Absurcularity and Transpirality

We're now into Volume II of The Matter With Things, subtitled The Unforeseen Nature of Reality. As with the first volume we'll try to review one chapter a day, but that may not be possible, since this volume tackles modest subjects such as, oh, life, time, consciousness, and purpose. 

The first chapter, The Coincidentia Oppositorum -- that's coincidence of opposites for those of you living in Rio Linda -- is right in our karmic wheelhouse, being that we have written countless posts on the centrality of complementarity, in particular, of primordial complementarities such as time and eternity, absolute and infinite, male and female, form and substance, vertical and horizontal, et al.

This is somewhat of a continuation of the previous chapter, which pointed out how trivial or superficial truths may contradict one another, whereas the opposite of a deep truth may well be another deep truth. McGilchrist quotes Niels Bohr -- father of the complementarity principle -- to this effect:

It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth. 

Or as we say, orthoparadox. 

Okay, but how do we avoid a vicious dualism at the heart of things? This riddle was solved for me by Charles Hartshorne, who essentially said that, in the case of a true complementarity, one of the two will nevertheless be more fundamental -- for example, vertical could give rise to horizontal, but not vice versa. Analogously, all the matter in the world will never add up to spirit. 

Male and Female? Interesting question. I don't want to spark a controversy, but there are those who would insist that Female must be implicitly behind it all, and I myself am partial to this view. 

It is explicitly expressed with the idea of Beyond-Being giving rise to Being, and more implicitly in certain esoteric connotations of Mary. At the very least, this complementarity will have to sneak into a sidedoor of your metaphysic.

I might add that threeness is another way of escaping from a two-timing impasse, and we'll no doubt return to this subject later.

But let's stay on track. Problem is, McGilchrist is once again preaching to the long-converted, so I find myself just nodding off in agreement, for example, "A tension between opposites is at the heart of all creativity," from Lennon-McCartney to Miles and Trane. 

This is new, but notice how it corresponds perfectly with what was said above about one complementarity being more fundamental than the other:

The right hemisphere can incorporate the left's take, but the left cannot incorporate that of the right. The mechanistic vision can come only from experience, even if it is an experience from which much has been excluded....

Likewise, we may begin with a 

description in terms of physics, but could never progress from that to the experiential tree; whereas we can begin with the experience [of the tree] and later incorporate within it the physics.

In short, "the experience of the tree can never emerge from the mechanistic vision," which is really just straight-up Thomisic realism, which always begins in the senses, from which concepts or essences are extracted. You can't proceed in the other direction; or Kant, rather, but that's another subject.

Each truth conceals another, opposing, truth, that becomes apparent as soon as we move from the abstract to a real world context.

Dávila expresses in compact RH Aphorisms what McGilchrist unfurls in prose, for example,

Any straight line leads to hell.

McGilchrist writes that

It was the painter and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser's view that "the straight line leads to the downfall of mankind."

Granted, but he doesn't stop there. In case you missed the point, straight lines are "an absolute tyranny," "something cowardly," "the rotten foundation of our doomed civilization," "atheistic and immoral," "criminal sterility," "forbidden fruit," "the curse of our civilization," "stillborn," "an aesthetic void," a "desert of uniformity," "prefabricated," "impotent," etc.

Okay, okay. Makes a fellow want to start a petition in support of lines.  

But the deeper point is that it takes two points to make a line and three to make a circle, I guess. I wasn't good at geometry, but in any event, 

The circle represents both the finite and the eternal, since it has no end; it also represents that which moves and stays still.

I'm gonna object, because the circle is a kind of phony infinite from which we can only escape via the spiral. McGilchrist says as much, in that

linearity and circularity can co-exist, if what looks like a circle... is actually a spiral, like an endless coiled spring viewed down its axis.

More to the point, could the circle ever give rise to the spiral? NO! The mere circle is cowardly, tyrannical, sterile, criminal, a curse! Circles makes me want to vomit!