The Two Faces of Janus

To continue for a little longer on the subject of morality, it strikes me that ethics may be pictured as the Roman god called Janus, a figure with two faces looking in two directions. Janus was the god of gates, of entries (alas, perhaps of border regions too) looking back and ahead. We get our January from this figure because Janus was also the god of endings and beginnings. But my purpose in using the symbol here is to emphasize that the ethical impulse we carry within us is at every step opposed by contrary impulses. Nothing is better known. That is why ethics gets the emphasis it does. No one preaches that we should eat or breathe. That, sire, (as Samuel Johnson might say), you can be sure shall be accomplished.

I concluded the last posting by pointing out that the moral impulse in us indicates a vector, a direction, some place we wish to reach: one face of ethics. Its other face is the resistance to this impulse everywhere manifest and at so deep a level that in the Christian tradition we call it original sin. Janus is a very good symbol for summing up the confusions and contradictions of “being of two minds”; no sooner decided on a path than the other mind has a better idea—and the struggle, therefore, is endemic. As Goethe aptly said:

Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
One wills to part itself from the other,
One holds fast with savage love-lust
To the world with hard organic force,
The other lifts itself by power from the dust
To the domains of higher ancestors.
[Faust, Act I.]

In the cosmic models I’ve discussed in other posts, the notion of one order entering and becoming entangled in another serves as an explanation of why life as we know it, a purposive striving, exists in a universe where nothing analogous is visible to us. The ethical impulse is thus that which “lifts from the dust” and the “savage love-lust” is the other face of our experience which clings desperately to the world. We may very well have this two-faced duality because we only see the one clearly, the world; and the other one, the domain of our origins, we see very dimly by intuition only. We cling to the familiar; we do so in ordinary life as well; we do so even when it is suboptimal; the new seems dangerous. So we cling. But something in us, a secret knowledge we can’t quite grasp firmly enough, tells to go on. Hence the struggle. The curious aspects of this suspension between two realities, only one of which we clearly see, is that the explanation of our entanglement in matter will probably become known to us only after we’ve managed to escape it.

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Image courtesy of this site concerned with Freemasonry.