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by Paul Cudenec
April 19, 2021
from
Network23 Website
"Philosophy which was once the pursuit of
wisdom has become the possession of a technique", as the great
Indian thinker Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan once warned.
1
So it is greatly refreshing, in 2021, to come
across a new philosophical work whose (achieved) aim is not to
perform self-conscious intellectual gymnastics or to catalogue and
categorize the philosophical offerings of previous writers, but to
impart wisdom.
The subtitle of Darren Allen's book "Self
and Unself" is 'The meaning of everything*' and the
asterix points to the addition '(*not literally)'. 2
This is a jokey nod to the kind of humorless literal thinking,
described in the pages to come, which could not allow itself to
appreciate the ironical undertones of the subtitle and would feel
obliged to rebuke Allen for claiming to having provided such an
utterly comprehensive account in a mere 400 pages of print.
Humor, in fact, plays an important part in Self and Unself -
something which again sets it apart from most of the works our
culture would classify as philosophical.
Sometimes it is a question of a laugh-out-loud turn of phrase or
choice of words, such as when Allen warns against allowing oneself
to,
"slump into the pudding of ordinariness that
makes up the mass of mankind", 3
...describes consumer society as,
"a grim Disneyschwitz" 4 or
declares that the vast majority of people are so predictable and
eager to conform because "they come pre-subjugated". 5
Other comic moments are more conceptual, such as
his pondering over the non-existence of,
"postmodern restaurants (selling postcards of
food)", 6 or the thought that an abstract philosopher
is "like a man who empties a box to see what is inside it".
7
On further occasions, the humor comes from a
deliberately-exaggerated bluntness which suddenly punctures the
serious and learned tone of the surrounding prose.
Allen announces with some authority, for instance, that,
"people who can tolerate raw lighting, bad
smells, loud noise, harsh emotions, mental junk-food, pointless
activity and institutional subservience are, despite nursing
whatever hyper-sensitivities they are constitutionally prone to,
generally speaking, morons", 8
...and also judges that the most shallow and
inept category of human being is the "physically attractive". 9
Beneath the humor lies Allen's sadness, which I
very much share, at the degraded condition of modern humans,
"highly specialized infants who can do
nothing but suckle at the tit of the machine". 10
The fairies and
trolls departed, driven out by technology
He describes today's tendency to,
"consider the universe to be entirely
comprised of separate comprehensible parts, particles or
granules relating to each other in predictable ways in order to
produce a measurable outcome". 11
Allen notes that we once lived in,
"a world permeated with magic; until the
fairies and trolls departed, driven out by technology", 12
where "the self still blended seamlessly with the mythic
universe, which centered man and his fellows in nature,
gracefully ordering their progress through it". 13
Not just our lives but also our thinking have
been shorn of all connection to reality, in other words to nature
and thus,
deprived of all depth and
authenticity, reduced to the blind confusion of an auto-isolated
ego...
This is not how it should be, as Allen says:
"Great philosophy, taking the principle of
nature as its source and subject, is like something in nature,
the growth of ivy perhaps, or the song of a wren, or the
activity of an ant's nest; messy perhaps, erratic here and
there, but it holds together as one, and it speaks". 14
'Real philosophy' is in fact the self-expression
of nature, and the universe of which it forms part, via the human
capacity for thought and language.
The idea of nature is never far away from the concept of the
feminine, it being the feminine from which we are all born (natus).
Allen writes:
"The source of creation might be presented as
an egg, or as a lake, or as a serpent, but all these symbols,
and many like them expressive of fecundity, completeness or
generative power, are representations of the common mythological
symbol of unself, the archetypal Great Mother..." 15
He adds that the first sex to "fall" from a state
of natural grace was man, who became gripped by existential fear.
"Women, children, unfallen others, the human
body, and beyond that, the natural universe, including
consciousness itself, became
alien entities which had to be disciplined and controlled".
16
Aldous Huxley
In searching for responses to the debased human condition in modern
society, Allen finds inspiration in the Perennial Philosophy,
as propounded by
Aldous Huxley, Karl Jaspers
and others, although he rightly warns that because of the way
authentic thinking is so often co-opted and corrupted by charlatans,
the perennial philosophy needs to be picked out,
"like blackberries from a forest of thorns".
17
This perennial philosophy presents us with
a truth which has been buried underneath layer upon layer of lie by
all the separated thinking of our culture (including that of
various religions and "spiritual"
schools).
He notes:
"Despite differences in style and emphasis,
there is fundamentally no difference between the message of Lao
Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Jesus of Nazareth (and the great mystics
inspired by him), the message of the Upanishads, the Puranas and
the
Bhagavad Gita". 18
The core of this timeless understanding is the
concept of oneness, the essential truth that is always
denied by the dominant mindset, in every dimension of life and
thought.
The "scientific" fragmentation of reality into separate facts,
causes and effects goes hand in hand with an artificial division of
that all-embracing oneness into separate perspectives of
"subjectivity" and "objectivity".
As I mused myself a few years back, a lot of confusion around
objectivity arises from the way that we cannot actually be truly
objective about a world of which we are part.
But that does not mean that there is no actual,
objective, reality:
"A goldfish in a bowl will never be able to
look at the bowl, and at himself swimming around the bowl, and
gain an objective impression of it.
But the bowl, containing the goldfish, exists
nonetheless". 19
The problem, and this is the basis of Allen's
analysis, is that the modern human has lost touch with the fact that
they belong to a
larger reality, has sawn off the
branch on which they were sitting and falsely imagines themselves to
be something unique and separate.
It is impossible for them to have what Allen terms a "panjective"
view of reality, because they do not understand that when they view
the universe around them, this is really the universe viewing
itself, through the eyes of one of its countless (human) facets.
The
self, or ego, because it is this
separation from the whole, simply cannot recognize or know this
separation, he explains,
"any more than a torch can 'know' darkness".
20
What I particularly admire about this book is the
way in which Allen applies the idea of this separation between self
and unself through every aspect of our being,
thinking and living and explains how the
problem is always essentially the same, whether it manifests
itself in mediocrity and shallowness, in the confusion between
language and reality or in the degradation of art.
What remains
when quality is subtracted from self, is quantity
Particularly important is the link he makes between the
separation of self from unself and the loss of meaning and
quality in our culture - the loss, in fact, of any understanding
that meaning and quality can even exist.
He writes:
"Quality is the 'entry' of unself into self.
The various words we have for quality -
beauty, truth, intelligence, wit, courage, confidence,
innocence, sweetness, sensitivity, goodness, generosity, genius,
love, joy, intensity and so on - express the appearance of
unself-meaning under different circumstances in the self...
What remains when quality is subtracted from
self is quantity". 21
"If quality is ultimately unselfish, then it
is not ultimately something about which self can have direct
knowledge". 22
In the final pages
of the book, Allen goes even
further and presents the self/unself divide in a way which casts new
light on what he has been saying and might encourage the reader to
start again at the beginning with this in mind.
Despite his insistence that he is not offering any "hope", this work
is not only intellectually stimulating but also uplifting.
Allen is convinced that "the entire egoic world must - and will -
fall" 23 and observes:
"Everything at the end of empire is
completely integrated with everything else, which is why it all
had to rise together, and just as it all had to rise together,
so it all must, and will, fall together". 24
Eventually, he says, a point comes when the
illusion and power of ego will shatter.
"Until that grim, chaotic time, the
individual must resist and refuse". 25
In his vision, the conscious human being, who has
released his attachment to the world of artifice, does not fall when
it does.
Instead, he,
"remains standing; on a new earth, watered
with tears of joy, of gratitude.
He is not, after all mad and sick and dead;
it was just winter, and now it is spring". 26
References
-
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan,
An Idealist View of Life
(London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 144
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Darren Allen,
Self and Unself - The Meaning of
Everything (expressive egg books, 2021)
-
Allen, p. 81
-
Allen, p. 252
-
Allen, p. 375
-
Allen, p. 286
-
Allen, p. 42
-
Allen, p. 104
-
Allen, p.167
-
Allen, p. 356
-
Allen, p. 27
-
Allen, p. 313
-
Allen, p. 306
-
Allen, p. 47
-
Allen, p. 296
-
Allen, p. 317
-
Allen, p. 340
-
Allen, p. 338
-
Paul Cudenec, Nature, Essence and Anarchy
(Sussex: Winter Oak, 2016), p. 130
-
Allen, p. 30
-
Allen, p. 55
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Allen, p. 57
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Allen, p. 400
-
Allen, p. 399
-
Allen, p. 399
-
Allen, p. 410
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