Masks, or Until We Have Faces

Perhaps the most spiritually and psychologically dangerous development in this current mass neurosis (the new abnormal) called the pandemic is the wearing of masks. Just think about this: a mask. What is a mask? Of course, many will say a form of protection—but is it not also, as in Greek tragedy, the projection of a persona? Such are not unlike kinds of personae (also known as avatars) that have become the norm via social media and the totalizing demand that the internet turn each and every one of us into a product. We wear masks to hide our identities.

So much of our discourse now has become faceless, dealing only with eyes (often fearful or suspicious) and muffled sounds of voices. Just think how much more of a disrupture will take place if people begin wearing goggles as well, following the advice of the illustrious Dr. Fauci. We will be even further removed from the Real.

In his classic text Totality and Infinity, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas meditates on the phenomenology and attendant metaphysics of the face. “The face,” he writes, “ is a living presence; it is expression. The life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the existent, expressed as a theme, is thereby dissimulated. The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse. He who manifests himself comes, according to Plato’s expression, to his own assistance. He at each instant undoes the form he presents.”1

Masks, I submit, subvert this very human need for encounter via the countenance, the encounter with the Other. They distort our humanity. Further: the politics of the mask have divided us, pitted us against one another. But the political does this by short-circuiting our chance at human connection. Even the blind touch the faces of their friends to know who they are. As Levinas observes, “The face to face remains an ultimate situation.”2

Our current facelessness, like the inherent facelessness of social media, gives vent to, I think, our baser instincts, allowing us to be cruel without compunction, callous, ugly. When we have faces, we reveal our humanity, bearing witness to the words of William Blake’s “The Divine Image”—

For Mercy has a human heart,

Pity a human face,

And Love, the human form divine,

And Peace, the human dress.

Without faces, we don’t face anything. Rather, in keeping with the metaphysics of the apparatus, we hide. By hiding ourselves from the humanity of those we encounter, we likewise hide from our own. Furthermore, the mask illustrates our enlistment as what Michel Foucault calls “docile bodies” and the masks become our portable disciplinary spaces. As Foucault phrases it, “Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony.”3 What a sublime description of our times.

The anxiety that accompanies this enclosure of the countenance was also a feature of the transition to modernity, as the almost beatific vision of Renaissance humanism gave way to the cruelties of Hobbesian pessimism, Cartesian duality, and the punitive theology of John Calvin. Shakespeare’s Hamlet articulates this stirringly:

“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.”

Let us have faces, for then we have each other.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne University Press, 1969), 66.

2. Ibid., 81.

3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans, Alan Sheridan (Vintage, 1979), 140.

The Ahrimanic Moment

In a poetic metaphysics such as the one I’ve been promulgating for some time now, one finds that the distinctions between actual and imaginal, between the concrete and the dreamt, between the logical and the intuitive are in reality constructed and that the barriers separating them easily dissolve before the beholder’s mindful and attentive presence.

We’ve recently been confronted with a number of narratives that shapeshift in response to need, even if the need is to confuse and destabilize. We’ve witnessed, of course, the myriad conflicting reports and mandates regarding the Covid phenomenon so engulfing our lives as of late—conflicting reports more often than not arising from the same entities, be they human persons or corporate bodies. Simultaneously, we stand and watch in a kind of awe if not bewilderment as our basic freedoms as human agents are challenged, muffled, if not canceled in the face of a totalizing onslaught of speech codes, restrictions on mobility, and threats of repercussion if we question these phenomena at all.

One of the disturbing developments in this moment, for me at least, is the migration of so much of our lives into online environments, not least schools and shopping. The gradual disappearance of coinage, for one, appears a bellweather of a disturbing trend. We have all become avatars, projected selves that would melt in the presence of other human beings of flesh and blood, warmth and spirit--presences which are at the moment discouraged.

As a result of all of this, what I’ve been thinking about lately is Rudolf Steiner’s notion of “the Incarnation of Ahriman.” For Steiner, Ahriman is a spiritual being that wishes to enslave us to logic, efficiency, and the technological (The Evil Genius in Terry Gilliam’s 1982 film Time Bandits illustrates this in a humorous manner). In a lecture delivered a century ago, Steiner contrasts this image with that of Lucifer (Hegel haunts Steiner to a degree):

“Lucifer is the power that stirs up all fanatical, all falsely mystical forces in human beings, all that physiologically tends to bring the blood into disorder and so lift man above and outside himself. Ahriman is the power that makes people dry, prosaic, philistine—that ossifies them and brings them in the superstition of materialism….

“Ahriman has the greatest interest in concealing from mankind that in modern intellectual, rationalistic science, in superstitious empiricism, one is dealing with a great illusion, a deception—that men should not recognize this is of the greatest possible interest to Ahriman. It would be a triumphant experience for him if the scientific superstition which infiltrates all areas of life today and which human beings even try to use as a template for the social sciences should prevail into the third millennium. He would have the greatest success if he could then arrive in western civilization in human form and find the scientific superstition as prevailing dogma.”1

As I’ve written in my book Transfiguration, I’m not exactly sure how to read Steiner’s take on Ahriman—as a metaphor? or as a spiritual reality? Maybe as both. Because, let’s face it: Steiner was on the money about the twenty-first century and every physical reality has a spiritual counterpart. In addition, the morass of scientific superstition in which we now wallow is more dogmatic than any pronouncement from the Catholic Church, and secular scientific inquisitors infest every corner and pixel of the internet, the world where most of us now live.

Steiner was hardly alone is his concerns about an encroaching technological evolution that could compromise the essence of being human. The Russian philosopher and prophet Nikolai Berdyaev predicted much the same thing, as did in their way Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, and, most notably, Martin Heidegger. Berdyaev, writing in the 1930s, speaks directly to our moment:

“The speed consequent upon the increasing mechanization of life has had a deadly effect on the human Ego, and has sapped its foundations of unity and consistence. The advent of machinery and the mechanization of life have led to an extreme objectification of human existence, to its materialization in a strange, inhuman and frigid world. And though this world is the work of man, it is essentially anti-human.”2

Sophiology stands in firm opposition to this mechanization of life, this Ahrimanic moment. Sophiology offers a relationship to the Real—to other creatures, to people, to plants, animals, and the cosmos, including even microbes, not to mention the angelic and divine orders. Our current moment encourages just the opposite.

One could say that our times have forgotten the incipient philosophical question posed by the Psalmist: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour” (8:3-4). The Psalmist furthermore places these relationships at the center of human flourishing: “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas” (8:6-8).

Our own path to human flourishing is a simple as it is clear. Will we embrace it?

The Evil Genius plans on remaking Creation.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1. Rudolf Steiner, The Incarnation of Ahriman: The Embodiment of Evil on Earth: Seven Lectures, trans. Matthew Barton (Forest Row, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2006), 17–18; 22. My emphasis.

2. Nicolas Berdyaev, Solitude and Society, trans. George Reavey (1938; repr., London: Geoffrey Bles / Centenary Press, 1947), 109.

Congruence: Cosmology, the Soil, and Judith Butler

illustration for the broadside of 'The World Is Turned Upside-Down," c. 1646

(Post)modernity is weird. You know it, I know it. But we seem to ignore it, feeling, I assume, that we can’t do anything about this unbelievable weirdness. (Aside: I know some people don’t like the term “postmodernity”—I’m thinking about you, Scott Dodge!—but I find it useful. Think of it as modernity + the internet. Because the internet has changed everything.)

Probably starting with nominalism and traversing through the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the sexual revolution, and the Capitalist-Marxist dialectic (the combatants of which perpetually vie to see which will be named the most evil system ever perpetrated on humanity), modernity eventually succeeded in alienating human beings from the cosmos: the awareness that the stars and planets influence us; that angels and demons inhabit the universe and seek to engage in human life; that minerals, plants, and animals possess spiritual lives and characteristics of their own that also touch us in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways.

But, wait, there’s more! Modernity simultaneously alienated us from the Divine. Resistance seems to have been futile. Even the Protestant Reformation, as Brad Gregory has so deftly shown, functioned as a prime agent of secularization. (And, I know I harp on this, but the Catholic Church’s acquiescence to this acosmological paradigm through divorcing the church year from the agricultural year has been nothing but detrimental to flourishing. It’s like living with a ghost.)

And not only do you get alienation from the cosmos and God! Act now and you also get alienation from the soil (you know, the place where food comes from)! And don’t even get me started on the FDA equating hydroponics with organic farming. Because of our alienation from the soil and from nature, I contend, we no longer know the basics of biology (here’s a great article on the topic). It’s pretty clear that we don’t. Monsanto (Home of the Frankenfood!) is not helping in this regard.

Added to our estrangement from the cosmos, God, and the soil, we have now arrived at the ultimate horizon: estrangement from our own bodies. (Oh, René Descartes, what hast thou wrought!) Thank you, Judith Butler. Only I don’t mean “thank you” thank you. The beginning of the transhumanist project is here, brothers and sisters (meant, of course, in the broadest possible context), and children are the lab rats. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything.

As an English ballad of the 17th century explained, we live in a world turned upside-down. (Interesting that the ballad was written in response to the Puritan “war on Christmas” that preceded secularization’s volley by several hundred years).

We do have a cosmos: the internet (and social media). We have a soil (synthetic chemicals and pharmacology). We have a god (our own wills and emotions—vaguely understood as possessing “rights”). What can I say? People have an addiction to poison.

I admit that I am increasingly pessimistic about where we are headed. I imagine it will be somewhere between Orwell’s Nineteen-eighty-four and Huxley’s Brave New World. We have yet to acknowledge the level of the hypernormalisation to which we have all become enthralled. Brainwashing (also known as the engineering of consent) is something that happens to other people.

There is an alternative, of course. We could try to live in congruence with nature and the supernatural (you can’t have one without the other: it’s a symbiosis). Worldviews that emphasize the spiritual over the material or the material over the spiritual are simply two sides of the same pathological coin. They have done nothing but wreak havoc over human flourishing. Sophiology, with its attentiveness to both the natural world and the supernatural world that shines through it, offers one such alternative: and a very sane and healthy one at that.

To be continued…