The Divided Mind. Part Three: The Unhappy Consciousness (3)
‘But, boy, you did your strong nine furlong mile in slick and Slapstick record time and farfetched deed it was in troth, champion docile, with your high bouncing gait of going and your feat of passage will be contested with you and through you, for centuries to come. The phaynix rose a sun before Erebia sank his smother! Shoot up on that, bright Bennu bird! Va faotre! Eftsoon so too will our own sphoenix spark spirt his spyre and sunward stride the rampante flambe. Ay, already the sombrer opacities of the gloom are sphanished! Brave footsore Haun! Work your progress! Hold to! Now! Win out, ye divil ye! The silent cock shall crow at last. The west shall shake the east awake. Walk while ye have the night for morn, lightbreakfastbringer, morroweth whereon every past shall full fost sleep. Amain’.
- James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’
So ends Book 3 Chapter 2 of the Wake wherein we are given an oh so brief look at the dreamer underneath the dreamy farcical mimicry, for of course a wake implicates a waking and Shaun the Postman in exile is now Shem the Penman coming back to Ireland to be greeted by the applause of the Irish and Shem must needs be Shaun for when Johnny comes marching home after his civil war he is Haun or Shaun and Shem all of whom will enjoy their Easter rising together, (Éirí Amach na Cásca, Easter Rebellion, an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week, April 1916), and all the while the phoenix burns and aspires upon its spyre as it attends to resurrection after death, the devil era of De Valera, (Éamon de Valera, (1882–1975), a prominent statesman and political leader), bringing resurrection beyond the limits of sphoenix spark, (Phoenix Park, Dublin), and thus makes it the Easter rising of 1916 and the founding of the republic, and the Bennu bird from the Book of the Dead, (an ancient Egyptian funerary text written on papyrus and used from the beginning of the New Kingdom c. 1550 BCE), is the phoenix or the be new bird and ben is Hebrew son. Va faotre! Not merely an echo of Shaun’s Fik yew foutre in French is Breton Va faotre, my son. And when the cock of the morning crows ‘the east awake’ then Haun the lightbreakfastbringer is immediately Stephen’s Lucifer the light-bringer of the devil era, and one thinks of Mr Bloom from Joyce’s day book ‘Ulysses’, bringer of Molly Bloom’s light breakfast upon a tray.
There is a union of opposites, as Janyouare, which is to say, John/Shaun, unites with Fibyouare, Shem/Joyce as Febuary faker, or Walker with Waltzer, catching a glimpse of the dreamer of the farcical pageant it is fitting the passage evokes the author of Joyce’s works and the works themselves, an evocation requiring the collaboration of Stephen Daedelus and Leopold Bloom or of Shem and Shaun and the book that minds us is the withering of our ways, which is to say paralysis, is ‘Dubliners’ for the docile boyu who runs round the track with high bouncing gait is Stephen Daedelus training under Mike Flynn reminding us of ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ while breakfastbringer brings in ‘Ulysses’ and of course work your progress refers to ‘Work in Progress’ Joyce’s name for ‘Finnegans Wake’ during its composition a work to be contested for centuries to come and awake is the Wake itself what Shem needs is to be Shaun just a little for only a partnership, a conspiracy of Hic and Ille (Latin demonstratives hic means this and ille means that) can do the creative task though in this Shem chapter of the Wake there is too little of Shaun as in the Shaun chapter there was overmuch Shem but a Portrait and Ulysses are in proper harmony along with a good deal of the Wake a work in progress.
Amain. Amen. So be it. An evocation of work done and work in progress ends like a prayer and it is through prayer that Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel’s, (1770–1881), Unhappy Consciousness first attempts to link individuality with the Unchangeable while the second attempt will be through work asthe eternal enters time. And what is left but feeling? is the question I left hanging at the end of the last part, as the Unhappy Consciousness finds itself in a fluid dynamic relation like a religious enthusiast waking up every day and asking himself or herself how can I know thee O Lord? Somewhat like the mission of a holy man or woman in the wilderness. ‘Then said they unto him, Who art thou? that we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself? He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias’. (John 1: 22–23).
The Unhappy Consciousness in its quest has yet to realize something more adequate; in its inadequacy it cannot articulate nor enter into a relation with the essential, the Unchangeable; its contingency removes it so far from the essential that it does not even have the essential means to ernable it to articulate how everything is just so messed up; for every time it endeavours to do so a dialectic is undergone whereby its expressions for the condition it is in are found to be inadequate. And such is the all too frequent bewailing of the religiously intoxicated as they try to understand God through reason and rationality, a procedure that Hegel would approve of incidentally, but as I discussed in the previous par St Anselm declared he understands not at all what God is nor can the transparency and the intelligibility that he or religious enthusiasts are able to grasp deliver the fullness of what it is that they are trying to grasp.
Hegel presents us with an understanding as to what is going on here, which is to say, we discover God in this individual that we encounter and subsequently feel deflated, disappointment ensues as we ask ourselves how this particular contingent shape is supposed to be the divine. And we can observe the same phenomena in political movements invested with a comparable quasi-religious ethos, the same kind of attitude emulatory of a religious stance. Jeremy Corbyn, (1949 — ) the person, as the leader of the UK’s socialist party (as Labour is now though it was once a reformist party but I won’t go into that here) can only be a let down as anyone in that role would be whoever they are and however charismatic they might be, because they are a person, an individual, and adherents to the socialist ideology, or Notion as I might put it, can only be left feeling there must be something more here that they are just not getting; this is an actual individual whereas what they want is the Notion, (Begriff), and in particular the Notion is that which they want to be a part of, but once the essential, the divine, the transcendent, the Unchangeable is given some kind of shape, (Gestalt), it thereby becomes embodied or incarnate and the Unhappy Consciousness cannot be satisfield with that with which it can then take hold. As Hegel writes:
‘Just as, on the one hand, when striving to find itself in the essence it takes hold only of its own separate existence, so on the other hand it cannot lay hold of the ‘other’ as an individual or as an actual Being. Where that ‘other’ is sought, it cannot be found, for it is supposed to be just a beyond, something that can not be found. When sought as a particular individual, it is not a universal individuality in the form of thought, not a Notion, but an individual in the form of an object, or an actual individual; an object of immediate sens-certainty, and for that very reason only something that has already vanished’. Consciousness, as Hegel explains with a rather beautiful image, can thereby only find as the presence of its reality the grave of its life:
‘Consciousness, therefore, can only find as a present reality the grave of its life. But because this grave is itself an actual existence and it is contrary to the nature of what exactly exists to afford a lasting possession, the presence of that grave, too, is merely the struggle of an enterprise doomed to failure. But having learned from experience that the grave of its actual unchangeable Being has no actuality, that the vanished individuality, because it has vanished, is not the true individuality, consciousness will abandon its quest for the unchangeable individuality as an actual existence, or will stop trying to hold on to what has vanished. Only then is it capable of finding individuality in its genuine or universal form’.
The grave of its life; the grave is where dead things are put by us; and thus is encapsulated the fundamental disappointment of the Unhappy Consciousness in endeavouring to attain what it was after; the comportment of devotion is not merely supposed to make it feel good but to connect it with the divine or at least what it takes to be the divine and yet by following this through consciousness has on one side that pure heart which suffers agony given that it is unable to attain its object and it is at the same aware to an extreme degree of itself and where does this take it to? The grave of its life. But nor can it remain as such, this too shall pass, so it is hoped, as the individual confronts and fails to get beyond it for the very failure itself is doomed to failure and ‘man is a futile passion’ as Jean-Paul Sartre, (1905–1980), said, (I never tire of pointing out just how much existentialist thinkers are Unhappy Consciousnesses every bit as much as religious thinkers). And one way out is taken to be that of demythologization, (interpreting scripture through separating cosmological and historic claims from philosophical, ethical and theological teachings), as the individual attempts to relate to the pure thinking Unchangeable that mayhap could be understood as essence or individuality in the attempt to flesh it out as a real and actual individual; which is to say, this pureness, this essentiality, well, the Unhappy Consciousness discovers that this has ended up escaping from it as it questions this particular individual, or this particular place designated a church, this congregation of individuals; what do they signify?
And so there is this particular determinate thing that is supposed to encompass the divine but that the Unhappy Consciousness is having such a difficult time getting into contact with but maybe the eternal enters into time by an alternate route so to speak, that is, not through this or that individual but rather through what said individual means or signifies, now that surely is something to be grasped in terms of the Notion and of course in the case of Christianity as to the matter of the universal becoming incarnate something rather obvious springs to mind. Jesus, (c. 4 BC — c. 30/55 AD), claimed to be the divine mediator through him the divine is present in the Trinity the three persons of the Christian Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through which in an implicit manner a community comes to better understand itself with respect to the revelation that has occurred this revelation being a relation of the transcendent back to the individual.
As far as the demythologizers are concerned what is of importance is not the actual historical person of Jesus but rather what he was taken to be and the meaning he has for that community and also what that meaning ends up being throughout history and what that meaning can be for us today. Rudolf Bultmann, ( 1884–1976), a Lutheran theologian who rejected the mythical interpretation of scripture, (‘We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament’, he said), proposed instead an existentialist (but of course) interpretation of the New Testament. And such thinking was indeed fermenting in Hegel’s day.
Such a species of Unhappy Consciousness demythologizers is to be found today in the likes of Jordan Peterson, (1962 — ), who, when asked if he believed the story of the risen Christ to be literally true responded in typically Petersonian manner (and remember no. 10 on the list of his 12 rules for life, his antidote to chaos, is be precise in your speech) that is to say, he prevaricated, or at least no good answer was forthcoming; he could not discount the possibility of Christ rising from the grave and the understands the resurrection from a metaphorical standpoint but that is not the end of the story whatever he means by that but he is a believer in so-called metaphorical truth, (see my article On the Nature of Truth part two, religion may not be factually true, it is said, but it is metaphorically true). And this we are of course well accustomed to in the UK with modern Anglicanism and senior figures in the Church of England discoursing upon the Bible purely as allegory and upon the truths that may be found within it. Narratives that may not be exact history, we are told, and by ‘not exact history’ is meant it never happened, can nonetheless be regarded as exact theology whatever that means given that they are representative of a long-term deposit from reflection on how God has been encountered over many centuries, and it is a very modern anxiety, we are told, for everything in Scripture to be what we may now so myopically think of as exact reporting.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, (1950 — ), has said that he is less concerned about one’s literal beliefs about what is in scripture than he is about the truths to be learnt from Biblical stories. Biblical literalism is out then; and take Giles Fraser, (please do, he writes for the Guardian which is all you need to know about him) one time Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s cathedral who wrote this: ‘It is commonly assumed that Christians don’t really believe in death at all, that we subscribe to the view that when we die we go on living in some other realm, or in some disembodied form. Just to be clear I believe nothing of the sort. I don’t like the euphemistic language of ‘passing on’ or ‘having gone to sleep’. Nor do I subscribe to Platonic ideas about the immortality of the soul. When you die, you die. As the first letter of St. Paul to Timothy puts it ‘God alone is immortal’. And David Jenkins, (1925 –2016), one time Bishop of Durham: ‘I wouldn’t put it past God to arrange a virgin birth if he wanted. But I very much doubt if he would’. Jenkins also spoke of the possibility that the disciples ‘pinched the body of Jesus’, and of the reality of a symbol in history as opposed to the term ‘literally physical’: ‘I was very careful about my use of language’’ he said. ‘After all a conjuring trick with bones only proves that someone is clever at a conjuring trick with bones. I am bothered about what I call ‘God and conjuring tricks’. I am not clear that God manoeuvres physical things. I am clear that he works miracles through personal responses and faith’.
And such an Unhappy Consciousness can only find as a present reality the grave of its life. And they continue to talk about the truths that are to be found in these stories and what we can all learn from them and as a result of this such Unhappy Consciousnesses are hastening to its end their particular sect for through the creation of a Christianity that flatters their intellect intelligent theologians, not wanting to be thought of as believing in something absurd but rather in something to which there is a level of truth, promote a kind of religion that does not sell and while with Catholic and other Christian denominations remain stable in their numbers Anglicanism the state religion of UK is in the throes of death. Who would be convinced that Christianity is for them on the basis of there being a book to be used as nothing more than a tool with uplifting moral messages, tremendous metaphors, familiar archetypes? Would not the message that God exists be more likely to do the job?
Bultmann may have drawn upon existentialism but much of this is a response to Søren Kierkegaard, (1813–1855), critic of attempts to rationalise Christianity and render it amenable to the ‘cultured despisers of religion’ as Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, (1768–1834), termed them.Kierkegaard who I have already identified in the previous parts as an Unhappy Conciousness maintained that Christianity transcends human understanding and presents the individual with paradoxical choices with the consequence that becoming a Christian is not a rational but a passional leap of faith (though he doesn’t use that expression) and this attitude has come to be labelled fideism whereby faith is supported by faith but, it is objected, such putative reasons and evidences for faith are mere fabrications of fallen human imagination the ironuy of which would not have been lost on Kierkegaard and the rationalisers of Christianity are Unappy Consciousnesses as much as he. And so for those not stuck there the Unhappy Consciousness will abandon its quest for individuality in its universal form towards Spirit that is to say a reconciliation of the individual and pure thinking or of the individual and the Unchangeable, that is, an identity in difference, not primarily the difference that stands out but rather a connecting together again whereby the identification is understood as a process and not simply as an effect for the prospects of devotion are not delivering where the Unhappy Consciousness wants to go but meanwhile some significant characteristics of the religious comportment of the individual human being in the Unhappy Consciousness and were I a Christian apologist wishing to rationalise Christianity which I am not I would be tempted to connect this with the true meaning of the Easter rising, a re-birth from the grave of life.
One wonders if an Unhappy Consciousness would ever yearn for its body to be set free from the prison of its Spirit rather than the other way round. Well, yes, as it happens, a richer conception of a rejection of Platonism that Giles Fraser could possible imagine:
‘No, Plato, No’
by W.H. Auden (1907–1973)
No, Plato, No:
I can’t imagine anything
that I would less like to be
than a disincarnate Spirit,
unable to chew or sip
or make contact with surfaces
or breathe the scents of summer
or comprehend speech and music
or gaze at what lies beyond.
No, God has placed me exactly
where I’d have chosen to be:
the sublunar world is such fun,
where Man is male or female
and gives Proper Names to all things.
I can, however, conceive
that the organs Nature gave Me,
my ductless glands, for instance,
slaving twenty-four hours a day
with no show of resentment
to gratify Me, their Master,
and keep Me in decent shape,
(not that I give them their orders,
I wouldn’t know what to yell),
dream of another existence
than that they have known so far:
yes, it well could be that my Flesh
is praying for ‘Him’ to die,
so setting Her free to become
irresponsible Matter.
But as Hegel explains the Unhappy Consciousness after the failure of devotion then considers the ideal of work, as it tries to serve God through labour; though now it has a contradictory attitude to the world on which it work; for on the one hand, anything worldly has no significance, as what matters is the God who stands above it; and on the other hand, everything in the world is sanctified as the expression of God’s nature. Likewise, the Unhappy Consciousness also sees its own capacities for labour in a two-fold manner; on the one hand if it can create anything using them, it is only because God allows it to do so; on the other hand, it also sees these capacities as God-given, and so divinely ordained, and therefore though work may well give the Unhappy Consciousness some sense of its union with the Unchangeable, in another sense it makes it feel even more cut off from it, as Hegel writes:
‘The fact that the unchangeable consciousness renounces and surrenders its embodied form, while, on the other hand, the particular individual consciousness gives thanks [for the gift], i.e. denies itself the satisfaction of being conscious of its independence, and assigns the essence of its action not to itself but to the beyond, through these two moments of reciprocal self surrender of both parts, consciousness does, of course, gain a sense of unity with the Unchangeable. But this unity is at the same time affected with division, is again broken within itself, and from it there emerges once more the antithesis of the universal and the individual’.
The difficulty is that the Unhappy Consciousness sees that its humility here is false, for while it treats the world and its capacities as gifts from God for which it gives thanks, it also recognizes that these gifts are a source of prideful enjoyment for it: ‘Consciousness feels itself therein as a particular individual, and does not let itself be deceived by its own seeming renunciation, for the truth of the matter is that it has not renounced itself’. And from such a sense of unworthiness it will moves on to the third ideal of penitence, where the Unhappy Consciousness tries to overcome its hypocrisy: ‘Work and enjoyment thus lose all universal content and significance, for if they had any, they would have an absolute being of their own. Both withdraw into their mere particularity, which consciousness is set upon reducing to nothingness’. In its endeavour to purify itself, the Unhappy Consciousness turns on its own body as a source of weakness and spiritual corruption, (the Auden option not apparently occurring to it), as standing in the way of its endeavours to rise above its mere individuality; but the more it tries to overcome its physical nature, the more the body becomes an obsessive focus of attention.
‘Work’
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
WHAT are we set on earth for ? Say, to toil;
Nor seek to leave thy tending of the vines
For all the heat o’ the day, till it declines,
And Death’s mild curfew shall from work assoil.
God did anoint thee with his odorous oil,
To wrestle, not to reign; and He assigns
All thy tears over, like pure crystallines,
For younger fellow-workers of the soil
To wear for amulets. So others shall
Take patience, labor, to their heart and hand
From thy hand and thy heart and thy brave cheer,
And God’s grace fructify through thee to
The least flower with a brimming cup may stand,
And share its dew-drop with another near.
To be continued …..
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ Quotation:
1. furlong = the present statute furlong is 220 yards, and is equal to the eighth part of a statute mile.
2. slick = first-class, excellent.
3. slapstick = knockabout comedy or humour, farce, horseplay.
4. record = spec. the best recorded achievement in any competitive sport.
5. farfetched = Of an argument, notion, simile, etc.: Studiously sought out, not easily or naturally introduced .
6. in troth =- truly, verily, indeed.
7. docile = ready and willing to be taught.
8. bouncing = moving jerkily up and down; marked by lively action; Of a ball: Rebounding up and down.
9. contest = to contend in rivalry, compete (with).
10. Phoenix = a mythical, sacred bird of the Egyptians (they called it bennu), of gorgeous plumage, fabled to be the only one of its kind, and to live five or six hundred years in the Arabian desert, after which it burnt itself to ashes on a funeral pile of aromatic twigs ignited by the sun and fanned by its own wings, but only to emerge from its ashes with renewed youth, to live through another cycle of years. The phoenix is an emblem of the sun, resurrection. Phoenix derives from Greek for ‘date palm’, which was the Sumerian and Phoenician tree of life and symbol of Christian martyrdom.
11. Erebus = the proper name of ‘a place of darkness, between Earth and Hades’; son of Chaos, who begot Aether, Night and Day on his sister; and Arabia.
12. smother = dense, suffocating, or stifling smoke, such as is produced by combustion without flame; mother.
13. shoot up = to assail (a person, thing) by shooting.
14. va te faire foutre! (fr) = (expletive); and va paotr (Breton), my son.
15. eftsoon = Indicating sequence or transition in discourse: Again, moreover, likewise; afterwards, soon afterwards.
16. spirt = to sprout or germinate; to squirt.
17. fire; and pyre.
18. sunward = toward the sun.
19. rampant = unchecked, unrestrained, aggressive, etc.
20. flambe = a torch; and Il Trovatore: song Stride la vampa (literally ‘the blaze crackles’).
21. sombre = depressingly dark, dusky, or obscure.
22. opacity = the quality or condition of being impervious to light; darkness, dimness, obscurity.
23. gloom = an indefinite degree of darkness or obscurity, the result of night, deep shadow, etc.
24. vanished; and Spanish
25. footsore = having sore or tender feet.
26. Work in Progress = Joyce’s name for ‘Finnegans Wake’ during composition.
27. win out = to come out successfully, succeed in attaining one’s end.
28. silent cock (Joyce’s note) = Crawford: Back to the Long Grass 181: (of an African chieftain) ‘his harem often gets out of hand and goes on strike, ‘the crowing hens and the silent cock’ idea’.
29. The West’s Awake (song).
30. John 12:35: ‘Then Jesus said unto them, Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth’.
31. ‘Lucifer’ means ‘lightbearer’.
32. whereon = on which.
33. the morn = the breakfast bringer shall fall fast asleep.
34. amain = with all one’s might, at full speed; vehemently, violently; and amen.
