THE COMING GUEST and the NEW ART FORM

All my books (this being my eleventh) circle around one thought:

There is almost universal understanding today that the “connective tissue” that once wove our world into a cosmos— an intelligent unity—has now disintegrated. A poet says it most eloquently in three lines:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold … (W. B. Yeats: The Second Coming)

The frantic search to “ward off” this truth is challenged by sober logic:

"The experimental search for new symbols or a new myth that will unite everyone may certainly gather a public and create a community, but since every artist finds his own community, the particularity of such communities merely testifies to the disintegration that is taking place." (H-G Gadamer)

Inevitability! With the collapse of absolute truth and reason as guiding principles, we are now exposed to Nietzsche’s will-to-power, as our political systems demonstrate so well and, as well, desires no longer modulated by spiritual restraints are released only to be neatly exploited by our consumer industry for the purpose of selling products. And so our modern civilization is slowly taking shape as an unholy union taking place between power and unconscious desire.

How are we to live in such a reality? Well, of course, as Joseph Campbell once simply remarked when asked how we are to live in a time of mythlessness, “we are doing it!” He is quite correct. Each day we get up and go about our daily lives intelligently and understandingly. This is our way of being as Daseins, as Heidegger has taught us. We each simply go about our business and the world takes shape accordingly.

But according to what? Our theory of evolution tells us that the world evolves according to processes (genetic variation and environmental adaptation) that are quite independent of individual action. But in no way can such a theory account for the shape of our world, the form or contours it takes, now as our technological civilization. The form the world takes is the result of a union of telos and contingency. This “form-maker” with its telos was once called the soul:

"It [soul or “form-maker”—my insert] has the audacity not to be content to simply be alive, but impudently dares to have ideas about the world and about life itself, to insist on giving life a telos or purpose, on interpreting and trying to understand what is and what happens; it insists on thinking, on entertaining fantasies and inventing stories, having memories, perceiving the things of the world as coherent shapes and figurations; …" (Wolfgang Giegerich)

Like genetic evolution the word telos carries a meaning of necessity, “ ‘Telos’ was also an invisible bond that fate, old age, indeed death put over a person and enveloped him or her which underlines the inescapability.” This necessity “breaks into” the world of contingency and begins to reconfigure its shape:

"In matters of the soul process it does not matter very much whether we agree or not. It will happen anyway …. However … there is a great difference in how his [the coming guest—my insert] arrival will happen, that is to say, what it will mean for us and how it will affect us. … Thomas Mann said (in Joseph and his Brothers), "If you can do it, you will do it. If you cannot, it will be done to you.”… If we resist, this reality will be mechanical and soulless. If we see the guest in it, our guest, indeed our deepest self, it can appear in redeemed form." (Wolfgang Giegerich)

C. G. Jung wrote a very similar perspective on the shape of things to come when he wrote:

"[O]ur only certainty is that the new world will be something different from what we were used to. If any of his urges show some inclination to incarnate in a known shape, the creative artist will not trust it … he will hollow them out and hack them up. That is where we are now."

And here we can get our first glimpse of how we are to live in our modern reality, this time of disintegration, chaos, and “soullessness”, if we choose to serve soul. Both Giegerich and Jung are speaking to the importance of how we orient ourselves to the necessity of the arrival of the coming guest. It matters to the outcome, to the final shape that the contours of the world assume, as configured by the union of the soul’s telos and contingency. “Contingency” implies that we have choices, as both quotes indicate. In quoting Thomas Mann, an artist, “[i]f you can do it, you will do it. If you cannot, it will be done to you”, Giegerich also aligns himself with Jung and his sense of the artist engaging or participating with the destruction of the formerly configured world and the creation of the as-yet-unknown newly configured world. There is a doing to be done, and that doing somehow involves the artistic impulse. This “doing” matters if the coming guest is to arrive in redeemed form or as the mechanical and soulless one that appears to be in ascendancy at this time.

This book, as a further refinement of the “one thought” that underlies all my work, explores the kind of “redemptive doing” that can participate with the phenomena of the coming guest, as well as its connection with the artistic impulse. In this effort, I intend to show how the question I raised above, “how are we to live in such a reality?” can be answered—and answered with a specific methodology.