Among what I love in Heidegger is that he points out what
seems most basic and forgotten about the mystery of Being: Society does not
create the human being.
What is society? The evidence of facebook seems to suggest
that society is one person’s abstraction. One is hard-pressed to find two
people with the same groups of friends in their facebook profiles. Does this
not indicate that, if society is the web of one’s sociological influences, that
no two people have the same society, definitionally? If we could all agree,
with a few exceptions, upon what society is, then my argument would be
rightfully condemned to ridicule. Yet the very presence and prevalence of wars,
economic “crises”, absurd depressions, both personal and collective, and a
pervasive hopelessness as how to overcome these collective issues and reaffirm
the individual quest – all of these factors indicate that Society is not only
particular to every individual but in many senses not commensible with the ideals
of others when it is treated as an ideal. Society itself is an individual
subjective phenomenon, and our agreements as to what it is are therefore understandably
superficial. So we defend ourselves with rigid common sense, tribal guilt, and
an anti-intellectual media and popular culture.
So it follows that we must shed Society as an ideal, one at
a time. Only then can Humanity progress. These two terms – society and Humanity
– are as far apart in meaning and far from being synonyms as are creed and
Religion. The more that one breaks with one’s own regularities, adventurously,
the greater the pull towards those outside of one’s social group. One does not
seek homogeny but heterogeny. The vagrant on the street becomes an informant.
The “out-group” becomes what one feels most comfortable in, because one only
knows oneself to be an individual when a minority in the midst of a minority.
This is how I feel in the company of African Americans, Arabs, Mexicans, Native
Americans, and any other racial minority that convenes to share a common
culture. I become more universally Human when in the presence of someone from a
different background, and eventually distinctions in class and race are
forgotten.
Labour serves society, yet that is more selfish than Work.
Work is in service of the Ideal, and the Ideal originates within that which is
Universally human, not particular to the norms of either capitalism or
communism, America or France, et cetera. What can be said to be Universal? Art
seems to be. Money does not. It is true that the consideration is vague. Yet
one must ultimately go by one’s deepest intuitions in such profound matters.
Art has been an aspect of the human condition since prior to barter; some
attribute the very birth of the Human Human to the first appreciation of
Beauty. It predates even barter, and it certainly predates Capitalism, not to
mention United States Capitalism, especially as it is practiced in a given
community in the suburbs of San Diego. Yet when I speak with certain patrons in
this town, I am told, “this is what Life is. Art is not the bigger picture.
Spiritual needs are for one’s self, but work is for the society.”
My question is two-fold: How does one know that what is best
for society is best for Humanity? How does one know that what society “*is*”
even exists outside one’s mind?
What is most universally human seems to speak through
intuition and Art. Yet we have forgotten how to listen, and ours is a story of
the Human Being, both in the individual and the Collective sense, tapering to a
point and only remembering his most recent dragons, paradigms, and forms of
conditioning. Art may be our only hope to regain our Sanity.
Heidegger was probably right, however. Art is not produced
by the human being; it creates the Human Being. When we look at a box with
print inscribed upon it, we think: This is the product of human intelligence.
It is the product of Society. It is the product of our labour. Yet how do we
know that we can take such credit for it? Beings reveal themselves to us, and
they manifest through us. Technology uses us as much as we use technology. Is
it such a stretch of the imagination to consider this admonishment from
Heidegger? Or is this most blaringly an issue now, as modern technology becomes
more and more homogenizing, sophisticated, and menacing? Has the machine so
tapered us and have we become such tools in ITS service that our imaginations
are dulled and we cannot even begin to imagine that what we think we control,
what we justify as a tool, is using us by its very nature? Heidegger’s
metaphysics seem like the only sensible explanation, but in the absence of “scientific
proof” we want to hear nothing of Beings. When Art falls on deaf ears and we
forget the Other, why should one bother to care about the mystery of Being? It
all begins to sound like Christian back-wash, and yet our very pious attitude
towards Science, the enduring rigour with which we repress the individual imagination
mercilessly from a young age, and our hatred for those who are not homogenous
leaves little room for one to say, “Art creates us. Technology uses us.” How
many poets retain that spark of individuated consciousness when everyone around
them not only fails to provide corroboration for the most astronomical of their
experiences but out-rightly condemns it as impossible? What seems possible is
constructed from words and ways of looking at things which are beaten in by
convention, and the moment that one says, “Art is selfish. Art is unimportant.
Art is only important to you,” we lose that territory to the machines. We
forget what it means to see a building and to feel as though its windows looked
back at us. How many teachers not only applauded the student poet for his
imagination but actually sat down and asked, “What do you mean by that? I need
to know. Because I have never heard it put that way before.” And how many
students were not frightened by being put in such high regard? Questioning is
the piety of knowledge, but we are not taught to question, because it cannot be
taught, and teachers are only insistent often, as so many members of the herd,
in doing their “jobs”, thinking little of whether or not they are hurting the
Dasein. If one says of the Other, “it spoke to me,” if one is taken
figuratively one is merely justified in the ears of the beholder by one’s
verisimilitude to an older common meme. If one is taken literally, one may also
be taken to a hospital and forced out of believing that the metaphysical view
of what Life Is to the common sense may be fundamentally flawed at its roots,
and all of our justifications for common sense may simply stem from that
original misconception like weeds. As people become increasingly memetic in thinking,
with the advent of social networking and technology becoming not only a
homogenizing agent but something regarded as a social “duty” and “necessity”, we
lost the ability to question Existence at its very roots. How will we resolve
social problems if we cannot think outside of the confines of our own
societies? Of our own culture? Of our own routines? Hopelessness is a form of
madness; it creates depression and other forms of illness. It leads to suicide
on a large scale. Yet the imagination will not be repressed. If it does not
serve human purposes, it will destroy Humanity; it can be ignored, not stifled.
As was wisely put, and as I have paraphrased in verse:
We can move backwards
or forwards.
Very rarely can we
stand still.
Whatever it is we move
towards,
Will work either for Great
or for Ill.
Dm.A.A.
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