Krasilov, 1997. Metaecology-17. Logos. Galatea. The Sword

Passers-by. Dulcinea. The Witness. Substitution. What is in a Name? V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 p. Part 17. Logos. Galatea. The Sword. Games. Mephistopheles. Logos The serpent was once considered the embodiment of wisdom, because it has a forked tongue. The human tongue is even more forked. Peacefully foraging baboons grunt constantly — a kind of acoustic background that tunes the troop to a single frequency and suddenly erupts into an alarm call. Judging by the fact that we still feel uncomfortable with silence and perceive complete quiet as a vague threat, a similar swarm of acoustic signals must have surrounded early humans as well. The emergence of the word from that swarm was a creative act of enormous significance. In parallel, the contours of a phenomenon and its verbal designation — its name — acquired definition in consciousness. In other words, the word and its referent were born in consciousness as Siamese twins; the bond between them seemed indissoluble. From this indissolubility arose the conviction in the magical power of the word, its capacity to create a desired world in the image of the speaker. That was precisely the purpose for which speech began. People healed with words ("healer" and "lexicon" share a common root). There was no doubt about the possibility of influencing a person or object by pronouncing names — for the name was a part, like a lock of hair, a hand, the outline of a hand on a wall. At the foundation of modern linguistics lie the ideas of the eighteenth-century German philosopher J.G. Herder concerning the parallel formation of human intellect and human language. Yet the cognitive possibilities of this conception are far from exhausted. The word was born in direct connection with the understanding of a thing as a sign of its essence. Subsequently, however, the separation of word from thing became necessary as a condition for the manipulation of concepts, for human thought. At the same time, things served to express (to objectify) the inner state of the human being, and in this capacity could also be substituted by verbal and other signs, which became material for the construction of the metaecological system of the inner world. (The syncretism of word and thing, characteristic of the magical period and underlying verbal magic, survives mainly in archaic profanities derived from incestuous taboos, and even today these are nearly equivalent to physical assault.) Among baboons, juveniles frequently emit false alarm calls — uttering a cry that signifies, in the primate sign language, a leopard, even though no leopard is in sight. Adult baboons tolerate this, understanding that the leopard in such a case is not an external threat but an expression of the irrational fear experienced by the juvenile. Ever since states resembling irrational fear first arose, the cry "leopard" has acquired a binary meaning — simultaneously a sign of an object in the external world and a symbol of an event in the inner world. The leopard may vanish as a biological species yet survive as an auto-symbol, an objectified state of the meta-ego. This duality has long troubled philosophers, some of whom were inclined to the view that leopards, like all other things, exist only in the imagination. The question of which came first, word or thing, cannot be resolved without a principled distinction between the sign function and the symbolic function — of both word and thing — even though in practice these intertwine and mutually substitute for one another. Already among higher animals there are, as it were, two languages: the primary-sign language and the secondary-sign, or symbolic, language — the latter mistakenly attributed to humans alone. In the first, a sign denotes a thing as the animal apprehends it (thus the cry signifying a snake conveys the danger it poses). This language is maintained by natural selection. In the second, a sign — possibly the very same sign — is used in a sense detached from the first, as a symbol of an inner state. The antlers of a deer are tournament weapons; yet to the female they signify something altogether different. The symbolic language of animals serves as a means of attracting a mating partner and is maintained by sexual selection. If the primary sign language of humans differs in principle little from that of animals, the sphere of symbolic language is considerably expanded and is not confined to mating behaviour, though it still retains its connection with its original source — the interaction of the sexes. The human language of symbols not only conveys individual psychic states but also serves as the external embodiment of the "inner self," of the soul. The material for such embodiment may be the entire external world as an inseparable equivalent of the soul (as it was for primordial humans and remains for children and artists), or some species of animal (whose images we find on cave walls as symbolic self-portraits of the ancient artist, frequently neighbouring the outline of his hand — a personal sign), or, at later stages, heroized deceased humans and immortal anthropomorphic beings. Symbolic language found its development in art, which still — despite the diversity of genres and styles — represents a gallery of symbolic self-portraits. In its primordial form, as Sigmund Freud showed (in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900), the symbolic language functions in dreams; the auto-symbols that rise in sleep from the depths of the unconscious are the same as those of the Neolithic (these include, in particular, totemic animals embodying taboo sexual drives and the fear associated with them). Characteristic of European civilization is the displacement of symbols by signs, reflecting the alienation of the inner world from the outer world and compelling us to speak of the extinction of spiritual life. The symbols of dreams become ever less comprehensible, as does art itself. Yet the two-layered nature of contemporary language is preserved as a non-coincidence between the surface structure of speech and the deep structure, which, as Noam Chomsky showed (in Syntactic Structures, 1957, and other works), can be revealed by methods of linguistic analysis. The separation of word from sound, of name from object, of image from what is depicted signified the birth of literature, of art, of philosophy — the doubling of the world accompanying the splitting of personality. The dual nature of language serves as the material foundation of double existence, by virtue of which the human personality constitutes a developing ego-system. Galatea As a natural being, the human is occupied with the search for resources for vital activity and for reproduction — for self-perpetuation. This occupation may consume an entire life, which in essence reduces to a genetic contribution to offspring, to the creation of biological copies that inherit the tendency toward the same mode of existence. As a social being, the human falls under the sway of a system that reduces life to the performance of one or another social role. At first, existence in a role seems like play, a comedy of masks. But the role suppresses natural desires (love and reproduction are sacrificed to career, which is pursued for the sake of success in love and reproduction), and so thoroughly absorbs the individual that he grows together with the mask, loses the sense of play, and becomes a socially reproducible component of the system. Potentially, the possibility of a parallel existence in the spiritual world remains. Culture offers standard material for its construction, laid over an individual genetic foundation — a certain initial diversity that may develop under the influence of the spiritual sphere, or, under that same influence, disappear, trimmed to a limited set of prototypes. "What will he be today? A Melmoth, A cosmopolitan, a patriot, A Harold, a Quaker, a hypocrite..." Only in exceptional cases does the individual foundation prove so intractable that none of the ready-made masks fits. Such an individual is condemned "...to look upon life as a rite And, following the orderly crowd, To walk, sharing with them neither Common opinions nor passions." Finding himself in solitude, he constructs his own world and objectifies it, like the first human or an infant (to the extent that individual development recapitulates the early stages of human history). The refusal to use ready-made material places him in the position of a cell reproducing by division, or of the god Atum, using his own physiological acts for the same purpose. Creative work in its pure form is, in general, a kind of atavism — a repetition of the situation of the primordial shaman, refracted through the situation of a god who creates from words something in his own image and likeness. The anthropomorphic cosmos was seen through the eyes of the primordial artist, who did not intend to depict the world but rather wished to repeat himself within it. If the biblical god created a mortal double in his own likeness, then in the process of artistic creation the reverse occurs: the artist invests in the work his spiritual energy in the hope of creating a double that will outlast him and may perhaps attain immortality. The artist, even when for whatever reason he strives toward a faithful depiction of his surroundings, creates nothing but self-portraits, which he then exhibits under various names. The consumer of art uses them as material for constructing his own double. That, after all, is what art exists for. The sacrificial nature of creativity lies in the fact that the double cannot be sold or given away without damage to oneself, without the sabbath emptying that inevitably follows the completion of work, even if all that has been created is "very good indeed." But the consumer, too, takes a risk, substituting for his own self-conception the self-conception of another person. The incompatibility of the artistic material employed with the primary spiritual foundation generates a sense of incompatibility with oneself (if, for instance, Christ or Buddha has been taken as the model) and ultimately a guilt complex — or, as the other extreme, the abandonment of the "primary self." The impossibility of cohabitation of doubles leads to real or metaphysical suicide (for no one truly believes that one can simply cease to be, cease to exist altogether; suicide is not self-annihilation but the resolution of an acutely exacerbated conflict between doubles). In the childhood variant, the role of the incompatible double is played by the parents; in the erotic, by an unfaithful beloved; in the ideological, as with Peregrinus or Kirillov, by all of humanity. In real life the meta-ego kills the primary double; in the metaphysical, it is the reverse. Both outcomes are equally tragic. (Tsvetaeva wrote of Mayakovsky's suicide: for ten years Mayakovsky the man was killing Mayakovsky the poet; at last Mayakovsky the poet rose and killed Mayakovsky the man. Her own story in the same terms appears as the more consistent killing of the man by the poet.) Another variant of suicide is the renunciation of spiritual nourishment, or its replacement by something indigestible, which may starve the meta-ego to death. Life becomes one-dimensional, practically reduces to nothing. One may also regard as suicide the absorption of the "primary self" by an aggressive meta-ego, the displacement of life into the metaphysical plane, whereby it becomes secondary — "something that happened without truly happening" — an anticipation of certain events already lived through at the metaphysical level and lying in wait, like the Jamesian "beast in the jungle," which will never spring. The Sword The ethical problems that arise when proto-ego and meta-ego are combined as equal components of personality — standing in relations of complementarity rather than competition — appear difficult to resolve, owing to the substantial differences in origin, habitat, and mode of existence of these antipodal doubles. The evolutionary history of the proto-ego began many millions of years ago with the emergence of sexuality, genetic recombination, and sexual selection. The individual was transformed from a fully autonomous reproductive unit into an element of a reproductive system comprising at least two individuals. This system soon put forward a series of imperative demands. First, a high probability of encounter between potential partners must be ensured, so that they do not remain without offspring; and for this, a more or less compact mode of cohabitation in the form of a population is necessary. Second, so that cohabitation within a limited territory does not become a war of extermination, unregulated aggression must be replaced by relations of dominance and subordination, which become the foundation of sociality. Third, in order to avoid close-kin mating (incest), which leads to genetic degeneration (if defective genes of relatives are joined), natural selection must be supplemented by a preference for non-kin (dissimilar) individuals — a preference that becomes a factor of individualization and the segregation of kin groups, which take on additional functions of protection against competitors and care for offspring (shared genes). In this way, the following are introduced into genetic memory: the species-wide rule "thou shalt not kill," the hierarchical instinct, kin attachment, and the prohibition on incestuous bonds. These form the foundation of biological morality. For as long as the human was part of nature, these norms sufficed. Separation from nature led to their erosion and replacement by the imperative morality of the Ten Commandments, approximately half of which regulate the hierarchical relations of dominance and subordination between God and man, while the rest are directed toward the weakening of aggression (thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not covet anything belonging to thy neighbour), the strengthening of kin relations, and, indirectly, the exclusion of incest. The proto-ego was formed under selection that cut off deviations from the norm (it has been shown, for instance, that in winter cold the sparrows that perish are those larger or smaller than the population mode). However, the relaxation of selection in the course of progressive evolution leads to an increase in variability, which in humans is undoubtedly higher than in other mammals. Individualization, arising in connection with sexual selection and intensified by cultural differences, impedes identification of oneself with another human being, which leads to the degeneration of natural ethics (based on identification, as we have already noted). It turns out that belonging to a single biological species does not preclude belonging to different metaecological species. The meta-ego appeared on the scene and immediately began to displace the proto-ego from its ancestral domains. At the same time, the imperative demands of the reproductive system remain in force, and their fulfilment is assumed to an ever greater degree by the metaecological system. At the early stages of its development the continuity is evident: research in structural anthropology (C. Lévi-Strauss) has revealed the universality of the incest theme in the mythology of all peoples. Incest was the monster that Oedipus had to vanquish before he married his own mother. Incest shows through later accretions in the legend of original sin as well (Eve was created from Adam's flesh and was therefore of the same blood). The sexual substrate surfaces in phallic cults and totemic symbolism. The influence of the proto-ego persists to some degree at later stages up to the present, manifesting in the political leader's desire to be the father of the people (or peoples), in the parasexual love of citizens for him, in the repetition of those same relations at every rung of the social ladder, in the emotional colouring of role-based social interactions, in theological patristics, in ecclesiastical eroticism, and so on (we shall return to this theme). The continuity is expressed also in the common regularities of the evolution of proto-ego and meta-ego, the latter likewise falling under the action of selection — both individual, which washes out of the population individuals potentially capable of enriching the meta-ecosystem with new ideas, and group selection, which wipes entire tribes from the face of the earth. Humankind has countered natural selection with technical progress and significantly weakened it. Nevertheless, selection still operates, if only at the level of pregnancy disorders. Tribes with distinctive cultures continue to become extinct or to be assimilated (the indigenous peoples of the Amazon are growing in number, but their spiritual life is disappearing). Alongside this, a selection of metaecological representations and systems occurs — those most adapted to the changing conditions of external life, to the spiritual climate of the epoch. The analogue of stabilising (deviation-pruning) selection in spiritual life may be intellectual conservatism — the hostile attitude toward new ideas that impelled Athenian democracy to exile, execute, and compel the suicide of its geniuses (victims of democracy included Protagoras, Thrasymachus, Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Aristotle; Jesus too was crucified on the basis of a democratic vote that gave preference to the criminal Barabbas). Yet the physical destruction of the bearer of an idea may contribute to his metaphysical immortality, as occurred with Christ and Bruno. Those who executed them failed to take into account the fundamental differences between proto-ego and meta-ego. Contemporary sociobiology emphasises the common regularities in the evolution of nature and culture, drawing parallels between genes and "culturgens" (E.O. Wilson). But these analogies are of no more than limited significance, since genes and "culturgens" are not so much identical as they are opposites. The condition for the existence of genes in nature is replication, reproduction — without which they disappear immediately. For culture, replication is tantamount to degeneration and death. (The commonplace idea that a healthy body contains a healthy mind is highly contradictory, since a healthy body is a standard body, and a standard mind is a gravely and most likely incurably ill mind.) We have already seen what became of the "solar journeys," conflicts and reunions of twins, Logos, Ananke, and other metaphysical images as a result of their appropriation by mass culture. By virtue of these differences a conflict arises in which the meta-ego attempts to prevent its own replication by suppressing the reproductive sphere as such. While the pagan gods still retained the symbolism of fertility and entered into sexual relations with humans, engendering new gods and heroes, for the biblical God such relations were complicated both by the enormous distance between himself and humankind and by his desire to be and remain the sole master of the universe. Without reproduction there is no life. Yet for God, reproduction reduced to the creation of a limited number of his own copies — the world and man. The latter, having been created in his image and likeness, was not intended for mass replication. Therefore God was from the outset disposed against the multiplication of human beings and was reluctant to make compromises. Normal childbirth was declared sinful. Demigods and heroes were born by divine will from virgins or from women of post-menopausal age (thus Sarah in old age gave birth to Isaac, and Elizabeth to John the Baptist). God's intervention in such cases was expressed in the perversion of the natural reproductive process. Jesus inherited the aversion to procreation and brought the competition between the metaphysical and reproductive spheres to a high pitch, declaring that he had come to bring not peace but a sword (in order to sever family bonds and free people for the service of faith). The Apostle Paul, converting pagans to the new faith, allowed compromises with revulsion, reckoning that it is better to marry than to burn. The immanent sinfulness of sexual love could be redeemed only by initiation into spiritual love. Entry into marriage was lavishly furnished with metaphysical symbolism. The indissolubility of marriage, the celibacy of the clergy, the suppression of the flesh, and so forth had far-reaching and largely unfavourable consequences for the gene pool and the psychological condition of human populations. The conflict spread rapidly to all spheres of life. For natural man, wealth was a condition of success — primarily reproductive success — but the ideologues of early Christianity left the wealthy man so little hope of a continued life after death that it is easier for a camel (or, in a more plausible translation, a rope) to pass through the eye of a needle. Reason developed under the pressure of sexual selection as a means of attraction, but the Greek sages declared sexual reproduction unworthy of a philosopher, leaving him homosexual love (see Lucian's "Two Loves"). Polyclitus's canon of male beauty, embodied in the figure of the spear-bearer Doryphoros, was created by homosexuals, and it cannot be said that women showed heightened interest in it (the short-legged, stout, and bald clearly reproduced more successfully), so that beauty — always in the service of sexual love — found itself severed from reproduction. Christian philosophy separated from it love itself. In antiquity there existed the concept of kalokagathia, combining goodness and beauty (the ephebes whom Socrates admired were not merely beautiful but kalogakathic). For the Pythagoreans, the beautiful was embodied in world harmony, in the music of numbers. Reviving the ancient notion of the resemblance between human being and universe (the "heavenly man"), they found the same harmony, the same magical numbers in the geometry of the human body and its proportions (the body with arms pressed to the sides forms a triangle; with arms and legs spread, a square; the body's length contains six feet, the face three equal parts — forehead, nose, jaws). Following them, Plato defined the beautiful as "the name of reason, since it is reason that makes such things, which it gladly calls by this name" (Cratylus). Cynicism and then Christianity contributed to the separation of spirituality from beauty, which passed into their opposition. True beauty was declared to be morality — which in essence meant the displacement of aesthetics by ethics (this stereotype has taken such root that physical beauty is to this day frequently considered incompatible with kindness, fidelity, honesty — the virtues of people of mediocre appearance). Simultaneously the highest spiritual (moral) values were set against reason. Thus the direction of sexual selection was altered. Passers-by. Dulcinea. The Witness. Substitution. What is in a Name? V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 p. Part 17. Logos. Galatea. The Sword. Games. Mephistopheles.