The Coming Collapse of the Cosmos

No, not the merely physical cosmos, which might also end in a collapse -- the Big Suck -- but the real cosmos --- the one that includes the Great Between where the cosmos makes itself known. 

This is another kind of violent implosion: of transcendence being sucked into the immanent frame discussed in yesterday's post. Indeed, it's that great sucking sound that pervades our culture. Let those with ears hear!

Gosh. We could probably boil down yesterday's post to Voegelin's definition of the Cosmos, which is

the whole of ordered reality including animate and inanimate nature and the gods. Encompasses all of reality, including the full range of the tension of existence toward the transcendental. Noetic and pneumatic differentiations of consciousness separate this cosmos into the immanent "world" and the transcendent "divine ground" (Webb).

When he refers to the "gods," he means earlier and more primitive ways of symbolizing the divine ground, which -- like O -- is 

the supreme, undefinable, transcendent reality which may be considered either as the source or origin of both the world and the metaxy [i.e., the human space between immanence and transcendence] or as "the Beyond" that forms existence by drawing it into participation (ibid.). 

Now, it is interesting that the Cosmos should include this ambiguous Between, but without it the Cosmos could not be known. I suspect it has some similarity to Eliot's mysterious Third who walks always beside us. If ultimate reality is substance-in-relation, then relation is irreducible, and there's your Between.

At any rate, it is where all the action is. Think about it. Or rather, try to think it away. Can't actually be done. Unless you're done with thinking, for thinking is always "about," and about is a relation. 

Of course, you might think that thinking is only about more thinking, but surely you Kant be that stupid. You need to get outside more often. Outside your head. Beyond tenure.

It will surprise no one if I say that Democrats are the party of the immanent frame, which is founded upon the rejection of transcendence. It is an inherently pathological move, hence all the pathology, which is both a cause and consequence of their disordered souls.

Nowhere does Trueman mention Voegelin in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, but he prophesied all of this decades ago. However, his ideas and terms are so uncommercial that it's no surprise that he never crossed over to the pop charts -- for example, Amathia, which really only means  

voluntary ignorance motivated by aversion to truth.... its symptom is an unwillingness to be drawn into consideration of the transcendental. 

A better and snappier term would be transphobia, but that has been taken by our immanent transphobes, who are phobic of transcendence, precisely. This phobia extends to history, hence all the frantic rewriting: "It has a vested interest in the actual erasure of history," so that "Forgetfulness is now the curricular form of our higher education."

*Ironically*, it mean that the person with a degree in history has a degree in forgetfulness. Moreover, he has filled the forgotten space with (immanent) ideology. No wonder these folks are unemployable, except by the Borg. But there are not enough jobs in the Borg for all the ignorantia produced by the Borg. 

This is true barbarism, and it is manifested in things as apparently diverse as art, architecture, technology, consumerism, and the sophisticated ideologies promoted in university seminars (Trueman).

Not to mention the secular seminaries of elementary and high school. It's why Democrats are still standing in the schoolhouse door, only now preventing escape. "Home" schooling is redundant. It's just schooling.

Trueman next reviews all of the Usual Suspects responsible for our plight, including Rousseau, the romantics, Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Darwin (in the metaphysical sense), Freud (same), Reich, Marcuse, Adorno, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Gramsci, et al. 

Reviewing these transphobes again would be like pulling teeth, but I'm already getting one pulled this afternoon, so I'll spare me. 

Besides, there's a deeper principle that unifies this rabble, and they are just instances of it. Trueman even says that any starting point is going to be somewhat arbitrary, as we can always go back further:

To the question Where should the starting point be? there is really only one answer -- and that itself is a question: How far back do you wish to go?

Me? I wish to go all the back to Genesis 3 and to the permanent possibility of reenacting the metaphysical error therein. This error has two sides, the denial of transcendence and (therefore) of human nature. Eve & Adam were the first transphobes.

For example, Rousseau's Confessions is obviously modeled after Augustine's, only the two come to opposite conclusions: for the latter

the moral flaw is ultimately intrinsic to him.... Circumstances merely provide an opportunity for a particular action to reveal the immorality of his innate inner disposition. 

 But for Rousseau,

his natural humanity is fundamentally sound, and the sinful act comes from social pressures and conditioning.... he is basically good at birth and then perverted by external forces.

Depraved on account'a being deprived, or something. Nevertheless, this principle is "so basic to much of modern liberal thought that it verges on the platitudinous." Which is why I would rather not review it, and would prefer to have my tooth pulled the old-fashioned way later today.

Likewise, for Nietzsche, "the basic error human beings have made is to give themselves a nature," whereas for us this is the basic truth -- a nature that includes the possibility of making Nietzsche's perennial error. 

Same with Sartre, for whom existence is prior to essence, which is precisely upside-down and inside-out. 

Or Marx, who also denies any essential human nature, but historicizes it in terms of the "social and economic structures of society." Your consciousness is a consequence of your class, or in the parlance of the times, race, gender, and victimhood.

Darwin? "By dispatching the idea of teleology from nature, [he] inevitably dispatched it from human beings too." It's a long fall from man to apeman, but here we are, a planet of the (mere) apes in denial of their transcendent nature.