Revaluation of Values: A New Heaven and a New Earth

A million things occur to me this morning, all clamouring for me to write something up about them. I have to disappoint most of them and tell them “later, later. Not now. It’s not yet the time.”

You see, any true restructuration of consciousness — of the Gestalt of consciousness and reality — is total, not piecemeal. This is exactly what is meant by the phrase “a new Heaven and a new Earth” that we find in Revelation. Reality is a very big place, consequently any complete or total restructuration or (Nietzsche’s “revaluation of values”) of what we call “reality” means there is never any end to things we might observe and write about. This is after all, the double-meaning of the word “apocalypse”, which actually means “disclose” or “dis-cover” or “reveal”, while to others it means catastrophe and destruction. At the same time, in the transitional period or zone everything is so ambiguous and paradoxical (and in rapid flux) that it is sometimes difficult to say what’s what before it isn’t.

This is our situation, and it has many minds perplexed, bewildered, disoriented, discombobulated, not knowing whether we are coming or going, or not knowing their left hand from their right hand, cognitive dissonance, self-contradiction, ironic reversal, perverse outcome, revenge effect, enantiodromia, breakdown of the dialectic, and so on and so forth. Most of this is really an effect of a (relatively speaking) slow-motion apocalypse that we describe as “chaotic” and which Gebser calls “the double-movement” and Bronowski “the crisis of paradox”.

So, let’s return to the fundamentals and “begin at the beginning” as they say.

What we call “reality” is a perceived (must emphasise that) pattern, configuration, structure, or Gestalt of spaces and times we can describe as a “matrix” in which we live, move, and have our being. We actually, here and now, don’t know what space and time (or energy) are in themselves. We only know them from their perceived effects — from the “evidence” of our physical senses.

But the physical senses lie. This is the parable of the five (or six) blind scholars and the elephant. The blind scholars are the physical senses. Depending upon what school of philosophy you subscribe too, the physical senses are four, five, or six in number.

What we call “reality” is actually a conjoint construction of thought, feeling, sense and will or “intuition”, but mostly what we call reality is the feeling we have for it, which is what people normally mean by the phrase “common sense”.

Now, we could write tomes and tomes about this — that reality is not so much what we merely think it is, but the feeling we have for it. (Coincidentally, David Lynch referred to this connection between feeling and reality in an article in today’s Guardian). This is rather crucially important for understanding Gebser’s phenomenology of consciousness structures or Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, or for what is often meant by the term “sensuous”. As you may have noticed, too, we use the word “feeling” in some very muddled and confused ways, or perhaps in ways we might describe as synaesthesic ways. If you begin with the recognition that what we call “reality” is primarly a feeling we have for it (a mood in other words referred to as “the common sense”) then you’ll appreciate the implications of what Gebser calls “chaotic emotion”.

There is, of course, a close connection between the words “mood”, “mode”, “modern” and so on. And, of course, much material has been written about the modern mind’s (or the Newtonian-Cartesian mind’s or “Pure Reason’s”) problematic relationship with feeling, emotion, or moods. These were dismissed as “subjective values” or states that affected the purity of the objective attitude and the ideal of disinterested or dispassionate observation of reality. The ideal of pure reason and the dispassionate mind was, of course, the Machine and reality, in consequence, came to look like a Great Machine.

All this, of course, embroiled the Modern Mind in a great self-contradiction which is probably the beginning of modern schizophrenic condition. Non-feeling is still a feeling or mood, and the pursuit of truth or power the following of desire and a passion itself. The ideal of the modern mind as “dispassionate” or “Pure Reason” — a thinking machine of pure logic — was precisely to place the whole soul in a double-bind and a self-contradiction. If it were true, reason, science and truth themselves would commit suicide, for any and all sense of vitality would be exorcised from the soul.

Which is exactly what happened, and now we have a spiritual crisis. What Gebser calls “the vital centre” is unintelligible without the feeling of vitality at all. And this is actually what aroused Nietzsche’s disdain for “modern ideas” and why he cleaved to the Dionysian.

And it is, of course, why Rosenstock-Huessy deliberately entitled one of his books I Am An Impure Thinker. And we do see in the history that a very unsatisfactory attempt to resolve the self-contradiction and double-bind was made through the segregation and re-assignment of gender roles. To the female was assigned the passions, while the male was to be the bearer of the rational principle. That was certainly a formula for trouble.

There have been all kinds of crises and consequences as a result of this bifurcation of the soul, both individual and collective, which Jung’s “new alchemy” attempted to address through the re-integration of the anima and animus principles.

In these terms, we can understand why Freud’s “discovery of the unconscious” came when it did, for it was what the Cartesian mind had repressed in itself and cast into the outer darkness — principally the passions, but which did not cease to be active for that all that. And we see in the fin de siecle 19th century already symptoms of the “irruption” of these passions in Stevenson’s Jekyll-and-Hyde myth and Nietzsche’s Apollonian-Dionysian conflict and tensions, and in other signals that the repressed passions were about to erupt.

So, the return of the repressed is actually a two-edged sword. The danger here is that the ego-mind or the conscious mind fails effectively to integrate this into a new pattern, Gestalt, or consciousness structure which would effectively be, also, a complete transformation of what we call ‘reality’.

Gebser seems fairly confident that the mind will succeed, because he effectively did this in himself, and his Ever-Present Origin is largely an account of that, although nothing is guaranteed. He did caution that the return of the repressed (he calls it “irruption”) could conclude in the total destruction of the planet.

And we definitely are having trouble integrating the return of the repressed. It’s pretty much why we speak of these times as a times of crisis and chaos.

Now, central to this return of the repressed is not only the passions that had been denied and cast into the outer darkness, but also the things of time. Time, and the sense of time and timing, was also exorcised from the concerns of Pure Reason which had determined upon a three-dimensional reality of spaces. Time was assigned to the clock, and could be ignored or forgotten because it seemed automatic, mechanical, fateful. This, it turns out, was not correct. Time is now the dominant “dimension” and time is a paradox. It isn’t like a machine at all, and it’s not an accident that Freud’s “discovery of the unconscious” coincides with Einstein’s space and time unification either.

And we see the effects of all this in the attempts to develop “process logics” and “process philosophies” in which time and timing become the most crucial and critical aspect — David Bohm in physics, Alfred North Whitehead in philosophy, Rosenstock=Huessy in sociology, Korzybski’s “General Semantics”, or the dramatist schools of sociology as well. Everywhere we see attempts, successful or unsuccessful, effective or deficient, to integrate time into logic designed for only three dimensions of space and which had excluded the paradoxical by establishment — the law of non-contradiction. It is the irruption of time that is basically generating the “crisis of paradox” and forcing a complete “revaluation of values”.

Time is a paradox because it is both dimension of growth and decay, of entropy and neg-entropy. It is time, for example, that compels us to cease speaking of “parts” and more of “aspects”. And I would say that if you contemplate what makes these two words similar, and yet very different in “feeling-tone”, you will acquire a very good sense for the subtle “paradigm shift” that is going on under the pressure of the irruption of time. “Parts” are fragments of a totality, but “aspects” are aspects of a whole. Picasso’s art, for example, is not a collage of parts, but of aspects, and in this sense of “aspect” we are approaching, too, what Gebser means by “aperspectival consciousness”.

I think this would be a very good exercise for approaching the whole matter of the shift in the Gestalt we call “reality” and how the “revaluation of values” is being reflected in changes in the meaning of “centre” or “central” for example, or what distinguishes a Whole from a Totality, or a part from an aspect. If you contemplate these, you’ll also see that they have an entirely different “feel” even if some use them as virtual synonyms for one another.

Parts apply to the details, particulars, factoids, fragmentary things of space, but aspects to processes in time. Aspects of a whole are polymorphic and multiform. Gebser uses the term “countenance” for this also. One could write a whole book about this and call it “Parts and Aspects” as a reflection of the meaning of spacetime and the new picture of reality, but the emphasis now is definitely towards the aspectual and aspectivity rather than particulars and particularity, and that also means a shift towards Blake’s multiform “fourfold vision” and away from the uniformity of “Single Vision”.

If you just sit quietly, and just sense the different “feeling-tone” that is associated with the terms “part” and “aspect”, I can assure you you’ll start to “get it”. You’ll begin to understand the real nature of the changes that are going on in the world today as time begins to overtake space (and Heraclitus begins to overtake Parmenides).

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