Author: Meng-hu

Death poems and disposition after death often reveal the writer or speaker more than any other writing or saying. Sometimes these words are too polished to be other than apocryphal, but the words and sentiments do intend to capture the style of the one to whom the words are ascribed.

While the practice is or was widespread in the East, it has an occasional counterpart in the West. But perhaps Westerners need to reflect more upon death in order not only to write a last poem or saying but in order to write more worthily along the way.

A poet’s death poem should not be the epitome of his or her writing but sometimes is taken that way. Perhaps because of our insistent curiosity or our insatiable desire to witness a grand finale, death poems or statements about disposition of one’s body fascinate us or give us vicarious pleasure as something we hope we can have the courage enough to write or say so forthrightly.

Today, when death is a drawn-out process of enormous expense, bureaucracy, and distraction, the tranquility and equanimity needed to reflect and sum up is cheated from the dying. Perhaps the living should start summing up even as they live, day by day.

A favorite death statement is ascribed to Nyogen Senzaki, the Japanese teacher of Zen who came to live in the United States and died in 1958. He is well known for his wonderful anthologies of Zen sayings: Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, The Iron Flute and Like A Dream, Like a Fantasy. Instead of writing a death poem, he had apparently made a tape recording that was played at the funeral — after arrangements had been made and mourners crowded in. They had already filled the place where his body lay amongst flowers and chanting led by twelve monks and much ado when unexpectedly the tape began playing. Nyogen Senzaki told them:

These are my last words to you.The funeral must be performed in the simplest way. A few friends who live nearby may attend it quietly. Those who know how to recite sutras may murmur the shortest one. That will be enough. Do not ask a priest or anyone to make a long service and speech and have others yawn. … Remember me as a monk and nothing else. I don’t belong to any sect or cathedral. None of them should send me a promoted priest’s rank or anything of that sort. I want to be free of such nonsense and die happily.

As to the disposition of his ashes, Nyogen Senzake stipulated that some should be sent to his old friend Soen Nakagawa in Japan. The rest should be buried “in some unknown, uncultivated field.” As to that field:

Do not erect a tombstone. The California poppy is tombstone enough. … I would like to be like the mushroom in the deep mountains — no flowers, no branches, no root. I wish to rot most inconspicuously.

These wishes of death and disposition are hard to match in their pithiness and their value in putting things into perspective. Funerals are for the living, not the dead. We ought to think such arrangements through while we are able to shape them, though the living will always insist on its perogative of celebration and ritual.

But Senzake’s words, especially about disposition, remind us of a Western equivalent, the poem “Solitude” by the 18th century English poet Alexander Pope, especially the last stanza:

How happy he, who free from care
The rage of courts, and noise of towns;
Contented breathes his native air,
In his own grounds.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest! who can unconcernedly find
Hours, days, and years slide swift away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mixed; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most doth please,
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unheard, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

How to distinguish between the genuine hermit and the mere recluse? “Mere” in the sense that reclusion is not necessarily eremitism and is only motivated by part of eremitism. Reclusion is a hiding away for mixed motives ranging toward the negative: misanthropy, worldly failure, mental illness, anti-social behavior, the psychological burdens of involuntary solitude.

Even historical cultures sympathetic to hermits have their aberrant personalities like hikkimori in Japan or vagabond thieves in India or medieval Europe. Not to mention those cultures antagonistic to hermits, as in a 1876 news item about a man who was obviously mentally handicapped but who was labeled a “hermit” by The New York Times.

The negative sense of the recluse is represented by the person not predisposed to ideals of eremitism nor motivated by philosophy, religion, spirituality or personality. Such a person may be engaged for a time with success in social circles, be involved for a time in intimate or decision-making interactions with others. They may have always shown signs of eccentricity or irregular personality but it did not affect them. Then, perhaps gradually or suddenly, they become reclusive. Among such eccentrics are celebrities such as Howard Hughes, J. D. Salinger, and the Beales of Grey Gardens. With such recluses there is no question of excluding them from a roster of hermits.

A vocational aspect of eremitism does not preclude eccentricity bordering on what others would consider irrational. Elements of austerity, asceticism, aesthetics, and personality strongly influence average people judging others. Such values are so anti-modern that people cannot but dismiss those who hold them as eccentric or worse.

Add physical reclusion to this mix and most people will conflate the hermit and the recluse. All of these traits are alien to the goings-on of the world, where power, beauty, cleverness, and social pleasures are the chief virtues.

Etymology shows a further means of distinguishing the hermit and the recluse. The word for hermit or eremite derives from “desert,” thus connoting the context as well as the disposition of solitude. Recluse only means “hidden away,” and suggests a furtiveness and fear that is not admirable. Note how these terms did not originally intersect with specific religious or institutional etymologies.

The progress of psychology in identifying multiple intelligences, patterns of learning and consciousness, and how the individual responds to rearing, environment, and genetics suggests a map or profile of the hermit, even a methodology or morphology of eremitism.

If certain emotional factors are today isolated by popular psychology in order to identify their parts (for example, happiness), the same characteristics of solitaries can be compiled in relation to those factors. Thus, while happiness consists of the perception of positive events and the sense of empowerment to make such events come about — with the concomitant attitude that successfully copes with one’s environment — such a discussion is focusing on an emotional state that is accessible to everyone, regardless of personality, beliefs, or philosophy of life. Regardless of solitary or gregarious styles or any in between. We miss the big picture if we just focus on sets of characteristics available to all but do not pursue characteristics that the individual taps, refines, and extracts insight from according to their philosophy and style of life.

The temptation of the hermits of the early centuries of the modern era was acedia, a sense of futility and boredom brought about by social and psychological isolation. This may have been a response to sudden isolation found difficult to handle, or it may have resulted from the human tendency to rely on a mind full of thoughts, busyness, and occupation. Acedia has been called depression, but it is not simply that insofar as it was considered “vocational” and corresponded to a stage, not something inevitable. The image of the depressive recluse is probably the image of the individual who does not or cannot resolve depression, even “vocational” depression. Such a factor in the life of solitaries may have to do with changes of material or social circumstances, or with having one of the intelligences that lacks intra-personal skill.

Rather than acedia, Nietzsche described the modern bane of solitaries to be resentment. A subconscious resentment at the ability of others to function smoothly in social circles and garner worldly success contrasted to oneself trapped in isolation or alienation can certainly lead to resentment. To Nietzsche, of course, this was a cultural phenomenon as much as a personal one. Resentment can grow into anger and misanthropy — yielding the classic recluse, who knows nothing of the vocational aspects of eremitism, silence, and solitude. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra recognizes and conquers resentment through disengagement.

Indeed, disengagement, the only remedy for resentment, is also a homeopathic one. Disengagement is not indifference to the pain of depression, alienation, or angst but is rather a disengagement from what should not function as genuine and an engagement with what does. Small doses of disengagement, for the novice of solitude, brings large and rapid gains to the self-esteem.

Self-esteem is still quite necessary for the potential hermit in the world, but disengagement allows that self-esteem to not grow into ego but, in fact, to shrink in proportion to one’s true place in the world. In this process, humility mingles with insight, power and will redefine themselves in terms of understanding and freedom. This process also allows the world to shrink to its true place in us.

As successful disengagement breaks down the dependence on the world and its feedback, it does so without exacerbating our emotional or psychological weaknesses, without leaving us vulnerable to the strange and dysfunctional profile of what the world thinks of disparagingly as the recluse.

The utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham proposed a “hedonic calculus” to synthesize or rationalize the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. His criteria was: 1) intensity, 2) duration, 3) certainty, 4) remoteness, 5) fecundity, and 6) purity. That is, each factor was to be applied to a pleasure in order to determine whether it was a pleasure worth cultivating.

The problem, of course, is that pleasure is not mathematical or even rational. While commutativity exists in algebra, it does not exist in real life. The sum is not the whole of the parts but a circumstance that can be reproduced somewhat but not absolutely. Just as we can argue that for every effect there are causes that can be pursued and identified, it is not the case that we can always or even sometimes reproduce them. Thus we are largely satisfied if we can get close. That is the grand compromise with life that largely undermines a consistently Epicurean solution. In other words, common sense rather than a calculus are sufficient for everyday life.

The historical Epicureans were not debauchees as such but refined aesthetes pursuing the pleasure of conversation, of the gourmand and the art collector, for example. There is an air of decadence, and it could be maintained that it does not represent an ethical or social threat. But that is more likely because the behavior is secondary to the person who has already acquired power and control, and now merely seeks to enjoy the fruit of gains acquired whether ruthlessly or out of cleverness. The dust of worldliness still clings to the dry calculus.

Freud is most closely identified with the “pleasure principle,” which essentially restates the premise of the hedonic calculus. But Freud tempered the principle with the reality principle (which makes the pursuit and exercise of pleasure more dependent on environment, circumstances, and feedback). He further tempered it by the idea that pleasure, after all, is nothing more than the avoidance of pain. This unmasks epicurean aesthetics but also acknowledges that nothing will every really satisfy Bentham’s fantasy.

Stasis may better define the momentum of sentient beings, not in the sense of stagnation or immobility but equilibrium. Freud was in this regard rightly concerned with behavior not philosophy. Equilibrium seems the innate goal of beings because it sets their growth, motility, etc. in harmony with their environment. While this ability to maintain equilibrium seems to be the operating behavior of nature, it is a learned behavior in human beings, or rather a behavior that must be learned the hard way. Everything in modern society and culture advocates mobility and change, power and control — while nature and our minds strive instead for equilibrium. The world is “nasty, brutish, and short” according to Hobbes, but primarily because others always seem to want it that way.

The far ends of the pleasure spectrum abandon the calculus: the infantile and the mystical. Both seek not only equilibrium but union, union with the source or Source of their being. Both abandon the content of logic and reason for experience, leaving the calculus behind. The infantile desire for the equilibrium of the womb, the “oceanic” feeling described by both Freud and Jung, has its counterpart at the other end of the spectrum with the mystic’s union, with samadhi. The place of equilibrium is a circumstance, a construction of our mind and time. Like pleasure, union is a variable, not the sum of the parts. It decays, dissolves, and returns the myystic reluctantly back to that dull state of ordinary sentience. The remains are a memory, a sensation that cannot be reproduced.

But the sense of union cannot be reduced to a calculus because it cannot be measured. Like subatomic particles, the experience of union changes when we train our tools of observation or discourse upon it. Classical literature from the biblical Song of Songs to Rumi have tried the sexual analogy, which appeals to common readers, but that only drags it down to the calculus. The fallacy is in intensifying engagement with the impermanent.

The calculus fails because it is a search for the ephemeral projected into the future, bound forever by desire. By disengagement from the ephemeral, the mind is strengthened, attracted by what it can create of its own mental environment, ineluctable, not dependent on the chase for measures of quantity or quality. In this subjective but authentic environment, the equilibrium we need can be quietly constructed. As Shantideva puts it:

In solitude, the mind and body
Are not troubled by distraction
Therefore, leave this worldly life
And completely abandon mental wandering. (8.2)

And abandon with it the calculus.

Romanticism objects to Enlightenment reason not for what reason does but for what it does not. What reason does not do is to take into account the emotions, sentiments, subjectivity, imagination, and insight.

In the tenuous medieval synthesis of reason and revelation, reason was not the robust empiricism of the Enlightenment but a simple logic inspired by Aristotle and fit to function as the handmaid of theology. Revelation as the content of theory defined the parameters of reason and provided objects of emotion and devotion in a neatly closed system.

For early modern thinkers, this too comfortable relationship would not do given the discovery of science and the economic and political changes sweeping Europe. What shattered the medieval synthesis was reason as empiricism, no longer the docile tool of theology. Except that at the same time it was emptied of the human element for the cerebral and the political, docile now in a different way — to power and authority.

The Romantics sought to reinstate the subjective element previously addressed by Revelation and to direct it to more “reasonable” objects, namely those that transcended empiricism. This transcendence would shun the aura of authority and control previously projected by Revelation and its institutional guardians: Church and State. Thus, a new revelation.

For the Romantics, the most urgent issue facing the self — especially with the demise of faith — is Death. To resolve the stark meaning of Death’s presence was far more pressing than the empirical status of scientific or technological objects. The social pace of the ascendancy of scientific and technological interests in society was only wrecking the self, and Romanticism was acutely aware of social forces. The reconfiguration of these material forces allied against the individual but now bereft of faith accentuated the pall of Death. Keats writes:

When I have fears that I may cease to be …

and

My spirit is too weak — mortality
weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die …

Further, Shelley, burdened by the world (“the sphere of our sorrow”) is tempted to speculate “how wonderful is Death” because it liberates.

The perception of Death is the beginning of solitude. Solitude is the renunciation of what is now perceived as impermanent and injurious. Solitude is the true condition of each consciousness, each individual.

The search that follows insight is a search for what endures, for what abides, not for any given entity. Thus Keats speaks of the nightingale (in “Ode to a Nightingale”) as “not born for death.” Ultimately, nature itself, unencumbered by contrivance and the intervention of human beings, is the source of revealed values or principles, a universal of Romantic thinking.

But more intriguing, perhaps, is how solitude is part of the Romantic pattern. Part of this pattern is the manifestations of solitude in nature, the solitary places of nature: forest, seas, remotenesses. This characteristic solitude of places extends to objects in those places: flowers, rivers, shores, storms, stars — all partake of solitude by their stolid presence, their deep silence, their quiet conformity to an ineffable pattern.

Human emotions evoke the characteristics of natural objects and nature’s patterns when they are authentic, meaning that they conform to nature. They are more true than whatever reason evokes. Solitude is a key element in this panoply of feelings and emotions and lends them strength and virtue. They are not the products of the social world, which is manipulated and made false. They can tap the soul’s depths because they well up from solitude, as do the objects of nature.

Thus in his last sonnet, Keats identifies the “bright Star” as “Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,” an image of solitude embracing principles of nature. In his “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Lord Byron draws out these themes in a magnificent summary familiar to many readers (stanza 178):

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can never express, yet cannot all conceal.

Here is a Romantic credo best understood from the perspective of solitude, shutting away society, cold empiricism, and mythic revelation to perceive as the deepest sentiment perceives. Solitude is the naturalness of perception — attentive, conscious, fully engaged in what is real, not contrived.

Yet it is Byron’s preceding stanza of the poem that encapsulates the convergence of insight into what he makes to be a “Spirit.” The stanza is weaker because it projects an artifice in this “Spirit,” but it is rightly placed before stanza 178 above as the progression from the desire to concretize Nature to the recognition of the purity of full emotion. Here is stanza 177, which precedes the above stanza quoted.

Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling place,
With one fair Spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her!
Ye Elements! — in whose ennobling stir
I feel myself exalted — can ye not
Accord me such a being? Do I err
In deeming such inhabit many a spot?
Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot.

The impulse to seek solitude arises from the sorrow of human society. The Spirit is not the old socially and culturally biased god but a refreshing, inspiring and benevolent guardian of eremitism. Note how the “Elements,” the confluence of nature, are charged to create this “Spirit.”

Yet even this wonderful being is but a summary projection, a useful, consoling poetic artifice. The emotions and the intuition sense that nature is an intelligent whole, a benevolent guardian of what is true — that the “Elements” ought to comprise Nature as parts would a whole.

The Romantic poets (and only a few English poets are mentioned here) are the first to perceive that our work, a solitary work, is to pursue our insight into the ineffable, to align our sentiments with nature’s, to “mingle with the Universe, and feel what I can never express, yet cannot all conceal.”

Whether we think of life as rehearsal for death or as a trajectory towards death, we are using metaphors because we cannot grasp meaning without having useful filters to which we can attach emotion as much as intellect. Ultimately, as deconstructionists tell us, language itself is a set of signs that points to what we may experience or may try to incorporate as knowledge, but it does not guarantee meaning.

A friend of Hermitary sends along an excerpt from an article about Heidegger’s description of death. Heidegger is always difficult because he knows that he is grasping after the ineffable but nevertheless goes on crafting a language or vocabulary that will capture the weight of emotion and sensibility in his terms. Perhaps, as the influence of German mystics in Heidegger’s later work shows, one must reach a certain level of intuitive capability before the richest “language” can be understood. That level altogether eludes those who do not seek.

Lao-tzu openly tells us that the Tao is unnameable. Yet he goes on to give us senses and intimations, presenting images cosmic to small: everyday images of nature, and simple images of human effort. Like all good sages, he speaks in parables.

There is a simplicity that allows for the essence of things to enter more clearly into one’s sentiments. Noise, controversy, rapidity of life, artificiality of language, music, appliances, food, technology, and rigid habits kill the spirit even while flattering the self. Thus is the social self manufactured, groomed, presented to the world as adept, clever, glib, ready for teamwork and cooperation with the modes of modern culture.

Cacophony interferes with the clarity of insight that we say we want but which most people will easily trade for a little noise and pleasure because noise and pleasure drown out the pattern of reality.

From this scenario of worldly-wise functionality, Death must be made remote from complexity and contrivance. Death is too final, too insistent, and undermines the pleasure of vanity, the meaningfulness of daily life and culture. In noise and contrivance, meaning is made part of experience because they cannot exist outside of attributes. Death does not suffer attributes. Death is hard enough to contemplate as it is, let alone by ignoring it.

I lived in a large city at one time and rode buses. One day two women sat a couple of seats in front of me, and an old man sat alone behind them. The women were chatting loudly and at length about where they were going to travel this season, and just couldn’t settle on where they wanted to go. It happened that the bus was passing a familiar city landmark: a cemetery. The old man, who had put up with their chatter for some time, leaned forward, politely tapped a shoulder, and said, pointing out the window: “There, madam, is where we all go in the end.” It was a wonderful moment of what I’d call peasant wisdom.

The peasant has the reputation of telling it as it is when provoked to speak or of just keeping quiet. St. Ambrose said that it is more difficult to know how to keep silent than to know how to speak. Further, Lao-tzu says that the wise do not speak and that to keep silence is to conform to nature. One cannot observe if one is busy talking, and it is always best to consider oneself dull and ignorant in the face of the world which boasts of cleverness and novelty. One subject about which the world has little more than platitudes to offer is death, so we need to ignore wishful thinking and contrived socializations of death and go straight to the sages — and peasants.

If death is dissolution, then we are like water — the favorite image of both Taoism and Buddhism. The form of dissolution, whatever we expect or hope, whatever is retained or not, whatever speck of consciousness remains in a universe of consciousness, should not matter. We defer to the universe not because we have no choice but because we need to cooperate and not contrive our own way. In that paradoxical manner do things become ours, yet without contrivance. Not one speck of dust on the mirror.

Water finds its own way by not contriving. Water finds its natural place, and does so eventually, with patience, with a molecular confidence, a defiance of annihilation that is not defiance but hope.

And that is what we need in reflecting on death — except that we will always be dealing with anthropomorphisms and metaphors — such as water and slippery concepts and the prospect of never quite touching the face of things.

“Life is a rehearsal for death.” Such is a common sentiment open to infinite interpretations. The spiritual may argue that what we do must be governed by our end, a teleology of diurnal living, so that actions, thoughts, and plans must conform to a higher vision. One may argue that death undoes everything, and that we must prepare ourselves to renounce what we cling to because we are not that which we desire. At the same time, still others will simply call for a maximum of pleasure. But it is not life but death that evokes the totality of our persons, as Dylan Thomas puts it so tortuously.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Whether we are of “frail deeds” or not, the temptation to rage will be there because of the wound of consciousness. We will realize that no amount of rehearsing will have prepared us for the final act.

But some will argue that life is not a rehearsal for death and that God or the gods deliberately place us here to enjoy consciousness and the fruits of being human. Similarly, thoughtless people grasp for every particle of amusement in daily life and give no thought to death, anymore than they give thought to anything else. These promise us that they will certainly not rage — or they will rage the more loudly at the loss of what constituted their lives.

The whole issue seems premised on a version of Pascal’s wager, wherein we act in a certain way because we bet on the existence of God, not being able to afford the consequences of not believing if, after all, God does exist. Pascal argues not so much for the existence of God but for a specific behavior of God in punishing all who do not believe what Pascal believes. We assume that the issue is a theological one when in fact it is an ethical one. One may argue that regardless of theological belief, everything comes down to ethics.

Pascal may be deemed a “consequentialist.” The consequences we bring upon ourselves on earth (but primarily in the afterlife) are based not on ethics so much as belief, the notion being that no ethics are sufficient to override the content of belief.

The non-believer’s reply is that an ethical belief would be rewarded by an ethical God regardless of whether the person held this or that personal belief.

But Pascal is ready to trap the non-believer by insisting on the content of belief. He would condemn the non-believer’s lack of belief as overthrowing any good that they may ever have done. The non-believer loses the wager simply by not betting.

In this case, the non-believer is not simply an atheist or agnostic but also the “other-than” believer, for Pascal offered a rather narrow set of beliefs to which his interlocutor must adhere. The content of beliefs of the many cultures and societies in the world (of which Pascal would not even have heard) would probably have their own version of his wager — except that they would insist on a different set of beliefs. The wager extends culturally (not logically) in terms of content and detail, like betting on different objects under the shell or on different cards not even in the deck. But always the bet is weighed against the better, who must guess the hidden number or card or a letter in the mind of the host.

The “other-than” believers may simply be Pascal’s counterparts in another part of the world. Or they may be “maximalists.” If the latter, they intend to maximize their contentment on earth, either through pleasure or ethical behavior — to maximize utility or happiness irregardless of God, or rather, irregardless of the content of the particular person’s faith, irregardless of the particular person (or institution, etc.) which has set up the table and invites or coerces passersby to bet.

The whole notion of a wager is distasteful, with its odor of deception, greed, and fraud. Even if we wager with ourselves only, we still must take into account all the cultural and social input that we happen to have encountered in our circumscribed life. We must realize that we are basing everything on feelings. We cannot assimilate all the arguments of probability and philosophy if the wager comes down to how one feels. That is why we had best abstain from Pascal’s wager, any wager, for that matter. The deck is stacked, the cards are marked, and nothing we do changes the outcome. No one can claim to prove that anyone has won, and even if they could it would not change the odds.

The solitary knows that the careful scrutiny of thoughts and beliefs reveals the imprint of culture and society. Our experiences can make us pessimists or optimists but it does not matter what we think as much as whether we are aware of our feelings, our fears, our motives. The one who lures others to wager and the one lured by the thought of reward over punishment play contrived and unwholesome roles. Our moral point of view does not change the outcome of the wager because life is rigged in favor of not belief but death.

Life is, indeed, a rehearsal for death, but it is not a wager. Our own stubborn hearts, full of desire, pit life against death, winning against losing, reward against punishment. These equations are capable of destroying the imagination and distorting a relationship to the world and nature from which can spring a genuine ethic.

If we are always rehearsing, we are never engaged in the role and only wondering whether we are living yet. Yet when we stop rehearsing, then we must be responsible for everything. At that point we can change the phrase. Not “Life is a rehearsal for death” but “Life is a trajectory towards death.”

That latter sentiment will emphasize that the play is ongoing and has been for millennia. We don’t have to practice or know any lines. We have only to remain silent. We can be “minimalists.” For only in silence and solitude will we recognize what the stage really looks like, what the audience really wants, and whether we want to accept someone else’s script.

The folly of society attempted to change itself and its course using the same contrived tools that brought it to its present precipice is an important lesson for the solitary.

Intrinsic to power and authority are the means of retaining and replicating itself, and these tools cannot be relinquished without self-destruction. Even such a devolution would not last. Some other aspirant to power and control would quickly fill the vacuum. This process could be described as an evolutionary instinct: the instinct of self-preservation and reproduction. Except that we are not speaking of individuals but of social and political institutions, of cultures and circles of power. Hence, the analogy of instincts is not accurate, but the desire for power and the extension and preservation of power is a good description.

The solitary already senses that institutions and organizations are not authentic beings. Indeed, they are abstractions, projections of individuals holding power, extending their power into families, associates, dynasties, cultural institutions, and ultimately into strong political, social, economic institutions, organizations, and structures. In turn, these entities can manipulate material conditions. Since these conditions include resources and infrastructure that moves them through society and provides individuals with consumable products and services, the abstractions then take on an aura of necessity and even a contrived naturalness, so that people assume they cannot live without them and that they evolved naturally and inevitably.

But the solitary looks at them with bafflement. These entities do not exist, epistemologically speaking. They appear to exist because countless individuals have acceded to their creation and renounced their autonomous spiritual status to them, transferring it to larger abstract entities (that is, to those behind the entities).

These entities (and they are familiar enough as institutions, organizations, groups, and collective legal fictions) are abstractions in the sense that they are arrangements and relationships between and among people. They are not concrete things. The material conditions in which we live appear as they do because of human inventiveness — or exploitation. The entities or structures themselves are no more than power relationships, as Foucault conceived of them. To the solitary, they are not inevitable in the epistemological sense.

That part of human relationship which entails a subordination to structures due to the threat of violence and harm does force the hermit to conform to power. We can think of laws that are not just, coercions that are unprovoked, societal and individual uses of power that are motivated by human aggression and vice — all these things force the solitary to conform outwardly, to submission or cooperation.

But understanding their origins helps the solitary to understand their evanescence and their lack of virtue, to understand that they exist out of what most spiritual traditions call the sinfulness of human beings, which might be called the complex web of mixed evolutionary inheritance, wherein human beings cannot distinguish their instincts or desires from a natural fellow-feeling in a social context.

An earlier post described the simple spectrum of social hierarchy found in the average person:

individual –> family –> community

The individual is concerned only for autonomy defined as reciprocity; the family-member is concerned only for the welfare of genetic kin; the community-member is concerned for group, regional, and institutional entities. It is these latter that constitute the breeding ground for power (not that families don’t). In “community” arises authority over large movements and social flows. And yet the community entities created and inherited generation after generation are abstractions. They have no real basis for existence except that we concede their legitimacy to wield power, a concession usually made at the point of coercion.

The hermit has always sensed this artificiality. Not necessarily being an intellectual, the solitary could not articulate this restless unease, this dissatisfaction with the world. The hermit knew that it was ultimately not a dissatisfaction with nature. However harsh and merciless the apparent ways of nature, the cycles of sorrow and suffering, they always seemed an inevitable context, a stage in which certain conditions were irrevocably placed, all of which called for deep reflection and understanding, not-too-facile acceptance, but not struggle or denial.

But the entities we call society and culture have always seemed to hermits of every age and culture to be, precisely, contrivances. They have been called vanities and red dust and illusions by the poets and sages, but only the hermit was willing to step back from, to disengage from, the relational aspect of the world.

This does not mean that the hermit needs to condemn anything or anyone, for that would be a form of engagement. From a philosophical and ethical point of view, the world (by which is meant the world of human contrivance) would stand largely condemned in itself. The source of the human contrivance would not be its mere facticity but originate in the contrived emergence of these entities and relations, from the social mind and desire of human beings.

The hermit is accused of indifference and hardheartedness for having the insight to see but not the desire to engage and help. And it may well be true in the case of hermits who are driven by an ideology of ego or are made misanthropes by harsh experiences. But the authentic solitary knows that what is ill with the world and with people is acquiescence to the large contrived edifice of power and authority, including false rebellion from it.

What is ill with the world is not something intrinsic to a given individual. We are all products of experience, genetics, and emotions, but, more to the point, we are primarily the products of contrivances.

How can an individual understand the world using the tools of contrivance? Science, reason, and tradition are not independent of human culture, society and manipulation. We have nothing to depend upon except that which precedes and exists independent of these contrivances. And seeing or sensing this, the solitary appears to be aloof and cynical, but is only seeing or sensing a reality that exists behind the phantasms that people expend themselves on.

Consciousness is a painful wound that nearly everyone tries to heal by conformity and identification with abstractions, by channeling emotions into grander schemes created by others more powerful and manipulative than themselves. We look upon the cycle of pain and sorrow in the animal world and wonder how it can be endured. But our own suffering is only worsened by the identification with entities defined by others, not our own doing.

We heal the wound of consciousness by identifying with the natural patterns that elude us, that rush on like a silent and invisible river or that trickle by like the quiet drops of water falling into the thawing soil at spring. We heal ourselves by disengaging from the world that others made and which frustrates the emergence of our own imaginative response to reality, a response that is as unique as the complex composite that we individuals are.

Could the magos of antiquity provide a prototype of the hermit? There are two confluences: institutional and individual, that of the authorized and that of the unsanctioned, that of the community and public culture, and that of the solitary and insightful.

The earliest practitioners of what the Greeks called magic were the priestly castes of the Persian Empire. These priests were called magoi. They officiated rites at sacrifices and funerals, and other established religious ceremonies. The ancient Greeks, as enemies of the Persians, ascribed evil motives and powers to the magoi, not noticing that they themselves had similar priests performing similar functions doubtless considered evil in motive and power by the Persians.

The evolving interpretation of magic and religion is succinctly illustrated by the cultures of antiquity, especially the Hebrew/Jews. In the first stage, as a small and powerless culture surrounded by larger cultural entities and empires, the Hebrews accepted the authenticity of multiple gods and their powers. This is the earliest stage and a stage at which all the (other) cultures of antiquity remained.

In the second stage, the gods of the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Babylonians, etc., are deemed to exist and to exert their power — but the Hebrew god’s power is increasing, rivaling, and finally greater than all the rest. Thus the contest between the god of the Phoenician priests and the god of the Jews in the first book of Kings, where Elijah defeats his rivals in a contest of divine intervention to demonstrate the superiority of the Jewish god.

The third stage maintains not that other gods exist, or that one god is superior to another god, but that only one god exists and that the others are false, that they do not exist, that they have no true power. Here is the beginning of exclusivism culturally, the high point of secular power and prestige spilling into the psychology of the elite.

And the fourth stage, represented by Christianity under the later Roman Empire and beyond, asserted both that the other gods were false and that their adherents derived their power from demonic powers. Thus did all non-sanctioned religious practices, all accretions of previous (pagan) religions, now representing conquered cultures, become anathema, condemned as magic. This stage parallels the growth of political and material consolidation, not at the tribal or nationalist stage but regionally, including subordinate states and cultures.

The cultural circle of established religions came round again with the establishment of parallel priestly castes performing religious rites of sacrifice and funerals. The originally small, localized tribe of stage one comes round to universalize or project its new epoch of power.

But a different trajectory occurred in the individuals who did not represent castes or powers. These, too, were dubbed magoi but were distinct in motive and aspect. The philosopher Heraclitus, living around 500 BCE, described these magoi as night-ramblers, Bacchants (adherents of Bacchus, god of wine, libertine and debauched), Maenads (disreputable women, adherents of Bacchus), and mystics, (adherents of mystery religions versus the conventional religion of the state).

Heraclitus or whoever is represented by the fragment left us, expresses a view that confirms the dominant powers of his society, motivated by the desire for stability and order. This view would naturally disdain any challenges to the religion of Olympus — even if Heraclitus himself did not believe in the gods. “The rites accepted by people in the Mysteries are an unholy performance,” he states. And yet the Greeks, if not Heraclitus, ascribed genuine power to them.

Tiresias, who appears in plays of Sophocles as a seer and prophet, is described as a magos. Tiresias advises the powerful through insight granted by the gods, yet holds no title in an official priestly caste, and is clearly a solitary, bound to be distrusted by all. From T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland:

I, Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives …

Tiresias can walk through the sinister side untouched, and through the corridors of power without desire. But because his revelations are so damning — to Oedipus in Oedipus the King and to Creon in Antigone, he is dismissed as a magos, a peddler of ill fate, a maleficent being, but inspired by Delphic oracles nevertheless, not as a fraud because he did not sell his knowledge indifferently but with great reluctance.

Plato, in The Republic, inveighs against sorcerers and diviners, as

begging priests and soothsayers [who] go to rich men’s doors and make them believe that they by means of sacrifices and incantations have accumulated a treasure of power from the gods that expiate and cure with pleasurable festivals any misdeed of a man or his ancestors, and that if a man wishes to harm an enemy, at slight cost he will be enabled to injure just and unjust a like, since they are masters of spells and enchantments that constrain the gods to serve their end.

But none of this character can be ascribed to Tiresias. There are, then, three sets of magoi. The priestly caste is clearly one side, but the other parallels the shamans and prophets distinct from the fraudulent peddlers, thieves, and con-artists. A magos not associated with the ruling caste and its priesthood, who is independent, eccentric, an ethical teacher, itinerant, homeless, viewed by authority as a potential criminal, as a fraud intent on power, will be vilified even centuries later. Living in an environment that straddled intolerant Judaism and an indifferent Roman Empire, Jesus, for example, has been depicted by some as a magos not of the priestly caste but as a fraud. Yet to automatically describe a magos as a fraud is to automatically reproduce the point of view of the ruling priestly caste, a situation found in all cultures and applied to all magoi.

In ancient Greece, the historical figure of Diogenes the Cynic emerges as another bridge to amalgamate the characteristics of the magoi. He disclaims any prophetic or magical function, any desire or ambition, reducing all to the philosophical and the ethical — yet with an air of madness, being what Plato called “Socrates gone mad.” Diogenes is an itinerant iconoclast who disrespects authority and outrages the power caste. Some of his acts are deliberately provocative and unacceptable to society, for which he was called a dog. But he accepts nothing from anyone, claims no special skills, and defrauds no one but rather forces them to think.

Diogenes is a prototype of the hermit. Eccentric eremitism carries over into early Christian times — Simon Stylites is an equivalent. The self-regulating eremitism of the desert hermits salvaged the hermit against powerful authorities and the tendencies of authorities to institutionalize the simple, the free, the ethical, prophets of a sort, magoi in the better sense.

Faith is the expectation that something is true. Hope is the expectation that faith is plausible. Plausibility is hope in meaning, but meaning is the construct of faith without the input of hope.

Hope is more difficult to maintain than faith. Faith relies on authority, on the guarantee that power asserts in its prerogative to bring forth content. Faith is content guaranteed. Hope has no such guarantee. Hope distrusts power and authority as presumed safeguards of the content of faith, guaranteers of content. Hope turns away from guarantees based on power and returns forlornly to expectation and desire.

But hope is more intelligent than faith. Too wise to depend on plausibility based solely on power or authority, hope scrutinizes faith, its object. Hope looks closely at its visage, inspects its expression and outward appearance for signs of contrivance, abuse, for “bad” faith.

Hope doubts the vehicle of faith long before even looking at its content. How can hope rely on the weak and flawed body of human tradition, on the vain and struggling conveyance that is human memory and insistence?

Only in suffering and anguish can anything authentic emerge, hope has concluded. Only then can there be something that hope can respect, that hope can have faith in. But it is too late. The hour is late, the light is waning, and it does not matter anyway because faith cannot catch up to the intellectual and intuitive content of hope.

Hope has no time to pursue abstractions and test hypotheses offered by faith, offered on faith. Besides, what content of faith will persuade hope when the evidence of centuries lies bare before it, like an open wound, with a low and mournful voice, a collective sob, evidence that reveals so little left to salvage. Just a little, just enough, perhaps, to not deny the life of a thing, to rescue the quiet and self-abnegating whispers of those who have, in good faith, hoped.

Hope is expected to be optimistic, forward-looking, positive-minded. Such are the expectations made on hope. But such a veneer, suggesting faith’s triumph, is only a little removed from smugness, arrogance, pride. Hope is the opposite, if it is careful and true to itself. Hope is humility, self-effacing, solitary.

For hope to welcome faith is to welcome an on-going future that has not proved itself, a future that necessarily breaks with the past, gainsays experience, make of hope a deliberate deconstruction not of the structures of faith but of the accumulation of experience, intuition, remembrance, and suffering gathered over time.

To throw this out, to throw it away? To rely now on nothing of its own and all of another? That is true hope, insists faith. Forget and renounce all will to faith. Power and authority will be hope’s only hope, says faith triumphantly.

If it were so, the content of faith’s present would override the wisdom of hope’s past — for that is what the past is, after all. The accumulation of the past is suffering but also wisdom borne of suffering. Hope cannot assent to renounce imagination, intuition, wisdom. Hope cannot accept the premise of power and authority as a prerequisite to faith.

Let hope release its dependence on faith, release its subordination to content. Hope has its own content, a parallel to faith over time and space. What shall last between these two parallel threads, never touching, always distrustful of one another? Unlike faith, hope can afford to throw out its content, discard, give up, release what is no longer wise, retain what needs still more attention and absorption and immersion, and then throw it out and continue to move forward, not as a line but as a spiral, taking up what is good, taking it to the next level of ascent, only dropping below and behind it that which is a burden. Hope can release what is accumulated without laying claim to anything, unlike faith which must cling to everything or risk dissolving altogether, leaving only hope.

Hope is the beginning of the path. Faith is the marker in the crossroads. “Thus far have you come on my authority, with my power,” says faith to hope, “overshadowed and nurtured and outfitted by me, as for a journey. Now you must begin the path, from this place,” faith says. “And when you begin, don’t look back.”

How little of what we think and do is based not on reason but rather habit and received convention. We function at a profound level of intuition, applying what we know or assume in social and other dealings with the world at almost an animal level of instinct and wariness. This is why books like Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, by Gerd Gigerenzer, are useful. Gigerenzer shows how intuition functions in daily life and thought in competition with and complementary to logic and reasoning.

Gigerenzer defines gut feelings as:

1. judgment that appears quickly in consciousness,
2. whose underlying reasons we are not fully aware of, and
3. is strong enough to act upon.

In this sense, intuition gallops ahead of reason in already holding the criteria necessary for both judgment and action, regardless of how capable we may be of articulating this criteria. The author’s many practical examples show further how dependent on the subjective and circumstantial the basis of reason can be. A good example (though only one of dozens in the book) is ethics or moral behavior.

Gigerenzer maintains (rightly) that we own an innate capacity for morals as much as we do for language. Like his broader definition of gut feelings, our innate capacity for moral judgment lacks self-conscious awareness — actionable but not easily verbalized. Like language, morals are intuitively based on external influences, chiefly from self, family, and community. Ethical judgments reflect emotional goals at their simplest level and all the way up to functional rules of thumb as themes for action. Our social environment is filled with contingencies and interpretable circumstances that regularly elude rationality.

Thus, the individual is concerned with the minimal ethical behaviors of harm and reciprocity. Here there is a high level of tolerance for behaviors that affect only the autonomous individual.

Those who root moral values in the family emphasize reciprocity and a primitive loyalty that evolves into a broader physical or abstract community. The family is narrowly defined, and the person limits ethics to the safeguarding of that narrow circle.

The community relates non-genetically-tied individuals into symbolical relations. The community is an institutional entity or symbol emphasizing loyalty, respect for hierarchy, the group, and authority.

This process of moral capacities can be likened to the progression of reason and logic in the chronology of a person’s life. The infant quickly evolves from no overt ethical sense to soon discover the system of rewards and punishment, thus emphasizing (unconsciously) the self. Throughout the rest of life, however, the person lives in what the author calls the conventional stage. A group, small or large, intimate or abstract, comes to dominate behavior in general and especially moral behavior.

Very few people, adds Gigerenzer, attain a post-conventional stage or status. This latter is characterized by the abstract, objective state of detachment from group, based on universal principles. Ultimately, the post-conventional leaves the social context behind, even leaves behind the self. Dare we count solitaries, mystics, and highly creative souls in this stage?

The extreme end of the spectrum shares characteristics of the extreme beginning. The author does not develop this thought but it is of compelling interest. At the beginning of infancy, no conscious ego appears to exist, where the unconscious is identifiable with the entirety of environment, which is to say, with existence. At the highest stage of the post-conventional can be seen similar psychological phenomena, except of course that the individual must address a lifetime’s worth of social experience and emotions while setting out to recover the oceanic feeling of pre- and post-birth. It is as if that was always the point, after all, the getting back to the beginning of life. Thus T.S. Eliot in Little Gidding:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

Back to Gigerenzer and a summary of the conventional stage: The individual is concerned with rights and liberties, with harm and reciprocity — and little more. Within the family of genetically-related kin, moral behavior hovers around honor and the welfare of kin, with hierarchy emerging as dominant. Under community, the person relates symbolically to an in-group, represented institutionally or regionally, commanding loyalty, respect, and a sense of purity and superiority.Gigerenzer shows how this vertical system of authority is horizontal at the individual level, and begins a vertical ascent with deeper social engagement from family to community.

For the solitary, the intersection of psychological, sociological and anthropological observations in these chapters of Gigerenzer’s book is useful for understanding how to maintain the self while correctly engaging the world. We can see that allegiance to the tight circles of social environment represented not by individuals or by nature but by human contrivances ultimately constrict intuition with “objective” ideas of reasonableness and conformity to authority — which is no more than an expectation on the part of others of sanctioned behavior and belief.

Our solitude must disengage from the social environment, or at any rate from allegiance to its representatives. Our solitude needs to bring us to natural sources of inspiration, in harmony with what is not contrived by a world dominated by power and authority. We must go where we can end as we began, a part of everything and no thing, apart from everything and nothing. Cultivating a sense of intuition that uses reason but understands its subjective origins is an important step toward cultivation of a wise self.