Our Metaphorical Cosmos

Human beings, like any other biological entity, are open systems. Now, it's one thing to be open to objective things such as food, water, and oxygen, but what makes a human human is our openness to other human subjects: our intersubjectivity, a mutual indwelling that begins even before birth, in the womb. 

There is and never has been such a thing as a radically isolated human being who only later becomes "social." So, philosophers who imagine otherwise, such as Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, are not even wrong. They're anthropological nonstarters we can dismiss with extreme prejudice. 

How these [intersubjective] individuals come to be in the first place is a large lacuna in early modern political and economic thought (Leithart).

I'll say. Man is a "political animal" because he is an intersubjective animal, not vice versa. And -- as explained in my book -- the first society is the mother-infant dyad, which coarises with the mother-father dyad: fathers are needed in order to protect mothers who can care for premature, helpless, and neurologically incomplete infants.  

The principle of this mysterious and otherwise inexplicable mutual indwelling is the Trinity. If creation bears the marks of the Creator, vestiges of this intersubjectivity are exactly what we would expect to find, instead of the last thing we would expect to find.

Yesterday I read a book that expands upon this idea, called Traces of the Trinity: Signs of God in Creation and Human Experience. As always, it's a relief to discover someone who suspects what I suspect, and has targeted God as a person of interest. Indeed, there is sufficient evidence to hold him for interrogation.

Of course, it's not the book I would write, since I am too lazy to write one. So let's just flip around and expand upon what Leithart has written. It's a fairly short book, so we may be able to manage it in a single post. I will try to focus on the new rather than the same old same old you've heard before. 

You don't have to be an advocate of woowoo physics to know that

Nothing is other than what it is, but nothing is what it is except by the other things that dwell in it, the other things among which it dwells. 

We touched on this yesterday via Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Not only is everything in motion -- a field of energy -- but everything is everywhere at all times, and every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world. I call this alone a pretty, pretty big vestige of the Trinity, wherein the whole is in the parts, and vice versa.

Back to human development,

everyone I know started life in a pretty intimate "engagement" with another human whom the child eventually learned to call mother...

That's how I remember it: "We all begin life indwelling another human," and "if there's one thing we're not at the beginning, it's by ourselves." In The Beginning "we're already a society."

Prior to I think, therefore I am is We are, and with your help, maybe I can start organizing these chaotic thoughts without a thinker. We all start out as progressive crybabies, but some of us move on.

Society + individual are "equi-primordial," existing "as distinct realities only by virtue of their interaction with each other." 

Now clearly, to say that we develop is to say that we are temporal beings who change with time, and yet, remain the same. If not for the latter, then every developmental change would result in a new being with no continuity with what came before. As we discussed a couple of posts ago, this problem of time was handled very differently by pagan folk for whom "the fundamental agenda was to escape time" (Leithart).

Greek religion was a quest for a rock of ages, resistant to the flow of time, a place or part or aspect of reality immune to change.... All Greek religion was a metaphysical "quest for the timeless ground of temporal being" (ibid.).  

Again, we can find that illusory place, except we can't be there to enjoy it. The cosmic d'oh!  

But what if time is a cosmic woo hoo! What if "we say that time is of the essence of things, and that change is good, very good." After all, we are interrogating God, and that's what he says. 

Time isn't a problem to be solved. It's a wonder and a mystery of human existence.... Without change, we wouldn't exist at all (ibid.).

I would qualify that and say that "mere" temporality becomes problematic to the extent that it is detached from its nonlocal source and ground. Our time is complementary to -- we won't say timelessness. Let's just leave it open for now.

The next chapter is on the subject of language, and here again, without the mutual indwelling alluded to above, "language would not exist at all." In an analogy we've used before, "Language is like a Möbius strip in which inside and outside form a continuum" (ibid.). I actually prefer the image of a dynamic Klein bottle, but the point is the same:

We began yesterday's post with the Aphorist's claim that

Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others. 

Leithart writes that

The property of metaphor depends on the mutual indwelling of word in word, and of world in word.... if words indwell words, and if things and words are mutually indwelling, then metaphor is not imposed from outside but a revelation of the character of language, the intimate interpenetration of one word by others. 

This is ultimately because "mutual penetration is not something imposed on the world but the basic pattern of reality." 

That's enough for today. I think we have sufficient evidence to bring an indictment, but we'll spell it out further tomorrow.