The Universal

οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει

Up to this point, we have glanced at three horizons: the intimate, the personal, and the strange. What holds all these together coherently, besides historical accident, is scale: they present what we might call a human scale, though the strange challenges this and moves beyond it, especially as civilization grows titanic. A human scale is one dominated by personal action, the kind of intentional behavior we observe in time and space close enough, and kin enough, to acknowledge our influence. Beyond the human scale, at the outer reaches of the strange or the abyssal depths of the intimate, where our personal agency vanishes in the face of wild Nature, we encounter one last horizon: the universal.

Before every horizon, humanity takes the view offered and expresses it somehow, as art or culture or civilization. Information from without (the spoor of the stranger, the words of family, the emotion of the self) is recognized, received, and then released in some subjective action (hunting, caring, tending, warding). The subject is necessarily an important limiting factor here: we cannot express something bigger than our power of expression, whatever that happens to be. At some moment, we inevitably find the limits of our powers. These are moments where we catch a glimpse into the world as something beyond ourselves, not just as individuals, but as humanity.

Where are these moments? Experience shows us individual limits relatively quickly, when we find a stone too heavy to move, a family problem too hard to solve, a political crisis we cannot end by some unilateral action. But in all these cases, civilization offers a powerful abstract solution: scale up. Bring in more people. Study the thoughts of others. Apply their thought and action to your problem. As Archimedes is supposed to have said, "Give me position and a lever, and I will move the world" (cf. Tzetzes, Chiliades 2.133). Civilization provides positions and levers, more and more as humanity grows, until it becomes only too easy to believe that our collective limits do not exist. I might fail to make a fire, myself, but I can call upon armies living and dead to channel the hidden lightning stolen by Prometheus. But there is danger here. The immediate proximity of ruin may have receded from my individual view, but it is still out on the larger horizon somewhere, the horizon that Zeus watches from Olympus. Seen from that horizon, I scarcely exist. As Sarpedon says, when Diomedes meets him on the battlefield:

           What use is it to ask my name

           Or ancestors who gave me fame?

           The race of men falls fast, as leaves

           Blown to earth from off the trees

           Failing in the summer's wane

           Turns the year, they spring again

           Fathers yielding unto sons

           Gotten, flowered, and then done.

                                               Iliad 6.145-9

                                               my translation

The prophet Isaiah has seen this horizon: "All flesh is grass, and every human achievement is a flower upon the grass. When the grass withers, its flower falls. This saying of the Lord endureth forever" (Isaiah 40.6). So has Laozi (老子): "Heaven and earth are heartless, treating creatures like straw dogs" (Daodejing 5). As Su Ch'e explains, "Heaven and earth aren't partial. They don't kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them" (translated by Red Pine). Examples could be multiplied, but you see the picture: eventually, faced with something like total war, plague, famine, or ecological collapse, we lose agency not just as individuals, but as species.

What to do with this? That is a real question. On the one hand, we cannot renounce all agency. On the other, we cannot set ourselves tasks impossible for humanity. The Greeks call this mistake hybris (ὕβρις, meaning wanton violence) or hamartia (ἁμαρτία, meaning a failure or miss), the Chinese guò (過, meaning to pass or surpass, to go too far). Other cultures offer similar words and concepts for presuming too much, trying too hard, fighting against fate. What all of them try to articulate is a need for dynamic adjustment: the ability to engage and disengage agency, to will and then renounce will. We must be able to grasp, when life comes at us intimately, and then release, when our tussle with life veers into the universal. There is no such thing as the grip we take and never lose. That is a misunderstanding of what it means to climb, a failure to wrestle well with angels (in the manner of the biblical Jacob when he became Israel). Modern civilization makes this lesson very hard to get, mostly because of its titanic size. When I am letting go, another is still hanging on, and vice versa, so that it becomes hard to see when our collective capacity to respond is exhausted, so hard that naive dreamers among us imagine that capacity as infinite. But it is not, as recent events show yet again. I write these thoughts from quarantine, where I have fled to avoid the sudden spread of another world-eating plague: the coronavirus xix, not yet as bad as some, but bad enough to challenge us all. So I must accommodate myself to resignation. But this does not mean I become utterly passive, or dead.

Imagine a surfer heading into an enormous wave. There is no such thing as controlling or dominating the wave; instead, the best chance for survival occurs as he surrenders. But the surrender must be active, must involve some serious and difficult labor, mostly directed towards keeping his balance on the wave. He must move himself deliberately, not trying to move events outside himself. The wave here is God, or Nature, or Being, or the Void, or whatever you like to call that which is impervious to humanity. We ride it by using whatever tools our culture provides to keep our little balance, and then releasing any moment outside that limited circle. We don't aspire to control what is not controllable. Eventually, when the inevitable time comes, this ability to relinquish manifests in a good death, one the ancients would crown with Olympus or Valhalla. If we are prepared to surrender effectively, we are prepared to die, and this means that our soul is equal to all the lesser tasks and smaller horizons of life.

           Always dear to me this hill

           And the hedge that holds me still

           Putting up their faithful screen

           Blocking out the vast unseen.

           But as I sit, take in the view

           Worlds unbound my thoughts imbue

           And silences too deep for man

           Touch this heart, release its pain.

           Wind within the leaves I sense

           Against an endless emptiness:

           To my mind the eternal springs

           Seasons dead, and present things

           The little sound of living joys

           Swallowed in death's silent voice.

           Even so my thoughts fall free

           And I sink happy 'neath this sea.

              Giacomo Leopardi, Infinity 

              my translation

ante diem IV Kalendas Apriles, anno Domini MMXX                                           --JGM.