The Divided Mind. Part Three: The Unhappy Consciousness (4)
Now it is notoriously known how on that urprisingly bludgeon Unity Sunday when the grand germogall allstar was harrily the rage between our weltingtoms extraordinary and our petty thicks the marshalaisy and Irish eyes of welcome were smiling daggers down their backs, when the roth, vice and blause met the noyr blank and rogues and the grim white and cold bet the black fighting tans, categorically unimperatived by the maxims, a rank funk getting the better of him, the scut in a bad fit of pyjamas fled like a leveret for his bare lives, to Talviland, ahone ahaza, pur sued by the scented curses of all the village belles and, without having struck one blow, (ig stole on him was lust he lagging it was becaused dust he shook) kuskykorked himself up tight in his inkbattle house, badly the worse for boosegas, there to stay in afar for the life, where, as there was not a moment to be lost, after he had boxed around with his forteiano till he was whole bach bamp him and bump him blues, he collapsed carefully under a bedtick from Schwitzer’s, his face enveloped into a dead warrior’s telemac, with a lullobaw’s somnbomnet and a whotwaterwottle at his feet to stoke his energy of waiting, moaning feebly, in monkmarian monotheme, but tarned long and then a nation louder, while engaged in swallowing from a large amullar, that his pawdry’s purgatory was more than a nigger bloke could bear,hemiparalysed by the tong warfare and all the shemozzle, (Daily Maily, fullup Lace! Holy Maly, Mothelup Joss!) his cheeks and trousers changing colour every time a gat croaked.
- James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’
A passage part of which I have previously discussed in The Seventh Degree of Wisdom — Part Five and which is taken from a chapter all about Shem the penman, that is, the writer, and is thus a portrait of the artist, but it is narrated from the point of view of his brother, Shaun the postman, thereby indirectly presenting us with a character portrait of him too, with his prejudices against Shem, and as always we move seamlessly from the sacred, (Schwitzer, Albert Schweitzer, (1875–1965), African missionary and modern exegete and interpreter of the works of J. S. Bach, (1685–1750) … bach bamp him and bump him blues …. Holy Maly, Mothelup Joss Holy Mary Mother of Jesus) to the profane Shem’s bodily functions his cheeks and trousers changing colour which is to say soiling himself in fright.
What is to be made of the notions of the sacred and profane from a philosophical point of view? Here is one story we can tell to shed some light upon them. As I touched upon in the last part, the pure heart, which is Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel’s, (1770–1831), Unhappy Consciousness expressing itself, after the failure of devotion it directs its attention towards the ideal of work, first endeavouring to bring the two sides of consciousness together, to grasp the Unchangeable through feeling but feeling is of course changeable: ‘But in the first instance, the return of the feeling heart into itself is taken to mean that it has an actual existence as an individual. It is the pure heart which for us or in itself has found itself and is inwardly satiated, for although for itself in its feeling the essential Being is separated from it, yet this feeling is, in itself, a feeling of self; it has felt the object of its pure feeling and this object is itself’. The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing, said Blaise Pascal, (1623–1662), but here the heart is responding in a way that will prove productive though it does not find it particularly agreeable at this moment for to remain inwardly satiated is to impede its own progress; indeed it has become conscious of its own individuality and what next? The feeling of separation is itself a feeling of self, it realises itself as infinite while reaching out for the infinite, the object of its pure feeling is itself, the Unhappy Consciousness is so near to the realisation that the Unchangeable that it is trying to grasp is its own consciousness in some manner united with the other part of itself, and this new moment is the modes of desire and work.
Desire and work permit the individual to thereby nullify independent things: ‘Thus it comes forward here as self-feeling, or as an actual consciousness existing on its own account. In this return into itself there comes to view its second relationship, that of desire and work in which consciousness finds confirmation of that inner certainty of itself which we know it has attained, by overcoming and enjoying the existence alien to it, viz., existence in the form of independent things’. That is to say, working upon them makes them dependent, from whence derives self-confirmation; I desire and then I enjoy, and this certainly works within the realm of objects but what about grasping the Unchangeable? It is but consciousness trying to grasp the Unchangeable, the self that is desiring and working aiming at some object beyond the desire and the work while not realising that that is itself a division placed between active individual being and whatever it is that it is after, the Unchangeable. But merely through desiring and working the Unhappy Consciousness does not attain the satisfaction that it wants; the alien existence is the self itself desiring and working while aiming at some object beyond the desire and work not realising that the object is itself and its inner life remains incomplete self-certainty, the confirmation is thus set at nought so that it may find confirmation in the division between the active individual being and that which it is after, the Unchangeable.
And so the Unhappy Consciousness’s relation to its embodied Unchangeable appeared as its own self-feeling connected with its desires and the work it performs but neither this desire nor this work give its existence any positive meaning to make it confident of itself and enabled to enjoy the Universal, rather, what is disclosed is the Unhappy Consciousness’s infinite remoteness and estrangement from its ideal. Now that the individual is desiring and working which is directed towards the actual world of things that is no longer intrinsically known though it is known in the sense that it can be nullified rather the world is split into two: ‘The world of actuality to which desire and work are directed is no longer for this consciousness something intrinsically null, something merely to be set aside (Aufzuhebendes) and consumed, but something like that consciousness itself, an actuality broken in two, which is only from one aspect intrinsically null, but from another aspect is also a sanctified world (geheiligte Welt); it is the form of the Unchangeable, for this has retained individuality, and because, as the Unchangeable, it is a Universal, its individuality has in general the significance of all actuality’.
That is to say, the world is made sacred, the individual is the profane; the Unchangeable is the universal, the universal has taken on individuality; the form (Gestalt) of the Unchangeable is the sanctified world; a form of consciousness one might say away from the individual while in actuality it is the inidividual and the Universal, the entire set up is consciousness itself.
The Unhappy Consciousness as individuality is trying to grasp the essence, the important, the Unchangeable, through the mode of desire and work and yet the Unchangeable has taken on individuality while the world has acquired a holy aspect for it is now the form of the Unchangeable and the Unhappy Consciousness cannot nullify it through desire and work. And in despite of this impasse and rather than disappearing into nothing consciousness nonetheless sets the world at nought because the Unchangeable relinquishes its embodied form to the enjoyment of the individual consciousness. The essential gives over its individulality to the individual person for his or her enjoyment and this latter can then grasp his or herself as something that actually matters. Consciousness remains divided however: ‘Consciousness, on its part, likewise makes its appearance as an actuality, but also as divided within itself, and in its work and enjoyment this divideness displays itself as breaking up into a relation to the world of actuality or a being which is for itself, and into a being that is in itself’. The for itself manifests itself through desires and work, through changing things in the world of actuality, the in itself is the surrender of the embodied form of the Unchangeable, the in itself has intrinsic being and ‘this aspect belongs to the Unchangeable beyond and consists of faculties and powers, a gift from an alien source, which the Unchangeable makes over to consciousness to make use of’. Which is to say, the faculty and powers of thinking, of reasoning, of movement, faculties and powers of a general nature, the in itself of an individual consciousness and the manner by which it uses them determinately is its for itself.
Which brings us back to Albert Schweitzer. I have covered in the previous parts how much the Unhappy Consciousness in devotional and feeling mode in its endeavours to connect with the Unchangeable has its exemplar in Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, (1813–1855); so much that Hegel writes in this section sounds familiar, and now the Unhappy Consciousness in desiring and working mode has its exemplar in Albert Schweitzer; for the Unhappy Consciousness at this stage everything in the world is sanctified as the expression of the nature of the Unchangeable (or God if you prefer) and compare that with Schweitzer’s assertion: ‘By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive’. And: ‘Whoever has looked into the eyes of Jesus as he appears to us in his words knows that true happiness consists of service to this great One and his Spirit — and a life offerred to his work. Those who accept this mode of life, who know how to live it, become brothers and sisters’.
An Unhappy Consciousness is divided into two extremes that are estranged from each other, but now the distinction is one of activity and passivity: ‘Accordingly, consciousness in its activity is, in the first instance, a relationship of two extremes. On one side it stands as actively present (das tätige Diesseits, (as opposed to Jenseits), the active presence?), while confronting it is a passive actuality (die passive Wirklichkeit, reality, actuality, what is there); the two sides are in relation with one another, but both have also withdrawn into the Unchangeable and stand fast in themselves’. There is a superficial relation between the two (Oberfläche gegeneinander … ) both extremes are what they are for consciousness and what they are for the Unchangeable the latter of which consciousness is trying to make sense of, although it is consciousness itself, but as both extremes have essence the passive extreme is set aside (aufgehoben) by the active. The initiative therefore comes from the active extreme, the power whereby actuality is dissolved as the here becomes the beyond and the activity on the behalf of consciousness derives its ground or its causality from something beyond consciousness and full activity is thereby not in itself. The Unhappy Consciousness believes its power to be the beyond, that which is forever eluding consciousness despite being within its grasp. And what is this outside of consciousness that is its ground? Another consciousness? A force of some kind? Well, whatever it is, it is a universal without full activity this latter of which being presumed to be unconditioned but here it is conditioned and the Unhappy Consciousness is truly lost through taking the active extreme as its condition or ground.
So, with regard to the Unhappy Consciousness designated as Schweitzer, his concept of the reverence for life (which is taken to be a universal concept for ethics) apparently developed from his observation of the world around him: ‘Ethics is nothing other than Reverence for Life’, he said. ‘Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil’. This is the actively extreme relatum in the relation of the two relata in his Unhappy Consciousness. Thi thes is reflected in his view that life of Jesus must be interpreted in the light of Jesus’ own convictions which themselves reflected late Jewish eschatology and apocalypticism:
‘The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth and died to give his work its final consecration never existed. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in a historical garb. This image has not been destroyed from outside; it has fallen to pieces’.
That is to say, Jesus defies any attempt at understanding him (there is always something just out of reach for the Unhappy Consciousness but it reaches for it anyway) by making parallels to the ways of thinking or feeling of modern men and women and Jesus was authentic in his belief that his ministry would bring about the end of history and did not see any prolonged period elapsing between his time on earth and God’s final judgment. (‘Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom’. ‘Matthew’ 16:28).
And of the other relatum in the relation? The extreme of passive actuality? Well, given that it is the active extreme taking the initiative actuality is thereby dissolved as the here and present becomes something beyond and Schweitzer’s activity is grounded in something beyond his consciousness. He regarded his work as a medical missionary in Africa to be his answer to the call of Jesus call to become fishers of men while at the same time he saw it as an albeit slight recompense for the historic guilt (if such a kind of guilt there could be) of European colonizers. (‘And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men’. ‘Matthew’ 4:19). Can there be a more obvious case of a divided mind, the two extremes of which are fully estranged from each other? How else could one account for such a total lack of self-awareness other than that his activity is grounded in something beyond and what that beyond is he does not know himself although he grasps at it.
Through a consideration of the ideal of work consciousness tried to serve the Unchangeable through labour though now it has a contradictory attitude to the world on which it works for on the one hand, anything worldly has no significance, as what matters is the Unchangeable standings above it; and on the other hand, everything in the world is sanctified as the expression of the nature of the Unchangeable. The Unhappy Consciousness comes to view its own capacities for labour in a two-fold manner, for on the one hand if it can create anything using them, it is only because the Unchangeable permits it, and on the other hand it views these capacities as a gift from the Unchangeable, divinely ordained one might say, and so it is that through though work the Unhappy Consciousness may attain some sense of its union with the Unchangeable, but in another sense this 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’.
As I said, Schweitzer regarded his work as a medical missionary in Africa as recompense for the historic guilt of European colonizers. That is an Unhappy Consciousness in penitential mode. The Unhappy Consciousness’s third and final attempt to connect to the Unchangeable, through penance, I will leave for the next part.
‘The Second Coming’
by W. B. Yeats (1865–1939)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
To be continued ….
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ quotation:
1. notoriously = to a notorious degree.
2. bludgeon = a short stout stick or club; to hit with a bludgeon.
3. Trinity Sunday = the Sunday next after Whit-Sunday (a festival in honour of the Trinity); and Bloody Sunday: 21/11/1920, when Black and Tans murdered civilians at Croke Park.
4. Grand-Guignol = Paris theatre noted for scenes of horror; The Letter: ‘grand funeral.
5. gall (Irish) = foreigner; and Germans and Gauls (French).
6. all star = composed of stars or of outstanding players or performers; and Ulster.
7. bout = a contest or match esp. of boxing or wrestling; attack; and Joyce’s note: ‘star bout’.
8. Harry; and merrily.
9. Finnegan’s Wake 4 (song): ‘Shillelagh law was all the rage’ (originally, Poole: Tim Finigan’s Wake: ‘Shillalah-law was all the rage’).
10. Wellingtons; and Tom; and Tommy (Colloquial), a private in the British army; and (Joyce’s note): ‘fighting man extraordinary’.
11. thick = a thick-headed or stupid person; and Dick; and paddywhack (Slang), Irishman; and pathetic; and ‘petty lipoleum’.
12. aisy (Anglo-Irish Pronunciation) = easy, La Marseillaise (song).
13. speak or look daggers = to speak or look fiercely, savagely or angrily; and ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’.
14. rot, weiss und blau (German) = red, white and blue (French tricolour).
15. noir, blanc et rouge (French) = black, white and red (pre-1918 German tricolour).
16. green, white and gold (Irish tricolour).
17. Black and Tans = popular name for an armed force specially recruited to combat the Sinn-Feiners in 1921, so named from the mixture (black and khaki) of constabulary and military uniforms worn by them.
18. categorically = absolutely, positively, unconditionally.
19. imperative = expressive of command, authoritatively or absolutely directive + Kant defined an imperative as any proposition that declares a certain action (or inaction) to be necessary. A hypothetical imperative compels action in a given circumstance: if I wish to quench my thirst, I must drink something. A categorical imperative, on the other hand, denotes an absolute, unconditional requirement that asserts its authority in all circumstances, both required and justified as an end in itself. It is best known in its first formulation: ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’.
20. maxim = a rule or principle of conduct; type of gun.
21. rank = unreasonably high in amount, excessive.
22, funk = cowering fear, a state of panic or shrinking terror; and Rundfunk (German), radio.
23. get the better of = to win a victory over.
24. scut = a contemptible fellow.
25. fit = the manner in which clothing fits a wearer.
26. pyjamas = loose drawers or trousers, usually of silk or cotton, tied round the waist, worn by both sexes in Turkey, Iran, India, etc., and adopted by Europeans in those countries, especially for night wear.
27. leveret = a young hare, strictly one in its first year.
28. for dear life = so as to save, or, as if to save, one’s life; and Joyce’s note: ‘fly for his life’.
29. talvi (Finnish) = winter.
30. a hon (Hungarian) = a haza (Hungarian), the fatherland; ahany haz annyi szokas (Hungarian proverb), as many countries as many customs; and honn (Hungarian), at home; and haza (Hungarian), homeward; and ochone! (Anglo-Irish) = ochón! (Irish), alas!
31, without striking a blow = without a struggle.
32. pig (Slang) = sixpence; and pistol; and Meillet & Cohen: Les Langues du Monde 142: ‘Example (in Afar): ala yo-k bata wah ani-k ramili yo utuq: camel me to was lost I miss I am because sand me throw. “Throw me some sand, since I cannot find the camel that I have lost”’ (sand throwing is a form of divination for finding lost items).
33. lag = to linger, loiter, steal; to serve as convict, to deport as convict (Slang); and to leg it. to use the legs, to walk fast or run.
34. dust (Slang) = money.
35. shook (Slang) = stole, robbed.
36. Koskenkorva = a Finnish vodka; and koska (Serbian), bone; and Meillet & Cohen: Les Langues du Monde 141: ‘Couchitique’ (French ‘Cushitic’; Afar is an Eastern Cushitic language of North-East Africa.
37. The Inkbottle House = Church of the Seven Dolours, Botanic Avenue, Dublin (shape said to have been suggested by Swift).
38. go from bad to worse = to become worse; and (notebook 1922–23): ‘the worse for drink’ = Leader 11 Nov 1922, 319/1: ‘Current Topics (on ‘the drink evil’)’: ‘poor fellows… make their way home as best they can in the small hours of the morning much the worse of drink… the constable arrived back at the barrack the worse of drink!’
39. boose = alcoholic drink, chiefly beer; U.S. esp. Spirits; and J.B.S. Haldane, the author of Daedalus, or Science and the Future, defends the cause of the chemical weapons: ‘None of us was much the worse for the gas, or in any real danger, as we knew where to stop, but some had to go to bed for a few days, and I was very short of breath and incapable of running for a month or so’. Joyce thanks to Haldane now changes the phrase, which was already there as ‘the worse for drink’, into ‘badly the worse for boosegas’. (Robbert-Jan Henkes and Mikio Fuse).
40. afar = far, far away, at or to a distance; fear of his life.
41. box = to fight with fists; now mostly of purely athletic practice with boxing-gloves.
42. fortepiano = loud than immediately soft (direction in music); An early name of the pianoforte (a musical instrument producing tones by means of hammers, operated by levers from a keyboard, which strike metal strings, the vibrations being stopped by dampers).
43. Bach, Blues (music); and black and blue.
Bach’s organ works (so does mine)
44. bump = to strike heavily or firmly.
45. bedtick = a large flat quadrangular bag or case, into which feathers, hair, straw, chaff, or other substances are put to form a bed.
46. SWITZER’S = Long-established department store on Grafton Street; and Switzerland (neutral in World War I).
47. almanac = an annual publication containing tabular information in a particular field or fields arranged according to the calendar of a given year; and Telemachus. Odysseus’s son; and Thelema, a religious philosophy that was developed by the early 20th century British writer and ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley, (1875–1947), based upon a religious experience that he had in Egypt in 1904. By his account, a possibly non-corporeal being that called itself Aiwass contacted him and dictated a text known as The Book of the Law or Liber AL vel Legis, which outlined the principles of Thelema. Franciscan monk François Rabelais, (1483/94–1553), in the 16th century used Thélème, the French form of the word, as the name of a fictional Abbey in his novels, Gargantua and Pantagruel. The only rule of this Abbey was ‘fay çe que vouldras’ (‘Fais ce que tu veux’, or, ‘Do what thou wilt’).
Essai de restitution de l’abbaye de Thélème par Charle Lenormant, 1840
48. lullaby.
49. sunbonnet = a light bonnet with a projection in front and a cape behind to protect the head and neck from the sun; and somnus (Latin), 50. sleep; and somnolence, a very sleepy state.
51. whot = hot; and (Joyce’s note): ‘Tintagel: hot water bottle’ (hot bath — Kevin?).
52. stoke = supply with a fuel or something resembling fuel; and store; and ‘A warrior cannot be helpless’, he said. ‘or bewildered or frightened; not under any circumstances. For a warrior there is time only for his impeccability; everything else drains his power. Impeccability replenishes it’. (Carlos Castaneda: The Tales of Power).
53. Marian = pertaining to the Virgin Mary, or characterized by special devotion to her; The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (Ulysses.10.585); and Mon Khmer language (178.15-.16).
54. monothematic = having a single dominative theme; and monothema (Greek), sole treasure, horoscope; solitary tomb; and monotone.
55. tarn, (German), camouflage, mask; Yankee Doodle (song): ‘I see another snarl of men / A digging graves they told me, / So ‘tarnal long, so ‘tarnal deep, / They ‘tended they should hold me… / …And every time they shoot it off, / It takes a horn of powder, / and makes a noise like father’s gun, / Only a nation louder’.
56. ampullar = resembling or rel. to an ampulla (a small nearly globular flask or bottle, with two handles); and ampulla (Latin), flask.
57. padre = ‘father’: a title applied in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Spanish America, to the regular clergy; and Padraig (padrig) (Gaelic), Patrick; and Patrick’s Purgatory , a cave on an island in Lough Derg, which Christ revealed to St Patrick, saying that whoever spent a day and a night there would witness hell’s torments, heaven’s bliss. It was a favourite resort of pilgrims, but was closed by the pope’s order on St Patrick’s Day, 1497. Also, according to legend it was the last stronghold of the devil in Ireland until St Patrick drove the devil out by 40 days of fasting and prayer).
58. bloke = man, chap, fellow; and Genesis 4:13: ‘And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear’; and knickerbocker.
59. tong = a deep sound given out by a large bell; a secret society esp. among chinese formerly notorious for gang warfare and associated with racketeering, gambling and drugs; attrib., esp. in tong war.
60. a confused situation or affair, mess, quarrel, row (Joyce’s note: ‘shemozzle’).
61. Hail Mary; and Daily Mail (newspaper).
62. joss (Pidgin) = God; and Litany of Blessed Virgin Mary: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace. Holy Mary, mother of God’.
63. his trousers changed colour (notebook 1923); (shitting himself in fright); and ‘The mystery or the secret of the sorcerers’ explanation is that it deals with unfolding the wings of perception’. He put his hand over my writing pad and said that I should go to the bushes and take care of my bodily functions, and after that I should take off my clothes and leave them in a bundle right where we were. (Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998): The Tales of Power).
64. gat = a revolver or other gun (gangsters’ slang, 1920s).
65. croak = to utter a deep, hoarse, dismal cry, as a frog or a raven.
