Pessimism, Nihilism, Dualism, and Hope

Just within a day or two last week I encountered the words pessimism, nihilism, and dualism applied to old Gnosticism by two authors—Henry Corbin and Hans Jonas. Jonas also applied the words to existentialism. Corbin was inspired by Heidegger’s phenomenological approach. He studied Heidegger for a while but went beyond that philosopher’s conclusions. Jonas came out of Heidegger’s school directly and also remained an existentialist throughout his life. Jonas’ essay, the concluding chapter of his The Gnostic Religion, makes the point that Gnosticism arose in the same historical circumstances as existentialism, namely a cultural disaster. Gnosticism, as Jonas saw it, was one answer to the collapse of the Graeco-Roman social system, a system based on a faith in a Cosmic Order, thus the belief in coherent relations between parts and the whole, the governed and the ruler. That order was in trouble, and minorities reacted. Existentialism was inspired, if “inspired” is the word to use, by the collapse of religious faith under the onslaught of modern science. I found Corbin’s comments in a presentation on comparative religion reprinted in The Voyage and the Messenger; that book holds a miscellany of his writings. Corbin uses the word pessimism by way of echoing the common characterization of Gnosticism, but then he parenthetically inserts the word dualism as a qualifier; in his view the Gnostic position was only pessimistic about this dispensation, not about Reality taken as a whole.

Dualism, in this context, is a technical term. It refers to systems of thought in which Good and Evil are both active and almost equivalent forces, thus Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and Mazdaism. The Gnostics, most assertively, dismissed the entire cosmos as the product of an incompetent demiurge, hence they were the most pessimistic about this world. As, indeed, the existentialists are too. The Gnostic believed in a very distant sort of God who had no active involvement in this world—and certainly did not create it.

Corbin and Jonas were both men of my father’s generation. Corbin died as a charismatic, almost mystical figure. Jonas went on from his study of Gnosticism to develop an elevated ethical doctrine which, ultimately, is a refined form of existentialism. Reading his later books I felt the cold airs of Stoic endurance—a genuinely sincere conviction, high moral courage, but also the absence of anything that resonated with anything within me—somewhat like watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Journey, in which we are invited by the displayed emotions and the tone to worship—but to worship what amounts to a lot of suns and nebulae.

Interesting times I’ve lived in. Thinking about this, it occurred to me that our times have not yet genuinely felt the pessimism (dualism—as Corbin might remark in parentheses) that the Gnostics felt. Why? The answer is wealth. In our culture throughout the last century and continuing to this day, the social order has not yet begun to show its cracks as deeply as it did in the days of ancient Greek and Rome. Hence existentialism was/is a minority reaction to a change in culture on the part of those inclined to embrace the spirit of the times while, at the same time, sensitive to what it portends. Progressivism is the modern expression of hope. The real pessimism-dualism will appear when the infrastructure of modern life begins to manifest our one-sided emphasis on the material in more obvious ways. And that is still in the future unless—as in the case of Henry Corbin—we make the transition to a more comprehensive understanding of reality before the old one really begins to fall apart.

The Taste and the Abstraction

In a post the other day (“Difficult to Express”) I remarked as follows:

In fact, I must confess, I don’t ... much like that word: abstraction. It suggests some kind of paltry residue of the physical, the last considered real, all else a derivate.

I’d like to expand on that now. The more time passes the more conscious I become of the limitations of concepts. They work fine for personal understanding. In using words, I know what I mean; but we have a tendency to use words we understand to communicate with others—and other people understand those words in quite other ways. For this reason I’ve long felt that genuine inner discoveries of how the world is fashioned and how it moves and has its being can only be communicated effectively using stories and poetry. But those forms of communication, of course, will leave some people dissatisfied. They want their concepts more sharply defined, made mathematical, as it were, stripped of flesh, guts, and circulatory systems, seeing only the supporting structure of bone. But the maddening aspect of reality is that it is captured by the very fusion of its parts. Bones aren’t prior to flesh and blood; but tissue cannot be placed above bone in any hierarchical sense either. It’s the totality that counts. I must assume that bodies came about by a circular or iterative process in which, no doubt, a single fuzzy, undifferentiated intention came to manifest, by degrees, as a structure that has many complexly integrated parts.

In the same post I make the point that for me essences, or forms, are best viewed as intentions, and by that I mean that intentions have a formative impetus. But when I compare this understanding of form to the eternal forms associated with Plato, I see something quite different. Plato’s forms appear to be static—whereas intentions are always dynamic. Eternal forms don’t seem to have life, but intentions are life. In the usual ways of teaching young students the basics of Greek thought, form and matter, the examples for form tend to be static: it’s the image of Venus rendered in stone or bronze, the static idea of a residence, fully formed and rendered as architect’s drawings. But behind that Venus or that residence was, first, a living form in a living mind, and not present in full detail at all but, as I say above, in a fuzzy state, at least as much feeling as image. The concept of “form” has a great deal more energy and life hidden within it than that word routinely suggests. Now I suspect that Plato’s own conception was undoubtedly much more like what I’ve just laid out than as it has come to be passed on to later generations, but the exigencies of communication have eroded its most essential characteristics into a caricature.

Yesterday, after writing a brief and very foreshortened piece on existentialism—and discussing it with Brigitte—and later pondering our talk while on my walk, it suddenly dawned on me that what Heidegger called care (Sorge) and what Sartre called engagement, that very same whatever is what I routinely mean by consciousness. That happens to be my pet expression for something that, in its native form, is an experience, a complex something, a feeling as much as an understanding or, perhaps, an understanding of a feeling—what the Sufi’s call a taste. You have to taste it to know it, the Sufis say. But a taste, alas, is very difficult to convey to someone who hasn’t already tasted the same thing.

In my own personal lexicon, consciousness contains a meaning quite missing for many other people. In my personal understanding, it gets a certain emphasis. It has the character of being awake, really awake, more dynamically of coming awake, of realization, of a sudden grasp. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn—if I could summon the spirit of a long-dead gnostic—that what one calls care, another engagement, and a third consciousness a Gnostic might have called a gnosis, a knowing. In this contexts I might mention that Hans Jonas, in his superb The Gnostic Religion, concludes that Gnosticism in its own time was what, in ours, we experience as existentialism.

Now I would submit here that the storyteller, novelist, and poet—all using a much more comprehensive language than merely that of concepts—is much more able to communicate the taste, the reality, and the flavor of experience than the person who tries to balance the entire insight on the single leg of abstractions.