Objectivity and Schizophrenia

The whole of the modern world is still an outworking of Augsburg and Westphalia. It is now a world incapable of marriage, intimacy, and relationship. The whole of the modern world is terribly, terribly wounded. It gives rise to children who have a variety of dysfunctions. Some of them are brats. Some of them are promiscuous. Some of them are married, but not married. Some of them are committed to what Rosenstock-Huessy says is the representative mental disease of our time…schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is especially the disease of the academy. It is the disease of a subject who views himself as an object. I make an object of myself: a thing. This is the pain of the academy, and is perhaps the result of the destruction of marriage on the part of the world, refusing her true Husband, and wanting many (pluralism).

Does not a promiscuous woman, or a whore, make of herself an object to be used by others?

What we see is massive incapacity for intimacy and relationship.

Our times are not quite like either Hosea, or like Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. But the point is something like the same. Our times are a dysfunction of relationship.

The woman needs to be a bride. If she refuses or is refused her true husband, then she will have many paramours (pluralism) or be isolated, or divorced. But she is terribly wounded and will strike out at anyone who tries to protect her.

I think this may have something to do with Rosenstock-Huessy’s “grammatical method” of the social sciences.

We think it is cute when a child, or in the cartoons, or Star Wars, or whatever, have a childlike or childish character who refers to himself by his own first name rather than as “I” or “me”. It is cute in a child, or a moron, because when they refer to themselves by their own first name, they are referring to themselves through the eyes of their parents or guardians. Hence, their reference to themselves is still filled with love, and “cuteness”. It still has real but immature healthy subjectivity. But a schizophrenic cannot refer to himself as “I” in any clear sense. Part of the modern world is schizophrenic.

“Objectivity” is a replacement for relationship, especially for marriage. The commonest words in the modern world are “I don’t trust you…” The university, which grew out of marriage (in the medieval settlement of Christ and His Church), and the need to settle marital disputes (every student had to study every subject from at least two different perspectives in two different colleges which made up the university), now leads the way in “objectivity,” and this objectivity is the Enlightenment replacement for trust and relationship. It is built on doubt and lack of trust, it is translated to a further incapacity for trust and relationship. Cynicism is the foundation of modernity and of being “learned.”

Of course the university gives rise to promiscuity, divorce, warfare, whatever.

Post modernity believes in “commitment,” relationship, etc, but with no foundation. If one cannot go back to “objectivity” after a series of pointless, contentless relationships, then I don’t know where one goes, unless it be to the Lord. We are like Hosea’s whore, lead into the wilderness and having her way “hedged in with thorns.”

The modern, and postmodern world, are lost in the adolescent Cartesianism of eternal and “creative” doubt. Doubt can create certainty with “objectivity.” Need to replace this silly doubt with the vision of Rosenstock-Huessy’s “ducta ignorantia”, which was a part of the medieval settlement and a part of the academic settlement. The scholar would place the sword (as a kind of new knight of knowledge) over his books and cross it in two ways, and vow to doubt all that he had learned, in order to relearn it. But this was doubt with a deeper faith behind it. The truth of God was behind it. And the truth is deeper, more mysterious, more wonderful, than anything known to date.

This is very different from Cartesian doubt.

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