Fantasy as Antifantasy: 6 Pan-religion and Peter -- concluded

In fact, this idea itself is not so new. Rather, in the ancient world, before the domination of Christianity by the Church, it was even a typical example of a mystical thought that was universally accepted across times and regions. It is a remarkable fact that it has been revived in the Age of Reason, which has made it possible for Swedenborg to criticize such formalized doctrines as the Trinity from a rational point of view. We must attempt a paradigm shift here. The paradigm that the rational and analytical thinking required by the age of reason has undergone a paradigm transformation and temporarily yielded its place to the super-logical and intuitive form of thinking must be modified. As a natural consequence of the other end of rational and analytical thinking, the paradigm of hyper-logic thinking that transcends the constraints of binary choices based on a holistic view of the universe must be re-established. (note)

note:
Godel's theorem, which is said to have proved that reason can recognize the limits of reason, is of course the flip side of the declaration of defeat, that there is no choice but to admit the limits of reason, but it goes without saying that this awareness of the Ouroboros duality was one of the ideological characteristics that strongly reflected the fantasy literature of the late 20th century, that Attebery was concerned with.

It was German Romanticism that seemed to be located exactly on the line connecting Swedenborg and Jung. The true nature of Romanticism cannot be understood in the simplistic scheme of emotional rebellion against the age of reason, as is commonly said. They were first scientific before they were involved in literary activities. Scientific interest acted on philosophy, and its practice bore fruit in the work of literature. The model of cosmology in German Romanticism was established on the basis of mineralogy. Through geological discussions such as the theory of Neptunism and Plutonism, they absorbed the most advanced scientific knowledge of the time and were forming a philosophical foundation that led to the new establishment of ontology. As with Novalis, mineralogy provided important guidance in the process of re-examining the basic understanding of Christian cosmology. (note)

note:
Ref. Fumiko Imaizumi, Romanticism in the Mirror (Keiso-Shobo, 1989).


Although Germany was dominated by Protestantism, the scientific intellectuals of the 18th and 19th centuries had gone beyond the conflict between the New Church and the Old Church and had actually taken steps to envision the completion of a comprehensive religion.


It can be said that they took an anti-religious stance by rejecting conventional Christianity, or they were ultimately religious in the sense that they overcame the conventional Christian doctrines institutionalized by the church and revived a more universal view of the universe. The fact that many of the German Romantics later converted to Catholicism can be seen as a setback brought about by the contradiction of the fundamental ideas of their thought, or in a sense it can be understood as a natural consequence of the demand for the unity of being and action required by the fundamental claim of their ideas. It was Edgar Allan Poe, author of Eureka (1848), a philosophical poem strongly influenced by German Romanticism, who defended this idea of a dimension that actively sought to develop a transcendental mode of existence in the speculative logic space by calling it “metaphysics” without adhering to empirical arguments. This kind of metaphysics developed at an accelerated pace with the progress of modern science, and it was by no means a delusion created by a mere desire to return to the ancient world, which was contrary to the spirit of science. In other words, metaphysics in this sense is the product of an ideational phase transition that has arisen as a result of the rational scientific exploration, and should not necessarily be regarded as a countergrade to the movement of modernism. (note)

note:
It is no coincidence that Charles Kingsley, author of Water Babies (1863), who, together with McDonald, played a part in the rise of 19th-century British fantasy literature, wrote Glaucus or The Wonders of the Shore (1855), which has a strong element of natural scientific aquatic zoology. The discussion of pterosaur fossils in The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, and the strong manifestation of a Natural Geology interest, indicate the philosophical and religious concern peculiar to fantasy literature.


The quantum physics model flourished on the direct extension of Newtonian classical physics, and at the height of the Descartes-Bacon method of separating and analyzing events individually, a new holistic view was eventually obtained by introducing the concept of interaction. We should refrain from applying models of opposing mechanisms to these preconceived notions. Nothing is more cheap a judgement than the contrast between modernism and postmodernism. Rather, one must carefully read the principle of “coincidentia oppositorum” in them. Modern rationalism in the Western world has certainly produced the evil of industrial capitalism, but it is the spirit of moral corruption that has taken advantage of it to resort to vile utilitarian means, which should have been rightly equivalent to the moral corruption manifested in populist communism. Just as we should avoid foolishness that places the blame on rationalism itself, we should also refrain from blindly accepting rigid criticisms of modernism.
The German Romantics, who sought to innovate the world formula, chose to seek the path of Eastern contemplation, so to speak, as indicated by their slogan, “The West is clever; the East is wise.” It was the discovery of the gap between Western logic and transcendental absolute truth. They come to understand the appreciation of works of art as a means of spiritual practice in order to arrive at a kind of introspection. The fairy tales they left behind, Marchen, were rightly created for such a purpose. In order to free the mind from the formalized Christian dogma and describe a more rational and free view of nature, they chose spirits, which were supposed to be the embodiment of the four elements of earth, water, fire, and wind, that are the constituent elements of the world, and the literary form of them was the fairies. McDonald’s scientific interest was focused on mineralogy, and the presence of fairies in many of his fantasy works, who preached mystical ideas that deviated from traditional Christian teachings, reflect this trend. McDonald was the philosophical and literary successor to the orthodoxy of German Romanticism. Since the German Romantics, the existence of “fairies” in literary works has continued to function as a factor that shakes the Western worldview to its foundations. (note)

note:
Strongly reflecting this mineral fantasy, it was Kenji Miyazawa who explored the possibility of transcendental religion and became the successor of these artists in Japan in the form of the creation of fantasy literature as a means of spiritual salvation for modern people. The geology that Kenji studied had a strong effect on his thought as a philosophical compass before it was applied to the applied technical agricultural science. He was already ahead of his time in focusing on the possibility of a new world-solving equation implied by quantum mechanics. It is a fact that is easy to understand that the religion that Kenji chose was not based on a narrow doctrine that constituted a division of secularized Buddhism, but that he had a perspective that encompassed Christianity and other religions in general, including Nichiren sect of Buddhism.

However, neither McDonald nor his predecessors, the German Romantics, believed in the existence of the spirits as literary iconography of the embodiment of the four major components of Nature. The Nature they rediscovered was not an image of the universe as an external world that surrounded them, but rather as something that lurked in the depths of their own psyche. The awareness of the need for a return to the unconscious and a priori wisdom gave rise to the dramatic prop of "fairies" as a process of searching for a means of literary representation. Considering the advanced nature of their awareness of the problem, they must have been strongly conscious of the fact that they did not believe in the existence of fairies in the literal sense of folk beliefs. The fairy was a metaphor for describing the constituent principles of the external world as a substance, and at the same time it was unmistakably a psychological symbol for describing the inner world as a psyche. This ambiguity of belief and disbelief, embodied by the fairies in Romanticism, would be applied in Barrie in a more radicalized way. If we cannot correctly read the disbelief behind faith and the projection of faith behind disbelief, we cannot correctly evaluate the strategy of fantasy.
For example, in McDonald’s first novel, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858), fairies and the fairy world were seen as contrasting concepts that existed as shadows of human beings and the objective real world, respectively. It was the design of this work, which seems to most clearly express the philosophical qualities of fantasy literature, to describe the secret of human spirituality and the mystery of the world-building principle in a composition in which dreams and reality alternate as day and night do, and the human world and the fairy world complement each other to form a solid close and intimate region. Compared in the light of the seemingly inexplicable duality and strange continuity between the dream world and real world depicted in the typical German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffman’s “Prinzessin Brambilla” (1821), it is easy to understand McDonald’s creative strategy in his novel. According to it, the axis of the world is composed of symmetry similar to the principle of yin and yang, and fairies and humans function as shadow entities of each other under the relationship of subtle complementarity. For a substantial human being, the unknown realm that lurks within oneself is the shadow, and furthermore, all the realms of the world outside oneself can also be the shadow. In other words, all parts are indispensable elements to complement the whole, and there is one whole as a complement to each part that exists innumerably. A unifying and persuasive supremacy that should guarantee the existential principle of the modern Western self, which is collapsing at the end of its ceaseless fragmentation, was thus desperately sought as a re-evaluation of the shadow principle that underpins invaluable wholeness. The inexplicable shadow, which is a part of oneself but as soon as it is separated from the main body, knows all the secrets of the world, including the human society and the natural world, and exhibits a magical ability to manipulate all things as if they were its own, is not limited to the shadow depicted in Andersen’s short story “Shadow” or Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale “The Fisherman and his Soul”. They shared a theme of the same quality as the stories about alter egos written in various countries in the 19th century, and at the same time it closely overlapped with the principal mechanism of world formula implied by the concept of magic as a system of sapience. There was the fairy as a shadow of man, the figurative being that represented the universal principle that should encompass the irreplaceable universe that exists as a meaningful entity, and the individual self that is supposed to be entrusted with a solid defensive area in it. (note)

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In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Imp of the Perverse,” the impulse exerted by the underlying consciousness that actually controls the actions of the conscious subject is clearly manifested in the form of a “shadow” as a complementary element that forms the very existence of the subject, while being seen as a kind of “evil spirit.” (We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us, -- of the definite with the indefinite -- of the substance with the shadow.) To use an analogy, it can be said that there is an idea postulated here that captures the core of human existence and the mechanism of the whole universe in a completely different scheme from the idea of understanding the gods of Greek mythology as abstract concepts and “personifications” of human emotions. On the premise that an element of the inner psyche is directly reflected in the external structure of reality, these gods and spirits could be called synonymous with the abstract concepts and words that express the emotions that are generated in the mind. The phenomenon of “the manifestation of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, in the cosmos space” could actually be one of the phenomena of “a change in a certain peculiar emotion in the consciousness of an individual”, in the result of modal transcription. These were each of the elements that were implied in the representation of the Ouroboros, in which the maximum and the minimum were connected to form a chain, functioning as a co-coherent latent force in the universe. Furthermore, the idea that corresponds to the principle of the integrated universe is suggested here, which would also allow us to comprehensively understand the “alter ego” that appeared as the daimonion, the inner voice heard by Socrates, and the eccentricity (clinamen), which is the “universal law” that acts on the principle of motion of the world advocated by Epikouros, as opposite aspects of the same thing. If we recall that the impulse of the Imp of the Perverse was a “demonic thing” belonging to the side of justice that exposes the evil deeds committed by the protagonist, together with the alter ego that appeared in “William Wilson” was the embodiment of conscience that denounced the evil deeds committed by the protagonist, it can be seen that the shadow was by no means recognized as a common negative entity in the conventional good-evil dualism. The fact that the procedure of refraining from reassuring the existence of the “imp of the perverse” as belonging to ethical evil, and reassessing the significance of the existence of shadows on the basis of a pluralistic criterion of values, is actively working here, it can be said that the so-called diversification of modern standards of value and the substance of the ancient idea of total oneness, which is said to have been lost in modern times, are in fact close to each other.
Robert Burton, who called himself Democritus Jr. after Democritus, the founder of atomism, described not only various diseases and disorders but also supernatural and paranormal phenomena, social problems, and natural disasters as the result of the mental illness of melancholia, in his global argument Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). If we understand that the basis for arguing that these are pathological phenomena caused by mental illness should have been based on the premise that both historical and natural history phenomena and internal psychological phenomena of individuals are extended in a continuum that can be superimposed, it will be enough to show that there is room for reconsideration of the chronological definition of the concept of “modernity.”