Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  (In particular, Germans shouldn't ape Frenchmen. But Herder was also a passionate, and earl y , anti-colonialist.) This is one of the origina ting ideas of modern nationalism. The expressive view of human life went along naturally with a new understanding of art. If e xpression defines in a double sense, i.e. , bo th formulates and shapes, then the most important human activity will partake of this nature. The activity by which human beings realize their nature will also define in this double sense. It is art which comes to fill this niche. In our civi l ization, moulded by ex pressivist conceptions, it has come to take a central place in our spirit u al life, in some respects replacing religion. The awe we feel before artistic originality and creativity places art on the border of the numin ous , and reflects the crucial place that creation/expression has in our underst andi n g of h uman life. But in thus being made central, art was also rei nterpreted. If to defi ne myself is to bring what is as yet imp e rfectly determined to full definitio n , if the paradigm vehicle for domg this is artistic creation, then art can n o lon ge r be defined in traditional terms. The traditional understanding of art was a s The Expressivist Tum • 3 77 mimesis. Art imitates reality. This of course left a number of crucial question s open: in particular, the question of what k ind and level of reality was to be imitated. Was it the empiric al reality surrounding us? Or the higher reality of the Forms? And what was the relation between th em? B ut o n the new understanding, art is not imitation, but expression in t he sense discussed here. It makes som ething manifest w hile at the same time realizing it, c ompleting it. This is the shift which M. H. Abram s described so well in The Mi"or and the Lamp.13 The move from mimesis to expression was under way well before the Romantic period, through out the eighteenth century in fact. It fed on a host of things : in part, the new valuation of sentim e nt gave a higher significance to its expression; in part also, the new conceptions of the origins of language and culture in the expressive cry lent colour to the view that the earliest speech was poetical, that early people spoke in tropes because they spoke from the heart and the natural expression of feeling is poe try. This could easily combine with the primitivist sentiment th at the earliest, most primitive poetry was also the purest. Admiration for early, rugged, unspoilt, strongly expressive poetry grew in the second half of the eighteenth century, and turned people towards folk poet ry (Herder played a particularly impor tant role here) as weH as towards Homer, the Hebrew Bible, and even the entirely invented writer 'Ossia n ' .

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Like the Shang, the Zhou held a special “hosting” (bin) sacrifice every five years and invited the nature gods and ancestors to a great banquet. For ten days, the court made elaborate preparations, fasting, cleaning the temple, and bringing the memorial tablets of the ancestors from their niches and setting them up in the palace courtyard. On the day of the feast, the king and queen processed separately to the courtyard; then the younger members of the royal family, each impersonating an ancestor, were led in by a priest, greeted reverently, and escorted to their places. Animals were slaughtered in their honor, and while the meat was cooking, priests ran through the streets calling any stray gods to the feast, crying, “Are you here? Are you here?” There was beautiful music, stately feasting, and everybody played their roles with the utmost decorum. After the banquet—a holy communion with the ancestors, who were mystically present in their young descendants—hymns celebrated the perfect performance of the rite: “Every custom and rite is observed,” the participants sang; “every smile, every word is in place.”50 Every single facial gesture, every movement of their bodies, and every word that they uttered during the bin was prescribed. The participants left their individuality behind to conform to the ideal world of the ritual. “We have striven very hard,” they continued, “that the rites may be without mistake.” All was orderly and swift. All was straight and sure.51 The festival was an epiphany of a sacred society, living in close proximity with the divine; everybody had his or her unique and irreplaceable role, and by leaving their everyday selves behind, they felt caught up in something larger and more momentous. The ritual dramatically created a replica of the court of Heaven, where the High God, the First Ancestor (represented by the king), sat in state with the Shang and Zhou ancestors and the nature gods. The spirits conferred blessings, but they too submitted to the rituals of the sacred drama. The Shang had used the rites to gain the good offices of the ancestors and gods, but by the ninth century, it was becoming more important to perform the rituals precisely and beautifully. When they were perfectly executed, something magical occurred within the participants that gave them intimations of divine harmony.52 The ceremony concluded with an elaborate six-act ballet, which reenacted the campaign of Kings Wen and Wu against the last Shang king. Sixty-four dancers, clad in silk and carrying jade hatchets, represented the army, while the king himself played the part of his ancestor King Wen. Each act had its special music and symbolic dances, and hymns celebrated the establishment of the mandate: The Mandate is not easy to keep, may it not end in your persons. Display and make bright your good fame, and consider what Yin had received from Heaven. The doings of high Heaven have no sound, no smell. Make King Wen your pattern and all the states will trust in you.53

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  The Inherent Sociality of Drives, Motivations, and Conventional EmotionsThe apparatus of drives, motivations, and emotions is concerned with the welfare of the subject in whose organism the responses inhere. But most drives, motivations, and emotions are also inherently social, at scales small and large, their field of action extending well beyond the individual. Desire and lust, caring and nurturing, attachment and love, operate in a social context. The same applies to most instances of joy and sadness, fear and panic, anger; or of compassion, admiration and awe, envy and jealousy and contempt. The powerful sociality that was an essential support of the intellect of Homo sapiens and was so critical in the emergence of cultures is likely to have originated in the machinery of drives, motivations, and emotions, where it evolved from simpler neural processes of simpler creatures. Even further back in time, it evolved from an army of chemical molecules, some of which were present in unicellular organisms. The point to be made here is that sociality, a collection of behavioral strategies indispensable for the creation of cultural responses, is part of the tool kit of homeostasis. Sociality enters the human cultural mind by the hand of affect.10 — The behavioral and neural aspects of drives and motivations have been especially well studied by Jaak Panksepp and Kent Berridge in mammals. Anticipation and desire, which Panksepp subsumes under the label of “seeking” and Berridge prefers to call “wanting,” are prominent examples. So is lust, both in its plain sex-related variety and in romantic love. The care and nurturing of progeny is another powerful drive complemented, on the side of those who are nurtured and cared for, by bonds of attachment and love, the sorts of bonds whose interruptions lead to panic and grief. Play is prominent in mammals and birds and is central to human life. Play anchors the creative imagination of children, adolescents, and adults and is a critical ingredient of the inventions that hallmark cultures.11 —

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Thus in Schelling's Naturphilosophie, different natural phenomena co r resp o nd to dif f erent levels of realization of spirit in nature. Nature is "visible Spirit". 47 Thi s certainly resembles th e old neo-Platonic theories of the Renai s sance, where the physical reality around us is also the embodiment of the Ideas. Wha t has changed is the very notion of embodiment. It is no longe r the manifestati on in the flux of an impersonal Form; it is rather understood on the model of the self-realization of a subject, completing and defining itse lf in the process of self-manifestation. The order of nature has g one through a su b jectivist twist. It follows that ou r acc e ss to it essentially turns on our ow n p ow er s of expressive self-definition, the artistic imagination as the early Schell ing conceives it; or 'reason' in the peculiar sense Hegel gives this term. But in the nineteenth century, this vision of cosmic order began to e rod e just as its predecessors had. Partly this was du e , no doubt, to the developm en t of nat ural science, which presented a universe much vaster and more bewildering in space, time, and evolution than the earlier orders had e nvisaged and rat ionalized. And to this we must add the developments i n bio logy in the latter half of the century, w hich introduced natural science int o the very depths of inner nature t hat the Romantics had originally made part o f the Eu ropean self-consciousness. The resul t for us has been a split-scr ee n vision of natur e. O n one side is the vast universe which scientific discovery continually reveals, huge and in some ways baffling, stretching far beyond our imaginative powers in both the gigantic and the minu scule; indifferent t o us and strangel y other, though full of unexpected beauty and inspiring a we . On the other side is the natur e whose impulse we feel within, with whi ch we Our Victorian Contemporaries • 4 1 7 c a n feel ourselves out of align ment and w ith which we can aspire to be in a tt unement. How these two are to be related is deeply problematical. This is on e respect i n whic h our cultural predi cament is utterl y different from w hat e x is te d before the eighteent h century, where the scientific explanation of the na tural order was closely aligned with its moral meaning, as we see b oth with Pla to and with the Deist conceptions of order. For us, the two have drifted ap art, and it is not dear how we can hope to relate them.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  But it als o reflected a change in the imagination and in the sense of our place in nature . Diderot leapt well beyond the availa bl e evidence when he wrote: Qu'est-ce que notre duree en comparaison de l'eternite des temps? ... Suite indefinie d'animalcules clans l'atome qui fermente, meme suite indefinie clans l ' autre atome qu'on appelle la Terre. Qui sait les races d ' animaux qui nous ont precedes? qui sait les races d'animaux qui succederont aux notres? What is the duration of our time compared with eternity? ... Just as there is an infinite succession of animalcu lae in one fermenting speck of matter, so there is the same infinite succession of animalculae in the speck called earth. Who knows what animal species preceded us? Who knows w hat will follow our present ones? 54 The new feeling for nature, which I described in Chapter 17, moved beyond the English garden, beyond the valleys of Switzerland where the wilderness touches human habitation and which Rousseau ri-tade famous, and comes finally to the inhospitable heights, where it meets in awe an immensity which seems utterly indifferent to human life. Ramond journeyed into these regions, and his books gave expression to this exaltation before the vastness of the untamed heights. They place us before the unchartable immen s i ty of tim e. Tout concoun a rendre les meditations plus profondes, a l eur donner cette teinte sombre, ce caractere sublime qu'elles acquierent, quand l'ame, prenant cet essor qui la rend contemporaine de tous les siecles, e t coexistante avec tousles etres, plane sur l'abime du temps. Everything works together to make our meditations deeper, and to give them this sombre h ue, this sublime character which they acquire, when the so ul, taking the leap which makes it contemporary with all centuries, and coe xistent with all beings, soars over the abyss of time. 55 Radical Enlightenment • 3 JI Charles Rosen quotes Ramond's descriptions of the Alps and Pyrenees, which bring to immediate visibility, as it were, in the accounts of different layers of r oc k and ice, the widely separated ages of their genesis. 56 Some startling findings of learned men combine here with the Romantic temper to produce a new sensibility, which has come to dominate our world. 19.4 W e stu m ble here across one of the many ways in which our conceptions of m oral sources are bound up with the kind of narrative structures in which we m ake sense of our lives.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  They constitute significant entries into the world of human-machine hybridization. Beneficial applications include exoskeletons for victims of accidents who become paraplegics or tetraplegics; exoskeletons are literally second, prosthetic skeletons, set around paralyzed limbs and anchored in the spinal column. These prostheses are moved by computers activated by an outside operator or by the patient. The latter can actually be guided by the patient’s intention to move, capitalizing on the capture of electric brain signals associated with the will to move. 3 We are well on the way to creating hybrids of living organisms and engineered artifacts, something akin to the cyborgs so beloved of science fiction. Immortality Woody Allen once joked that he wanted to achieve immortality by not dying. Little did he know that one day the idea of doing away with death would not be a mere joke. Humans have now figured that the possibility is real, and they have been quietly working toward that goal. And why not? If indeed it would be possible to prolong life indefinitely, should one forgo the option? The practical answer to this question is clear. It might be worth trying, provided one would not need to confront a supreme creator who might have other plans and provided this forever life could be lived as a good life, without the diseases that become so frequent with prolonged longevity—cancers and the dementias, mostly. The boldness of the project takes your breath away, and so does the arrogance it implies. But once you recover your composure—and weary of falling into the Stockholm syndrome pit again—you say, fine, but let me ask some questions. What are the consequences of such a project, immediately and in the long run, for the individuals and for the societies? What conception of humanity informs the endeavor to make humans eternal? In terms of basic homeostasis, immortality is perfection, the realization of nature’s undreamed dream of life perpetuity. The early conditions of homeostasis were such that they promoted the ongoing life and, unwittingly, life into the future. The unplanned devices ensuring future life included the emergence of genetic machinery. In our futuristic scenario, immortality would be the ultimate stage in the life enterprise, an achievement made all the more intriguing and commendable by the fact that it would arrive by way of human creativity. It appears natural, actually, when one considers that creativity is itself a consequence of homeostasis. But what about the downside? Not all things natural are necessarily good, nor is it advisable to let natural things run unchecked. Immortality would eliminate the most powerful engine of feeling-driven homeostasis: the discovery that death is inevitable and the anguish that the discovery generates. Should we not worry about the loss of such an engine? Of course we should worry. It can be argued that as backup engines of the process of homeostasis perhaps we might keep pain and suffering, due to causes other than death foretold, and pleasure, too. But would we really?

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  And when Zilu persisted, and asked what the life of the ancestors was actually like, Confucius replied again: “Till you know about the living, how are you to know about the dead?” 11 Confucius was no skeptic. He practiced the traditional ancestral rites punctiliously, and was filled with numinous awe when he thought of Heaven. Like the Indian sages, he understood the value of silence. “I would much rather not have to talk,” he once complained. Zigong was distressed. “If our Master did not talk,” he objected, “how can we little ones teach others about him?” “Heaven does not speak,” Confucius replied, “yet the four seasons run their course by the command of Heaven, the hundred creatures, each after its own kind, are born thereby. Heaven does no speaking!” 12 Heaven might not talk, but it was supremely effective. Instead of wasting time on pointless theological speculation, people should imitate the reticence of Heaven and keep a reverent silence. Then, perhaps, they too would be a potent force in the world. Confucius brought the religion of China down to earth. Instead of concerning themselves about the afterlife, people must learn to be good here below. His disciples did not study with him in order to acquire esoteric information about the gods and spirits. Their ultimate concern was not Heaven but the Way. The task of the junzi was to tread the path carefully, realizing that this in itself had absolute value. It would lead them not to a place or a person but to a condition of transcendent goodness. The rituals were the road map that would put them on course. Everybody had the potential to become a junzi, who—for Confucius—was a fully developed human being. In the old days, only an aristocrat had been a junzi, but Confucius insisted that anybody who studied the Way enthusiastically could become a “gentleman,” a mature or profound person. Zigong once suggested that the company adopt as their motto: “Poor without cadging, rich without swagger.” “Not bad,” Confucius said. “But better still, Poor, yet delighting in the Way; rich, yet a student of ritual.” Zigong immediately capped this by quoting a verse from the Classic of Odes: As thing cut, as thing filed, As thing chiselled, as thing polished. 13 Confucius was delighted: at last Zigong was beginning to understand the Odes! These lines perfectly described the way a junzi used the rites to burnish and refine his humanity. A junzi was not born but crafted. He had to work on himself in the same way as a sculptor shaped a rough stone and made it a thing of beauty.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  Feelings, and more generally affect of any sort and strength, are the unrecognized presences at the cultural conference table. Everyone in the room senses their presence, but with few exceptions no one talks to them. They are not addressed by name. In the complementary picture that I am drawing here, exceptional human intellect, individually and socially, would not have been moved to invent intelligent cultural practices and instruments without powerful justifications. Feelings of every sort and shade, caused by actual or imagined events, would have provided the motives and recruited the intellect. Cultural responses would have been created by human beings intent on changing their life situation for the better, for the more comfortable, for the more pleasant, for the more conducive to a future with well-being and with fewer of the troubles and losses that would have inspired such creations in the first place, ultimately and practically, not just for a more survivable future but for a better lived one. The humans who first devised the Golden Rule, that we should treat others the way we want others to treat us, formulated the precept with the help of what they felt when they were treated badly or when they saw others badly treated. Logic played a role as it worked on facts, to be sure, but some of the critical facts were feelings. Suffering or flourishing, at the polar ends of the spectrum, would have been prime motivators of the creative intelligence that produced cultures. But so would the experiences of affects related to fundamental desires—hunger, lust, social fellowship—or to fear, anger, the desire for power and prestige, hatred, the drive to destroy opponents and whatever they owned or collected. In fact, we find affect behind many aspects of sociality, guiding the constitution of groups small and large and manifesting itself in the bonds that individuals created around their desires and around the wonder of play, as well as behind conflicts over resources and mates, which were expressed in aggression and violence. Other powerful motivators included the experiences of elevation, awe, and transcendence that arise from the contemplation of beauty, natural or crafted, from the prospect of finding the means to make ourselves and others prosper, from arriving at a possible solution of metaphysical and scientific mysteries, or, for that matter, from the sheer confrontation with mysteries unsolved. How Original Was the Human Cultural Mind? Several intriguing questions arise at this point. On the face of what I have just written, the cultural enterprise originated as a human project. But are the problems that cultures solve exclusively human, or do they concern other living beings as well?

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  And this is where incomparability co nnects up with what I have been ca11ing 'strong evaluation': the fact that these ends or goods stand indepen dent of our own desires, inclinations, or choices, that they represent stan dards by which t h ese desires and choices a re judged. These are obv iou s l y two linked facets of the same sense of higher worth. The goods which command our awe must also function in some sense as standards for us. Looking at some common examples of such frameworks will help to focus the discussion. One of the earliest in our civilization, and which is still alive for som e people today, is that associated with the honour ethic. The life o f the warrior , or citizen, or citizen-soldier is deemed higher than the merely private existence, devoted to the arts of peace and economic well-being. The higher life is marked out by the aura of fame and glory which attaches to it, or at least to signal cases, those who succeed in it brilliantly. To be in public life o r to be a warrior is to be at least a candidate for fame. To be ready to hazard one's tranquility, wealth, even life fo r glory is the mark of a real ma n ; and those who cannot bring themselves to this are judged with contempt as "womanish" (this outlook seems to be inherently sexist). Against this, we have the celebrated and influential counter-position put forward by Plato. Virtue is no longer to be found in public life or in excelling i n the warrior agon. The higher life is that ruled by reason, and reason itself is defined in terms of a vision of order, in the cosmos and in the soul. The higher life is one in which reason-purity, order, limit, the unchanging governs the desires, with their bent to excess, insatiability, fickleness, conflict. Already in this transvaluation of values, something else has altered in addi tion to th e conte nt of the good life, fa r -reach ing as th is ch ang e is. Pl at o' s ethic re quir es what we might call today a theor y, a re asoned ac c ount of wha t huma n life is about, and why one w ay is higher th an the othe rs . Th is flo w s inesc apabl y fr om the new moral status of reason .

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  One way to deal with the problem is simply t o suppr ess one of these terms as irrelevant or illusory. This is the response of disenga ged naturalism, which rec og nizes only th e order of scientific explanation. But if we don't take this quick way with it, we can recognize an area of puzzlement and uncertainty in modern culture. The different ways of meeting this puzzlement have had a lot to do with our changing understanding of the creative imagination and its r ole in our moral life. But for those who retained a sense of the inner impulse of nature, its meaning began to change. This came partly from the scientific developments. And partly too, it was the continuing force of what I called above the a nti-Panglossian objection to all notions of providential order, that they made the structure of all things a bit too tidy and harmonious for our experience. There were other factors as we ll, which I will discuss in the next chapter. Th e shift finds one of its expressions in the philos ophy of Schopenhauer. For those who went through this change, the great current of nature to which we belong is no longer seen as somethin g c omprehensible, familiar, closely relate d to the self, and benign and comes more and more to be seen as vast, unfathomable, alien, and am oral, until we get reflections like those of Conrad's narrator Marlowe in Heart of Darkness, as he sees the natives dancing on the shores of the river: The earth seemed unearthly .... and the men were-No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it,-this suspicion of th eir not being inhuman. It would come slowly on one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you wa s just the thought of their humanity-like yours-the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly . Yes, it was ugly e no ugh; but if you were man eno u gh you would admit to yourself that t h ere was in y ou just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible fr an kness o f that noise , a dim suspicion of t h ere being a mea ning i n it w h i ch you-y ou so remote from the night of first ages-could compre h e nd. A nd why not? ... What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, de votio n, valour, rage-who can tell ?-but truth-truth stripped of its c loak o f tim e. 4 8 4z8 • SUBTLER LANGUAGE S 2.. The second change is obviously related.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Therefore love reason; that your writing s will always draw fro m her alone both their lustre and their worth. 37 Fo r B oileau and his followers, of course, reason had to be understood partly a s the proce dur al, co nst ructiv e, o rdering po wer defined by Descart es. But it a l so i ncorpo rated some of the old su b stantive sens e , where nature itself embodies reason. Art must obey reason, because the mind must construct its mimesis by rational canon s , but also because nature itself has its orders and p r op ort ions . The g ardens of Le Notre, who did hi s greatest work for and under Lou is XIV, are the perfect embodiment of neo-Classicism. They involved imposin g a n or der of const ruct i ve re ason on nature--dra wing straight lines down long v i sta s, balanced and s ymmetr i c al, as we see at Versailles. But they also 300 • THE AFFIRMA TJON OF ORDJNAR Y LIFE reflected an order, i n which the Sun King. was the central power whi c h secured a hi e ra rch y endorsed by nature and God. The 'iardin anglais' is a protes t , a rebellion against all this. It is a place w e go to encounter nature. But this encounter a llows no more sense to th e o l d ontic re ason. And it demands that we reject the abstract, constructed o rd er s of procedural reason. Its aim is to allow unforced nature to awaken in us t h e response of unforced feeling. Now what previously passed for monstrous, for disorder, could awak e n a stonishment, awe. It could be what now came to be call ed 'sublime'. 38 Mm e . Necker p rotested in th e n ame of the old order when she said N ous sommes bien lo i n encore de cet amour de la nature qui fait reconnaitre la per f ection dans les justes proportions, dans le rapport des eff ets avec nos gouts et non dans l'etonnement qu'elle nous cause . We are still very far from that love of nature that recognizes perfection in its ;ust proportions, in the relation of its effects to our taste and not in the astonishment it causes us. 39 But the new love of natu re turns precisely on what it awakens in us. This is still recogniz abl y continuous with the meaning of nature for u s t oday. The experience evoked by Shakespeare, the premisses of Le Notre's design s, are no longer available to us a s living options.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Following a flow [peak] experience, the organization of the self is more complex than it had been before. It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow. Complexity is the result of two broad psychological processes: differentiation and integration. Differentiation implies a movement toward uniqueness, toward separating oneself from others. Integration refers to its opposite: a union with other people, ideas and entities beyond the self. A complex self is one that succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies.7 When we surrender to a transcendent experience, we glimpse our universal aspects, moving beyond the limitations of the ego and its illusions of separateness. Yet the great paradox of transcendence is that while self-consciousness totally disappears, we know more clearly than at any other time exactly who we are. TRANSCENDENCE AND SPIRITUALITYTranscendence and spirituality are closely related. Those who have some familiarity with spiritual practices—meditation, for instance—or who have had mystical or religious experiences may be more likely to recognize moments of transcendence in their erotic lives. Unfortunately, for our ability to recognize the spiritual aspects of eroticism, in most of the world’s great religions, transcendence is of the spirit, whereas the joys of the body occupy a lower realm. Therefore, if you have been influenced by the teachings of virtually any organized religion, you probably believe, subconsciously at least, that sexual ecstasy and spiritual awareness are incompatible. Even though transcendent eroticism usually happens quite by accident—an unexpected gift—certain techniques can help anyone actively explore the mystical dimensions of the erotic.8 One of the best-known approaches is Tantra. Both a vision and set of practices, Tantra is said to have developed thousands of years before Christianity as an offshoot of Hinduism in India. Initially, it was a reaction to the belief that the denial of sexuality was necessary for enlightenment (sound familiar?). Tantra recognizes eros as a vital life force. It seeks to mobilize and shape—rather than to suppress—erotic energies as a pathway to the divine. Although many Westerners find their ideas too strange to be of interest, Tantric practitioners believe that ecstasy is most likely to occur when relaxation and high states of excitement are combined. Rather than having tension build until it culminates in orgasmic release, Tantra calls for relaxing into arousal. It advocates recirculating erotic energy for extended periods, which sometimes results in orgasms that are long-lasting and not particularly genitally focused. If we weren’t so conflicted about eroticism I have no doubt that many of us would be much more cognizant of its transcendent and spiritual aspects. Peak erotic experiences are perfectly suited to transcendence because they engage us totally, enlarge our sense of self by connecting us with another or with normally hidden dimensions of ourselves or both, and expand our perceptions and consciousness. What a pity so few of us are encouraged to discover all of eros’s gifts.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  Several intriguing questions arise at this point. On the face of what I have just written, the cultural enterprise originated as a human project. But are the problems that cultures solve exclusively human, or do they concern other living beings as well? And what about the solutions that the human cultural mind advances? Are they a completely original human invention, or were they used, at least in part, by beings that preceded us in evolution? The confrontation with pain, suffering, and the certainty of death, contrasted with the unattained possibility of well-being and flourishing, could well have been—most certainly was—behind some of the creative human processes that gave rise to the now staggeringly complex instruments of culture. But is it not the case that such human constructions were assisted by older biological strategies and instruments that preceded them? When we observe the great apes, we sense the presence of precursors to our cultural humanity. It is known that Darwin was astonished when, in 1838, he first observed the behaviors of Jenny, an orangutan that had recently arrived in the London Zoo. So was Queen Victoria. She found Jenny to be “disagreeably human.” 5 Chimpanzees can create simple tools, use them intelligently to feed themselves, and even visually transmit the invention to others. Some aspects of their social behaviors (and those of bonobos in particular) are arguably cultural. So are behaviors of species as far apart as elephants and marine mammals. Thanks to genetic transmission, mammals possess an elaborate affective apparatus that, in many respects, resembles ours in its emotional roster. To deny mammals the feelings related to their emotionality is no longer a tenable position. Feelings could also have played a motivating role to account for the “cultural” manifestations of nonhumans. Importantly, the reason why their cultural achievements turned out to be so modest would be related to the lesser development or absence of traits such as shared intentionality and verbal language, and, more generally, the modesty of their intellect. But things are not so simple. Given the complexity and wide-ranging positive and negative consequences of cultural practices and tools, it would be reasonable to expect that their conception would have been intentional and possible only in minded creatures, as nonhuman primates certainly are, perhaps after a holy alliance of feeling and creative intelligence could devote itself to the problems raised by existence in a group.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  But there w as something deeper. If one vi e ws these paintings without a sense of their immediate historical context, as we do now, some t hing of the transfiguration stil1 comes through. That is because they carry something of the power and titanic f orce of raw nature, a force which declares irrelevant all ju dgements made on this nature as crude or imperfect from more refined and spiritual points of view. Rosen and Zerner in their discussion of the Burial point to "the aggressive presence of the personages". 39 A force resides in these people, even for those unfamiliar with the e ar lie r hierarch y of genres. And similarly Courbet's Stonebreakers p o rtrays not only deprivation; it also c aptures the strain, the concentrated exertion to the very limit, o f hard physical labour. There is fo rce an d not only misfortune h ere. The affirmation of raw nature, which is in effect a declaration of its inde pendence from the depreciatory judgements of "higher" standpoints, takes up one of the basic themes of the naturalist Enlightenment. There it was a matter of affirming the innocence of nature. Here it has become something more ambiguous, alr e ady affected by the nineteen t h-century transposition in the sense of nature which I discuss below, but basically similar in its moral purport. In these and other paintings of Courbet, as also in some of Manet's outstandin g works-Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, Olympia-the se nse comes throug h that unrefined nature, basic de s ire, doesn't have to be seen a s a dead wei ght hold ing us back from spiritual asc en t, but is to be wholeheartedly embraced, perhap s even rejoiced in. What was once a basic thesis of the m aterialist philosophers n o w inhabits the canvas. This is a naturalist transfiguration. We could even speak here of a naturalist epiphany. There seem to be two s trands of realism, one of which focusses on the power of the ar tist, the other on the dignity and force of the subject. But in fact they appear to be closel y co nnected; it seems to have been possible to run them together; and ev en the e p iphanic kind in it s o w n way testifies to the power of the artist. The thoroughgoing naturalist disenchantment of the world throws into relief the cr eative work of the imagination in transfiguring it. All this emerges in a short pa ssage of Emile Zola's appreciation of the painting Jallais Hill, Pointoise b y Camille Pissaro: This is the modern countrysid e. One feels the passage of man, who digs up the earth, cuts it up , saddens the horizon. This valley , this hillside manifest a simplicity and an heroic frankness.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  23.2 I have been arguing that a certain understanding of art has run continuously t h roug h the modern world since the Roman tic era. I t is the conception I 've b e en calling epiphanic, and it encompasses not only an aesthetic of the work o f art bu t also a view about its spiritual significance and about the nature and situation of the artist. It is a view not only about art but about the place of art in life, and its relation to morality. It is in fact an exaltation of art; for this becomes the crucial locus of what I have been calling moral sources. Realizing a n epiphany is a paradigm case of what I called recovering contact with a moral source. The epiphany is our achieving contact with something, where th is contact eith er fosters and/or itself constitutes a spirituall y significant f u l fil ment or wholeness. 426 • S U BT LE R LANG U A GE S Nor is this vie w of art the propeny of a minority or a coterie only. The individual instantiations of th is view are indeed held by a minori t y in each case, sometimes a little-known one. But the general understanding of t he place of art is very widespread and deep in our culture, and this corres p onds to a widely shared sense th at the creative imagination is an indispensable locus of moral sources, as the paradoxical and ambivalent relation between minority art and mass public I have just described attests. This general conception has been through a number of transformations and taken a great many forms. It has brought about successive revolutions in p oetics and engendered styles of p oetry very different from those of the Romantics. But what often inspired thes e changes was this very notion of the epiphanic. Wordsworth shows us what is spiritually significant in the ordinary, both people and things. At t he same time, his poetry contains a rea listic description of these people and things, and straightforward expres sions of feeling. But th e lines of modern poetry which flow from Baudelaire have detached themselves from the straightforwardly mimetic and expressive. What underlay this separation was the sense th at the revelatory power of the symbol depends on a break with ordinary discourse. Mallarme speaks of the poet as "ceding the initiative to words,, and allowing the poem to be structured by their inherent, interacting forces, "mobilized by the shock of their inequality". 23 For the Imagists, "the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object,,. 24 The poetic image is opaque, non-referential. Here the Romantic contrast between the symbolic and the referential has intensified in to the attempt to achieve epiphany by deranging reference-to give power to symbols b y taking language beyond discourse.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  The symbol r e m ains central to epiphanic art, and not only in the school which was called ' Sy mbo l ist'. C arlyle spoke of the symbol as "an e mbodiment and revelation o f the i nfinit e". Yeats took up the Romantic contrast of symbol with allegory: "A sy mbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a t r a n sp aren t lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of man y p o s sibl e r epresentations of an embodied thing or a familiar principle . .. : the o n e is a r evelation , the other an amusement". 8 The "image" that Pound and h is g eneration so u ght pa rt akes of t h e same nature. The image is a concrete 42.2. • S U B TL E R LA NG U A G ES manifestation; it is not meant to be understood as discourse about something. Music, th e clearly non-discursive, non-representative art, is the model. Symbolists and Imagists, like Pater, think that all art should aspire to the condition o f music. 9 Quite understandably, the Romantic imag e of the poet as a seer continues, explicitly in Baudelaire, but implicitly in the quality of admiration and aw e which surround the makers of epiphanies up to our day. There is a kin d of pi ety which still surrounds art and artists in our time, which comes from th e sense that what they reveal has great moral and spiritual significance; that in it lies. the key to a certain depth, or fulness, or seriousness, or intensity of life , or to a certain wholeness. I have to use a string of alternatives here, because this si gn ifi cance is very differently conceived, and often-for reasons whic h hav e to do with the very nature of epiphanic art and which I will discuss below-is n ot clearly conceived at all. But for many of o u r contemporar ies ar t has tak e n something like the place of religion. In contr ast to th e fulness of epiphany is the sens e of the world around us, a s we ordinarily experience it, as ou t of joint, dead, or forsaken.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  This is why late-eighteenth-c e ntu ry sentimentali s m , wh en it moved beyond the early influential formulatio ns of Rousseau, fou n d its natural home in the philosophies of nature as a source. The difference in relation to the Platonic model is that here the "senti ments" are defined by the transcendent object of love, the Good. We ca n be lieve that we can attain a descripti on o f th is ob ject independent of ou r The Expressivist Turn • 3 7 3 f e elings, although the object prop erly understo od must command our love a nd awe. But we come to define what nature is as a source in the course of ar t iculating what it inclines us to. If we think of nature as a force, an elan r unning through the world, which emerges in our own inner impulses, if these imp ulses are an indispensable pa rt of our a c cess to this force, then w e can onl y know what it is by articulating what these i mpulses impel us to. An d this articulation must be partly in terms of sentiment, as we have seen. So once ag ain, our sentiments are integral to our most original, underived definition of the good. The first difference above, that in relation to the Aristotelian model, gives rise to another slide, analogous to the one away from orthodox theology. If the good life is defined partly in t erms of c ertain se n timents, then it can also slip its moorings and de p art from the traditional ethical codes. At first, the appropriate sentiments are define d very much in congruence with the ethic of ordinary li f e and benevolence, following moral sense theory. Benevolenc e and sympathy are seen as natural, as were the traditional limits on sensual fulfilment by, say , Rousseau or Herder. But th e way is open for a redefinition. Renewed con ta ct with th e deep sources in nature ca n be seen as conferring a heightened, more vibrant quality to life. This can be interpreted in a way which abandons the usual restraints on sensual fulfilment. In p artial attune m ent to the outlook of Enlightenment materialism, sensuality can itself be made signi fi cant. The good life comes to consist in a perfect fusion of the sensual and the spiritu a l, where our sensual fulfilments are experienced as having higher significance. 9 The journey along this path tak e s us beyond the period now being discussed. We have perhaps come to the end of this r o ad on ly in our own time, with the " flower generation " of the 196o's. Similarly, the source which gives heightened vibrancy to our lives can be detached fro m benevolence and solidarity. But this , too, happens later.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Mobility was still a sacred value: the sacrificial ground was used once only, and was always abandoned after the completion of the rite. At the western end of the sacrificial area, a thatched hut represented the hall of the settled householder. During the rite, the warriors solemnly carried the fire from the hut to the eastern end of the enclosure, where a fresh hearth was built in the open air. The next day, a new sacrificial ground was established, a little farther to the east, and the rite was repeated. The ceremony reenacted Agni’s victorious progress into the new territory, as a ritualist of a later period explained: “This Fire should create room for us; this Fire should go in front, conquering our enemies; impetuously this Fire should conquer the enemies; this Fire should win the prizes in the contest.” 52 Agni was the patron of the settlers. Their colony was a new beginning and, like the first creation, had wrested order from chaos. Fire symbolized the warriors’ ability to control their environment. They identified deeply with their fire. If he could steal fire from the hearth of a vaishya farmer, a warrior could also lure his cattle away, because they would always follow the flames. “He should take brightly burning fire from the home of his rival,” says one of the later texts; “he thereby takes his wealth, his property.” 53 Fire symbolized a warrior’s power and success; it was—an im-portant point—his alter ego. He could create new fire, control and domesticate it. Fire was like his son; when he died and was cremated, he became a sacrificial victim and Agni would carry him to the land of the gods. The fire represented his best and deepest self (atman), 54 and because the fire was Agni, this self was sacred and divine. Agni was present everywhere, but he was hidden. He was in the sun, the thunder, the stormy rain, and the lightning that brought fire to the earth. He was present in ponds and streams, in the clay of the riverbank, and the plants from which fire could be kindled. 55 Agni had to be reverently retrieved from these hiding places, and pressed into the service of humanity. After establishing a new settlement, the warriors would celebrate the Agnicayana ritual, when they would ceremonially build a new brick altar for Agni. First they processed to the riverbank to collect the clay, where Agni was hidden, ritually taking possession of their new territory.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The traditional yoga had never centered on a god, but karma-yoga did. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad had instructed the yogin to focus on Rudra/Shiva, but Krishna told Arjuna that he must meditate on Vishnu. Krishna had a surprise for Arjuna. He explained that he, Krishna, was not only the son of Vishnu, but he actually was the god in human form. Even though he was “unborn, undying, the Lord of creatures,” Vishnu had descended into a human body many times. 83 Vishnu was the creator of the world and kept it in being, but whenever there was a serious crisis—“whenever sacred duty decays and chaos prevails”—he created an earthly form for himself and came into the world: To protect men of virtue And destroy men who do evil To set the standard of sacred duty, I appear in age after age. 84 Now that he had imparted this astonishing news, Krishna could speak more openly to Arjuna about the devotion of bhakti. Arjuna could learn how to detach himself from his egocentric desires by imitating Krishna himself. As Lord and Ruler of the world, Krisha/Vishnu was continually active, but his deeds (karman) did not damage him: These actions do not bind me, Since I remain detached In all my actions, Arjuna, As if I stood apart from them. 85 But if he wanted to imitate Krishna, Arjuna had to understand the nature of divinity; he had to see Krishna/Vishnu as he truly was. Right there on the battlefield, Krishna revealed his divine nature to Arjuna, who was aghast and filled with terror when he saw his friend’s eternal form as the god Vishnu, creator and destroyer, to whom all beings must return. He saw Krishna transfigured by the divine radiance, which contained the entire cosmos. “I see the gods in your body!” he cried. I see your boundless form Everywhere, The countless arms, Bellies, mouths, and eyes; Lord of all, I see no end, Or middle or beginning To your totality. 86 Everything—human or divine—was somehow present in the body of Krishna, who filled space and included within himself all possible forms of deity: “howling storm gods, sun gods, bright gods, and gods of ritual.” But Krishna/Vishnu was also “man’s tireless spirit,” the essence of humanity. 87 All things rushed toward him, as rivers roiled toward the sea and moths were drawn inexorably into a blazing flame. And there too Arjuna saw the Pandava and Kaurava warriors, all hurtling into the god’s blazing mouths. Arjuna had thought that he had known Krishna through and through, but now, “Who are you?” he cried in bewilderment. “I am Time grown old,” Krishna replied—time, which set the world in motion and also annihilated it. Krishna/Vishnu was eternal; he transcended the historical process. As destroyer, Krishna/Vishnu had already annihilated the armies that were apparently drawing up their battle lines, even though, from Arjuna’s human perspective, the fighting had not even begun.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Those who were drawn to materialism often strengthened the la tter impression. They were indeed concerned to subvert traditional religion and morality. What could easily fa i l to be noticed was that this new/o l d p hilosophy was not just the negation of all spiritual stances to human life, but involved its own characteristic one. It was easy to miss, because of the self-imposed inarticulacy of Enlightenment naturalism concerning its moral sources. But this stance, and the conflict around it, is well captured by a writer of our day. Douglas Hofstadter recognizes that certain people hav e an instinctive horror of any "explainin g away" of the soul. I don't know why certain people have this horror while ot h ers, like me, find in reductionism the ultimate religion. Perhaps my lifelong trainin g in p hysics and science in general h as given me a d eep awe at seeing how the most substantial and familiar of objects or experiences fades away, as one appr oaches the infinitesimal scale, into an eerily insubstantial ether, a myriad of ephemeral swirling vortices of nearly inco mprehensible math ematical activity. This in me evokes a cosmic awe. To me, reductionism does n ' t "explain away"; rather , it a dd s mystery. 4 7 We don't find such an openly articulate statement in an eighteenth-centur y author. But just as with the significa n ce of human life, the spir it ua l insp iration can be sensed where it isn't stated. Thus Holbach's materialism sees al l be i ngs alike as tending to a "gravi tation sur soi", 48 as driving to maintain themselves in their being. This involved a break with the Cartesian conception of matter as fundamentally inert. This conception fi gured in a standard argument for the existe nce o f God: he had to be invoked to explain how moveme nt starts. Holbach replaces it with a picture of nature as the locus of force, a pict u re with depth , which awakens our awe and which can conceivably be the locus from whic h thought emerges, something unthinkable with the Cartesian variant.