to the latter, the two stay in dyadic tension in a hierarchical system of complementarity: monks and nuns established a separate society in the monasteries. Everyone else lived as before. But the latter come to revere the former, support them financially, and over time the axial ideals of the former have a disembedding effect on the latter. In Latin Christendom, this came to a dramatic culmination in the Protestant Reformation, which sought to purify Christian society from any remaining pre-Axial beliefs and practices.

Taylor argues, and I agree with him, that while the Radical Protestant Reformers intended to sacralize the whole community, the unintended consequence was to secularize it. Protestantism at its best emphasizes the radical nakedness of the individual human in his relationship with the transcendent Godhead. This spiritual nakedness is the goal of disembedding taken to its extreme. This is perhaps most dramatically exemplified by Kierkegaard about whom you'll read in Barrett later. But the mistake the Reformers made was in thinking that you can build an entire society around such a "special" kind of experience.

Most people don't have that kind of experience of God or the transcendent, and they can't be forced to have it. The consequences of forcing it play a signficant role in shaping the condtions for the alienation that so many people feel living in a secular society where moralism becomes a parody of the truly moral. Any religion, if it is to have a positive significance for a society, must provide a transformative, experiential dimension for most of the people who participate in it. It cannot sustain itself as an enriching, deeply humanizing force in social life if it is reduced to an austere, repressive code. Any religion, of course, must have a code, but the code is not the end, but the means to an end when the end is Goodness, the growth of a true interior goodness, not just the mimicry of it.

I want to spend some time with Shakespeare because he understands the distinction between being moralistic and being truly moral. There are few characters in literature that receive more scathing treatment than his legalistic prigs, and few that are more beautifully realized than his true moral heroes and heroines.

Later in the weekend, if I have time, I'll try to pull some thoughts together about The Matrix. (See paragraph below regarding The Matrix and 'transcendence'. Remember to email me about terms or phrases you want me to define more clearly.

The Axial Age: An era during the mid-first-millennium BCE during which spiritual/philosophical elites from Greece to China asserted the existence of a transcendent eternal realm that was the deep Real as contrasted with the relatively unreal phenomenal world within the immanent frame of ordinary day-to day experience. The two Axial traditions that most influence the North Atlantic societies are those of Golden Age Greece and Ancient Israel. In Irrational Man, Barrett talks about the fraught relationship between the two in his chapter "Hebraism and Hellenism".

Embedded: the characteristic of premodern societies and most of the people in them, especially pre-Axial societies, in which the individual is embedded in the tribe/polis, the tribe/polis with the natural world surrounding it, and the local natural world with the cosmos. This becomes elaborated in the image of the Great Chain of Being. The chief characteristic that distinguishes embedded societies from disembedded ones is that there is a deep sense of the interconnectedness and participation of all things, whereas in disembedded societies, there is a sense of disconnections, fragmentation, and often toxic level of alienation. Junger's comparisons in Tribe describe the differences eloquently.

Disembedded: the charactersitics of post-Axial societies in which spiritual elites assert that the sublunar immanent frame is not the 'really' Real. Rather there is a transcendent realm. While this is imagined in different ways in different Axial socieities, in the west it is imagined as the eternal, changeless realm beyond the fixed stars outside the created cosmos. The moral life for post-axial spiritual elites involves ascetic, disembedding displines that are designed to facilitate a deeper level of alignment between the individual's soul and the deep reality of the transcendent. China and Israel develop laws and practices that are designed to align the entire society according to transcendent law.

Porous Selves: The people who live in embedded, enchanted societies typically have porous selves. Extremely porous selves see almost everything that happens as caused by the influence of spirits, gods, and other supersensible beings who use humans rather like puppets. Homeric heroes are porous in this way, as are peoples who live in totemic and shamanic societies. Even in a contemporary disembedded society like ours, people who are psychcially "sensitive" might be described as porous--artists and other creative types are more porous than the rest of us. The Oracle in The Matrix was porous in this sense, as was Pai in the Whale Rider.

Buffered Selves: The people who live in disembedded, disenchanted societies. In other words all of us. We are buffered most of the time, and even if we have experiences that our porous ancestors would have thought were from some supersensible spiritual reality, we think of them as intrapsychic projections, i.e., something that originates from our own personal subconscious, rather than from the extra-mental world that engulfs us. Buffered selves experience, rather, a very strong boundary between what is in the world and what is in their heads. Porous selves don't feel that sense of boundary.

Transcendence. The realm or dimension beyond the physical universe or cosmos or the rules that govern or shape our social imaginaries. It has rules/laws that in no way depend on the rules and laws that govern the immanent world, but the immanent world usually in some way depends on the transcendent world, which is superior to it. Because of the inferiority and dependence of the immanent on the transcendent, the rules and laws that govern 'reality' within the immanent frame can be subverted by people or beings who operate at the higher, transcendent level.

This is nicely illustrated in The Matrix after Neo comes back from the dead. He has achieved a level of existence that transcends the rules of the matrix, and so is able to subvert it. That's why the agents/demons run away from him. The agents still must operate according to the rules established within the Matrix, and they realize that because Neo 'transcends' those rules, they have no means to defeat him. It is only when Neo achieves this level of 'transcendence' that he fully realizes his destiny to become "The One". He doesn't become the One until after his death and resurrecton, the latter effected by Trinity's kiss. The biblical allusions are too obvious to spell out.

Immanence/Immanent Frame. For our purposes, it's the ordinary world as it shows up within our conventional social imaginary. What we take for the real world of our everyday experience. For contemporary Americans, the immanent frame is experienced as disenchanted and secular. For our premodern ancestors it was experienced as enchanted.

Orthodoxy--means correct teaching, and by extension correct belief. Someone who is orthodox knows the correct teaching and believes it. Orthodoxy for Christians, for instance, would at a minimum require adherence to the tenets of the Nicene Creed.

Orthopraxy--means correct practice or conduct. Keeping a kosher kitchen would be an example.

Intrapsychic projection--means that all psychic activity happens within human heads--and any experiences that present themselves as 'extra-psychic'--ghosts, poltergeists, voices, visions, experiences of the numinous power in places and objects, etc., are visual or auditory hallucinatory phenomena that do not exist outside of the human mind but are rather things that we project into the world without realizing we are doing it. Premodern, porous selves did not believe that such phenomena were hallucinations but really existed in the world outside their heads.

A related concept would be the literary term 'pathetic fallacy' coined by Ruskin to critique what he thought was a sentimentalized projection of human feeling into objects in Nature. Someone like Heidegger would argue that such experiences are not necessarily projections. He talks about the moods of Being and that's what the true poets, as opposed to sentimental/conventional poets, are picking up on.

Douthat describes Oprah as the prophet of the American spirituality that currently holds that center between traditionalists and secularists, and speculates what would happen if she were to run for and be elected president:

Think about Oprah when as you watch The Matrix this week. Does anyone in the film remind you of her?

This lecture by Leonard Shlain on 'Art and Physics' complements what I am trying to get at when talking about the social imaginary as a model of the Real. It also sets up things I want to talk about regarding the feminine and the loss of the feminine during the modern period.

I believe that Colerdige said and that all great minds are androgynous. I assume that both men and women have both masculine and feminine charateristics, and so when I use these terms I am thinking of their psychic characteristics more than their biological ones. What those characteristics are we'll get into another time. But you'll see that Shlain assumes them in this lecture:

Saturday, January 6, 2018—Week 1 Wrap: My objectives in the first week were to lay the groundwork for what lies ahead. The most important idea from which this ground work is constructed is ‘social imaginary’, which we discussed on Day 2. But I want to combine that concept with the Heideggerian idea of truth as ‘aletheia’ that we discussed on Day 1.

I hope I was able to convey clearly the key insight that while great art can be entertaining, not all entertainment is art. While some entertainments can have flashes of what great art seeks to do, it's important to understand what it seeks to do. The work of the great artists, as well as of the great philosophers and prophets, is to manifest for the rest of the community aspects of Being that were either not previously disclosed or in other cases to refresh what is known--the traditions and customs--with restorative life that comes from under the line, and in doing so to either change the social imaginary (see below) or to keep it aligned with the deep Real under the line. This is the story that Whale Rider tells. Pai is the prophet who restores life to the traditions and customs, but changes them insofar as it becomes clear that women can play a role that the tradition prohibited for women before.

There is work that passes for art that is witty and clever, but unless it brings something 'alive' to the above-the-line world from the below-the-line dimensions of Being, by my definition, it isn’t art. It doesn’t mean that such non-art has no value or can’t be interesting, but within the confines of this class, at least, it is art only to the degree that it makes visible, or brings out of hiding some aspect of Being that had been hidden and invisible within the society's social imaginary. The more profoundly and intensely disclosive of Being such a work is, the greater the work of art, or philosophy, or oracular utterance.

So what do we mean by Being? Well, it’s the whole thing, the vastness of everything that exists. And whatever we know about it is dwarfed by what we don’t. So wisdom begins with humbly acknowledging our ignorance. But as relatively ignorant as we might be, that does not mean that we know nothing and cannot know more. And certainly it’s important to develop criteria to discern or make judgments about what is real and what is delusional. The whole history of Western Philosophy has been an ongoing argument about how to determine what is true from what is not—and as Barrett points out, epistemology--the theory of knowledge--has been a particular obsession of academic philosophy since Descartes in the early 1600s.

Unfortunately, the preoccupation with ‘certainty’ has led to a reductive kind of philosophizing that has neglected the most important philosophical question-- “How should I live?” or “What is the Good Life?” Academic philosophers, for good reason, see themselves as unqualified to address those questions and so leave it to individuals to find their own way. But no questions are more important than these, and the point of this course is not to tell you how to live or to insist that this or that is the good life, but to take a look at how the ancestors answered those questions, and to discuss to what degree those answers are relevant for us today. I, obviously, think they are relevant, or I wouldn’t be teaching a course like this. I am hoping that by the end of the quarter you will think so, too.

Social Imaginary: Taylor's definition--"the social imaginary is that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and widely shared sense of legitimacy." It's very close to what we mean by "ethos", which denotes the code that determines within a particular group which behaviors and attitudes are acceptable and unaccceptable. And in that sense comes close in meaning to 'ideology and metanarrative'. (See below.)

But 'code' is too abstract a word because the imaginary is not something that for most people is so 'abstract'. Rather it is like habit, not something we think about. We have habits of mind, daily routines and practices that we don't think about at all until something disrupts them, and then we have to adapt and make a changes which soon enough become unconscious routines. A social imaginary has that quality of unconscious habit. People don't like changing their routines and will resist unless circumstances force it. That was the point of my kindergarten vs. middle school example. Changing one's imaginary on an individual level is difficult enough, but on the level of the entire culture, it's a massive kind of shift that sometimes happens gradually, but often enough in leaps.

But I would like to stretch the meaning a little more by bringing in the idea of 'aletheia'. (See definition below if you need a refresher.) Imagine Being--that which we are defining as the vastness of existence that we know about but which is dwarfed by what we do not. The interface between my individual awareness and Being is mediated by the social imaginary. It is in that sense the interface between the indivdual and the vastness of existence. It is not just my awareness, because it is socially mediated. I experience Being the way I do--i.e., I interface with it--through the culture and language into which I was born and acculturated.

The social imaginary is therefore not reality; it is a cultural-linguistic construct that mediates our relationship to Being/Reality. It defines the surface of Being and functions as a kind of membrane, but for some people it's more 'porous'. Paikea had that porousness in Whale Rider. Some argue that the surface is all there is--more on that toward the end of the quarter--I do not think that, and would argue that people who believe that are more rigidly buffered than most.

While Being/Reality is invisible in the background, it makes itself felt when you get out of alignment with it, as for instance if you are delusional. Individuals can be delusional, but so can entire societies, as for instance Germany in the 30s. So when this construct--what gets represented in the social imaginary--gets out of alignment with Being/Reality, I would argue that people experience a feeling of disconnection, homelessness, and in extreme cases what I call 'ontological dizziness'. If there were no "Being/Reality" beyond the construct, then there would be nothing for it to get out of alignment with. A lot of people there is no there there to get out of alignment with, but as we'll see, the "ancestors" most clearly did not.

I had you watch Whale Rider because it provides a very powerful metaphor for a society that has found itself out of alignment with Being in this way. The truth of the story it tells is symbolic, not literal. It's the story of how a community whose traditional social imaginary is no longer working for them, and can only work for them again when it finds renewal from "under the line" symbolized by he ocean, where the vast, life-giving resources of Being abide. It accomplishes this realignment through the shaman/prophet, Paikea, and in her doing so renews the tradition, but also changes what had become a dead, overly rigid imaginary. The leader in the old imaginary had to be a male; in the new imaginary it's clear that the "powers" from under the line had different ideas about that.

Metanarrative/Ideology--see below for narratives of legitimacy. The important thing for our purposes is that metanarratives and ideologies are reductive. They force the complexity and multi-dimensional richness of Being into manageable formulas. In that sense they are like social imaginaries: societies need them to provide some organization and justification for the practices that are necessary to function. But they become a problem when they become repressive and intolerant of things that "don't fit". Not to be conflated with Mythos. As I say in its entry below, mythos, when it works as mythos, subverts such repressive narratives of legitimacy.

Premodernity--for our purposes the traditional, enchanted societies and cultures that were or continue to be unaffectd by the secularizing, rationalizing changes that uniquely altered the beliefs and practices of the North Atlantic societies starting around 1500.

Modernity--the historical era that began in the Renaissance/Reformation era and extended into the 20th Century. Its narrative of legitimacy came to be shaped primarily by Enlightenment rationalism. Some people argue that the Modern Age ended in Europe after World War 1, and in the U.S. in the 1960s.

Postmodernity--Whatever comes after modernity. Are we all post moderns now or just late moderns?

Modernism--a late 19th and early 20th century artistic and philosophical and architectural movement that rejected the optimistic Enlightement, rationalist assumptions of Modernity. It could be described as the first moment of Post-modernity, so terminology gets confusing. Key figures are Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Picasso, Arnold Schoenberg.

Postmodernism--a mid- to late-20th century artistic, philosophical and architectural movement that rejects elitism celebrated by Modernists. It is characterized by a skeptical, debunking, distrust of ideologies, belief systems, and power hierarchies. Key figures are Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Frederic Jameson.

Aletheia--Greek word for truth in the sense of that which is unhidden or comes out of hiding. Heidegger focuses on it as a counterbalance for the hegemonic idea of truth that comes to us from the Baconian concept of truth that prevailed during the Enlightenment and beyond. That approach to truth emphasizes a kind of reductive attack on Being to wrest from it what it can exploit for human material improvement. Heidegger wants to recover a sense of truth that reveals or discloses itself--i.e., comes out of hiding below the line--on its own terms.

Above the Line (sometimes referred to as Foreground)--A phrase that I will use frequently in this class in reference to ideas and perceptions that are a part of a society's or individual's ordinary day-to-day experience that shapes his commonplace beliefs, attitudes, and practices. It has less to do with awareness and more to do with habits of mind and habits of practice.

Below the Line (sometimes referred to as Background)--the part of reality that plays no role in shaping a society's or individual's practices, attitudes, and beliefs. What is below the line in one society might be above the line in another. People in Hindu and Buddhist societies assume that reincarnation is a part of the rhythm of life, so that's above the line within those societies. For American society, many are familiar with the idea, but it remains below the line in terms of shaping their beliefs and practices. Artists, prophets, and philosophers (e.g. Moses, Buddha, Muhammed, Dante, Shakespeare, Marx) bring ideas and perceptions from below the line to above the line where, if plausible, they are embraced and incorporated into a group's and then eventually a society's attitudes and beliefs.

Naive Consciousness--The kind of awareness we all had when we were children that just accepted the world its customs, beliefs, attitudes as it was given to us by our families and the society into which we were acculturated. Difficult to maintain in pluralistic society.

Epistemically Privileged--Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that establishes the rules for establishing what's knowable, what is true and not true. Within a scientific research frame objective data available to everyone is epistemically privileged, and data that is subjective, intuitive, not reproducible is unprivleged. Within the frame of a Zen Buddhist monastery, certain intuitions and insights are epistemically privileged as the product of meditative practice, but they are only are only recognized as epistemically valid by others who have had those insights or intutions. Not easily reproducible.

Logos--In rhetoric, Logos involves the kinds of arguments that rely on inductive and deductive logic. Are your assumptions and premises sound? Does your thought process proceed logically from those premises in a coherent, logical way? It works with facts that are established as 'above the line'.

Mythos--Mythos works with 'facts' and experiences that come from below the line. A mythos works for a particular community only when it can accept as believable the testimony of prophets, shamans, rishis, artists, philosophers who report on experiences they have had below the line they believe are meaningful for the rest of the community. What legitimates a group's mythos is related to problems associated with narratives of legitimacy. Mythos in the pure sense is radically open to levels of interpretation and cannot be used in reductive ideologies or metanarratives. Mythos, when it works the way it should, subverts such narratives.

Narratives of Legitimacy--stories that are told to justify a particular ideological or other kind of belief systems. Divine right of kings; fair and open elections; I deserve my millions because I earned them; if it was good enough for my grandfather, it's good enough for me; the will of the people is always right; the evidence indisputably points to his guilt, etc. Some narratives of legitimacy are easy to deconstruct (debunk) by people who live outside them, but difficult to disbelieve by those who live with naive consciousness within them. Individual identity is often deeply invested in the narrative of legitimacy of a person's group affiliations.

Welcome to the course site for Honors 394. This site is under construction, but it should be ready by the beginning of Winter Quarter 2018.