Since opening my blog I have posted 44 essays as well as longer works on Academia, and innumerable posts on Facebook. In 2017 alone I wrote seventeen posts. I felt a growing urgency, as I know we all do, with the global “plot” thickening fast.
Then, following my last post in August, it all came to a halt. I am familiar with the fallow period and its customary depressed mood, which occurs between bursts of creative writing, but this cessation of activity is something new. Everything went quiet, just quiet! My familiar guest of anxiety, after I read the news etc., also disappeared. I remember having dreams but they are not crossing over into consciousness. A kind of disturbing stillness prevails—disturbing to my thoughts since I have not forgotten what is happening in the real world.
I went about my daily routines while this strange state of being continued. “What if this goes on forever? Well, is it all that bad? No, it’s a kind of relief from the urgency but how can anyone stay relieved while we all lurch towards horror? I can’t imagine anyone suffering from hurricanes, floods, famine, or politics feeling any relief!” Then I thought, “well there is one ‘place’ where everything becomes still, yet is not removed from the danger facing us all—the stillness of the eye of the storm!” At this point I began to feel uncomfortable with my ruminations and decided to ask an authority on such matters—an authority that speaks from the wisdom of participation i.e. shows us how our local personal issues participate in the greater universal movements that swirl through us at all times. I only consult this authority when my own resources have come to an end and I can thus open up to and hear the quiet voice of the other.
So, I opened the I CHING with the question, “what is my current state of being and movements towards the future, if any? The oracle answered with Hexagram 18: “Working on What Has Been Spoiled.”
The Chinese character ku represents a bowl in whose contents worms are breeding. This means decay …
Well, this disturbing image of quiet stillness had not occurred to me! Decay, corruption, being spoiled; worms quietly eating away in the stillness of death! The Old Man goes on to tell me that this particular kind of despoliation is not the result of “immutable fate” as in the hexagram “Standstill” but is caused by man’s fault, an abuse of human freedom. Since this decay is caused by abuse of human freedom, work is required and we must take hold decisively and energetically. But proper deliberation is required: we must understand the causes of corruption and we must pay attention to the time after the start of work. The hexagram is speaking to a process of regeneration of society by stirring up opinion (wind) and strengthening/calming the character of the people (mountain). The moving lines further specify the causes of corruption and decay—the inner conditions, i.e. the domains of “father” and “mother”—rigid adherence to tradition (the father principle) or a mother wound producing weakness.
Once I got over my alarm at this death imagery, I was more or less back on familiar ground. Who in psychology does not know that our current corruption and decay is human-caused as rigid adherence to tradition (father-complex) and a fundamental psychological weakness (mother-complex). I can certainly attest to my own participation in these difficult psychological issues. But I knew the Old Man does not simply repeat what I already know. The voice of the other can only be heard when our usual considerations are interrupted, or penetrated via the body, or emotions. I left the reading for a few days and then returned, unsatisfied. What am I not hearing? I began to read the moving lines more carefully even though I had not cast any with my yarrow sticks. In ignoring them I had in fact slavishly been sticking to the rules (only look at moving lines if your hexagram has one—rigid adherence to the “father”!)
The final paragraph describes nine in the sixth place:
Not every man has an obligation to mingle in the affairs of the world. There are some who are developed to such a degree that they are justified in letting the world go its own way and in refusing to enter the public life with a view to reforming it. But this does not imply a right to remain idle or to sit back and merely criticize. Such withdrawal is justified only when we strive to realize in ourselves the higher aims of mankind. Although the sage remains distant from the turmoil of daily life, he creates incomparable human values for the future.
This passage seemed to speak of a very different way of being, in relation to decay and corruption. It speaks of “the effort of realizing in ourselves the higher aims of mankind”, of “creating incomparable human values for the future.” My imagination was fully engaged with these words, so it took a few minutes to quieten down enough to notice a detail that stunned me, and penetrated me, speaking to my emotions, finally delivering the reading I needed to hear. For some strange reason, Wilhelm added a footnote to this last moving line: “Goethe’s attitude after the Napoleonic wars is an example of this in European history.”
Goethe! How did he get into this ancient Chinese picture? Well here he is! The Old Man had spoken and what generative speech!
Now my curiosity was aroused and I had to follow the scent into the woods towards my unknown quarry. If Goethe is a relatively recent example of a sage who created “incomparable human values for the future” in a time of corruption and decay, how could his “realization in himself of the higher aims of mankind” be of service to us today, in our time of, perhaps, terminal decay?
Goethe lived an individual life that was an expression of the time in which he was immersed, the end of an epoch. He valorized poetic reality and ordinary reality equally, placing himself in the service of both, suffering greatly in the process. He sensed the impending age of nihilism—an empirical world of paralysing boredom (no “poetry”) set against a world of increasing abstractions. He fought against this historical movement, insisting that soul and body, mind and nature “were, are, and will be the necessary double ingredients of the universe”, each equally available to the senses, i.e. as phenomena of the real world.
He could fight against the separation between poetic reality and empirical reality because he possessed a soul capacity to perceive ideas, (his ur-phenomenon)—what he called a “delicate empiricism”, whereas, for example, his philosopher friend Schiller could only think them. Goethe’s method involves “entering into” the empirical object until we discover an underlying “delicate empirical reality” from which emerges the ur-phenomenon or living idea—the poetic foundation of empirical reality, as an experience. Subsequent generations followed Schiller in strengthening thinking while Goethe’s imaginative and thinking capacities were lost to us. Mind and nature, soul and body became disjunctive as our cultural decay set in.
Can we find a way to an experience of perception of ideas, accepting the gift of Goethe’s legacy? Is it out of reach for us today? Such an gift unites what has been sundered historically and led us to our present state of decay and corruption. But is Goethe the “last man” to hold these values through his capacity to perceive phenomena that are normally invisible to eyes informed only by scientific empiricism?
Goethe is often described as the last man to have this capacity to perceive living ideas but I rather think he can be equally described as the first man in the sense that he inaugurated a new capacity in us—what we can call today psychic consciousness. Contemporary art is a field in which this capacity is beginning to be noticed via the works of modern artists. Arthur Danto shows us how the centuries-long theory of art as mirror to reality is being superseded by a theory of art in which the mirror or medium of art is coming into focus. Up until modern times the medium of art had to remain transparent or invisible in order to perceive the represented reality. We didn’t for example look at the stone (the material substrate), we looked at the sculpture or form. Now things are different, art is looking at its own media and holding it up as art. [1]
The medium in which reality is reflected is of course the psyche and so, when Goethe struggled to keep poetic reality and empirical reality together in his life and work, he was telling us that psyche and reality are distinguishable yet belong together, always! As our art world seems to be announcing, we seem to be more ready collectively to take up Goethe’s gift to us and take it forward into the future. Although many think that we can revitalize science with Goethean methodology, I do not believe any institutional or programmatic approach can make any difference to our future. Rather any future must lie in the hands of those individuals who can live their lives like Goethe did, as a work of art, perceiving the living psyche at work as the inner of ordinary reality and giving “poetic” voice to it.
I leave this essay here with a quote from an artist whom I love, the great Russian director Andrey Tarkovsky:
When I speak of poetry I’m not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality. … such an artist can discern the lines of the poetic design of being. He is capable of going beyond the limitations of coherent logic, and conveying the deep complexity and truth of the impalpable connections and hidden phenomena of life.[2]
[1] See my essay, The Gap: https://www.academia.edu/33528147/The_Gap
[2] Andrey Tarkovsky: Sculpting in Time. 21. See my essay on his movie Stalker: http://johnwoodcock.com.au/2016/05/stalker/
