The Divine Afflatus

There is perhaps no better way of describing our modern era other than the manner in which it was described to me by my former professor of anatomy in the elevator at the RCSI in Dublin. 'We are living', the portly, jocular and yet somewhat stern countenance of Professor Monkhouse declared, 'in an intellectual dark age'.   It is a phrase I am constantly reminded of as the evidence for this astute observation becomes more poignant with each passing year.

Nietzsche called for thinkers who might see beyond the horizon of 'good and evil' for 'philosophers of the future'.   The American philosopher Emerson called for a 'poet of the future'. That future brought Emerson, Hemingway, further afield it gifted the Europeans with; Joyce, Beckett, Thomas Mann, the French existentialists and so on.  That same future answered Nietzsche's prayers with Freud.  It is doubtless that Emerson would have immersed himself within Joyce's love of the moment.  His minute and precise dissection of, a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, and his rendering of the apparently banal into the truly sublime, is a clear answer to Emerson's call for us to transcend the myopia of convention and marvel at the infinity that we are a part of.

In Ellmann's definitive biography of Joyce he describes a scene where Joyce and his brother were on a platform at a train station. The pair observe in a passing moment, a woman hurriedly crossing the tracks. Joyce remarks at how that occurrence would take on an entirely different significance, if the woman had been unfortunate enough to have been struck by an approaching train. Each second; before during and immediately after the incident would become invested with a detail that is generally forgotten as soon as it is perceived because that moment lacks a significance for us.

It has taken me more than a single day to read Ulysses and each time I approach the novel I discover more and more; ever new veins of intellectual treasure within it's single day. Doubtless this will be my experience each time I return to the text for as long as I live. Indeed if Emerson's Christian sentiments were to survive Bloom' masturbating in the park and defecating with relish and consummate pleasure, I am sure he would have greatly appreciated Joyce's controlled explosion of a moment into it's constituent infinities. Within this magnificent rendering of the common place, of the pedestrian perambulations of one 'El Bloomo', we encounter the clarion call of the Transcendentalist (whoever he is when he's at home).  We hear the words of Thoreau and the grave admonishments of centuries of Greek philosophy.  For an Irishman to 'know thyself', one could just as easily begin by looking in the cracked looking glass of our humble servant Joyce.

There is of course, for both Thoreau and Emerson, little difference between the lump of compressed carbon one wears upon ones finger and the equally beautiful if not more useful lump that one tosses upon the fire. Joyce was assuredly a capitalist, he enjoyed money and was always short of it, yet neither his wealth nor his legacy were of the material, rather they are of that same substance that Emerson often refers to as 'Soul'.

The world, unfortunately is not ready for Emerson, for Thoreau for Nietzsche. It was not then, it is not now, and one wonders if it ever will be? This is perhaps why philosophy must appeal to the future, for an audience, for delegates and devotees, for the revolutions that might evolve our civilisation towards the practical application of intelligence.

However, where is this future that is so welded to our receding horizons?  This veritable Eldorado, where each age of thinking men and women do send their prayers? As far as I am concerned this appeal to the future is entirely misdirected.  For sure the future will undoubtedly iterate and reiterate the ideals of a Nietzsche and an Emerson.  This stream of consciousness will inevitably find it's Zeitgeist, it's voice as the vision of an era is reborn in it's new skin. This  inexhaustible seam of precious metal will be dragged to the surface in new and more sophisticated vessels. The old truths,of the old masters will say the same things, but in a language and attire that are more familiar to its age. Where once there was God, the philosopher of the future will substitute Infinity.  Where once there was 'soul' the scientist will substitute life.  In place of the mysteries of the universe we shall diet on quantum mechanics, astrophysics, ultimately the same points the same philosophies are being iterated and reiterated over and over again.

The philosopher of today must always look to the future because today he has been the first to climb over that old fence, to escape that old mire. Because he does so alone, because he is, he was, and he must be the iconoclast, the father of revolution he goes to that place alone, and there he must anticipate he future.  The purity of the metal he has brought up from the mine-shaft is inversely proportional to his following.  He can only look to the future for its refinement, for its iteration it's capital investment into an ephemeral truth. How far a nation is from an evolution of its intellect is reflected in the reverence it affords to the philosopher and the poet.

And yet what is brutally distinct this time round, what is entirely different for today's philosophers and poets of the future, is this: 

That they cannot luxuriate in these notions of a future, of a 'next generation' to ignite that torch and carry on this crusade.

Ecology population growth, and the expansion of the human herd, bring a new imperative and altered form to this 'future', one that the past did not and could not have imagined.   Humanity may well be compelled to listen to the voice of catastrophe.  The same catastrophes we meticulously construct, our monuments and temples to the 'old ways'; all may well be lain to waste by the approaching storm.

Should there be a recovery from the disasters we are building, and doubtless there will be in some form. That same future will laugh loudly at our ignorance and our 'old ways' just as we deride the ignorance of the past. Today we have our Pharaohs and our crusades, today we put our fellows into ovens and gas chambers, today we remain as faithful to the ideals of the past, we are ignorant of the deluge approaches from the future.

Where to begin with the idiocies and ignorance's that simultaneously blind and define our age? With medicine perhaps? This enormous farce that we perpetrate upon ourselves. Indeed, the only thing that modern medicine preserves is the ignorance necessary to keep itself alive.

Consider this: which would you rather, illness and happiness, or health and unhappiness? Most of the sensibly sentient would undoubtedly choose the former. Yet what are we saying here other than iterating the reality that illness is entirely mitigated, cured and dispelled by happiness.

How can one label another as relatively sick or unwell if indeed he is happier than ourselves? We are led to believe that healthy people are happy, or at least that they have good reason to be;  yet it is the inverse that is entirely and unequivocally true, that happy people are healthy.

Indeed there is little point to being healthy if one is unhappy.  Many many billions of dollars are wasted upon the ridiculous attempt of trying to make unhappy people healthy, whilst leaving them chained to the same conditions that causes them to be miserable.  Suicide, self destruction quick or slow, this is the primary pathology of our age. Unhappy people invariably engage themselves in the process of 'health-destruction' and all medicine is purely palliative.

It  remains a poignant testimony to both the intellectual paralysis of our age, and the abject failure of modern medicine, that unhappiness (in the western world) is the leading cause of premature death.  Of course it is not recognised as 'unhappiness' but is referred to by the euphemism of 'life-style'

When are we going to get it into out thick heads that people damage their health because they dislike themselves, and they dislike themselves because they are anxious and unhappy. Whether by design or accident medicine has not taken ownership of the concept of happiness.  This ideal once belonged to religion and its forfeit was a consequence of not adhering to this or that particular dogma. Without legal ownership of the ideal of happiness human medicine is simply veterinary. Cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse, obesity, all are manifest forms of abuse perpetrated by the self  upon the self as a consequence of unhappiness.

Happy people are happy enough that they do not need drugs to make them happy. One of the crucial ingredients to happiness is freedom. However with freedom comes the implicit obligation to apply that freedom towards happiness. America loves it's freedom, and yet it does not know what to do with that freedom, it has yet to evolve this capacity and remains shackled to 'ownership' and the material.  In the land of the free, the free enslave themselves to a greater degree than anywhere else on earth. They enslave themselves to food, to drugs to the herd, to idiotic notions of success in the eyes of others.

Freedom is wasted to the degree that the world would be a better place if America were instead a nation of slaves, united in labour towards some common purpose, some husbandry of the land or industry. And yet, enslaved as they are Americans unlike the Europeans and the Asians, possess the freedom to think independently.  This remains a crucial distinction.  Even in the fading twilight of American industry, they will undoubtedly be the first to imagine a freedom beyond those liberties they have enslaved themselves to.  Given enough time, enough rainforest, enough oxygen, America might yet evolve a 'new cowboy', a new hero, and a new crusade; one that leads towards a freedom that is free of the old 'freedoms'.

Freedom from dependence, freedom from addiction and most importantly freed from ignorance. Socrates was perhaps the first old fool to remind us that the wisest man is the man who can recognise his own foolishness. Intelligent people are happy, they are as happy as the fool who is ignorant of his ignorance, yet the happiness of the intellectual is relatively free of disease, is relatively immune to dependence.  The intelligent man is identified by his capacity to honestly recognise and remediate his ignorance, and by the capacity for independent thought. To think independently one must be free.

The moment one becomes capable of thinking independently is the moment one obtains the potential for happiness. Independent thinkers make no aesthetic and ultimately no material distinction between gold and brass, the one is hard the other soft; both are equally brilliant when polished and viewed in the light. Those who can think independently garner as much pleasure (if not more) from the blackbird as from an evening at the opera. Those who can think independently will walk with Bloom rest with Thoreau, shout with Neitzsche and iterate in word and deed, the wise counsel of Emerson and the rest.