You're Gorounded!

The previous post touched on E.F. Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed, which was an influence back in the day, especially in terms of helping me turn the cosmos bright-side up, and to heal those nasty ontological discontinuities, say, from matter to life, life to mind, and mind on up to O:

Man has powers of life [symbolized "x"] like the plant, powers of consciousness like the animal [y], and evidently something more: the mysterious power "z." 

With the emergence of z, "Consciousness and intelligence, as it were, recoil upon themselves," which is close to how Voegelin conceives apperception, which is to the interior or intrapsychic world as perception is to the exterior and extramental. 

Note that the World as such must include both poles, but that many if not most thinkers forget all about the thinking end.

Importantly, neither end is something we can grasp in a oncenforall manner; rather, we always live in the dynamic tension between them -- or even in the Between as such. 

I suppose I first encountered a drop of this nocean in the writings of psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who spoke of the "transitional space" between mother and infant, a space we never outgrow, to put it mildly, for it is the very space in which growth takes place. 

Similarly, according to Schumacher,

This power z, consciousness recoiling upon itself, opens up unlimited possibilities of purposeful learning, investigating, exploring, and of formulating and accumulating knowledge. 

Well, not literally unlimited, since we are necessarily limited by existence between the poles of the cosmic tension just mentioned. 

So much ideo-illogical mischief is caused by tossing out one side in order to eliminate the tension! Idealists to the north of us, materialists to the south, but we're always stuck in the middle (and vice versa, since this tension only exists in us, supposing we tolerate it).

BTW, does this make us relativists? LOL and STFU. For one thing, we just described the objectively scientific perennial and totally rational nature of man and his existence forever, so go annoy someone else.

Briefly, back to E.F:

Man can be written         M

Animal can be written    M - z

Plant can be written        M - z - y

Mineral can be written    M - z - y - x

Does this imply that God can be written O minus M? That's kind of a stupid question, but we will need to meditate on the nature of the relation. 

But for starters, man is a person, and the ground and principle of personhood is situated within O. A principle is that from which something flows or is entailed, and I suppose I would express it schematically thus:

O

(⇅)

(¶)

Although we are (¶), we always live in the tension of (⇅). If you're looking for the cosmic goround, you've found it.

Okay, but what happens if we ignore the tension? One of two things, or rather, two ways of the same thing, that thing being Genesis 3 All Over Again. At one end you become your own personal godling, at the other you become like unto a man, only worse.

But let's get back to Voegelin, shall we? I'd like to finish our discussion of this chapter, called In Search of the Ground, (which for us is the metacosmic goround mentioned above, for the Tension is actually in the form of a spiral. IMO).

The Ground of existence is an experienced reality of a transcendent nature toward which one lives in tension.

Concur. And it is our task and our privilege to be vertically open (o) to this transcendent ground, which is really another name for religion, which always, in some form or fashion,

means openness toward the Ground of existence, because we all experience our own existence as not existing out of itself but as coming from somewhere even if we don't really know from where. 

I know from where: O. But that's just a way of symbolizing my knowledge of not knowing in principle. Nor is it a matter of insufficient knowledge, rather, too much, as in how the owl is blinded at nOOn.

That is reason: openness toward the ground.  

Again, the ground is the supreme, ineffable, transcendent reality which may be regarded as the source or O-rigin of the world, the beyond, and the participatory tension between them. 

Conversely, myth -- whether primitive or postmodern (i.e., more primitive) involves a collapse of the Tension and an intra-worldly just-so story, from Witoto and his long leak, to the village Darwinist (in the literal sense). There's one Tension, but a million ways of making it go away, all pathological.

Myth as such 

can be defined, I think fairly exactly and there are no exceptions to it, as imputation of the ground to other intracosmic things. It is myth when you tell a story of an intracosmic ground. 

Looked at this way, a scientistic story of, say, the big bang, that pretends to be sufficient to account for existence is just a myth, whereas Genesis 1 is not a myth, since its whole point is to locate the ultimate transcendent ground totally outside the cosmos. One of its additional purposes is to counterpose this radically new metaphysic to all those intracosmic pagan myths circulating at the time. 

In our day, we call these myths "ideologies," but that's a somewhat new subject, so we'll close up shop for today.