The Opposite of an Ancient Egyptian

Like many, I often go to bed too late, reading by the bedside lamp, then awake, groggy, to an alarm clock, drink too much coffee, eat too much sugar, and, during the day, pay too much attention to those athletes, movie stars, and musicians whom we pay tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to distract us, for an hour or two, from our actual lives. And, like you, I live in a world that for the past hundred years or so has erected curtain-walled towers that reach toward the sky and that consist mostly of air, a world that has learned to fly and then raced to the moon.

Our feelings of heaviness, of tiredness, which we combat with levity, with stimulants, with distraction, and with structures and endeavors that soar (yes, the dream of flight is ages old, but not in the context in which we experience it now), present a configuration unique to our age. Undoubtedly those hundreds of historical generations that lived before the electric light, the professional musician, the can of caffeinated sugary soda, did not suffer as we do (not that they didn’t have suffering of their own).

Take the Egyptian pyramids, almost five thousand years old, built in a creative burst of no more than a couple of hundred years. They are virtually solid mountains of stone. Imagine standing in an inner chamber, any shaft to it sealed off, in the blackness. Above, below, and all around you are hundreds of feet of solid stone. Feel the weight, the claustrophobic pressure. This is not a modern structure.

Or look at an Egyptian sculpture or relief or painting of a pharaoh. Notice the too-large, flat feet, almost pyramid-shaped, loving attention given to each toe.

The Egyptians, too, created much of their artwork for the afterlife, to be sealed in tombs, not to be seen by human eyes again; they did not open museums and galleries and invite the public. They mummified bodies and sealed them away. (We, apparently, plasticize them for display and ship them around the world.)

Perhaps the Egyptians, like young children, felt, relative to grown-ups of today, too light, too disincarnated, too disconnected from the world around them. Not too heavy and tired, but buoyant. So, rather, than seeking levity and stimulants, they sought gravity and weight. Rather than a focus on the here-and-now, a focus on the hereafter.

The Egyptian experience, I propose, was the opposite of our levity, our tiredness, our materialism and our concern for this life, now.

Perhaps it’s no accident that, a short while later, Greek drama was born as tragedy.

Art and Evolution

The Ninth Grade is most of the way through a seminar in “History Through Art.” The distinction between this study and “art history” is that we take sculptures and paintings to be symbolic of changes in human evolution. By interpreting works of art, we can chart the development of the human species.

Cave paintings, for example, are often surrounded by a black “action line” or outline, the first outlines in human history. Imagine the power of a mind that could say for the first time, “everything inside this line is elk; everything outside it is the rest of creation.” The outline does not exist in nature – there is only fur and grass and air. The line is an abstraction, a product of the artist’s mind. To be able to see the world this way marks a significant step toward human separation from the cosmos. Because to be able to make an outline that acknowledges a distinction in the world, we must tacitly acknowledge our own distinction from the world. The outlines around cave paintings are as resonant as the story of Adam and Eve, cast out of paradise, but taking a step toward the possibility of freedom.

Thousands of years later, Rembrandt’s self-portraits show evidence of the same process. Self-portraits in Rembrandt’s time were innovative, not 200 years old. In the “School of Athens,” Raphael timidly inserts himself in a corner of the painting, peeking out at us. Rembrandt paints himself unapologetically, over and over, appraising the course of his life, from newly-wed swashbuckler to impoverished old man. Not only does he have a self, separate from everyone else, but he has a self worth showing the world, a self balanced in paint between external appearance—every wrinkle and pouch—and inner life.

Two examples make a complex evolution seem too linear. But the more important question regards us, here, today. If human beings have evolved toward freedom (as Gruber says, freedom is the immediate, necessary link between creativity and morality), where do we stand? Ask the Ninth Graders; they’ll be thinking about it.

Barfield and Consciousness

When we discuss thinking and perception, we enter tricky philosophical territory. For instance, there are philosophers today who deny the existence of human consciousness. We may take a cheap shot by asking them how they can profitably write books about this, what they believe their readers are up to, if not consciously appreciating the contents of the book. More to the point, most of these arguments, however sophisticated, are on the wrong track in that they objectify consciousness—reify it—and then, when they fail to find an object (even an immaterial, mental object) called consciousness, announce that it is an illusion. We all did this for decades with intelligence (IQ) back in the twentieth century.

Owen Barfield takes a different approach to this problem. He points out—my paraphrase here—that no one disagrees that we perceive the world around us (however defined) and that no one disagrees that we may think about this world (although what we mean by “think” may be open to discussion). Our consciousness is what mediates, maintains a healthy tension between, or, in Barfield’s terminology, arises when these poles of perception and thinking “interpenetrate” each other. Our consciousness is not a thing, not a hormone or quantity of electrochemical energy, however structured.

Two analogies may clarify this thought. First, the ancient Greeks discussed courage in a way analogous to Barfield’s description of consciousness. In a stressful situation we may experience fear and we may experience an urge to foolhardy behavior. To give in to either makes us ineffectual. Fear prevents action; foolhardiness prompts thoughtless, dangerous action. By mediating these two poles, maintaining a healthy tension between them, allowing them to interpenetrate within us, we may rouse ourselves to courageous action.

Second, Goethe’s theory of colors is predicated on just such phenomena. By allowing light and darkness to interpenetrate each other, colors arise. For those familiar with Goethe’s work, this should be clear. For those not familiar with it, a thorough explanation goes beyond the scope of these paragraphs.

When light and dark simply mix, we get shades of gray. This is instructive in that fear and foolhardiness may also mix in us, unmediated, and produce a state of anxiety. Similarly, our perceptions and thinking may mix in an unconscious, unmediated manner and give rise to thoughtless convention and unexamined “common sense.”

Nothing like wrestling with the big questions.