Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, along with a slew of other 19th century transcendentalists that formed the face of the movement, were influenced by a Revolution-era Frenchman named Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who aside from being a namesake of a character on Lost, was also the author of one of the most influential political science documents in history, On the Social Contract. But eight years before Rousseau's social contract was written, he published a slightly less known pamphlet, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. 'Discourse' was what the set the stage for the transcendentalist and humanist movements in 19th century American philosophy, becoming a crucial inspiration for Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, and eventually even the French Revolution and the Romantic movement as a whole.
But none of those figures lived out, nor did that movement or that revolution create, a world in which ideals of 'Discourse' were carried out - even to the slightest degree.
Yes, it is true that some people take communism from Rousseau. He was, after all, the first person to say that society "wrongly injects into the savage man's concern for self preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions which are the product of society and which have made laws neccessary." It was these new, unnatural passions, Rousseau argued, that led to crime, suffering, and inequality. In the natural state - the state which writers like Thomas Hobbes believed was one of immorality and anarchy - these passions did not exist. Rousseau used the famous example of the 'noble savage' and claimed that "Nature, in giving men tears, bears witness that she gave the human race the softest hearts." From such worldviews, Marx took various critiques of capitalism, applied them to economic theory and the tremendous suffering of the masses at the time, and came up with communism. Years later, a butchered and severely skewered version of this theory came to be the calling card of the Soviet Union, and ever since, a loosely educated Western world has come to identify communism with evil - an opinion which 99 times out of 100 takes little consideration of the history of thought, and much consideration of popular, albeit ignorant, persuasions.
Yet still, it was Marx who designed communism, not Rousseau. Rousseau put forth his own political ideas in the social contract, ideas such as rule by the general will of the populace, and the separation of the government from the sovereign (which could be the people at large), but he never created anything so intricate as Marx, and moreover, his governmental suggestions were suggested in response to the already regrettable status of human civilization as a developed consumerist society, in which habits of jealousy and greed were developed, thereby making war, crime, and other horrors effectively inevitable. The social contract is far from Rousseau's true utopia; that was implied eight years earlier with the release of 'Discourse' and the implication that the first step down the dark path, away from our naturally ideal state, was the reasoning man.
"Reason is what engenders egocentrism, and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what turns man in upon himself. Reason is what separates him from all that troubles and afflicts him. Philosophy is what isolates him and what moves him to say in secret, at the sight of a suffering man, 'Perish if you will; I am safe and sound.' No longer can anything but danger to the entire society trouble the tranquil slumber of the philosopher and yank him fro his bed. His fellow man can be killed with impunity underneath his window. He has merely to place his hands over his ears and argue with himself a little in order to prevent nature, which rebels within him, from identifying him with the man being assassinated."
This crucial, underlining aspect of Rousseau's philosophy is either ignored entirely, or only given lip-service towards in later romantic literature and general thought said to be influenced by the famous Frenchman. It is, after all, a bit more than inconvenient to believe that reasoning, philosophizing human beings are the source of all the world's suffering, and that therefore an ideal world is not only one in which ideas of property rights and owernship and consumerism are absent, but one in which humans are closer to animals, than they are to any kind of supreme being. Instead of idealizing the merits of human accomplishment and achievement, Rousseau views the price of progress to be far too steep.
Even perhaps the most ingenious man in the history of the world, Albert Einstein, questioned the consequences of progress. "I made one great mistake in my life," he says in his biography, "When I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made." Though it is unfair to lump all scientific development into the basket of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the symbolism of Rousseau's original point remains: the thinking human mind, separated from its savage state, is capable of horrors which animals can only gape at. Kurt Vonnegut takes a satirical spin on this idea in Cat's Cradle, when he uses the fictional Dr. Hoenikker to represent a sort of alternative universe Einstein - well-intentioned, but the tool of uncontrollable societal predetermined fate which was set in motion long ago. His son Newt says:
"There are lots of good anecdotes about the bomb and Father ... For instance, do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamagordo? After the things went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?'"
Though Hoenikker's existential questioning 'what is sin?' seems to be more of a reflection of the blank nihilism and meaninglessness which envelopes many of the enlightened characters in Vonnegut's fiction (often critically seen as a direct response to the Candide-like optimism which infects the masses in the wake of tragedy), it also highlights the apathy - in this case seen as helplessly inevitable - which progressive science bears towards morality.
I say 'helplessly inevitable', because what is the reality of Rousseau's vision being realized? "The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: 'Do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!'" The damage has effectively been done, and there is little hope for a return to the time before that first man who said 'this is mine.' This is primarily true, however, because of how much the world has changed in the time that has passed since this writing - the industrial revolution and the advent of metropolises have assured that human life will never be so simple on a global scale ever again, barring some kind of massive holocaust. Yet in 1755, it was not too late. But the next generation of philosophers and thinkers supposedly inspired by Rousseau did not carry on the extremism of his legacy.
Emerson and the transcendentalists ignored this bit of Rousseau, I think, not for practical concerns (Thoreau can be seen as a possible exception, as he lived on his own in a tiny cabin for two years - he essentially lived what everyone else could only write about), but rather for theological ones. Emerson especially, and most transcendentalists, were still steeped in a strongly Christian - albeit antinomial - tradition. Emerson was a reverend, even if he was rogue-ish. But the justification for his proposal that humans were naturally good came not from biological or ecological roots like Rousseau, but from a faith in the divinity with which each of God's creatures were created. Yes, both agreed society planted false needs within man, and led him away from himself, but the power of the individual unfettered which both sought to idealize was grounded in opposing scientific and religious ideologies. Rousseau even speaks to this very contrast:
"Instead of the sublime maxim of reasoned justice, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, pity inspires all men with another maxim of natural goodness, much less perfect but perhaps more useful than preceding one: Do what is good for you with as little harm as possible to others." This, to Rousseau, was the natural state of man - in the wild, a savage would hunt and kill a deer to feed himself and his family, but he would very rarely kill it for pleasure. He would fight to protect himself and his family, but would very rarely incite violence as a natural impulse. That instinct would have been more than sated by the rigors of life in a world where every day was not a luxury, and each breath was an accomplishment.
Emerson, like Tolstoy and others, still did not see outside the specter and worldview of Christian religion, regardless of how independently he thought, and regardless of how comparatively free he was from the strictly nomian structure which has dominated religious practice in the Western world for centuries. In a twisted way - in a way which defines the difference between the pure romanticism of Rousseau and the transcendentalist take on self-reliance as the contrast between those two maxims above, the contrast between the noble savage in the wild and self-reliance in the world - in that respect, it was the institution of religion which prevented Emerson from agreeing with Rousseau, that rational, thinking man was the downfall of mankind's good nature. A fact that is of course ironic, both because Emerson was strongly against instutions like the established church, which wrongly influenced the human mind, and because even as he argued this, a bit of that institution had become a part of his own thought process.
This brings us back to the original point of the post: how Franz Kafka's 1922 short story 'A Hunger Artist' serves to vindicate the extremism of the Rousseauian philosophy that was overlooked by even hardened 19th century transcendentalists like Ralphie the W. The story involves a man who makes his living by starving himself for 40 days at a time, placing himself as an exhibit for the public to see.
"I couldn't find a food which I enjoyed," he says, by way of explanation.
Food, in this case, bespeaks the general human appetite for life in society, life in the world. Food, here, is synonymous with unfaithfulness to self. If 'A Hunger Artist' is about fundamental solitude as a part of the human condition, it is about the solitude that is crucial to maintaining an individual identity in the midst of a world which will strip such tendencies away like paint-remover - reckoning of course Emersonian nostalgia for 'Self-Reliance': "A great man is he who can maintain within the midst of a crowd the indepedence and perfect sweetness of solitude."
When the hunger artist explains why his chosen profession - being locked in a display cage for 40 days at a time without food - is the only thing he can do, when he says that he simply could not find a food which he was able to eat, he is effectively saying that there was no part of the outside world which he found acceptable. The man realizes he must suffer immensely to protect himself from this world - to avoid 'eating', or partaking in social, civil living, he must 'starve' himself. So he in turn uses his suffering to create something beautiful, redirecting his pain and agony into an artistic creation which reflects an altruistic ideal - an ideal which almost transcends his own wretched condition.
No one appreciates the hunger artist's work. He quickly falls from popularity and is seen as a joke. Even his admirers seek to limit him, restrain him to 40 days fasting, which they do not realize is an affrontal to his sensibilities. 'Eating' to him is the equivalent of canniabalism to the average person - vile, taboo, unpure. The scene where he is forced to eat is described in stark, revolting detail. The process of eating food, is akin, as an allegory, to selling out - it is an almost Satanical temptation, where the forbidden fruit is actually raw human flesh.
What Kafka seems to suggest is the extreme difficulty, the near impossibility, of maintaining "the perfect sweetness and independence of solitude" - and in the process he sees a darker vision of what the individual must do to avoid the loss of that nearly divine ideal. At the same time, he romanticizes the struggle through portraying it as an art form, making even the sickeningly casual death of the hunger artist at the end seem idyllic. The death is even reminiscent of the death of Aslan in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe - a noble sacrifice followed by a anathematic display of disrespect.
As the hunger artist finally dies in pursuit of the perfection of his art of starvation, he is replaced in his cage by an eager jaguar (he had come to be a part of a circus show at the end of his life). The jaguar is shown in sharp contrast to the dying hunger artist. The hunger artist, aware of his condition as a reasoning human being, was cursed by his understanding of philosophy and life, in the way that the secular man is doomed to a life of assuming that there is no afterlife. His self-inflicted suffering came about as a result of his understanding that the world was a vile place. The jaguar, conversely, is ignorant. He welcomes the cage. It is well fed, and that is enough. "It enjoyed the taste and never seemed to miss its freedom," Kafka writes of it.
Rousseau writes: "The people, already accustomed to dependence, tranquility, and the conveniences of life, and already incapable of breaking their chains, consented to let their servitude increase in order to secure their tranquility." He may as well be speaking of the 'jaguar', who is clearly representative of the sated society man, who is well-fed, reassured with lies, and accustomed to the comforts of living out the days of his short life in a cage. Rousseau also describes the hunger artist, who alternatively represents the "barbarous man who does not bow his head for the yoke that civilized man wears without a murmur, as he prefers the most stormy liberty to tranquil subjection."
That his intentions were misunderstood and his art seen as a failure during his lifetime only further cements this reading of Kafka's text. "To be great is to be misunderstood," Emerson famously said in 'Self-Reliance.' Thus, the hunger artist is the epitome of the man who had the strength of spirit to take to heart the extremism of Rousseau, and attempt to live it out in a sincere and genuine manner. And the fact that Kafka had his protagonist brutally starve himself to death to achieve this ideal is far from coincidental.
Song of the Day: None other than the greatest song of all time, 'The Sounds of Silence' by Simon and Garfunkel. Though there have been mixed interpretations as to the direct influence for the song, the most popular belief is that the murder of Kitty Genovese inspired the haunting melody and lyrics. Seeing as the apathy regarding her murder is a key point relating to the nature of human nature, and the squashing of natural pity by society as discussed above, the song seems fitting.
Showing posts with label Emerson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emerson. Show all posts
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
What Human Fitness Means in the 21st Century
Running is never something you'll do with any consistency if you allow dread and cultural stereotypes to anticipate your workouts. And that’s a fairly easy thing to do. Step one: grow up in a household with multiple game consoles and more than one television. Step two: allow popular opinions to permeate your daily thoughts. Step three: listen to what a doctor has to say regarding the specifics of your athletic career. After that, it’s just a matter of buying an unnecessarily cushioned, overpriced pair of sweatshop-produced, sparkly white running shoes to stare at behind a mound of Power Bars and you’ll be well on your way to never taking a step out the door.
Staying in shape gets a bad rap, infested as the world is with Neo-healthnazis, organic grocers, and 24 hour fitness plans. That’s certainly understandable. Infomercials showcasing abdominal belts that “do the work for you,” en-route to “giving you the body you only dreamed of” should never be considered anything less than nauseating. In these commercials, in advertisements for the whole spectrum of liquid vegetables and proteins in pill form, the end goal always seems to be the same: improve your image. Make others jealous. Change your self-respect. Always they focus on the negative; always there is the underlying assumption that you are disturbed by your own image, that you harbor jealousy towards your peers, that you no longer care for yourself. They rarely take aim at the hot core of the issue, and thus they have not succeeded in lowering
The time has come to look these health schemes in the eye and tell them, on no uncertain terms, that they have failed.
They have failed, and they have failed in the worst way: by continuing to fail again and again, and reeling in easily duped customers, again and again. Always the world continues to do things the same way and yet still expects different results. Einstein said that was basic definition of insanity, and I don’t think it’s wise at this point not to trust old Al.
The first mistake of these advertisers and health planners and Neo-healthnazis is their general attitude. Always they start things on the lie that has predicated billions in annual revenue: “it’s as easy as…” The thing is, no, it’s not as easy as…nor will it ever be. And no one should endeavor to spend time or money on something that is based on a lie. The truth of the matter is, taking a body accustomed to all of the luxuries of 21st century mechanical wonders, and transforming it into the rippling, powerful collection of flesh that it should be, will never be an easy thing. It could be the hardest thing you ever do - but that does not mean it won’t be enjoyable. One of the popular opinions that permeates the daily thoughts of the masses runs something along the lines of: “working out is so hard, and I’m really gonna hate it.” Well, if you had any chance of taking something positive from one of the most riveting emotions we as humans can experience – taking our bodies to the limit – you probably just blew it.
The best things in life are always hard to attain. Try and imagine the last thing you truly enjoyed that you didn’t really earn. It’s a cliché, but we still overlook the message it entails. Everyone can convince themselves that they have gained much from doing little, if for a short period of time. But living an entire life based on such shallow experiences? Diving into an icy cool river on a summer afternoon loses its appeal if you spend the day on your laptop within the air-conditioned confines of your office or home.
It is not just our population that is unfit – and we should not blame our individuals. It is our society which is unfit, in every way. We not only encourage a love of idleness and a hatred of physical effort, we have built a world which thrives on it. Popular conceptions of athletes are as jocks, while serious academic pursuit, or serious anything out there in the skyscraper world, has come to be viewed as directly opposed to sport. Everyone says, and it is generally agreed, that “it’s only a game” – but that statement never took into account the human motives behind and beyond the game.
I used to think, a very long time ago, that I was strange for enjoying running so much. I suspected some mystery behind my enjoyment, something beyond the fanfare of simply winning an arbitrary race. It had always been more than just athletic glory. I cared about winning races, but I cared more about something I couldn’t define as a 10 year old. I cared about the instinctual urge to explode through the wilderness, to chase down some phantom of my or my teammates’ imagination, to rip through the wild heart of the woods with a ferocity which no amount of fame or trophies could ever inspire within me.
To exercise is who we are instinctually are as human beings – and to run long distances is the best equivalent of that in 2009
The puma is the Plutonic ideal of cat – in the same way that the fit man is the complete version of humankind. It is not a statement meant to insult or intimidate; everyone has the capacity to be fit, barring serious health issues. We need to start by recognizing athletics as something more than athletics, and not “just a game.” Sports reflect our more primal past – a past that has been largely lost, at least in the popular sense, to the advents of modern technology and a social attitude which prizes ease over all else.
Always, the “reward” of work is leisure. Yet more and more often we are finding that what we call work – a pastime that, in Native cultures, had once been healthy for the growth of both man and culture – has become something like slave-labor. We have earned our leisure only in name. And that is the fault of a world which has become a collection of pussycats, run like robots, by our institutions. Our society of healthnazis, which will try to guilt you into exercising for the sake of their products, for the sake of easy leisure, has helped to sacrifice the individual. We never willingly parted with our healthy, primal, puma-natures. They were stripped away when it became more convenient to step away from that ideal of man – referred to by Ralph Waldo Emerson as “Man Thinking” – and become nothing more than the “parrot of other men’s thinking.” When we start to lose our original, independent thought, we lose everything that is best about us as human beings. And these days, it is almost impossible to preserve the beauty and innocence of original thought, seen occasionally in children who haven’t been taught “better” yet, and seen elsewhere like lightning, powerful but rare, in the remainder of our sadly content society.
Becoming physically fit is a shortcut past all of these problems. The process alone – aside from being the most emotional and riveting thing a person can ever do, if they only allow themselves the opportunity – will help our population reconnect with their inner spirit, with their more human natures. I want a revolution - but this time, it’s not for the sake of the evils of capitalism, or the goods of socialism, or the merits or downfalls of any world political system. It is simply for you. You as a human being. You as a living breathing thing that is not taking full advantage of life.
Academics, scholars, politicians, businessmen, may think they are excused or somehow exempt on the pretext that they already live meaningful lives. They may spend countless hours a year working a job that provides for their family and that may just contribute positively to society. But as Emerson said in his American Scholar address, “character is higher than intellect.” What we do when we live trumps what we do when we think. “Thinking is the function,” he said. “Living is the functionary.” It is the ultimate clarion call for fitness: for work over leisure, for hard over easy, for willingly throwing yourself into a fiery hell of aching legs and burning chests and spasming joints – because in no institutionally constructed, leisure-based replacement for life will you ever even catch a glimpse of that glittering orb inside you which we often think to call our true selves.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
