Trialogues at the Edge of Myself

A kind of experimental post, with words of old Bob in black, present Bob in blue, and Dávila, as usual, in purple:

So, we are situated in an unending tension between two endlessly knowable unKnowns: immanence and transcendence. 

Agreed: No one in principle can ever "know himself," any more than the eye could ever see itself.

If you can know yourself, you're wading in a rather shallow pool. 

He who understands least is he who stubbornly insists on understanding more than can be understood.

I was in and out of psychotherapy for... let's see, at least a decade, all through grad school and beyond, partly because it was an academic requirement. Not to say I was sane. Or even treatable, really. Nevertheless, I took the cure.

Looking back, did I learn anything? Was anything really "healed"? Or, was it more like a ritual in order to become a priest in the secular Church of Psychoanalysis? 

Y'all think I'm kidding, but then again, you probably don't.

The cause of the modern sickness is the conviction that man can cure himself.

Nor can God ever be known, foolstop. Rather, both the immanent self and transcendent God are known in the knowing. Which is neverending and always beginning, like an endless riverrun to the celestial sea. 

Everything that can be reduced to a system ends up in the hands of fools.

Certain "arrows" or vectors are built into the nature of things, which I believe goes to the mystery of time.

For it is difficult to know what time is, but anyone can see that it has a direction. True, it also "flows," but it never flows backward. Just as spatial immanence points to transcendence, so too does the temporal present point to (and descend from) eternity.

I'll buy that. 

The tensional movement in consciousness develops as a striving for attunement: we seek attunement with truth as far as we can. 

If we do not attain it with some degree of satisfaction, then there is discord and misery in our own being. We become what is variously represented as evil, unjust, and unhappy men. The higher capacities do not master the lower. Such men may be a walking civil war (Webb).

Attunement toward at-Onement?

"Man's existence is not primarily an external or phenomenal reality but rather the In-Between existence of participation" (ibid.).

Which we have already stipulated, but if this is true, then we had better do something about it! Or at least non-do, AKA abide.

This In-Between existence is our permanent condition: "Somehow we participate and must participate in both the temporal and the spiritual, if we are to live lives esteemed to be fit for human beings" (ibid.).

Here again, this is one of those Permanent and Ineluctable Truths they forgot to teach me in grad school. But it's never too late to make up for lost timelessness.

The choice is ours, even though there's really no choice, any more than we can choose to ignore gravity. We can, but not really, for the person who denies reality is nevertheless subject to it -- as is true of the atheist vis-a-vis God, a subject to which we will eventually circle back.

Now that we've cleared that up, let's try to actually clear it up. We'll start with Pieper, because he's the clearest and most concise of the various authors we're attempting to juggle here.

Recall the title of the book discussed yesterday: Hope and History. History isn't only "in" time, but it is the form of human temporality; there is no such thing as a human without history, as the two come into existence simultaneously: man and history co-arise (and fall).

But hope can only occur in the present. While it reaches forward, it is first a "reaching upward" toward the transcendent. Again, it is fundamentally a link between two great knowable unknowns.

This is about as clear as it can be said:

The one who hopes, and he alone, anticipates nothing; he holds himself open for an as yet unrealized future fulfillment while at the same time remaining aware that he knows as little about its scope as about its time of arrival.

Again, hope flourishes in a space of vertical openness (o) toward the transcendent (O). You've no doubt noticed that history conceals its own meaning from us, and can never never be comprehended from within. Which calls to mind a cryptic aphorism by Señor D:

If history made sense, the Incarnation would be superfluous.

A bold statement, but let's time travel back to grad school, because it was by no means totally superfluous, it's just that the most important learning took place outside the classroom, with a lot of off-road reading & cogitating.

It was there that I discovered an enduring influence by the name of W.R. Bion, whose credo was The answer is the disease that kills curiosity. 

He also quoted Poincaré to the effect that Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything. 

This is at once the flash between immanence and transcendence, time and eternity, (¶) and O, Question and Answer, etc.

These terms, or ontological poles, exist in a permanent dialectical tension. Which does not reduce to relativism or subjectivism, because there is an ultimate Answer, only ultimately unknowable. It is, however, infinitely intelligible. For example, Bion wrote that 

The central postulate is that atonement with ultimate reality, or O, as I have called it to avoid involvement with existing association, is essential to harmonious mental growth.... 

In short, the individual has, and retains, what religious people call a belief in God however much he denies it or claims to have become emancipated. The final relationship is permanent, though its formulation is subject to constant reformulation.

Reformulated, for example, in this post.