The Spine of Western Culture

By Carlos Wiggen

Reviving Nietzsches use of the ancient gods Apollo and Dionysus as notions for seeing the emergence, growth, and imminent and final decay of Western culture, Carlos Wiggen goes through the historical process by way of selected interpretations of this cultures drama, thought, and social structure.

Is the spine of a radically new culture already forming? If so, what is its essence?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546294009

Carlos Wiggen

Carlos Wiggen also wrote: “Kant and the Barbarians” “Philosophy at Gunpoint” “The Nazil Grail” “The Spine of Western Culture”

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© 2018 Carlos Wiggen. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  06/27/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-9401-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-9400-9 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

To my friend and companion

Pilar Parcerisas

NOTE

A dopting the practice Robert Graves established in his studies of Greek and Hebrew myths, I have put a separate section headed Notes after the main text. Looking like footnotes, this actually consists of additional factual information, reflections and observations that are not strictly necessary in order to comprehend the main text. Thus, it is a supplement designed to answer a number of questions forming in the mind of the reader, particularly regarding statements that seem odd or farfetched.

CONTENTS

Note

Why Spine?

PART 1:   GETTING IN POSITION

Zenith

Die Verkehrte Welt

Creating the Spine

Atlantis Rising

PART 2:   THE ENLIGHTENMENT CLASSICS

Kant and Schiller

Schiller: Don Carlos

Schiller: The Artificiality of Art

Hegel: The Essence of Being is to Be

Goethe: Egmont

Schopenhauer / Nietzsche: A Hungry Will

Wagner: The Ring of the Nibelungs

Wagner’s Persona

PART 3:   A SOCIAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE

Ibsen: The Wild Duck

Jarry: King Ubu

Artaud: The Universe is a Scandal!

Kafka: Oklahama Theater

From Sorel’s Working Class Epic to Hitler’s Machine

Brecht: Can we make them light their Cigars?

Max Ophuls: The Merry Go Round

PART 4:   ENTER DEMOGORGON

Freud: Like a Garrison in an occupied Town

Strindberg: A Dream Play

Heidegger: The Authentic and the In-authentic

Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author

Jean-Paul Sartre: I Choose to be Born

Alain Resnais: Last Year in Marienbad

PART 5:   DRAMA, PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE

The Historical Interaction

PART 6:   NADIR

What Now?

Memo From A Robot

A New Genesis?

Notes

Literature

WHY SPINE?

I n the following, spine refers to the human spinal column and serves as a metaphor for human culture, its emergence, characteristics, life span, fate and demise.

Let us first look at this part of the human body like a physician does:

Your nervous system looks much like an upended tree, suspended from its roots at the base of your brain, its millions of limbs reaching out to every corner of your body. Your spinal cord is like a thick braid formed by billions of these nerves. Your body has approximately 15 billion nerve cells-all of which receive and transmit nerve impulses by way of the spinal cord. These impulses control virtually all functions of your body, from your senses to mobility. Your spinal cord actually ends near the base of your upper back, shooting out braids of nerves called nerve roots. These nerve roots run through a large tunnel-like canal, and at each level of your spinal column, a pair of nerve roots exits from the spine. The knowledge we are born with guides cells and organs to receive and transmit impulses to our brain through this vast network of nerves. A healthy spinal cord allows these impulses to flow freely back and forth but, when your spinal cord becomes misaligned, its parts get out of place and nerves can become pinched. When this happens, the flow of information from your nervous system gets interrupted. This imbalance, called subluxation, can lead to physical and emotional problems 1).

The similarities are easy to see. The spinal chord is the first growth that shows itself as coming out of the brain-to-be, immediately followed by the other extremities, which it inhabits like a guideline. Recently, it was discovered that parts of the column have a more-than-rudimental intelligence that impacts on the surroundings like a local brain but, without consulting the head-brain directly (Vahdat, Lungu, Doyon 2015). This is interesting because it revives the ancient belief that consciousness was seated in the heart, not the head; a figure of speech that has been active to this day; as in gut feeling.

Like the musculoskeletal spinal column of the human body, human culture can also be seen as a spine. The regularities that make up an organic entity follow certain routes that, with Freud’s words, try to lead the organism toward its death as pain- and effortlessly as possible. This makes up the normal life cycle and behavior of the organism, or multitude of exemplars of that organism, like a bacteria- or fungus culture. In the human organism and the surroundings that it exists in, these conduits are often called custom, normal behavior and, are codified in rules from what is seemly, to law and order.

Consequently, a human culture, limited to the area it prefers, like occidental / western culture, could also be seen and evaluated as an organic, living entity stretched out in time, with its emergence, life span, fate (subluxation) and demise thus, the question where do we come from, to where do we go? is more than just a figure of speech, both regarding the individual and the species as such.

The human being is aware of this; it knows that it exists thus, homo sapiens sapiens. Any other organism just lives up until a moment where it lives no more. The human being—which commonly refers to Cro-Magnon Man and his descendants—is, like some other animals, capable of thinking and communicating in the conditional. However, due to a mutation, chiefly of the brain which also grew considerably in volume, it developed mental faculties way beyond even the closest of the other animal species. With that, it also developed complex ideas and language, it fashioned imaginable realities, hypothetical situations, assumed the presence of higher, hidden orders, considered possible meanings of birth, life and death and, recognized a dimension of apparently ultimate, unanswerable questions.

With that last level, the mutation that seemed such a leap forward also produces insecurity and doubt. Like the bible states in Genesis 3:7, and the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. The human being also knows that there are things it doesn’t know; a whole dimension of unknowns, maybe many times larger than what is known. This, if anything, makes up the essence of human culture. human of knowledge and ignorance, conviction and perplexity would be a more fitting characterization of our species. We suffer from a natural born subluxation. Why? What happened? What, if anything, can we do about it? What do we do if we can’t? This is our original, existential enigma. Without keeping that in mind, an enquiry into the essence of western culture, an attempt at diagnosing it, past, present and future, is already doomed to failure, drowning in a sea of pointless detail.

But, keeping the existential enigma in mind, we can establish some more precise lead questions.

1): How have people tried to handle this matter up until today?

2): What preferred fields did those people chose to work in?

3): What consequences and reactions did their work produce?

4): How can our present cultural situation most adequately be described?

5): In light of what we have found, what reasonable predictions can we make?

6): Can we ever get rid of our basic subluxation?

Moving down this list, compared with historical progression and, hinting at correspondences in the spinal chord and its spheres of influence, will also take us on excursions in the fields of traditional aesthetics; the science of beauty (nerves), a social science perspective (observable knowledge), the politics of existence (psychology and meta-psychology), philosophical-existential ontology (self-care and -development), and a critique of culture (morals and ethics).

PART ONE

GETTING IN POSITION

ZENITH

T he Great Exhibition in London 1851 has come to be widely seen as the zenith of Western Culture. Great Britain was the largest empire on earth, had a modern parliamentary democracy, excelled in exploration, the liberal arts, industry and commerce and had no serious quarrel with any other major power. The exhibition presented the boldest and most advanced results of technology, science, mass production and human comfort. The interplay of nature, as in the Hyde Park vegetation, and human habitats, as in the enormous Crystal Palace which contained large trees of the park without disturbing them, was also a monument to modern humanism; human endeavor conquering ruthless nature by the power of its spirit alone. The Great Exhibition was, ultimately, a celebration of man at his most noble, God’s principal agent in The Great Work; to make the world a new Garden of Eden; Paradise regained.

With that, The Great Exhibition also showed the excellence of Western culture and its rightful place in history. It physically showed what is sung in Haendel’s Messiah: Goodwill to all Men.

In 1851 that culture was at its zenith. Where and how did it begin? Does it contain an inherent madness? Why and when will it die? Is it already dead but unaware of it? Is its spine broken? Is another culture in the process of taking its place?

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Today, the word culture is opaque and inflated; it often has a negative ring. Most of us know the terse comment ascribed to Joseph Goebbles but originally launched in a German stage play: When I hear the word ‘culture’ I instinctively reach for my pistol. The provenance of that notion is worth a book in itself but, let us just do a short recapitulation of the word’s etymology. It began with Cicero’s using an agrarian term (cultivate the earth) as a metaphor for ennobling the highest region of the soul and, with that, bringing the human being to the completion of its potential. Like so many of the ancient words, it did not begin as a noun but, as a verb going toward adverb-adjective (cultivated). In Roman times, this was a work on one’s own person, laid out as practicing the seven liberal arts: astronomy, grammar (reading/writing) rhetoric (speaking well), dialectic (discussion and argument), music, arithmetic and geometry. Today, this is known as general education, as in the curriculums of public schools.

Abrahamic religion ate into it, chiefly through the drama known as The Fall of Man where the first humans end up exiled from the Garden of Eden. The sentences Cursed is the ground for thy sake, thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, by the sweat of your brow will you win your bread introduced the cultivation of the field as the punishment, first life long then, in the Jewish version, until God forgives you. From this, the notion of human toil expanded to the visions of Saint Augustine and Tomas à Kempis: through the imitation of Christ, to turn the earth into a temple worthy of the Lord; prepare a new garden, The City of God, that He would take pleasure in and where He would accept the humans back in under His luminous presence.

With this as reference, one could say that creating and practicing culture was doing God’s Work—all the way to The Great Exhibition of London 1851. However, there were already dark clouds on the horizon. Only two years later Great Britain and France found themselves conducting a proxy war with Imperial Russia on the Crimean peninsula. Between 1866 and 1871 the German states united into a German Empire, wasting France in 1870-71 and becoming more and more of a cuckoo in the European nest. A grand scale European war finally broke out in 1914, swelling to a global matter including the United States. As it was not properly completed, a second war followed in 1939, leaving us with the atomic bomb and the ensuing situation of nuclear deterrence.

How did this rockfall affect Western culture? Let us look at one single person who could be seen as a catalyst of it all.

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DIE VERKEHRTE WELT

H ow to translate this German notion has over the last two hundred plus years been a major headache for philosophers and other academics. It gained philosophic significance through the philosopher Hegel (1770-1831). Welt is world. Die in this case, is the determinate article; the but, what about the word in the middle? Directly translated it means wrong-driven, as in putting the cart in the ditch by driving recklessly. It can also mean taking the wrong turn. It can mean topsy-turvy. In the beginning of The Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) Hegel talks about the world as it appears to the human mind. At first, there is no problem: we experience the world, including our inner world, right from the start of our lives. Let us call that World I. As we grow up, we come to understand that many things in this world change, while others apparently don’t. These unchanging parts are called laws. That word is inclusive, it reaches from our parents’ no, no and yes, yes through failures caused by our lack of knowledge or unwillingness to obey, up through laws of human nature and the physical world in general. The law of gravity is one such unchangeable principle.

So, we come to distinguish between World I and world II, of the principles and laws, that make up its essence. So far, so good.

But then, we are also capable of imagining the opposite of that second world. That world, if we treat it as a World III although it is a product of our imagination, is verkehrt. It is not a mirror image, not a negative photo, but contrary somehow. It is kind of what if but more radical than what if the north and south pole changed their positions on Earth? We could research that possibility and eventually, come up with very exact descriptions of the consequences. Still, we are within the structure of our first two worlds. The verkehrte Welt is inside our mind, our mind’s eye can fashion parts of it and, some people go delusional as they mistake World III for World I whilst applying the rules of World II to it. Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote (1605-15) is the supreme portrait of that phenomenon.

Hegel goes on to discuss the relations between these worlds and their derivates. His basic point remains the same; these are natural born features of the human mind.

Hegel’s enormously suggestive term took on a life of its own, and got inflated. In modern German, it is more or less the same as beyond good and evil—which Nietzsche used as a title of one of his books—in the sense of the outrageous and impossible, down to what we today refer to as the messie problem; improbably cluttered up households of people close to the subnormal. The English word closest to its actual use in German language today might be surreal. In that context, it would probably not be too outlandish to infer that Hegel would accept the surreal as an integral, ineradicable part of the human mind 2).

One person experiencing the entire world of the 20 century as Verkehrt was the Austrian Robert Musil. He lived from 1880 to 1942, was a writer and, is becoming more and more of a cult figure among intellectuals today. Musil did not refer to Hegel or his famous term, but used pseudoreality. The first part of his chef d’oeuvre, The Man without Qualities is titled Pseudoreality prevails.