I Am Weird, Therefore I Am

Do you believe in aliens? I do, because it takes one to know one: "man is the only alien creature, as far as we know, in the entire Cosmos" (Percy).

Certainly man is the only alienated creature, and what happened there? Why is he not at home in his only home? Why the restlessness, the neurosis, the mischief, the endless wacktivism?

Death and denial thereof?

Yes, there's that, and indeed, it is very much bound up with the vertical events of Genesis 3. We'll let that one macerate while we distract ourselves with other mysteries -- for example, the mystery of language: "most people don't even know there's a mystery," but "the use of language"

appears to be the one unique phenomenon in the universe [and] the single behavior that most clearly sets man apart from the beasts.... Yet it is the least understood of all phenomena. We know less about it than about the back side of the moon or the most distant supernova (Percy).

Language. By virtue of what cosmic circumstances is it even conceivable? What can we say about language without using language, thereby sealing us in absurcularity?

It reminds me of a skit in which a man called a phone number and was placed on hold. He was irritated by this, so he struggled his way out of hold and reconnected with the receptionist, who again put him on hold, which he struggled even harder to escape. 

Are we all permanently on hold? God will be with you shortly. You are #6,084,236 in line.

On the first page of Percy's Lost in the Cosmos is a list of subtitles such as

Why is it that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos -- novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes -- you are beyond doubt the strangest[?]

Or

Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life[?]

Now, if there is an answer to the question of WTF am I, and besides, how?, it is only conceivable if we are an open system -- not just horizontally, since that is equivalent to being placed on hold, but vertically. If there is no vertical -- no transcendent object -- then we are waiting and waiting... for Godot, frankly, 

in which two characters engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives. 

We wait and wait, and yet, the waiting is far from fruitless. For my money, Voegelin's characterization of the metaxy -- the great In Between -- is the most non-inaccurate account of our existential situation, i.e.,

the experience of human existence as "between" lower and upper poles: man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on (Webb). 

We are -- both in experience and in fact -- vertically open: "consciousness is consistently and unreservedly oriented toward truth and toward the transcendental pole of the tension of existence," and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Except deny the fact and thereby put ourselves on hold:

CLOSED EXISTENCE, CLOSURE: the mode of existence in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental (ibid.). 

But this open existence makes us analogous to a process structure, in which the form is a consequence of the flow, like a whirlpool or eddy. Stop the flow, and the form dissipates. The soul dries up.

Percy's Big Idea is that 

Extremely recently in the history of the Cosmos, at least on earth -- perhaps less than 100,000 years ago, perhaps more -- there occurred an event different in kind from all preceding events in the Cosmos.

Like another Big Bang, as it were, only this one an explosion into interior, subjective space. Gosh. Someone ought to write a bʘʘk about that, where 

there's another startling explosion -- or perhaps implosion -- this one into a subjective space that was somehow awaiting the primate brains that had to learn to navigate, colonize, and eventually master it.  

And Here We Are, in

a trans-dimensional subjective space refracted through the unlikely lens of a primate brain..., a multidimensional landscape unmappable by science and unexplainable by natural selection (Bob).

Eh. Who would buy it?

Percy conceptualizes this novel development as a transition from dyadic to triadic being. Again, I think he's on to something, since man is irreducibly triadic, for example vis-a-vis the endless cycle of Knower-Known-Knowledge. Obviously, all three are needed in order to know anything, but can we know the Knower? If so, it can't be in the same way we know immanent knowledge.

Nevertheless, Percy says that people "don't have the faintest idea what sort of creature man is," and for "the layman, language is a transparent humdrum affair. Where is the mystery?" 

It's here, and furthermore, we've got to do something about it!

But what? 

Grrrunt. I'm fighting my way out of hold. 

Not working. Could there be an easier way?

Signs point to Yes. 

The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person.

In the face of "this disintegration" resulting from "atheistic ideologies," we must recover "a kind of 'recapitulation' of the inviolable mystery of the person (Wojtyla). 

That's a problem for Future Bob -- i.e., tomorrow's post -- but let's finish with Percy if we can.

"My feeling is that the only way to get a hold of any 'science of the psyche' is to approach it through triadic theory," instead of the usual modality, which comes down to "a triadic creature making dyadic theories" -- which works fine for everything short of the triadic creatures we are.

That's the reason I keep harping on it: the only way to get at the psyche is through a study of triadic behavior.

Which I will study today and get back to you tomorrow. Meanwhile, consider yourself on hold.