The Recovery of the West: An Essay in Symbolic History

THE RECOVERY OF THE WEST

An Essay in

Symbolic History

Marvin Bram

Copyright © 2009 by [Author Name].

Library of Congress Control Number:       2001127200

ISBN:                      Hardcover                1-4010-4368-2

                              Softcover                  1-4010-4367-4

                              Ebook                      978-1-4535-6536-0

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

PART ONE

The First Equilibrium

CHAPTER 1

On Civilization

PART TWO

Disequilibrium

CHAPTER 2

The Paradigmatic

Civilizations

CHAPTER 3

The Greeks

CHAPTER 4

Yahweh and Rome

CHAPTER 5

Europe I

CHAPTER 6

Europe II

CHAPTER 7

The Enlightenment Project, I

CHAPTER 8

The Enlightenment Project, II

CHAPTER 9

Modernity

PART THREE

The Next Equilibrium

CHAPTER 10

On Postcivilization

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PART ONE

The First Equilibrium

CHAPTER 1

On Civilization

Imagine that you have been marooned alone on that tropical island one reads about and that you are sitting there on the beach in a peculiar state of mind. You are thinking clearly, you are healthy and alert, but you have no memory at all of your past. Your life until now is a blank; and that does not trouble you.

An elderly woman approaches you from the rain forest inland from the beach. You are surprised that she speaks English. This cheerful and calm person — you like her right away — offers you her hospitality, and more, her help in starting over. You are about to be educated again, under remarkable new auspices.

As the two of you walk around the island, exploring it and admiring the richness of its plant and animal life, she suggests two ways to you of orienting yourself to what you see and hear. It goes without saying that you already see and hear a world of separate, differentiated objects: birds and trees and rocks; that particular bird, this particular tree, the rock over there; things and more things, of different sizes and shapes and colors. But, she tells you, you may proceed, proceed mentally, with that differentiated world in two ways.

First, you may continue to differentiate the world your senses give you. Put in a more schematic way than she would have: within any clear field, you may make a distinction, a cut, as a school of logic has it. This is the first orientation. Or, second, you may de-differentiate the differentiated world your senses give you. Within any differentiated field, you may dissolve a distinction, heal over a cut.

The two ways of proceeding are equally good, she says. A proper education cultivates both.

There you are, marooned, and you are offered these strange instructions by a clearly well-meaning person. You can understand continuing to differentiate a world. That is merely a way of saying that you are being discriminating, exactly that you make distinctions. The language you speak is designed for distinction-making — all the names for precisely this variety of warbler or beech tree as distinguished from that variety of warbler or beech tree. Your first education, pre-island-paradise, must have instructed you in distinguishing among birds and among trees in this way, and in distinguishing among great and not-so-great writers (except that you do not remember ever having read any books), beautiful and less beautiful paintings, pieces of music, and buildings (except that you do not remember any of them either), and so on. You do not understand de-differentiating a world, though. What could that nice old person mean?

She knows that your intuitions are intact for the first, differentiating orientation toward the world. She confirms to you that speaking English is itself enough to preserve and strengthen those intuitions. But your intuitions are weak, if not moribund, for the second, de-differentiating orientation. You ask her if another language, perhaps another kind of language, would support the de-differentiating of the world. She says that yes, another kind of language would. She speaks an island language that does that.

Perhaps you will learn her other language. Before deciding, you would like to know why the second orientation is worth cultivating in the first place. There is no question in your mind about differentiation; that is the way of discrimination and learning. Down what path does de-differentiation take someone, you ask her. She tells you that you will feel fuller down that path. The first way, toward learning, is useful, pedagogical, and often somber; the second way, toward fullness, is useful in a different way, therapeutic, and always cheerful.

Since you must have a completely restored imagination in order to practice de-differentiation and you must acquire a new species of judgment regarding its use, she says, you will not have access to fullness for a little while. You will want to go slowly so as to awaken old intuitions, actually childhood intuitions. Beginning modestly, you might practice erasing the distinction between yourself and a yellow warbler, or if you are ambitious, between yourself and a copper beech. Your senses may give you separation from those objects, but your awakening imagination will give you fusion with them. When you convincingly feel your own complete human substance and yellow-warbler substance, you will have succeeded in overcoming the separation, erasing the distinction, de-differentiating the two of you.

From Leaves of Grass,

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look’d upon, that object he

        became,

And that object became part of him for the day or

        a certain part of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycle of years.

You will no longer need to ask why you would want to learn, or re-learn, de-differentiation, because you will feel all the attributes of your own large-bodied smooth-skinned ambulatory self and as well all the attributes of your small-bodied feathered flying self, and that will fill you with wonder. You will possess double substance. You will be fuller than you were before you fused with the yellow warbler, by an unusual definition of full.

The main product of de-differentiation is polysemy. A polysemy is a packed, thick, multiple object, a thing as full as the human imagination wants it to be. Living in a world of full things as a full thing oneself is a formidable way to live. The main product of differentiation, on the other hand, is univocity, a precise thing rather than a full one. In a univocal world, a person is a person and a person only, never a person and a bird or a person and a tree, not to mention a person and a bird and a tree.

On our tropical island you would have been re-educated in distinction-making and univocity on the one side, and in distinction-dissolving and polysemy on the other, with even-handedness. Or perhaps your teacher would have leaned a bit toward distinction-dissolving and polysemy, since fullness means so much to her. Back in our temperate climates, where we are not amnesiacs and where distinction-making and univocity are everywhere given the greater weight, let us continue to unfold the two orientations of our island fantasy.

Univocity should be easy.

Making a world: univocity

Most of us think that we simply live in the world, the same world everybody has always lived in. But in our thought-experiment the possibility arose that one can act mentally on the world that is given to the senses, and depending on how one does that, the world changes. When we differentiate exclusively, we construct a world of very many separate and distinct entities, substantially different from one another. Let us call that kind of world plurisubstantial.

A plurisubstantial world tends to acquire a hierarchical structure. Hierarchies generally have a top stratum with little room on it, a bottom stratum with a good deal of room, and graduated strata in between. Large hierarchical corporations, for example, will have a few upper managers, a larger number of middle managers, and many non-managerial employees. Armies similarly. Power and rewards concentrate at the top of such hierarchies and thin out as you go down them. CEOs and generals make more important decisions than cost-accountants and captains, tell cost-accountants and captains what to do, and get paid more than cost-accountants and captains. One stratum of the hierarchy taken by itself will be differentiated with an exactitude proportional to the intensity of the differentiating activity that produced the hierarchy. Especially intense differentiation produced the modern world’s armies, and military strata are exceedingly finally cross-hatched into job-descriptions. A hierarchy taken three-dimensionally, then, is a tiered pyramid the strata of which represent differences in status, power, and reward within the hierarchy, the compartments on each stratum representing different functions at the same level of status, power, and reward.

Hierarchies like corporations and armies are whole societies. The parts of those wholes are the employees and soldiers in service to the hierarchies. Is there something that can be said about employees and soldiers that can be generalized to any parts of any hierarchical whole? It seems that as any hierarchy becomes more and more articulated vertically and horizontally, more plurisubstantial, the parts of the hierarchy empty in content.

Take a small, aggressive corporation thirty years ago. It made three styles of men’s leather shoes. There were ten people in the business and each one knew a great deal about making and selling such shoes. Today the corporation is fairly large. It makes forty-seven styles of running shoes for women and children as well as men, and it boasts several levels of management, production, and sales. At each level there are appropriate numbers of employees responsible for carefully delimited tasks. No one knows the whole business; any one person does only a piece of the corporation’s work. As the business expands, perceived as parts of an increasingly differentiated, hierarchical whole, the employees find themselves contracting in function.

Contraction is synonymous with emptying because less and less of an employee’s repertory of competencies and interests as a complete human being will be exercised at work. This emptying while hierarchized carries over to the employee’s life away from work. She will be pained that so much has been taken, abstracted, from her. So her life is comprehensively emptier as a result of her company’s success.

Added to her abstraction — in several senses of abstraction — is division. Many employees in the middle of a hierarchy are obliged to follow orders and to give them. The same person may act obsequiously one moment looking up a stratum in the hierarchy and arrogantly the next moment looking down a stratum. She may not realize that she acts in these ways, or she may give such behaviors other, more acceptable names. Nonetheless, for half or more of her waking life during the week, she lives a reduced, abstract and abstracted, disturbingly divided life as an emptying part of a hierarchical whole, a condition that darkens the remaining hours of her week.

Speaking a world

One of the privileged wholes in the human world is surely language. We humans never stop talking. We discover or confirm worlds with words. If distinction-making creates plurisubstantial, hierarchical wholes and abstract, emptying parts, then we will expect that linguistic wholes in the distinction-making realm will be plurisubstantial and hierarchical, and linguistic parts will be abstract and near-empty. The parts of social hierarchies are people. The parts of linguistic hierarchies are words. People empty out in social hierarchies; words empty out in linguistic hierarchies.

Languages created by persistence-in-differentiation can be viewed as vertically stratified and horizontally cross-hatched as follows:

the word: univocal semantic

small word-groups: ordered syntactic

larger word-groups: strongly ordered logistic

extensive traditions of word-groups: hypotaxis

The word taken by itself is at the top of this hierarchy. It is abstract and emptying, a classic part-of-a-hierarchical-whole. Its principal feature will decide questions on every lower level of the linguistic hierarchy. That feature is univocity, the abstraction of all the word’s meanings but one.

Most of us do not use words all by themselves. We group them into sentences or sentence-like clusters. At this second level of the linguistic hierarchy, we are told, meaning comes as much from the relationships among the words as from the words themselves. Orderliness becomes preoccupying. In languages like English, the sequence subject-predicate-object becomes a model of orderliness.

Assume that our words are univocal and our small-scale ordering, our syntax, passes all tests. The next-stratum-down of the hierarchy carries groups of small-scale word-groups. There are many ways to group small-scale word-groups like sentences: into spoken conversations, into letters home, into novels, poems. We will look at a severe and particularly consequential grouping principle, the one that creates logistic.

The second, syntactic level of the linguistic hierarchy often displays the three-part, subject-predicate-object order. On the third, logistic level of the hierarchy, we always find a three-part order — never an elegant variation — this time of

1) universal statement (s)

2) particular statement (s)

3) conclusion

Each of these statements possesses its own subject-predicateobject structure. Each subject, predicate, and object will in turn be univocal. All hierarchical relations are preserved.

Universals are statements claiming to be true in any place and at any time. Particulars are statements claiming to be true in one place at one time. Conclusions are particular statements — true in one place at one time — that are entailed by properly selected universals and particulars. The full set, universal-particular-conclusion, we will call a law. Two kinds of laws interest us: social laws, with which civilized societies will be put together, and scientific laws, toward the discovery of which civilized inquiry will be conducted.

The first formal social laws appeared in Sumer, off the Persian Gulf, about fifty-five hundred years ago. They are of the form,

1) any person doing that thing, in any place and at any time, is guilty of a crime and will be punished in this prescribed way

2) that person over there, in that place and at this time, is doing exactly that thing

3) that person over there is guilty of that crime, and will be punished in this prescribed way

The first formal scientific laws appeared in Greece about twenty-five hundred years ago. The philosopher of science Carl Hempel has described scientific laws in a story. A car is left on the street on a cold night. Its radiator is filled with water. The particular statements in the story include these facts, plus the exact temperature and air pressure outside. The universal statements in the story include the freezing temperature of water, the temperatures at which water pressure increases, and the bursting pressure of the radiator metal. The conclusion of the story is that the radiator cracked. It had no choice but to crack. The entire three-part deduction is the explanation of the cracked radiator.

The deduction leads to prediction as well as explanation. If the night in question were tonight — a midwinter night and we have an accurate weather forecast — then we would know right now what the condition of the radiator will be tomorrow. We would have predicted the future. Univocity seeks prediction and its conviction of control over the future. We will soon discover a painful anxiety attached to the future in worlds built by persistence-in-differentiation.

Observe that the form of social laws, which, we must remember, are also concerned with prediction and control, is exactly the same as the form of scientific laws. This form becomes a foundation-layer of both the internal and external life of the West. We can in justice call the third, logistic stratum of the univocal linguistic hierarchy the curriculum of the West.

The fourth level of the linguistic hierarchy includes longer and longer word-spans, like books and literary traditions. A general characterization of the base level of the hierarchy will be useful in comparing differentiated worlds to de-differentiated worlds. The base is hypotactic, a term that suggests arranged hierarchically, and showing subordinations. We see hypotactic structures in all hierarchized places, not only in literary traditions. A life can be regarded or lived hypotactically: everything arranged, every arrangement the best arrangement possible, each arrangement following the last in the correct order.

There are two deep-lying hypotactic structures in most of our lives that are almost never construed as hypotactic; they are understood simply as givens, again as the way things are and always have been. For that reason they need to be illuminated with special care: they are not the way things are, but the way they are under the aegis of distinction-making.

The first of these hypotaxes is space, visual and aural. People who live in largely differentiated worlds see and hear hierarchically. That is to say, they see and hear only some elements of a visual or aural space, those elements that they (often instantaneously, perhaps unconsciously) think are important to see and hear. They barely see or hear the other, hypotactically subordinated, less important elements in their spaces. The Gestalt psychologists of the 1930s might have said that they see and hear foregrounds; the rest they push into backgrounds. Recall that persons empty to single functions in hierarchical organizations and words empty to single meanings in hierarchical languages. Here we see that perceptual spaces can also empty, to simpler and simpler foregrounds.

The second hypotaxis, time, is a much more complex problem, more hidden, more taken for granted as unproblematical, and, if anything, more important to understanding the West and ourselves. Time is more perfectly hypotactic in the differentiated world than is any particular tradition in words, tones, stone, pigment, or social, political, or economic arrangements. Perhaps time is a privileged category and it must be made unequivocally hypotactic before any other more-or-less hypotactic tradition can emerge.

Picture a time-line with a point at its center signifying the present. We now invoke the curriculum of the West: universal statements apply everywhere on the time-line; particular statements make up a chronicle to the left of the present, the past. Among the particulars,

some are causes; effects fall to their right on the line some are means; ends fall to their right on the line some are particular statements in laws; conclusions fall to their right on the line

A past is now revealed that carries complete causal, means-ends, and lawful structures.

Next, take an enlarged cut at the present. This moment reveals incomplete structures. There are causes, means, and particular statements in it without effects, ends, or conclusions for them. We need a place, a future, to accommodate those effects, ends, and conclusions. So we go ahead and create a future. Its role is to provide the one and only one place where incomplete hypotactic structures can be completed. This future must be articulated in exactly the same way that the past, the site holding complete hypotactic structures, is itself articulated. Before long, after all, the immediate future will be the immediate past.

Hypotactic time has a specific intellectual tone. Interest in causal, means-ends, and lawful relationships places a westerner’s attention in the past, from which he or she learns, that is, learns what complete hypotactic structures look like, and in the future, into which he or she plans, that is, projects the completing elements of incomplete present structures. Learning from the past and planning for the future become highly valued ways to use the mind in such distinction-making, univocal cultures as our own.

The emotional tone of hypotactic time is another matter. Preoccupations with effects, ends, and conclusions, preoccupations with prediction and control, create culture-wide preoccupations with the future. The problem for emotional life is that a fixation on the future cannot help but lead to a fixation on personal death. One’s death has not happened in the past and it is not happening as one speaks; it can only happen in the future. The more futurity, the gloomier the present.

Acting in a world

Thinking about the textures of living and dying takes us to questions of action. Of course, speaking is already acting, since so many human connections and disconnections are made with words. We speak ourselves into love and hate, into cooperation and competition, into every degree of attraction and repulsion. We naturally ask whether certain kinds of speaking are more likely to have particular social and personal consequences than other kinds.

The curriculum of the West helps us to answer that question. Learning to excel in the curriculum, in the logistic, is often to acquire a skill that finds its possessor pitted against others possessing the skill in other degrees. These engagements of the logistically equipped generally become zero-sum contests: the better-equipped contestant wins, the less-well-equipped contestant loses.

Any tendency in the sphere of action for two persons or groups of persons to enter into zero-sum contests will hierarchize those persons. The winners will rise, the losers fall. They will all adopt the emptying and divided personality-structure characteristic of hierarchized persons. Where the hierarchy restricts room at the top by multiplying contests, the pyramid with which we are familiar will take shape.

The pyramid we saw in making a world is in the minds of individual differentiators. It is the internal pattern for world-making when the mind is used principally to differentiate fields of perception and experience. The pyramid we now see, in acting in the world, is a social pyramid. Does the micro-hierarchy in the mind create the macro-hierarchy in society? Does the way we think determine the way we live, or does it work the other way? Because we live in social hierarchies, do we project that social reality into the mind and make or find thinking hierarchical? It does not matter to us just now where this circle begins. What matters is to recognize how powerful a circle it is, joining the most intangible, private, mental processes, through spoken and written words, which are both private and public, to the most tangible, public, social processes.

There is a second circle, equally seamless and consistent, generated by actively de-differentiating the perceptually differentiated world.

Differentiated worlds, demarcated both vertically in levels or strata or floors of a high-rise corporate headquarters, and horizontally in job-descriptions of one sort or another, are worlds made up of many separate things of many different kinds. The boundaries separating one kind from another are impermeable. A tree is only a tree, never a tree and a bird; a bird is only a bird, never a bird and a tree.

Making a world: polysemy

If we were to imagine those boundaries thinner, like the bidirectional, semi-permeable membranes of living cells, then under special conditions certain entities could pass through the boundaries or membranes and fuse with each other. Sometimes a tree could be a tree and a bird. A person could be a person and a tree and a bird. The world in which that polysemous person lived would not always be plurisubstantial; there would be occasions when her world was something like a single substance, nearly boundary-free. Let us call such a world, much less demarcated either vertically or horizontally, unisubstantial. Parts of de-differentiated, unisubstantial wholes can fill; they are concrete, in contrast to the emptying, abstract parts of differentiated, plurisubstantial wholes.

We observed employees at work in order to adduce general features of abstract parts and hierarchical wholes. If abstracting means taking away, rendering concrete must mean giving back. The employee who surrendered activities that meant a great deal to her, spending her days reduced to a single activity that meant little more than that it paid her bills, now takes her meaning-filled activities back. She will make her peace with the economy some other way. The main criterion for choosing her new work, other perhaps than that it do no harm, will be that she remains a concrete being the entire day, every day.

Speaking a world

We come to the languages of de-differentiation. They can be viewed as follows:

the word: polysemous semantic

small word-groups: barely ordered syntactic

larger word-groups: virtually absent logistic

extensive traditions of word-groups: parataxis

The word taken by itself in the univocal linguistic hierarchy is important; its precision is necessary for syntax to extrude properly. Precise words and correct syntax are necessary for the logistic to lock tight. The payoff is the logistic. That is where the cultural weight lies in differentiating languages. That is where social laws are made and natural laws are made or discovered.

The word taken by itself in the de-differentiated linguistic non-hierarchy is even more important. Almost all the weight in de-differentiating languages lies with the word. There is little weight on the barely existing syntactic and logistic strata. That is why it is appropriate to say that there is no hierarchy here, and no curriculum.

One might wonder why words count for more than word-groups in a polysemous language. The positive reason is immediately apparent: full words communicate a great deal. They are like the full persons we can now begin to understand, and like the full moments we will soon encounter in paratactic time. The negative reasons are less apparent. They shed additional light on univocal syntax and the univocal logistic.

When in a univocal language you carry the precise word down to a correctly formed sentence and then carry the sentence down to a correctly formed law, all those words must maintain their meanings while in transit in the linguistic hierarchy. You can not tolerate a noun like person in a level-two sentence changing its meaning to person-tree in one statement in a level-three law and to person-tree-bird in another statement at level three, and then expect that the law will work properly. A person (level one) must be a person (level two) must be a person (level three). Such constancy is a requirement of univocity.

Polysemous nouns, on the other hand, can expand or contract in meaning between levels; that is what precludes the levels from crystallizing. The weight of meaning in a de-differentiating language stays right at the top with the word by itself. First, it belongs there; second, it can not be anywhere else.

When words, not as word-groups but just as words, are considered collectively, they may be thought to constitute parataxis. While hypotaxis denotes orderliness, parataxis denotes non-orderliness. Parataxis suggests coordination more than subordination, and any number of sequences rather than a single correct sequence. Parataxis de-hierarchizes the world. The filling parts of paratactic, unisubstantial wholes never array themselves hierarchically, but exist in a flat, coordinate, non-order.

Parataxis is concerned with the concrete thing itself, the local and contained, and the moment, rather than with relationships among abstract things and over-arching spatial and temporal schemes. Paratactic stories, often the favorites of children, include numbers of exciting episodes with little or no relation to each other. They can be put in any order, and begun anywhere. It is not unusual for teachers of adult literature to proclaim an evolution from such primitive parataxis to an ever more civilized hypotaxis. It is upsetting to some of them to find Ernest Hemingway, who removes hierarchizing conjunctions from his sentences, arriving on the scene after Henry James. Teachers of ancient history, similarly, will move quickly through Egypt, where the texts are not hypotactic, so that they can spend more time with Greece, which practically re-invents hypotaxis. And surely the most famous un-read book of our time is Finnegans Wake, which places itself squarely in a polysemous linguistic world. There may be no literary work that makes univocal readers more anxious. So runs the opposition of parataxis and hypotaxis: lumpish piles, but of extraordinary things, against extraordinary structures, but of near-empty things.

Paratactic space and paratactic time make dramatic antitheses to their hypotactic counterparts. Vision supplies plentiful examples of the two kinds of perception. A person looking ahead of him on a forest path, looking hypotactically because he spends most of his time in the distinction-making mode, will see what is important to him — birds, if he is a bird-watcher. Another person, walking down the same path but seeing paratactically, will see much more than the first person. The second person’s space will be fuller of things. The phenomenon of paratactic persons taking in more of the world, living in a fuller world, than hypotactic persons, has been reported time and time again by (hypotactic) travelers among (paratactic) traditional peoples.

The case of paratactic time appears more obscure than that of paratactic space, as we might expect, and it is profoundly important to understanding human prospects. Hypotactic time took what space it did to describe because it was necessary to bring the curriculum of the West to bear on it. We needed to follow the construction of the future from nothing so that it might receive effects, ends, and conclusions. But there is no curriculum in the polysemous linguistic world.

In paratactic time there is little past because there are no complete logistic structures to be sought there, and there is little future because there is no need for a place in which to complete incomplete logistic structures. There is certainly a present, gathering to itself much of the energy that hypotactic persons give to the past and future, and inhabited by full persons and full objects: a full present. The present of hypotactic time often enough takes third place behind the past and the future, depleted of energy: an empty present.

We would expect to find the emotional tone associated with paratactic time entirely different from the emotional tone associated with hypotactic time. A person living in paratactic time can not be anxiety-ridden about the future, there being little of futurity in her temporal sense-of-things. There can consequently be little serious anxiety about her death. Because of the insubstantiality of the future and the density and sufficiency of the present, thoughts of personal death, when they do come, are less likely to be characterized by the dread with which they are charged in largely hypotactic cultures. Death-terrors do not inform largely paratactic cultures.

Acting in a world

To ask what does inform a society inclined to parataxis takes us again to action. Contest, which, with its supporting institutions, often infuses societies inclined to hypotaxis, depends greatly on the univocal logistic. That logistic is absent in de-differentiating languages and communities. Just as we saw the future fully present in the distinction-making constellation and barely present in the distinction-dissolving constellation, contest always thrives in the former and hardly exists in the latter. Where there is no weaponry — and logistically wielded word-groups are pre-eminent weapons in contests — it is difficult to fight a war.

In order to learn what social principle animates de-differentiating worlds, we need only remember where the burden of meaning rests in de-differentiating languages. The place is the word alone, and what permits the word to become a polysemy is the power of the imagination to fuse things with one another. Fusion is also the social engine of predominantly paratactic communities. It is the end of action and the means, both.

Fusion may be seen as the opposite of contest. In a community in which fusion is the social aim, children, women, and men thinking and feeling polysemously become each other, become in its strongest meaning. They already become entities in nature in order to multiply their attributes; they now become each other, in order to constitute a human society.

A non-hierarchical society of full persons closes a circle with the non-hierarchical wholes and concrete parts with which our development of