It's All Too Much

For me, anyway. The more I learn, the less I know. At this rate, we'll know nothing by the end of this post, if not before.

Number two of Clarke's six main themes of metaphysical reflection is existence as the act of presence. This involves a shift of perspective from the Whatness of things to their sheer Isnsess; from the form of existents to existence itself,

seen as the radical underlying act of presence in each real being by which all beings are real -- i.e., actually present in the universe and actively present to all other beings.

This is the most general category we may conceive, surpassed only by the God whom we can never conceive; I like to think of God the Father as Beyond-Being, and Being as eternally conceived and begotten in his matrix/womb. I'm not saying this is correct, only that it helps me to think the unthinkable. Ignore the names and just think of an eternally generative perichoretical dance between....

Come to think of it, this gnotion can be fruitfully applied to any number of ultimate categories, from Beyond-Being <--> Being on down, e.g., eternity/time, whole/part, absolute/relative, personal/interpersonal, wave/particle, subject/object, etc. We can never finally come down on one side or the other without either denying half of reality, or illicitly smuggling properties of one complementarity into the other.

For example, you can't just eliminate truth or free will from the cosmos and then proceed as if nothing has happened. Because if there is no truth or freedom, there is no thinking, period. Conversely, if you are actually thinking, and your thoughts are conformed to reality -- i.e., disclose truth -- this alone implies a great deal, to put it mildly.

Truth and Presence. Can't have one without the other: for

the Absolute is either Truth or Presence, but it is not one or the other in an exclusive fashion, for as Truth It comprises Presence, and as Presence It comprises Truth.

Such is the twofold nature of all theophanies; thus Christ is essentially a manifestation of Divine Presence, but he is thereby also Truth: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” No one enters into the saving proximity of the Absolute except through a manifestation of the Absolute, be it a priori Presence or Truth (Schuon).

In other words, we must know the truth, and the truth shall se us free, not as a horizontal "consequence" but because these are two sides of the same coin-cidence. Truth coincides with freedom and presence; not to mention love and beauty.

But let's not put words or thoughts into Clarke's mouth or head. What does he say?

The principle of existence is not a form or structure in things, a "what," but rather an inner dynamic act of presence that makes all forms of structures actually present as diverse modes of the radical "energy" of existence.

In short: existence is an inner dynamic Act of Presence.

It's difficult to put these things into words without sounding like one is high, or even Heidegger. But there it is, right here and right now: an interior dynamism presently acting as active presence of interiority-truth-freedom. Or something. Let's try to find some clarity here. We are fumbling around in the dark, but let us grope for the damn light switch!

Clarke:

every real being, in virtue of its in-dwelling act of existence, has the power to express itself, relate itself to the rest of the universe, communicate its own existential energy to other beings.

In other words, because the existence of the Cosmos is an Act of Presence, it is present before us as precisely that communicative Act. If this weren't the case, then the created world wouldn't speak to us so coherently and intelligibly, and to the extent that we "understood" it, we would be understanding nothing.

Bob, you are really on a roll this morning -- a roll of obscurity. You sound positively tenured. Another stab? I guess we're not alone:

this deep-lying act of existence at the core of every being, as the ultimate bond of union between all real things, does not come easily to a common-sense vision of the world, more concerned with what things are and how they act than that they are.

Mere common sense must be supplemented with uncommon nonsense. This requires a kind of "metaphysical conversion." I would say we must be born again, or undergo a metanoia, a "turning around" from existence to being; we have to get out of the tired rutness of Whatness and into the spirited business of Isness.

This latter is truly the business of God, or of God's first business: first and foremost he is busy with Isness.

Clarke quotes Shelley, who said that The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. Note the irony: clarity can impose its own special kind of fog, which is surely the case vis-a-vis any ideology, from Marxism to Darwinism to atheism and All the Rest.

Indeed, there is a power of negative thinking, or better, a complementarity between apophatic (+) and cataphatic (-) theologies. Can't get more mainstream than Thomas Aquinas, whose "anti-doctrine" of God

never tells us what God is, only what God is not. His entire approach is to undermine all our idolatrous attempts to turn God into something understandable or controllable....

Well, if that's the way he feels about it, I'll just shut-up.