This morning I found the fundamental idea of my current favorite diagram in Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. I’ve also found it in Voegelin and Frank.
All posts by anomalogue
Seed
By way of a seed the Earth and Sun organize themselves into a tree.
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Allah said “I was a hidden treasure. I wanted to be known and so created the creation.”
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(According to the Gnostics) Jesus said “If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels. Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.”
They are dreadful people
“Allow me to tell you one little anecdote, gentlemen,” Miusov said impressively, with a peculiarly majestic air. “Some years ago, soon after the coup d’etat of December, I happened to be calling in Paris on an extremely influential personage in the Government, and I met a very interesting man in his house. This individual was not precisely a detective but was a sort of superintendent of a whole regiment of political detectives – a rather powerful position in its own way. I was prompted by curiosity to seize the opportunity of conversation with him. And as he had not come as a visitor but as a subordinate official bringing a special report, and as he saw the reception given me by his chief, he deigned to speak with some openness, to a certain extent only, of course. He was rather courteous than open, as Frenchmen know how to be courteous, especially to a foreigner. But I thoroughly understood him. The subject was the socialist revolutionaries who were at that time persecuted. I will quote only one most curious remark dropped by this person. ‘We are not particularly afraid,’ said he, ‘of all these socialists, anarchists, infidels, and revolutionists; we keep watch on them and know all their goings on. But there are a few peculiar men among them who believe in God and are Christians, but at the same time are socialists. These are the people we are most afraid of. They are dreadful people. The socialist who is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist.’ The words struck me at the time, and now they have suddenly come back to me here, gentlemen.”
— Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The shame of the inexplicable
If Judas had not accepted his thirty silver-pieces, he would have been forced to admit that he could not explain his need to betray Jesus. It was precisely this inexplicability that Judas needed to eliminate through the elimination of Jesus, who is the embodiment of what matters and cannot be explained nor explained away.
But Judas looked too long. He saw and was unable to deny that his motives were only reflected on the face of the thirty silver coins, that month of little moons. He could not account for himself.
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We are ashamed of our unaccountable evil, but we are also ashamed of our unaccountable good. We are ashamed of the heart.
The first musician
I keep posting a story then pulling it down again. It is an ugly story, but it is not merely ugly. Things are beautiful from where I stand, but if you don’t stick with me long enough to see as I see, my outlook appears horrifying. Really, my perspective is necessarily horrifying. The entire point of my outlook is to include precisely what is universally excluded in the name of goodness, beauty, taste, optimism, etc.
After years of my kind of experimental seeing-and-digesting, it has gotten to the point that “sticking with me” is far too much to ask of anyone, even of a friend. Nevertheless, I ask anyway. It is painful to have to ask for such a thing, much less to be told “no” and to be reminded of the legal limits of “friendship”, or to be told “yes” and to be indulged or tolerated.
I’ve developed all sorts of sneaky ways of communicating with the unwilling. (I have to do my job.) It’s like feeding a baby.
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If you cherish independence and individuality, at least follow me this far:
1) Do not fully exercise your independence and individuality or you will lose them. Genuine, radical, faithful, active individuality self-destructs. Instead be moderate and stop a little short. Think your thoughts against “the herd” to your heart’s content – but think them in the accepted manner of the herd. Especially protect yourself from the influence of any other individual. Remain comfortably “unique”. Once you cross over into genuine individuality you might find yourself unable to cross back over into the world of individualism. Even if you do get back, you’ll starve for authentic company. People will be around you, but they will not be with you.
2) If you know how to read, be careful who you read.
3) People do not love what they would love to believe they love. Some people are much easier to love as memories. A memory does not resist fictionalization.
A kind of heartbreak
I’d love to meet someone who knows my kind of heartbreak:
A reality is shared between you and an Other; but then the other changes and the reality is no longer shared.
The Other comes to you with a radically different reality and retroactively disinterprets the reality you once shared in a new, alien and alienating light. Faith is entirely a matter of practicing truth; what is practiced now is apartness, estrangement. What was shared cannot even be recalled. The relationship is annulled – annihilated not only in the present and future but also in the past.
In my experience, this estrangement is felt generally before it can even be traced back to the particular Other who has effected the estrangement. The entire world darkens, the nerves lose their protecting skin. Something is wrong. (I believe this sense of general wrongness was how Jesus knew he had been betrayed by one of his disciples.)
Innately good
I was raised with the idea that people are “innately good”. Good? Meaning that we are innately incapable of cruelty? That we are innately not in need of development of goodness? Or that we are born good but learn evil from “society”? Those were the various meanings I heard in the claim of innate goodness, and they all struck me as self-evidently false, even dishonest.
However when I see good as the ability to acknowledge, to be invested in, to identify oneself as belonging to super-egoic existences – relationships with other individuals and formal and informal cultural institutions that surround us and are the substance of self – I do see people as innately good. We have the innate desire to belong to and to participate in and to love all of what is beyond self, but supports and surrounds self.
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“The chastest expression I have ever heard: ‘Dans le veritable amour c’est l’ame, qui enveloppe le corps.’ (‘In true love it is the soul that envelops the body’)” — Nietzsche
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From puritanism to radical capitalism: Humans are innately sinful –> Humans are innately self-interested –> Humans are exclusively self-interested –> Humans should be expected to behave exclusively out of self-interest –> In “the world” I should be expected to behave exclusively out of self-interest. The radical capitalism of the United States is the combination of modalism of moralities (contextual moral relativism) and puritanical moral pessimism. In the world of business a puritan permits his “innately sinful” nature to run amok and wholeheartedly “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”.
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Genuine transcendent relationship depends on honesty. This includes the sub-self beings of which compose us. They have to be taught to speak truthfully to one another, and to be patient in speaking and listening. This practice is philosophy.
Originality
A search for novelty that terminates in an already well-established truth is the best outcome. Genuine, radical novelty isolates; it makes one alien and insulting; it is unbearably lonely. An original new way to see or say something familiar invests the familiar with new energy and depth, and is welcome in the world. Not that we should abandon the search for the new – but we ought to accept the gift of reinvention when it comes to us.
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Longing is the core of mystery
Longing itself brings the cure
The only rule is suffer the pain.
Your desire must be disciplined,
And what you want to happen
In time, sacrificed.
– Rumi
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“The advantage of a bad memory is that, one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.” – Nietzsche
Holism and systems theory
As far as I can tell, the only way to bridge my own intuitive holistic sensibilities and the infinitely-fragmented-and-quantified reductionist world of business is systems theory. Learning a new language is always tedious – and frankly I’m a little annoyed to be learning this merely useful language rather than something glorious like Hebrew, Greek or German – but my first priority is learning to communicate with the natives, and they speak the objective language of dollars and minutes and milestones.
Beyond objectivism and solipsism
It is easy to enter the realm of idealism through the gate of solipsism. But once you pass through that gate, who is there to follow out? Whose testimony has validity? You cannot leave this realm with your self; and if you will not leave your self, you will remain behind as a sovereign self-reflection.
Conceptions of power
When people feel “powerful” they can mean quite a few things. Some of them are not even actual powers with practical potential, but ephemeral sensations of powerfulness. Genuine power is demonstrated in application: what can it do? Here is a partial typology of powers, both imagined and real:
1) Power to inflict pain – sadistic power – the capacity to steal energy directly from another.
2) Power to coerce – tyrannical power – the capacity to render another will strictly instrumental to one’s own.
3) Power to evade other powers – freedom – the capacity to at least feel that one’s own will is independent and unrestricted by other wills in all relevant categories of action.
4) Power to understand – philosophy – the capacity to at least feel that through one’s intellectual efforts one is brought to an experiences of self-sovereignty.
5) Power to persuade – charisma – the capacity to harmonize other wills with one’s own will (to form consensus).
6) Power to organize desires into unities – leadership – the capacity to synthesize individual wills within one’s own overarching will (to align disparate interests).
7) Power to transcend – The capacity to identify one’s will with a will that includes and exceeds it, and to participate knowingly as a participant in what defies objective knowledge.
Some ethical fragments
Gratitude: Gratitude is acknowledging that your own apparently individual successes and good fortune are actually collective, and only illusorily individual. Gratitude is giving others their fair share in your self: shared oneness. Ingratitude is spiritual theft.
Apology: Apology is the repairing of damage done to the oneness of a collective self by one or both of its participants. Apology is essentially atonement: the participant reaffirming oneness with a partner after denial (in word, action, or even thought) of a shared oneness.
Offense: Offense is the palpable feeling of destruction of actual or possible oneness. We are offended by ethical breaches because oneness is accomplished within an ethos – an ethos being a way of seeing and living, and an ethic being the sustaining praxis of its ethos.
Metanoia: A Greek word which means radically changing one’s mind, seeing differently. This is generally translated as “repentance”. When a person violates an ethic severely enough, the person is no longer able to exist within the violated ethos, and in fact changes modes of existence and becomes a stranger.
Unrepentant regret: The expression of regret for destroying oneness with another without the intention of atonement – that is, unrepentant regret – is the opposite of apology: it consummates an estrangement. These has the form: “I’m sorry, but…” It also frequently has the form: “Forgive me, God…”
The retraction of gratitude, which is the same as denial of oneness, is one of the deepest offenses one can commit.
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The Jews are humanity’s geniuses of oneness. Antisemitism is a poetic expression of radical individualism.
Good quote
“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.” – Aldous Huxley
True; but I’d still say an intellectual is interesting to the degree that he finds sex interesting.
To constellate
Facts, or personal attributes, or elements – think of them as stars. Throw them into the sky and let each find its logical place in the heavens. Walk around and look out into them from different perspectives. See with unsquinting eyes what is there, adding nothing and subtracting nothing. When you find the place where they are most beautiful sit down and and trace out the constellations.
A way of understanding a situation; the spontaneous experience of a person; a brand; a design – what matters is constellations.
“Constellate”: ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from late Latin constellatus, from con- ‘together’ + stellatus ‘arranged like a star.’
Myth
It may be stupid, but at least it is decently stupid to misunderstand and reject myth. What is indecently stupid is to misunderstand and accept myth.
This indecent stupidity comes in two strains, one phobic and the other counter-phobic: 1) fundamentalism, and 2) psychologization of myth, a la Joseph Campbell.
The commonality of the two strains is also two-fold. They share: 1) a stunted intellectuality dominated by a narrow conception of knowledge as explanation; and 2) a preoccupation with religion experienced primarily as a form of libidinous power, fascinating because it defies explanation. The fundamentalist wants to harness that power (which is alarming) and the psychological mythicist wants to disarm and diffuse it (which is boring). And of course, there are also those disordered souls who have both attitudes toward myth simultaneously, and spasmodically push and pull against it according to their current orientation (which is embarrassing). This type is common in the New Age community.
These three types all have “spiritual” self-identities, but are the furthest thing from spiritual. They lack depth, and they lack the will to know what depth is.
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People who want life explained to them should study science. People who find God incomprehensible ought to be (cautious) atheists.
The Star Grid
When I was ten years old I read an astronomy book which claimed that from a particular point in our galaxy one could look out into the night sky and see all the stars arranged in a perfect grid.
The idea of the Star Grid impressed me so deeply it became one of my dominant guiding idea-images.
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It is fair to ask: What if this idea is factually false? My guess is that it is factually false. However, this idea is not essentially factual but mythical, and this means fact is secondary to… something else… in the truth of the idea. The stars are the anchor point of an analogy, but the analogy was only the scaffolding of a way of seeing. Once that way of seeing was established the scaffold could be disassembled. Frankly, I care as little about the factuality of the Star Grid as I do about the metaphysical reality of the world of physics or of the existence of the so-called “historical Jesus”. As Black Elk said, after relating his tribe’s myth of its origin: “This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true. ”
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Does any of this mean I disregard facts? No. I respect – I obey – facts within their domain. But the domain of facts is limited. I observe the limits of factuality’s sovereignty as scrupulously as I observe factuality’s laws within its limits (in the objective world, which is “Caesar’s”). Beyond those limits I observe the laws of meaning which belong to the subjective world. (Properly understood, the subjective world is essentially “inter-subjective”. A “subject” is best understood as a point of participation within a collective spiritual existence that sustains and exceeds any particular soul. Subjectivity is rarely understood, despite the fact that everyone knows their subjectivity best of all. Did I say “despite”? I’m sorry: because. There’s known unknowns, there’s unknown unknowns, but the biggest bitch of all – the one who took Rumsfeld down – is the too-emphatically-known known.)
Know what I mean?
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All this abstract crap is utterly practical and applicable to concrete life.
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“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
The noble lie
The idea of the “noble lie” is dangerous and unnecessary. It is a distorted conception of the kind of truth spoken in symbolic language, capable of graceful degradation of meaning in more limited ears – including the speaker’s own. I am talking about the revelatory language of religion and poetry.
Joints
Truth does not accrete in a vacuum of ignorance; truth articulates from pre-existent, pre-articulate wholes. Truth does not extend outwardly; it intends inwardly. Truth resolves; truth cannot be constructed. Truth is not a machine or a story or a system. It is not invented; it is discovered and rediscovered.
The primordial truth is a crude, chaotic undifferentiated whole. Language divides the whole into finer and finer distinctions. Only in hindsight are we born on some particular day, on a bed, in a room, in a building, in a city. In actual fact, we are all born exactly at the same time, in exactly the same place, and we all say exactly the same thing about it: “waaaaaaah.”
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They do not live in the world,
Are not in time and space.
From birth to death hurled
No word do they have, not one
To plant a foot upon,
Were never in any place.
For with names the world was called
Out of the empty air,
With names was built and walled,
Line and circle and square,
Dust and emerald;
Snatched from deceiving death
By the articulate breath.
But these have never trod
Twice the familiar track,
Never never turned back
Into the memoried day.
All is new and near
In the unchanging Here
Of the fifth great day of God,
That shall remain the same,
Never shall pass away.
On the sixth day we came.
Metaphysics and epoche
The phenomenal can be interpreted variously, but it must be incorporated in any interpretation. In other words, in a legitimate interpretation no phenomenon can be omitted
A dimension or pole of the metaphysical manifold can be omitted from a legitimate interpretation, but this omission is not a matter of will (a.k.a. “faith”). It is a matter of experiencing the metaphysical extensivity in the phenomenon or not experiencing it. To superimpose an interpretation onto an experience, either before or after, is bad faith. If the interpretive superimposition leaves the phenomenal element intact, somehow that is even worse.
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Proper faith tries on possibilities and makes a genuine effort to see differently. If it succeeds, it succeeds; if it fails, it fails – but faith is necessarily intellectually honest.
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Subjective intellectual honesty is the ground of friendship. Active, receptive intellectual honesty is the ground of philosophical friendship. It has been said that true friendship only exists among philosophers.
Interest
Consider the etymology of “interest”, and ask yourself: Isn’t it a case study of how meaning drains from words over time? Inter + est. Nowadays the word “interest” implies that we stand apart from a thing and regard it objectively. That is we stay apart from it and keep it “whole against the sky”, as opposed to entering into its being – really being with it. At least we’ve preserved some formal grammatical clues: we remain interested in something, not interested about it, or on it, or toward it.