Six

Beyond Civilization

In the beginning was boredom

—KIERKEGAARD, Either /Or

Preliminary Note

THIS CHAPTER is a response to an inquiry that asks the following questions:

Is there an ideal kind of civilization? Can civilizations present and past be cross-culturally compared in terms of achievements and failures? Would the results of such comparisons be acceptable to most men? What would be the criteria or parameters used to justify such results? Can modern civilization be more or less preserved as is? Does it require reformation? Must it be scrapped and replaced? If something must be done, who are the ones who have the will, courage, and knowledge to maintain the present or produce a new civilization: are they humanists, artists, scientists, philosophers, the common man, a given social class or combination of social classes? Will there be a civilization of the future?

First, a brief response to these questions before turning to the fundamental question, the presuppositions of the questions themselves, in order to suggest a related yet categorically different mode of questioning. To the questions as posed, it would seem to me evident that since civilizations are themselves ideals, and since any civilization is a form of life, there could be no single “ideal civilization” any more than there could be a single “ideal person.” And since civilization is a form of life, it is only accidentally measured by criteria such as achievement or failure, criteria meaningful only for activities that have a finite, assignable end. If life has no such assignable end, neither has civilization. Each life and each civilization proposes to itself its own ideal; beyond that, what have we but abstractions thought out by someone else, a “critic” of persons and civilization? Precisely from what platform would such a critic speak? Next, the aspiration to define an ideal “acceptable to all men” destines the project to disaster; have all men ever agreed on anything? Should they? Would the agreement of most be compelling on the rest? Have we not with this question covertly introduced criteria appropriate to a political rally into the domain of philosophy to the latter’s sorrow? So far as preserving or reforming modern civilization, fortunately critics of that civilization have very little influence on their subject matter. Civilization everywhere and anywhere changes itself, preserves what it still has some heart for, changes toward what it still has hope in. And all of this occurs independently of the cheers or wringing of hands of private critics. Nothing alive stands still, nor does it turn itself inside-out into something unrecognizably different. With what would one “scrap and replace” one’s own civilization except with what is already afoot in that civilization? Of course, “something must always be done,” but that could hardly be either the invention of a new and unheard-of form of collective life out of whole cloth, or the imposition of a glacial immobility upon what is. Nor, of course, is the life of any civilization sustained or modified by the “will, courage, and knowledge” of anyone. If any civilization rested upon any such virtues, it already looks moribund; and if something new is to proceed out of will, courage, or knowledge, it had better look at once elsewhere for its motive power. Those virtues are indeed appropriate to individual acts, particularly those where knowledge has some role; but neither civilization nor culture is an individual act, nor are the ideals that define civilizations objects of anything that could even remotely be called knowledge. They are evidently ideals, and an ideal is an object of choice and devotion, not knowledge. And finally, “will there be a civilization of the future?” Who knows? The term “future” conceals a disquieting ambiguity: is it the factual future, to stare into which is both amusing and fatuous, or is it the ideal future, which is but another name for our hopes? Or is it a dialectical future, to which I shall turn in a moment?

In a word, the presupposition of these questions is insupportable. The civilization in which we live is not an entity independent of us from which we can, as observers, detach ourselves in order to judge it, preserve it, scrap it, or project out of private dreams something new to be brought into being by will, courage, and knowledge of the good. For a single person to examine his civilization, in order to approve this and reject that, is for him to offer us nothing but a moral profile of himself that may be interesting in its own terms, but not for the question he imagines himself to be addressing.

And thus, by mental formation, we are already in civilization perhaps as a resentful fish in the water, and if we were not, we would not understand the least thing about it. Our life does not offer its meaning to an a priori being from Mars; and civilization, whatever else it is, is a form of life. As a form of our very lives, it is nothing that can be grasped as a whole. It is not surveyable, conceptualizable, nor does it offer itself up either to experiment or to a priori insight, Husserl in his Crisis to the contrary notwithstanding. It is not, therefore, a directable process. Whatever understanding we have of it is by way of sympathetic participation, and that offers us only partial glimpses into something essentially unfathomable. These glimpses need not be delusive so long as we remember the surrounding darkness; but need we listen further to anyone who supposes himself to have grasped either life or civilization? Has he grasped either himself or a friend? Woe unto him if he thinks so.

It is not surprising, then, that the questions are all “civilized” questions addressed to civilized men, and that therefore they can hardly touch anything fundamental. Civilization, as we shall see, is in effect nothing but the very questioning of itself. But so long as it remains within the circuit of such questioning, it can only stumble about in the domain of personal preferences, empty hopes, contrary denunciations, self-hatred, or self-congratulation.

But fortunately none of us is wholly civilized. There remain, therefore, resources from which we might glean some suspicions of those origins and that future destiny of the civilization within which we are. These ideas of origins and destinies do not offer themselves as personal preferences, nor are they efforts to peer into a future of which no one knows anything. They place themselves on the plane of phenomenological and dialectical analysis; our questions now are: Why and out of what did the human spirit civilize itself in the first place? What is that into which it has civilized itself? And what can be envisaged as the dialectical future of the civilized spirit? The three aspects are all dialectical: that is, they name stages in the development of the human spirit. And since we all are in midflight, that is, civilized people, can we not by sounding out the depths of our own actual spirits find the secret motives through which we civilized ourselves in the first place, what it finally is to be civilized, and where we civilized men must long to go? Where that is will carry us almost wholly out of civilization conceived of as anything spiritually final. But this very project of archaeology, of uncovering deeper strata of the mind and its life, presupposes that these layers are all still present, waiting to be uncovered. The life of mind is itself dialectical, a developmental form of existence in which the past is not simply obliterated and unrecoverable except by inference, but rather still there, buried but active; and its future haunts it, not in any factual form, nor merely as a moral choice, but as already logically prefigured in the present, and therefore available to the conscious life that lives now. These presuppositions, which might seem highly questionable put so baldly, are in fact merely abstract descriptions of the very everyday and humdrum life available to any of us. The mind moves ahead, builds upon itself, and it retains implicitly its former explicit enthusiasms, and it already conceals within it something beyond its own explicit present. Needless to say, this way of uncovering the embedded logic of culture, civilization, and what lies beyond civilization owes its essence to Hegel; I should argue that some such thing is all that philosophy can say in response to the initial questions, even if it departs from Hegel’s own analysis here and there. And, as with any phenomenological analysis, facts from here on are to be taken as illustrative rather than evidential.

Nature and Culture

Nature is first, culture second, and civilization third; these are surely not related simply by factual succession or chance. Each presupposes what is prior to it for its basis and sense. And in the present case, the most difficult of all for us is nature. For if we try to elicit the sense of natural life in ourselves, we are at the very limit of our possibilities of excavation; is there anything whatsoever left in man of the purely natural? If we look in the direction of the “animal,” self-protection, food gathering, and reproduction in ourselves, we find that these are already so modified by culture that the purely animal or “natural” is for the most part poetic, what other animals are to man, who is no longer an animal. We feel traces of ourselves in our pets and in the higher apes. Our pets take on something of our life and the higher apes almost begin to behave as we do. Some men even wish to become animals, but that nostalgia is itself strictly human. In any event, the life of animals is not conspicuously a life within a culture, and ours is. Human self-defense is not exclusively snarling and rage; feeding becomes dining; and lust is modified by love. Caves and nests become homes, a naked beast clothes itself, paws develop into hands that can make tools, snouts develop into faces, the body is tattooed and ornamented, hair is cut, the animal walks upright with some discomfiture and fatigue, ways of right behavior are established, ideals are proposed, grunts and signals become speech, a society is formed beyond the animal troop, gods are revealed and worshiped. The final step occurs when man distinguishes himself generically from the animal, even when he traces himself totemically back to some favorite beast.

The natural is for us a limiting idea; our own nature is no longer accessible phenomenologically, and the content of the idea is more or less drawn from our observations of and friendships with other animals. It is a fundamentally negative idea arrived at by an attempt to strip from our own sense of life all that can be accredited to culture, that is, all mental interpretation. I should say, therefore, that no man knows what it is like to be an animal or natural.

But we are in a far more fortunate position with regard to our own selves as participants in culture. Here we have but to elucidate our own lives as we live them, but with a far slighter qualification: that we do not attribute to culture that which properly belongs to civilization. For our purposes here, culture names a collective mode of life that is the work of instinctive mind; civilization is the work of mind no longer instinctive but consciously reflexive upon culture.

Culture, then, can be regarded as the work of mind, but mind working instinctively. It is not “natural” if that term designates life which while conscious does not yet exhibit in any conspicuous sense volition and deliberate thought. The natural world has desire and sensation, of course; animals are not asleep; but will and thought, not yet. While springing up naturally, those powers by their operations bring man out of the purely natural into the human, and with that man forms his own culture though hardly by any act of deliberate choice. The mind here works by its own instinct, and what is the instinct of mind but to plan and think, to raise to order that which before was simply given or found, merely natural.

The culture I have in mind is itself hardly to be found now except in primitive or degenerate forms in New Guinea, Australia, the Philippine Islands, etc., but are these not already essentially transformed by the attentions of civilized anthropologists? And yet some such thing is the basis of everything within history that developed into civilization. Can it too be excavated by dialectic, in order to respond to the question why did we civilize ourselves? And after that, what? But with culture we have something more accessible to us than the natural; even within civilization much of culture remains even though modified.

If culture is that form of collective life which proceeds out of the instinctive operation of mind, and if the primary acts of mind are will and thought, taken together, the aspiration of mind itself must be to raise the natural to the level of significance, to either impose upon or discover order within its own life. But mind, I think it safe to say, primarily never regards its own works as “imposed” by it; for itself, in its direct and instinctive force, it assumes it is discovering an order already there. It is only through a secondary reflection that it interprets its discovery as its own work. But that already belongs to civilization, to the reflexive examination of its own “work.” But in the beginning, that is, in culture properly so called, mind works directly, or, as later reflection has it, “naively” or “instinctively.” Needless to say, it does not regard itself as naive.

What is the “order” it discovers? That there is good and evil, that there are general connections among the events in its life, in other words, that what had been simply there is now felt and seen as connected; and connected in a form that is intelligible. Since it is intelligible, and since the mind of culture does not imagine itself as the source of order, that source is something like its mind but independent, divine, imperious: the old gods of nature and human life. The gods are origins, the very same who were the gods of one’s ancestors, not in the least modern or private, gods who are the source by their own will of what is proper and what is not, of the fertility of man, beast, and crops, who are sufficiently different from ourselves to suddenly appear without any reason knowable to ourselves in the form of bolts of lightning, floods, droughts, who are sufficiently close to ourselves to be moveable by prayers and sacrifices, so long as they are performed in the old way and with a pure heart.

For culture this is the way things are; and it is best for man to live within an order which proceeds from the gods and which was discovered by ancestors, that is, from of old. To be human is to worship the gods in the old way. Culture, then, is that instinctive sense of coherence, significations, and order where mind is straightforward. Its will wills the objective, divine good; its thought thinks the truth, and its arts are at one and the same time useful and in the praise of the gods.

Life lived within the primary acts and instincts of mind is so foreign to us civilized ones, it might be well to pause here for a moment. It surely has been lost irrevocably. And if it looks hopelessly primitive, before we proceed to the delights of civilization there is room to ask precisely what has been lost. And I should argue that culture, defined as here, is the absolute basis of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Without culture the famous trio of values would lose instantly every shred of significance. They are all to be essentially modified in civilization; but then what is it that is being modified? To anticipate, the modification worked by civilization will be to place all these values within quotation marks.

But for culture, they are never within those brackets which evacuate them of their primary meaning. To understand the gods as “gods” is already blasphemy. Similarly, to speak of truth as “truth” is to turn it into falsehood. To speak of both truth and falsehood within quotes is to speak unintelligibly, although such is the inveterate practice of civilized philosophy. Some effort therefore is required to recapture the straightforward sense of life lived before civilization and upon which civilization lives parasitically.

Culture loves what it loves and hates what it hates and is certainly capable of perceiving inevitable conflicts between the two as well as dreaming of possible resolutions. It is by its own instinct moral where that term had not yet lost its concrete sense, or had not yet attempted to become formal. The famous question “why be moral” would be unaskable and senseless. The moral is what is right, not what I think right, and its rightness is directly connected with the gods. Religion and morals could not be separated; and the gods were the gods of always, of the ancestors, and they were least of all abstract principles, laws, or even scrutable by reason, the very exercise of which in this domain is impiety, arrogance, and human folly. Furthermore, the moral in culture is invariably concrete, ancestral patterns of how to live and what should be done. Hammurapi’s Code and the Ten Commandments offer us almost pure examples. In the case of Hammurapi’s Code the moral laws specify even the price of a bushel of corn and the precise penalties for cheating, as if they were to be fixed for all time. Freedom meant largely the release from slavery, and not the very essence of consciousness as it has come to be for Sartre. Moral life then was inherently connected with custom, but custom was not understood as the sad chronicle of what men had done but as the best in what they aspired to do, and unexaminable by private persons. Neither Plato nor Aristotle wished young men to study the state with an eye toward its critique; they might have a pure reason sufficient for mathematics, but they did not have the concrete experience of life necessary to understand all those “reasons” for custom that cannot be reduced to or seen by abstract reason. Further, they lacked piety or reverence for the sources of life; they might even go so far as to dream that they had invented themselves. For final efforts to make sense of an inscrutable life, culture turns to its dramatists. Drama, because the subject matter is not private sensibility, but rather the social life of the group; that too must be seen, and seen from the point of view of the gods, who are both angry and amused. The dramatist, then, whether he writes comedies or tragedies, or neither but is rather a choreographer of customary rituals, is for culture the same as the priest or the philosopher. And the drama, the ritual, the dance, are never conceptual although they are indeed reflective. But the reflection now is not into abstractions, but into what the dramatist presents as a final concrete whole: what we men can see after all our wars, loves, and destinies are over. Some such thing is the instinctive life of mind that finds only a degraded echo in the life of civilization: now culture and its direct senses, problems, and celebrations are left only in the form of stale religious and national holidays, empty forms, hollow rhetoric, boring entertainment, all of which nevertheless can catch us by the throat for brief moments.

Truth for culture also means something radically different from what it means for civilization or abstract reflection. For culture or the instinct of mind, to he true is primarily the character of a man and not of propositions. In Anglo-Saxon, “truth” comes from “troth,” which means loyalty and not propositional correctness—preserved in an obsolete form as “plighting one’s troth.” To be loyal, to be true, is obviously a moral value and not the product of intellectual cleverness. Any man is called upon to be true, by his lovers, friends, and community; it doesn’t require a supreme act of “intellect.” Its opposite is not the incorrect, but the disloyal, the lying, the cheating. Obviously here we are dealing with a very different category from anything widely studied in epistemology.

The instinctive acts of mind aim directly at their proper end; culture is our name for a social life and understanding based on that direct and instinctive aim. Culture then is the home of the true, good, and beautiful, as well as their straightforward opposites. Culture is that lost paradise which has always haunted civilization. Or it is that Golden Age which was “once upon a time,” or will be in some unforeseeable future when civilization cures itself of its ills? And always there is the suspicion that civilization is itself the illness. Culture is not easily accessible to us civilized ones; we are too civilized within to find the straightforward instincts of mind lying ready to hand. Almost our entire impulse is to reflect them into something else, into reflexive instincts, which is precisely what they are not. Nor will history be of much help, since history itself is the product of civilization and therefore of least use precisely on those periods where written language was never or only occasionally employed, the period of culture. Surely we are closer to our primitive selves than we are with our natural selves, but still at such a distance that this stage is best illuminated not by analytic thought but rather by the dreams of poets.

Constituent of that dream of the Golden Age is the structure of the dream itself, taken as wish-fulfillment and not nightmare. The Golden Age was beautifully uncomplicated and self-sufficient; its people were noble, loyal, and devout, or if they were not, their crimes had a certain inevitability and magnificence to them. Meanness, small-minded cleverness, and endless deception are rare though there is a whiff of them too in Loki and even Ulysses; and there was a good deal of trickery on Mount Olympus, but then the Greeks loved agility of mind more than most. The arts of the Golden Age are beautiful in a simple and obvious way: finespun gold encrusted with the brightest and rarest gems, silver and marble, all turned to the purpose of temples, cups, swords, bracelets, helmets, harnesses. In the Golden Age men had a detailed knowledge of their natural environment acquired by experienee and lore, hardly by experiment and analysis. Its social arrangements were fixed and satisfactory in form. There was always a question of who was to be king, but not of kingship itself. There might similarly be a question of whether justice was exercised, but not of what it was. Even the wars of the Golden Age seem in the poem to be rather more like gorgeous rituals than nasty bloody affairs among strangers. Victory was glorious, celebrated, and preserved in legend. All in all, the dream that for all we know may also have been true presents us with the least-alienated man. The history of the idea of the Golden Age has been well studied; Plato even has Socrates dreaming of it in the Republic; the good life before the soul became fevered with the desire for more than was either healthy or just. Christians and Marxists also spend a certain amount of their time in such dreams. The questions at the beginning of this essay are equally dominated by such dreams.◦

But our present problem is somewhat different from either a historical or a poetic one. Since culture, civilization, and the dialectical future of civilization are all considered here as layers within present consciousness, and therefore subject to excavation and articulation, our present question concerns the motivation by which the human spirit chose to depart from culture and civilize itself; and finally what lies beyond. The question is phenomenological; that is, the act of civilization is regarded as an act indeed, something with a sense, and not an accidental fatality that fell upon us as a result of chance discoveries in the natural sciences, the technology of metals, the discovery of suitable climates, trade routes, population expansions, or anything whatsoever resembling a natural process. It goes without saying that all these things occurred, and all had their influences upon life, such that now virtually the entire planet is civilized in some form or other. But to become enchanted by these phenomena as though they were causes is to forget certain essential facts about the human spirit as well as the essential phenomenon being questioned. Civilization is an act, an act of a very distinctive sort and an act of the human spirit. The acts of the spirit have an intention whether self-consciously known to it or not; the intention of an act is essentially and not accidentally connected to it, being, in fact, its very structure. And since the spirit is in varying levels and degrees conscious, its intentions are in principle accessible to its own reflective analysis. The question, why did the spirit civilize itself, is therefore in principle answerable and answerable by a reflexive return of the civilized spirit upon itself to discover that hidden intent. Needless to say, the project must always remain tentative in its results and sensitive to the very profound complexity of the problem. No one can grasp the problem in its depths.

The history of the histories of civilization would show them to be of little use for our project. What for us is a problem for them is presupposed in the form of some morality taken for granted. They are in effect concealed theologies. One class sees the origin of civilization in a Fall. The temptation to the knowledge of good and evil was accepted and with that men have been confused in mind, speech, and action ever since. Thus disobedience, greed, egotism, vanity, lust for power, sex, or curiosity, whichever the favorite vice of the historian is, “accounted for” the rise of civilization, “whose proudest virtues are but glittering sins” for Augustine. Or the morality shifts feet: men civilized themselves because of the obvious advantages: now the Garden of Eden is the scene of savagery, butchery, cannibalism, all of which are obliterated by civilization. Superstition gives way to reason and science, tyranny to democracy and law, the sway of tradition to a readiness to reform, disease, poverty, and hunger to public health, wealth, and an abundance of food. The wretched naked savages now have the opportunity to clothe themselves, feed themselves, and live longer than thirty or forty years. But here we are not interested in the “moral” evaluation of civilization. If it is a Fall, why indeed did men choose to fall? But if it is Progress, it is progress only into civilization and its own values, which can hardly help us with the question of why those unique values should be chosen. More importantly, the values of civilization are necessarily at the expense of other values realized better in simple culture, which accounts for the civilized nostalgia for the Golden Age. Morally considered, civilization is a highly ambiguous phenomenon; and it would take a hardy soul indeed to sum it all up as an undoubted triumph or failure. Finally, since so many of the triumphs of civilization are apparent only late in its development, how could they supply the motivation for its choice at the earliest stage? And so there is, at very least, room for further questioning.

The Origin of Civilization in Boredom

The question may now be rephrased: what was lacking in the Garden of Eden? and the answer that seems to me most direct is excitement. Its happiness and virtue were insufferably boring. Men civilized themselves to escape suffocation by the Good, True, and Beautiful. But something should perhaps be said to save this answer from the charge of frivolity.

Civilization cannot be regarded simply as a prolongation of simple culture along lines already definable within culture. It is something else altogether, a radically different posture of mind that we shall call here “reflection.” If the mind of culture feels, thinks, wills, and acts straightforwardly, the civilized mind never does, at least not in its capacity of being civilized. This is not to say that it is devious but rather that it is reflexive upon its own direct activities. It therefore does not worship, but sees itself worshiping; it neither loves nor hates, but critically notices itself “indulging” in these activities. Its own reason formerly directly addressed to problems now becomes suspect as the very source of the problems it formerly found in nature. Reflection is the doubling back of consciousness in any form upon itself; and with this doubling back, the individual self comes to self-consciousness. The “I” enters the stage as the central actor. For the instinctive acts of mind, there is a nature out there to be patiently and reverently explored, gods whose pleasures and angers are to be studied, other men who are to be loved and hated. The act of reflection radically transforms the scene; noticing that all of what had previously been regarded as “objective” is so only for some subject, and that it itself is that subject, the formerly objective world becomes now phenomenal: it is the mere correlate of my own or some other subjectivity. Things, nature, men, and the gods are for me what I take them to be; otherwise they lose sense, and indeed how can we think the unthinkable, experience the unexperienceable, or love the indifferent? This phenomenological reflex, which has been studied again and again, usually from idealistic or transcendental points of view, is at the same time not in the least a product of arguments, but a possibility always latent in the instinctive mind of culture and, when chosen, “when the temptation is accepted,” we have by an inner act already radically transformed ourselves, our world, and our lives.

This act of radical reflection upon ourselves has been justified in a number of ways but always in my opinion inadequately. We are now, needless to say, already on the plane of what in late civilization is called “idealism” or now “transcendental phenomenology.” The justifications of radical reflection follow a predictable pattern: it is only in reflection that we can finally achieve the truth of what we formerly took for granted. And the truth so seen is the destiny of European man, as Husserl defends it in his Crisis. For Hegel it is a necessary stage in the ultimate teleology of the spirit itself, whose goal is Absolute Knowledge. But in each case the new “truth” or the Absolute Knowledge attained is radically different from the old truth, which had nothing to do whatsoever with reflexive clarity. Nor is the “phenomenological life” or the “life” of the Absolute Spirit anything but the most questionable extension by metaphor of what any simple culture calls life. Socrates was far more clearheaded when he said right out that the philosophical life is “learning how to die.” The justification of reflection by its truth or vital value is inadmissible; it seeks to accredit an activity by the achievement of goals absolutely foreign in essence to it. The inherent home of the good, true, and beautiful is never in reflection, but in precisely those acts of mind upon which reflection reflects and which in our present discussion is called “culture.” If “phenomenology” is the current name for the most radical and transcendental reflection, it is no wonder that “existentialism” rises always as its counterpart; phenomenology is the philosophical expression of civilization, and existential thought frequently the reversion to the posture of direct culture by civilized minds. Before the act of civilization men never thought of themselves as “existentialists.”

If these civilized motives then are insufficient to answer the question of why men civilized themselves, we are not yet at the end of our resources. Why indeed should the human spirit depart from the “existential,” that is, from the direct life of culture? Our answer given above is because the Golden Age is boring. But boredom itself should receive some attention, necessary mostly because the moralists regard it as utterly frivolous, itself a product of a worn-out civilization, jaded nerves, a superfluity of the sensuous, something in effect worse than a sin, since boredom is also bored with the category of sin. Baudelaire’s greatest offense lay far less in his official vices than in the frankness of his confession of ennui.

What we are looking for is that which lies beneath or is beyond the true, good, and beautiful of the Golden Age, the age of direct life; something in short which is not wholly expressed in those values and which therefore offers itself the option of escaping from them. And what could that be but the human spirit itself, defined now as that not wholly given over to the values of culture but given over to something else, given over perhaps to its own life, which is always activity. But activity in the present domain is an act of transforming the given. It is, so to speak, the art of the soul. And now, given the spirit, which is transformative activity, what would such a spirit do in the Garden of Eden, having tasted its direct delights, except escape; and how escape except by that act of reflection upon itself which so profoundly transforms the direct meaning of life itself? Animals fall asleep when nothing moves; equally the immobility of the spirit is its death. The movement open to it is not so much the transformation of its world, planting new gardens or devising new means of irrigation; it is that inner act by which its former reality becomes a phenomenon of its own devising, in a word, the reflection that is the essence of civilization. The spirit must act if it is to live, and the one act by which it can escape asphyxiation by the sincerities of the good, true, and beautiful is to look at them, reflect upon them, put them within quotation marks so that, having lost their real, direct meanings, they can be played with. Civilization now appears as a vast amusement park of no direct value to life, not a culture, indefensible by direct value, and in depth a remedy to the menacing boredom of the spirit. But to preserve the life of the spirit is hardly a frivolous value, even when its works are one and all defined by insincerity, artificiality, and amusement.

Lest this seem far too theoretical, let us take a glance at some phenomena. Civilization, we have said, is the social form of reflection. But what could more foster reflection than an encounter with others unlike myself? And where would that occur preeminently except in the city? No wonder that civilization is fundamentally an affair of cities. Cities of course are not large villages, nor is the difference merely quantitative. The city in developed form has a wholly different sense than a village, the one pertaining to civilization, the other to culture. The village is the way families and clans live together, loving its old traditions, its old gods, more or less self-sufficient, and highly suspicious of both strangers and the new. The city on the other hand is unthinkable without its foreigners, slaves, merchants, travelers, its dispossessed and rootless, all of which it now holds together not by custom but by explicit, written law, enforced by magistrates now appointed or elected but decreasingly hereditary. “Justice” is no longer located in the eyes of one’s family, measured against all personal loyalties, but something hitherto unique, “equality,” namely the equalization of the “rights” of an inherently motley population. The city is the perfect place for rights and duties, the rule of law rather than persons, and all of this culminates in its most active institution, the law court, where words rule supreme.

The spirit of the city offers us the archetypical example of the spirit of civilization. A few years ago in Cambodia, riding in a pedicab outside of Siem Reap through a small garden of Eden, complete with banana trees, a small stream full of fish, and some very young people playing naked in the water, I asked the driver why no young men were to be seen. Only children and grandparents were waving from the thatched huts. “They’re bored,” he said; “they’ve all gone off to Siem Reap where there are bicycles, movies, lights, and the bars.” Was this a mistake? I saw before my eyes the self-expulsion from the Garden of Eden of young men who could no longer endure their beautiful lives, even to the point of choosing the shoddy, backward “city” of Siem Reap. There they would see movies showing them further excitements . . . . They would never return home.

The transformation worked by the city touches everything. What had hitherto been quite natural as dress, manners, speech, occupation now takes on an ethnic aspect; that is, it looks local, quaint, primitive, and definitely not modern. It sinks to a dialectical past, that which has already been surpassed. It is first a matter of shame, then laughter, then in the weariness of civilization with itself, it is rediscovered, imitated, and exhibited. Civilized reflection is always an act of abstraction from the immediate and concrete; it is necessarily universal, rational, and international. To reflection, the authority of the traditional disappears and is replaced by the general law; neither reflection nor reason has any past in itself; the “past” for reflection is that which is reflected upon, namely, the life of culture, the instinctive work of mind now to be understood with rational categories.

The civilized spirit celebrating itself now endeavors to manufacture everything, to remake the old, to invent, to expose the secret and sacred ways of nature so it can repeat or modify natural processes at will. Deliberate and methodical arts supplant magical practices and reverence. Reflection overcomes the instinctive acts of mind, puts them into its past and valorizes itself for the first time as the “modern.” But the modern, whatever else it is, is nothing but amusement and play; the traditional, which is what always was, is the stable source of that very seriousness reflection flees; the modern in essence is perpetually changing, can never catch up with itself, and enjoys this very motion. It can never get stale until one tires of the category of the modern or until civilization transcends itself.

If spoken language is the medium of culture, civilization is dominated by the written word, which seeks to give a deceptive permanence to the whirl of reflection, to communicate with persons not present, to inform civilized persons of that which they have never experienced. Existentially considered, it is a form of dislocation: paper speaking to men in general of things they have never seen. It enlarges consciousness by directing it away from where it is. To the thoroughly if not absurdly civilized man, affairs exist largely in what is written about them, the word displaces the thing, and now the world exists in a new medium where it can be played with at will, all experienced with the exaltation of a freedom from the old and instinctive life where not everything has to be said. In the classical old, high cultures, the king felt no pressing necessity to either read or write; he hired a clerk for the job.

Civilization both is created by and creates its own habitat. The dwelling of the village becomes an apartment, the temporary abode of the restless spirit. Its decor must be changed yearly to ward off tedium and to keep up. Better yet is the trailer, or mobile home, a contradiction in terms to life as lived in a village. The modern spirit is frankly devoted to excitement and entertainment, not surprising since those values were its very origin. The city is full of shows and in all respects is nothing but an enormous showplace for things, people, events. Everything that had its own existential location in village culture is now taken out of context and put on show; what are cities like Florence or Venice but museums of museums? The arts of culture are turned into “aesthetic” objects to be admired for their “composition” since that is all they have left, ripped out of their sacred functions. And so with the great libraries, zoos, and universities where books, animals, and sciences are offered to all. The medium within which such activities are equalized in value is money, which by abstracting from each thing its unique value and essence turns everything into comparable units, a kind of language of the marketplace. In contrast, the New Guinean hesitates to use money; he looks upon each coin as a unique thing, to be prized for itself and its associations and not in the least equal in value to another of the same denomination. They are like shells, each of which is itself. Copper pennies are preferred to silver coins of the same value; copper is more beautiful than pale silver.

It would not be difficult to trace every characteristic phase of civilization back to the same sources, that reflection away from the instincts of mind that form culture. From the shops, shows, restaurants, nightclubs, the buying and selling, the emergence of tourism as a way of life competing with religion, the transformation of marriage into love affairs, the final need for psychoanalysis, sleeping-pills, and liquor before the troubled sleep—all of this was in outline foreseen by Baudelaire with that very ambiguity which characterizes civilization itself. The “sincere,” the “bourgeois,” the sacrosanct and sanctimonious must give way to the “modern”; and what is that but a kind of bonfire of the free spirit? The fuel is nothing less than the values of instinctive culture, the good, true, and beautiful; the igniting spark is boredom and the promise of amusement; the spectacle itself is neither the truth, nor the beauty, nor the moral value of anything: it is simply the glee of the life of the spirit.

Excursus: Baudelaire to Duchamp

In his poetry, prose poems, and criticism Baudelaire is the modern civilized man par excellence. If others tried to see throughout history a universal type that increasingly began to look like the “common people,” Baudelaire celebrated the Dandy, contemptuous of the bourgeoisie, useless, a flaneur of Paris, rich, and without obligations beyond amusing himself. If historical painters sought the great scenes of history where universal meanings were highlighted, such as David’s “The Death of Socrates,” Baudelaire celebrated Constantin Guys, “the painter of modern life,” who caught the passing parade, sketched at the battlefront or the racetrack, perceived the eternal in the absolutely ephemeral. If Rubens doted on natural flesh in rosy bloom, Baudelaire scorned it all in favor of “cosmetics”; as for the natural in general, he “refused to worship a row of vegetables.” The sumptuous, exotic, savage in a Delacroix were the proper food of the imagination, and then by a final reversal, wholly typical of both Baudelaire and the modern, he also could find “nothing more interesting than the common-place.” “The beautiful is always the bizarre,” he said somewhat in anticipation of André Breton. If, straightforwardly, good was to be loved and evil hated in an eternal opposition, for Baudelaire evil grew its own unique flowers.

If Baudelaire was one of the first and last celebrants of the peculiarly modern, Marcel Duchamp passes beyond, both to help create and at the same time to exhaust the delights of Dada, surely the final phase of civilization beyond which there is only backtracking. If the “serious” painters, like Cézanne and Picasso, work into old age furiously battling with the problems of making an oil painting, Duchamp after some early triumphs such as the Nude Descending the Staircase became bored with canvas and oil paint, worked some seven years on a glass, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, where love was reduced to a curious machine constructed not in accordance with physics but Duchamp’s own physics of chance, a kind of pataphysics. But then he got bored with that too and it remains definitively unfinished. There were other serious amusements such as his ready-mades, where snow shovels, bicycle wheels mounted on kitchen chairs, retouched cheap lithos, or combs were presented to the art world as objects of interest. This too became boring, so Duchamp amused himself with chess, only to become bored with that. “What do you do now,” he was once asked: “I breathe,” he replied, implying a kind of euphoria in his “meta-irony.” With Pierre Cabanne* he expresses again and again his “motive”: “it was amusing,” along with, “I have always been lazy.” Art was a “drug” from which he had long ago cured himself,† In a superb picture of the old master we see the final face of civilization.‡ He has seen through that too.

Götterdämmerung

Culture passes into civilization, but that magnificent autoda-fé of the free spirit cannot possibly burn out of its own resources since it has none. It lasts only so long as there is a trace of the naive life of mind left to burn up. What then is the dialectical or dramatic future of civilization so conceived?

Three possibilities are open, a reversion to its past, that is, the endeavor to create a new primitive culture; the persistence in its own present through variations on its themes; or the passage into its future, which carries it beyond civilization into something else altogether.

The temptation toward a reversion back to the stage of a relatively primitive culture is always great, particularly so in mass civilizations like those of modern times. Obviously never more than a small proportion of men in any high civilization really are civilized or reap in any authentic fashion the benefits of civilization. In effect they live out their lives more or less as butts of jokes or as the objects of scorn by the aristocracy of the civilization. They are the “middle classes,” the “bourgeoisie,” half-educated, rising by newly acquired wealth alone, and avid purchasers of books and works of art whose chief content is the ridicule of themselves, with which they share a chuckle too. But it is all half-understood, and when one reflects that the aristocrats of civilization also frequently enjoy economic privileges, what can the finally enraged and disappointed ones do but dismantle the existing civilization in favor of a new “people’s culture,” one that can be “shared by all”? The new culture, not surprisingly, is always held to be “more natural” than the now hated civilization, perceived as a life-stifling artificiality. The sanctification of agriculture and hand labor is quick to follow, education is made more practical, and men of the people have an advantage in politics. Foreign languages become an affectation, passports for traveling become more difficult to get, disloyalty to the new state culture is increasingly scrutinized. For “thought” the meditations of the Leader are not merely sufficient, but anything beyond is somewhat suspect. These “thoughts,” whether from Mein Kampf or the Little Red Book are to be committed to memory and chanted on public occasions; they are not subject to scrutiny, let alone laughter. These new primitive cultures all prize “sincerity,” that is, a peculiar form of humorlessness, against which the older civilization is judged to be sickened with hypocrisy, salon wit, arrogance, hauteur, frivolity, degeneration, and internationalism. It is not long before the Jews, as internationalists par excellence, begin to feel the folk pressure.

Civilization is always susceptible to this internal disintegration back into an artificially generated new culture. Nor can it be surprising to the dialectician of history to see each new culture, if it is given a long enough life, proceed to civilize itself back into what it had just despised. The new culture begins to laugh at itself, to crave leisure, to relax the revolutionary morality, to be just a little wicked; and soon, bored stiff with the people’s earnest values of the good, true, and beautiful, it debauches itself back into the cynical laughter of civilization. This particular cycle, always at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, looks too much like the bad or repetitive infinite of Hegel.

The second path open to the civilized spirit is, of course, to go on with the infinite variations possible to it. After all, it can always improve itself with educational, economic, or political reforms. And the arts have a way of becoming their own subject matter, such that this year’s works are commentaries upon last year’s. There will always be a new generation, alienated from what is, ready to make it all new. Since the turning of this glittering wheel offers us nothing essentially new, we shall pass it by to examine the third alternative. After all, the dialectical future of civilization is not yet another civilization.

Beyond Civilization

The same intrinsic motive that generated civilization out of naive culture, boredom, also serves to propel it out of civilization itself; what indeed could be more boring than the perpetual artificiality, invention, and restlessness of the civilized life? Wit tires of wit, the gourmet no longer seeks the new dish, love has twisted and turned through too many affairs, and the arts end up mocking themselves. The civilized mind either longs to extinguish civilization altogether into a new culture, or else, foreseeing the eventual civilizing of that too, looks elsewhere; but where else is there?

Culture lives in the village, civilization in cities; where else can the spirit now live except within its own privacy? The form of life, then, that carries the spirit beyond civilization will not be essentially social, by which it is not meant that “cities will disappear” historically. They may very well, but that is hardly our question. Our question touches rather the possibility of a withdrawal of primary interest in the business and work of civilization into a final interest, the recovery of the human spirit by itself. For this work there is no social form; it must be the work of the individual with other individuals perhaps, in personal communication. But even then the transcendental solitude of the spirit can never be abrogated by itself or breached by another without a defeat of its project.

This project of the spirit, to recall and recover itself, we shall call, following Hegel, “absolute.” From this standpoint culture is the instinctive, dreaming life of mind; civilization represents the reflection upon that dreaming life, promoted by the other person. The face of each expresses his response to what he sees in the face of the other, looking at him. The face of civilization, then, is inherently bland, tired, the mirror of a mirror. The possible person has been dissipated into the other, who in turn is dissipated into his other. Both culture and civilization are “one-sided”; and the question is raised whether the spirit cannot recover itself not by regression but by development. The recovery of the spirit by itself is not an obliteration of its previous development but an understanding of its one-sidedness through perhaps a new perception of itself. As no longer one-sided, it may be called “absolute”; is there a further development that it can perceive?

The inherent work is now that of living mind and not another social product of civilization. Nevertheless, such personal work finds its way into civilization as an expression in the arts, religion, and philosophy. For traces of that work, then, we shall look at some contemporary expressions in these three domains: surrealism, existential religion, and transcendental philosophy.

SURREALISM

Surrealism from the first had a marked preference for the “primitive.” A “surrealist map of the world” shows an enormously enlarged New Guinea and an enormously shrunken United States and Europe. New Guinea, Africa, the Easter Islands, the Hopi Indians, these were the last bastions of the old culture untouched by civilization. Moreover, the primitive in each man was to be released, that domain ruined by reason, science, self-consciousness, and their delusive sense of reality. At first glance then surrealism might appear to be a regressive stage; and yet a closer look shows the opposite. The surrealists did not wish to become primitives, except in some wilder moments, and, while they prized the minds of the child, the insane, and the criminal, they themselves remained for the most part under control. In fact what was cultivated was a double or paradoxical consciousness of both the real and the unreal. The surreal they sought and expressed always bore an indirect reference to the reality it was above. Breton in the First Manifesto says: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality . . . into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.” And again in the Second Manifesto: “Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low cease to be perceived as contradictions.”* The affinity of this “point of mind” with Hegel’s Absolute is obvious and explicitly recognized by Breton. Its affinities with the mystical works of Ekhardt and the “coincidentia oppositorum” of Cusanus need not be belabored. For our present purposes it may be enough to remark that, historically developing out of dadaism, surrealism offers what is already beyond civilization, an effort at an absolute recuperation of the spirit, but not on the plane of reason, reflection, or civilization, all of which now pass as one element into a new final synthesis. And it is not surprising that surrealism is not merely an aesthetic but a form of life aimed at “freedom, poetry, and mad love.” Its politics were usually revolutionary, and its social form consisted of small groups, with shifting membership and weekly meetings, that became increasingly exclusive. It entered the civilized world mostly in the form of outrageous demonstrations and exhibitions; its proper life was its own.

EXISTENTIAL RELIGIONS

Beyond civilization are also certain religious directions, many of which originated with Kierkegaard. Characteristic is the violent anticlericalism expressed in Kierkegaard’s The Instant, where official priests are declared to be worse than murderers and the whole of official Christianity, with its concomitant notion of a “Christian civilization,” is excoriated as an enormous fraud. And all in the name not of a new church or new civilization, but of inwardness, an absolute and solitary living in the presence of an Absolute Telos, God. It is absolute, and if anything in the world should stand in the way, it must be discarded. Abraham, in Fear and Trembling, provides the archetypical example of both the absoluteness of his devotion to God and the essential incommunicability of that faith. He may give an example to those who can understand but his work does not consist essentially in improving upon civilization or founding a new one. That inwardness may as well be called ontological autobiography.

TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy as a function of civilization is a “rational,” “teachable” enterprise, more or less summed up as “analysis.” Analysis of what, except the direct, naive, or instinctive acts of mind and speech. In its analytical role it is essentially piecemeal, looking now at this, now at that, eschewing by both taste and method anything aiming at the synthetic or systematic. Analysis is self-multiplying by a form of spiritual parthenogenesis: the analysis is no sooner given than it too invites further analysis, which in turn . . . all of which gives us a perfect image of the hidden intentions defining civilization by its interminable reflection. And yet if recollection of the spirit is sought, what used to be called “wisdom” in those parts of the philosophical classics that are no longer read or taught, it can hardly be found through any extension of analytical reflection. And so we now hasten over those parts of Plato where the philosopher is considered to be the “spectator of all time and existence.” Could anything be more pretentious, less teachable?

And yet happily there are and always have been signs that philosophers recuperate themselves from time to time, take up their personal and private-task of understanding the life of the mind, even when they decide it is not understandable. The work of understanding must of course be the work of the philosophic self and not a group engaged in what they might imagine to be a collective “scientific” project. It remains the act of that self no matter how many sympathizers form a “school” around it. It may be expressed, but then the purport of the expression could hardly be to compel any exclusive assent to what is said; it resembles a conceptual confession, which from time to time also uses arguments. It does not seek to generate a new civilization unless it misunderstands itself. But unless it seeks some final and transcendental understanding of itself as philosophy and of the existence of the living person of the philosopher, it has not risen above the controversies of the schools. Where it does aim at such understanding, it represents an effort to achieve something that can no longer be a part of civilization but looks at that absolute point where life and death are one, which has one foot in life and another outside, and where perhaps the spirit can recuperate itself by understanding how it itself arose, and where its final destiny lies: always with itself.

* Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971).

† Calvin Tomkins, ed., The World of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Time Inc., 1966), p. 173.

‡ Though not completely or without some nostalgia, as the last work at the Philadelphia Museum shows.

* André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Seaver and Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), pp. 14 and 123.