The Philosophy of the Beats

Anarchism and the Beats

227 anarChIsm and the Beats Ed D’Angelo Thefirstproblemthatweseemtobeconfrontedwithwhenwetrytocompare the philosophy of the beats to the philosophy of anarchists is that the beats were poets, not philosophers, and do not seem to have had a “philosophy.” But things are not as they seem. Following Oswald Spengler’s idea of a second religiosity that arises out of the primitive elements (the “fellaheen”) of a declining civilization, the beats understood themselves to be religious prophets of a new form of liberated consciousness. Poetry was both a means to achieve this new form of consciousness and a means to express that consciousness once it was achieved by other means including travel, drugs, sex, or meditation. The transformation of consciousness sought by the beats was therefore primarily religious in nature, not political or ideological. Kerouac was especially careful to distance himself from an aesthetics that might subordinate art to political ideology. But that does not mean that the beats believed that the transformation of consciousness they sought had no political or social implications. It merely means that, for them, political ideology follows consciousness , not the reverse. In an author’s note he wrote shortly before his death in 1997 to a 1961 essay titled “When the Mode of the Music Changes, the Walls of the City Shake,” Ginsberg wrote: “It seemed to me the breakthroughs of new poetry were social breakthroughs, that is, political in the long run. I thought and still think that the bulwark of libertarian-anarchist-sexualized individual poems and prose created from that era to this day—under so much middleclass critical attack—were the mental bombs that would still explode in new kid generations even if censorship and authoritarian (moral majority) fundamentalist militarily-hierarchical ‘New Order’ neoconservative fascistoid creep Reaganomics-type philistinism took over the nation. Which it nearly 228 Ed D’Angelo has. Thus the title—Poetics and Politics, out of Plato out of Pythagoras— continuationofGnostic—secretpoliticallysuppressed—libertyofconsciousness and art—old bohemian—tradition.”1 Ginsberg here locates the beats within the Platonic philosophical tradition, but he identifies with Plato the mystic, not Plato the rationalist. The irony of the fact that Plato banished the poets from his ideal city is that Plato was himself a great poet. The Republic is a work of fiction written with poetic skill and replete with rhetorical devices including metaphor and allegory. The rationalist Plato’s argument against the poets is that they are two steps removed from the absolute truth of the ideal forms. Perceptual objects are already mere shadows of the forms, but the images concocted by poets are mere shadows of perceptual objects meant to stir up the basest part of the soul, the appetites. Philosophers, Plato believes, should rely only on reason to apprehend the truth. But yet, Plato recognizes that not everyone in his ideal city will be a philosopher. For those who are not capable of reason, it will be necessary to guide and persuade them with poetry and fiction—hence Plato’s notion of the “noble lie.” However, poetry is dangerous. Because it has the power to alter people’s beliefs, perceptions, and emotions, it has the potential to disrupt the state and make the “walls of the city shake.” Therefore, according to Plato, poetry must be controlled by the philosophers, who will craft fictions that maintain justice and harmony. Imagination serves a purpose, but it serves a just purpose only when controlled by reason. The beats invert the rationalist Plato’s hierarchy of imagination and reason by grounding reason in imagination and in the body’s rhythms and emotions. Like the romantic anarchist poet William Blake, who warned of an excessive capacity to reason in the “dark satanic mills” of England’s industrial revolution, Ginsberg warned of an excessive capacity to reason relative to imagination and emotion in the nuclear age. Ginsberg warned that reason had become a “horrific tyrant” in Western civilization and “created the nuclear bomb which can destroy body, feeling, and imagination.”2 The transformation of consciousness sought by the beats was not a mere change in the ideas or ideology contained within consciousness, but a transformation of consciousness itself entailing the psychological death and rebirth of the ego.3 The radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing and the Jungian analyst John Weir Perry understood madness and mysticism in the same way, as a journey to the underworld where the ego—burdened by the outmoded norms of its society—was torn asunder and reassembled, as in the ancient Egyptian shamanic myth of Osiris...