Showing posts sorted by date for query poteat. Sort by relevance Show all posts
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Wednesday, May 07, 2025

Back to William Poteat

 THE NULLITY AT THE CENTER OR BEGINNING OF THE FIBONACCI SEQUENCE DOES NOT DISAPPEAR OR DIE WHEN IT'S SUCCESSION ENSUES. IT'S AN INFINITE EGRESS AND AN INFINITE EVOLUTION OF NULLITY REMAINS, HOWEVER INTERESTING, A NULLITY.

Been reading William Poteat's essay "Myths, Stories, History, Eschatology and Action: Some Polanyian Meditations" in Intellect and Hope, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1968. I have, of course, written about Poteat before. Some thoughts:

First, there is a steep learning curve associated with this which I humbly admit beyond my capacity.  Still, I strive.

The first thing that struck me is:

The realm of myth can be thought of as prehuman silence. I construe this, probably wrongly, as Polany's tacit dimension. He's trying to get at the relationship of man to his spoken words. This is, I want to think, in relation to the belief that "God" spoke the world into being. "Let there be light!" And before that it's said in the beginning was the word and more so that the word was God. This aligns with the thought instilled by my mentor G.V. Desani that the Universe is a throbbing as I suppose is the meaning of "in the beginning was the word." So, God can be thought of as vibration, a throbbing, as Desani puts it, based on the instructions, teachings of his benefactors in the Indian subcontinent.

Light is a gift; so it is. And further, aside from physical light we are given the light of truth, the light of understanding, the light of beauty, the light of love, and the light of wisdom; the light of hope. I take these to be facets of physical light serving to enhance, make more attractive, supplement, increase the brilliance. So, we are drawn to light.

When I was a mere boy I once had a vision, a meditation, a waking dream, as it were, that my perception of the world was receding into darkness, away from the light of this world. The planets disappeared into the sun and likewise the sun into the milky way which in turn lost itself in the local group of galaxies. The light of these kept resolving  and getting smaller as I receded, as their distance from my standpoint grew greater and greater until finally all of creation was a mere speck of light surrounded by infinite darkness. Hello void! I knew the whole of creation was that minuscule speck of light and that the void was a mere finger pointing at the illumination of the focal point. I felt very insignificant, a mere nothing of nothing. Yet that light was mine; somehow we were bound in what Poteat calls "prehuman silence."

The gift of light is also the gift of life. But, one might wonder, does light or life, have an inherent claim on eternity? If so, how does that relate to death and darkness? Do they have equal claims? Are they mere phases of eternal process? Perhaps only process itself has an inherent claim on eternity. The nullity at the center or beginning of the Fibonacci sequence does not disappear or die when it's succession ensues. Actually, it's there in all the subsequent ramifications, each iteration consisting of the first and each subsequent instance, though slightly altered, a lot like a fractal. Every instance manifests it's precedents but with enough alteration to keep interest (hope?) alive. Thus, Greek civilization is not dead but lives on in the racial memory of human beings.***

Poteat writes (page 215), "What has been concerning me in all this is the curious relation of man to words; how through some poignant mystery we have occasionally the courage just to say something; and yet how even then - indeed especially then - it comes to us - this courage - unbidden, as a gift, but a gift which paradoxically, it may seem, if faithfully received, puts us into bondage: as if giving ourselves out of our prehuman silence into the realm of speech and saying is an act first of hope, then of love and thanksgiving for the world, but also an act by which everything becomes forever ambiguous and equivocal."

My note on this at hand says he defines here the conundrum of creation, how God must feel about his creation. This is a guide post. Perhaps everything being equivocal and ambiguous is a measure of our freedom, and is really the nature of the substratum written of in the Mandukya Upanishad. Everything is process, fluid, nuanced; it is hope.

It may be as according to Buddhism that nothing abides, there is no abiding soul, that all is process. But does this deny the existence of a substratum? Perhaps it asserts that the process and the substratum are the same. Yet we are naturally inclined to hold that change implies the unchanging or, that by which change is possible or intelligible in the sense that cold is that by which hot is knowable.

One might claim, or want to, that there is ultimate reality and that there is contingent reality. But this might be false, a mere assumption based on the qualities of being a person, a manifested live, conscious, entity. It's said Samsara is Nirvana meaning that relative existence properly understood, seen from the standpoint of ultimate reality is itself that ultimate. The world of coming and going, of manifestation, is when properly understood unchanging, timeless, extra spatial, an illusion - as in that speck of light I saw as a boy not seeming to allow for multiplicity, for a world of things moving in relation to one another. Is there an actual truth to this? I don't, and probably can't know; and maybe can't understand either.

I think that consciously or not when I use the first person singular I am invoking the whole universe. Further, that I is not me as a contingent entity but is the entire tacit dimension as person; that my invocation brings the world into being as that particular "I" the naming of which is likewise a gift, a gift of ownership. I take possession of the world when I use the first personal pronoun, at least nominally. Also, if one reads the Mandukya Upanishad of Guadapada with Sankara's commentary and substitutes tacit dimension for ultimate reality, is the same meaning there? So perhaps Polanyi and Poteat, for instance, were thinking in the same vein as those ancients.

The same with breathing. Watching one's breath meditatively as in Vipassana meditation one comes to the realization that I am not the breather; I am, if anything, the observer of breathing. Breathing is ongoing but no one breaths; there is no one there except in name only. To say I breath is to indulge an illusion; to say I am, to say I do so and so is likewise illusory. There is breathing, no doubt, but the breather is beyond any boundaries whatsoever, for the tacit dimension, I want to claim, is boundless, unknowable, unsearchable, infinite; it is the entire cosmos itself. The process is real but there is no person in the common sense of a unique individual there. The so called breather is only nominally real. When I invoke the first person singular what I actually do is claim existence in name only. Thus "I am that I am" is senseless. But isn't that senselessness a goad to true understanding? It provokes a leap of faith into the unknown, the void. As Ernst Cassirer might put it, the word takes us to transcendence of the word.

Language - another insight gleaned from Cassirer* - casts a dark shadow on thought and can never become entirely commensurate therewith. Thus the world is illusionary and mythological when the "self deception of the mind is realized," discovered. "All symbolism ... is bound to obscure what it seeks to reveal." I think language is not different from nature itself whose forms fruitlessly strive to express the ultimate reality. This striving is infinitely varied and involves existential hope. It might reveal God but simultaneously casts a shadow thereon. Knowledge likewise. All to often we take our name of a thing - and names only apply to things - as the thing itself in its true ultimate nature. The ultimate reality is, however, revealed when one comes to an understanding of this. Submitted: The greater the belief in the validity of the language as knowledge, the darker the shadow, the denser the obfuscation. Thus, science tends to hide what it seeks to reveal because we "trust" our measurements. Religion, likewise, because we trust our faith. The world of sensory input is transferred into the world of ideas, meaning, and purpose through the naming process. Notice first, then name, then denote, that is, then know and understand.

If the ultimate reality is unknowable, unsearchable, unfathomable then the meaning and purpose of anything at all is likewise a mystery. Therefore the meaning and purpose of a life is what a person makes it. Put another way. If you can't measure the whole then the parts are likewise immeasurable, truly. If you can't know "God" you know nothing. That's a positive statement. The infinity of the whole applies to every part. Infinity is without meaning, being immeasurable. Defining a part assumes that which contains the part is definable.

Not knowing the ultimate, you know nothing. There is your freedom! If you want meaning and purpose make it yourself. It's an individual responsibility; the freedom to do so is the ultimate gift. And most importantly, it gives you the profound responsibility of being co-creator of the universe; a kind of opportunity tending towards hypostatic union.

An essay "In Pursuit of Discovery" by another University of Texas professor I was privileged to know, Donald Weismann. is included in "Intellect and Hope" - there are several others, too. In his essay Weismann quotes Bernard Bosanquet that "In creative art the production is as it were a form of perception; it is subordinate to the full imagining, the complete looking or hearing."** Now, I leave it to others to judge whether this piece of mine is "art", however, I reiterate it is a striving. Perhaps as such it will help me, and maybe others, to come to some understanding that will serve to enrich one's life or at least assist in coming closer to a full imagining.

*Ernst Cassirer, "Language and Myth", translated by Susanne K Langer, Dover Publications Inc, New York, 1953

**Bernard Bosanquet, "Three Lectures on Aesthetics" London: Macmillan, 1923, P. 34

***Will and Ariel Durant, "The Lessons of History", Simon and Schuster, 1968, page 93

Soren Kierkegaard

 As architecture stands in relation to existential mass so something stands in relation to being. What is that something?
How far out must one seek objectively for the search to become subjective?

Existential mass is the medium of architecture. Being is likewise a medium. And Life. Might life be the medium whereby matter transforms into spirit.

If space/time is curved wouldn't one arrive where one began if journeying on a "straight" way through the cosmos? Being able to see forever wouldn't one's gaze end up being at the back of one's head?

Isn't it an illusion that anything is truly beyond, above, objective to the self. Doesn't objectivity ultimately become subjectivity?

Onward!

In the Orient one finds statuary of meditating people usually with their eyes closed or half closed. Obviously they are not focused on the exterior world but on what is within. We learn that these poses are to illustrate the seeking of self realization of the individuals so composed by attainment of Nirvana, Samadhi, some form of the Truth. In the western world seekers of truth typically do not assume such attitudes. They rather seek the truth of things objectively, outside, so to speak, of the searcher, usually by measurement of some sort. Subjective attitudes are not the norm. God, the absolute ultimate reality is considered to be in his heaven which is above man in the sphere of perfection which perspective is shown by church steeples which always point their spires in the direction the ecclesiastics agree upon, a sign that this is the way learners, seekers of spiritual truth should follow. Soren Kierkegaard was an exception to this. He claimed that the truth is subjective not objective. He thought that, miraculously, God was in time as an existing individual. That being the meaning of the incarnation of the Christ. Significantly he further writes that truth is "that which is tending toward unity or completeness, rather than as something formed or complete in itself."

My aim here is to discus and amplify this idea of subjective reality. In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard writes that the individual begins the search for truth from the standpoint of actually being in truth. If God is in time then it follows that any self realization begins therein, with the individual existing human being starting from the truth itself. It further follows that it is a false assumption that one does not already have the truth. So, one seeks the truth from the standpoint of the truth. Therefore one does not find the truth for one can't find what one already has. What really happens is one realizes the truth, realizes God which necessarily is always already there waiting, so to speak, to be discovered through self realization or actualization. The truth hides in plain sight and if we didn't already possess it it could never be realized. So, inwardness is the direction of seeking the ultimate reality. Notwithstanding Kierkegaard says the "eternal is in itself in its attributes" and that the object and the subject are the same. Is in itself in its attributes. That is to say phenomenal reality actually is the substratum when viewed from the standpoint of the ultimate reality, or, at least, they aren't unrelated. For, there is only one reality here and the only way to see God is to see the attributes, which, while they are not the same, neither are they different. The absolute informs the phenomenal, that is, and the phenomenal reveals, bit by bit, the absolute. This is an eternal process. Or, as Plato put it, "Beauty is in the object, and it is in beauty that we see through the factual reflection of reality into Being itself." The eternal is in itself in its attributes.

I want here to state my personal aversion for writing with such familiarity of "God". More on this later. Let it here suffice that I am uncomfortable so freely using this name, word, presuming, as it does, a relationship that is antithetical to the supposed aims of the subject of this writing.

Of the Kierkegaard writings I have I prefer Robert Bretall's anthology published by Random House. For me the study of Kierkegaard is something I go back to from time to time. It's an enriching study and putting it aside actually helps my understanding. I will never complete this task.

Kierkegaard's life was just over forty years, 1813 - 1855. He is considered the father of Existentialism and was known largely by his hostility to speculative philosophy especially in the person of Hegel.

Speculative philosophy, like science, depends on what is measurable, what is outside the existing individual, what is objective and reached in dialectical stages. Kierkegaard's great insight was that the truth is actually subjective and he bases this on what he calls the paradox of God being in time in the person of Jesus, the Christ.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The aesthetic, one's feelings, as well as philosophical speculation, by Kierkegaard's metrics, are obstacles to becoming a Christian. Kierkegaard thought that the enjoyment, immediacy of the aesthetic should be dethroned, not abolished, however. The aesthetical, the ethical, the religious are three great allies, he writes. And that in which all human life is unified is passion and faith is Passion. He thought that love, based on sensuous beauty, gained the imprimatur of the eternal which means that the eternal is known in the immediacy of the temporal. This is an important aspect of his thought. Beauty in life is to be lived, not seen, heard about, read about. It is real only through the living by an existing human being. The whole thrust of his writing is, he says, what it means to become a Christian.

It's commonsensical but make note that Kierkegaard thought life could be explained only after it has been lived and in this regard he notes that "Christ only began to interpret the Scriptures and show how they applied to him - after his resurrection." Quoting Aristotle who thought philosophy begins with wonder, "not as in our day with doubt" he takes an appreciated jibe at Descartes's doctrine of Cartesian doubt (Ego cogito, ergo sum - I think therefore I am. This according to Descartes being the one undoubtable quanta of his being.) Kierkegaard likewise admits most live a life of calculated enjoyment (as aesthetes) instead of a life of self realization through moral decision.

Kierkegaard is about twenty five when he makes these observations and the crown of this early work is his consideration of the meaning of Christ as God in time of which he thinks this is a profound paradox - and, importantly, if one is to believe this hypostatic union of an eternal God and temporal man one must have bequeathed to him a condition, a faculty, a device, which is a new organ of seeing, understanding, and that condition is faith, which recall he says is passion. Faith must be exercised in which regard man must overcome his error ridden guilt, his sin. God thus becomes a teacher from whom man learns of his erring which tracelessly vanishes - nothing changes apparently - yet all is nevertheless new as said man is born again through redemptive conversion. This understanding, I think is closer to love than knowledge. and should rightly be characterized as love of truth. "Consciousness of sin is the conditio sine qua non of Christianity." Also, "despair is the anatomy of melancholy", he writes. "Man is spirit" but not yet a self. Man is not what he is in principle, rather, the polar opposite. Thus despair, which is more commonly known as sin. The task of true Christianity is to lift man out of this disunity and by joining with God make of him a true self thereby saving him from a "Sickness Unto Death."

Man is spirit, is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal. There is the temporal self and the eternal self. Failing to understand this is a corruption which manifests as despair, a death instinct. "Every individual...despairingly unconscious of having a self and an eternal self has willed to tear his self away [from the eternal]. This is sin and its opposite is...faith"

Our own self is the self of the entire universe and the "torment of despair is precisely this: not to be able to die." It is such profound hopelessness that even the last hope, death, is not available. Suffering and sorrow - despair - can be so overpowering "that death has become one's hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die." When one would become nothing, cannot endure to be oneself then all is lost. Yet Kierkegaard writes that "If there were nothing eternal in a man, he could not despair." Kierkegaard notes here that which Socrates reminds us, the "immortality of the soul [we know] from the fact that the sickness of the soul (sin) does not consume it as sickness of the body consumes the body."

Conferring on man eternality is demanding of him infinite obeisance. "And thus it is eternity must act, because to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession made to man, but at the same time it is eternity's demand upon him." And. Despair which turns to hatred for existence has become daemonic; it wills to be itself. But "The despair which is the passageway to faith is also by the aid of the eternal: by the aid of the eternal the self has courage to lose itself in order to gain itself...He went forth in sooth, the infinitely long way from being God to becoming man, and that way He went in search of sinners."

On sorrow. Writing, of course, about the ancient Hebrews he says "There once lived a people who had a profound understanding of the divine; this people thought no man could see God and live. - Who grasps this contradiction of sorrow: not to reveal oneself is the death of love, to reveal oneself is the death of the beloved! ...They do not even dream that there is sorrow in heaven as well as joy, the deep grief of having to deny the learner what he longs for with all his heart, of having to deny him precisely because he is the beloved." God. Yahweh! If I give man what he longs for with his entire being he will die, my glory is so great*. This terrible conundrum is addressed by God making himself into the likeness of man, a humble man, a carpenter, a servant. I have this to add: God has the power to self manifest. The phenomenal world is his handiwork. Does this mean man is (potentially) God? Is that what we are to believe? Miraculous. If so, then his character - if he can be said to have character, attributes - is more anthropomorphic than not - isn't that the implication of so glibly using his "name"? Rather he is more like man than man is like him. Perhaps, too, he is anthropogenic. Is God a creation of man as man is a creation of God? What is the truth of this? Where is the illusion? Where is the real? From the Mandukya Upanishad (Guadapada and Sankara) Advaita: (Brahman or Atman) God, being beyond time, space and causality, is ever incomprehensible through any empirical means. It is the eternal subject having no object through which one can comprehend it.

Our speculation is a kind of measure coming as it must out of our temporal being. Any such measure results in an illusion, I think, for the eternal is not subject to the temporal. Our speculation is reduced, if one is to be honest, to child's play. We presume to define the infinite. Now, that's arrogance to be avoided. We do not know. Our understanding is small. Really, we cannot in ourselves fully understand.

The mystery is to be lived, not known, and is wrapped up in the quote of Lessing by Kierkegaard that God stands before us his hands outstretched. In his right hand he holds the ultimate truth. In his left the unending search for the ultimate truth. We must choose. Lessing chooses the left hand. We may glibly talk of God but this is to be taken charitably as a learning device for the unending search to which we have dedicated ourselves and is perhaps to be taken as a small recognition that the Real being process, process of becoming, then a ceaseless search is the only authentic choice available. But. Take note. The becoming, too, some say is illusory.

Walter Lowrie, Doctor of Divinity. whose life long study of Kierkegaard's works writes in my anthology that the so called stages on life's way of Kierkegaard are best considered as realms or spheres of existence and they are the Aesthetic, the realm of pleasure, of perdition, the Ethical, realm of action and victory, and the Religious, realm of suffering. These merge into one another and the Religious realm retains a bit of its precursors.

Hegel, of whom Kierkegaard was at times very critical thought in part that pure being "accompanies everything but is never observable itself." This, by the way, bears a striking resemblance to the thought of ancient Oriental sages such as Guadapada and Sankara. Kierkegaard said if Hegel had added a foot note to the end of his work stating that all of it was a thought experiment he would have thought him a most intelligent philosopher. The thrust of Kierkegaard's criticism of Hegel was that he didn't conduct his life in accordance with his philosophy, and that he was a speculative thinker and held that the ultimate reality is objective. Kierkegaard promoted the opposing view that the truth is subjective and the individual is an existing spirit in reality and that all understanding comes after this fact. He writes that man searches for the truth from within the truth. So how he relates to his efforts are of prime importance more than what the thought actually is. "If a man knowing no better, worships an idol, but does it with absolute sincerity and the whole "passion" of his being, he is nearer the truth than the enlightened individual who has a correct knowledge of God, but ...remains unmoved by it." He thought the systematic thinker was simultaneously "...outside of existence and yet in existence, who is in his eternity forever complete, and yet includes all existence within himself - it is God." The systematic thinker has an eternal aspect on account of God having entered into time as the true subject. Elsewhere he writes: "He (God) clothed himself in the visible world as in a garment. He changes it as one who shifts a garment, himself unchanged. Thus in the world of sensible things....In each moment every actuality is a possibility."

Wrapped up in the idea of subjectivity one finds the idea he calls resignation which is acceptance of one's true, actual self as subjective. To be as you are one must relinquish the urge to be more than what one is, this being characteristic of the sensuous urge. One lives in falsehood who seeks to be what is beyond one's subjective self. Passion has no objective existence and Kierkegaard's Christianity wishes to intensify passion to its highest pitch through infinite resignation, surrender to our personal actuality. The true subject. Infinite resignation is a total , a complete effacement of the self, a withdrawal of oneself from notice. Faith is the highest passion of human subjectivity but the tendency of objectivism is to make everyone an observer while the subjective man participates. There is no objective truth. Whomsoever God elects by his love, "He begins by reducing to nothing." Thus we are brought up against the extreme limit, the pure springs of passion; and simultaneously thrust into faith! Thus Kierkegaard asserted the primacy of passion, not in the vulgar sense of aroused emotions, but as the primary ontological substance from which our world is built (William Poteat). Such a man renounces the world where he needs nevertheless to live but this living is informed with an infinite resignation. Such a man constantly leaps into the infinite but faultlessly and with complete abandon and confidence drops back into the finite where nothing about him noticeably changes (Denis DeRougemont). This infinite resignation is total surrender to God. Thus the doors of perception are cleansed and everything appears as it truly is - infinite (William Blake).

So faith is born of the intrusion of eternity upon temporality (Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik).

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of man (Proverbs 25:2). Wherever, however one seeks the true, the real, it's never to be owned. It's God's - in his right hand. Kierkegaard: Correct understanding has it that we are closer to such understanding when its realized that we seek what we already have, we would be what we already are. Yet, to be in a state of mediation is to be finished, while to exist is to become but never to actually be finished, complete. Our passion to be in a relation with God involves a dialectical contradiction, Kierkegaard writes, turning our passion into despair. But the category of despair gives rise to, is indeed necessary for the emergence of faith. That is, one realizes the impossibility of being in a relationship with God thus entering into all that remains possible, the category of faith. And this comports with the teaching of great sages the world over. One must surrender to God forsaking knowledge, forsaking all, giving over to love of God. Understanding that it is out of the realm of possibility to know God actually gives rise to what is possible and that is love of God, devotion, faith.

Searching, seeking truth, the eternal, God, implies one is in truth from the beginning. An effort must be made, but how? Which how is subjective and thus infinite striving ensues, renewed repeatedly from the decisive passion of the infinite which is faith, belief. Speculative philosophy might think it grasps God objectively but is thereby bereft of faith. Faith involves risk. God can't be grasped objectively which results in uncertainty. Speculative philosophy forgets the essential significance because of existence, that the knower is an existing individual who given over to striving embraces risk taking. Furthermore, if I think I grasp God objectively I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. It is the misfortune of speculative philosophy to again and again have forgotten that the knower is an existing individual.

Speculative philosophy holds that truth is objective, not to be realized inwardly, subjectively. That the Christianity of Kierkegaard's time acceded to this view is perhaps best illustrated by the architecture of cathedrals since the earliest times of the Christian era. These edifices always have a steeple which always, of course, pointed up. Up and away from the imperfect realm here below to the pristine perfection of God's heaven. This is a statement in stone and masonry that the objective is quite removed from the lowly existing individuals and, to such thinkers, subjectivity is the road to perdition. It also is, I think, a kind of self loathing to consider our earthly home is not itself floating in the heavens, in the so thought of perfect realms. But, I think heaven is not a place whereas the ancients, especially a profoundly influential Aristotle, for instance, considered heaven the realm of the stars, the unmovable stars thought of as exemplifying a kind of perfection because, well because they didn't move. That made for a good point of reference one understands, a place or condition around which all else stands in stark contrast. So, the perfect above, the corrupt imperfect below. I wonder whether Kierkegaard would believe this. It should be pointed out Kierkegaard did not claim to be a Christian though he spent his life studying Christianity. He said he was always coming to be a Christian. Note this writer tends to view Kierkegaard's view of a properly modified faith a kind of surrender to God and his work in that regard a kind of worship, love of God.

In existential philosophy much is made of the absurd especially by authors such as Albert Camus. Kierkegaard introduces the idea of the absurd, writing "The absurd is - that the eternal truth has come into being in time, that God has come into being, has been born...precisely like any other individual human being." Citing Socrates' shunning of the objective search for God paganisticly in nature and human history "where the quantitative siren song enchants the mind and deceives the existing individual." This quantitative siren song quote is better applied to science nowadays. Some worship their stomach. Some worship measurement, quantitative analysis. They both live in the cellar.

A true God relationship is possible only when a breach is brought about annulling the paganisticly immediate relationship to God, Kierkegaard writes. God is elusive, he says, and attributes his invisibility to his omnipresence. "His visibility would annul his omnipresence...Nature is the work of God. And yet God is not there; but within the individual man there is a potentiality (man is potentially spirit) which is awakened in inwardness to become God-relationship, and then it becomes possible to see God everywhere." My words: The ultimate reality is not revealed in the manifest, the relative, as such, yet the manifest, the relative, serves to awaken the process of self realization meaning "God" is not present but neither is "He" absent from sensible phenomena. This bears some similarity to contributions of Oriental sages. Kierkegaard writes the mystery of such revelation is the only way in which it is known. The potentiality of self realization actualizes. It is by faith one yields to an understanding forever beyond one's quantifying grasp.

The reverence of the early Hebrew people, the early Israelis, and some Christians, too, cannot be overemphasized. I've written of this at other times but never tire of its reiteration. YHWH - Yod He Vau He transliterated into the Latin as Yahweh, but the original name of the divine creative spirit was unpronounceable, having no vowels and, by the way, is written right to left. Nevertheless it was pronounced in ancient times by the high priest, but only in a whisper, and only during their celebration of jubilee. This in recognition that this supreme being can't be named, is improperly limited by a name. A noun is a person, place, or thing. Convenient that "he" is treated in that way so that we can have a handle on "him". That is "his" making into something like man. Understand, this is not like man and, mysteriously, neither is this unlike man. The substratum for all manifestation reserves into itself its true nature and this in order to actualize as said substratum. Whatever is named is construed as in a sense owned. The eternal is not up for ownership, only participation. However man will have his comforts, his illusion, even arrogating to himself ownership of the divine creative spirit. While impossible, what comfort it gives is permitted and does at least put one in the neighborhood of the divine.

Study of Kierkegaard is challenging. My effort is admittedly somewhat cursory. Truly it is a task for dedicated scholars who have a deep grasp of Socrates, Plato, the 18th century philosophers especially Hegel. One needs to be thoroughly informed as to the history of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Jewish tradition, Christianity, of course, and much more. This writer comes up short on all of these when compared to a true scholar. So, my caveat. What one sees here is something more than a "man in the street" offering but something less than a scholarly offering. I don't mean to apologize for any shortcomings and offer this for what it is which is a study by an interested individual - existing individual - in the work which aims boldly at - yet misses - the understanding of life's meaning and purpose, at least getting into the neighborhood of those whose genius I am perhaps at least smart enough to recognize.

Those followers of Kierkegaard in later times are many. I've written about my study under Professor William Poteat of Duke University when he visited the University of Texas. From him I learned that Hebrew davar, word or action of God in space/time was merged in Christianity with the Greek logos, meaning reasonable, logical, word. Poteat taught, and this based on Kierkegaard's work, that the Real is exhausted, that is, expressed completely in the process of creation. The Greek Arche', beginning, original stuff of the universe, compares to logos and Hebrew dibur, to speak, is the root word of davar. Poteat taught that every davar expresses a dibur, a spoken message which is to say that every physical object or phenomenon, in addition to its physical reality, conveys a spiritual comment on existence. This, having some relation to Advaita philosophy, details somewhat the way the ultimate reality reveals its true nature and helps make sense of my statement that God is not as such revealed in the manifest but neither is He not so revealed.

Prof. Poteat made a lot of the implications of media and its use by various activities, for instance, the medium of architecture is matter, or as he put it, existential mass, and is the most concrete medium. The medium of music can represent the most abstract idea conceivable, namely, the spirit of sensuality, Don Juanism. Kierkegaard writes of being itself as a media. Poteat did not discuss this, however. Neither did Kierkegaard except this brief mention. But, of what would existence be the media? Life? Self realization? Perhaps life itself might be rightly thought of as media; the medium whereby matter transmigrates into spirit. These are interesting considerations I suppose and bring to mind something my revered teacher, G.V. Desani put forth, that "Time and Space are things, some of the tools he made, home made tools in his pocket. When we try to impose our limitations (our limitations of understanding, and our limited space and time) upon God, we are playing childish games, playing at being God." So a proclamation: I do not know anything of myself. Compared to the truly great I am playing childish games. I make no claim to special knowledge or understanding and am the paltriest tool of that greater being who might have in his mere pocket space and time itself. Enough!

Some personal observations.

God is neither subject nor object and he can be approached, as Kierkegaard notes, only by approximation. As you approach him the probability that you have found what you seek increases - becomes more probable by the accuracy of your measurement, albeit measurement of the admittedly immeasurable. However, inwardness and outwardness I'm inclined to think both involve approximation and measurement of some some kind or another. To even speak or, yes, think of something is a kind of measurement. Also take note that when Kierkegaard says that God doesn't think, he creates and he doesn't exist, he's eternal; the creating and the eternality I'm considering, are both, however subtle, limiting factors. In other words they are parameters that define/limit that to which they are intended to pertain. Which is to say they are just a more subtle way of characterizing God, the eternal, which by definition can not be said to have qualifying characteristics. These belong in the realm of the manifest. So, to say something creates or that something is eternal you must first posit it as being, as an object, a thing in being which is contradictory and paradoxical because that which is eternal can have no being and Kierkegaard says that himself. Furthermore let's consider - Kierkegaard never says this - but the use of language, words, to establish or elucidate what language or words can not is a task of the wise. (One must go to the other side of the world to find such statements, which I think this is attributable to the Buddhist philosopher, sage, Nagarjuna.) However let's give him the benefit of the doubt. He's likely trying to do what he privately or secretly knows within himself to be impossible though he never explicitly states this. So God doesn't think, he creates. God doesn't exist, he's eternal. That's a grain of salt with which everything here should be taken. That is to say that one knows it isn't literally true what is stated there however one also knows at the same time what is intended to be expressed which because of the limitations inherent in language is impossible to state explicitly. Words, at best, point to a direction. So we should judge Kierkegaard by his intention rather than his actual words. That's fair. We do not need to waste effort splitting hairs.

God does not think, he creates, God does not exist, he is eternal. Man does think and exist. One might consider this makes of man a decent partner to God. Thus subjectivity is truth and reality, by divine providence. Man is what God can't be being ironically limited by his infinitude. Thus God confers on man universality, the eternal, and man returns with/by conferring on God temporality, particularity, the finite. This is the sharing between divinity and the secular, the sacred and the profane. God needs man, in order to be finite. Man needs God in order to be infinite.

The upshot of all this fooling around with language is that we will use the word God with the caveat that we must at the same time admit that such use means literally that God is a thing to be held, owned, and that is not what is intended. We name the unnameable for the convenience of discussion. On the other side of the world this is dealt with somewhat differently when the most wise would simply maintain silence instead of fruitlessly trying to speak the unspeakable. Kierkegaard writes there is that which "should be suffered and matured in silence." He further, in the same passage, derides the craving for gossip and the lust for preaching. He is warning to be careful the sensuous does not carry over into the life of the person of faith. He writes the religious (and love) experience become ennobling when it teaches one to keep his feeling within oneself. "The religious individual is silent and whoever is silent before God doubtless learns to yield, but also learns that this is blessed."

We cannot as lowly creatures endure leading constantly the life of the eternal in time. It is advised to deal with this with humility since there is this absolute difference between God and man, which humility frankly admits its human lowliness and frailty. This religious suffering is merely the "dieing away from immediacy." He admits the profound difficulty with which one enters the strenuous life of inwardness on which religiosity has embarked though it is the "greatest of miraculous actions." He writes here that "passion is man's perdition but it is his exaltation as well."

Allow me to make note of a somewhat more nuanced view of this from Oriental thought. While Brahaman has no qualities, is without attributes, there are those who hold that while this pertains to the true nature it does not hold for "its personality as God." In that it might be considered that Jesus is a personality of God. We should accept it remains a mystery, however.

On Don Giovanni, Mozart's opera: Kierkegaard was quite enamored of this opera. The immediate pertains to the sensuous. The sensuous genius confines himself to the immediacy of the sensuous. That's Don Juanism, which one lives in the immediate in order to sustain a sense of the infinite thereby yielding to the Daemonic. He externalizes his experience by way of exclusion of the eternal, God. For him there is no tomorrow, only his immediate present. It is in this corruption the meaning of his self indulgence emerges as inconsequential. So he is free and the price is he is sociopathic. Ethical considerations are alien to him. He thinks only of himself, is not fit for society. His life is a perpetual beginning. But! Make some good out of this for surely one can live in the present - the immediate - but from an eternal perspective. I think surrender to God will get you there. One can live surrendering to God, the infinite, the eternal and thus yielding to his will deny the over indulgence of the sensuous. So replace the daemonic in nature with an ethically driven faith wherein accountability of the consequences of one's actions are real.

End note.

Soren Kierkegaard thought of himself as poet and I can think of nothing more poetic that what he wished to be his epitaph. "Died of a longing for eternity." Its not my intention to gainsay this superb author but I will allow my comment on this sentiment is that whatever is here it is through that that we live our lives. I conceive that whatever it is is eternal and whatever we are as living creatures, we perforce embody that. So longing for the eternal is longing for what we already are and is sort of like searching for God, as Kierkegaard holds, must begin from being "in" God. That's saying too much for anyone can appreciate the beauty of Kierkegaard's sentiment. It is poetic and as such, though perhaps taking a bit of literary license with the Real, it adds a perspective of wonder, of humility, indeed, of Love of God. He adds that from said eternal standpoint "...he would have nothing else to do but to [unceasingly] thank God." He was one, therefore, who had love of the Lord. No one, I think, has ever been more intent on being in that attitude towards God than the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.

* In the Bhagavad Gita Krsna tells Arjuna who asks that "God", i.e., Krsna show himself in his true form, that in order to so reveal himself Arjuna must be given by Krsna a faculty capable of handling such a manifestation of God else it would destroy Arjuna.

Monday, April 25, 2022

Notes extracted from my "A Plus Notebook" which also contains notes on Don Juanism from Poteat's class

 Desani, March 14, 1973

Burn the seeds (of deeds) by high samadhi only. The weakened klesa is stronger than the klesas/passion full blown because its expression is more subtle, harder to root out because they are harder to recognize.

Margin note here that I got Texas tags today; quit moving houses. March 21, 1973. This means I retagged the 72 Chevy yellow van that I bought in Virginia and that I no longer worked with Jerry Sires. This leaves some confusion in my mind because I thought we finished moving houses prior to my purchase in VA. of the van. Maybe it means I quit "leveling" houses with Jerry.

Now the notes.

Heavy Karma is in the mind. There is a diagram here, a circle with a small area at the top delineated as "fixed destiny" while the larger area is labeled "unseen karma". This unseen karma it is noted, consists of inumerable past deeds, words, lives.

The desiring of an object is animalistic.

Clinging to an object is equivalent to fear of losing same.

Fear is equivalent to guilt. Or rather, their natures are intimately entwined. (This is not attributable to Desani. It is mine.)

If one tends to animalism one eventually falls into violent experiences, employment, etc. For instance, the proliferation of armaments.

A sanskara is an unaccountable karmasaya.

Important: To have a spiritual mentor is a fixed destiny.

Attachment (is related to) revulsion.

A selfless action is a virtuous action.
Duty, not? intention, with love, with compassion.

Desani spent five years learning to walk without intention. It is exceedingly difficult, he said.

Restraints must be imposed on things that are easily overindulged in, for instance, sex.

My aside: Desani is a composer, a maestro, a conductor. He draws ideas, words, etc., into a mosaic.

When sattva rises to its highest level illumination is produced (in a situation).

There is a need to rise above the sweet and the bitter experience; there is a reward.

Told story about being in Burma, about yogis, hills, snakes, very large mosquitoes, AHIMSA (non violence). Desani reformed - first "clean" room - for a smooth pursuit of practice.

"The Science of Yoga"
I.K. Taimini

Sutra is an aphorism. (Patanjali's Yoga Sutras are aphorisms.)

First sutra: Yoga is control of the vriti, modifications, of citta, consciousness.

Patanjali was the compiler of yoga, an ancient tradition. (Later note: He was a retainer of a King I expect somewhat like the European Kings retained astronomers, mathematicians, etc.)

The Gita notes there are many yogas. The sage Patanjali's yoga is a precursor of these:

Raja yoga
Dhyana/Zen yoga
Karma yoga - yoga of action (without desire)
Bhakti yoga - yoga of devotion - like a practiciing Christian's love for his God. This would be Krsna.
Hatha yoga - physical yoga
Kundalina yoga

Samkhya is the theoretical basis of yoga.

The yogi seeks quiesence in order to attain samadhi or satori.

The philosophy derived from the yoga sutras is outlined thus:

Here a chart is drawn showing two realities. On the left is Purusha or spirit and on the right is Prakriti or existential mass, the substance of the universe, nature. Prakriti consists, with reservations, of three elements known as the gunas. They are Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas. (see below)

A line extends downward through Mahat, cosmic intelligence and then to Ahamkara, the principle of individuality, of "I am".

A margin note here explains that the first product of the union of Purusha and Prakriti is Mahat.

Below Ahamkara comes Manas, the cosmic mind. Below Manas the chart branches into, on the left, Indriyas, the power of the senses, hearing, smelling, seeing, etc., and on the right the Tanmatras or subtle elements of sound, odor, visibility, etc.

Another margin note explains that it is from the Mahat that Patanjali intellectualized his compilaton. It is also the Mahat that westerners allude to when they speak of universal mind.

That is the chart.

Consciousness is made of, consists of (the) three gunas. A rose is made of the gunas. The "image" of a rose in one's mind is made of the gunas. The difference is, with some reservations, a matter of quantity.

Sattva is the most subtle substance in nature. It is mental substance. On the moral level it is goodness. On the aesthetic level it is the most beautiful.

Rajas is the animating element.

Tamas is the passive element, the tendency to procrastinate is tied in with Tamas. It is also the steadying element. It pulls toward sleep.

Yoga has to do with the second guna, with stopping the animating element so that Sattva can shine forth. This is the quieting of consciousness.

Samadhi grants mokti, freedom. There are different levels of Samadhi. (page 41 of book)

Incomplete note on Samprajnatta (sp.) Samadhi.

There are five kinds of citta vritis.
1. A person feels full of lethargy, sleepy. Sattva and rajas are conquered by tamas. (The god's never sleep and Desani, as monk, went ten or so days with no sleep. In this condition sattva reigns.)
2. Full of anger, tamas dominates.
3. Full of restlessness, rajas dominates.
4. Full of good works, Sattva dominates.
5. The highest Samadhi is the one that grants knowledge.

We have Purusha, or spirit on the one hand and Prakriti, cosmic substance on the other.

Yoga means union or yoke. The first result of the union or yoking of spirit and cosmic substance is cosmic intelligence.

On foreknowledge, a side note on the Nadi shastras, he said that two centuries ago on palm leaf [was written references] to Desani by name. It gives date of birth, place, and so forth. More on this here.

Qualities of Purusha: It is the Lord. It is not material. It is conscious.

Qualities of Prakriti: Sattva, mental substance, Raja, activating element, Tamas, inertia.

A 2500 year old commentary says that space and time are schemes for the understanding.

In Mahat Sattva dominates. Mahat is the source of wisdom. Mahat is the first evolute. Literally mahat means the great.

When Purusha and Prakriti are joined and the first evolute arises it is Purusha who sees this. It is Purusha that sees all.

Ahamkara is the precondition for the mind's ability to discriminate. At Mahat there is no discrimination but just an ocean of light. (A thought that most people evolve to Ahamkara and stop, especially westerners.)

Yoga is the stilling of cita vritties, of modifications of consciousness.

(Yoga nirodha citta vritti.)

Consciousness is material so what we think effects others. Thought empinges on the object of thought: Highly advanced yogi might think of a person as dead that person will find his death. If I think good..... Desani has seen it.

Thought is substance. Think Sattva will increase, it will. Think Raja as increasing, it will. Think Tamas as increasing and it will. Example of a teacher at Cambridge hitting a student who questioned whether thought could be proved to be a substance in the stomach with a visualized (by thought) heavy object. Desmond hit his student, turned, whirled to face student. The student fell, was hospitalized, almost died. Desani said this was a petty trick. Also a man worked ten years to perfect a trick whereby he could not be moved by five men from a train he refused to pay for. He thought heavy object into existence at the base of his spine. That is, he cultivated Tamas at the base of his spine.

There are four states of consciousness. Awake, sleep, profound sleep, Samadhi.

One must practice and practice detachment.

The intellect is material. If it is mirror like, superior material, it is comprised mostly of Sattva.

Purusha is masculine, the divine father. Prakriti is feminine, the divine mother.

More on Rougemont

 I'm on page 269. I wish I could recall which university course this book goes with. Of course it was philosophy, but don't recall which one. Perhaps William Poteat's course on "Eroticism, Music, and Madness". Seems fitting.

Details on the book: A Fawcett Premier Book copyright 1940, Harcourt, Brace and Company. This augmented edition copyrighted 1956, Pantheon Books, Inc., published by Fawcett World Library. Translated by Montgomery Belgion.

M. Rougemont was born in 1906 in Neuchatel, Switzerland. I once knew people there, interestingly, had a girl friend. Francoise Tschudin. They lived on the lake in Hauterive, Neuchatel. Beside the point, I know.

Rougemont views human relations through the lens of the Tristan and Isolde myth which dates from about the twelfth century. He cites multiple versions, multiple authors, with the troubadours playing the major part, at least in the beginning. He writes that the underlying theme of the myth is that Passion is Love perverted, is narcissistic. Literature of that time, and he cites many following works, is an expression of this perversion. The myth coincides with the beginning of civilization's departure into this gross error. His thesis, in part, is that this myth promotes common or acceptable behavior in the culture. Rougemont really gets down in the weeds. His genius, pg. 275: "...passion of love is at bottom narcissism, the lover's self-magnification, far more than it is a relation with the beloved. Tristan wanted the branding of love more than he wanted the possession of Iseult (Isolde). For he believed that the intense and devouring flame of passion would make him divine; and, as Wagner grasped, the equal of the world. See here.

Eyes with joy are blinded ...I myself am the world.

Whatever obstructs love actually consolidates, intensifies it, he writes. (Pg 43) The ultimate obstruction of love is the aim of the romantic who seeks the ultimate intensity, passion, consolidation. The romantic seeks unity. What expresses this better than  "I myself am the world?" The ultimate obstruction of love is death. The romantic seeks death but calls it passion. So, if obstruction is the true object of passion, the beloved is a mere substitute. And if peril brings obstruction the affinity for the thrilling arises. M. Rougemount describes enlightenment and redemption as "passing from existence into being." The desire to exceed our limits is "fatal but divinizing."

As mentioned earlier he works Mozart's Don Giovanni into his thesis but doesn't mention Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Kierkegaard thought of passion as a force of nature calling it the Daemonic in Nature, a sensuous-erotic principle. M. Rougemont agrees but doesn't acknowledge this profound idea - at least not directly. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. (Edit: at end of book he brings SK in.)

As an aside gravity is a force of nature, too, and spin, without which there is no vector, direction, or for that matter, congruence. Life too is a force of nature.

Rougemont strives mightily to quantify literature so that it confirms this thinking. There is some obfuscation there but his genius prevails though it is a bit messy at times. As I say, he really gets down in the weeds. There is a confirmation bias with him and, I'd note that the more we cling to our pet ideas the more we exclude the real truth. [And, what is true locally may be false universally.] Kierkegaard quickly elevates perverted Christian love to the universal daemonic in nature. So does M. Rougemont. Pg. 275: "Passion requires that the self shall become greater than all things, as solitary and powerful as God. Without knowing it, passion also requires that beyond its apotheosis death shall indeed be the end of all things."

Death is made an enervating force, finally making of war the inevitable outcome of passion's grip on humanity. William Poteat, and G.V. Desani also spoke of this. Desani said that the end of the development of war making machines, devices, ended necessarily in man's annihilation. Kierkegaard also thought annihilation was the natural end of the development of the "sensuous-erotic" principle.

We do hug and kiss our self destruction, the spokes of the wheel whose turning returns us again and again to our beloved suffering because of which we feel alive. The more we suffer passion's pains the more intense our lives. Passionate love is for the sake of pain. And the more we pursue our passions the faster their fulfillment recedes on an ever disappearing horizon.

There's no escape. Eastern religion and philosophy address these root causes and while Rougemont brings them into his subject he fails to address the reality of their suggested remedies. Neither does he acknowledge the esoteric teachings of the ancient rabbinic Jews. While he and Kierkegaard advance the notion that Christianity is not what we are led to believe it is, that it is in reality a destructive force, as it is popularized, they provide no insights as to the path one must take to escape the enumerated conundrums. (Editor: see next post)

On the Daemonic in nature. Love is in the noosphere so passion is too but not naturally in that created man puts it there. True love enhances life. Passion destroys. True love is selfless.

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Irwin Lieb, R. G. Collingwood, William Poteat, Soren Kierkegaard*

David Goldman

America’s journey is the Christian pilgrimage that cannot end with an earthly goal. Thus, Huckleberry Finn is an exemplar of Christian literature as much as is The Pilgrim’s Progress. The journey is motivated not by the destination but by the restlessness of the pilgrim. There is only one possible conclusion to Huck’s adventure: His journey must resume, as he announces in the book’s last line: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

     To the ancient Greek a person can come to know reality, meaning, the Real is finite. To the ancient Hebrew and Christian a person can never know reality because it is essentially unsearchable. Created beings can never fathom the divine will. This comports with the old Hebrew idea that Gods' name is unpronounceable - being vowels only - Yod He Vav He rendered in Latin as YHVH. It also is more a verb than a noun. The doctrines in the Qabala are precursors of Christian orthodoxy. So, even though unknowable in 'this' life, the fruit of ascending to heaven is full revelation of the Real in the after life. Here, below, we must live by grace. Put another way, for the Hebrew/Christian, the full truth about reality is in a separate realm accessible only when certain conditions are met in the death of the individual. Is this not prideful of man to think by the grace of god that what is in essence a man generated account of the ultimate workings of the cosmos have been revealed only to him?

     Hubris is to make the world over to one's own design, to shape the cosmos to one's own purpose. It is of impiety. It is tampering with the cosmos. Another essentially Greek idea.

     For the Greek the cosmos is finite and orderly; its meaning can be grasped for the real itself is finite, a thing in itself. For the Hebrew and Christian it is governed by divine will. But neither account for Don Juanism, that is, restlessness, tumult, infinity. So, how, then, does Christianity posit spiritually qualified sensuousness? It is an outgrowth of the idea that it will be fully available in the future, when one passes into the after life. So, it exists for us on the horizon, hovering there like a jewel, attractive, beautiful, infinitely fulfilling. We want that, live, race towards that fulfillment. It becomes an object of longing which keeps us from fully attending to our life in the flesh, and really, we come to despise our supposed limitations as embodied creatures. Remember, to the Hebrew reality is equivocally manifest in appearances, that is, it is not exhausted while the Greek view is that reality is wholly manifest in appearances; it is exhausted, there not being a supra-real.

     So, "As principle, power,....it is Christianity that first posited sensuousness into the world." (Kierkegaard) Western sensibility can best be understood if looked at in this light. As principle, arché (from or in the beginning), sensuousness was first posited by Christianity, and this is opposed by the Hebrew davar, meaning word, or speech. The Greeks thought the cosmos finite and equivalent and that logos and psyche inform reality throughout. The Hebraic universe is orderly because God would not deceive us; he is bona fide, as Descartes put it. For Christianity, God informs reality, creating it anew each moment. For Greeks, logos, psyche, cosmos inform reality by being, becoming, or keeping reality. The word of God is not reality, not divine, not any more than our words are us. Logos is the real, and it hides behind appearances. God is faithful, but unsearchable; his being is not exhausted in his deeds. Neither is ours. We are complete only in an ever disappearing event on an ever receding horizon. Gratification of the senses supplants having this future completion; we're deprived of being whole so the unfillable void in us becomes a daemonic urge - Don Juanism. Satiety ever escapes us remaining forever unachievable like that point of being fully real in an ever disappearing future event.

     The historical corollary is the Israelites being 'brought' out of Egyptian bondage. Likewise the world, in the biblical account, was 'brought' out of the void. This pattern repeats when, we will be, in the fullness of time - upon the perfect realization of creation - 'brought' out of this world, apocalyptically, and into heaven and into complete, whole eternal beings with perfect incorruptible bodies.

     Kierkegaard, through his "Author A" states that Christianity posits sensuousness as its own opposition in that the spirit sees the ego as separate and evil. "Beware of worldly things, the 'ways' of the flesh." So not only is man irrevocably incomplete, he is self loathing, which feeds the daemonic urge adding or enhancing his restless tumultuous race to infinity. Poteat thought, along with Kierkegaard that in the music of the opera Don Giovanni, Mozart actually expressed in sound this restless urge. In Christianity and Don Juanism the sensuous is not related to the "senses" so much as to a kind of spirit. It is a discarnate sensuousness. Coming to dwell in this feeling is an elevation or transfiguration of the sensuous out of the body to the level of a spirit. This is the birth of the daemonic. The daemonic prevents us from having proper reverence for the absolute other, if, indeed there is that - I don't think so - and leads us on a blind path searching a universal culmination of the restlessness, tumult, the erroneous sense of infinity that is its heritage. We literally and forever teeter on history's brink ever racing to a disappearing point on the horizon the sense of being complete in ourselves, the sense of wholeness impossible to reach.

     This is a most abstract idea and has a minimum of bearing on me as I am in the world and which thus tends to take me out of the world. The most abstract medium is the medium which makes a minimum of reference to man as a spatial temporal creature and which thus tends to take him out of his being in the world. Put another way it is an escape from what is to what might be. Don Juanism, in one sense the erotic in nature gone wild, was sprouted from the seed of the insane drive to achieve salvation, personal completeness, only by union with an absolute other in a reality disconnected from life.

     There is no cure for this malady unless it might be complete annihilation, which seems to be where we are headed. Western man has morphed into a creature that is permanently estranged from himself and reality.



Saturday, January 16, 2016

How does intuition relate to transcendence

Matthew Arnold

Dover Beach (c. 1867)

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.


Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

How does intuition relate to transcendence?

Faith must be freely chosen.

If God can't be parsed from the whole of the Real there can be no transcendence except in the sense that arriving where you started you know the place for the first time.

The world of things is available to us through our senses alone yet there is a transcendent aspect of "things-in-themselves".  But it is not a separate realm.  What is perceived in phenomenal reality is not entirely factual. "Plato himself esteemed beauty as the particular form of value that actually can be seen in things. To make this consistent with the rest of his theory, however, he had to say that beautiful objects were only "shadows" of the higher reality, "participating" in the Form of Beauty. Although Kant's own aesthetics were subjectivist ...., his metaphysics could allow for a more literal rendering of Plato's own claim about beauty: Since transcendence is in phenomenal objects, the beauty that we see in things is in fact a perception right through factual reality to Beauty Itself." (Kelly Ross)

Now, turn that a little further and you might get: Since transcendence is in phenomenal objects, the sacred that we see in things is in fact a perception right through factual reality to the Divine itself. 

Intuition is this "perception right through factual reality" and as such is the faculty of transcendence, such as it is.  Arriving where you began and knowing the place for the first time is thus explained.  It is a real transcendence without the baggage of requiring a separate realm or level of reality.  Faith is active intuition. When freely selected it can blossom into a full mode of existence, a way of life, a path to everlasting transcendence; a dwelling in the numinous.  It is nothing short of a prolonged and everlasting Noesis.  The only way you have faith is if you choose faith.  It is the very essence of the affirmation of the Real. Faith and intuition are evidence of things unseen.  They are inclusive; they are constant affirmation continuing across the entire spectrum of experience.  In a sense they are the opposite of Science as a mode of being in the world which demands of the Real convincing proofs before the suspension of doubt.

False and fanciful notions of transcendence whether as a project of History, as in cultural Marxism, or, similarly, exoteric Religion, secular or otherwise, with its idea of a separate and perfect realm called Heaven, or Nirvana, or a perfect state of cultural utopia however defined by the social justice warriors, denizens of the Cult of Modern Liberalism,  are root causes of a discarnate longing, insensate and  boundless, a force of nature, a passion to finally arrive at a state of completion always just the other side of every day reality.  The reason people are so miserable is they insist on making the world conform to their notion of transcendence.  They say they have the answer to life's problems and intend to force their ideas on everyone else - because they, unlike the rest of us, really do own the truth, have a direct path to the one true source, "God", whether it is religious or secular.  So, until everyone thinks "right thoughts" we will be mired in misery and it is their mission to make certain this misery is shared equally.  The Progressive of the Cult hurries in a perpetual vanishing and has no reflexivity.  He is discarnate longing for his Utopian dreams, wholly owned by the daemonic.  This evil is the state of being insatiable, forever seeking fulfillment in an ever receding underivable future condition.

You can thank Christianity and its offshoots for this.  As a force of nature, the boundless, insensate and discarnate passion, longing, to finally own completion in a final act of transcendence is Christianity's gift to the world.  Christianity posited the daemonic spirit in the world and is responsible for the modern malaise wherein western man has evolved into a spiritless self, a self filled with despair and self-loathing, utterly lost and confused and yet increasingly certain that they alone have the prescription for society's ills.  They are the "insensate prison of an alien and restless power in quest of a 'hidden' divinity" or surrogate thereof.  (William Poteat)

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Eroticism, Music and Madness - annotated

He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him by nature between those two abysses of the Infinite and Nothing, will tremble at the sight of these marvels; and I think that, as his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption.”

Blaise Pascal



Prof. William Poteat passed in 2000. This is in honor to his memory. I knew him briefly at the University of Texas, Austin philosophy department in 1970/71 where he was guest lecturer from Duke University. His course was Eroticism, Music and Madness.

Another of my benefactors instructed that if you bring something to mind again and again it tends to take on a life of its own and that in fact, if you are following others who have pursued similar meditations you eventually tap into that stream of consciousness, as it were, and benefit from the work of those in whose steps you follow. I have done that all these years with the knowledge imparted to me by Bill Poteat. That endeavor has increasingly come to occupy my mental activities and has been a source of inspiration and discovery. I was blessed to have the great fortune to have known this wonderful man. I am, of course, not an academic and am anything but an expert in these things but they bring me joy and more importantly, peace. It helps me to write this down in a more formal way than it exists in the books and papers scattered around my study and in the thought patterns, modifications, of my mind.

Bill Poteat used this course in part to convey his thoughts about modern man’s malaise. His thinking is that a large segment of western man has evolved into a spiritless self, a self filled with despair and self-loathing, that this personal tendency has roots in a fundamental philosophical conflict between Greek and Hebrew world views. Hebrew thought, being the basis for Christianity, is a primary underpinning of the western experience. It is this influence that creates, or posits, as Kierkegaard (Author A) wrote, the daemonic in nature, the sensuous genius, the erotic. This daemonic spirit is expressed most eloquently in the classic work of Mozart's Don Giovanni but its ramifications are much more than musical. This spirit informs every aspect of modern life. Poteat thought that it was the foundation for a madness that permeates modern civilization. He particularly thought that the development of atomic weapons were the most egregious manifestation with the accompanying policy of “mutual assured destruction”. He put together a tape that he played for the class that combined among other things the sounds of exploding atomic bombs with the music of Mozart’s Don Juan. At this juncture in my life, I am not so sure that it would not be more accurate to attribute war like activities to a more primitive impulse in the human animal than the sensuous in nature as posited by Hebrew shortcomings that flowered in Christianity. This is not to say that these attributes have no bearing whatsoever on the tendency of mankind to make war. It is an ephemera that we pursue here. Trying to pin down such cause/effect relationships is an extremely daunting intellectual exercise to which people, like Bill Poteat, dedicate their entire lives. My efforts pale in comparison.
Having said all that it is important to point out that Prof. Poteat was a practicing Christian. So was Kierkegaard, though he was at odds with the established religion of his time. The ESOTERIC teachings of Christianity do not carry the same negative baggage as that written of here. It is but one scenario that might shed some light on western history, on western man in particular, and how he has evolved as a sentient being in a world. I happen to believe that Christianity on the whole has been a positive influence. Take particular note that I, and not Poteat, focus attention on so called evangelicals. However, it goes without saying that I find a limited common cause with them in certain ways, particularly in the political realm. I think we share a common love of liberty and an attendant rugged individualism. This is an infinitely complex issue and any attempt to quantify all of the nuances involved will necessarily fall short. I would note in passing the parallels, I think obvious, between the activities of intoxicated youth (and yes, adults too) at rock concerts and those in attendance at an “old fashioned” revival meeting. As well, it is worth noting that highly successful political figures, e.g., Adolph Hitler, used the spoken word in the musical sense herein described and were able thereby to not just engender a longing in the sense of the sensuous but to make it into a power base, to use it to hold a whole population in thrall and set them on a suicidal course of action.

This post is as true a copy of the syllabus as I could make. Here I presume to insert my personal comments. I also appended Pascal’s fragments 72, 205, and 427 as well as the below referenced excerpt from Kierkegaard’s (Author “A”) Either/Or Vol. I.

In memory of William H. Poteat

"Eroticism Music and Madness"
Course Syllabus
I. "Eroticism, Music and Madness"
As principle, as power, as self-contained system, sensuousness is first posited in Christianity; and in that sense it is true that Christianity brought [the] sensuous into the world.
1. Arche' as Cosmos, logos, psyche.
Arche', first principle, beginning of the world {as cosmos, i.e., order, ornament, opposite of chaos; as logos, i.e., fundamental order of the cosmos, divine word or reason (believed) incarnate in Jesus; as psyche, i.e., human soul, mind, spirit, universal consciousness}
2. Arche' as davar.

Arche’ (Greek) as davar (Hebrew), word or thing, action of God in space/time. From root word “dibur” meaning “to speak”. Every davar expresses a dibur—a spoken message. Every physical object or phenomenon, in addition to its physical reality, conveys a spiritual comment on existence.

3. The ordinacy of Cosmos arche' –
Orderly arrangement, disposition of order as first principle.
4. The different ordinacy of davar arche'
Orderly arrangement, disposition of word or thing, action of God as first principle, beginning of the world.
     a. Logos is being, is reality, is divine. (Reality does "hide" itself, must be sought behind "appearances".)
      b. The relation of "appearances" to logos. Being and nothingness relation.
      c. Yet: Being is finite and fully knowable.
      d. Davar is not reality, is not being, is not divine.
      e. The paradigmatic act -- speech
  •   Speech and speaker: former manifests latter, but not fully.
  •   Act and actor: former manifests latter, but not exhaustively.
  •   The person cannot be known exhaustively -- by another, by himself.
  •   The Person is fully disclosed only to God.
5. What is the ordinacy of the Davar arche'?
      a. Keeping promises -- God's model.
      b. Is retaining one's identity
  •   Cf. Israel vs. Yahweh: "I will be as I will be" -- "absolute relation to the absolute, relative relation to the relative."
  •   Edward Chamberlain, Bendrix.


II. So -- whether you have the ordinacy of a finite Cosmos, or that of a providential divine will -- faithful Yahweh -- as alternative principles, you still do not have "restlessness and tumult, infinity."
A. How then does Xianity posit that spiritually (pneumatically) qualified sensuousness expressed in the musical Don Giovanni in Mozart's opera?
B. Xianity destroyed the finite, harmonious and fully intelligible cosmos of Grk. thought by substituting davar (the speaking and heard word) for logos (the word as written and read).
The book of Mark, 16:15 “Go into the world and PREACH the gospel…!” Proselytize, evangelize, stand in a pulpit and exhort the congregation. Passion is key to success of evangelizing. I would further note that, to my knowledge Jesus never wrote. Any reference to his teaching always follows the form “Jesus said so and so.” I think this simple fact goes a long way towards verifying the thought of Kierkegaard and Poteat.
C. This made the relation between medium and its content more equivocal and contingent.
  • Reality does not hide behind appearances -- logos behind aesheta.
  • Reality is equivocally manifest as a person is always equivocally manifest in his speech.
  • Reality of man is contingently manifest inasmuch as he cannot fully indwell his own speech.
D. But the medium of speech becomes radically distinct from all cyclical and organismic forms of ordinacy; and becomes paradigmatic medium to reality.
E. Let us remember:
  • Language has its element in time.
  • It passes away in time in an essential sense.
     a. Because of verbs with 3 tenses
     b. Reflexive first personal pronouns -- thereby making a constant reference to the world as radically experienced by each of us in our bodies.
     c. That inasmuch as speech has its element in time:
  • The sensuous element is negatived
  • Therefore: as a medium, speech frees us from ordinate nature, thereby giving us spirit --while restoring ordinacy at a higher level. (We "hear" the meaning not the "sounds")
F. Yet -- the very equivocalness and contingency of the relation between this medium and its content has consequences:
  • Emphasizes the importance of fidelity to the spoken word -- the promise -- with Yahweh as model. Our words are forever in danger of becoming "musical".
  • Thereby suggests an antithesis to itself.
  • The loss of identity in passion finds a perfect expression in another medium which has its element in time, viz., music.
Evangelism aims to create a sense of passion as an instrumentality of loss of identity to a separate reality, abode of the divine. Intense emotional response and so called speaking in tongues is outward appearance of this. The speech of the evangelist is more music than word. One goes beyond listening for the meaning and listens for the “beyond” and in a sense goes there to the point of being in trance like state even at times, fainting.
     a. Sensuousness is pneumaticized, i.e., freed from ordinate nature, by music because it hurries in a perpetual vanishing and has no reflexivity.
Pneuma, the vital spirit, the soul, or the spirit of God as holy ghost. Sensuousness comes to be filled with soul, i.e., soul is transfigured as sensuousness, the erotic in nature, and thus assumes characteristic of the daemonic. Evil is state of being insatiable, forever seeking fulfillment through sensual gratification.
     b. We hear the "restlessness, tumult and infinity," not the sounds.
     c. Eroticism thus becomes a power in itself.
     d. It is inordinate, discarnate, spiritual, infinite, erotic longing.
It is a chaotic, disembodied spirit totally given over to infinite, erotic longing. This is the seusuous genius of Don Juanism.
     e. Cf. E/O. p. 88 -- "The Middle Ages..."**
E/O is Soren Kierkeegard's "Either/Or, Vol. I"
     f. Don Giovanni is "pure, discarnate erotic spirit..."
4. With neither the ordinacy of finite cosmos nor that of an unfailingly faithful will, the world is neither eternal (as a Cosmos) nor contingent (as a creature which might have not been) and becomes "contingent" in the sense that it is underivable, as a meaningless surd.
5. Pascal's Pensee's: Fragments* 72, 205, 427.
6. If psyche (Cosmos) is no longer the locus of numinal power; and, if pneuma no longer corresponds to the Yahwist speech, then psyche (Cosmos) becomes heimarmene, the insensate prison of an alien and restless power in quest of a 'hidden' divinity.

Heimarmene, divine providence or fate in the sense of God’s justice-dealing activity. I think Poteat meant something other than this here.

Now -- both the ancient Cosmos metaphor and the Yahwist metaphor gave alternative accounts of the background of order and meaning in the world; they both saw this background as “holy"; and in different ways commensurate with human existence. When both of these metaphors are fragmented -- we are left with an impersonal cosmos and a homeless voice whose questions evoke no (Yahwist) answers. This fragmentation is, of course, what we are trying to understand.

Pascal advises the wise thing to do is just “contemplate in silence” the mystery of being. I agree that the default state is silence, peace. But absent any evidence to the contrary it is as likely as anything that God is a child with an ant farm and that there is no purpose outside that parameter. The cynicism of this view is astounding suggesting as it does that to see what we will do he invents trouble to throw at us, stirs us up with a stick for the pleasure of watching whether we overcome or succumb. This is as far as skepticism can take us, I suppose. I am personally more comfortable with less extreme approaches to achieving an understanding of being in the world. Coming out of that infinite silence of Pascal one can make a way to an infinity of destinies. The main problem with some views is they are just too simple and I think the purely skeptical, cynical view clearly falls into this category. One can mold life around the kernel that we live in an “impersonal cosmos” but it is wrong to do so. At the same time we can evolve unconsciously into a modality of living that means necessarily that ours is “a homeless voice whose questions evoke no (Yahwist) answers.” I think this is the obvious outcome of living a merely materialistic existence. One can consciously choose to believe that the universe is impersonal but those that follow the paths of Don Juanism, of the sensuous, the daemonic spirit that is materialism, make that choice unconsciously. It is made for them by their nihilistic solipsism. In the complete service of evil, as a majority of society seems to be, we all suffer from the combined madness and flounder in a tumultuous malaise of dread, fear, and anxiety from which there is “no exit.” I think there are good reasons to take different paths.

Plato, in the Timaeus, defines out of the divine, out of God, an aspect or facet he names the Demiurge. In Gnosticism this Demiurge is a divinity that is more builder of the material world than creator of the universe. He is the Archon, stands between man and God proper, and is capable only of endowing man with a sensuous soul whereas a rational aspect to the soul is an additive of the greater God. The Hebrew Jehovah God was identified as Archon by the Gnostics.

Speaking from personal experience, ritual activities of evangelical Christians involve dissipation of self identity in passion. A confused amalgam of feelings of not just joy, but guilt, anxiety, dread, fear, sorrow, and awe characterize the passages into these trances. I would point out that joy is not necessarily peace and also note Kierkegaard thought that dread was the opposite of faith. I wonder whether Christian faith, for many, is not also based on feeling? They try the impossible, to “know” with their body rather than their soul. They intend to “love” God, but is it not something less than God that they truly love? Is the trance itself a surrogate for the divine and thus is it not true that they in reality worship evil? God, thus, eludes them and their embrace sadly closes merely on the abyss. We are warned that there are serious pitfalls on the spiritual path, that evil is devious in the extreme and can appear as the greatest good, as the brightest truth. Tread carefully the path to God.

Look again at Don Giovanni, the sensuous genius as expressed in Mozart’s opera. This mode of worship of which we speak is not unlike Don Juanism, not unlike the tumultuous musical experience. Meaning is lost to feeling; feeling IS the whole of the Real, assumes a spirit of its own, a forever discarnate spirit, disappearing on its appearance, ephemeral and perpetually vanishing, seeking everywhere anihilation. It can’t be held and therefore is impossible to truly affirm. It is essentially empty, a meaningless, purposeless surd. Evil is that. Void of meaning and purpose is that longing for rapture, union with the divine in a “separate” realm, a heaven, to be carried away there to permanent bliss, joy, and release from the bonds of the flesh in order to join with eternal spirit. It is an impossible dream and those who truly find the essential truth of reality find that “the end of all our exploring/ will be to arrive where we started/ and know the place for the first time.”

So, for the simple person, is there a true path to the divine? Yes, and it is essentially characterized by humility. Fundamentalist Christians, and others too (secular humanists?), egotistically claim they have the secret to truth. This is not so, for, in a sense, the secret to the truth is bound up with doubt. One can never ever hold the truth, hold God, as his own for how can one hold what he always already has? “Salvation” is a process and I assure you the more you cling to certainty the more salvation will slip away.

* Blaise Pascal, (1623-1662)
Fragment 72
Man's disproportion. - [This is where our innate knowledge leads us. If it be not true, there is no truth in man; and if it be true, he finds therein great cause for humiliation, being compelled to abase himself in one way or another. And since he cannot exist without this knowledge, I wish that, before entering on deeper researches into nature, he would consider her both seriously and at leisure, that he would reflect upon himself also, and knowing what proportion there is ....] Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty, and turn his vision from the low objects which surround him. Let him gaze on that brilliant light, set like an eternal lamp to illumine the universe; let the earth appear to him a point in comparison with the vast circle described by the sun; and let him wonder at the fact that this vast circle is itself but a very fine point in comparison with that described by the stars in their revolution round the firmament. But if our view be arrested there, let our imagination pass beyond; it will sooner exhaust the power of conception than nature that of supplying material for conception. The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God, that imagination loses itself in that thought.
Returning to himself, let man consider what he is in comparison with all existence; let him regard himself as lost in this remote corner of nature; and from the little cell in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him estimate at their true value the earth, kingdoms, cities, and himself. What is a man in the Infinite?

But to show him another prodigy equally astonishing, let him examine the most delicate things he knows. Let a mite be given him, with its minute body and parts incomparably more minute, limbs with their joints, veins in the limbs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours, vapours in the drops. Dividing these last things again, let him exhaust his powers of conception, and let the last object at which he can arrive be now that of our discourse. Perhaps he will think that here is the smallest point in nature. I will let him see therein a new abyss. I will paint for him not only the visible universe, but all that he can conceive of nature's immensity in the womb of this abridged atom. Let him see therein an infinity of universes, each of which has its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; in each earth animals, and in the last mites, in which he will find again all that the first had, finding still in these others the same thing without end and without cessation. Let him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in their vastness. For who will not be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little ago was imperceptible, in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect of the nothingness which we cannot reach? He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him by nature between those two abysses of the Infinite and Nothing, will tremble at the sight of these marvels; and I think that, as his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption.

For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up.

What will he do then, but perceive the appearance of the middle of things, in an eternal despair of knowing either their beginning or their end. All things proceed from the Nothing, and are borne towards the Infinite. Who will follow these marvelous processes? The Author of these wonders understands them. None other can do so.

Through failure to contemplate these Infinites, men have rashly rushed into the examination of nature, as though they bore some proportion to her. It is strange that they have wished to understand the beginnings of things, and thence to arrive at the knowledge of the whole, with a presumption as infinite as their object. For surely this design cannot be formed without presumption or without a capacity infinite like nature.
If we are well-informed, we understand that, as nature has graven her image and that of her Author on all things, they almost all partake of her double infinity. Thus we see that all the sciences are infinite in the extent of their researches. For who doubts that geometry, for instance, has an infinite infinity of problems to solve? They are also infinite in the multitude and fineness of their premises; for it is clear that those which are put forward as ultimate are not self-supporting, but are based on others which, again having others for their support, do not permit of finality. But we represent some as ultimate for reason, in the same way as in regard to material objects we call that an indivisible point beyond which our senses can no longer perceive anything, although by its nature it is infinitely divisible.

Of these two Infinites of science, that of greatness is the most palpable, and hence a few persons have pretended to know all things. "I will speak of the whole," said Democritus. But the infinitely little is the least obvious. Philosophers have much oftener claimed to have reached it, and it is here they have all stumbled. This has given rise to such common titles as First Principles, Principles of Philosophy, and the like, as ostentatious in fact, though not in appearance, as that one which blinds us, De omni scibili. 3

We naturally believe ourselves far more capable of reaching the centre of things than of embracing their circumference. The visible extent of the world visibly exceeds us, but as we exceed little things, we think ourselves more capable of knowing them. And yet we need no less capacity for attaining the Nothing than the All. Infinite capacity is required for both, and it seems to me that whoever shall have understood the ultimate principles of being might also attain to the knowledge of the Infinite. The one depends on the other, and one leads to the other. These extremes meet and reunite by force of distance, and find each other in God, and in God alone.

Let us then take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the Nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the Infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature. Limited as we are in every way, this state which holds the mean between two extremes is present in all our impotence. Our senses perceive no extreme. Too much sound deafens us; too much light dazzles us; too great distance or proximity hinders our view. Too great length and too great brevity of discourse tend to obscurity; too much truth is paralyzing (I know some who cannot understand that to take four from nothing leaves nothing). First principles are too self-evident for us; too much pleasure disagrees with us. Too many concords are annoying in music; too many benefits irritate us; we wish to have the wherewithal to over-pay our debts. Beneficia eo usque laeta sunt dum videntur exsolvi posse; ubi multum antevenere, pro gratia odium redditur. 4 We feel neither extreme heat nor extreme cold. Excessive qualities are prejudicial to us and not perceptible by the senses; we do not feel but suffer them. Extreme youth and extreme age hinder the mind, as also too much and too little education. In short, extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. The escape us, or we them.

This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance. We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.

Let us therefore not look for certainty and stability. Our reason is always deceived by fickle shadows; nothing can fix the finite between the two Infinites, which both enclose and fly from it.
If this be well understood, I think that we shall remain at rest, each in the state wherein nature has placed him. As this sphere which has fallen to us as our lot is always distant from either extreme, what matters it that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe? If he has it, he but gets a little higher. Is he not always infinitely removed from the end, and is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even if it lasts ten years longer?

In comparison with these Infinites all finites are equal and I see no reason for fixing our imagination on one more than on another. The only comparison which we make of ourselves to the finite is painful to us.
If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole? But he may perhaps aspire to know at least the parts to which he bears some proportion. But the parts of the world are all so related and linked to one another, that I believe it impossible to know one without the other and without the whole.

Man, for instance, is related to all he knows. He needs a place wherein to abide, time through which to live, motion in order to live, elements to compose him, warmth and food to nourish him, air to breathe. He sees light; he feels bodies; in short, he is in a dependant alliance with everything. To know man, then, it is necessary to know how it happens that he needs air to live, and, to know the air, we must know how it is thus related to the life of man, etc. Flame cannot exist without air; therefore to understand the one, we must understand the other.

Since everything then is cause and effect, dependant and supporting, mediate and immediate, and all is held together by a natural though imperceptible chain, which binds together things most distant and most different, I hold it equally impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, and to know the whole without knowing the parts in detail. [The eternity of things in itself or in God must also astonish our brief duration. The fixed and constant immobility of nature, in comparison with the continual change which goes on within us, must have the same effect.]

And what completes our incapability of knowing things, is the fact that they are simple, and that we are composed of two opposite natures, different in kind, soul and body. For it is impossible that our rational part should be other than spiritual; and if any one maintain that we are simply corporeal, this would far more exclude us from the knowledge of things, there being nothing so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself. It is impossible to imagine how it should know itself.

So if we are simply material, we can know nothing at all; and if we are composed of mind and matter, we cannot know perfectly things which are simple, whether spiritual or corporeal. Hence it comes that almost all philosophers have confused ideas of things, and speak of material things in spiritual terms, and of spiritual things in material terms. For they say boldly that bodies have a tendency to fall, that they seek after their centre, that they fly from destruction, that they fear the void, that they have inclinations, sympathies, antipathies, all of which attributes pertain only to mind. And in speaking of minds, they consider them as in a place, and attribute to them movement from one place to another; and these are qualities which belong only to bodies. Instead of receiving the ideas of these things in their purity, we colour them with our own qualities, and stamp with our composite being all the simple things which we contemplate. Who would not think, seeing us compose all things of mind and body, but that this mixture would be quite intelligible to us? Yet it is the very thing we least understand. Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being. Modus quo corporibus adhaerent spiritus comprehendi ab hominibus non potest, et hoc tamen homo est. 5 Finally, to complete the proof of our weakness, I shall conclude with these two considerations . . .

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been alloted to me? Memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis. 7

Man does not know in what rank to place himself. He has plainly gone astray, and fallen from his true place without being able to find it again. He seeks it anxiously and unsuccessfully everywhere in impenetrable darkness.
** The Middle Ages had much to say about a mountain, not found on any map, which is called the mountain of Venus. There the sensuous has its home, there it has its own wild pleasure, for it is a kingdom, a state. In this kingdom language has no place, nor sober-minded thought, nor the toilsome business of reflection. There sound only the voice of elemental passion, the play of appetites, the wild shouts of intoxication; it exists solely for pleasure in eternal tumult. The first-born of this kingdom is Don Juan. That it is the kingdom of sin is not yet affirmed, for we confine ourselves to the moment at which this kingdom appears in aesthetic indifference. Not until reflection enters does it appear as the kingdom of sin….

[Footnote 3: "Concerning everything knowable" - the title under which Pico della Mirandola announced the 900 propositions which he undertook to defend in 1486.]

[Footnote 4: "Benefits are pleasant while it seems possible to requite them; when they become much greater, they produce hatred rather than gratitude.

[Footnote 5: "The manner in which spirits are united to bodies cannot be understood by men, yet such is man." - St. Augustine.]

[Footnote 7: "The remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day." - Wisdom, v. 14.]