The Difficult

Against idolatry of the Written Word with reference to Schuon, Parmenides, Heidegger, Plato

“Our relationship with space furnishes a symbol of this hostile nature of outwardness; by launching himself into planetary space – in fact or in principle – man becomes enclosed in a cold, despairing mortal night....by contrast, when man advances towards the inward, he enters into a welcoming and peace-giving limitlessness, fundamentally happy though not easy to achieve in fact; for it is only through deifying inwardness, whatever it’s price, that man is perfectly in conformity with his nature. The paradox of the human condition is that nothing is so contrary to us as the requirement to transcend ourselves, and nothing so fundamentally ourselves as the essence of this requirement, or the fruit of this transcending”¹- Frithjof Schuon

The fetish of the book, the replacing of the original, of experience, with the derivative, in other words, the reduction of ‘truth’ to mere scratches in ink which through the influence of a particularly Abrahamic characteristic has fettered western and European culture for centuries now is neither something that was inevitable, nor in any way harmless.

To be clear; I am not ‘anti-semitic’. I am in no way doubting the relative worthiness of the Semitic religious traditions in the context in which they arose and to which they belong. Neither do I mistake the particularities of the western Semitic Hebrew tradition for all Semitic civilization. And lastly, in no way would I presume to dictate what or even have a word to say with regards to, any individuals’ personal religious beliefs. Freedom of religion was a great and necessary (probably the most necessary) advancement from the impotence and oppression of feudal backwardness which hamstrung national unity and development in Europe (and doubtless other places).

What I find myself increasingly (perhaps excessively) concerned about is the seeming inability (understandable given the conditions) of western society and culture to demarcate it’s own ‘native’, cultural patrimony from what was a politically motivated editing and redefinition by an imperial authority, namely the later emperors, which imposed a Semitic mystery cult upon a largely non-Semitic people or peoples. And part of what was lost was an understanding that the written word is of ambivalent advantage; that as an aid for transmission of thought and knowledge it is excellent, but the danger of literalism and the fetishization of the written word (a danger of which Plato was very much aware) is also a vector. Generally Indo-European cultures did not succumb before Abrahamicisation. The consequences of that shift are all around us today in bloodiness, shallowness, fanaticism and destruction.

Complexity may not be easy to live with; indeed so, but life is not without inherent complexity and suffering. The desire to abandon the complexity for the assurance of the written authority is perfectly understandable. But it is not without it’s own dangers and extreme limitations. Further, it is a replacement of the primary with the abridgement of the secondary. The original of which any ‘book’ is an aspect at most is here all around and in us. To objectify the Real into the written as absolute is, ironically, the essence of what is often condemned by said books as idolatry. I cannot but sense in the malaise of western society in it’s acquiescence to the dictates of consumerist propaganda (in other words, the advertising industry) and it’s stupefied, craven even, tendency to blindness to the difference between what is presented, what is said, what is written, and what IS, a persistent echo of the historical abolition of that distinction which occurred with Christianisation.

To take just one example of the contrary, that is, of an appreciation for the complex and living, ‘difficult’, nature of ‘truth’, which is not simply and totally available just in knowing the meaning of words, but is rather a process or ‘discipline’, a constant revelation, here is an originary thinker of the European tradition, Parmenides, as understood by Martin Heidegger-

“The belonging together of what strives in opposition”

This is how Heidegger explains the unity of Being and thinking which Parmenides reveals in his poem as the ground of “alaetheia”, “unconcealing”. Alaetheia is a word that was later (mis)translated as ‘truth’. Being, that which is, is a unity. It’s unity however includes striving, or internal differentiation, between it’s aspects. Two of these, and the two which are of essence for the human being, are ‘what is thought’ and ‘what thinks’. Here is not a dead letter solution or dictate, once and forever ‘correct’ on what Being is, that people just have to know and believe, but a revelation of our inextricable relationship to and the necessity for our engagement with this ultimate of Being.

This relates to the above quote from Schuon; that which is merely outward, in other words, objectified and ‘fixed with certainty’, even into book-form, is an abandonment of the greater part of our essence. And as such (and Indo-European cultures seem to have been originally quite aware of this danger) is an opening to easy fanaticism, obsession, enclosing of the mind, and leading often to despair and destruction.

1. Schuon, Frithjof, “A Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism”