LOVE AND CULTURE 

by W. B. Macomber

How you're reading about yourself all the time and don’t know it; the painful process of striking out for oneself; the marvel of history; becoming real for other people; the religious attitude towards pleasure, beauty, culture and success; the loss of Greek imagination in ancient Rome; the Coliseum and the Catacombs; watch your language!;  whether you'll ever know anything and how you might be looking in the wrong place; how depth can lead to a new appreciation of the present and superficial; res cogitans, noumenon and the tabernacle; finding ourselves in the things we do and  say—and in literature.

(I had just learned that my sister had left the Church, and at the beginning of the hour read a note which said, "Dear Mr. Macomber, I've left the Catholic religion.")

I wanted to write to her: Congratulations, you've moved into a higher level of being. You're now making the painful move into the modern era. You're experiencing the Reformation and the eruption of the problems of modern life. You're going through what I went through in Toronto, over a period of seven years—under therapy, having lost my childhood faith, and feeling just dreadful, putting all this together in a book called The Anatomy of Disillusion, which was my doctoral study of Heidegger.

When I was working on my dissertation, over a period of seven years, I didn't see any connection between it and my own life. I entitled it The Anatomy of Disillusion simply to sell more copies. Martin Heidegger’s Phenomenological Notion of Truth, I thought, might not sell as many copies as The Anatomy of Disillusion. But when my friend Ann Kuhn in London saw the book, she immediately exclaimed, "Marvelous! That's the story of the last decade of your life." Then I began to see the connection between the abstract theory I was arguing in my doctoral dissertation and my own life.

I had no inkling of this as I pursued my study of Heidegger. I thought of it only as a scholarly study, which had nothing at all to do with me. But it was the perfect expression of my spiritual life during that decade. That was the decade in which I lost my childhood faith, didn't know where I was or what life was all about, and began to strike out on my own for the first time. All this without knowing it, without being able to put it in such pretentious language, when I was going through it, because I appeared to myself so unimportant, so banal, that I would never have used the pretentious terminology I'm now prepared to use to describe what was going on: making the step from the Middle Ages into the modern world, coming into my own being, and beginning to decide issues wholly for myself.

It was a painful experience, and that was when I had the hell experience for the first time. That was SO interesting. I'd believed in hell for 25 years and not had the hell-experience.  Then I lost my belief in my religion, and the hell I'd learned about from it, and it was just at that point that I really experienced it. In the depths I was very unhappy. Sometimes I'd twist and writhe on my bed and pour out all my unhappiness. I discovered therapy at that time, and the point of therapy was to pour out one's unhappiness, achieving what is called "discharge." I'm no longer after discharge, but expression. The difference between my life now and in Toronto 12 years ago is that I'm now able to express myself effectively, and at that time I couldn't.

I looked back not so long ago at an old photograph, a small photo which I'd never really seen until I looked at it through Mike Lawson's viewer. It was like Blow-up. Suddenly I really saw that picture for first time. I zoomed back into the days when it was taken. There I sit in a tuxedo with Anne Bolgan, the girl I was in love with, in an old formal—the old-fashioned type formal, with the big skirt that flared out (phew!) and the corsage I'd brought her—out of another era, it seemed. I looked at myself up close and said, "That's perfect"—flashing eyes but the mouth wooden and embarrassed, like the expression Charlie Brown gets sometimes.

That old photo expressed my whole being at that time. I was seeing things for the first time, discovering Freud, Heidegger, Kant, Veblen, D.H. Lawrence, fantastic minds whom, even if I had read them when I was a Catholic, I couldn't give myself to, because I knew that they were not for what I was for; they cut against the belief I was banking my life on. Almost all those books were on the Index when I was going to Santa Clara. Copernicus’ treatise on the celestial spheres was forbidden to Catholic astronomers up until 1822. Up until 1822 Copernicus was on the Index and consequently sinful to read.

I'm not simply attacking the Church. I'm trying to say something about human nature, and how slowly it advances on its way to the light. How is that possible—that people can still be betting on Ptolemy in 1821, that Kant can be regarded as a dangerous to the spiritual life in 1950? How is that possible? I don't just want to knock it or vent contempt for it. It's history, and it's no good holding history in contempt. It's part of the wonder I'm philosophizing about, that holds me spellbound, almost every moment of the waking day.

One cannot philosophize endlessly about something one holds in contempt. I don't hold the Catholic Church (or Christianity) in contempt. It's the guardian of about four fifths of our cultural history (and besides it produced me!). But I marvel how slowly we push upward to the light. The Pope is still offended by Franz Kafka, who didn't dare publish his writings while he was alive, and left it to his friend Max Brod whether to make them public after his death. (His recommendation was that they be burned, but he left it up to Brod—he couldn't bring himself to do it himself.) In my day, we found Schopenhauer shocking and dangerous. I remember how furious I was at Philip Wylie for Generation of Vipers. God, he was insulting my mother! We hadn't encountered Eldridge Cleaver and Frantz Fanon and Jerry Rubin in those days. It was a very prim and proper society indeed.

In 1951, the year after I graduated from college, the Church defined as dogma the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into heaven. Every Catholic was now obliged to believe it, and to believe it in the literal sense: that the Blessed Virgin ascended in a straight line from here (or Galilee) to heaven. How incredible! There is no straight line from here to heaven. That is what we now call a "category mistake."

Heaven isn't a place but a condition, and you can't move from a place to a condition. One might as well go from Peterhouse to Cambridge. Of course we're always representing another condition by another place. If we were only somewhere else—like Huck Finn squirming in his chair in Aunt Polly's parlor. For years I was always wondering what was going on at other tables and in other cars. Heaven was somewhere else. (And I was always relatively happy with my life. For many people it's anywhere else.) So I tell you: heaven is right here, and hell too—the only joy or punishment you will ever know. You can't get there from here because this is it. I'm sorry, but that's the way it appears to be. I claim that this is not what I believe; it's what we believe.

But our belief is still a belief like any other. If the beliefs of past ages make no sense to us—if we don't believe one way or the other regarding them, but simply can't make out what they mean—our beliefs would make even less sense to them. All such beliefs are on a par, once one recognizes the limits of objective insight on the issue. Extinction is as absurd, as utterly unthinkable, as heaven or reincarnation. We only think we understand it because it's our belief, and the others aren't. If one could venture anything at all on the question, it's that those are the three basic possibilities: heaven, reincarnation and extinction, but they're all utterly absurd.

At any rate, that old photo was from the period in which I was making my painful move toward believing in myself, and then I had the hell-experience, after I'd given up my official belief in it. So I know that, if you lose a faith, or begin to strike out on your own, it's a painful experience. And I understand some of the things my sister is going through. It's miraculous, I think, that that girl, whom I think I've already described as a "mindless socialite" (meaning she likes being with people and doesn't give evidence of thinking very much), is now beginning to ask herself ultimate questions—at age 50! She felt herself guilty as a mother, for one thing, because her son hasn't lived up to the ideals of the belief in which she grew up, has gotten into trouble with dope, was for a time on smack, hasn't really given himself to anything, and is (although she doesn't know it) homosexual. I want to say to her: Look, although he doesn't live up to a specific ideal you have in mind, even one that represents the accumulated wisdom of centuries, still he's not such a bad chap. He doesn't live up to your specific ideal, but try seeing life in a more complex, many-faceted way than just through your own ideal. If you don't have too fixed an idea of what he's supposed to be, you may come to see that he's not so bad, and if he's not so bad, you have no guilt to feel as a mother. You think you haven't done your job properly because you didn't raise him up to be what you wanted (and the Church wanted) a son of yours to be, but the fact that you haven't been able to do that doesn't mean that he's a botched job. He's a great chap. And when you accept that, you have no guilt and you can live much more freely. You redeem yourself by taking another look at your son.

Well, anyway, I appreciate the many difficulties the person may be going through who wrote me the note, "Dear Mr. Macomber, I have left the Catholic religion." Remember it's not specifically my aim to get you to do that. There's nothing I want you to be or not to be. That's the doctrine I'm against, any coercive ideal. I've known two very distinguished Christians: Father Doyle who tended the rose-bushes at Loyola High School and Francois Hartmann in Paris. I suppose, when all is said and done, they're the two best men I've ever known.

I’ve no specific aim in mind with you. I only want you to think, and in thinking, respond to me, and carry me with you through life. That's thumos, the Greek approach to immortality. And it's also Hamlet: Adieu, adieu, remember me! That is making oneself real for others, wirklich in German w-i-r-k-l-i-c-h, real, efficacious, doing something (wirk-lich). It’s Rick Long's definition of communication: making yourself real for another person. I want to be wirklich in your minds, but there is nothing specifically I want you to do or be. I have no code and no program. I'm like Hamlet, whose motto is Adieu, adieu, remember me!, and like people who send stacks of Christmas cards—because what do you think Christmas cards say but "remember me"? At last report, and that was five or six years ago, my sister was sending some 250 Christmas cards. In this society we're absolutely starved for Wirklichkeit, for a sense of our reality or importance for others. There’s so little scope for it any more, it seems. Just like the speech of Eryximachus—no human relations.

The aim of the philosopher is to get people to think, and in getting them to think, to respond to him for their entire lives. Martin Heidegger does not want to convince us of anything in particular; he simply wants us to use his terminology. And we do! It's fantastic. Heidegger has swept the continent along with him. People write everything from sociology to literary criticism to Catholic theology and psychiatric interpretations in Heideggerian terminology. One can use Heideggerian terminology to prove the most diverse conclusions. Catholics make him the handmaiden of Catholic theology—they can put the old message in the new terminology. I don't want to put that down, but I want to challenge hell out of it.

Well, anyway, here we are, and I've lost a vital 25 minutes of the hour for the evaluations, which I hold to be very important however, because they're Skinnerian counter-control, and give me a report card, just like Loyola High School. So, now we have to wind up the drama of the Symposium. We left it with Socrates holding forth, and I said I thought there were four vital stages of his speech. We begin with the duality of depth and surface: "depth" represented by Aristophanes—human life as an impossible project, an absurd, contradictory pursuit—and "surface" by Agathon's sense of beauty, which streams in through the eye, the sense which caresses surfaces.

I don't know how I want to define ''surface.'' I suppose the best working definition is everything which a theologian puts down. That would include steaks, sunsets, beautiful women, Les fleurs du mal (or the Divine Comedy, for that matter), and the experience of standing in a stadium deluged by the applause of 60,000 people who are out of their minds at your grandeur—that sort of thing. They're all very diverse things, and I call them all "surface."

After all, the kid who had the hybris-experience of all Greece at his feet (Rick Long after chess)—all he did was throw a plate farther or run 100 yards faster than all the others—unimportant, meaningless stuff. It's important that it be unimportant, meaningless. It can't be meaningful or we separate off to favor Ronald Reagan or Che Guevara, Wittgenstein or Heidegger, Martin Luther or St. Thomas Aquinas, the Pope or Jerry Rubin. Joe DiMaggio can command the admiration of both camps only because what he does is meaningless.

When we move from Greece to Rome, we have the Greek need for intensity and high-key excitement associated with the games. Only we've lost the Greek imagination which could endow things like throwing a plate, or running100 yards, or writing something in exactly 14 lines, with immense transcendent meaning. When we lose the Greek imagination, the games become spectacles. The spectacle purports really to be something. Something must really happen in the spectacle; there must be reality there. And so something bloody well does happen: one of those two cats is not going to emerge alive! That's "reality" right before your eyes, and the spectacle becomes a blood spectacle.  Once this happens, we get into a kind of progression like an arms race. We've got to keep the excitement up, and that means more and more titillation. So we square off no longer one to one, but 20 to 20, and 20 against lions, and finally we have a great collective battle between "high-born ladies and dwarves." That's Satyricon stuff.

Today women's wrestling perhaps fulfills some of this function, jazzing up our otherwise jaded and empty lives and giving us a sense of reality. Like Rome, we're a society without imagination, essentially without taste. The Magic Christian, Zabrinski Point, Midnight Cowboy, Little Murders, Carnal Knowledge—almost every film one sees nowadays  makes the same point, and that's a beginning!

Life splits apart in Rome. The sensitive members of the community are appalled at the bloody spectacle in the Coliseum. They withdraw from it, recoil from it, flee it, down into the Catacombs, and in the Catacombs celebrate—a bloody spectacle! The bloody spectacle in the mind of God nailed to a cross by human nature.

This view of human nature, I maintain, pervades all our thinking. I don't know the truth of the matter, of course, but I'm concerned about the spiritual effect of this sort of thinking. As I sped to the campus in my open MG two years ago, absolutely on top of the world, I frequently heard a western gospel-hymn on the radio:

So who cares if men may hate you 

And may spit into your face? 

Just remember, Jesus loves you—

On the Cross he took your place.

I shudder at this sort of thing. I can't help believing it has an injurious effect on the people who sing it. Even if you don't believe in it, really—just repeating the words again and again—I think (a priori) that it would tend to make you uptight about the Dirty Commies who deny Christ and persecute men who worship Him. I get my queasy old Armageddon feeling—that we are pushing towards confrontation, the great showdown with the forces of Evil, from both sides, mind you, for they think we're Evil. I wonder: what madness has mankind in its grip? For the difference between the way Mr. Nixon lives and the way Mr. Kosygin lives—for that? I believe this is the heart question of western metaphysics at the present juncture: diagnosing our collective illness, as Nietzsche puts it.

How sagely the Greek philosopher Xenophanes (Parmenides' master) wrote:

First of all, enlightened men should hymn the God, using words of propriety, and stories that have no fault . . .

It's no use to tell the tale of battles of Titans and

Giants, or Centaurs either—those fictions of our fathers' imaginations—

nor wars of the Gods. There's no good to be got from such subjects.

One should be thoughtful always and right-minded towards the Gods.

So Socrates in the Phaedrus wonders whether he's a Typhon (dragon) or a being "of a gentler, humbler sort." The dialogue is about whether human nature is vicious and we're all out to eat one another (without Christ's grace).

Isn't that marvelous? "One should be thoughtful always, and right-minded towards the Gods." The words you use will gradually project the sort of life you lead. You should be careful of the company you keep; that's your life, and the most significant company you keep is the words you use, the language game you're in: Catholicism, Judaism, free enterprise, psychoanalysis, Eastern mysticism, or whatever. Patriotism and jingoism, egoism and individualism, cowardice and discretion, sick and saintly (i.e., deviant) are the same thing in different language-games, as Wittgenstein says—and the way you behave towards them will depend on the game you're in.

So Clarence Darrow argues that he can't be regarded as an "infidel" because the word has no meaning: in Mohammedan countries it means a Christian and in Christian countries a Mohammedan. But if you see a man as an "infidel," or a "lost lamb" or whatever, if you subscribe to a faith which excludes his, you are going to relate to him differently. At the very least you won't be maximally open to the things he has to tell and teach you. I oppose all sectarianism, which strikes me as merely provincial. I at least want to challenge it, to make believers stronger in their own belief.

I'm afraid of Christian language, the language through which the Christian sees the world, as in that gospel hymn. I find it concealed, but still virulent, in the language of existentialism, communism, and psychoanalysis, the three modern heirs of the Christian tradition. And I see the new doctrine of the East as simply Christianity in disguise, Christianity in sheep's clothing, so to speak—untainted by guilt for Vietnam and air-pollution. We must learn to celebrate life, not adjust to it—we who live in the midst of the very wonder of creation, with everything men ever dreamed of having.

We need more vibrant vocabulary and, though it sounds superficial, more of the imagination and style of ancient Greece. I'm as alarmed at the bloody spectacle of the Catacombs—the image of God nailed to a cross by man's base nature—as I am at the  bloody spectacle of the Coliseum, where we lust after excitement without imagination, without taste or style.

In Rome the unity of life which pervaded Greece is lost, and we have a duality or conflict between depth and surface. When depth is dissociated from surface we no longer understand it. What "depth" means in our tradition is Christian theology, volumes and volumes of it, the Patrologia Latina and Patrologia Graeca, which I used to gaze at with eyes full of wonder at the Institute of Mediaeval Studies. That is the accumulated wisdom of Christianity, the repository of our most sacred beliefs, and the record of the mainstream of culture for better than half our history.

What a staggering task, when wisdom is contained in all those immense, weighty tomes. I was within reach of a Ph.D., and nowhere close to it. I believed I never would be. When I was 25, I decided I was going to take my leave of it and decide things for myself.

Well, not entirely for myself right at first. I took Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud for my guides, tried on their spectacles, let their language-games pervade my entire being for years. At least I had something manageable to work with: two volumes of Kant, and one of Freud. I knew it was all there somehow, and I believed that I could get it. And I did, by God!

Unfortunately, knowledge is still as esoteric and unattainable as the contents of all those ancient tomes, or the musty tomes of Prof. Faust's study, as far away as Harvard and Oxford and the Sorbonne, if not Rome. You graduate from university thinking, not only that you don't know anything (which is clear enough), but that you will never know anything. It's all so fragmentary and specialized that it never falls together to form any coherent pattern. We professors make everything so complicated that nobody "knows" anything. After 20 years of training, I can still only follow lectures with difficulty, and often not at all. The modern professor is the heir of the priest, who can't be contradicted or understood, in his field of specialized expertise. We can have a guest lecturer at the Philosophy Club who has spent 200 or 300 hours preparing a lecture, and the consensus will be that he didn't say anything, or anything significant. How is this possible? We professors (of humanities) must start de-mystifying knowledge, talking simply and clearly, so that anyone can understand.

Interestingly, I pinned my real hopes on Freud, and psychoanalysis. I thought Kant was simply a game we played in senior common rooms and graduate seminars. Kant was so sublime—talking him was such a gas (it still is). But it was through Freud's spectacles that I was taking what is called a "long, hard look" at myself. (Come on, own up to it—that's what you're like at base, isn't it?). I had only changed languages, really. It was my homosexuality (the one thing in my life I couldn't control) I was wrestling with, trying to change. Previously, I was "sinful"; now I was "sick." I had simply moved from the old-fashioned Western to the sophisticated, psychological Western, where the Top Gun is liable to say, "I won't draw on you—you're sick." I always thought it unfair that sickness should bear any opprobrium. Anyway, in the end it wasn't Dr. Freud but dour old Prof. Kant who changed my life, or "saved my soul," who brought me the "joyous tidings."

I now say Kant gave me the sunset, ten years later. You have to know a bit about Kant to appreciate the wonder of that. But what it means is that depth (Kant) and surface (the sunset, a lab's coat, Rick Long's chess, the humor of Ulysses and the sensuality of Les fleurs du mal) are somehow tied together by the most mysterious bond. Kant taught me that man structures or creates the world, and is therefore God, Spinoza's causa sui, since he "does" what God does in the "fictions of our fathers' imaginations," and that each life, my life, is an end in itself—in effect that you can't get from the universe to Stephen Dedalus, but you can get from Stephen Dedalus to the universe.

I let surface go for awhile—quite a long time, actually—in my pursuit of depth, but the point, after all, as Nietzsche insists, is to come back to the surface, to a new experience of the passing moment—not, however, as Rick Long once pointed out to Denny Miller, of every passing moment indiscriminately (doing the dishes and reading Shakespeare or making love), which I take to be the message of the East.

Not indifference, so that differences make no difference. ("I will teach you differences," Wittgenstein writes.) Not so that you're capable of smiling, sitting on top of a dung heap. That may be a considerable power, but I don't regard it as the highest power. I don't want to make you into Carnation Cows. If you know transcendence, like Socrates and Leo Tolstoy and A.E. Housman, you're likely to be torn apart by the world and its idiocy. You'll know why Mephisto says to Marlowe's Faust (in Terry Dalton's unforgettable formulation): "I'm not going to take you anywhere. I'm simply going to show you the face of God, and then you'll realize that this is hell." With Dylan Thomas, I say:

Do not go gentle into that good night, 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light!

Never be reconciled with life as it is, and always has been. The point, as Karl Marx says, is to change it—even if we cannot change it, which I take to be the message of Kant's moral philosophy. But we can change it. I'm selling out to the doctrine I oppose unless I say that. I must believe that! The point, however, is not to change it, but the life one leads from day to day trying to change it.

Under Christianity depth becomes unintelligible. The ideal man is the saint, and his superiority is not visible, is not intelligible, is a matter of miracles, and miracles are mind-confounding by definition; they don't lead you anywhere. Christ's miracles tell me nothing—except understood symbolically. The aim—yes—the aim is to loosen your tongues, and bring you to life, "life everlasting," as Kant did for me.

In the Christian (or anyway Catholic) creed the penultimate step to life everlasting is the resurrection of the body. The Credo ends: ". . . the resurrection of the body and life everlasting, Amen." So the resurrection of the body (the lowly, fleeting, banal, superficial) has become one of my primary theoretical concerns.

I want to be perhaps the first man to show statues of David or the Discus Thrower to a class in "culture" and exclaim, "What a build!" Shameful, shameful! Words which could not have been spoken a decade ago, because depth had taken leave of surface, and we extolled the saint, the ascetic, the hermit, the guru, whose greatness is concealed behind what he says, not manifest in what he says as obviously as a man's physical power is manifested in his build (which, admittedly, can be deceptive). They talk about a life which is thrilling and divine—or is the word "thrilling" appropriate here? A life which is tranquil and divine might be better. I'm for excitement, for high-key intensity, and wherever youth are thinking, there is that imaginary high-key intensity on which I depend.

I was talking about depth getting lost from surface, so that philosophers of the modern age must bring us back to the surface, to the here and now. Kant begins this project with his demand that all knowledge relate to a "possible object of experience." Everything that goes on in understanding, he says, must come back to intuition. Intuition is his word for the immediate presence of a sensible object. Kant must bring us back to our senses, must bring us back to life, which had become in the meantime merely "this life." Throughout the long centuries of the Middle Ages our thinking had "gone off," in Nietzsche's memorable metaphor, to "beat its wings against eternal walls."

Wittgenstein fights the same battle in the 20^th century, with his claim that the criterion of depth must be at the surface, where we can all see it. The criterion of meaning must be found in our facial expressions: whether they are alive and with it and understanding, whether communication is going on or not. We must be able to see this on the surface; we must be looking constantly. I have to tell students again and again: look at the people you're talking to, to make sure you're not boring them or laying a trip on them. Communication requires that you look at the other person all the time you're talking.

Kant tries to bring us back to the surface, to bring us to our senses and to life, and so does Wittgenstein. You are not something behind everything you do and say, something eternally mysterious. You are in the things you do and say. You're a pattern in your behavior, not something behind all your behavior. That something behind everything you do and say Descartes called res cogitans, parodied as the "ghost in the machine," which I call the butterfly in the suit of armor. For Kant this could never be "known," could never be experienced, only believed in and lived for, in a life of powerful commitment symbolized by his Categorical Imperative.

You are ultimately mysterious to yourself, Kant believes, and this ultimate mystery he calls noumenon. The meaning of life is noumenal, ultimately mysterious. Now noumenon has come down into the modern age from a Christian approach to life which is unintelligible, which culminates in the great cathedral, looming up out of all the misery and suffering and degradation. In the cathedral there is a tabernacle, and concealed deep in the tabernacle is the ultimate mystery and meaning of human life. This mysterious ghost comes into modern philosophy as Descartes' res cogitans (the "ghost in a machine"), and Kant's noumenon, the essence of which is that it cannct be apprehended directly, which means that Socrates' challenge, "Know thyself," Gnothi seauton, is ultimately unfulfillable. Well, I know it's ultimately unfulfillable, inexhaustible, but I want to maintain that we are not ultimately mysterious, that we must have values which can manifest themselves tangibly. We find ourselves in the things we do and say. That's you, not just your image or facade. That's what Wittgenstein is trying to teach us.

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