/tag/dualism

9 quotes tagged 'dualism'

Publisher: Inner Traditions International (2003)

109-110

Originally persona signified 'mask': the mask that ancient actors wore in playing a given part, in incarnating a given personage. Thereby the mask possessed something typical, nonindividual, especially in the case of divine masks and even more clearly when used in many archaic rites. At this point I can resume and apply the ideas of the preceding chapter about the dual structure of the being: the 'person' is that which the man presents concretely and sensibly in the world, in the position he occupies, but always signifying a form of expression and manifestation of a higher principle in which the true center of being is to be recognized, and on which falls, or should fall, the accent of the Self. \nA 'mask' is something very precise, delineated, and structured. So man as person (= mask) is already differentiated thereby from the mere individual; he has a form, is himself, and belongs to himself. Consequently, whenever a civilization has had a traditional character, the values of the 'person' have made of it a world of quality, diversity, and types. And the natural consequence has been a system of organic, differentiated, and hierarchical relationships: something that cannot be said of mass regimes, but also not of regimes of individualism, of 'values of the personality,' or of real or pretended democracy. \nLike the individual, the person itself is in a certain sense closed to the external world, and in relation to it, all the existential situations whose legitimacy we have already recognized can be of value in the present age. Unlike the individual, the person is not closed to the above. The personal being is not himself, but has himself (like the relation between the actor and his part): it is presence to that which he is, not coalescence with that which he is. Moreover, a kind of antinomy is brought to light: in order to be truly such, the person needs a reference to something more than personal. When this reference is absent, the person transforms itself into an 'individual,' and individualism and subjectivism come into play.\n

107-108

In fact, in the West there has been a collusion between individualism, subjectivism, and 'personality' that goes back to the Renaissance period and which developed in the light of that 'discovery of man' exalted by antitraditional historiography. Historians have carefully ignored, or considered as positive, the counterpart, that is, the more or less conscious and complete separation from transcendence. All the splendor and power of 'creativity' of that period should not blind us to this basic tendency. Schuon has clarified the true state of affairs regarding the artistic realm as follows: 'Speaking in human terms, certain Renaissance artists are without a doubt great, but their grandeur becomes insignificant when faced with the grandeur of the sacred. In the sacred, it is as if the genius is concealed; what predominates is an impersonal, vast, mysterious intelligence. The sacred work of art has a perfume of infinitude, the imprint of the absolute. The individual talent is there disciplined; it mingles with the creative function of the entire tradition, which cannot be substituted, much less surpassed by the mere resources of man.' One can say the same regarding self-affirmation on other levels of the 'personality' in that epoch: from the Machiavellian Prince type, with its more or less perfect historical incarnations, to the condottieri and demagogues and, in general, all those who received Nietzsche's approbation for their prodigious yet unformed accumulation of power. \n Later, the emphasis on the human and individual I, the basis of humanism, would survive only in the by-products of the nineteenth- century bourgeois cult of the I, associated with a certain aesthetic cult of heroes, geniuses, and 'nobility of spirit,' But to meet many of the current defenders of 'personality' one must descend yet another degree, to where all the vanity of the I predominates: its exhibitionism, worship of one's own ' interiority,' the craze of originality, the boastfulness of brilliant literati and ambitious belletrists. Even with regard to art alone, this 'personalism' almost always appears joined to an inner impoverishment. Lukacs, though generally opposed to our position, made this legitimate remark: 'The present-day practice of overestimating and exaggerating the importance of creative subjectivity actually betrays the weakness and poverty of the writers' individuality. They distinguish themselves merely by 'eccentricity,' either spontaneous or painstakingly cultivated; their worldview is at such a low level that any attempt they make to go beyond subjective immediacy threatens to leave their 'personality completely flat. The more that this is the case, the more weight is placed on pure, immediate subjectivity, which sometimes is in fact identified with literary talent,' The character of 'normative objectivity' that was proper to true, traditional art is altogether lacking. The category that Schuon has effectively characterized as 'intelligent stupidity' includes almost all the intellectual efforts in this area. But I will not dwell further on considerations at this level — I will return to the subject later — beyond pointing out that in contemporary celebrity worship we can see the popular, updated edition that takes the former 'cult of the personality' to ridiculous lengths.

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

Author: Paul John Eakin

Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)

Food of the Gods

Author: Terence McKenna

Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)

148

The natural world had come to be seen, by late Roman times, as a demonic and imprisoning shell. This was the spiritual legacy of the destruction of the partnership model of self and society and its replacement with the dominator model. The nostalgia for the Gaian Earth Mother was suppressed but could not, cannot, be ignored. Hence it reemerged in time in a clandestine form‑as the alchemical theme of the magna mater, the mysterious mother matrix of the world, somehow everywhere, invisible yet potentially condensable into a visible manifestation of the universal panacea residing in nature. In such an atmosphere of feverish and ontologically naive speculation, alchemy was able to thrive. Categories concerning self and matter, subject and object, were not yet fixed by the conventions introduced by phonetic alphabet and later exaggerated by print. It was not entirely clear to the alchemical investigators what about their labors was fancy, fact, or expectation. It is ironic that this was the context for the discovery of a powerful mind‑altering drug; that the spirit in alcohol, sensed and enjoyed in beer and wine brewed through the ages, became in the alchemical laboratories a demon, an elemental and fiery quintessence. And like those other quintessences that would follow it into existence, morphine and cocaine, the quintessence of the grape once passed through the furnace and the retorts of the alchemist had become deprived of its natural soul. That absence made it no longer a carrier of the vitality of the earth, no longer an echo of the lost paradise of prehistory, but rather something raw, untamed, and ultimately set against the human grain.

The linguistic depth women attained as gatherers eventually led to a momentous discovery: the discovery of agriculture. I call it momentous because of its consequences. Women realized that they could simply grow a restricted number of plants. As a result, they learned the needs of only those few plants, embraced a sedentary lifestyle, and began to forget the rest of nature they had once known so well. At that point the retreat from the natural world began, and the dualism of humanity versus nature was born. As we will soon see, one of the places where the old goddess culture died, fatal Huyuk, in present‑day Anatolian Turkey, is the very place where agriculture may have first arisen. At places like fatal Huyuk and Jericho, humans and their domesticated plants and animals became for the first time physically and psychologically separate from the life of untamed nature and the howling unknown. Use of hallucinogens can only be sanctioned in hunting and gathering societies. When agriculturists use these plants, they are unable to get up at dawn the morning after and go hoe the fields. At that point, corn and grain become gods‑gods that symbolize domesticity and hard labor. These replace the old goddesses of plant‑induced ecstasy. Agriculture brings with it the potential for overproduction, which leads to excess wealth, hoarding, and trade. Trade leads to cities; cities isolate their inhabitants from the natural world.

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)

The Denial of Death

Author: Ernest Becker

Publisher: Free Press (1975)

280

The fetishist prepares for intercourse in just the right way to make it safe. The castration anxiety can be overcome only if the proper forms of things prevail. This pattern sums up the whole idea of ritual—and again, of all of culture: the manmade forms of things prevailing over the natural order and taming it, transforming it, and making it safe. It is in transvestism that we see an especially rich staging of the drama of transcendence. Nowhere do we see the dualism of culture and nature so strikingly. Transvestites believe that they can transform animal reality by dressing it in cultural clothing—exactly as men everywhere do who dress pompously to deny, as Montaigne put it, that they sit “on their arse” just like any animal, no matter how grandiose the throne. The clinical transvestite, however, is even more dedicated than the average man, more simple-minded it seems, completely obsessed by the power of clothing to create an identity. Often there is a past history of dressing dolls or of playing games with one’s sister in which clothing was exchanged and with it the identity of each one.63 It is obvious that for these people “the play is the thing,” and they are as dedicated as stage personalities to actually being what their clothes make them. What do they want to be? It seems that they want to refute the castration complex, overcome the species identity, the separation into sexes, the accidentally of the single sex and its confining fate, the incompleteness within each of us, the fact that we are a fragment not only of nature but even of a complete body.

100

What Kierkegaard means here is that the development of the person is a development in depth from a fixed center in the personality, a center that unites both aspects of the existential dualism—the self and the body. But this kind of development needs precisely an acknowledgment of reality, the reality of one’s limits: What the self now lacks is surely reality—so one would commonly say, as one says of a man that he has become unreal. But upon closer inspection it is really necessity that man lacks… . What really is lacking is the power to … submit to the necessary in oneself, to what may be called one’s limit. Therefore the misfortune does not consist in the fact that such a self did not amount to anything in the world; no, the misfortune is that the man did not become aware of himself, aware that the self he is, is a perfectly definite something, and so is the necessary. On the contrary, he lost himself, owing to the fact that this self was seen fantastically reflected in the possible.25

This Is It

Author: Alan Watts

Publisher: Vintage (1973)