In the interest of brevity, I’ll make this brief. I started a Substack focused on travel — travel stories, essays, and curated lists of travel-related media. If that interests you, you may like the first post about a Guatemalan deity named Maximón. Here it is. Enjoy :)

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had a particular way of thinking (and living) that can serve as a way to move between horizontal and vertical ways of thinking.

Toward the end of Wandering God, Morris Berman offers a helpful chart that outlines four approaches to searching for truth in the western world. The point of this post is to outline some of the characteristics of each approach.

Each is like a lens that provides a unique yet limited view of that multi-millennia search. We need to look through, appreciate, and overlap them to create a world worth viewing and living in.

The four are

• Logical Analysis Approach
• Spirit and Process Approach
• Primacy of Matter Approach
• Paradoxical Questioning Approach

Now, let’s take a look at each in more detail.

#1: Logical Analysis Approach

This approach to seeking truth is heavily influenced by Plato, who believed:

“The world that appears to our senses is in some way defective and filled with error, but there is a more real and perfect realm, populated by entities (called “forms” or “ideas”) that are eternal, changeless, and in some sense paradigmatic for the structure and character of the world presented to our senses.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

To better understand these eternal forms, we should focus on classifying arguments, identifying logical forms, and studying inference, fallacies and semantics. Breaking down concepts into smaller forms is important as well.

Here are 5 thinkers who did it well.

1.1 Plato (428–348 BCE)

“Imagine a cave where prisoners have been held since birth, they’d believe that the shadows they see are reality. The true philosopher is like someone who escapes from that cave and sees real things, when he gets back, no-one believes him. We’ll get this by careful education up to the age of fifty.”

~ Plato, The Republic

Ancient Greek philosopher, student of Socrates and admirer of his street-epistemology method of inquiry. A thinker so foundational that 2500 years later the renown mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously wrote that all of European philosophical tradition was basically “a series of footnotes to Plato”.

A physically robust guy who, supposedly, earned the name “Platon” (meaning ‘broad’) by his wrestling coach. He opened The Academy and taught for many years, probably in an informal dialogue-style that posed problems to be worked through and solved by others. His writings were often conversational in style and used elements of drama and humor to discover the essences behind questions of metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, art, love, epistemology, literature, education, justice society and friendship.

1.2 Aristotle (384–322 BCE)

“If true happiness is an activity in accordance with virtue, it must be in accordance with the highest virtue, which is philosophical contemplation.”

~ Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

Ancient Greek philosopher and long-time student of Plato at the Academy who later founded and taught at his own school, the Lyceum. The act of walking while dialoguing with others in an informal setting was integral to his process of thinking.

Aristotle was a fantastically prolific writer who was largely this-world focused and spent a lot of time meticulously observing and gathering notes and facts from the realm of biology, zoology, physics and more. He synthesized these facts and systematized his thinking about it in order to discover the essences beneath questions of metaphysics, logic, ethics, rhetoric, music, poetry, economics, politics and government.

1.3 Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 CE)

Second Way: The Argument from the First Cause — In the world, we can see that things are caused. But it is not possible for something to be the cause of itself because this would entail that it exists prior to itself, which is a contradiction. If that by which it is caused is itself caused, then it too must have a cause. But this cannot be an infinitely long chain, so, therefore, there must be a cause which is not itself caused by anything further. This everyone understands to be God.”

~ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

A Dominican priest and Scriptural theologian who was formally trained in the 7 Liberal Arts (Trivium of grammar-logic-rhetoric and Quadrivium of arithmetic-geometry-music-astronomy) and who led an ascetic life devoted to teaching and writing.

He was mindboggle-ingly prolific (his unfinished Summa Theologica ran 2,592 pages) and did his thinking by taking passages from Aristotle’s work and Scripture and then expanding and commenting upon it. Alongside these commentaries, he would synthesize many different theological ideas and excelled at Disputatio (the medieval method of learning that took a proposition and defended it against as many objections as possible) all in an effort to discover the truths of metaphysics, logic, theology, epistemology, ethics, the mind, and politics.

1.4 Rene Descartes (1596–1650)

“But, because our senses sometimes deceive us, I was likely to err. So I tried to reject all which I had formerly accepted as no more truth than the illusion of my dreams. But I observed that the I who thought must of necessity be somewhat; so that — I think, therefore I am — was so entirely firm and assured that I could unhesitatingly accept it as the first principle of the philosophy.”

~Descartes, Discourse on Method

Educated by Jesuits in the 7 Liberal Arts (Trivium and Quadrivium) as well as metaphysics, natural philosophy, and ethics, he took on a wide range of ideas early on.

Later on, he used a systematic Method of Doubt to discard knowledge gained simply through authority or reason alone and often rejected final-cause (teleological) thinking. He developed a type of deductive reasoning based on mathematics while on a 10-year long journey through southern and northern Europe to study “the book of the world” and used those ideas to model plants, animals, humans and more in a mechanistic way in order to discover the truths of metaphysics, epistemology, math, physics, and cosmology.

1.5 Issac Newton (1642–1727)

“LAW I: Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.

LAW II: The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.

LAW III: To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.”

~ Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy

A formal education that focused on Aristotelian rhetoric, logic, ethics, and physics bored him enough that he chose the autodidactic route and taught himself mathematics. Newton took in a very wide range of reading material — chemistry, alchemy, theology, biblical studies, mathematics and physics. He experimented with chemistry, invented calculus, studied optics, taught at university, and often spent time thinking and writing in the isolation of a room.

He used both Hermetic (Explain natural phenomena in magical and alchemical concepts) and Mechanical (explain natural phenomena in terms of particles of matter in motion that interact mechanically) ways of thinking to discuss the truths of physics, natural philosophy, alchemy, theology, math, astronomy, and economics.

#2: Spirit and Process Approach

This approach gives primacy to “Spirit or ‘Process’” where “laws exist, but they are of a different kind of law than in the dominant (Logical-Analysis) tradition and experienced in a nonrational way”, and the governing motif is “Evolution of the Soul (world seen as a personal reflection).”

The world is seen as a place of dynamic events in contrast to a place of stable things. Spirit, or the incorporeal substance in everything, and process, or the world as fundamentally in flux, play a key role in understanding how the soul evolves, especially when informed by non-rational experiences.

A popular philosophical understanding of the soul, according to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is that it:

“…is not only responsible for mental or psychological functions like thought, perception and desire, and is the bearer of moral qualities, but in some way or other accounts for all the vital functions that any living organism performs.”

Knowing derived from this vitality often hits us at a deeper level than the type of knowing in the Logical Analysis tradition, which isn’t concerned with evolving the soul or perfecting oneself. Wisdom in the sense of applied knowledge is easier to see through this lens.

2.1 Hildegarde of Bingen (1098–1179 CE)

It happens that certain men suffer diverse illnesses. This comes from the phlegm which is superabundant within them. For if man had remained in paradise, he would not have had the flegmata within his body, from which many evils proceed, but his flesh would have been whole and without dark humor [livor]. (…) All this arose from the first evil, which man began at the start, because if Adam had remained in paradise, he would have had the sweetest health, and the best dwelling-place, just as the strongest balsam emits the best odor; but on the contrary, man now has within himself poison and phlegm and diverse illnesses.

~ Causae et Curae

Bio: A German Abbess, visionary mystic, composer, writer, and saint who was born in 1098 CE. She experienced visions early on, spent most of her life in monasteries (including the two she founded), went on 4 preaching tours, and died, accompanied by two streams of light, in September 1179.

Ideas: A prolific creative who wrote 3 volumes of visionary theology (Scivias, Liber Vitae Meritorum, and Liber Divinorum Operum) “in which she further expounded on her theology of microcosm and macrocosm-man being the peak of god’s creation, man as a mirror through which the splendor of the macrocosm was reflected.” Also, 69 pieces of music (including Canticles of Ecstasy), 400 letters, 2 volumes on natural medicines, a sacred music drama (Ordo Virtutum), and her own language (Lingua ignota).

Methods: Much of her work was based upon visionary experiences — perhaps due to migraines — that involved ecstatic loss of consciousness and the “God of Light”. Alongside this, she read widely, wrote poetically, was a skilled speaker, had hands-on medical knowledge, and used music as a means of worship.

2.2 St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1225 CE)

Holy obedience confounds all bodily and fleshly desires and keeps the body mortified to the obedience of the spirit and to the obedience of one’s brother and makes a man subject to all the men of this world and not to men alone, but also to all beasts and wild animals, so that they may do with him whatsoever they will, in so far as it may be granted to them from above by the Lord.

~ Salutations of the Virtue

Bio: A monk, saint, and founder of the Franciscan Order who was born to a wealthy family in Assisi, Italy in 1182 CE. After a vision in his early 20s, he dedicated himself to a religious life of poverty, charity, solitude, teaching, and restoring chapels stone by stone. He died while listening to a pslam in 1225.

Ideas: Francis viewed all of nature as the mirror of God, as can be seen in his religious song Canticle of the Creatures. He wrote letters, prayers, rules and poems, alongside creating the first live nativity scene (using real animals) to commemorate the birth of Jesus.

Methods: By modeling his life upon the life and spirit of Jesus. He lived simply, embraced poverty, denied self, spent time in mountain solitude, fasted for 40 days, traveled extensively, preached to birds, and referred to all ‘creatures’ (animals, plants, the wind etc.) as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’.

2.3 St. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582 CE)

The words are very distinctly formed; but by the bodily ear they are not heard. They are, however, much more clearly understood than they would be if they were heard by the ear. It is impossible not to understand them, whatever resistance we may offer. When we wish not to hear anything in this world, we can stop our ears, or give attention to something else: so that, even if we do hear, at least we can refuse to understand. In this locution of God addressed to the soul there is no escape, for in spite of ourselves we must listen; and the understanding must apply itself so thoroughly to the comprehension of that which God wills we should hear, that it is nothing to the purpose whether we will it or not; for it is His will, Who can do all things.

~ The Life of Saint Teresa of Jesus

Bio: A Carmelite nun, theologian, mystic, author, and saint born in Spain in 1515. After a multi-year illness in her early 20s, she developed an interest in mental prayer and deepened it over the years. After her death in 1582, parts of her body were cut off and scattered to various parts of Europe.

Ideas: A prolific writer who used personal experience and scripture to write about the ascent of the soul through four stages. She wrote an autobiography, influential works of theology (including The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection), 31 poems, and 458 letters. Her stress on the importance of philosophical reflection probably influenced the “father of modern philosophy” Rene Descartes.

How: Through philosophical reflection, mental prayer, religious ecstasy, and spiritual exercises like the one below, meant to focus the mind and guide the soul on its four-fold ascent:

• Devotion of the Heart through through contemplation
• Devotion of Peace through surrendering human will to God
• Devotion of Union through ecstatic absorption in God
• Devotion of Ecstasy through disappearance of body-consciousness

2.4 Plotinus (204–270 BCE):

From the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must share the body’s experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is working.

~The Enneads

Bio: The philosopher, teacher and founder of Neoplatonism was born in Egypt in 204 CE. After an 11-year apprenticeship to the obscure yet profound Ammonious Saccas, he made his way to Rome where he taught for 20+ years. On his death bed in 270 CE, he reportedly said “try to bring back the god in us to the god in the universe.”

Ideas: He was primarily engaged with the ideas of Plato, but he also took in influences from Aristotle, the Stoics, the Gnostics, Astrologers and synthesized them into his posthumous work The Enneads.

His mind-before-matter metaphysics is based upon 3 principles: The One (a sort of transcendent Source that is “the eternally present possibility — or active making-possible — of all existence”); Intellect (contemplates the One as its source and meditates upon the thoughts or Platonic Forms that make up its being); and Soul (which generates “a separate, material cosmos that is the living image of the spiritual or noetic Cosmos contained as a unified thought within the Intelligence.”)

This metaphysical view informs his ethics which, as Peter Adamson says, is “basically all about encouraging us to turn away from the body and turn towards these higher principles, so universal soul, universal intellect and ultimately the One.”

Method: Through the dominant mode of reasoning (clarifying, dissecting, and refuting ideas) as well as Henosis (mystical union) with The One. In order for humans to return to the Divine Realm there are 3 steps:

• Virtue: cultivating virtue in order to “remind the soul of the divine Beauty”
• Dialectic: practice dialectic to “instruct or inform the soul concerning its priors and the true nature of existence”
• Contemplation: “the proper act and mode of existence of the soul.”

2.5 Carl Jung (1861–1961 CE)

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

~The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man

Bio: Swiss psychologist, psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology born in Switzerland in 1861. A painful split with Freud eventually led to him further develop his own insights, which took in much more than early childhood experiences. He wrote up to the end of his life in 1961.

Ideas: An omnivorous reader and prolific writer whose incomplete collected works take up 20 volumes and include books like Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Psychology and Alchemy, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, and Memories, Dreams, Reflections. In these and others, he explores archetypal images and their role in dreams, the repressed material that makes up the Shadow, the space of the collective unconscious, the principle of synchronicity, and the goal of individuation.

Method: Through becoming aware of the factors that influence our personalities through dream interpretation, reflection, art, active imagination, and analysis of symbols. Travel played an important role in his thinking as did the creation of art as seen in his Red Book.

#3: Primacy of Matter Approach

This approach gives primacy to “Matter as Vehicle for Spirit” where “truth is in matter; spirit is matter; ‘laws’ are an illusion”, and the governing motif is “Immersion in Experience.”

As Merleau-Ponty wrote in Phenomenology of Perception, “The body is our general medium for having a world.” That sentiment is a great starting point for the Primacy of Matter Tradition. It touches on the importance of the body and appearances in knowledge and hints at the role of embodiment in that process.

In a material world, we use the body and phenomenological reality to understand truths in an embodied manner.

Lets define a few things:

Spirit: “the nonphysical part of a person that is the seat of emotions and character; the soul” & “those qualities regarded as forming the definitive or typical elements in the character of a person, nation, or group or in the thought and attitudes of a particular period.”

Matter: “physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit; (in physics) that which occupies space and possesses rest mass, especially as distinct from energy.”

Truth: that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality” & “the quality or state of being true.”

Using the above to expand our definition, “Truth is in Matter” can mean: “that which is in accordance with fact or reality” is in “physical substance in general, that which occupies space and possesses rest mass.”

For “Spirit is Matter”, we get: “those qualities regarded as forming the definitive or typical elements in the character of a person, nation, or group or in the thought and attitudes of a particular period” is “physical substance in general, that which occupies space and possesses rest mass.”

3.1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)

“Whether it is a question of my body, the natural world, the past, birth or death, the question is always to know how I can be open to phenomena that transcend me and that, nevertheless, only exist to the extent that I take them up and live them.”

~Phenomenology of Perception

French phenomenological philosopher who wrote mostly about perception, language, art, and politics in books like The Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible.

According to wikipedia, he:

“emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and maintained that the body and that which it perceived could not be disentangled from each other. The articulation of the primacy of embodiment led him away from phenomenology towards what he was to call “indirect ontology” or the ontology of “the flesh of the world”

3.2 Georges Bataille (1897–1962)

A French writer and librarian who “wanted to bring art down to the base level of other physical phenomena” with works like The Story of the Eye (written under the pseudonym “Lord Auch”), the 15 issues of the surrealist Documents magazine, the secret society obsessed with human sacrifice Acephale, and collaborations with the College of Sociology.

Check out Supervert for some free reading and Open Culture for a useful introduction.

He gave written expression to everything from philosophy to economics to poetry to porn and, if we are to fit some of him into the Primacy of Matter Tradition, concepts of interest are:

• Base Materialism: “He argues for the concept of an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilises all foundations. (…) it defies strict definition and remains in the realm of experience rather than rationalisation.”
• Accursed Share: “Thus, according to Bataille’s theory of consumption, the accursed share is that excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy which is destined to one of two modes of economic and social expenditure. This must either be spent luxuriously and knowingly without gain in the arts, in non-procreative sexuality, in spectacles and sumptuous monuments, or it is obliviously destined to an outrageous and catastrophic outpouring in war.”

3.3 Isadora Duncan (1877–1927)

The “Mother of Modern Dance” who focused on “natural movement” like skipping and leaping, traced dance to its sacred origins, became inspired by the sea, and “believed movement originated from the solar plexus.”

Deborah Jowett in the Village Voice wrote that Isadora Duncan “emphasized the connectedness of body and soul at a time when links between human beings, their work, and the land were being severed and Victorian prudery shaped moral law”. Lewis Mumford commented that “What mattered in Isadora’s Hellenic dances was not the Greek themes or the gauzy costumes, but the uninhibited vitality, the sense of a glorious nakedness.”

Modern interpretations of her dances can be found at the Isadora Duncan Archive.

3.4 F.M. Alexander (1869–1955)

Fredrick Matthias Alexander focused on a “reeducation of the mind and body” through re-training habitual patterns of movement and posture in order to overcome repetitive limitations in both movement and thinking.

His particular approach became known as the Alexander Technique and its impetus came when he lost his ability to embody his voice for acting. He figured out how to fix his voice and then began, year after year, to systematize the process, teach it to others, and write it down in various books like The Use of the Self.

Popular among actors, writers, politicians and more, it was designed to get rid of harmful tension and to promote self-awareness in health.

3.5 Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957)

An Austrian psychoanalyst known and notorious for his work on character, armor, and orgone therapy. Over at the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust a few definitions can be found:

• Character: An individual’s typical structure, his stereotype manner of acting and reacting. The orgonomic concept of character is functional and biological, and not a static, psychological or moralistic concept.
• Character Armor: The sum total of typical character attitudes which an individual develops as a blocking against his emotional excitations, resulting in rigidity of the body, lack of emotional contact, and “deadness.” Functionally identical with the muscular armor.
• Muscular Armor: The sum total of the muscular attitudes (chronic muscular spasms) which an individual develops as a block against the breakthrough of emotions and organ sensations, in particular anxiety, rage, and sexual excitation.
• Psychiatric Orgone Therapy: Mobilization of the orgone energy in the organism, i.e. the liberation of biophysical emotions from muscular and character armorings with the goal of establishing, if possible, orgastic potency.
• Physical Orgone Therapy: Application of physical orgone energy concentrated in an orgone energy accumulator to increase the natural bio-energetic resistance of the organism against disease.

The American College of Orgonomy still publishes journals and Man’s Right to Know is a 28-minute introduction to Reich’s life and work.

#4: Paradoxical Questioning Approach

This approach gives primacy to Paradox where “Truth Emerges Only When It Is Not Pursued”, where “laws exist, but not in a fixed form”, and the governing motif is “Rilke’s ‘Live in the Question.’”

“Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

The above letter by Rainer Maria Rilke touches on some important themes in the Paradoxical Questioning Tradition. This includes the embrace of ambiguity rather than a quick collapse into certainty and a focus on world-presence (“the point is, to live everything”).

In this Search for Truth, the world is seen as a place of paradoxical events that one lives with. The word “paradox” makes more sense in the context that Morris Berman uses it in Wandering God. It refers to the Hunter-Gatherer mode of consciousness prior to the rise of agriculture and is a mix of three things: mature ambiguity, world-presence, and horizontality.

As humans became more and more sedentary (agriculture and all the rest of it), those elements withered away and something new emerged: an obsession with certainty, world-views, and verticality.

The dominate tradition in western thinking, logical analysis, is a perfect example of this: it’s tree-like (or arboreal) way or organizing thought and experience centered around the search for the essences that sees Truth as a stable and transcendent being.

In contrast, the Paradox tradition uses a rhizomatic (see Deleuze below) way of organizing thought and experience that focus on connections and sees Truth as dynamic and immanent becoming.

4.1 Sophists (5th century BCE)

“A human being is the measure of all things, of those things that are, that they are, and of those things that are not, that they are not”

~ Protagoras

“Whatever in any particular city is considered just and admirable is just and admirable in that city, for so long as the convention remains in place”

~ Plato’s Theaetetus

Bio: A name given to traveling teachers and intellectuals in (mostly)Athens during the 5th century BCE. Three famous ones include: Protagoras, Gorgias and Antiphon.

Ideas: Many of their primary texts don’t exist and most of what we know comes from Plato’s dialogues, like Gorgias, which often show them in a negative light.

However a few themes can be gathered: the distinction between nature and convention (in Antiphon’s On Truth); relativism about knowledge and truth (in Protagoras’s Truth and On the Gods); and the power of speech (in Gorgias’s About the Nonexistent or On Nature).

In line with this tradition, they were masters at understanding and articulating the logic behind multiple arguments, both the ones they agreed with and disagreed with. This can be gleaned from the anonymous work Dissoi Logoi, which is made up of competing argument for 5 theses.

Method: Through teaching the art of rhetorical persuasion to others for a fee. Through eristic arguments (“seeking victory in argument without regard for truth”) and antilogic arguments (starting from a given argument and moving toward establishing its opposite in a way where an opponent must abandon the first or accept both).

A positive result of this tradition is the Steel Man argument where a person tries to create the best possible form of an opposing argument and then refutes that. Those in the Long Now Foundation practice it in their Seminars about Long-Term Thinking (SALT).

4.2 Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811)

I can see you opening your eyes wide at this and replying that in former years you were advised never to talk about anything that you do not already understand. In those days, however, you probably spoke with the pretentious purpose of enlightening others. I want you to speak with the reasonable purpose of enlightening yourself, and it is possible that each of these rules of conduct, different as they are, will apply in certain cases.

~Gradual Production of Thought During Speech

Bio: A romantic poet, writer and journalist born in Germany in 1777. A restless and roaming human with boundless passion and energy who, strangely, committed suicide along with his lover Henrietta Vogel in 1811.

Ideas: He wrote tragedies, poetic dramas, comedies, political tracts and and philosophical essays like “On the Gradual Production of Thought During Speech” quoted above.

Methods: The above passage shows how Kleist employs the “indirect method” by disregarding the common assumption that you should know what you’re saying before you say it. Instead, he goes the indirect way of speaking in order to find out what you want to say.

4.3 Franz Kafka (1883–1924)

“The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisible, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. Thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.”

Bio: Writer born in Prague in 1883. He studied law rather than literature to try to appease his terrifying father (didn’t work) and ended up working in law firms and insurance companies. He considered writing a form of prayer, published little during his life, and died of tuberculosis in 1924.

Ideas: Luckily Kafka’s friend disobeyed his orders to burn all his collected writings upon death, so we have 3 famous novels (The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika), short stories, and letters.

Berman sees Kafka‘s work as the “perverse form” of the paradox tradition, probably because the ambiguities he explores are often disturbing, giving rise to the adjective Kafkaesque.

Method: Through the art of writing surrealist-like fiction filled with dark ambiguities like getting arrested for a crime that’s never revealed to you by people you don’t know.

4.4 Later Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)

“Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.”

~Philosophical Investigations

Bio: Philosopher and mathematician born to a big, wealthy, and cultured family in Vienna in 1889. Despite this he often refused money and gifts from his parents, spending time teaching in rural Austria, and volunteered for the front lines in World War I. He later accepted a spot at Cambridge, watched westerns in his free time, and died in 1951 amidst 20,000 pages of unpublished material.

Ideas: Many commentators split up Wittgenstein’s life and thought into two parts: early and later. The early is squarely in the logical-analysis tradition and results in his dense and precise Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus. The “second half” as Berman writes, is “in a horizontal, rhizomatic, contextual/hermeneutic one. (…) the Philosophical Investigations is about language games and local/tribal reality systems.”

One important idea is that the “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” rather than simple reference to objects or associated mental representations. Context is king.

Methods: Despite only publishing one book during his life, Wittgenstein left about 20,000 written pages upon his death. As John Heaton writes in Introducing Wittgenstein:

“He constantly changed his text, reformulating his remarks, putting them in different contexts to test their meaning. When he reached a conclusion he would often start all over again, reexploring the topic from a different viewpoint.”

Maybe this was part of a “method” of sorts. After leaving philosophy because he assumed he solved all the problems, he spent a decade or so roaming around the rurals of Austria before “returning” to philosophy and academe. Instead of stable truth, maybe it’s more of truth as a verb. The going is the goal. The style of Philosophical Investigations takes the reader along rather than setting up stable arguments.

4.5 Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995)

“We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants.”

&

“The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities”

― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Bio: Philosopher, writer and teacher born in France in 1925. He taught at the infamous University of Paris VIII school for 18 years. Due to a long history of pulmonary illness, he ended his life in 1995.

Ideas: Delueze wrote histories of philosophical thinkers, works of metaphysics as well as “encounters” with literature, cinema, and art. Some classic works include Difference and Repetition, a Thousand Plateau’s, Nietzsche and Philosophy, and What is Philosophy?

He viewed philosophy as “the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” and viewed his writings on art, literature and cinema as “encounters” where “non pre-existing concepts” could emerge.

He sees the dominant strand of Western philosophy as being “arboreal”, that is hierarchical, order-obsessed, and linear. Its bias is searching for the abstract essence of things (this is the Logical Analysis tradition). In contrast to the “arboreal” (tree-like) way of thinking common in the logical analysis tradition, he practices a more rhizomatic way of thinking.

Rhizome.net sums it up pretty well:

“As a model for culture, the rhizome resists the organizational structure of the root-tree system which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the original source of ‘things’ and looks towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those ‘things.’ A rhizome, on the other hand, is characterized by ‘ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.’ Rather than narrativize history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a ‘rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.’ The planar movement of the rhizome resists chronology and organization, instead favoring a nomadic system of growth and propagation.”

Methods: Although not a geographical nomad (he rarely traveled), he was an omnivorous reader and intellectual nomad who had philosophical “encounters” with art, cinema and literature and more alongside his more standard philosophical works — which were often written in nonstandard ways.

Deleuze thought writing, rather than debates and dialogues, was the best way to do philosophy. Partially Examined Life has a great podcast on him as does this episode of The Philosopher’s Zone.

The last post (LINK) was about nomadic tribes and how they represent a middle way between the horizontal world of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers and the vertical world of Neolithic farmers.

The horizontal world was a way of life centered around movement (hunting and gathering, moving camp, etc.). It was about world presence (an intense focus on the world as it presents itself), mature ambiguity (being comfortable with uncertainty), and egalitarianism (equal social, political, economic, and spiritual relations).

The vertical world is a way of life centered on settlements (staying in one place to farm). It’s about world-views (fixation on a world beyond), immature certainty (obsession with finding and clinging to certainty), and hierarchies (social, political, economic, and religious).

Nomadic tribes were a little bit of both.

In this post, we will look at the unique nomadism of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. His ability to move between the Vertical and Horizontal Worlds in terms of social relations, economics, wealth, and thought.

As Morris Berman sums it up in Wandering God,

“we have a man who lived the first half of his life in a severe, totally vertical, scientific-mystical/transcendental world and the second half in a horizontal, rhizomatic, contextual/hermeneutic one.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Early Life: A Vertical World

In 1889, Ludwig Wittgenstein — or Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein if you want to get all full-named about it — was born in Vienna, Austria. He was the youngest of eight siblings.

His dad, Karl Wittgenstein, basically ran the iron and steel industry in that area. He was the second wealthiest guy in Europe (after the Rothschilds), and considered Andrew Carnegie a friend.

Karl spent a lot of that wealth on supporting the arts. The composers Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler gave multiple performances in their house, and the artist Gustav Klimt painted Ludwig’s sister.

Alongside culture, Ludwig’s childhood was filled with a demand for perfection.

All Karl and Leopoldine’s kids were homeschooled and expected to take over the family empire. This incessant demand for perfection meant his dad lacked empathy and his mom was full of anxiety. It also meant that the kids had it rough — three of Ludwig’s four brothers committed suicide, and Ludwig thought about it a lot.

This legacy of perfection seems to have drive his love of logic and detail.

He studied mechanical engineering for a bit, then switched to the philosophy of mathematics and moved to Cambridge University where he met (and impressed) Bertrand Russell. However, he always had a fraught relationship with academic life and never stuck around for that long.

When WWI broke out, he had been living in a remote cabin in Norway. Once he learned of it, however, he immediately left the cabin and volunteered for the war — despite the fact that an exemption was easy! Unsurprisingly, fellow soldiers were impressed by his bravery.

It was during this time that he began work on his first (and only) published book.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

In between dodging bullets, Wittgenstein was thinking about logic, ethics, and the problems of philosophy. These thoughts were condensed into a 75-page book first published in 1921.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is known for its austere and mathematical style organized around seven propositions broken up into 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.22 and so on. According to Berman, the book is about “universal knowledge and transcendent truth” — in other words, the Vertical world.

The Tractatus, as Berman writes,

… was the epitome of the vertical transcendent tradition, a Platonic-intellectual version of the sacred authority complex, if you will, in which the explanation of the world (i.e., its fundamental laws) is seen as lying not in the world but somewhere outside of it.

It sought certainty in the foundations of logic, but never found it.

Wittgenstein thought that his book solved all the problems of philosophy by showing them to be confusions of language. Despite that, he was unimpressed with the answer.

So, he looked elsewhere.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Later Life: A Horizontal World

Shortly after WWI ended (which for him included a 9-month stint in a POW camp), Wittgenstein divided his inheritance among his siblings. Then, he took on a variety of false names and taught at elementary schools in rural Austria.

When his family tried to provide financial support, he refused. He wouldn’t accept anything he didn’t earn.

As a teacher, he was very strict — especially when teaching math. As a citizen, he was very out of place — he hated the anti-intellectual attitudes of locals. Although eccentric, he was tolerated … for a while. However, he was also known to hit kids in class, including one small boy who collapsed shortly after.

This ended his teaching career in rural Austria.

Shortly afterward, Wittgenstein’s sister offered him a job designing a townhouse, so he spent a few years drafting up an insanely precise house. Around that time, he came to the conclusion that all of philosophy’s problems weren’t, in fact, solved.

So, Ludwig re-entered academia by way of a train. When economist John Maynard Keynes saw him at the station, he reportedly though, “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train.”

Soon after arriving at Cambridge University, Wittgenstein submitted his Tractatus as a Ph.D. dissertation. It was accepted, and he became a lecturer at Trinity College. He taught there until 1947 when he resigned to focus on writing.

A few years later, he died. His last words (spoken to his sister) were, “tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Nomadism

Ludwig Wittgenstein was a nomad in a few senses of the term.

He moved between cities and rural areas, and between unfathomable wealth to relative poverty. He moved from the height or urban academia (schmoozing with some of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers) to a rural elementary school surrounded by people he despised as anti-intellectual.

Not only that, but he did it by giving away his vertical wealth (or accumulation) and spreading it among his siblings.

He was an intellectual or spiritual nomad by moving from a fixation on “universal knowledge and transcendent truth” in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to an acceptance of “language games and local/tribal reality systems” in Philosophical Investigations.

This switch can be seen as the difference between Tree-thinking and Rhizome-thinking. (These terms are borrowed from Gilles Deleuze’s thinking).

As Berman writes:

“The oak tree, of course, conjures up grand images; it is heroic. Rhizomes, with their lateral and circular taproot systems, are a lot less romantic: potatoes, weeds, crabgrass. But their power lies precisely in being anti-Platonic, anti-Jungian, nontranscendent, for the heart of rhizomatic patterning is immediate interconnection and heterogeneity, dialects and argots, not a universal language. This patterning is not composed of centers of significance and subjectivization, as arborescent systems are. And whereas the tree, which has dominated Western thought, is about transcendence, the rhizome, the steppe, is about immanence.”

Rather than choosing one over the other, Wittgenstein’s nomadism has to do with balancing between both — settling in the oak tree for a bit and then moving along to the rhizome. Back and forth. Vertical and Horizontal.

In the next (and last post in this series), we will look at four ways that western culture has sought truth in order to help us better balance between the two worlds.

In the last post looking at Morris Berman’s book Wandering God, we saw how the horizontal world of hunter-gatherers turned into the vertical world of settled farmers.

As you might recall, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers lived in a highly equal horizontal world that reigned for nearly two million years.

However, due to food storage, climate changes, population growth, the breakdown of “leveling mechanisms”, and the rise of aggressive subgroups, that horizontal world was turned 90 degrees. It became a vertical world of religious, political, and social hierarchies that we continue to live with to this day.

Although that was true for many people, it wasn’t true for all people. Nomads staked out a kind of third position that wasn’t quite hunter-gatherer and wasn’t quite farmer. It was in the middle.

In this post, we’ll look at a basic definition of who nomads are, why they are important, and why they valued movement so much.

What is a nomad?

A “nomad” is basically a person without a fixed home. Nomadic cultures are generally grouped into three broad categories:

• Hunter Gatherers: often move from campsite to campsite to find food. Includes San, Piraha, Hadza, and many more.
• Pastoral Nomads: generally stay settled for a season or so to provide pasture for livestock, then get up and move. Includes Basseri, Nuer, Pala people and many more.
• Peripatetic Nomads (tinkerers & traders): highly mobile people who move within a settled culture to trade, fix things, etc. Includes Romani, Dom, Kochi people and many more.

These various nomads move around to gather the resources they need to live. However, that’s not the only reason why. In discussing the pastoral nomads, the anthropologist Anatoly Khazanov:

“‘Pastoralism is not only a way of making a living; it is also a way of living.’”

Why are nomads important to history?

Nomads are important to history because they represent settled, Neolithic people’s link to their unsettled, Paleolithic past. Alongside that, they provide an alternative model for living that places a high premium on movement, freedom, ambiguity.

First, the link to the past. As hinted above, nomads balance between two worlds — the Horizontal world of the Paleolithic, and the Vertical world of the Neolithic. The result of this balances means a mixture of the following:

• An embrace of the Self/World Split through mature ambiguity AND a trying to “solve” it through certainty, transcendence, and trance
• A mix of Horizontal-Egalitarian AND Vertical-Hierarchical Structures (social, political, spiritual)
• A mix of diffuse awareness that accepts the world as it presents itself via World Presence AND centralized awaress that filters the world through myth and ritual via World Views
• A balance of sedentary practices AND mobile practices
• A mix of death-fear AND death-acceptance
• Movement AND sedentism

With this in mind, Berman writes about the role nomads and nomadic ways of being played in history and the hope they offer for the future.

He writes that nomads:

… attempt to recapture core elements of the lost HG [hunter-gatherer] life: egalitarian social relations, self-reliance and autonomy, paradoxical consciousness, a ‘nonreligious’ way of being, and the world of immanent brilliance, perpetual surprise.

The importance of movement

One of the ways nomads “recapture core elements” of earlier hunter-gatherer life is by placing movement at the center of their lives.

Movement is one of the most under appreciated aspects of the Neolithic Revolution. When most people think of the Neolithic Revolution, they think about the development of agriculture, animal domestication, the spread of diseases, the creation and walls, cities, and new technologies. Although important, those developments don’t get at the subjective experience of what happened.

For nearly two million years prior to agriculture, people basically lived their lives on the move. They set up camp for a few days or a few weeks, then broke it down, and headed to an entirely new place. Rinse and repeat for your entire life.

Then, in an evolutionary blink of an eye, people stopped moving. They stayed in one place. That was massive difference. In a hat tip to travel writer Bruce Chatwin, Berman writes:

Thus, in The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin argues that movement is not only a leveling mechanism, something that prevents the emergence of social inequality, but also something that is central to nomadic consciousness, to human fulfillment, and that serves to make life so rich here on earth that there was no need for many or most HGs [hunter-gatherers] to create religion or concepts of an afterlife. Wandering, says Chatwin, reestablishes an original harmony (read: paradox) that existed between human beings and the universe. He argues that it is an instinctive migratory urge, something we carry with us in a genetic or inherent sense.

It is precisely the nomadic (i.e. ambulatory) aspect of HG life that sustains the perception of paradox and the fluidity of mind that was lost when the human race sat down. The HG [hunter-gatherer] way of life, with its evolutionary basis in movement and animal alertness, adds up to a kind of process psychology: the going is the goal. The wandering life is not about finding permanence, securing a beachhead against change or insecurity. Rather, movement is the physiological substrate of the paradoxical experience, of embracing life as it presents itself, rather than exclusively through the filters of myth and ritual, which are mistakenly taken to be, in sedentary societies, the fundamental source of aliveness.

As you can see, settling down not only changed their physiology, but it also changed their social relations (settling in one place means you acquire more stuff, which gives rise to inequalities of wealth) and their religious or spiritual life.

Berman continues:

“Religion, wrote Bruce Chatwin, is a response to anxiety, and it is at least possible that movement, by eliminating anxiety in a whole number of ways, removes the need for religion as well. The great religions, says Chatwin, arose among settled people who previously had been nomads — such as Jews, Arabs, Zoroastrians — and whose ceremonial is filled with pastoral metaphors, notions of pilgrimage, and so on.”

The effects of stopping movement

In an earlier part of the book — covered here — Berman described what he thinks consciousness was like for Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Rather than a myth-drench and religion-drenched experience, it was what he calls “paradoxical.”

To be honest, it’s not the greatest term for it because it’s hard to pin down. However, if I can take a crack at it, it’s pointing at two things:

1. Shifting between the feeling of being continuous with the external environment and feeling alienated from the external environment. Or, between diffused outward-focused animal alertness and intense inward-focused self-consciousness.
2. As anyone who has traveled a bit can attest, what was true in Spain isn’t true in Siberia. Truth is relative, a moving goal, rather than a certain destination to be pinned down. Paleolithic people moving camp every few weeks understood that well. Settled farmers staying in one place their entire life, didn’t.

That perception of paradox was sustained by movement. It led to what Berman called ‘mature ambiguity,” a sort of deep grounding in immediate world presence. Alongside releasing individual stresses trapped inside one’s biochemistry and diffusing social tensions that could bubble over to war, movement sustained and refreshed paradox through making truth and what works a moving goal.

As Berman writes:

In the nomadic world, the tent is not tied to a territory but to an itinerary. Points are reached only to be left behind. The road to truth is always under construction; the going is the goal.

When people stopped moving, however, that perception faded away. It led to an obsession with certainty. We — meaning the descendants of Neolithic farmers stopped moving and hence lost that mature ambiguity and paradox.

However, can it be regained? Is it possible to live within civilization yet carry some of that nomadic thinking and life with us? In a world obsessed with certainty, is it possible to be uncertain? On an individual level, absolutely (or relatively). The life and thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein provides a good example of it. We will turn to that in the next post.

The Neolithic Revolution is (mostly) about humans going from hunting and gathering to farming. It happened around 10,000 years ago and is widely considered to be one of the most important developments in human history.

In other words, it’s worth looking into.

When you do look into it, you quickly learn that the effects of this revolution include cities, civilization, other “c” words (cuneiform, carrots, cybernetics), armies, hierarchies, and a whole host of technologies, institutions, and ways of thinking that contemporary folks see as natural features of the world.

They aren’t.

Instead, they’re human inventions developed at particular moments in history.

With that said, it’s impractical (and perhaps impossible) to draw out the details of each effect in this humble blogpost, so I have to pick and choose. For this post, I pick hierarchies. By that, I mean some of the social, political, economic, and spiritual hierarchies that are so embedded in everyday life that we assume they’ve always been there.

But have they?

Most likely not.

At least that’s the claim that Morris Berman expands upon and defends in his provocative book Wandering God. So, in part three in this series of book reviews, let’s look into the question in the title of the post: did the Neolithic Revolution lead to inequality?

In order to answer that, however, we need to look into what life was like before the Neolithic Revolution.

Life before the Neolithic Revolution

Before the Neolithic Revolution kicked off in 10,000 BCE or so, humans had been living as hunter-gatherers for nearly two million years. Clearly something worked.

By “hunter-gatherer”, we mostly mean “immediate return hunter gatherers”. That is, human cultures who hunt animals, gather food, and then immediately share it upon returning to camp. They do not store it for later (more on that later).

Although rare today, immediate-return hunting and gathering was all the rage back in the Paleolithic day — in that glorious time before the Neolithic Revolution kicked it in the proverbial genitals.

Features of Immediate-Return Hunter-Gatherer Cultures

Psychologists Leonard L. Martin and Steven Shirk defined some of their major features:

• Small, Nomadic, & Ever-Changing Camps: this “fission and fusion” pattern allows people to come and go as they please
• Intentional Avoidance of Formal Long-Term Binding Commitments: “by avoiding formal long-term, binding commitments, they reduce the possibility of social domination.”
• Relational Autonomy: since groups are so ad-hoc and fluid, each member has a high level of autonomy while simultaneously viewing themselves and others as part of a larger group.
• Highly and Intentionally Egalitarian: they have leveling mechanisms (mostly ridicule and scorn) to bring people down a notch when they get too high and mighty. Certain people are better hunters, but they don’t boast about it or try to dominate others because of it.
• Non-Contingent Sharing: they share with everyone regardless of if someone has helped in the hunting and gathering or not. They tolerate mooches to a degree.
• No Formal Leaders: although the most skilled hunter might have influence over others during a specific hunt, that influence fades when the hunt is over — they don’t retain coercive power forever after. If they tried, most people would criticize them, ridicule them, or simply disobey.
• Distributed Decision Making: a series of individual decisions eventually grows into a group decision rather than a top-down formal leader deciding for everyone.
• Benign View of Nature: they view nature as they view human culture — centered around egalitarianism, sharing, and autonomy
• Cultural Instability: they don’t hold tightly to strong narratives of right and wrong or single versions of truth
• Present oriented: very centered in what’s happening the present moment rather than what might happen in the future

Immediate-return hunter-gatherers were able to maintain their egalitarian ways for some two million years or so. However, around the Neolithic Revolution, they began to morph into delayed-return hunter-gatherers.

If you flip the features above, you get delayed-return hunter-gatherers. In contrast to immediate-return societies, delayed-return ones didn’t immediately share what they hunted and gathered. Instead, they stored it.

They created a food surplus — and a group of people with power over that surplus. In the long run, that seemingly insignificant act of food storage kickstarts a kind of inequality that eventually leads to Jeffrey “Space Cowboy” Bezos and his seven buddies having more combined wealth than 3,600,000,000 people.

How?

How the Neolithic Revolution led to inequality

Although hunter gatherers were by no means perfect, they did manage to keep inequality low for about 20,000 centuries — which is a lot when you consider that “civilization” has only been around for 60 or so centuries. That astonishing fact dismantles the idea that inequality is baked into human society.

Anyways, a little before the Neolithic Revolution, some immediate-return hunter-gatherers were becoming delayed-return hunter-gatherers by storing food. Social anthropologist Alain Testart traces the origins of social inequality back to this change.

Morris Berman agrees with that in Wandering God, but adds a few more factors, including:

1. Population pressures

2. The influence of “aggressive subgroups”

3. Alteration in child-rearing practices

4. Breakdown of ‘leveling mechanisms’

5. Deliberate human intention

Food storage plus the five factors above caused inequality to grow. As humans became more deeply involved in agriculture, it led to disease and food insecurity.

Disease because people were domesticating animals, and that led to animal diseases transferring to humans, and humans transferring it to other humans. Food insecurity because droughts, floods, and raids made it impossible to guarantee food each year.

These were times of stress, and in times of stress aggressive subgroups take power. In the earlier egalitarian days, these mini-Napoleon’s would have been ridiculed, criticized, and disobeyed. Most people would have fissioned off from that toxic group and fused in with another.

But, as populations grew and the climate changed, that was a lot harder to do. Instead, they stayed. Unlike in earlier times when the temporary influence of the best hunter faded after the hunt, the temporary influence of these mini-Napoleon’s stayed after the stressful time. It became formal coercive power for the individuals.

Over time, those individuals formed institutions, and those institutions formed civilization. And that is where we are now.

Summary

So, in short, yes, the Neolithic Revolution did lead to inequality.

Sure, it was slow and gradual. But, over time, food storage, population pressures, climate change, and mini-Napoleon’s created the inequalities around us.

In Wandering God, Berman frames this gradual shift from egalitarian hunter-gatherers to hierarchical civilizations in terms of a change from a Horizontal to a Vertical world.

A horizontal world involves world presence, egalitarian social relations, and leveling mechanisms for checking power. A vertical world, in contrast, involves hierarchical world views, social inequality, and the loss (or ineffectiveness) of power checks. (More on that in future posts).

For now, we have a world that went from Horizontal to Vertical over the course of a few thousand years. Although that’s true for a large percentage of humans, it isn’t true for all of them. One group in particular — nomads — staked out a third position, what you might call a diagonal position that fluctuated between both poles.

That diagonal position of nomads is what we’ll look at in the next post.

How were kids raised in the Paleolithic? It might seem like an odd question, but it’s a vital part to understanding what society was like back then. By “back then”, we mean a period of (roughly) 190,000 years.

Anatomically modern humans evolved around 200,000 years ago, and from that time until around 12,000 years ago (when agriculture started), people were living in highly mobile hunter-gatherer bands. Clearly something worked in the hunter-gatherer configuration for it to remain dominant for over 190,000 years.

To put that in context, people have been living in settled agricultural communities and civilizations for only a few thousand years and, if you’ve taken a look around lately, things aren’t going too well.

What made the hunter-gatherer band so sustainable? Also, what makes settled agricultural society so prone to chaos?

Those are some of the questions that Morris Berman tackles in his 2000 book Wandering God. If you’ve been following along, last post was about defining what human consciousness was like in the Paleolithic. Continuing on, this post is about the Paleolithic approach to child-rearing — that is, how kids were raised before the invention of agriculture around 12,000 years ago.

In short, Paleolithic kids were held more, breast-fed longer, taken care of by multiple people, and not required to compete with siblings for attention. Generally this led to more stable and grounded kids who were deeply embedded in the world as it presents itself.

Let’s look at each of those factors in a little more depth.

Paleolithic kids were held more

Since there are no Paleolithic hunter-gatherers around, primary source material is impossible to come by. Instead, Wandering God author Morris Berman gathered together insights from anthropologists who studied modern hunter-gatherers and non-western societies.

Since many of these non-western societies are agricultural societies, that’s a weakness in his argument. However, it’s important to note that Berman is mostly concerned with providing a critique of western culture — what the evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich calls the WEIRD world (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) — so it’s still informative.

Moving on.

Generally speaking, babies in hunter-gatherer tribes and non-western societies are held more and breastfed longer. This “somatic” style of childrearing can be contrasted with the “verbal/visual” style that’s popular in the west.

In comparing American and Japanese styles of raising kids, Berman writes:

“Whereas the American model is that of seeing the infant as a dependent organism that needs to become independent in order to mature, the Japanese regard the infant as a separate organism who needs, from birth, to be drawn into interdependent relations. Thus, mother/child symbiosis is ‘pathology’ in New York, ‘health’ in Tokyo. While the American mother typically looks at her baby and ‘chats’ with it, the Japanese mother carries, rocks, and soothes it.”

Alongside comparing the US and Japan (both agricultural civilizations), Berman also compares agricultural civilization as a whole with the hunter-gatherer societies that predated them. What he found is that hunter-gatherers breast-feed for longer. This means the weaning process of moving from breast milk to other kinds of nutrition is less abrupt and traumatic — which has important psychological effects.

As Berman writes:

“… interference with early somatic needs, and the imposition of ‘autonomy’ before a child can handle it, creates a sense of absence where there should be a primary experience of relationship.”

That “sense of absence” creates a strong desire to fill that absence with the aid of transitional objects (more on that later).

Paleolithic kids had multiple caretakers

As the old cliche goes, “it takes a village to raise a kid.” That seems to have been the case in hunter-gatherer societies prior to agriculture. Although biological parents probably had stronger connections with their infants, plenty of others would pitch in when needed.

This had a few benefits when compared to single-parent caretakers.

1. Multiple kids raised by a single caretaker have to compete for that single caretaker’s limited attention. This fosters sibling rivalry and intense forms of jealousy. Having multiple caretakers alleviates some of that rivalry.
2. Kids raised to single caretakers can have a greater fear of “object loss”, especially when the single caretaker is unreliable. In a multi-caretaker situation, most likely someone will be around to feed or soothe an anxious infant.
3. One way of dealing with object loss is through the use of transitional objects (comfort blankets, teddy bears, etc.) that provide security and comfort. Since the fear of object loss is greater in single caretaker child rearing, the desire for transitional objects is stronger. (Berman argues that ideological “isms” are adult forms of transitional objects, which is why people cling to them so fiercely.)

By diminishing sibling rivalry, reducing the fear of object loss and, hence, the need for transitional objects, multiple caretaker configurations tended to birth “healthier” kids — ones more grounded in the world as it presents itself.

Plenty of modern intentional communities have tried to replicate this. One of the more popular examples are the kibbutzim in Israel. Using some of the multiple-caretaker models above tended to create kids who were less anxious.

However, the “diffuse emotionality” that made them comfortable around lots of people and unconcerned with object loss also caused a certain flattening in them. They were kind of shallow.

It’s kind of like the social butterfly at the party who can jump in and out of conversations with a variety of people and strike up instant rapport. However, when you take them aside for a one-on-one conversation, you realize they lack depth. A certain kind of interiority is missing because their emotionality is diffuse — it is spread too thinly to cover lots of people rather than focused intensely, like a laser, on one.

For better or worse, “depth” seems to require a strong attachment to one person to evolve.

As Berman writes:

“If the kibbutznik had very little fear of object loss, he or she also had very little ability to be close to anyone at all.”

(…)

“They became less neurotic but also less curious about life.”

Paleolithic kids were born less often

Since hunter-gatherers were always on the move, it made sense not to have too many kids. Trying to move camp while carrying two or three kids is no easy task, so they avoided it as much as possible.

That’s why they decided to space out their pregnancies more than those in agricultural societies (where more births means more helping hands in the fields). Birth spacing not only made it easier for them to move around, but it also kept population numbers relatively low and manageable for hundreds of thousands of years.

Although that sounds great, there was a brutal reality underlying it. If birth spacing didn’t work, then they resorted to infanticide. Uncomfortable as it may be, infanticide was probably quite common in the Paleolithic.

Infanticide is brutal, no doubt, but it’s also important to view it in a wider context as a form of birth control. If infanticide wasn’t as common, then the ability for hunter-gatherers to move around would have dropped, population sizes would have ballooned, and the emotional cocktail caused by sibling rivalry (jealousy, heroism, etc.) would have skyrocketed.

In summing it up, Berman writes:

“In other words, HGs practice quick death, while civilization, being more sophisticated, does it a lot more slowly.”

That “more slowly” means producing population booms that inevitably lead to a certain percentage of the population being jealousy-ridden, anxiety-filled, and heroically-hopped up individuals who create all sorts of damage for society at large.

Effects of Paleolithic Child-Rearing

All of the above taken together helped to create what Berman calls a “horizontal world.”

That is, a world where people are on a level playing field — social inequality is low, people have more or less the same amount of political power (egalitarianism), and “spirituality” is centered on the here and now rather than relegated to a sacred realm “above”.

This “horizontal” world can be contrasted with a “vertical” world. One where social inequality is high, politics is hierarchical (with some having a lot more power than others), and “spirituality” is hierarchical and all about ascending to a sacred realm above the here and now.

Let’s put a pin in that because the question of how the horizontal world tilted to a vertical world will be the subject of the next post.

Before we end, however, let’s turn to how the Paleolithic child-rearing described above affected the psychological development of individual kids.

Psychological birth

To do that, let’s start with the idea that each person has two births: one is physical, and the other is psychological. Taken from the Object relations school of psychology, Berman wrote about this extensively in the first part of his previous book Coming to Our Senses.

Physical birth occurs when you physically separate from your mother. Although physically separate, you still feel continuous with the external environment — there are no hard boundaries between Self and Other.

Psychological birth occurs about 3 years later when you psychologically separate from your mother — when your “ego” begins to develop. The boundary between Self and Other hardens as your experience becomes less continuous with the external world.

Berman writes that this psychological birth:

“… marks the beginning of the journey toward individual identity, self-conscious awareness, and the experience of fear and alienation. This begins the dialectic of Self and Other, and even under the most benevolent child-rearing conditions, fear and alienation are going to be present.”

Following from the idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, also called recapitulation theory, Berman suggests that this individual psychological birth (which we all go through in varying degrees) repeats the principle stages or phases (i.e. recapitulates) of the birth of the ego on a species-wide level.

In a previous post, we called this “birth of the ego on a species-wide level” by two other names: “existential awareness” and “self-conscious awareness.” This event happened sometime in the Paleolithic (maybe 100,000 years ago) and involved the combination of two kinds of awareness:

• animal alertness to the external environment. Also seen in cats, dogs, monkeys, etc., it involves a deep paying attention to your surroundings — “An utter watchfulness.”
• self-conscious awareness of an internal environment, aka the “self” or ego.

Psychological birth begins around age 3 or so when a self-conscious awareness of an internal Self separates out from an animal alertness to the external Environment.

That leads to a feeling of alienation because the prior unity — feeling of being continuous with the environment — ends. Instead, we become discontinuous with the environment. A barrier arises between “me” (or Self) and the surrounding environment (or Other). That leads to a feeling of alienation, of being separate from the environment (people, places, things).

That being said, like most things, the barrier and the alienation exists on a spectrum — and child-rearing plays a big role in where individuals and cultures at large land on that spectrum.

Some psychological births involve a more porous barrier, others a very rigid barrier. Likewise, some experience an intense form of alienation. Others, a mild form.

Those with rigid barriers and intense forms of alienation (i.e. most westerners) need “transitional objects” to fill the emptiness created when the feeling of being unified with the environment abruptly shifts to a feeling of being intensely alienated from it.

In childhood, these “transitional objects” take the form of teddy bears, security blankets, and other physical objects meant to reduce anxiety about the world. In adulthood, these “transitional objects” take the form of ideologies (religious, political, etc.) that also seek to reduce anxiety about the world. What both share in common is a high level of anxiety toward the world.

Those with more porous barriers and milder forms of alienation don’t seem to need “transitional objects” as much — either in their childhood physical form or adult ideological form — because their anxiety toward the world is lower.

One of the main determiners of how hard the barrier is, how intense the alienation is, and how strong the desire for transitional objects are, is how often an infant is held during the early years.

The extended carrying, rocking, and soothing eases the transition into psychological birth. The Self/Other barrier is less rigid, the alienation is less intense, and the obsessive desire to cling to transitional objects is less present. This becomes important later on with the rise of “vertical” religions that seek to transcend the world because they don’t feel like they belong there.

That, in large part, will be the subject of the next post: how the horizontal world turned vertical.

Originally published at https://flownotes.xyz on December 29, 2021.

History is largely the written documentation of the past. As such, it only goes back a few thousand years because writing only goes back a few thousand years. Most of the lived human story, however, has been unwritten — it goes back around 200,000 years ago when anatomically modern humans appeared on set.

That’s right, the brains and bodies of the humans who ate, slept, thought, and shagged 200,000 years ago are basically the same as the brains and bodies we schlep around today. Although similar in that respect, there’s one major difference: our basic mode of consciousness.

What was human consciousness like in the Paleolithic (say 200,000–10,000 years ago)? There’s one (popular) camp led by Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade and others that basically says it was drenched in myth, religion, and altered states of consciousness. Although commonly accepted, is it true?

Historian and cultural critic Morris Berman doesn’t think so. His reasoning and his alternative is worked out in his 2000 book Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality.

Berman is skeptical of a myth- and religion-drenched Paleolithic in which:

“the mundane world is regarded as inferior, and human beings, via certain kinds of occult practices, can become like gods.”

The question of human consciousness

The past half-dozen or so posts on this blog have been dedicated to a slow reading of the first two books of Morris Berman’s trilogy on consciousness.

Each book in this series has taken a look at the development of a certain kind of consciousness and its effects on the broader culture from a historical, psychological, and anthropological perspective.

• The Reenchantment of the World, the first book, was about the rise of scientific consciousness in 16th/17th century European, its problematic effects (i.e. disenchanting the world), and the potential to “reenchant” the world.
• Coming to Our Senses, the second book, was about the neglected role of the body in fashioning western culture and history, and about how integrating the body more consciously into culture (literally “coming to our senses”) may lead to a more somatically healthy future.
• Wandering God, the third book, is about the development of vertical consciousness, its effects on (mostly western) history, and the alternative promise that a “nomadic consciousness” might hold.

Wandering God: a broad overview of the entire book

Wandering God was written in a similar way to hunter-gatherers collecting berries and meat. Rather than a single-minded focus on proving one airtight argument, it collects together three broad themes:

1. The Horizontal World: hunter-gatherers, paleolithic consciousness, “paradoxical consciousness”, world-presence, egalitarian structures (political, social, economic)
2. The Vertical World: settled farmers, neolithic consciousness, the “Sacred Authority Complex”, world-views, hierarchical structures (political, social, economic)
3. The Nomadic World: nomads from a historical and anthropological point of view, “intellectual nomads” like Ludwig Wittgenstein

These three broad themes bring up a few questions:

• What was the horizontal world like?
• Why did the horizontal world change into the vertical world?
• What is the vertical world like?
• What role does the nomadic world play in this shift?
• What does it mean to have nomadic consciousness? To be an intellectual nomad?

These themes and questions get carried and explored across the 200+ pages in the dense yet readable text. One of the central threads running through it is the claim that the horizontal world was “better” in some ways.

As Berman writes:

“…I do believe that HG [Hunter-Gatherer] life was more congruent with the multiple aspects of human Being — spiritual, political, somatic, environmental, and sexual (and perhaps even intellectual) — than the civilized form of life that followed it. The irony of civilization is that the SAC [Sacred Authority Complex] promises a better life yet delivers one that is probably worse.”

Over the next few posts, we’ll explore that in depth. But first, let’s get a clearer picture of the horizontal world by looking at what paleolithic consciousness is.

This post will look at one part of the horizontal world, namely, paleolithic consciousness.

Back to consciousness: What was it like in the Paleolithic?

To probe the question of what human consciousness was like in the Paleolithic era, it can be helpful to break down that term “Paleolithic consciousness” a bit.

Paleolithic refers to the time between 2.6 million years ago and 10,000 years ago. This further splits up into the Lower, Middle, and Upper Paleolithic. Berman is mostly concerned with the Middle and Upper (roughly 250,000 to 10,000 years ago).

Although “consciousness” is notoriously hard to pin-down with a concise definition, for our purposes, an awareness of the internal self and external environment is fine.

Putting that together, “paleolithic consciousness” is about the awareness of self and environment that existed from 250,000 to 10,000 years ago. In the first part of the book, Berman is concerned with defining what that awareness was like and what kind of world it was embedded within.

The Mythico-Religious View of Paleolithic Consciousness

The “mythico-religious” view of what consciousness was like in the Paleolithic comes from scholars like Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Mircea Eliade, alongside some New Age writers and r ock art theorists.

This view sees paleolithic consciousness as centered around magic, shamanism, and non-ordinary states of consciousness. Although it’s true that contemporary hunter-gatherers are interested in those three things, it doesn’t necessarily mean that tribes 50,000 years ago were.

Berman has two problems with it.

1. It violates the principle of parsimony by making simple explanations unnecessarily complicated.
2. It assumes religion is (and has always been) a necessary part of human life.

In its place, Berman argues for a “paradoxical” mode of consciousness.

“Instead, what was dominant was a more horizontal spirituality, a persistent ‘secular’ tradition that is a lot less exotic, but that, because of its obviousness (and our own fascination with the exotic), has escaped our attention.”

The Paradoxical View of Paleolithic Consciousness

By “paradoxical consciousness,” Berman means:

“…a diffuse or peripheral awareness, which can be characterized as being ‘horizontal’ in nature (…) not characterized by a search for ‘meaning’, an insistence of hope that the world be this way or that. It simply accepts the world as it presents itself, and in that sense, it would seem to require a very high level of trust. One does not ‘deal with’ alienation (the split between Self and World) as much as live with it, accepting the discomfort as just part of what is.”

The “paradox” quality of it comes from the fact that it never sits still. It’s moving between categories of self and other. Berman describes it as being “simultaneously focused and unfocused” in a state of “utter watchfulness” that is “paying equal attention to everything all at once” because it understands that “the moment that is fully experienced lasts.”

Paradoxical consciousness has to do with “holding contradictory propositions, or emotions, simultaneously; sustaining the tension of this conflict so that a deeper reality can emerge.”

Those “contradictory propositions” are Self and Other. These two separate experiences haven’t always existed. They emerged at a specific time in history and they also emerge at a specific point of our individual psychological development.

The experience of both of these together, Self and Other, is existential awareness.

Existential awareness

Although we take it for granted, existential awareness, or the “perception of having a self separate from the environment” emerged at some point in human history. True, the exact point is pretty much impossible to identify, but it was most likely during the paleolithic era — say around 100,000 years ago for convenience.

Before that point, humans had “animal alertness” — they responded, like any other animal, to their surrounding external environment. After that point, something else emerged — an internal “I” that was separate from the external environment.

That mix of animal alertness of the external environment and self-awareness of the internal environment is what makes up existential awareness. At that moment, humans became aware that they were somehow separate from the environment. It was a moment of identity — I am this separate internal environment.

Also, it was a moment of alienation — I am not that external environment. Switching between both is something we’ve been dealing with ever since.

To Wrap It Up

Paleolithic consciousness basically amounts to Animal Alertness + Existential Awareness. It was a kind of diffuse or spread out (‘horizontal’) awareness that shifted back and forth between the two.

Rather than ascending to a sacred world above, this paleolithic awareness was deeply embedded in the world as it presents itself in the moment. Berman (borrowing from Walter Ong) describes it as World Presence rather than World Views.

This definition of paleolithic consciousness is an essential part of the broader Horizontal World that Berman unfolds throughout the book. In the next post, we will take a deeper look into that world.

Originally published at https://flownotes.xyz on December 23, 2021.

In the last few posts on this blog, we’ve been working our way through Morris Berman’s trilogy on consciousness. It began with his first book The Reenchantment of the World and continued on with Coming to Our Senses. For this post, it will be useful to provide a summary of salient points for each of these two books.

Once that’s in place then we can move towards a slow read of the final book, Wandering God. This one is, in my opinion, the best and most provocative of the series. So let’s go.

Book One: Reenchantment of the World

Published in 1981, The Reenchantment of the World is concerned with the rise of scientific consciousness. It focuses on the “progressive removal of mind, or spirit, from phenomenal appearances.”

Other ways to think about this “removal” is in terms of a shift from enchantment to disenchantment, a move from participatory consciousness to non-participatory consciousness, or a change in modes of cognition from one of “active emotional identification” to one of detached analysis.

Scientific consciousness is due, in large part, to two factors:

1. The development of a mechanical philosophy
2. The collapse of the feudal world and the rise of capitalism

“Mechanical philosophy” is all about the world being a mindless machine that humans can control and manipulate. They do this through poking and prodding nature to learn how it functions. Natura Vexata, or “nature annoyed”, is what Galileo called it.

Galileo, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, and other mostly-European dudes of the 16th and 17th centuries developed this philosophy as an alternative to the staid religious philosophies of the time. Although this mechanical philosophy started out as a heresy, within a few centuries, it became the orthodoxy — the default mode of modern life.

At the same time, capitalism was being born. This birth involved the collapse of the earlier feudal world. For all the problems with the feudal world, the two things it did well was provide a deep sense of belonging (each person had a well-defined role to pay — baker, blacksmith etc.) and to keep money local.

As trade routes expanded, however, this local feudal world collapsed. Competition increased and the emotional foundations of capitalism — anxiety and busyness — began to flourish. Taken as a whole, this led to the disenchantment of the world.

Berman argues that modern disenchantment isn’t wholly good, and neither was medieval enchantment. Each has beneficial aspects, so they should be synthesized together to create a “reenchantment of the world” (hence the book’s title).

To give a sense of what this would look like, Berman writes:

“The hope is that archaic knowledge, especially the recognition of Mind, will emerge under an aesthetic rubric, so that our science (knowledge of the world) will become artful (artistic). The hope is that we can have both mimesis and analysis, that the two will reinforce each other rather than generate a ‘two cultures’ split. Only through a mimetic relationship with your environment (or anything you address, for that matter), can you obtain the insight into reality which will then form the center of your analytical understanding.”

Book Two: Coming to Our Senses

Published in 1989, Coming to Our Senses is about uncovering “hidden history (in particular, religious history) by means of somatic analysis” in order to “chart the changing mind/body relationships in the West over the last two millennia.” The point of this project, in a sense, is to help us come to our senses.

By “somatic analysis” Berman is talking about writing history with the body holding than pen, rather than the mind holding the pen.

Many modern historians undervalue the body’s role in shaping history. They tend to assume that most people (or the people who make up “history”) are rational actors motivated by a mix of power and ideology. Berman’s “somatic analysis” starts with the body as primary, and then filters in the mental details later.

We might call this “embodied history “ rather than “disembodied history.” This would include, as Berman writes:

“.. topics tied up with the body, the emotions, and inner psychic perception: religious experience, love and sexuality, humor, anger, insults, play and fantasy, sound (not the history of music, which is a very different thing), boredom, depression, fun, crying, sneezing, gesture, the treatment of body hair, anxiety, addiction, suicide, creativity (not simple the history of art), oedipal tensions, incest, and so on.”

Although these kinds of topics are mundane to a large extent, they have played an enormous role in motivating day-to-day behavior which, over time, makes up “history.” The fact that they’re so understudied (or were in 1989) is why it’s “hidden history.”

Using somatic analysis to uncover this hidden history is meant to elicit an experience of “coming to our senses.” Berman uses this phrase both figuratively and literally. Figuratively in the sense of waking up from a delusion. Literally in the sense of feeling the body more and taking it into account during any process of knowing.

Coming to our senses means sorting out what’s important from what’s unimportant. For Berman, the important stuff includes: birthing practices, early childhood development, a rich dream life, animals, ontological security, fulfilling sex life, and great friends and relations. The unimportant means careers, prestige, and intellectual fashions (isms) — the latter are examples of “transitional objects” meant to soften anxiety of the world.

Understanding the bodily motivations that drive western culture — whether that be the ascent experiences that drew converts to early Christianity or the bodily repression that led to the standard model of creativity — can help us in the project of somatic reconstruction. Berman regards this project as vital to a livable future.

Book Three: Wandering God

Published in 2000, Wandering God is about the spirituality, politics, and consciousness of hunter-gatherers, nomads, and farmers.

The hunter-gatherer world — which dominated human existence from, say 200,000 years ago until 10,000 years ago — was a “horizontal” one. Social inequality was very low, the secular-everyday was experienced as sacred, and mobility was high.

The settled farmers world started around 10,000 BCE and continues to this day. It is a “vertical” one. Social inequality is very high, the sacred is entirely divorced from the secular, and mobility is low.

The nomadic world started around the same time as the settled farmer world. It’s a mix of horizontal and vertical — sometimes egalitarian, othertimes hierarchical; sometimes a separate sacred world, othertimes the world itself is sacred; some periods of settlement, other periods of movement.

Wandering God expands the scope laid down in the two earlier books. Reenchantment dealt with mostly European history from 16/17th centuries to the 20th century. Coming to Our Senses mostly dealt with the last 2,000 years of western history. Wandering God deals with 10,000 years-plus of human history that includes plenty of anthropological evidence from non-western cultures.

In Berman’s own words:

“The theme of this book, in any case, is how the dominant perception of human beings shifted from a horizontal to a vertical one; how this shift is (for the most part) associated with the transition from nomadic to sedentary ways of life; how a kind of openness toward experience faded, only to be replaced by a search for ‘certainty’; and how we are now struggling with the consequences of these age-old developments.”

In the next post, we’ll begin looking at this theme.

Originally published at https://flownotes.xyz on November 24, 2021.

A lot of creative people either go crazy (Van Gogh), commit suicide (Hemingway), do both (Diane Arbus, also Van Gogh), or die young (Mozart, the “27 Club”). We assume the “tortured genius” is the only kind of genius that’s possible.

But what if there was another way? Another form of creativity that didn’t thrive off the tension and struggle that leads to madness and death?

That’s what Morris Berman takes up in his last chapter of Coming to Our Senses, titled “The Two Faces of Creativity.”

Where does creativity come from?

For the origins of creativity, Berman looks to an essay by Sigmund Freud. In 1910, Freud published Leonardo da Vinci and A Memory of his Childhood to study da Vinci’s art through the lens of psychoanalysis. There he gave an explanation of where creativity comes from.

Basically, creativity arises from repression. Between the ages of 2 and 5, kids have a “sensual curiosity about the world” — they want to touch, taste, smell, hear, and see all the odd shit that’s on the other side of the womb (aka the world we live in).

This causes discomfort in (many) parents because their parents were uncomfortable with it; their parents were uncomfortable with it because their parents were uncomfortable about it; and so on. Parents choose to repress their kids’ curiosity, and, later on, kids internalize that external repression and manage it themselves (eventually passing it onto their kids).

Two main outcomes arise from this:

1. Complete repression: sensual world-curiosity is entirely cut off, and so is their source of creativity. Fear and anxiety toward the world becomes the dominant stance. Berman reckons that a hell of a lot of people linger here for their entire lives.
2. Neurotic compulsion: sensual world-curiosity is not cut off completely because the stubborn will of the child doesn’t allow it. Sources of creativity still flow, but they have a neurotic and compulsive quality to them. This is the standard understanding of the starving artist and mad genius — the tortured soul who feeds back our tortured world to us.

Alongside those is a third option called smooth sublimation. Berman sees it most readily in non-western cultures. This model of creativity flows from individuals who didn’t have their sensual world-curiosity repressed — or at least not as much. They fear the world less and are less obsessional in their art.

Since his chapter is about creativity, Berman sidesteps the first outcome — complete repression — because it’s about the absence of creativity. He focuses on the second one, neurotic compulsion, and the third one, smooth sublimation.

Two Kinds of Creativity

Neurotic Compulsion Creativity

This kind of creativity is what most westerners mean when they think of creativity. It’s the romantic vision of a starving artist on the brink of madness — Van Gogh, for example.

In this, creativity and self-expression are identical, and the artist creates their sense of self out of the work — meaning their identity is on the line with each new piece. The stakes are high and it has led to some brilliant artwork. It has also led to a lot of broken people, mental health issues, and suicide — the so-called 27 Club, Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Edvard Munch, and plenty of others.

Our love for the romantic aura of “the mad artist” leads us to pave over its unpleasant effects. Berman writes that this kind of creativity “produces a mode of expression that is extremely powerful and focused, but, I shall argue, extremely draining, both for the individual and for the culture at large.”

We find it made of the following parts:

• Conflict and a painful origin: Or, as Berman writes, “you create from what you lack, not from what you have.”
• Art = self-expression: Your sense of self comes from the work, and the mystique of the artist is celebrated. Rather than the unsigned anonymous work of Medieval craftsfolk, you get Dali’s ego.
• Creativity is explosive: it erupts out of the unconscious. As Berman writes, “It is this eruption that generates the psychic split that demands to be healed, and that alters the personality structure so that the work of integration becomes self-expression.”
• Addictive and compulsive: art is never finished, it’s always in-progress and artists are never satisfied. They always have to one-up themselves or other artists, and they always have to create bold new work that creates a new genre.
• Creativity is sexualized and eroticized: “One’s work becomes one’s lover — one’s central, and obsessive, relationship.”

For many, this is creativity — the only possible form it can take.

It’s not (more on that below).

Smooth Sublimation Creativity

Many westerners see smooth sublimation creativity as “craft.” Examples include non-western art, western medieval art, and children’s art. To give a feel for what it’s like, Berman looks at the painting Six Persimmons, a 13th-century painting by the Chinese monk and artist Muqi Fachang.

Riffing off this, Berman sees 3 main things that differentiate it (and by extension, smooth sublimation creativity) from the neurotic compulsion described above:

• Lack of pent-up sexual or sensual struggle
• Healing occurs before the work begins, rather than after: as Berman writes, “you create from what you have, not from what you lack.”
• It’s spontaneous, can be finished (rather than a perpetual work-in-progress), and works within specific genres (rather than always seeking to create a new genre).

We often see this kind of art in non-western traditions, however, we can also find it in western ones. Prior to the Renaissance, art was more craft-based, and artists rarely signed their work. With the rise of the individual, however, the artist’s ego took center stage.

As described above, this shift led to some brilliant artwork, but it also led to a lot of destruction for individuals and the culture at large. In this way, smooth sublimation creativity is healthier. But that goal of “health” comes at a price — for many westerners, Six Persimmons doesn’t move them as deeply as Starry Night.

However, if we’re willing to put “health” over occasional brilliance, then Berman suggests a way of moving from creativity driven by the repression of sensual world-curiosity to creativity driven by a free-flowing embrace of the world.

Moving from Neurotic Compulsion to Smooth Sublimation

Neurotic compulsion creativity has created a situation that is “as brittle as it is brilliant, as neurotic as it is rich.” It requires a somatic damaging of the body — shutting down sensual world-curiosity. We take energy funneling from our entire body and shoot it upwards toward the head. This fuels neurotic creative endeavors.

To give a more detailed understanding of this type of creativity, Berman subdivides it into two parts.

1. Creativity A = the kind described above. The obsessional kind that has the creative impulse erupting from the unconscious and possessing the artist to create work that validates the artists existence.
2. Creativity B = a movement toward the “smooth sublimation model” that consciously manages the unconscious material rather than suffering from its eruption. It seeks to solve the issues at hand and gain liberation.

In describing Creativity B, Berman writes that:

“…one moves into one’s fears. This releases the energy that is tied up in obsessional patterns, which is then available for creative work, and which starts to come out in a more free-flowing way.”

Examples of this include Wallace Stevens’s poetry, Henry Moore’s sculptures, and the minimalist music of Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley.

Conclusion

It’s important to have other models for creativity because the neurotic compulsion model has, as Berman argues, reached its end.

It’s based upon a certain idea model of child-rearing that is quite destructive and leads to neurotic and obsessed adults who’re fearful and anxious about the world. They feel that they don’t belong in it. When they get in power, that leads to problems.

Imagining and then enacting a new kind of creativity could help lead to a more somatically healthy future — one that’s less obsessive, neurotic, fearful, and anxious. Van Gogh made some powerful paintings, but they cost him his life. Was it worth it? That’s up to you to decide.

Originally published at https://flownotes.xyz on October 27, 2021.

The previous post looked at what the “Gnostic Response” was, how it could be understood through the 5-Body model (physical body, body image, unconscious body, magical body, and spiritual body), and how it spreads from one person to another.

This post will look at what Berman sees as the four heresies of western history. The heresies are “par­ticular intersections of somatic/spiritual energy and political context” and include the following:

Heresy and Orthodoxy (the dominant culture at any given time) form a cycle that goes like this:

• Orthodoxy can’t provide people with meaning/spiritual experience
• Heresy points this out and provides a solution (practices for eliciting spiritual experience alongside new ideas)
• Heresy grows, but eventually gets destroyed or co-opted with elements of it forming the new orthodoxy

Around and around it goes, will it stop? That question is saved for the last part of Berman’s book. For now, we’ll look at the four heresies above to better understand the heretical cycle.

Heresy #1: Christians

The Christian heresy was partly born from the oppression of the Jews. This oppression led to an apocalyptic tradition within Judaism that gave birth to the need for an “apocalyptic deliverer” and vertical religious practices. Early Christians inherited that tradition because many of its early members were Jews.

At the time, Judaism at the time was a mix of two strands: the horizontal and the vertical.

The horizontal was all about laws, customs, and rituals. It viewed history as a continuous process with the Messiah coming down at the end of time to liberate the world.

The vertical, on the other hand, was all about the ecstatic experience. It saw history as a discontinuous process made up of different stages. The present stage was the end time when the Messiah would arrive. Through magic, prayer, meditations, and more, you could ascend to heaven, contact God, get the download, and come back down to liberate the world.

Wrapped within this vertical was an apocalyptic tradition. Intensifying during a period of persecution for the Jews (say 175 BCE — the Kokhba Rebellion of 135 CE), this tradition led to the belief that a rebellion would happen that results in a deliverer with “magical powers” (more on that below) liberating the Jews from foreign domination.

Totally understandable considering their precarious political situation.

As Berman writes:

“Imperialism has at its root the interpretation of Self by Other, the imposition of a visual interpretation on an original kinesthetic one. A colonized people intuitively knows this, and this is why magic is frequently resorted to as a weapon: it is a tool for doing away with the visual interpretation and reinstating the kinesthetic one.”

Jewish culture, for most of its history, was a balance of the horizontal and vertical. However, persecution led to a kind of split identity. The vertical tradition could get pretty wild, so they had to tone it down for the Greco-Roman authorities. On the outside, it was all about horizontal laws, customs, and rituals; but inside the Jewish community, there was a lot of magical and mystical practice.

At a certain point, for reasons unknown, the vertical tradition took over. This heavily influenced early Christianity.

Early Christians clung to the vertical because they felt the burden of persecution and hence the somatic need to liberate themselves and others. Their vertical ecstasies were powerful enough to convince people to join this odd new sect.

As more and more joined and had those transformative experiences, “a morphogenetic field can develop and become irreversible” as Berman writes, leading to a sort of “spiritual takeoff” that grows and grows. Once it grew to a certain size, it could sell itself on “a purely social and ritualistic basis.” That is, advertise the horizontal values and downplay the vertical ecstasies. The trances became too wild and destabilizing, so they were cut off, downplayed, or written out of history.

In 313 CE, Constantine accepted Christianity, and soon after it became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Then, it persecuted other heresies.

In summing it up, Berman writes:

“… amidst the rich diversity of Greek philosophy and shamanism, Jewish ethics and magic, and Oriental Gnostic practices that made the culture of the Mediterranean basin so exciting and heterogeneous, one system managed to triumph. Christianity was victorious over its competitors, including the Roman Empire, only to become a Roman Empire of the mind for the next several hundred years. “

Heresy #2: The Cathars

Around the 12th century in southern France and northern Italy, another heresy grew — the Cathars. They posed a threat to Christianity that had ruled western culture for centuries.

Shortly after Christianity became the new orthodoxy, it basically outlawed vertical ascent experiences. This had the effect of cutting off a whole world of interior experience and replacing it with horizontal laws and rituals. From the time of Augustine in the 5th century to around the 11th century, people blindly followed these laws and rituals because “that’s what you do.”

Berman backs this up by looking at the following bits of evidence:

• Monastic life: they just performed rituals and didn’t probe the mind of a sinner until around the 12thcentury — repenting for behavior didn’t require a reflection on why you did what you did.
• Religious debates: they revolved around regurgitating Bible verses & Church Father dogma rather than putting forth intellectual arguments
• Not many documents show a sign of “interiority”
• The lack of references to mirrors, which earlier on in the book, Berman shows to be important for developing interiority

People during this time lived in a kind of robotic consciousness. But then, around 1050 CE or so a complete cognitive shift seems to occur.

As Berman writes:

“It is rather a total revolution in perception, a whole shift in the way reality presents itself to the eyeballs and the brain.”

Evidence for this includes:

• Some monks denied the importance of ritual without an inner component
• Intentionality got taken into consideration in legal cases
• Logic rather than authority played a more important role in religious arguments and doctrinal debates
• Homicide with thought of it before becomes a special crime
• Romantic love based around voluntary choice grows alongside a new interest in emotions
• Examination of one’s conscience becomes important as guilt grows
• Consent becomes more important in marriage
• Individual portraits in painting become more popular

One potential cause for this massive change is that larger groups began to break apart smaller kinship groups. This required a better understanding of what was going on inside another person.

Whatever the reasons, the Cathars emerged around the time that this robotic consciousness began to thaw. When interiority opened up.

Meet the Cathars

Around the 11th century, a bunch of Dualist Heresies arose. These were groups of people who believed that the world could be broken into Good versus Evil and that despite all the Evil, there’s a small nugget of Good in each person. It’s that person’s duty to release that Good from being stuck in the material world by following a spiritual path. The Cathars were dualists.

They had sort of three-tiers of membership if you will:

1. The Perfect (Perfecti)- the hardcore practioners who renounced the world and lived exemplary lives
2. The Believers (Credentes)- ordinary folks who looked up to the Perfect.
3. Sympathizers who supported them even if they had other beliefs.

The Cathars took up residence in southern France, which had a cosmopolitan vibe about it — philosophy, universities, satire, pagan rituals, and a lot of tolerance (families were often half Cathar and half Orthodox Church).

The Cathars had a variety of practices that reliably produced non-ordinary states of consciousness: fasting, trance meditations, and chanting. It was said that the Perfect mastered ascent experiences that allowed their souls to split from their bodies and ascend. It was said they didn’t make a sound when burned at the stake.

Some Cathars spent their time as troubadours — the wandering poets of southern France known for their romantic songs. These songs, at least some of them, were coded references to a romantic longing for Christ or religious experience rather than a particular person.

Destruction of the Cathars

But that was annoying to stuck-up authorities like Pope Innocent III. So, in the early 13th century, hot off the macabre high of the Inquisition (gotta love that torture), he sanctioned others to persecute and kill off the Cathars.

There was a battle between North and South France, with the Northern authorities having their own more mundane reasons (they stood to gain land and wealth). It ended with the Cathars being destroyed, which means the destruction of a unique interior life and feminine stream of culture for the West, which carried on for the next few hundred years.

It goes a bit like this. A Church Orthodoxy that largely lacked interiority battled the Catharist Heresy that included interiority. They did this through outright repressing it (persecution and lots of burnings at the stake) and by co-opting their beliefs, in particular their beliefs about romantic love.

The Church authorities took all the archetypal and somatic energy released by the Troubadours and Cathars when speaking of romantic love and longing and focused that on the figure of the Virgin Mary. This allowed them to control its potentially disruptive effects.

Heresy #3: Renaissance Occultists

Renaissance occultists reacted against the stale orthodoxy of Church Aristotelianism and Scholasticism. By the 15th century or so, it “had completely lost touch with the natural world” by blindly following ancient authorities to the exclusion of real experience. Instead of looking at bodies to understand anatomy, they would look at old textbooks while dissecting bodies and (incorrectly) believe the textbook rather than the (bloody) organs at hand.

That clearly wasn’t working, so the cultural avant-garde of the day tried to figure out a different way of gaining knowledge of the world and spiritual insight. Instead of stale contemplations, they wanted an “I’ll do it myself” approach that involved “somatic techniques that catapulted man to the status of a god, using cabala and ‘natural magic’’ to control his destiny.”

This could involve everything from “astrology, Jewish number mysticism, and related arts” to “the world of fantasy, dream, and intense sensual experience.” The purpose of it all, for the most part, was to repurify the body so it can ascend back up to the heavens.

They ended up mixing bodily practices like fasting, chanting, and prayer with a mathematical study of musical harmony among other things. Giordano Bruno’s work on the heliocentric worldview was a mix of mathematics and magic. It wasn’t just the fact that it was more mathematically accurate, he also felt that contemplating it could elicit a gnostic experience.

Magic Becomes Science

As the decades went by, the work of these occultists was built upon and stripped down at the same time. The heliocentric model was taken more seriously, but the gnostic implications were left out or downplayed. The experience of soul travel was too difficult to deal with, so it was mostly set aside for mathematics.

As Berman writes:

“The “heretical” recovery of ecstatic ascent and magical practice during the Renaissance blew the lid off the dead cover of Church Aristotelianism, and opened up a new role for the human being, that of the operator, or magus. In the early phases, there was much direct experimentation with this “ladder to the stars.” This energy enabled a whole “new” worldview to emerge as a possibility, an active and dynamic one. But because of the particular conjunction of all this with major political and economic trends, the liberation embedded in the ecstatic tradition got turned against itself. Ascent was co-opted not by the Church, as in the French model [The Cathars], but by “the age.” Ascent got reified; in Galileo’s work, as in Newton’s, the same laws applied to heaven and earth; this was how the two worlds got sewn together. The theory of universal gravitation was a kind of “lasso,” in which a mathematical “rope” was thrown out and the heavens were hauled in.”

Renaissance occultists sparked the birth of modern science, but science didn’t take it all. It built upon the math but left behind the vertical experiences. From this new way of modeling the world came a mechanico-mathematical philosophy. This becomes the new orthodoxy.

Heresy #4: Nazism

Renaissance occultism, originally a heresy, got subsumed into the science of Galileo, Newton, and others. They ditched the experiential side of things (soul travel) and focused on developing a mechanico-mathematical philosophy. This way of looking at the world as something that can be controlled and manipulated. This gave rise to the “modern world” — a liberal, democratic, rational way of organizing society.

Nazism, in the 1930s and 1940s Germany, was the heresy that reacted against that. Whereas previous heresies were religious, this one was secular. Berman sees it as a “demonic attempt to reenchant the world.”

Rise of Nazism

Nazism, just like the previous three heresies, was centered around ascent experiences and ecstatic experiences. It represents a “return of repressed pagan (mystical/heretical) tendencies that had been buried by official Christendom for centuries.” Instead of taking the form of a new religion, it played out in the secular world.

Nazism built upon irrationality, the sense of “cosmic meaninglessness and futility” that followed their defeat in WWI, the corresponding need for “secular, or political, salvation,” anti-Semitism, and a whole host of 19th century Romantic (anti-industrial) and Occult ideas (Blavatsky’s idea of “root races” alongside Ariosophy and more).

All of these parts were built up and managed by Hitler and his inner circle. They funneled it toward their “demonic attempt to reenchant the world.” This attempt was carried out through “public shamanism” — those vast trance-inducing gatherings that included lights, public symbols, and Hitler’s charisma and “mesmerizing” oratory.

As Berman writes:

“National Socialism was, rather, a secular variety of religious apocalyptic. People wound up in a kind of personal/political “heaven” of existential clarity and immense psychic reorganization;”

That secular apocalypse created a hellish world that was luckily destroyed during the war.

Conclusion

What binds Heresy and Orthodoxy together is their insistence on vertical ascent experiences. Heresies usually go for the DIY approach whereas Orthodoxy says “we can provide that for you.”

As Berman writes:

“One [Heresy] is about direct somatic experience, the other [Orthodoxy] is about fear of the same and about finding substitutes for it. But in one crucial respect, the two camps are identical: reality is regarded as being vertical. The idea, in fact or theory, is that things are not sufficient or satisfactory on earth and that one must somehow go to heaven in order to make them right.”

Will this cycle just continue to go on and on? Or is there some way out? Why is western culture so obsessed with not finding this world enough? Berman takes these questions up in the last section of the book.

Originally published at https://flownotes.xyz on October 8, 2021.