A New Human Capacity

A NEW HUMAN CAPACITY: can we meet its demands in time?

I was recently reading a biographical/philosophical account of the early years of Existentialism, where I came across this description of Heidegger as a boy: [1]

He was shy, tiny, black eyes, with a pinched little mouth, and all his life he had difficulty meeting other people’s eyes. Yes he had a mysterious power over others.“He was the smallest, he was the weakest, he was the most unruly, he was the most useless. But he was in command of all of us.” [2]

And then, later, as a lecturer:

Heidegger’s impenetrable quality gave him a mesmerising hold over the class; you never knew where you were with him, so you hung on every word. According to Gadamer, Heidegger’s trademark style was to raise up a ‘breathtaking swirl of questions’ which would billow forth until, finally, he would roll them up into “deep dark clouds of sentences from which the lightning flashed”, leaving of the students stunned… Georg Picht, who attended Heidegger’s courses as a student, recalled the force of his thinking as something almost palpable. It could be felt as Heidegger entered the room, and he also brought with him an air of danger… Once Picht felt he had a terrifying glimpse of what it might like to be Heidegger: “How can Heidegger the person be described? He lived in a thundery landscape. As we were taking a walk during a severe storm, a tree was up rooted ten metres in front of us. That touched me, as if I could then visualise what was going on inside of him.” [3]

From a very early age, it seems, Heidegger was a mouthpiece! The kind of speech he voiced has the phenomenology of a thunderstorm, and, like a storm, released new life in the minds of his students. Peter Kingsley addresses the same phenomenon this way:

Perhaps you noticed it out of the corner of your eye—how even the most seemingly ordinary events can sometimes have such a significance that slip right through our awareness. And sometimes things can come to light, discoveries are made, that literally make no sense … The situation could be compared to thunder and lightning out in the countryside, so intense they can’t be seen or heard: invisible lightning, silent thunder. Our minds simply won’t acknowledge what’s happened. And it’s not only that everything seems to go on exactly as it did before; we’re not even conscious of anything happening. But there, where our awareness doesn’t yet want to reach—that’s where the future lies.[4]

Both descriptions are talking about a certain kind of “speech” that creates new futures—inceptive speech. There can be no doubt that Heidegger’s speech was inceptive: for the first time in thousands of years, he found a way to describe a reality more fundamental than what the reflective mind and its epistemology could know about. He described ordinary reality, and us, as we are prior to any reflection at all. It turns out that we are not fundamentally isolated subjects gazing at an inert world, but we ARE what we ordinarily do, as already immersed in a life-world that bestows meaning through our daily activities, prior to any reflection. Heidegger found a way to describe this life-world.[5] He found a way to give language to this otherwise silent world. This silent world now could “speak” through this mouthpiece that was Heidegger.

The phenomenon of Heidegger’s speech, as witnessed by his students, is a powerful example of a new human capacity that has broken through. Our consciousness has become alienated from everything that is sensual (of the senses or even imaginal). Husserl’s phenomenology shows this extreme state of alienation when he proposes that we can focus our attention on the mind’s intentionality (i.e. he is suggesting that we can now become conscious of the mind’s workings).

Our consciousness is so estranged from the sensual world that we have now “arrived” at a threshold: the threshold between our human-ness and the uncanny, non-human other. Note that Kingsley refers to “invisible lightning and silent thunder”. He is talking about a phenomenon of mind that is other, breaking into our human consciousness, yet at the same time being us. From this broiling alchemy comes the inceptive utterance, much like Kerenyi describes:

For the great mystery which remains a mystery even after all our discussing and explaining, is this: the appearance of a speaking figure, the very embodiment as it were in a human-divine form of clear articulated, play related and therefore enchanting, language—its appearance in that deep primordial darkness where one expects only animal muteness, wordless silence, or cries of pleasure and pain.[6]

These utterances, emerging as they do from Silence, are a gift from “the other side”, and as such, are inceptive. As Kingsley says, “that’s where the future lies!”

But what happens next is crucial to our survival as a species! And Heidegger gives us a taste of the enormous peril. We can assume his students were good phenomenologists and their description of Heidegger reveals the contours of the phenomenon to us. What do we see? The human being Heidegger becomes a conduit for an enormous, terrifying, penetration from the “other side” of the threshold. The inrush of inceptive speech has not been humanized but rather breaks through into the human domain untransformed. Of course this intrusion feels uncanny, giving Heidegger an “air of danger”. What has entered the human domain is alien, non-human living thinking! And Heidegger is its unconscious mouthpiece. He did not, as Kingsley suggests, consciously encounter this awesome other in the void filled with invisible lightning and silent thunder. He identified with its processes. And so he in effect became a magician in the eyes of his students (“the magician of Messkirch”).

This is the supreme danger of reaching the threshold without understanding that one is encountering the other in the realm of Silence. Its silent speech is not ours to appropriate. Rather, we are appropriated to its ends!

My book, The Peril in Thinking, goes into further detail about this danger that Heidegger succumbed to. He in effect became inhuman in his dealings with others (including his teacher, Husserl).[7] Yet his case is simply an outstanding example of what happens to each of us when we reach the threshold between the human and that alien otherness seeking to incarnate into the human, through us. We accept the gifts and ignore the danger. The gifts are those of our technological civilization (the appearances that come into being as informed by the language of these “alien processes”). The dangers, as we see with Heidegger, lie in an increasing de-humanizing of us!

What is a way through this moment of supreme danger and opportunity? I was shown such a way during my own encounters with the other, at the threshold. In one particular initiatory vision (1995) I was shown that, if I could consciously endure an encounter with the fury of destructive forces that lie beyond, yet are breaking in, then a transformation happens: that fury is transformed into human love.[8] And further, that transformation is achieved and expressed as “art” as an act of human love![9]

But I had already received such an initiation twenty years previously, when I was in my early twenties. I was in an Encounter group where

They were to participate in a guided fantasy. This was David’s [my “fictional” name] first such exercise with the imagination. The leader (Valerie) suggested certain images and everyone had to follow her guidance. She asked them to imagine someone approaching with something or other. David accepted the suggestion and quickly forgot to stay alert for further directions from the leader. He began to “depart” from the group exercise. Valerie’s voice began to grow faint and the room receded into the background. He was in essence, alone. He clearly perceived a hand reach down from heaven bearing a gift – a box wrapped beautifully like a present. It had a tag on it too, and so David looked at the tag. He could see some writing on it but it wasn’t clear. It looked like a pen that was running out of ink or which was written on greasy paper. At this point David inexplicably became gripped by a sense of urgency, an emotional intensity. He felt he had to understand what the writing was saying on the tag. His whole being was getting caught up and engaged in the activity. The reality of what was happening was not in question. It was totally real! Guided fantasy had become true imagination. David struggled to read the words on the little gift-tag. His whole attention was focused and as he willed himself to read the message, he began to speak what was on the tag. He had no idea why he was doing that. David just knew with certainty that he must speak those words that were originating from the gift-tag. He felt that something depended on his doing so. But what was it? His speech began awkwardly, like the writing itself. He was uttering something not yet his that was speaking through him. As he began to speak more clearly so too did the writing become clearer. Or, was it the other way around? Did his speech get clearer as he saw the writing get clearer? It was impossible to tell.

David was in a very strange condition of having simultaneously to exert his entire will and to surrender completely. He struggled to speak, to become a mouthpiece for that silent language that was uttering. Finally, the words were spoken and the message delivered:

I love you!

With this spontaneous speech came an eruption of emotion and David began sobbing deeply, much to his utter astonishment. After the torrent had ebbed, he sat back up, feeling refreshed. The members of the group were watching him in a mixture of astonishment and silence. David couldn’t remember what was said to him afterwards or what he thought about, but apparently nothing that followed bore any relevance to his experience in terms of sticking to memory. The episode left a seed in David, an ambiguity that lay in the dark for many years. Was he the recipient of divine love? Was he to be used as a vehicle for divine love to transmit a message to the world – a message of love? The gift was given freely yet there was also something required of him, it seemed. David’s effort to make the writing clear suggested that there is some difficulty in transmitting the message of love to humanity. Clarity and speech followed when he engaged with all his being in order to understand and make his own what was being shown to him. Whether the difficulty lay with David or with ‘other’ is perhaps not the right question. Rather, to be true to his experience, he acknowledged that the difficulty lay “in between”, in the very medium of transmission and what eased the difficulty was his own desire and will to “read the message”. David’s desire and will made the other real, or better, brought its reality forth. Once its reality was felt fully with all David’s heart and soul and body, the difficulty vanished and he could become and speak the message.

This was David’s first clue that effort is needed by us in some way to participate in bridging a gap between the divine and human. This gap or split is not so easily healed. David was given a taste and then the gift was withdrawn. He returned to his normal surface life, but could not go on in quite the same way. Slowly at first, then with an accelerating speed David was turned towards his task. It was to be twenty years before the angel returned. The ground had first to be prepared![10]

In order for the gifts from the other side to “enter” the human condition, those individuals who reach the threshold must first face the invisible lightning and silent thunder until the transformation happens and the fury is now humanized as human love. The inceptive speech, “in that deep primordial darkness” that Kerenyi knows, that first silent utterance, is then re-spoken into the human world as words or deeds of Love—simple human love, which at the same time is Love.

Although this encounter at the threshold has long been prepared through historical transformations in consciousness, our collective fears are such that

It is the fear of what you will find [which] becomes the fear to look, the fear to look becomes the wish that it may be impossible to look, and from that unconscious wish comes the [doctrinal] impossibility to look.[11]

The other “wants” to incarnate into the human condition but remaining as alien. Do we welcome this visitor as the coming guest, with love, transforming our self-definition in the process? Or must we go under, in fear, refusing this next?[12]

 

[1] Sarah Blackwell: At the Existential Café: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails. London, Chatto &Windus.

[2] Op. Cit., 53.

[3] Ibid, 57.

[4] Kingsley, P. In the Dark Places of Wisdom. London. Duckworth, 1999, 228.

[5] I.e., his existential phenomenology.

[6] Kerenyi, K. Hermes: Guide of Souls. Dallas. Spring Publications Inc., 1990, 88.

[7] Available at https://www.amazon.com/Peril-Thinking-other-essays/dp/1517560403

[8] Many of my books explore this vision as over the years as I tried to refine my understanding of its mystery. For example, see my book, “The Peril in Thinking”, p.111.

[9] This of course is Nietzsche’s great discovery of the nature of art, expressed as Apollo/Dionysus.

[10] Extract from my book, The Imperative. See https://www.academia.edu/14010164/The_Imperative

[11] Owen Barfield: Unancestral Voice. Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 1965, 160.

[12] See my essays which explore this theme with reference to the art world. At https://independent.academia.edu/WoodcockJohn/Papers