Expanding upon the previous post, recall that -- for how could you forget? -- IT IS and I AM.
We don't want to say "therefore," because each is a spontaneous realization that isn't deduced from or reducible to anything else. This is the Rock Bottom upon which we will build this post.
As mentioned this morning, there is the ocean (of being) and there is the shore (of intelligence and knowledge of being, which is truth).
Nor is man able to drink the ocean, only drink from the ocean. If the human subject could somehow contain "the whole reservoir of truth," it would suffer a fate worse than Midas, for
wherever it turned, it could find only itself and its own truth. Just as Midas could not eat anything without turning it to gold, the subject could not receive any truth that it did not already recognize as its own.
Absolute boredom. Might this be another hint about what goes on behind the door of the Trinity, and why the party there never stops?
Back to the simultaneous recognition of IT and of I, of being and subject:
We need to understand that self-knowledge and the disclosure of the world are not just simultaneous but intrinsically inseparable (emphasis mine).
Again, not I think, therefore I am: "It is not as if the worldly subject began with a kind of solitary self-preoccupation," and after pondering it for awhile,
realized that it also had the ability to apprehend other truth outside of its ego. Rather, one knows oneself simultaneously with actually being addressed by another's truth....
There is no moment when subjectivity monadically and self-sufficiently rests in itself. Rather, subjectivity is a matter of finding oneself always already engaged with the world.
Just wanted to clear that up.
Okay then, if intelligible being is on the ocean side and we're on the shore, how is progress possible? Good question.
[K]nowledge does indeed make authentic progress, which means that there is such a thing as certitude but that every new step displays the field of truth in ever greater, ever more infinite enlargements.
It's like the ocean of being gets bigger, which of course it doesn't. Rather,
The more of the truth the subject manages to master, the more the truth overmasters it.
So, it's always high tide, but we learn how to swim:
At the beginning of knowledge is an expectant readiness... Yet insofar as each new truth opens and promises further truth, this readiness does not gradually grow numb or surfeited but, on the contrary, becomes increasingly intense.
Yes, INTENSE!
The more particular truth the subject comes to know, the higher and vaster the firmament of truth as a whole arches above him.
Very much as if the bigger we get the smaller we become, but also vice versa, for the poor in spirit shall inherit the cosmos.
It all reminds me of O, which is to say,
a sphere of absolute identity on which all reality and truth in the world are necessarily based.
No comments:
Post a Comment