The Manhappen Project

Back to our Manhappen Project, AKA how God made (and makes) Man happen. As the note in my recipe indicates, there are certain ingredients that must go into it, in that we want this to be a 1) thinking, 2) creative, and 3) loving being. But none of these things mean much unless they are turned toward their proper ends.

Man must be a relational being right down to the ground -- he shall have no final bit of unrelated substance -- both vertically and horizontally. Vertically he is always related to the Sovereign Good, while horizontally he is related to Mother, Father, Child, Spouse, Sibling, Friend, and Stranger by way of prolongation.

As alluded to the other day, thinking is related to truth as creativity is to beauty. And love is related to the Good itself. To put it conversely, it makes no sense to exalt lies, to create ugliness, and love what is evil, but what is a demonic political party -- the Democrats -- but a stupid one's teacher?

Freedom must also be in the mix, obviously. And not by way of a simple "additive," so to speak -- an extra feature. No, like relation, this goes all the way down to the ground. Man is free and man is related, full stop.

Man is also -- and for this reason -- in process. He is a movement and a sojourn -- an Adventure of Consciousness. Importantly, to say process is not to say relative, the reason being that the process, while a movement, is related to what is stationary, principial, axial, e.g., Truth.

Having said that, there is a kind of analogous "movement" in God as well, the difference being that this movement can never surpass itself, but is like perfection upon perfection. It is unending novelty -- even the source of novelty -- accompanied by... let us call it "delighted witness."

God is the delighted witness of his own belightful novelty. Each is "relative" to the other, which again is the ultimate foundation of Relationship. Call it Father + Son + naches.

Ever been delighted just to watch your child breathe while sleeping, let alone accomplish even more than that while awake? That's probably a glimpse through God's peophole.

(Off topic, but in the middle of the night a thought occurred to me. Remember the bit about God breathing the breath of life into man via the nostrils? Why nostrils? I was reminded that in yoga, one always inspires through the nose and expires through the mouth. There are many reasons for this, one of which is to imagine God's grace, or power, or light, coming in with the inspiration and going back to God with the expiration. Thus again, our in-spiration is God's ex-spiration.)

Back to the Man happening. We've just laid out all the "parts" or ingredients for the recipe. However -- and this is a key point -- our man will not be composed of parts, but rather, be a whole. Thus, each "part" can only be understood in the context of the whole, similar to how we can say that God has distinctions but no divisions.

Better, we can say that man is fractal, in that each part will contain the whole, as in DNA: each cell -- each "unit" -- contains the formula for the whole organism.

This is how, for example, a musicologist can instantly say "this is Mozart," or "that is Beethoven," or "wo, that must be Monk!" One could say the same of painting or literature. There's a distinct soulprint, as it were (or stench, depending on the case).

For example, even though I forget each post after it is written, if you show me one ten years later, I could instantly say that's my Gagdad! There's a kind of rhythm and logic and flow to them. There are certain things I would never say, and certain things I would inevitably say given the trajectory of the thing. This has of course become more pronounced as I have given up trying, but rather, just let the planhappen as it will, without precoonception or artifice.

In Thinking Beyond Darwin, the author cites a gag by Goethe to the effect that "From the top to the bottom the plant is all leaf." (Which reminds me of Petey's crack that the world is a tree of life for those whose wood beleaf.)

The great man's point is that the plant is first a whole before we divide it into various abstract parts. Thus, it is a concrete way of looking, just as science is an abstract way of looking -- of analyzing the whole into its parts. But if we aren't careful, we can reify our own abstractions, which ultimately redounds to a sterile scientism of pure abstraction. Infertile eggheads and all that.

Even more deeply, there is only one world, AKA One Cosmos. And most importantly, consciousness is entirely wrapped up in this world. One can remove consciousness, or divide the world against it, but just remember it is you who have done this, not the world. The world is always the world, not our ideas about the world.

In conclusion for this morning, it seems to me that the modern anti-Manhappening Project of analysis and dissection is ultimately rooted in a philosophical nominalism. Applied to man, it means that man has no real form, no transcendent reality, no nature. Rather, he is just a bundle of parts, and these parts are just random and contingent adaptations to a transient environment.

That being the case, there is no moral problem attached to literally cutting one of us into parts and selling them to the highest bidder. If something about this makes you recoil, it means the left hasn't yet succeeded in preventing your wholeman from happening.