An Interesting Answer to the Most Interesting Questions

Not being a properly enculturated man, I don't know anything else about Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Hernan Diaz except for an (interesting?) comment that “God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.” 

Presumably he has a more interesting answer, but my interest in pretentious postmodern Argentinian novelists is admittedly undeveloped. 

What would constitute the most interesting answer to these Most Interesting Questions (?!) -- all other answers being number two, or lower?

Let's start with the dictionary, because interesting is an interesting word, and leads to the question of why anything is interesting -- which is to say, anything beyond the immediate interests of our instincts, drives, selfish genes, and worldly ambitions. 

First of all, I notice that there are about ten dense pages of words with the prefix inter-, and even a separate entry for it:

between, among, in the midst; mutual, reciprocal; between or among parts of; carried on between; occurring between; shared by or derived from two or more; between the limits of: within.

What is the Principle of this great reciprocal Between of dynamic mutuality in the midst of two or more? Sounds interesting! Which is something

capable of arousing interest, curiosity, or emotion: ENGROSSING, ABSORBING, INTRIGUING, prompting a desire to understand, etc.  

Now, this absorbing desire to understand implies something to be understood, or to hell with it. 

Alternatively, it implies a reality or principle beneath the shifting sands of appearance, and we're back to Plato. 

As we said a few posts ago, philosophy as such is either Platonic or it isn't philosophy, rather, something less, e.g., mechanism, reductionism, naturalism, determinism, relativism, scientism, et al, each of which is not only anti-philosophical but the a priori denial of its very possibility. 

Let's quickly glance at this big book of Christian Platonism I'm slogging through so you don't have to. One author says that Socrates-Plato argues that "such naturalistic pseudoexplanations are not merely incomplete but rather radically different from what a real explanation should do."

Should. Which is to say, not just kick the can down the road, but rather, up the vertical road to what would constitute an ultimate explanation or first principle from which everything else is an entailment: "at the apex of the intelligible world is the superordinate Idea of the Good, the unhypothetical first principle of all."

Naturally -- or trans-naturally rather -- it presupposes an intelligible world which is the subject -- or object -- of philosophy, precisely. Why all the intelligibility, not to mention our abiding interest in it? After all, if it weren't intelligible it would be as interesting as a blank wall.

"Platonism" is just a label for the view that there is a distinct, hierarchically arrayed subject matter irreducible to the material or physical world.

And here we are, nor can we not be here, supposing we are to be at all, for our being is a participation in Being as such. 

I find that... interesting. 

Now back to our main text, Christ, the Logos of Creation. He represents 

not just a union of natures but a thoroughgoing and therefore utterly marvelous exchange whereby the one nature enters completely into the actual condition of the other...

Which goes to the whole "intra-" thingy referenced above, i.e., mutual, reciprocal, between, within, and derived from two or more.

At the end of this chapter Betz describes "a Platonic metaphysics" whereby the transfinite apophatic Nothing "becomes Nothing, in order that Nothing might Be." Or, as in the title of yesterday's post, Being becomes that becoming might Be.

The next chapter -- called From Image to Likeness: An Essay in Analogical Anthropology, is dense with highlights, so it will be slow-going. It begins with a confession by Maximus the Confessor to the effect that

God in his supreme goodness [recalling Plato's principle of the Good] brought into existence a rational and intelligent nature... in order that what He is by essence the creature might become by participation.  

The difference with Plato is that he sees our existence as a kind of automatic emanation from the first principle, whereas Christianity would regard it as a free act -- a gift -- from this same principle -- which is personal, not just an impersonal emanation. Strokes and folks, Greeks and freaks.

The chapter itself starts with this Bold Claim: that 

metaphysically speaking, to be a creature is to be a nonidentity of essence and existence vis-à-vis God, whose essence is to exist, and that this, in the most general sense, is what constitutes the analogy of being.

Indeed, we needn't even bring God into the deuscussion just yet, rather, just posit a first principle of Necessary Being. The restavus are strictly unnecessary or contingent accidents waiting to happen, and boy do they. 

To be perfectly accurate, we would be accidental entailments if the first principle were impersonal. If it is personal, then our own personhood participates in this necessary Person, or in the very principle of Personhood. 

Or just say in Our image, according to Our likeness. Looked at this way, there is -intra all over the place. Which is interesting.

For it is only in this way, by entering into reality, and to the extent that we are one with reality, that we can become who we are....

Alternatively, it may befall us "that the gap between one's essence and one's existence, which somehow [recalling the sketchy events of Genesis 3] fell apart, is closed."

Vertical closure. Bad! But because of this ontological closure, "we fail to become likenesses of God. For we think that what we are at any given moment is simply what we are, that our existence is our essence."

Now, bear in mind that only God's essence is to exist, so failure to be open to this makes us either little essential godlings -- or, more likely, big existential devils, and the rest is history.

The real situation is far more... intriguing, 

that what we are is not fixed from the start but given in the form of a potency to be realized over time.... 

Human beings are by nature beings with a vocation [a calling, supposing we take the call] to become what they are, with the corollary that human beings can also, for a number of [sketchy] reasons, tragically fail to do so... 

Now, I don't judge, but are any of us really intended to be postmodern atheistic storytellers? It's an interesting question. 

In any event, there is a "mysterious teleology at work within [there's that word again] material nature," a kind of 

telos calling from within... to realize some higher rational-spiritual nature that is mysteriously hidden within its psycho-somatic nature like the seed of some higher life but whose full realization depends on any number of [admittedly sketchy] internal and external factors.

I like mysteries. They're... engrossing. Put conversely, what could be less interesting and more gross than a complete absence of mystery? 

"In sum, the human being is uniquely in nature but more than nature." Within but not thereof. 

Wow, we've already surpassed our daily dose of 1,000 words, nor do I want readers to overdose and thereby lose even more interest. To be continued...