‘The colorless metaphysic of the bourgeoisie’ – Berdyaev

‘. . . progress in one’s own profession is sufficient compensation for the incomprehensionof imbeciles.’ – Cézanne  

            Cézanne was wrong. It’s not a question of compensation. It’s a question ofsurvival. If, in fact, we lacked the vocational force inherent in the powers of creativity, no one would venture on the true ‘professions’ – a redundancy, perhaps, since a true profession cannot be other than a vocation. But where are the ‘professors’ who can acknowledge that they don’t know everything in their field? I can remember a day when professors might respond to a question by saying, ‘An interesting point, something worth looking up.’ But today, it’s not about ‘profession’, the Emersonian idea that a legitimate vocational study is not necessarily the knowing of every fact, but rather of making one’s life synonymous with the field. The Emersonian is about ‘vocation’, about the ‘calling’, which means that when one comes to the center, when one finds the source of the voice that calls one on toward some unforeseeable and unexpected goal, one automatically has something new and comprehensive to say, some revolutionary statement in terms of the field itself. But now all intellectual change is radically incremental, radically miniscule, a termite change that may or may not bring the house down, but generally calls for the exterminator, the flavorless, odorless poison of the ‘colorless metaphysic of the bourgeoisie.’
            And the paradox is that both process and poison are the colorless metaphysic of the bourgeoisie.

             What is unique today is not at all a new manifestation. The present usage of the world ‘Philistine’ has been around for quite a while. What is new is its pervasiveness. If this philistinism is substantively new, the newness dates from the beginnings of industrialism and the gradually widening ratio of bourgeois culture. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not asocialist. Just the reverse, I’m the worst kind of elitist. Like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson I believe in a ‘natural aristocracy’. But, unlike them, I do not tend to associate it with the earned acquisition of political power. One was a lawyer by education who raised himself into power and position by the practice of law and politics. The other was a patrician, slaveholding plantation owner, who was both de facto and de jure a magistrate within his holdings, and who also rose through political action and position as a legislator. Politics and the lawcolored their understanding. Perhaps this is why, today, we need the ‘new’ models for vocation provided by the east, not just the vocational models for the intellectual and artist, if we hark back to the Emersonian, but models for cultural transformation, such as Confucius, or independent religious revolutionaries, such as Gautama. While the European Renaissance turned to Rome and Greece, opening a new horde of motif for the intellectual and the artist, and, to some extent, the philosopher, the chief models and programs were essentially political.Caesar and Cicero spoke directly to the handling of political power.

             Now what is needed is a creativity of legitimate cultural transformation.What I have discovered – and already presented – is the source or basis of the modern in the now lost history of western philosophy – a history only two centuries old, but lost because we would rather bathe in the colorless metaphysic that now engulfs us.
            We are engaged in a similar burial of an era far closer to us. Even old hippies are trying to pretend that the 60’s did not exist, because they have bought into the dissociative ‘intellection’ necessary to justify this colorless, viscous intellectual swamp in which we are now drowning. In the 60’s, we recognized that something was wrong – not only that something was amiss, but that something crucial and imperative was missing. But no one could give us the key, or even the ghost of a key. These same ‘intellectuals’ have now turned around, some deploring the loss without being willing to look for the source, and others insisting that there is neither loss nor hidden source, presumably because they have found their comfortable and secure seat somewhere in the midst of the morass.
            The problem, of course, is that the ‘colorless’ metaphysic is not ‘colorless’ at all. ‘Colorless’ implies transparent. But this is illusory. The ‘colorless metaphysic of the bourgeoisie’ may be colorless, but it is also opaque. In fact, it is background color. It is precisely the color of comfort and security, which is a no color that hides all true color. As Thoreau (I believe) first said: it is the color of zinc. And Lowell repeats it : What is destroying us is something insignificant, like a mouse or the color of zinc.
            But the real problem is the addictive nature of bourgeois comfort and security. When an artist arrives, when a creative intellectual arrives, with the true colors of creativity, the full palette and the naturalspontaneity of the motif, the essence of vocation, it’s not simply a discomfort for the bourgeois, it’s an outright threat. And the response is mediated through the inherent savagery – but self-justifying ‘pacifism’ and ‘equanimity’ – of the addict : a sideways viciousness that can resort to almost any violence while presenting itself as the paragon of judiciousness and the ultimate peacemaker.