April 26, 2024

The most famous speech in literature about the imagination condemns it. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus dismisses the “lunatic,” or religious visionary, the lover, and the poet for choosing illusion over reality. All three see things that aren’t there and believe they are real. The conflict between imagination and reality has been around for a long time. What has changed recently is its social context. The nature of reality is a vexed question, but until now it was an acceptable move to circumvent it by simply speaking of “consensus reality.” Whatever reality may be in itself—which Kant as far back as the 18th century said we can never know—we can for most purposes speak in terms of an average reality whose assumptions would largely be agreed upon by ordinary people. Pigs do not fly, and the moon is not made of green cheese. What is new is that there is no longer any consensus. Nowadays, you do not need to be an intellectual to see that we do not all live in the same reality.

The idea of a kind of least common denominator reality adhered to by all sane people originated in the Enlightenment as a normative reaction to the religious hysteria of the previous century, which had led to endless wars. The Augustans abhorred the kind of religious fervor they called “enthusiasm,” which was associated with the lower social orders, with its revivalism and great awakenings. Reacting in the opposite direction, “gentlemen” formulated the version of Christianity called Deism. In it, a rational God created the universe on rational, basically mechanical principles, recently laid out by scientists like Newton. The universe is like a gigantic watchworks, and once God set it ticking, he sat back and contemplated it in an endless Sabbath, with no further divine intervention, for it is a poor craftsman who makes a watch that has to be constantly tinkered with. No more miracles; no more speaking in tongues, faith healings, and other forms of spiritual possession. These irregularities, believed in by Catholics and evangelical Protestants respectively, are irrational and unseemly. Religion consists of a set of moral principles that are held to be self-evident, whatever terms we use to enumerate them, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Founding Fathers of the United States were Deists or Deistic, and they built separation of church and state into our government as a protection against churches and groups that feel themselves “inspired” to impose their version of absolute truth on everyone else.

The first great champions of the imagination, the Romantic writers, critics, and philosophers, denied the concept of consensus reality. Despite appearances, reality is not given and inevitable. Reality is created by the imagination, and consensus reality is simply one way of creating it, a gentleman’s agreement that provides a certain amount of social stability, but at a price. This sounds great when you are reading someone like Blake, who promises that when the doors of perception are cleansed, we will see everything as it really is—not average, but infinite. “How do you know but that ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” The problem with that notion is that, if it is admitted, anything goes. How do we know but that every bird is carrying Jewish space lasers that are setting wildfires? If there is no reality principle to distinguish truth from delusion, then the sky’s the limit, and watch out for low-flying pork. The idea that there is nothing to ground us upon a stable “foundation,” to use a philosophical term for it, means, “Well, then I can believe anything I want,” and that leads to a godlike “inflation,” as Jung calls it, a megalomania which believes that the self is without limits. Since delusions are easier to believe when many others believe them too, this has led to the rampant outbreak of conspiracy theories at the present time. There have always been paranoids glassy-eyed over one theory or other, but the number and extent of conspiracy theories in our time is startling and frightening. We can no longer call them “fringe” beliefs when half of the United States is delusional in one way or another. This is not the triumph of the imagination heralded by Blake and the other Romantics—although they would have understood it. They learned what can happen if the imagination becomes crazed and runs out of control when the French Revolution, on which their hopes were pinned for the renovation of the world, turned into a psychotic Reign of Terror in which people were guillotined, with ultimate irony, in the name of Reason.

But, some will say, there is a reality, and it is not just consensus but empirically proved. Science does not create but discovers a reality that is true no matter what people wish, imagine, or try to insist on. Scientific reality acts as a check upon the ego’s addiction to escapist fantasy. It is “objective,” that is, external to the subjective self. The subject confronts an objective world independent of both its desires and fears. This subject/object paradigm was first formulated in philosophy by Descartes in the 17th century, in the process of laying down the fundamentals of scientific method. One does not have to be a philosopher to understand the truth of this paradigm. The Idealist philosophy of George Berkeley, a precursor of the Romantic theory of imagination, said that all reality was mental. There is a famous anecdote that Samuel Johnson kicked a stone and said, rubbing his sore toe, “Thus I refute Berkeley.” Northrop Frye liked to say that scientific law, unlike human law, which is a human construct, is proved true by being unbreakable. You do not break the law of gravitation: if you step off a cliff, the law of gravitation breaks you. Mind you, unbreakable is not undeniable, and human beings are perfectly capable of being in denial despite the consequences. The opening scene of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon features a man with an artificial set of wings who insists that he can fly, only to be proved wrong the hard way when he leaps from a tower. One reason we remain traumatized by the pandemic two years after its finish is that we remember the fate of those who insisted that they made their own reality, rejecting scientific proof as a government plot. I remember the account of a nurse who tended to a man who insisted that he did not have Covid because there was no such thing, even in his last hours as he was dying from it. He did not even get so far as vaccine skepticism. There is more to be said here, because Song of Solomon comes full circle in its final scene, in which the protagonist leaps into the air and flies figuratively, in the sense of transcending all of the lies of a self-centered life that have held him down thus far. But that is a different matter.

The Romantic idea that the imagination is a creative power is essentially a new kind of religious theory. If the imagination actually creates the world, it is not just godlike but an indwelling form of God. The conflict between religion and science is not just intellectual. Science, or at least people for whom science is the truth language of our time, often view it as the best defense against religion’s brand of magical thinking. Religion does not begin as theology, a set of ideas. It does not even begin as a set of supposedly historical facts—fundamentalism reduces religion to the historically factual in order to “prove” it, but religion actually begins in certain experiences that Mircea Eliade calls “hierophanies,” revelations of or experiences of the sacred. In traditional religion, these visions are said to manifest a transcendent supernatural power; in the Romantic theory of imagination and the various cultural phenomena that derive from it, such as Jungian psychology, the visions arise from some deep, mysterious source within the psyche. But, wherever they come from, the hierophanies break through the ordinary reality of both “common sense” and the scientific worldview, and we see—in Blake’s terms once again—the world in a grain of sand, or experience eternity in an hour. The kind of rational materialism that Auguste Comte called “positivism” rejects such visions as delusional. This is roughly the philosophy of science aggressively asserted by the New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion (2006).

A more sophisticated and fair-minded version of this scientific skepticism is willing to admit that at least some religious visions are neither priestly lies nor neurotic inflation. They are real experiences, except that the visionaries do not realize that they have an underlying material cause. The inspiration for the present subject was actually Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966), also the starting point for last week’s discussion. The specific catalyst was her remark, “So much for medical materialism, a term coined by William James for the tendency to account for religious experience in these terms: for instance, a vision or dream is explained as due to drugs or indigestion” (32). Medical materialism continues to thrive, and is the basis of a major science fiction story, “Oceanic,” by Greg Egan, which culminates in the bitter disillusionment of the first-person narrator, the follower of a maternal goddess figure on an alien planet. The central ritual of the religion is a full-immersion baptism, during which initiates experience feelings of rebirth into a paradisal state, a return to the womb in which they feel united with the maternal goddess. Tragically, however, the narrator is also a scientist, and discovers that the feelings are induced by a psychedelic-style chemical in the baptismal waters. The story seems influenced by Freud’s theory in Civilization and Its Discontents that the repressed desire of the unconscious is for a return to the “oceanic” state, a regression to the unborn and infantile state in which the subject is not yet fully separate from the object. Growing up means a disillusioning renunciation of that longing, an adult acceptance of the fact that alienation and isolation are the truth of the human condition.

In Eliade’s terms, all hierophanies, all epiphanies of the “sacred,” are projections of psychic energy from the unconscious onto something in the objective world, investing that object or person with psychic energy, bridging the gap between subject and object. But from a positivistic standpoint, the connection is illusory. Moses did not realize that it was his unconscious that lit the burning bush, his unconscious the ventriloquist that made it speak. Mary Douglas ventures upon this territory because she is brave enough to face up to what has been, for perhaps a century and a half, the most vexing, at times agonizing, question of modern anthropology and comparative mythology: the status of the “primitive.” Douglas notes that some scholars, basically in English-language studies, repudiate the word “primitive” because it implies that people in traditional cultures, whether ancient or contemporary, are psychologically inferior to people in modern cultures; and inferior people create inferior cultures. Almost 60 years onward, sensitivities about this issue are greatly exacerbated. The idea of primitive cultures is angrily dismissed as colonialist ideology, designed to rationalize the domination and exploitation of indigenous peoples. Such “primitive” people must be either put down with a firm hand, because they are “savages,” or gently but firmly civilized. The latter is work, but someone has to do it: the British imperialists called it the “white man’s burden.” It is for the natives’ own good that they be educated out of their own ways and into the ways of true civilization. This is what we are now calling the myth of the “white savior,” and Shakespeare foresaw it all clear back in 1611 when he wrote The Tempest (which I have just finished talking about in the Expanding Eyes podcast). The indigenous character is Caliban, described as half fish by the shipwrecked white people, who may be biased by their belief in the “natural man,” who is still in the state of nature. Prospero, the exiled magician, tries in good faith to be a benevolent white savior according to the rule book. Since language is the vehicle of civilization, the first task is to wipe out the native language and replace it with English. Indigenous peoples have given descriptions of what it is like to be forbidden, often by physical threats, to use one’s own language. Nothing is more intimately related to our sense of identity, so that forced linguistic re-education is one of the most harrowing forms of violence. Caliban’s intensely bitter response is, “You taught me language, and my profit on it is I know how to curse.” Prospero does a great deal of good for the white people properly under his authority, rehabilitating them and getting them to know themselves. He never understands why he fails with Caliban, and in the end gives up and says that the native is intractable.

Shakespeare models Caliban according to the myth of the “primitive,” though it is important to see that he is interrogating and subverting the description at the same time, being inspired in this by Montaigne’s essay on cannibals, which makes the point that cannibals may have virtues that Europeans lack. Caliban is unsocialized like a child, as recalcitrant and immune to discipline as Calvin in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, credulous and superstitious, and with poor impulse control (he tries to rape Miranda, and laughs about it later). Yet he is a better human being than Antonio and Sebastian, who are psychotically vicious, or than Stephano and Trinculo, who are idiots along the lines of the January 6 insurrectionists. He is not a “noble savage,” and is naïve, but has learned from his experiences. It is worth noting that it is he alone who hears the mysterious music that haunts the island. Ferdinand too hears music, the oracular song “Full fathom five,” but that is generated invisibly by Prospero’s servant Ariel. We are not quite certain that the “thousand twangling instruments” that Caliban hears are merely Prospero’s contrivance. It is possible that the island has magic that is not Prospero’s, and what we do know is that Caliban has the sensitivity to weep when he hears the unearthly, beautiful music that wakes him from sleep.

It is difficult to separate the concept of the “primitive” from its ghastly colonialist heritage, yet, whether or not we should continue to use the word (Douglas elects to do so), we should not walk away from the fact that indigenous peoples often have beliefs, customs, and taboos that we find strange and incomprehensible; they may have rituals and myths that we find as bizarre as the contents of the unconscious as seen in the fantasies of children, the dreams of “normal” people, and the hallucinations and delusions of psychotics. And that is the problem. To put it bluntly, how are we to avoid drawing the conclusion that pre-modern people wander around in a kind of half-dreamlike state because they are trapped in what the anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl called a “pre-logical mentality”? Which is to say that they are trapped in their own imaginations, like the lunatic, lover, and poet of our own society, who could be said to be throwbacks to the primitive mode of being. In a satiric essay, “The Four Ages of Poetry,” Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock in fact did say as much about the poet, the march of whose intellect is, as he claimed, like that of a crab, backward.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s Le Mentalité Primitive, translated into English as How Natives Think, generated a great deal of controversy and was roundly attacked when it was published in 1922. In a chapter of Purity and Danger called “Primitive Worlds,” Douglas mounts a qualified defense of Lévy-Bruhl, asserting that some anthropologists were so interested in what we now call virtue-signaling that they turned away from the uncomfortable question of the strangeness and difference displayed in so many “primitive” rituals, myths, and customs. Saying that native peoples are just like us, and that any reference to cultural difference is a colonialist move, designed to turn them into the exotic “other,” is an evasion. Yes, the colonialist move is a danger, but the difference is real and needs to be accounted for. Almost all early theories of primitive cultures account for it in the same way—the wrong way, by assuming a kind of mental inferiority. “Primitive” people are deficient in a sense of reality, and so fall into bizarre superstition. Either the inferiority is innate and unchangeable, in which case, since most indigenous cultures were not white, the theory quickly becomes racist, or it is because the “primitives” are at an early stage of development, in which case they are like children, not fully mature, rational, and socialized. The latter is Sir James Frazer’s view in the enormously influential study The Golden Bough (1913), whose thesis is a Victorian myth of rational progress, in which cultures move through religious and magical early phases on their way to the cause-and-effect scientific basis of our culture.

The problem was that the early researchers of Frazer’s time, especially those who, unlike Frazer himself, were not armchair anthropologists but actually went out and studied indigenous cultures at first hand, reported that native peoples were neither stupid nor childlike in the areas of their lives that called for what we call critical thinking—the use of cause-and-effect reasoning to draw conclusions from a set of facts and thereby solve problems. One of my mentors, Ted Chamberlin, who has worked all his life with indigenous peoples, speaks of hunting and tracking as an art of interpretation, a reading of a kind of natural text, a set of signs, demanding every bit as much subtlety as required of a literary critic constructing or deconstructing the intricate and ambiguous patterns of a written text. The skills required to survive in an African or Central American jungle or in the Australian desert are deeply impressive. Stupid or childlike people wouldn’t last a week—a fact dramatized by all the Hollywood movies in which stupid and childlike and usually rich white people mount expeditions into wilderness territory and have to be saved from the consequences of their foolish behavior by the native guides and hunters. And yet the same impressive natives might believe that—to switch from hunting to planting cultures—the crops can be made to grow by having sex in the fields, or by sacrificing one of Frazer’s “dying god figures” or a symbolic substitute for one, figures who are killed and planted in the ground like seeds. Or, in a Biblical example, the belief in Leviticus that a “scapegoat” may be loaded with the sins of the community and driven into the wilderness to be devoured by demons. As Douglas says,

On the one hand there were convincing reports of the high level of intelligence of Eskimo or Bushmen (or of other such hunters and gatherers, or primitive cultivators or herdsmen), and on the other hand reports of peculiar leaps made in their reasoning and interpretation of events which suggested that their thought followed very different paths from our own. (75)

These “peculiar leaps” result from what Douglas calls a “lack of differentiation”: “Progress means differentiation. Thus primitive means undifferentiated; modern means differentiated” (77). But the real lack of differentiation is not social but psychological. What is not differentiated is the difference between the subject and the object, between the self and the world. Curiously, Douglas does not quote Lévi-Bruhl’s famous term for this lack of differentiation, a term quoted endlessly by Jung: participation mystique. Primitive consciousness is trapped in a state of participation with the world around it. It is at best only intermittently aware that things in the environment, including other people, are separate from itself. What Frazer called “sympathetic magic” operates through the sympathies, i.e., the connections, that unite all things, so that if you stick pins in a doll that looks like your enemy, your enemy will suffer agonizing pains. In other words, it is what we call “magical thinking.” The social sciences are uneasily aware that calling indigenous cultures undifferentiated and modern ones differentiated implies a myth of progress in which the pre-modern cultures are, in the end, inferior:

To the extent to which sociology, anthropology and psychology are possible in it, our own type of culture needs to be distinguished from others which lack this self-awareness and conscious reaching for objectivity. | Radin interprets the Trickster myth of the Winnebago Indians on lines which serve to illustrate this point. Here is a primitive parallel to Teilhard de Chardin’s theme that the movement of evolution has been towards ever-increasing complexification and self-awareness….| [The Winnebago Trickster] myth contains profound reflections on the whole subject of differentiation. As the story unfolds he gradually discovers his own identity, gradually recognizes and controls his own parts; he oscillates between female and male, but eventually fixes his own male sexual role; and finally learns to assess his environment for what it is. (78-79)

Ingeniously, Douglas interprets the myth as a Winnebago theory of progress: the myth is a satire on an early stage of development of a sort that resembles the modern “object relations” theories of psychoanalysts such as Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott, in which the infant or very small child has not yet learned to distinguish, for example, between the mother’s breast and itself, and only learns that distinction through the separation anxiety that ensues when the breast inexplicably goes away. The Trickster argues with and punishes his own anus because he does not know it is part of himself. He does not accept his masculinity as he “should,” but at one point becomes temporarily female and gives birth. In this interpretation, the Winnebago are laughing at the Trickster as the Europeans laughed at the antics of the “savages” they encountered all over the world. How, wondered the early explorers, could whole tribes of people seriously believe the 20 impossible things they seem to believe before breakfast? Their subjectivity—their wishes and fears—have completely overrun the objective world, leaving them in a state that is essentially narcissistic.

The kind of scientific attitude called positivism or scientism attempts a complete reversal of this subjective kidnapping of external reality. Its ideal goal, never fully achieved but at best approximated, is what we can call, after Star Trek, the Vulcan ideal of complete, coldly detached objectivity. Primitivism treats the object as a spider treats its prey, wrapping it up totally in webs spun out of its own self. Scientism attempts the reverse, an elimination of the subject, reducing the subject to a mere recording device, an observer. In early Marvel comics, the Watcher was a member of an ancient alien race so possessed by guilt for having once tragically intervened in the destiny of another race that they have confined themselves for millennia to the role of merely watching and recording the universe as it transpires. To the extent that such an objectivity is achieved, the subject in fact disappears: it is an illusion, an epiphenomenon. Reality is a mechanism, and we are mechanisms. Such was more or less the view of a philosopher such as Daniel Dennett, who just died this week after spending a lifetime arguing that consciousness does not exist. If we adopt a sociology of science approach, this brand of science seems to appeal to two types of personality. One is contemplative in an almost monastic way: a lifetime spent observing and recording the processes of matter and energy that we call the universe is a life well spent. The other is activist: there are those who very much want there to be the guarantee of a reality outside what we imagine. If there is no reality principle, then the lunatics are running the asylum, and the asylum is the whole universe. The activists may make their whole career into a crusade against the lunatics. I have some sympathy with them: when I say that the imagination is the home of human life, I am not advocating some neo-hippie or New Age or self-help attitude that reality can be wished away by having a positive attitude. Some magical thinking may be charming: denial of the Holocaust or the results of the 2020 election is not.

But it is not as simple as the astringent scientific types would have it. A century after Descartes and others developed scientific method came Immanuel Kant, and with him what is sometimes called the Kantian dilemma. It can be stated fairly simply. Reality is not simply “out there,” recorded by our senses upon the blank slate of our minds. The mind is not a passive receptor, but actively constructs the raw data of the senses into a picture it calls the world. Out of the chaos of sensory flux, it creates a world exactly as God created in Genesis—by constructing order out of chaos. We have no idea what reality is “in itself,” Kant said. What we know is an interpretation, and that interpretation is a mental act. Reality is a product of the creative imagination after all. To the extent that my mind appears to construct reality in the same way as my fellow human beings, I may accept the idea of a consensus reality. But then, along come the lunar cheese and airborne pork brigade.

Worse, I may not be sure myself what is real and what is illusion. As usual, Shakespeare was prophetic: Hamlet is a play that ends in near-complete ambiguity. Not in terms of its foreground action: Claudius really did murder his brother, and a stage littered with bodies may be stamped with the interpretation “revenge achieved,” which is after all the plot trajectory of a revenge tragedy. But what has been the point of all this? Was the ghost real, or a demon in disguise? What kind of supernatural machinery has been set in motion to counsel revenge, given that revenge is an anti-Christian value? Hamlet seems to fit Macbeth’s description of life as a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. To stare into the abyss of that nothingness courts madness. Ophelia falls into madness, and then into the water, and drowns. Hamlet escapes only by a radical and utterly arbitrary leap of faith in Act 5, where he is suddenly sure that there is a divinity that shapes our ends. Has he glimpsed something beyond the world’s appearance, or is this a kind of deathbed conversion to magical thinking?

Are we left with a kind of terminally ambiguous postmodern skepticism, then? Let me attempt to provide a tentative answer by returning to the question of the “primitive.” What Lévy-Bruhl and the other early anthropologists and comparative mythologists got wrong was not the idea of participation mystique itself, only its identification with “primitive” psychology, and the identification of rational objectivity with “modern” psychology. That is the tragic ethnocentric error. Yes, some of the rituals, myths, and taboos of indigenous peoples do not resemble “realism” but rather the strange processes of the unconscious, which operates not by daylight logic but by dreamlike associations and connections. But modern people are just as susceptible to an influx of unconscious materials, though they may be in denial about it.

Anyone expounding about the “bizarre” beliefs of primitives ought to take a careful look inside the Bible, which most Christians do not. Christian belief is a kind of popular normalization of what began as a series of hierophanies no more or less bizarre than anything in native mythologies. From one end to the other: from the talking snake in Genesis to the Book of Revelation, in which the snake has morphed into a seven-headed dragon. Oh, the snake’s just a parable, and the dragon is just allegory, right? But how far does that principle go? Was Christ a dying god who rose from the dead, or is that too just a parable, imagery drawn from the Classical Mystery religions but only to be taken figuratively? People don’t rise from the dead, and the idea that the Creator of the universe was a carpenter’s son in Nazareth, born in a stable, is just as “primitive” as anything in indigenous religions. And the Biblical canon is just the tip of the iceberg. Many of the books excluded from the Bible, such as the Gnostic scriptures, make the Bible look sedate. In the secular realm, much of the Modernist revolution in the arts consisted in attempts to return to the “primitive” level of experience, close to the unconscious. In the visual arts, surrealism was influenced by depth psychology’s venture into both dreams and psychotic visions, and artists like Picasso borrowed from “primitive” African and Cycladic art. In music, the Dionysian frenzy of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring caused a riot on its first performance. In literature, Conrad showed in Heart of Darkness that the “savage” lurked within the European colonizer, ready to emerge when civilized laws were no longer present to prevent it.

We too have a deep level of the mind in which what Freud called “primary process” makes connections and identifications between the self and the world without regard to daylight logic. That is what we can call the first phase of the imagination, in which the mind says, “I am all that is around me, and everything that has ever happened to me.” At moments of greatest intensity, the imagination may have the intuition that it is coterminous with all space and time, that it is potentially the cosmic identity that Jung called the Self, as opposed to the ordinary ego. But that is only the first phase. As Blake saw, the imagination is a dynamic of Contraries, and, as the first phase is one of identification, the second phase is an opposite one of difference and discrimination. This is what we call the reality principle, the sense that, no, I am not one with the universe, and in fact the universe often opposes my wishes and exposes my ideas about the truth and the secret of life as just more of my own neurotic crap, sigh. The world and other people do not exist to gratify my desires, unless of course I am a sociopathic narcissist like certain people we could mention. Science may posit an objective reality, but that objective reality is a mental construct, an interpretation, and therefore itself a product of the imagination, even if it conflicts with and refutes some of the notions of the imagination’s first, wish-fulfillment phase. The idea of a foundation, of something outside subjective consciousness, is not merely made up: but it does exist within the imagination as a kind of honorable opposition, a necessary resistance and corrective.

We vacillate between these two modes of imagination, between the fantasy-thinking of primary process that we call “primitive” and the practical, real-world orientation by which we survive in a dangerous world. Indigenous or pre-modern peoples do the same. There are two conclusions to be drawn from this interpretation, one tragic and the other, if not optimistic, at least full of possibility. The tragic one is stated in the first line of a poem by Yeats, called “Vacillation”: “Between extremities man runs his course.” Freud’s late work is a pessimistic statement of history as a tragic series of cycles in which human desire, with all its wild and dangerous fantasies, has to be largely repressed, its energies “sublimated” or rechanneled into the building of a civilization, with its law and order. But such repression, whose instrument is the “reality principle,” can only be maintained for so long, and when repression no longer holds in a civilization’s final, decadent phase, unsocialized desire breaks through and chaos is come again. Clearly some such cyclical pattern is evident in history, despite postmodern skepticism that history has any pattern at all.

The real question is this: is there a third phase of the imagination that unites the first two phases as true Blakean Contraries, like the yin and yang of Taoism? The skeptical answer is such a union of opposites is a logical contradiction and therefore what some literary theory calls a “mystification.” The hopeful answer is that there is a higher logic of both/and rather than either/or, expressed not by abstract syllogisms but by metaphor's A is B. Or, if you like philosophical terminology, you may call it identity-in-difference, the term I plastered it with in The Productions of Time, borrowing from German Romantic philosophy and the writings of Coleridge, who plagiarized it from the Germans.

But, again, you may skip the degree in philosophy. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet in their greatest moments rise to this third phase in which we, in a phrase of Wallace Stevens, reason with a later reason. The lunatic or religious visionary knows that the God who created the terrifying and sublime cosmos also weeps at the fall of the sparrow, which is the death of us all. The lover knows that he and the beloved are one flesh, one heart—and also that they are mysteries to each other, circling like a planet and an unknown moon. The poets know that the metaphors of poetry are lies, but that lies are all they’ve got. For the truth is only accessible by means of lies and illusions. Like the poet, native peoples know, at their best, that their myths and rituals are a kind of play—in fact, are plays, for drama emerged out of ritual. When we go to the theatre, we suspend disbelief, which is not the same as saying either that we disbelieve, in which case we could not “get into” the play, or that we believe, which would make us like the “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, afraid that a man in a lion costume will be mistaken for a real lion. We believe at the same time that we do not believe, the law of non-contradiction be damned. We create, we love, we live our lives that way, a way that is at once primitive, childlike, and perhaps a little bit mad, yet at the same time prudently skeptical and pragmatic. We laugh the exuberant laugh of satire even at the moment that life and love and God and art are breaking our hearts.

Reference

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge, 1991. Originally published 1966.