Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 3 Number 3, December 2002

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Haney, William S. II and Malekin, Peter (Eds.), Humanism and the Humanities in the Twenty-first Century. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2001, pp.204. ISBN 0-8387-5497-X. $ 36.50, hbk.

Reviewed by

Ralph Yarrow

The implied question motivating this book is: what use are the humanities in the contemporary world? The answers it provides draw on historical understandings, on the ability of the humanities to engender particular kinds of response and resultant modes of behaviour, and on an interrogation of the fundamentals of what it means to be human and conscious. The subject is important; it is approached through an interesting variety of perspectives and framed by a suggestive organisation which groups the seven essays following the Editors’ Introduction in three sections: The Nature of Consciousness; The Arts and the Transformation of Consciousness; and Humanism and Human Concern. A short fictional epilogue by Brian Aldiss rounds off the book, whose ‘central concern…is our humanity, what it means or should mean to be human, what is a humane society, and how we should live in relation to totalities that are greater than modern humankind’.

 

The Introduction poses a crisis of the world and of the (‘dying’) humanities, and the book asks what the latter have to offer in terms of regeneration. The issues are articulated most extensively and provocatively in the three essays in Part 1, by Haney, Malekin and David Jasper. Each makes a bold attempt to rethink the essentials of humanism against, or in dialogue with, modernist, postmodernist and poststructuralist thought, and frequently by extension in a relationship to contexts, modes of understanding and forms of language which recent critical theory has been unwilling or unable to engage fully with.

 

Haney’s essay on ‘The Science of Mind, Consciousness and Literary Studies’ situates humanism in terms of a full understanding of ‘self’ and ‘consciousness’ – both acknowledged as contentious terms and explored in original conjunctions. By examining them alongside models like Indian rasadhvani theory, phenomenological approaches to aesthetic experience and recent scientific work in consciousness studies, he elaborates an argument which ranges from Kant to Ken Wilber and can take in Derrida, William James and Colin McGinn. Like Malekin and Jasper, his essay charts the necessity of a realignment of the epistemological and ontological bases of humanity’s engagement with its environment. Haney makes subtle and extensive links between philosophy and scientific theory in order to reclaim the primacy of experience in both domains, including a reiteration of the ‘hard question’: why is there an inner life on which all forms of processing and interpretation (scientific and poststructuralist) are based? Haney identifies consciousness per se – as opposed to phenomenological or psychological models which always delineate its mode of operation in conjunction with an exterior perception – via Kant’s ‘qualityless pure consciousness’, Derrida’s dynamic tension of opposites (‘the Real’) and Shear’s witnessing awareness that has ‘no distinguishing quality of its own’ (cognate with formulae proposed by Plotinus, Shankara and Nagarjuna); this enables him not only to indicate precisely why it is simultaneously deleted and implied by postmodernist thought, but also to locate the value of this ‘gap’ in aesthetic experience and its role as touchstone of the human. In other words he is able to argue – impossibly perhaps, but entirely appropriately – for a fundamental value to the qualityless, a value which relocates the basis if any humanist project.

 

Malekin’s ‘What Price Humanity’ adopts a scathing irony towards the limited paradigms of contemporary knowledge and practice and the increasingly likely disasters they herald: ‘our modes of  mental operation need reform’, he says (60). He contrasts such partial views to the status of Plotinus’s numberless One, examined in terms of being and knowing, and to other pluralistic models such as Feyerabend’s questioning of the truth status of modern science.  Malekin links knowledge in its contemporary form to power, symptomatic in its voracity of admission of insufficiency. So this kind of knowing/possessing is built on fear of what it does not know/have; on fear of the otherness inherent in it. It is thus exclusive, protective, fortress-minded, violent. Malekin presents a robust challenge to the monologic (pseudo)-objectivity of scientific, economic and political thought. For him, Plotinus and Dionysus the Areopagite provide an alternative by opening up the possibility of forms of consciousness (already identified by Haney) which may give rise to alternative ways of knowing and being, and hence to action arising from kinds of impulse other than the acquisitive and manipulative. Malekin links this to Jasper’s concept in his subsequent essay of the ‘death of god’, which shifts the monotheological, authoritarian, externalised entity-status of God towards a process of via negativa, an unthinking or moving into what precedes and can thus transform all limited Systems of knowing and doing. He also targets economic and cultural monopractice, another aspect of the vicious powerdrive scenario. Alternative forms of thought (or rather, pre-thought) seem the only resource to effectively combat the homogeneity of life: he quotes Havel’s analysis that ‘without a global resolution (sic: should it be ‘revolution’?) in human consciousness nothing will change for the better’ (81). Malekin’s writing in this chapter, often succinct and paradoxical, enacts something of Empson’s semiotic ambiguity, thus exemplifying its opposition to the closed-mind views he attacks. In so doing it invites a reading practice, like that subsequently championed by Schwarz, which sets different perspectives in simultaneous motion.

 

For David Jasper, in ‘The Death of God: A Live Issue’, as for Altizer, traditional theology’s exaltation of a solitary and transcendent God and a heteronomous and compulsive law is a mark of its ‘failure to countenance radical kenosis’ (89). With a-theologians like Mark C. Taylor, Jasper suggests that God can only be a live transactional event if ‘he’ first ‘disappears as an object’, subsequently requiring ‘a deep imaginative engagement with scandal’ of the kind Blake articulated. The apocalyptic moment of this ‘self-emptying into silence’ (90) is the ground of renewal of language, of entry into creative activity, as Joyce demonstrates in Finnegan’s Wake. Jasper also draws on Nietzsche and Karl Barth to substantiate this radical thesis which joins Haney and Malekin in identifying the space of absence through which consciousness, self, language and world must pass if they are to be renewed. As Haney and Malekin point out via Vedanta and Plotinus, this zone, whether it be called God, the Void, or the One, can precisely not be thought; it is known only by being it. Moreover, because, as Jasper notes, it is an absence of meaning or sense, it is always rejected by the fearful and possessive world Malekin outlines, as well as by the kinds of thinking practised by traditional  theologies.

 

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, in ‘Consciousness and the Future of Theatre’, examines responses to the experience of theatre and theoretical models of acting and reception in order to identify the possibility of ‘higher states of consciousness’ occurring in these contexts. Thus the location of a mode of consciousness compatible with those discussed by Haney and Malekin may be seen as fundamental to the kinds of ‘transformation’ spoken about by theatre anthropologists like Richard Schechner. (Curiously, Meyer-Dinkgräfe’s remarks about theatre and conflict appear to overlook Schechner’s (and Turner’s) derivations from ritual process.) The frame of the discussion is useful and suggestive, though perhaps actual theatre practice needs to be examined in more specificity to make the claims stick, and the essay is somewhat reductively dismissive of non-Indian 20th-century attempts by directors and actor-trainers to institute alternative forms of being for performers and receivers.

 

Frederick De Armas’s chapter (‘The Eloquence of Mercury and the Enchantments of Venus’) situates  the transformatory power of images as fundamental to Renaissance Humanism with reference to Don Quixote, Botticelli and other texts. Rather like Meyer-Dinkgräfe’s, his suggestive reading could perhaps benefit from a closer analysis of the processes by which consciousness is affected here. He links the aesthetic to Otto’s ‘numinous awe’, which has close correspondences with the formulations highlighted earlier by Haney, Malekin and Jasper. Meyer-Dinkgräfe’s and De Armas’ essays in Part 2 explore ways in which aesthetic experience may offer access to the states identified by Haney, Malekin and Jasper in Part 1, whilst Schwarz presents a more external but nonetheless complementary argument for critical pluralism. Haney’s case against ’scientific imperialism’ is echoed and extended by Malekin, and Schwarz exemplifies it in arguing for narrative as a plurality of reading positions as a counter to the closure of monoculture and the reductive postmodern take on language.

 

Daniel Schwarz argues in ‘Signing the Frame, Framing the Sign’ for an understanding of narrative as a plurality of reading perspectives (via an examination of narrative positions in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) and of language as an enactment of individual value (via comments on Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical novel of the Holocaust, Night). He sees these moves as essential to counter both fascist models of monoculture and postmodernism’s myth about language’s ethical neutrality – the latter recalling George Steiner’s position in After Babel. Schwarz’s arguments against theoretical orthodoxy and for critical pluralism are perhaps rather less original than he appears to be claiming, but they are important, and it is valuable to resituate both the specifics and the ethics of reading and writing in this way.

 

Robert Torrance, in ‘The Radical Tradition of Humanistic Consciousness’, spends much of the essay recalling historical perspectives on humanism, which is useful in laying out the ground for claims that some ‘universal’ criteria are relevant. However, this doesn’t leave room to do much more than moot a claim that consciousness – here rather narrowly defined in largely biological terms – might provide them. Torrance’s assessment of some of the dissenters from the rationalistic corpus looks a little reductive, and the limitations of a definition of humanism as species-linked have been underlined by Malekin.. The chapter quite defiantly updates the general humanist stance, but doesn’t really offer new insights into the specific qualities of consciousness which might underpin it.

 

The individual chapters of this challenging book both present important arguments of their own and also interact in a stimulating way with those which precede or succeed them. It is a volume which deserves to be central to any consideration of what teachers and other practitioners of the humanities are doing.