Truth, Freedom, Interiority

Perhaps I should start with some basics while my brain is still coming on line -- I woke up with a sort of fog in my head, and it's not dissipating as rapidly as one would like. Blood sugar slightly low. Perhaps that was a factor.

Anyway, the Theo-logic is presented over three volumes, and we're only only in the beginning of the first, The Truth of the World; this is followed by the Truth of God, and then The Spirit of Truth.

This first volume is actually an immanent phenomenology of worldly truth, without any bearing on God per se. That will not come until volume two, when HvB gets into the problem of finite and infinite truth.

Nevertheless, the second volume is surely implied by the first, for anyone who has truly stood in the ground of truth has under-stood the necessity of God. In other words, truth implies and points to its ultimate sponsor, without whom there wouldn't be the slightest possibility of truth, much less having faith in it. No: worldly truth is grasped in "the sustaining ground from which it emerges: eternal truth." It can be no other way, for necessity cannot be derived from pure contingency.

Any truth carries a promise, and the promise is this: "a sphere of absolute truth in which eternal being and eternal self-consciousness have always already coincided and by which all finite objects have always already been measured and... delivered over to be known by finite subjects." This will become clearer as we proceed, but it is critical to appreciate the relationship between truth, freedom, and interiority, in both their metacosmic and worldly manifestations, the latter again being a reflection of the former.

For truth of any kind quite obviously "presupposes a free, personal inner space." One must be free to discover truth, or it isn't truth at all, and freedom is a function of interiority.

Here again, this is our profound objection to the leftist tyranny of totolerantarian political correctness, which, in one fallen swoop, undermines both freedom and truth. And it also implicitly attenuates the interiority upon which truth depends, since radical secularists and neo-Marxists are absolutely committed to a blind materialism in which our precious interiority is just an epiphenomenon. Thus, no truth, no freedom, no objective interiority. Other than that, we have no problems with the left.

Now, just as worldly truth depends upon absolute truth, so too, ipso facto, do worldly freedom and interiority depend upon the Absolute Subject, who also happens to be infinitely free. We can never measure him; rather, he is the measure of us. Here again, this would have to be considered to be in the realm of the obvious, at least if one takes the time to think about it deeply (assuming other qualifications that the non-Raccoon will not possess, either by training, or more likely, vocation).

Okay, the caffeine drip is beginning to kick in. Unfortunately, Future Leader could stir at any time, plus I have to leave fairly early. Let's get busy.

Phenomenolgically, there is self and there is world, or interior and exterior. However, as mentioned a couple of posts back, while our senses only register the exterior, our intellect innately recognizes that the exterior actually has an interior -- that existence is the manifestation of essence.

As I reflect upon this primordial mystery -- about which I will have much more to say -- I go back to chapter three of the Coonifesto, where I discussed the extremely unlikely situation of a neurologically incomplete baby being born into the trimorphic structure of mommy-daddy-baby, the cosmic implications of which are well beyond this post.

But somewhere in there, I related this to that first bit of purely exterior matter that wrapped around itself and then persisted through time: i.e., that first cosmic declaration of subjectivity, Life. But the cosmic purpose of infants -- who otherwise seem so useless -- is to be the breach in time and space which allows interiority to come flooding in. Here again, it seems that the A.I. people -- much less the sociobiologists -- will never appreciate the profundity of this truly cosmic-developmental event. For it is to the evolution of Spirit what metabolism is to Life.

Here again, we don't have time to get into it, but Bion had a symbol for this interior process, which he called "alpha-function," which is basically the ability to "think about thinking" -- or, more to the point -- to actually think one's thoughts, rather than, say, being thought by them, allowing them to be hijacked by primitive emotion, projecting them, etc. Each of these interferes with the development of the interior world, and therefore erodes freedom and truth.

Now, a human being is not only open to the world, but he is also open to the infinitely wider world of other Subjects, beginning with the (m)other. Indeed, a good mother does not relate to her baby "surface to surface," but reaches "way in," so that they touch subject to subject, interior to interior, and ground to ground, in the most profound and intimate way.

Because this goes on for such an unusually extended period, during which time the brain is assembling itself, it puts in place the fissure in being, the crack in the cosmic egg, that will allow the celestial light in. Again, absent this interior space, neither truth nor freedom would be conceivable, for this space is also -- obviously -- the Cosmic Interior, with all that implies. It is why we can relate not just to people -- but to the world -- interior to interior and essence to essence.

Perhaps this is sounding too abstract, but it isn't. For example, when you open yourself to the beauty of virgin nature, and allow it to breach your boundaries and come pouring in, what do you think is happening? We've recently had a series of particularly beautiful days here in Upper Tonga, and I mentioned to an acquaintance -- a flatlander -- how odd it was that there was no such thing as an ugly cloud. He immediately launched into a dissertation about how he is an "empiricist," so that such statements have no meaning. Suffice it to say, I didn't pursue the subject. As always, the secret protects itself.

The point is, the human subject is not only a window on the world, but he is the only being that also sees the world as one big window, with the light of truth and beauty shining through from essence to existence. Imagine if the world were not like this! Again, this would be tantamount to a living death of severe autism, just flat people in a dead world (and vice versa).

But the human vocation is to serve as "host" for the world's beauty and truth, so long as we have a developed interior and allow it to remain receptive to being. In my view, the essence of psychopathology revolves around these two factors, 1) the absence of a highly developed interior, in which one has colonized a substantial portion of the subjective horizon, and 2) the extent to which the person is an open system (both horizontally and vertically), particularly on a deep emotional level. We will have much more to say about this in a future post, when we discuss the cosmic implications of coonjugal Love.

Damn, better stop again. No time to even spiel-check. Gotta get ready for work. I need a slabatical to really get into this!