On Tools

essay and verse

ON TOOLS

“Accordingly, the fundamental absurdity of materialism consists in the fact that it starts from the objective; it takes an objective something as the ultimate ground of explanation, whether this be matter in the abstract simply as it is thought, or after it has entered into the form and is empirically given, and hence substance, perhaps the chemical elements together with their primary combinations. Some such thing it takes as existing absolutely and in itself, in order to let organic nature and finally the knowing subject emerge from it, and thus to completely explain these; whereas in truth everything objective is already conditioned in manifold ways by the knowing subject with the forms of its knowing, and presupposes these forms; consequently it wholly disappears when the subject is thought away. Materialism is therefore the attempt to explain what is directly given to us from what is given indirectly”¹

Like so many – if not all – doctrines and “isms”, materialism is both a myth and a menu; here, for your consumption, is a set of elements and formulas, under which arrangement one can render palatable this existence, or realm of experience.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with such intellectual tools; only the demand that what works for one must be forced as the way for all, in other words, exalting the relative to the dignity of absolute.

The messiness inherent in the condition of the human psyche can make absolutizing very appealing; we like “either or”, and with things of seemingly foundational importance, we like clarity. Thus, we will look for stark and solid extremes; it is either this, or it’s polar opposite; something either exists or not, is either good or bad, is either useful, useless, natural, unnatural, it is either freedom or tyrannical oppression. Babies and bathwater alike take flight under the rule of such longing for surety. Education has been, largely and in many western countries, debased. The ‘products’ of the universities seem ever more tailored to suit the paradigm of so-called “bullshit jobs”.

But to leap from these recognitions to vilification of education in itself is hardly a prudent move. The same goes for so much of what constitutes our cultural environment, including art, science, religion etc.

Messiness of course is anathema to certain kinds of religious attitude. The monarchic-monotheisms of Hebrew descent are generally, and to varying degrees, hostile to the heterogeneous. Although there certainly were religious aspects to native Indo-European wars, intercommunal violence, and occasional legal proscription, there was scarcely, even in the highly legalistic Roman empire, anything so comparably extreme as the exclusive theocracies springing from the Abrahamics. Egypt knew of such extremes, and indeed, Egypt rather than West Asia and Mesopotamia could be regarded as the fountainhead of the ideas that informed the development of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition(s). But, as scholar, Jan Assmann remarked, in ancient Egyptian religion orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy, that is, ritual conformity rather than conformity in belief was paramount. As long as one observed the same rites, one could understand them, and the divine world, in the ways that seemed appropriate.

With ancient Europe, the situation was even more accommodating; a set of a small number of great gods under various names, and with varying translatability of associated myth, was common. Beginning around the 5^th century BCE, it also became increasingly common for the learned classes to regard these pantheons as the differentiated epiphanies of one hidden god, or divine principle.

In the ancient pre-conversion culture of my own country and people, as far as we can tell, a great variety of localized cults and divine forms were venerated, while a priestly class, the druids, were honoured and granted authority by all. What these druids themselves believed we cannot know, because they left no writings (intentionally). However, it may have been, if their wider Indo-European counterparts and the reports of classical authors are anything to go by, a form of holism or pantheism (to indulge in some “ism-atizing”) where all the various divine persons were understood as manifestations of cosmic principles.

There is a perpetual tension inherent in the human psyche (or individual psuche, soul) between recognition of uncertainty as a natural condition, and the impulse towards finding certainty, and in finding, imposing it. This tension is far from exclusively in spiritual affairs, although with the rise and spread of Abrahamic versions of monotheism, the emphasis on orthodoxy became a priority, with bloody and destructive consequences. It goes for aesthetics, morality, politics, and culture generally. In it’s least potentially harmful form, it limits the tension to material things, to economy and the tension between freedom of enterprise, and the stability and welfare of the society. Such a scope, although still fraught, at least has as it’s subject matter things insentient, ie, wealth and resources. When it goes above and beyond this, however, it engenders profound aggravation and suffering.

“Isms” may be of immense help to individuals thus navigating their circumstances, but they will not, and cannot, satisfy universally, nor by themselves completely negate the uncertainty and ambiguity of the human condition. And this may be because, as Schopenhauer describes it, the subject rather than what appears as objective, has priority, and indeed, conditions the objective in manifold ways

THE SEER OF DONN²

There nothing laid before the eye,

so clear beneath a living sun,

but ready made, apportioned by

the seer in the house of Donn

***

The same, he casts a million shapes

unfailing from the dark behind,

the cerement, and naming drapes

the lasting will of Gaelic kind

1. Schopenhauer, Arthur, “The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1”

2. Gaelic-Celtic god of the dead and ancestor of the Gaelic peoples