The Bungle Book by Loewen G. V.;

Author:Loewen, G. V.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: UPA
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

3.3 Fans or Fanatics?

If it is the case that we not only are possessed of a suite of essences, but also possess the essence of forms within ourselves as the gestalt of organic consciousness—whether or not this form of life is infinite in itself, it clearly participates in the infinite through the means adumbrated in the previous section—what are the implications for human agency in the world of forms? We often are attracted to human causes, manufactured or spontaneously real. Our allegiance to them is an expression of seeking an essence and, perhaps, of pushing the politics of the either-or appearance of the One who must be dead or alive. This “One” is exemplified, so we think, in the cause at hand. Staffing the barricades or writing letters to the editor are two extremes of placing ourselves in the position of the One as if he were here with us on earth, possessed of a human interest and also, perhaps most surprisingly but also most revealingly, taking sides. When it becomes apparent that the essence of things does none of these other things, we begin to feel some resentment, perhaps even ressentiment—the malicious existential envy that desires not only the demise of the other but also specifically so that we can replace her—in that we now move from being a fan of a cause of the essence to being a fanatic thereof: “Fanatics are not just stern moralists, they are obsessive ones who forget all but one party of the moral scene.” (Midgely 2004:155). The one so obsessed feels himself possessed of a kerygmatics of thought and action. He not only knows the truth of things, he must speak, preach it to whomever he encounters. Not only this, but his audience must fully understand and take up his cause as well. If they do not, they must be vanquished in some way, even unto death. There are many people who make a theater of this version of the mission, such as television evangelists. We might flatter ourselves that the epoch of the authentic fanaticism is long over, the reformation and the counter-reformation had enough of the purely political and cynical within them to discount even these horrors from being of the type we imagine the classical world experienced during its transformation into early Christendom, or with the Islamic conquest, or still later with the Crusades. The Columbian conquest had a material motive; the metaphysics was a whitewash that simply washed along in the wake of the conquistador’s genocidal actions. True fanaticism, we think, is one of those shadowy motives that can be consigned to the dustbin of ambiguous history. Is this really the case?

Like the other concepts discussed in this chapter specifically but also investigated in this book as a whole, the movement from being a fan to being a fanatic involves a conversion to the cause of essence as imagined in a particular time and place amongst peoples indigenous to both of these. Fanaticism might well be more aptly

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