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On Whatness
Address by Lars-Erik Wiberg
for Sunday, July 10, 2005
There's an old folk-saying telling us: "The cat may have had kittens
in the oven, but that didn't make them cupcakes." This old
observation is strangely powerful. We learn from it that no matter
where the cat had her litter it would be of the same ilk as she. In
other words there was nothing that cat could do along the lines of
procreation that would produce anything other than other cats. It's
like this with life in general which, of course, includes us. It's
the way the world works. You and I could have been born anywhere on
earth, and we would still be You and I. We can call this our
"Whatness" in other words what we are, what we're made of.
Our "Whatness" is easily distinguishable from our "Whoness" which we
will not be exploring this morning except to say that it is who we
eventually become by using as a basis the building blocks provided
by our Whatness. You will discern, of course, the similarity between
Whatness and Psyche, and Whoness and Soul, but without the
historical baggage attached to those more comprehensive and
illustrious terms. You can think of Whatness as an unfurnished house
before any attempt is made to fill it with the amenities that make it
into a liveable home. It's something like that with the proviso that
you can't move to another house. We take what we can not possibly
alter at all, and furnish it with the choices, learnings,
perceptions, and personality, all of which unfold over the interval
from birth onward. All the while our Whatness remains constant to be
inherited by our progeny, essentially unchanged.
To give you an idea of the persistence of Whatness, its historicity
if you will, these words from Carl Jung in his book, The Practice of
Psychotherapy ¶ 61 are apt. He writes: "Inasmuch as the newborn
child is presented with a ready-made, highly developed brain which
owes its differentiation to the accretions of untold centuries of
ancestral life, the unconcsious psyche must consist of inherited
instincts, functions, and forms that are peculiar to the ancestral
psyche. This implies the probability that a man will behave much as
his ancestors behaved right back to Methuselah. Thus the unconscious
is seen as the collective predisposition to extreme conservatism, a
guarantee, almost, that nothing new will ever happen." So we can
safely agree that this psyche-based Whatness of ours is a force to be
respected, situated and secure as it is in the self of our infancy,
never to be lost.
How is your Whatness different from mine? Well to start with we have
different parents. But how were their Whatnesses different? For one
thing, they probably came from different places on the globe. My
parents, and thus my self, were the progeny of persons living in or
within about 50 miles of Kristianstad, Sweden for as far back as we
have any record (except for a great grandfather who was from
Copenhagen). This condition makes me considerably different from one
whose forebears had their roots in Mexico or Tasmania or, for that
matter, in an oven. There are intrinsic racial and cultural
components, including customs and languages and religious
preferences, that are peculiar to the complex Whatnesses of various
individuals.
Further there are environmental components to Whatness whose effects
accumulate over untold centuries in a combination of extrinsic
factors including geography, climate, natural food supply,
educational practices, and available building materials. The
long-term effects of the blending of these components gradually
condition our Whatness and do so distinctively. In their unique
combinations, they gradually take effect in all of us, in every
person who is under their thrall, and establish, as Jung has stated,
an influence of considerable conservatism and duration.
At one time it was thought that, except for certain inherited
characteristics which were mostly observable, a newborn was
essentially a blank slate primed and ready for the environment to
step in and wield its transformative influences. No longer. It is
now well-recognized that the infant greets the natural world
well-equipped with all sorts of genetic and psychological
paraphernalia. Thus, as I am sure you have already realized,
Whatness embraces an abundance of contents. We can't do justice to
many of them in the short time available, so I am going to focus on
two especially important character- istics that the infant has from
day one. Both are implied in the previous quote from Jung, so you
will recognize them.
The first is a psychic inertia such that changes in Whatness from one
generation to the next are minuscule. We see this expressed down
through the generations in families which often pride themselves in
the observation of family traditions, in the repetition of names and
the unscrambling of genealogies. We see a short-term variation of it
in organizations in the form of practices and procedures which have
changed in their fundamentals but slightly over many years and have
actually developed a discernable corporate culture. We see it in basic cultural expressions such as
national constitutions, political parties, and holidays. And we see
it in the loyalties to these expressions that actively resist changes
in them. We see it in near-universal love of nature.
We see it in the horror with which we view the behavior of the young,
acting out what seems to be a perpetual collective hubris, who seem
obsessed with discarding their Whatness and adopting bizarre patterns
of behavior. Then we remember that we were young once too and did
the same sorts of things, and now here we are a generation or so
removed from our youth, our Whatness having reasserted itself to the
extent that we now take issue with latter-day variants on our own
past antics.
The exciting and flashy and experimental doings of this or that
society may make a big splash, gain notoriety, and be featured on the
Net and TV and in the papers, but there is something about the tried
and true that appeals to our Whatness, and it has a quiet way of
prevailing in the long run. It is probably accurate to think of
society's collective Whatness as being both reserved and cumbersome.
Undemonstrative enough that it is usually unobtrusive and large
enough that, over time, society's peccadillos cannot penetrate it.
This is not to say that Whatness is anti-progress. Progress, itself
an invention, has become subsumed into Whatness over time, but only
such progress as has managed to stand the test of time, and as you
have heard from Jung, it takes a long long time to pass that test.
Here in the natural world we live in a domain that is characterized
largely by time, and we disregard its tempering influence at out
peril. At the end of this address, I have a rather astonishing
notion to suggest in this connection.
Since we are religious people in this sanctuary, we can easily see
how this next quote, also from Jung, in his book, Psychological Types
¶ 313 is most relevant to the foregoing: "We think we have only to
declare an accepted article of faith incorrect and invalid, and we
shall be psychologically rid of all the traditional effects of
Christianity or Judaism. We believe in enlightenment, as if an
intellectual change of front somehow had a more profound influence on
the emotional processes or even on the unconscious. We entirely
forget that the religion of the last two thousand years is a
psychological attitude, a definite form and manner of adaptation to
the world without and within that lays down a definite cultural
pattern and creates an atmosphere which remains wholly uninfluenced
by any intellectual denials."
After inertia, we have also been introduced to the essential
conservatism of Whatness.
Another way of putting it is that we enjoy the chance to be among the
familiar. This isn't to say that we don't enjoy new and invigorating
experiences, our fair share of excitement and expanded horizons. But
it isn't among these that we feel our greatest comfort. This level
of comfort is what we see clearly presented by the inclination of
immigrants to congregate in enclaves. What could be more natural
than to want to be with one's own in a strange land? Later on is
soon enough to move into the more
diverse mainstreams that society provides. But even "later on" one
can still find ethnic pockets that accommodate many generations. It
is mighty easy to see that Whatness and its uneasiness with basic
differences do not go hand in hand with adroit adaptation.
Yet here are we being asked, taught, even enjoined as Swedenborgians
to love the neighbor or, more accurately, to love the good in the
neighbor. And if we have any doubts about precisely who this
neighbor is, we are instructed without ambiguity as our Affirmation
of Faith, as well as today's readings from The Writings, so amply
demonstrate. Our Whatness and its inertia may hold us back
instinctively. It may thwart any impulses to resist our innate
conservatism and reach out to others. But then nobody ever said that
the exercise of Christian charity was going to be a cakewalk.
Let Jung weigh in again with an extraordinary statement that any
Swedenborgian can readily accept and that actually amplifies the
Swedenborgian perspective. He writes in Civilization in Transition
¶779 "Our world has shrunk, and it is dawning on us that humanity is
one, with one psyche. Humility is a not inconsiderable virtue which
should prompt Christians everywhere, for the sake of charity - - the
greatest of all virtues - - to set a good example and acknowledge
that, though there is only one Truth - - it speaks in many tongues,
and that if we cannot see this, it is simply due to lack of
understanding."
Our Whatness aside, our innate inertia and preference for the
familiar accounted for, we must actively develop our understanding.
This is the key requirement in our mandate to love the good in the
neighbor. For this need Swedenborg's remarks from ¶ 243 of
Apocalypse Explained give us the following assurance. "For the human
understanding has been formed to receive truths, and thus it becomes
such as are the truths from which it is formed. It is believed that
the understanding is also the ability to reason from thought and to
speak from falsities, and to confirm these by many things; but this
is not the understanding; it is only a faculty given to one together
with the memory to which it is adjoined and of which it is an
activity. Still, the understanding is born and formed through it in
proportion as one receives truths from affection. But to receive
genuine truths from affection is not given to anyone except by the
Lord, because they are from him; and therefore to receive
understanding, or to become intelligent, is not given to anyone
except by the Lord alone, but it is given to all who apply
themselves to receive them."
It is no surprise that the Lord is the answer, the relief from an
unwieldy Whatness when we most need it. He never asks or expects us
to do anything beyond our capacities, so we would have every reason
to believe that, if he were to ask us to transcend our Whatness, he
would show us how to do it. We know from The Writings that he will,
indeed, "give to all who apply themselves." We read in scripture how
the Lord himself recognized the good in the good Samaritan and
offerred this parable to us as a lasting example when he told the
questioning lawyer to "Go and do likewise." We see how the Lord
instructed Moses early on "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"
known by all Swedenborgians as the second of the two great
Commandments, the first being, as we all know: "Hear, O Israel; the
Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with
all thy strength." No commandments are greater than these.
Notwithstanding, we shouldn't dismiss our Whatness. It does provide
stability and it helps us from going off half cocked with silly
notions or being gulled when subjected to the untried new however
artfully presented. At times our Whatness is a rudder to help us
steer. At times it is an anchor to keep us from drifting. But at
all times it is the Lord, and the Lord, alone who gives us true
destinations and the impetus to reach them.
But what of that astonishing notion I promised? It just sort of
popped up as this was being written. You will recall that our
Whatness is most comfortable with that which has withstood the test
of time. Jung stated that Christianity and Judaism have done that,
and also, by inference, other divinely inspired religions. Generally
speaking, religion is no johnny-come-lately. Our Whatness is
comfortable with the religion of our forebears; it is no stranger.
But what about science? I'm not referring to mathematics or to
engineering which have lengthy histories in their present
incarnations and with which our Whatness has had ample opportunity over the centuries to
become quite comfortable. On the other hand, we have the examples of
astronomy which developed out of astrology, and chemistry and
psychology which had their origins in alchemy. Although their
histories are now well established, they are comparatively recent in
Whatness terms. Even more so are the younger sciences and especially
those commonly referred to as the "soft sciences"? They are truly
new kids on the cultural block, and have not yet had an opportunity
to penetrate our Whatness in any meaningful way.
Maybe that's one reason why a veneer of science, applied willy-nilly
to all sorts of notions, makes the resulting junk science seem to so
many of us as if it were valid. Generally speaking not many of us
are able to understand science very well. Few people possess, in
sufficient degree, the natural combination of intuitive and
intellectual strengths needed to do good science. Then too science
is unpredictable. Its very nature makes it subject to drastic and
sudden changes in hypotheses, and even in established theories,
through application of its own rigorous and impersonal methodology.
As a result, persons having a secular orientation, who are cleaving
to the sciences for temporal support, should take heed that the horse
they are betting on now may emerge as a far different animal down
through the centuries to come. Pursuasive evidence today suggests
that, in the long run, science could very well turn out to be not at
all secular. What joy to contemplate the marriage of religion and
science!
Amen
Copyright 2005 by Lars-Erik Wiberg
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