The coronation of Charles VII of France (1429).

I owe Daniel some replies to his recent comments across two threads about his personal preference for particular intellectual adumbrations as a means, I think, of liberation for a cognitive elite who, as far as I can see, then prescribe benign social inter-action for the rest of us.  In the process, I will try to probe the underpinnings of the political. However, first I want to raise another question with Kumiko which is at the heart of the exchange with Daniel also, namely her perfectly natural presumption, with which I do not entirely agree, that:

... upon awakening, the next step is—I think—always to take actions to create the economic and social framework that can facilitate that defence [ie, of one’s people’s existence], in accordance with the particular historical and geographical circumstances that they have found themselves in.

The question goes well beyond the usual conceptions of the social and economic, because these are not the point of arising of the European malaise.  Likewise, the call to self-defence, as a means by which to awaken the people, may fall on deaf ears in the absence of other buttresses to identity.  How does one defend something one cannot properly perceive?  More concretely, how many people perceive civilisation or the civic space, culture or economics where the true cause is racial and ethnic identity?

In my very meagre work on awakening, it is implicit that a person whom we would describe as awake, or existentially self-aware, is not really in some fixed and enduring condition.  Our neurological condition happens to be one in which the intellectual, emotional, and motor functions operate not under direction of any kind or even in concert, but simply as mechanisms made of habit.  This is our ordinary waking consciousness, and it will always claim us.  It is, after all, the River Lethe, the river of unmindfulness, of existential forgetting.  We cannot permanently deliver ourselves from it to abide in aletheia.  It is rather difficult for the individual person to traverse, even for a few seconds, into self-awareness in any meaningful sense.  But how much more difficult is it for an entire people to do so?

To answer that, we need to think a bit more subtly about what it means for a people to be awake.

I would contend that awakening has a momentary, turning quality.  Most of all, I would say, it is the moment of detachment when something that might not be any more concrete than a humanising sense of the positive and affirming, which was forgotten and scarcely conceivable for a long time, holds itself out in front of the subject and invites appropriation.  For that is the passage out of identification with the personality – that part of us which is socially acquired and does not belong to us but to the world and to time, and which, in the scheme of the ontological transit :

absence ◄ habituality (mechanicity) ◄ immersion ◄ negation ◄ reverie ◄ sloth ◄ passivity ◄► intent ► attention ► stillness ► detachment ► affirmation ► appropriation ► presence ► non-ascription of identity ► self-annihilation ► Being

… quantifies to the left of appropriation.

But that is the limit of it at the level of the group.  For, the group cannot take the next step on the journey.  It cannot abide in a state of presence (defined in that last essay I have linked to as “our earthy, ineffable, already known, always present truth”).  But it can abide in the turn.  That much is possible.  Indeed, that much is very probably the “normal” estate of a psychologically free and healthy people (such as the Japanese).

On that point, it might be interesting to gesture in the direction of the established social forms which both buttress and express group health.  There are only two, the first and the older of them being the institution of leadership of the group, to which unfortunate office-holder the people’s acknowledgement, fealty, service and love are freely given. As proof of the existential import of the institution I offer the monarch’s traditional coronation as a symbol of the group’s ascension to Being:

These ceremonies, which remain of consuming public interest even today, sublimely encapsulate the group’s own acknowledgement that its knowing of self has bona fides of a cosmic nature even if these must remain beyond reach because, to quote from that essay again:

An entire people cannot raise itself to this estate.  There are no whole populations of mystics contemplating the absolute Being of all things.

I suppose, if we were to use the Heideggerian terminology, we could note that dasein … “being there” … has something of the holy ghost about it, mediating between and perhaps even reconciling the subject as identity and the subject’s act of living as Being.  To mediate these is to pass beyond the turn and into presence.  That has a profound transforming effect, and that transformation is symbolised for the group in the person of the monarch.  This is all rather close to the god-king, a surviving example of which is the Emporer of Japan, who is held to be descended from the sun goddess and is the highest authority in the Shinto religion.  His role in heavenly affairs is not less important than that in affairs of the state.  His title Tennō means “heavenly sovereign”.

Perhaps the most interesting European example, though, was the Führer.  The messianic devotional cult which surrounded him helps to explain the extraordinary connection and awakening effect that the person of Adolf Hitler had for ordinary Germans after 1933.  The German Messiah, of course, turned out to be false, and so did his model of Homo heroica.  He died railing at the unworthiness of the German people, having never comprehended that life is Nature’s means to her own subsistence, and cannot be more.  In so much as weaponising the German people to smash their way to a more glorious German life exceeded Nature’s bounds, the project would always collapse under the weight of its own inauthenticities – something which the Führer-redeemers in WN seem equally incapable of grasping.

However, as far as it concerns awakening, Hitler’s example proves the efficacy of “a symbol of the group’s ascension to Being”.  Heidegger stressed that we think existentially when confronted by our mortality.  But the German people woke up - and, by any reasonable yardstick, spectacularly so - quite without such extremis.

Obviously, (a fully functional) religion is the other great orienting influence in this respect.  My contention is that its strict function is to privilege perception of the totality of “the thing that is”.  It sounds altogether too prosaic, but faith’s evolutionary fitness gain (ie, assuming that there are genes for faith) surely lies there, in a maximal potential to make adaptive life-choices.  How this extraordinarily coloured and attenuated emotional capacity should come about at all is for better psychologists than I will ever be to theorise.  But perhaps it is explicable as a compensatory mechanism, arising through the same innate inventiveness by which the sensory system commonly develops refined and unexpected capacities with the loss of sight or hearing - the loss in this case being the perceptual depression of the mind habituated in ordinary waking consciousness.  In that event, perhaps the high neurotransmitter activity associated with beatific episodes is of the same category of reward mechanism as sexual pleasure.

In any case, faith ties together higher-order emotions such as conscience, love, humility, piety, devotion, and so forth, and employs these rather crudely to suppress the selfish extremes of personality and to drag the “believer” towards the turn and peceptual normalisation.  Fully functional religions take a concentric form.  The morally-focussed outer or exoteric circle privileges if not yet perfectionment of the self (not really a helpful term, dasein is more precise and informative) then certainly a state of opening to the possibilities of the inner or esoteric circle.  This latter supplies guided movement ever onward towards a perceptual totality - in religious terms, a union with the divine. Whereas the exoteric circle is characterised by formal dogma, a moral regimen, and rite, delivered to the faithful masses by a priestly caste, the esoteric circle is characterised by a programme of daily strictures, exercises, and devotions typically delivered to acolytes by teachers in a monastic environment.  Strictly speaking, actual faith is not a requirement of the esoteric circle.  But, obviously, the religious systemization of practise and language prevails and contextualises what could otherwise stand perfectly well as a pure quest of the mind for liberation and revelation ... freedom and truth ... identity and Being.

But to return to the turn, the man in the turn is no longer entirely a sleeping man, and does not live and act entirely as the sleeping man lived and acted.  He is not a product of unremitting absence and mechanicity.  And neither is how he now lives and acts a product of intellectual work by others.  It comes out of himself, perfectly free of prescription; because the awakened man is no longer a mere passive entity.  Awakening means becoming historically active in a natural, pure act of world-making, a constant process of creative renewal.  It cannot be anything other.

Now we can come back down to earth, hopefully carrying with us the clear understanding that the great, freeing preoccupations of the political mind properly begin as practical projects there, in the turn; and that peoples do need the goods of monarchy and religion not just to keep before them the existential fact of the group, but as modes of quiet identitarian activism in themselves.  We can also, perhaps, begin to appreciate the vastness of reach of a revolution which might be termed onto-nationalist or existentially nationalist, but is really the work of life.