Chapter 1 of It's About Time

Over fifty years ago, I studied with Gerhart Ladner, the author of The Idea of Reform, and many articles on the history of ideas in the medieval period. His monumental work defined the subject of Renewal Ideas and provided a magisterial treatment of Reform in patristic thought, demonstrating its Christian origins and implications for human freedom. Born and trained in Austria, Ladner hoped that reform could medicate the shattered world that had forced his emigration after the Anschluss of 1938, believing that understanding ideas could lead to appropriate action. In introducing his study of reform, he explained that it is one instance of a class he called Renewal Ideas. For him, they include alongside reform: cosmological cycles, vitalistic cycles of life and death or spontaneous new growth, millenarian ideas of apocalypse, utopia, revolution, progress, and lastly, conversion, including baptismal regeneration.

In Ladner’s seminars, we studied texts that exemplified the history of these various renewal ideas in the Middle Ages. The time was the 60s, self-defined, particularly on campuses, as an age of renewal. Although this coincidence was not discussed in The Seminar, where we focused on the Latin texts and the precise methodology Ladner promoted, I was electrified and well-prepared. Although my undergraduate degree was in History, my coursework was oriented toward philosophy, literature, anthropology, intellectual history, and languages. (Proudly diffident, I avoided ancient, medieval, or renaissance survey courses.) Since high school, when I read Hesse, Plato, Ayn Rand, Nietzsche, Frazer, and Durant on the side and took a Summer course on Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis at the local college, my interests were in ideas, the big questions, and their answers over time. Good fortune had put me in the right place at the right time, the Ladner seminar.

He assigned students topics from the Middle Ages that would continue and complement his work. I was given a very fertile subject, Renewal Ideas in the early Thirteenth Century, emphasizing Franciscans:  reform, vitalistic renewal, and Joachite millenarianism. I wrote my dissertation while becoming obsessed with the patterns of these ideas; that their function, their formal structures, and use are somehow essential to mankind’s experience of his relationship to himself, others, society, and history. Obtaining the “degree” and a “job”, I was invited to return to teach Ladner’s course and seminar at UCLA. Since I was unknown, I had few students and, with ample time, collected data for a broad monograph. However, my mental monologue about ways in which ideas such as renewal, reform, rebirth, and the millennium are essential forms, structures, or categories of human experience remained ungrounded because, although my collection of texts and references was prodigious, I did not write and drifted away into other careers. It is only through the scribblings which follow that I have begun to recover from that failure.

Michael’s bio could read: he taught too many courses, including study abroad; his marriage failed; his small college failed; he restored his own home than others; he gardened; he sailed; he dabbled in local politics; he drank. His second career was a business restoring old buildings called, of course, The Renewal Company; then, 30 years ago, together with a new, delightful, and inspirational wife, a successful software company was founded. Its name did not include a “renewal word”.

The research was lost in a flood, and languages withered along with my body. But, as involvement in the business slowed, I tried to write about the subject of my earlier failed obsession on at least three occasions. I reread Ladner, found new indices on the internet, and filed a few remaining “dry” notes, but could never bend the mind to produce more than a couple of pages, which bored in the rereading. I escaped from self-disgust by concluding that these “ideas” are just words and not very important while, at the same time, never stopped thinking about them, at least a little. This nominalism was, for a while, a psychic good that allowed escape from the guilt harbored since the 1970s, but it did not last when I began to think about the subject during the great COVID-19 winter of 2020-21.

Now, over fifty years later, I understand why my guilty memory has returned hundreds of times to the bathroom break during my Ph.D. orals (1968) when Ladner said “You should read Levi-Strauss.” He was a shy man who almost never made suggestions, and I was and am diffident to an extreme, seldom asking questions and never asking for advice. Only recently, memory has restored, vaguely, questions from the committee about my historiographical approach to The History of Ideas that preceded the bathroom break. I do not remember my answers, but they must have included attempts to explain my method using examples of comparative functionalism. Thus, Ladner’s recommendation of Levi-Strauss, he knew that Levi-Strauss’ structuralism could fit the methodological path I was on. We never discussed it. 

I knew he was an anthropologist who made simple, abstract generalizations about human culture and picked up a book to read someday (I had a dissertation to write). I loved Kant and had read Jung, Cassirer, Collingwood, Eliade, James, and Frazer; I had the kind of open mind that would squint and grit teeth trying to rethink a text deemed important–how does that work? Beginning in High School I discussed questions of epistemology with anyone who would listen and some who didn’t. Originally a science student who loved the simple beauty of abstractions like F=ma, college taught that the only answer is Method. The library of a mind was built, but an “academic” career left no time for method except private musing. Recently, a friend coined the term “endless cerebration” in a letter–that’s me.

With the dissertation finished, the collection of stuff for the big book began. Committed diffidence blocked discussion of grand thoughts with Ladner and others even though opportunities were plentiful. Then changed careers and the loss of research in a flood removed anchors–the big book could not be written. Constrained before because “scholarship” was impossible without the collection of stuff, now, in retirement, I am free because there is no reason to write something scholarly: the texts and references are lost; I neither need nor want a job in academe; in fact, I don’t need to do this at all. Today however, writing about renewal ideas is fun, play. Citations are unnecessary, and examples may be chosen from all over the place, including the structures of my mind.

The following is a project of self-renewal after fifty years, which returns to the old subject and examples to write from within my memoria, following a method without a certain goal. There is no requirement except to write as long as I enjoy it, no scholarly apparatus, no goal of publication. 

The Question

Is there an invariant functional structure common to renewal ideas, and can the variegations of their use and content within specific eras and cultures provide insight?

Hypothetical Answer

I confess to the feeling that renewal concepts may provide an essential and natural framework for communication. In use, their value content may differ dramatically, but they are, at their simplest, functionally and structurally the same across time. Apparent differences are contingent and may be keys to a better understanding of watersheds in history.

These formulations roughly represent the problem I posed during that COVID Winter, but, admittedly, they have been rewritten more than once. The following chapter is very close to the first draft of the story.

Escape from Nominalism

Nominalism had provided some peace from my sense of guilt until, during pandemic-imposed isolation, I regressed into thinking about the importance of renewal ideas again. Crossing out platonic idealism and remembering Ladner’s unused advice, I dove into the problem with the sociological/anthropological/psychological thought of Cassirer, Jung, Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, and Eliade as references. I was looking for some kind of grand “reality” in renewal ideas, some way to explain that, functionally, they are part of human nature. Perhaps a recent reading of Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians on Cassirer, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein provoked joy, admiration, and some inspiration remembering these giants whose dilemmas, whose methods mirrored mine in ways. That may have, along with the isolation from distraction, sent me back someplace with a bag of tools accumulated over a lifetime.

Sixty years ago, I sought models of ideas abstracted to the level of F=ma and had a special affection for Kant’s categories, which shape our experience, for example, cause and effect. The distinction between the functional structure of a concept and its various manifestations and value content had been born, and I again perspired a dialog between induction and deduction whereby the active mind using reflection upon itself gives shape to messy sensory data. Somehow I fell back into those days when sticky notes inscribed with renewal attributes were scattered among the brain cells–what are the common patterns, the reoccurring functionalities? Most importantly, I started, writing stuff, and have not stopped writing. No goals, just write a little every day; the project will take care of itself if it is worth anything. I knew what to do: proceed mentally from the sticky notes to more abstract formal statements, which apply to more of the sticky notes and so on. Colloquially, “wash, rinse, and do it again.”  Then, once I had hypothetical structures, I hoped to test them by application to two millennia of texts.

The mental exercise did point toward pairs, dualities, binaries of old and new. Next, seeking origins, I asked if they might be embedded in the human experience of nature. Perhaps each pair, abstracted, is a single cycle in a countless series, necessary and mechanistic, which has spanned human experience. Perhaps the cycle is the category I seek, the key to renewal origins. 

Dark Light

Winter Summer

Die     Born/Sprout

Dry/Recede Flood

Sleep Awake

Looking backward from the perspective of two years, I recognize this as an “Ah, ha” or “Eureka” moment but also a simple or even simplistic notion that several others have noted as well. In other words, how could I have missed this? However, even in retrospect, the places I travel next are intriguing and perhaps original.

 Continuing from these binaries, my all too human imagination can take off, leaping from the original naming of these repeating events–sunrise, solstice, birth, sprouting, flooding–to the creation of linguistic symbols to categorize and then expand them into stories about change in cyclic myths and stories of transformation. These pairs or binaries are derivable from the common experience of humanity. Although there is no time machine, it is reasonable to follow Frazer and many others in asserting that ritual and magic involving these events precede the stories of creation and transformation to move with Cassirer from naming to symbol to concept. Questions of the chicken and the egg may be involved, but it is easy to imagine peoples’ attempts, using magic, to control the seasons, new life, flood waters, etc. . . . to evolve into complex stories, myths. And, the expressions of change embodied there were eventually abstracted to the level of the concepts or categories of renewal and rebirth that I wish to model. 

At some point in this mental exercise, I took the advice Gerhart Ladner had recommended exactly fifty-three years earlier and read Levi-Strauss. His structuralist quest for the invariant elements among humans, modeled upon the methods of the hard sciences, was much the same as my attempts. I was excited by his belief or prejudice that binaries, simple opposites, are indicators of theoretical depth. This faith in the theoretical power of binaries evolved in dialog with his colleague, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and for both acted as useful blinders which they handed down to a generation of anthropologists and linguists. Also, in the twentieth century, the bits and bytes of computer logic comprised of only 1’s and 0’s, literally on’s and off’s, organized with boolean algebra, transformed into electrical signals, then filtered by transistors in order to manipulate and communicate, are another product of binary magic. This belief that binary opposition leads to useful theories is also held by particle physicists in their search for symmetries, using opposite attributes like spin, charge, magnetic moment, and dramatically, matter and anti-matter. Each particle has its anti-particle, with the only difference being charge, or for particles such as mesons, which lack charge, magnetic moment. When close, these almost identical twins annihilate themselves, producing clouds of particles, including the photons transmitting light and information with electromagnetic waveforms measured in cycles. Are these and the many other examples of pairs, defined by their opposition (anti-matter is not matter, cyclic pairs in nature, 1 is not 0), simply coincidence, and are they in their opposition the product of some inherent tendency of the mind? Returning to the analog of Kant’s categories of understanding, are cycles subcategories of an essential (a priori?) binary category?

Also exciting as I read his structural anthropology was Levi-Strauss’ Neo-Kantian position that “[cultural] values translate the impact on the consciousness of the individual of intellectual constraints resulting from the system of collective categories and the way that consciousness reacts to such constraints.” In other words, consciousness is constrained by certain collective categories that, in the individual, become particular and contingent through culture. Values fill in the blanks in the constraints inherent in and provided by instruments of thought. (He nicely avoids using the word mind.) I propose that abstractions derived from the pairings discussed here–binary, cyclic, pendular change–are such categorical constraints. They are the shapers of the admonitions or proclamations that culture presents concerning change over time. While their attributes (such as freedom versus necessity, personal versus societal) vary through mutation and culture, an invariant repetitive pattern of change from old to new shapes the mind’s perception, proclamation, and advocacy of renewal.

These binaries that are basic to mythical thought, derived from the experience of nature and life, are as essential and necessary as 0 and 1, north and south, left and right, up and down. They are primal in the sense that they have been experienced by mankind since he has been able to experience and binary in the sense one side has no meaning without the other. They are opposites that give one another meaning. In our experience of nature, they shift, transition, and pass from one state to another, repetitively, thus in cycles. Each pair includes renewals, new beginnings: 

New light follows night. 

New warmth follows Winter. 

New life follows death. 

Flood follows dryness.

Wakefulness follows sleep. 

We inherit these notions of change as well as an unconscious memory of the magic used to invoke them in our Renewal Ideas, constructed by analogy from primal cyclic experiences. So when people ask for “renewal” they ask for a process to begin which will “renew”, instantiate again, their values (which vary widely among individuals and cultures), perhaps derived from stories of earlier times or derived from a primitivist concept of the natural. Our renewal ideas, concepts used to assert or proclaim change over time, are constrained by and rooted in the magic used involving these pairs. A call for renewal is analogous to a magical incantation; a claim of rebirth or renaissance is a claim that mysterious cyclic forces have unleashed something new. In his introduction to The Golden Bough, with his normal uncommon insight, Ludwig Wittgenstein said that all metaphysics is magic.

Another term that may help to understand the derivation of renewal ideas from pairs is “action predicate.” They are the conceptualization of the action or change connecting the two sides of the pair. In the above sentences, the predicate in each is “follows . . . .” The positive value of each subject is defined by the object, connected by, in this simple example, the predicate “follows.” One could as easily say using conceptual language:

Light is renewal.

Warmth is renewal.

Life is renewal.

Flood is renewal.

Wakefulness is renewal.

Each pair implies movement in a positive direction. Although there are exceptions to the direction of flow in some myths, it is fairly consistent, and the meanings of the exceptions are clear. As these pairs evolve, are abstracted into concepts, and become renewal ideas, New Light, Birth, and Springtime are strongly associated with the good. Floodwaters may be bad or good. Death may be bad or good, but its opposite birth is always good. Rebirth is a powerful good and is clearly associated with the life cycle, springtime, and new light. Springtime is analogous to the primitive, the golden age of peace and plenty from which, in our imaginations, we have diverged. 

From their primal origins, transmitted in “collective unconscious” and myth, through a process of involuntary and unconscious conception, through language, the pairs, predicates that invoke or describe change, are abstracted into classes that may be applied both descriptively and proscriptively; they are structures which when filled with content fitting the needs of the culture, text or user have a visceral power. They might also be called “memes”, analogous to genes, transmitted through culture rather than DNA, and, like genes, they undergo mutation over time. 

Escape through Constraint

 Renewal and Rebirth are primal concepts; they originate in human understanding of cyclic processes of nature and, for this reason, are keys to understanding the origins of our ideas of change. However, having reached this conclusion, I was left with the need to explain why cyclic patterns are so important and finally found the simple answer in my memory of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland. This ingenious description of life in a world of two dimensions, where equilateral triangles and circles dominate, and wily women are lines, reminds me that cycles are important because they, like three-dimensional space, are essential to human experience. If light, warmth, and life were perpetual, our conceptual language would undoubtedly differ significantly. Although mathematicians may be able to imagine living with two, one, four, or even “n” dimensions, ordinary experience is constrained to three, and, in the same fashion, our understanding of change is, until the last three centuries, constrained to cycles. Or, by analogy, when we look for experience of change at its essential, visceral level we find cyclic rhythms. That is our world in the same way that our world is a world of three dimensions. Cyclic structure is a priori, logically prior, to the human experience of change as it develops in language, myth, and conceptual thought and has a chicken-and-egg relationship with our common experience of the natural world.

By invoking poultry, I remain agnostic as to whether the natural cyclic structures of the world or the capabilities of the mind to experience “it” in that way came first. This is like the question of whether the apparent order of nature or the human ability to perceive and organize it is prior. I cannot return to some age of primitive man and am not privy to the intentions of any Creator, and even if I had such knowledge the answer would evade me. It is not important. Simply, I claim that our understanding of change is an essential structure of thought in a way that makes it a relative of Kant’s categories. Regarding whether the mental constraints or the cyclic natural phenomena are temporally prior, who cares? They are ours in the same fashion as our three dimensions. In structuralist terminology, they are invariant; in my historiography, they are a categorical model. The structural bones of renewal ideas are memes, categories of thinking abstracted from myths built upon cosmic, astronomical, and life cycles, primal pairs, which are themselves essential to our world. Their structure is necessary; cultures add values and exemplars. In the most abstract, generalized words I can invent at this point, they are binary states that reoccur in repeating sequences, the parent of renewal ideas.

A riff on Abstraction: Flintstonelike

Imagine the primal human who experiences periodic sunrises; he names the event. He waves a stick in celebration, then the stick becomes causal, magic, and a story evolves concerning the sun, a personified god, and his family and events such as eclipses where the stick may be very helpful in stopping eclipses. As this story grows myth is integrated with more magic. The same primal human experiences then name periodic springtimes and control them through magic, explain them through myths, and so on. The same process occurs with a flooding river and human life and death. 

The various myths include the repetition of these events, leading to the first important abstraction, that they will continue to repeat before and after a human lifetime, and, next, even more abstract, that other, unseen repeating events may control these repeating events. Next, observers of these various myths and the events that spawn them see similarities among astronomical and vitalistic events and yet more abstractly categorize them as cycles. So, from naming a sunrise, explaining it in a story, predicting that it will continue, and finding similarities with other events and stories, move to a categorical level of abstraction, a concept. 

I trace abstract concepts like “renewal” back to their possible, notional beginnings so that I may better understand their similarities. Then, I trace their developments forward in time within culture.

Perhaps the reader noticed the disclaimer “until the last three centuries” in the section on Flatland. It was added after the excitement born of invention waned and the process of testing models by applying them to texts began. Both Progress and Evolution, born of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, differ from Renewal Ideas inasmuch as they both display important incongruities that will be better understood once renewal functionality has been described. To my knowledge, at least in the West, there are no options to describe, proclaim, and promote change for the better except for renewal ideas until the arrival of Progress and Evolution, which shall be examined in greater detail once their position in time has been reached. They shall, however, be used as foils to understand better the category called renewal, born of cycles, which is the focus of this study.