History, Culture, Language, and Ethos

The Real takes shape in memory alone.

Marcel Proust

We are only individuals at present and the only real individual is the One, all that is. Our actions are only apparently real. Nothing really happens. Our actions are caused by the whole of things, not really by our will. Therefore, only the One is an individual.

Irwin Lieb

“Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? What shall I say unto them?”And God said unto Moses, “I AM That I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” 

Exodus 3

Proust wrote that in his monumental Remembrance of Things Past. It has always struck me as a profound observation and when I recently ran across a note from years ago it immediately came back into focus.

The note was that in getting a culture - language, ethos, that is - we get a past, we make it explicit. This is the common cultural, historical past.

That was from Irwin Lieb. We were studying R.G. Collingwood's Speculum Mentis (Map of Knowledge). I've written here before about Collingwood and return often to contemplate his contribution to my contemplative life.

Plato observed that in thought we are always going "up" to principles, or "down" from them. Thought somehow puts one in touch with a higher order of things, a height from which we can enjoy a broader perspective. Socrates, Plato's teacher, said the unexamined life is not worth living, it stunts one's growth. But a life of thought is a life of reasoning writ large. The "Good" of Plato is the principle to be found in an examined life - the life of reason or thought. It is the bringing together of ideas and forming a synthesis of them.

We are considering history - memory, in Proust's language, and its contribution to man's place in the world, to his finding meaning and purpose. Language and culture exist because we have a past and the past exists because we have ideas or thought or reasons that give it shape. Without language we have no thought and no past or history. You see the synergy?

Collingwood postulated that history was one stage of being in the world. He taught us that art, religion, science, and history were part of a dialectic process, one being the foundation of the next in an emergence from primitive to refined modes of being of sentient life. It is said that because ignorance is bliss the artist can lead a full life. That is because art asks questions about the real for which it expects no answer. It lacks even the self awareness, consciousness, to understand its efforts to be questions about reality. Religion at least attains a level of self awareness where wonder about the nature of the world is seen as questions about existence itself. And science takes the next step but instead of positing answers in an absolute other as in the religious mode, it abstracts meaning and purpose as insubstantial, not concrete. It denies historicity by its very nature. Its abstraction leaves it without a basis in concrete reality to which we can relate. It thereby becomes uninteresting, unrevealing, and looses its relevance when it comes to the task of finding meaning and purpose.

In the particular there is buried generality (universality) we want to bring out. When it is extracted science is speaking of hypothetical if universal judgments. The language of science is mathematics which is closely akin to music. Is there a more abstract medium than music? Now, the medium of architecture, for instance, is existential mass. Language, the word, is closer to that substantiality. We can live by words. They can be grasped. They're concrete, to make a pun. Mathematics, science, art, and religion, inform that life, enrich it, but without language the whole edifice crumbles into oblivion.

Having a memory of the past engages man in real existence. Whether that is something that persists is debatable. Likely it is as ephemeral - and maybe entirely an illusion - as the fleeting moment. But we can talk about the past, our history, and at least we seem to have the capacity to hold onto memories even if we can't hold onto the instance out of which those memories forever flow into the reservoir of history. We desire a complete synthesis, a safe haven from tumult and its turmoil and trouble. But that ever escapes our grasp. We, while born astride our own graves, are given a glimpse of light during our plunge back into darkness. This brief yet precious beyond understanding moment is an instance of the Cosmos seeing into its very own nature. Take heart that we humans, all sentient life everywhere in the Universe, are the agency by which Reality, Existence itself - God, if you like - has self awareness. The world realizes itself through you and me and all like us. So, of course it is never ending, never complete, always escaping us on a distant horizon. Its somehow comforting, therefore, that the only real individual is the One.

Biblically speaking, God becomes an individual when the Word is made flesh, taking the form of Jesus the Christ. Accordingly, the thoughts expressed here bestow that same status on every sentient life form anywhere. "I am" sent Moses. "I am" sends All.

"G_d" is not a noun. Rather, "he's" a verb. I am, you are, he, she, it IS. When he says I am sends you he is also saying, without being rude, don't ask foolish questions. It's obvious who I am and if you have to ask, well, I'm sorry, but you wouldn't understand.