Identity Noetics and the Tax on Existence

The Creator is Necessary Being, such that only his essence is to exist. Conversely, the problem with creaturehood -- d'oh! -- is that we are "a non-identity of essence and existence." 

It seems that all other problems are grounded in this first one, but it is unavoidable so long as we -- or anything outside the Creator -- are to exist.

Call it the tax on existence.

If God's essence is to exist, it implies that only he can be "self-identical," or at one -- at peace? -- with himself (or selves). 

Now, we've already stipulated that man is the image and likeness of the Creator, meaning we are an existential analogue of this ontological principle. 

But our reflection must be deployed in time, such that our becoming is always movement toward the "full being" known only by God, which is to say, a dynamic but harmonious union of essence and existence.

Indeed, the separation of these two seems to be what fuels the dynamism of existence herebelow, this because of the ineradicable tension between immanence and transcendence, which is analogous to, say, the polarity of a battery. The battery is dead, and so are we, when the polarity is collapsed. Or at least you'll need a jumpstart from an outside source.

It seems that God is the principle of negentropy, on which entropy is parasitic, so to speak. Which is a slightly different subject. 

At any rate, because of our queer existence amidst the Tension (between essence and existence, immanence and transcendence), "the identity of human beings does not lie in themselves but their proper identity can be found only outside and beyond themselves." 

But it turns out that this too is an analogue, in that the "identity" of the Father is found in the Son, and vice versa, for again, the Father couldn't be one without the Son, only this Son has never not been.

Why is there any dynamism at all, from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology to what you and I are doing right now? And is this dynamism nothing more than local agitation akin to existential Brownian motion, or is it growing somewhere? 

Where is the nonlocal telovator, and how did it get here? "What is at issue,"

and is logically prior to the question of human identity... is the question of the identity of the God in whom one finds one's own identity (John Betz, ibid all quotes above and below save for those of the Aphorist).

Good question: just who is this guy in whom we supposedly have our identity? Inquiring minds want to know, or at least be given a hint.

We know all about the diabolical invention of identity politics. Perhaps it is diabolical not just because it divides us from each other, but prior to this divides us from our essential identity in the God without whom there can be no such things as identity or essence. 

After all, the Devil is the scatterer, the Great Divider, and the events of Genesis 3 suggest that we can alternatively find our (non)identity in him, of all persons. The rest is history. Literally, for 

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God, another who believes he is a god.

Or in other words,  

Men are divided into two camps: those who believe in original sin and those who are idiots.

Identity politics is one of those annoyingly (ontologically) impossible (existential) possibilities, because  

For God there are only individuals.

At least until he chose a people to try to undo the damage caused by people. Nevertheless,  

The two poles are the individual and God; the two antagonists are God and man.

Here again, the two poles are also immanence and transcendence, or existence and essence. To collapse the poles is to bring about the antagonism or enmity between man and his transcendent source, ground, and principle. 

For if the essence of God is to exist, then the essence of creation is precisely not to exist of itself but to exist by the grace of the one whose essence is to exist. 

"Thus, the moment we really begin to think metaphysically,"

we find ourselves "between," so to speak, essence and existence -- this being the indelible metaphysical sign of our incompleteness... 

Necessarily incomplete because try as we might, essence and existence simply cannot coincide in us. Man has attempted virtually every ønanistic wankaround in the vain attempt to found an existential loophell, each one seemingly worse than the last. 

Which is why the 20th century was worse than previous ones, to which our current crop of spiteful progressive mutants says: challenge accepted!

To put it mildly -- or better, insultainingly -- some assouls "have made daring attempts" to

suppress the mystery of creatureliness by forcibly reducing existence to essence or essence to existence.

And truth to power.

Such *daring* attempts have been made by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and existentialism in general, which either "absorbs and dissolves all contingency into its necessity," or else brings about "a decidedly brute and brutish hermeneutics... which refuses to acknowledge anything transcendent to which one might have an essential obligation" or relation.

This is a logical place to end the post, but there's more illogic to explain, so let's continue a bit longer.

"Over and against" the brutal absolutisms just mentioned is the analogy of being, which "immediately relativizes all thought and being as creaturely thought and being, disallowing every Promethean philosophical attempt to round being into thought or thought into being." 

These daring brutes always want to close what is necessarily an open cosmos, and run out of the restaurant just before the waiter arrives with the check, for  

Every "liberator" finally passes on the bill.

Put another way, to recognize the analogy of being -- and Adam's Big Mistake was in failing to do so --  

is precisely to refuse divine status and patiently to abide in the suspended analogical interval between essence and existence without trying to resolve one into the other or analytically to separate them, as though we had pure, unmediated access to essences..., or any grasp of our own existence, which is ever flowing and flowing away.

"Such illusory philosophies" -- and they are legion, just like their father -- "presume in one way or another, consciously or unconsciously, to master the interplay of being and thought, and so end in vanity."

Mere vanity if we're lucky, more progressive insanity -- and criminality -- if we're not, for their lengthy crapsheet always gets longer. 

To say Yes to God is to "ever more humbly and resignedly to get over the delusions of all seemingly self-contained systems and to recognize the creature's true vocation." 

We'll keep you in dynamic suspense regarding your true vocation -- your one job -- until the next post.