Patty Popp

HONORS 394
February 21st, 2018
Diary Part II: A Continued Study in Disenchantment

Lecture 8: Medieval Cosmology

“Be ye shrewd as serpents and guileless as doves.” (Matthew 10:16)

When this quote came up on the screen, it gave me pause. Over the course of my nineteen
years of life, I have always identified myself as someone who is shrewd, calculating, down-to-
earth, and practical – just your everyday serpent. I never saw anything wrong with that. It was
these attributes that allowed me to thrive in school and internships and I felt reassured in the fact
that I was on the right path – the one that would allow me to land a job at a neat tech company
where I could help develop great software products that would positively impact people all
around the world. I was always a curious individual with an inquisitive thirst for learning and an
ability to successfully accomplish tasks given to me in a timely manner. What more could I ever
possibly need? If someone were to ask me whether I would rather hang out with a bunch of flaky
dreamers or Machiavellian cynics for the rest of my life, I would choose the Machiavellian
cynics in a heartbeat, but it is crucial to recognize the importance of finding a balance in life that
allows one to get exposure to both sides of the spectrum – the serpents and the doves. It is
through a strong imbalance of too much of one or the other from which evil, destructive acts
come, so it is imperative to not get too carried away on either end of the extremes of the
spectrum.

Unlike me and my fellow aggressively left dominant allies, right dominant people tend to
be characterized as guileless, flaky, priggish, idealistic, and airy. In my wildest dreams, I have
never and would never adopt such personality traits, but it is important to realize that neither of
these two mindsets are morally superior. Shakespeare clearly notices this inherent duality of
mankind and plays to both sides: in his tragedies, one side or the other tends to get the better of
the protagonist, and in his comedies, the protagonists tend to find balance symbolized by the
union of the masculine and the feminine. Most people want happy endings in life and in order to
achieve this desire, one must find harmony between the two seemingly dissonant notes so that
they can complete their melodious symphony.

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur urges people, namely left dominant people, to tell
the jabbering reptile on their left shoulder to shut up for a minute, let the dove on their right
shoulder present its experience of Being, and finally test what they have learned. This is the path
towards achieving a wholesome “mensch” status. Upon identification of which way you lean,
you must find someone to counteract the filters which you impose on the world which distort
your overall perspective and view towards society. Almost all great artists, philosophers, and
prophets had this openness to Being that allowed them to be in touch with the eternal, and thus to
be possessed by a sort of divine madness. If it were not for the seemingly subversive, delusional
visions of important players like Socrates, we would be living in an exceedingly different society
and civilization, as a whole.
 The serpent and the dove go together like yin and yang, the mystic and the modern, etc.,
and therefore, the two must act in tandem. Without the shrewdness of the serpent, the vision that
the dove discloses would quickly fade from history, being dismissed as mere hallucination. But
without the dove’s inspiration, the serpent would go out and create a utilitarian world devoid of
beauty and goodness. On a personal note, I am able to get in touch with my inner dove and
obtain a resemblance of balance whenever I go hiking or explore someplace new as I find myself
encountering nature and beauty in its purest form and put aside any prior agenda in order to fully
embed myself within my surroundings. The sounds of the birds chirping, the wind flowing
through the branches, the scent of the pine, all come together to form a truly transcendental
experience.

Disembedding oneself from his or her current, comfortable social imaginary follows from
an awakening to reality that makes the previous “reality” seem almost dreamlike. In the past,
there was a desire to strip everything away that gets in the way of experiencing the really Real.
Socrates welcomed death as the final liberation and in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition,
there is a motif of going to mountaintops or out into the wilderness or into a cave in order to
encounter the holy. The wilderness and other symbolically equivalent notions lie outside of the
social imaginary making access to the multifaceted dimensions of Being less filtered and
increasingly porous. But the sad reality is that many long for it, but few actually experience this
transformation. Modern elites came to dismiss such experiences of the transcendent as
mysticism, but postmoderns are less adamantly skeptical – each to their own, as the saying goes.

Across the board, we tend to associate mysticism and religious enthusiasm with religious
fanatics and cults, but when it comes to love, we make an exception. It is through love that we
are offered a glimpse of the eternal. Love’s persistent power trickles its way into the seemingly
closed-off barriers of our increasingly secular society. And it is through this idea of mad love in
late-modern culture where there is some vestige of the enchantment of eternity – love being the
ultimate place where the immanent and the transcendent come together. Even as someone who is
skeptical about the existence of an “eternity”, I cannot deny that falling in love is an experience
reminiscent of awakening to a new life. For Dante, Eros is when sexual desire and spirit –
serpent and dove – come together, and the latter transforms the former. This theme of the duality
of mankind and the need for balance appears yet again. During this process, Plato claims the
whole soul is fully in a state of ebullition and effervescence which bubbles up and induces a
feeling of uneasiness and tickling, but when in like manner the soul is beginning to grow wings,
the beauty of the beloved refreshes and warms its recipient whilst enveloped in an embrace of
overwhelming emotion.

The ideal of love and beauty entered Western literature in a variety of different ways,
most commonly through the idea of the eternal feminine as a central archetype. The Divine
Feminine has always been associated with divine wisdom. Despite Medieval Christianity being
deeply patriarchal, it had a place for the Feminine that was all but lost during the modern period.
The cult of the virgin and the courtly love tradition honored the feminine in a way that the post-
Reformation social imaginary did not. As we will see in many of Shakespeare’s plays, women
play a crucial, dual role which is pivotal for many of the plot trajectories of his protagonists
(more on this later).
 The medieval cosmic imaginary was one which was ensouled with animated beings,
visible and invisible. The Western social imaginary, on the other hand, was primarily
hierarchical. Humans had their place of rank on the Great Chain of Being, but reform was
desirable. Reform, back in those days, entailed returning a thing that is corrupted or de-formed to
its original ideal form. Since society adopted a pseudo organic form which could easily get sick
or corrupted, it was necessary for its inhabitants to return it to health. Justice was about
maintaining cosmic balance, to ensure that one side would not get the better of the other side and
was firmly rooted in a sense of the deep law that governed the cosmic balance. These notions are
echoed in Taylor’s A Secular Age as he claims that in healthy polities, the equilibrium is
maintained by the play or rivalry and mutual surveillance between the orders. But there are
certain developments which threaten this, such as an excessive interest on the part of citizens in
their private wealth and property. Once we lose form, collective action disintegrates into the
corrupt strivings of self-regarding individuals. Once again, we must strive to attain the ideal of
balance in order to move towards living a more wholesome life.

Lecture 9: Cosmic & Moral Imaginaries

As we continue to explore the notion of moral imaginaries, I first wish to digress briefly
with some take-aways from the Ficino and the Platonic Academy reading. Ficino believed that
unity, truth, and goodness formed a single stable reality that underlay this unstable and
inconsistent world we live in and all knowledge was a return towards a single source. God, he
believed, was everywhere and was inherently part of all forms by virtue. At the head of the
Neoplatonic hierarchy of Being is the One exalted above all by being and all knowledge. From
the One, there proceed the three degrees of emanation that form the three worlds of the cosmos.
Each one of the three worlds, intelligible, celestial, or material, is at the moment of its first
creation in some sense a chaos. In order to receive form and adornment it must turn to the
essence immediately above it in the hierarchy of being. All things that exist in the material world
are merely dim shadows of the eternal realities – everything is dependent on Him while He is
independent of it. The mind of man seeks God always and in everything and cannot be satisfied
until it finds Him. It is natural and inevitable for man to desire perfect goodness and felicity – his
mind cannot be satisfied with the finite because it contains a ray of the divine light.

Tying this back to our previous discussion about the overwhelming power of love, the
lover lives again in God and there finds his true self, thus being able to give himself in love to
God. According to Ficino, there can be no experience more absolute than that by which a man is
made aware of a harmony in himself that corresponds to a like harmony in the universe. Love
inspires the desire for good and beauty and a great hatred for all evil since the lover wishes to
stand well in the opinion of the beloved and to be in every aspect worthy of him. The mind
reverences and loves beauty as an image of the divine and at the same time the soul desires to
create a form resembling the beautiful object. At the end of the day, love is eternal and is
eternally renewed and contented by its divine object.

But it is important to realize that everything is ultimately a mix of good and evil. In the
Chain of Being, the closer a thing is to Nothingness at the bottom, the eviler, and vice versa. On
the Chain of Being, everything is good insofar as it exists, but some things are better than others,
with chaos being about as far as you can get from God before descending into absolute
Nothingness. God is the density of fully actuated Being and everything that moves away from
God loses its density of being, thus losing its form. Humans alone have the freedom to choose
either to ascend or descend. In Shakespearean comedies, the protagonists can be characterized as
ascending souls, while in his tragedies, the protagonists tend to be descending souls. In this
crazy, bubbling world that we live in, we each are presented with a choice: ascend closer to
fullness of being and communion or descend into the chaotic void and de-actualize. To make this
choice, one must identify the goal to which they aspire. For medieval and Renaissance elites, it
was to become what God created you to be – fully realized in his image and likeness, and it was
love and beauty that drew the human being upward towards divine self-realization.

What gives a thing its existence is its participation in the Divine Mind – when the essence
of a thing as it exists in the Divine Mind penetrates the formless chaos of matter, and in
interacting with it creates a world of creatures. If the world were like an amorphous, dark, stormy
cloud, the Divine Mind can be likened to a lightning strike – in a single, outstanding, swift
movement, the cloud comes alive in captivating detail. Therefore, the things in the world are real
to the degree that they actualize the idea and essence of it that originates in the Divine Mind.

Lecture 10: Much Ado Discussion

Before we began discussing Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, we took a brief
detour in order to revisit the notion of social imaginaries. The more naively one identifies with a
particular cultural-linguistic construct, the more fragile one’s sense of identity is in a pluralistic
society. A positive future lies in finding the balance between the pluribus and the unum. Too
much unum and you have a flat, homogenized, soulless society, and too much pluribus yields a
situation similar to that of the Balkans, Northern Ireland, etc. I continue to notice this trend of the
need for balance. Human beings are inherently prone to extremism if they have no sense of the
centripetal unifying center and so can be easily swept away by the fragmenting, centrifugal mob.
This kind of extremism shows up in Much Ado about Nothing with the sharp contrast that shows
up between the naivete of characters like Claudio and Hero and the shrewdness of characters like
Beatrice and Benedick. One of the things that I found amusing about the juxtaposition of the two
outlooks of the different parties was the fact that each member of either party could just as easily
be characterized as a “fool” to a certain extent. It goes to show that until full balance is achieved,
we can still not even begin to dream of achieving a flawless state of existence.

In Much Ado about Nothing, the serpents needed the doves to more clearly see what was
happening and to be more open to the possibilities before them. On the other hand, the doves
needed the serpents to introduce reason into their dreamlike fantasies and to bring them back to
reality. In standard Shakespearean comedic fashion, the characters started off being very one-
sided, but over the course of the play, through the power of love, the union of masculine and
feminine, the protagonists begin to find balance.

Lecture 11: Florentine Neoplatonism

Over the course of this quarter, we have been exercising in empathic imagination. I know
that I, personally, have been able to better understand the views held by the premoderns by
putting myself in their shoes and to better recognize that their ideas were not nearly as absurd or
delusional as is commonly believed in our current postmodern world. Just like we had discussed
at the beginning of the quarter, in going forward, we can learn from what our ancestors knew but
we have since forgotten and seek to integrate it with our modern critical consciousness. A more
deeply satisfying human future requires finding a greater level of balance. Part of being in this
Age of Whatever entails that we are unbalanced as a society, we have no strong cohesion that
binds us all together. One might argue that we might even benefit from a “re-form” of our own –
a returning to the ideal form, a restoration of our societal organism to health.

This idea of the “ideal form” harkens back to our discussion about the Divine. To
contemplate a thing of beauty was to discern in it the presence of the Divine Mind, to see its truth
and goodness. The goal for many artists was not to escape the world but to see the divine that is
present in the world. Much like the way a ray of vibrant sunlight would pierce through a dark
room, the divine lies behind mere appearances (that is, if you have the eyes to see it). Everything
is meaningful because it is shot through with the divine mind – the ray of light envelops
everything in its proximity with a sense of warmth and holiness, that immediately brings it closer
to the ideal form. Art was not about holding up a mirror to nature, so much as it was seeing
beneath the appearances with the inner, inspired eye. The more the human mind becomes like
God’s mind, the more capable the human mind to understand nature’s mysteries. To know a
thing in its deep truth is always to encounter its true beauty – to experience its beauty is to love
it. Here is where we see a clear correlation between knowing and loving, each requires a duality
of descent and ascent: descend to uncover the essence as it lives in the Divine Mind, and thus
promptly begin the ascent towards the One.

Lecture 12: Renaissance Synthesis

Now that the immanent world is shot through with the transcendent world, it is finally
worth paying attention to. Our ordinary senses only see the shadows of things, but the inspired
mind is capable of penetrating beyond the appearances to reach the essences that are deeply
intertwined with the Divine Mind. In attempting to decipher this “divine code”, three branches of
methodologies arose: art, magic, and science. Art was about “aletheia” – letting Nature disclose
itself to the viewer, magic was about understanding the “soul code”, and science was about
understanding the “material code”. Although all three branches were important in their ability to
shape the era, I will focus on art for now.

To uncover in the immanent world what is in the Divine Mind requires an awakening of
latent parts of the artist’s mind. The greatness of the artist was determined by his “genius” which
was his ability to see what others could not see – to see a thing as God sees it. This ties closely to
the notion of Platonic Love – the intoxication one experiences when they encounter the true
essence of the beloved. It’s about the uncovering of the deep truth of the person behind all the
appearances, roles, and social conventions that could often obfuscate the really Real. The
experience of the beloved for the lover is inherently a cognitive act and truly an intoxicating
encounter tied to the sacred which incites a kind of madness.
Lecture 13: Love’s Labor’s Lost Discussion

Love’s Labor’s Lost did a particularly good job of highlighting a lot of the key points that
we had touched upon in lecture. The King desired disembeddedment at Navarre (via ascetism),
but he failed because he was very much still lodged in his current social imaginary, making it
difficult for him to think with the bigger picture in mind. It took the overwhelming power of love
to break him out of his fantasy and for him to finally see clearly. And where did this love come
from, if not from the women? The women in this play serve a dual role – taking on both a mortal
form and an eternal essence. In my opinion, they represented the Beloved, the Divine, and the
Truth, and that helps to explain why the men’s plan to cut them out would prove to be fruitless.
As Longaville went on to profess in the library, “a woman I foreswore; but I will prove, thou
being a goddess, I foreswore not thee; my vow was earthly, thou a heavenly love…” Upon their
first meeting, the women were able to slip into the men’s hearts via the reoccurring theme of the
Doctrine of the eyes. Perhaps it is my inner hopeless romantic, but I am a big believer in the idea
of “love at first sight” and no film that I have seen to date had presented a more explicit
rendering of that moment of instant attraction and intoxication. The women managed to gain
entry upon first glance despite the futile attempts of the men to physically barricade themselves
from the feminine.

As the men begin to give in to the power of love and to the breaking of their original
oath, the women are tasked with keeping them true to reality. After an elaborate masked dance
scene in which the men were so enthralled with the women, that they did not even realize they
were dancing with someone other than their beloved, the women proceeded to mock them. As
dual figures, they are tasked with stripping the men of their illusions and to confront them with
their inability to see clearly. The women possessed the unique ability to call the men out for
acting and talking love, without being truly in love (much like the way Koro and the tribe were
merely performing the actions of the tradition, without embodying the tradition to the fullest
extent). The death shock comes as a further moment of sobriety or rather a coming down to earth
– further repentance for the men’s foolishness. Throughout the play, the men were doing
everything in their power to pass the constancy test and I believe that after the humbling
experience of the women’s mockery and the King of France’s passing, the men will take it upon
themselves to keep their word and maintain this particular oath since they have the unstoppable
power of love on their side. Their new ascetic regime is undertaken not in the service of book
learning, but rather in the service of love which is the true path to the attainment of Divine
Wisdom.

Lecture 14: Disembedding the Forms

Returning back to the notion of constancy, it is important to understand that healthy

ascetism is never a discipline for the sake of discipline (a mistake made by the men in Love’s
Labor’s Lost). Rather, ascetism is a means to an end towards a higher level of freedom. Much
like how a highly skilled musician can perform a broader range of pieces at a higher level of
freedom and improvisation, normal people can also broaden their perspectives once they
eliminate distractions from their everyday routine. Spiritual practice is like the practice of a
highly talented athlete – it requires a rigorous training regime and an end-goal which in this case
is theosis, becoming spiritually transformed into something divine. One must give up less
important things to achieve more important goals and this requires a disembedding from ordinary
life. As a result, ascetism can also be viewed as a form of purification or spiritual cleansing
which provides one with an increased capacity to see the truth about themselves and others.

Particularly in Shakespeare, a reoccurring belief is that the intellect divorced from the
wisdom of the heart ends in self-destruction, while the wisdom of the heart deepens only by tests
of faith and truth. It is these tests that are essential for moving into a deeper cognition of the
Real. As I had discussed before, tied closely to this intimate perception of the Real, were the
inspirations and intuitions of great artists and philosophers. In order to avoid having their
creations be dismissed as eccentric, lunatic ravings, artists and philosophers must artfully
represent them and have society respond. There is a difference between a renowned
spokesperson and a stumbling drunkard shouting in the streets, after all. And it was up to these
creative thinkers to ensure that their voices were heard. Their representations had to work with
the existing social imaginary, but also had to add something currently not available. What made
Pai such a positively disruptive character in Whale Rider was her ability to not just hold a mirror
to the existing flaws in their tribe’s culture, but to both renew and expand her tribe’s traditional
social imaginary.

Art, in this way, can be viewed as a two-way street – the work of art presents itself as an
experience and others must work with it in constructive ways. However, like everything in this
world, it has the potential to be misunderstood, corrupted, or twisted into something that was far
from the creator’s original intention. Traditions die when people lose touch with the originating
inspiration or intuition (again, just going through the motions instead of embracing the meaning
and power of the mythos). In the chief school, the young boys were just learning the gestures of
the tribal dance but failed to give the tradition the respect it deserved – it was only until the final
coming-together scene where the community rediscovers themselves. Similarly, tradition must
possess the power to adapt to a continuously changing reality, because if not, people will tend to
dismiss it as antiquated delusion.

Speaking of a changing reality, this time period showed ideological conflict between the
Realists and the Nominalists. A Realist is somebody who thinks that the forms are real. They
were under the belief that matter is worthless dust until it is given form by the Divine Mind. The
forms were the hidden code, even if they were directly perceived only by mystics and inspired
artists with second sight. The Nominalists, on the other hand, just thought the forms were mere
abstractions – names we give things and nothing more. They strove towards emphasizing God’s
power and freedom and proceeded to deconstruct The Great Chain of Being. Since most people
did not have a direct experience of the divine forms embedded in nature, they questioned
whether they existed at all. The nominalists wanted to free God from his obligation to give the
world its form and to sustain it. Their idea of God’s freedom and power was so robust and that of
God’s transcendence so pure, that they thought that his creation of the world required a radical
separation from it. God was too big a deal to be in the least bothered with the problems of his
creation – he created humans, gave them freedom and rationality, and left them to their own
devices. If God plays a role in saving the world, he does it out of his infinite freedom and
benevolence, not because the system requires it. In my opinion, it was this debate which led to a
new interpretation of the word “reform” – no longer a returning to a previous state, but a
disruptive introduction of new ideas which would lead to the adoption of a new social imaginary.
Lecture 15: From Sacred Mater to Profane Matter

In the conflict between the Nominalists and the Realists, the Nominalists prevail. Over
the years, the feeling of alienation from the original moment of creation increases for more and
more people. Instead of freedom being realizing oneself as God intended, the word is redefined
to be a sense of autonomy which stressed separation, disengagement, and disconnection via
increased buffering. Nature promptly loses its divine ground as the world as we know it is no
longer shot through with the divine essences. The building blocks which used to hold up the
beliefs of the Realists collapsed from underneath them, as a new perspective took over. The
ultimate goal of Nominalism, according to Charles Taylor, was to free things from their
essences. Instrumental reason has no interest in discerning the spiritual mysteries in the sense
world, all that is needed is ordinary, practical, common sense. Nature is no longer viewed as a
mother, but rather as a machine.

Calvinists took the emphasis of the power and transcendence of God one step further by
viewing Him as a terrifying and wrathful absolute power, whilst humans had little to no worth.
According to them, we all deserved to suffer and it was only because of God’s mercy that a few
will be spared. The elect few are predestined from all time for salvation, but everyone else, the
unregenerate, are predestined from all time for damnation. I find this to be somewhat of a scary
notion because I believe that through a solid work ethic, you can achieve anything you set your
mind to. The idea that this might be completely out of our hands, we might be placed on a
predestined path with no means of changing direction, shakes me to my core because it incites
internal doubt and skepticism towards the purpose of life. Have all my efforts been meaningless?
Is my fate predetermined?

The beliefs held by Calvinists left little room for ascent to beauty drawn by Divine Love
or for the goddess of mercy and compassion. People felt the need to battle for the Lord to prove
their virtue and in doing so, to start demonizing everyone else, as there was no longer a safety net
to catch them when they would ultimately fall. In order to think of yourself as pure, you project
all the repressed, darker parts of your soul onto others. This causes a split after the Reformation:
Faith goes one way, and Reason another. Truth is only what’s reasonable, and so whatever is in
scriptures or in one’s subjective experience that is unbelievable or rationally unsupportable is
rejected as mysticism or ignorance. Material prosperity promptly becomes a sign of being
blessed by God, thus making the new Protestant social imaginary very receptive to technological
development and capitalism. If human mind can imagine it, all that is needed is the craft or
knowledge to make it. The new ideal is the sanctification of ordinary life – God still exists, but
there is no felt need for him. Faith becomes a test for purity which reinforces a disconnect
between one’s personal beliefs and the way the world really works. As spiritual concerns become
increasingly irrelevant in the public sphere, the biggest expansion in material prosperity and
technological innovation in the history of the world gets ushered in.

Lecture 16: King Lear Discussion

King Lear holds a lot of significance, particularly in regard to truth. The play is about the
movement from blindness to true sight (literally in the case of Gloucester, but also figuratively in
many of the play’s other pivotal characters). The driving question being “what needs to be
removed so that one can finally see clearly?”. There is a difference between respecting the
tradition and making an ideological idol of it. Both Lear and Koro were so out touch with the
spirit of their tradition, that they did not have the ability to recognize it even when it was right in
front of their eyes. In the case of Koro, he loved his granddaughter, but not enough to truly see
her. For both of these men, it was their love that opened up new possibilities for them and the
surrounding community. Much like how the men in Love’s Labor’s Lost were too hemmed into
their social imaginary to disembed themselves, Lear was too grandiose, too identified with his
role as king that he hardly knew who he was.

Over the course of the play, Lear experiences moments of anagnorisis when he finally is
able to open his eyes to the truth and see Goneril, Regan, Edgar, and Cordelia for what they truly
are. Gloucester experiences a similar moment of discovery when he recognizes Edgar and
Edmund for what they truly are, despite no longer physically having sight. It was Cordelia who
acted as a dual figure – Lear’s mortal daughter and a figure of Divine Wisdom. Truth and
balance appear as key themes that underlie many of the things we have discussed in lecture and
ultimately this play, going to show Shakespeare’s innate ability to capture the times, whilst
transcending them.

Lecture 17 & 18: Wars of Religion and Early Enlightenment & Enlightenment Reaction

With reform came a shift as the engineer began to replace the gardener. Nature and
society began to be viewed as clay – inert, malleable material that could be molded for human
purposes. Humans must use their will to make their own behavior and society as a whole
conform to the law as revealed in the Bible. To be moral is no longer about becoming what one
was created to be in the mind of God, but rather about following the law.

This leads to people living in their heads, and so whatever they concoct is something that
they can impose through force of will on a malleable world around them – a new power is
unleashed. All they have to do is to come up with some way of justifying it as God’s will (very
similar, in my opinion, to what the Republicans are doing now to justify their controversial
beliefs and actions). Although this new power is obviously susceptible to getting abused, there is
a tremendous sense of freedom that comes with liberation from the forms. Humans are no longer
constrained by some sense of cosmic order to which they must conform themselves. This leads to
a split between the proponents of the new and those of the old. Advocates of the new were
viewed as interesting and exciting while defenders of the old were reactionaries who only wanted
to defend their vested interests. The new represented open-ended possibility for progress and
improving the human material condition (via rationality and science), while the old represented
superstition, corruption, irrationality, and constraint.

The new notion of liberalism assumes that human beings are fundamentally good, and
when allowed to freely operate as rational actors they do what is in their individual best interest,
and in in serving their self-interest, they serve the collective interest or the common good. Quite
an assumption, wouldn’t you say? Wealth, thus, becomes one of the clearest indicators that you
are among the predestined elect. These new, radical ideas were disruptive forces in the cultural
revolution that took place. People and times were changing, and it was imperative that the social
imaginary would follow suit.
Lecture 19: The Big Lebowski Discussion

The Big Lebowski was an interesting movie, in my opinion. Due to my previous distaste
for the Coen Brothers, I could not help but expect the worst with this movie, however, was
pleasantly surprised. Although the plot was all over the place and the film was ridden with
extraneous details, it is important to recognize that the Coen Brothers were careful and
intentional film makers. On one level, the film was merely entertainment with well-written
comedic dialog. On another level, it was a political allegory that was making a statement about
the bull-in-the-China-shop, militarist mentality of the arrogant Neoconservatives (Walter) whom
the anemic, feckless political Left (the Dude) were powerless over. And onn yet another level,
the movie was about the American male in a post-Vietnam world and his not knowing who he is
anymore because the old social imaginary that gave men their identity and instructed them how
to act had collapsed. In particular, the cowboy Stranger was a creature of the old 1950s
masculine imaginary who realized that his time had passed, and for lack of a better model, saw
the Dude as the new exemplar for American masculinity. The Dude’s laziness throughout the
film was a personal failure to aspire to something more, to realize the full measure of his
character, but there are hopes that as the social imaginary shifts and a new balance is found, that
he will adopt that role.

The film offered a critique of the world we live in as the Coen Brothers artfully set up a
mirror facing towards society that allowed us to see just how absurd everything is. I am curious
to watch more films of theirs and to begin drawing connections with what is going on. And who
knows? Perhaps my initial distaste for them was because my subconscious is disgusted with the
world we live in now and am in denial. I guess we shall see…