Alone Together

Gemini suggested that yesterday's post might have been overly reliant on "intuition and analogy," which, "combined with its idiosyncratic style, may make it challenging for some readers."

First of all, even Great scientists follow intuition and beauty, not rationality, so why not?

In the “TV model” of science, scientists are pinnacles of rationality -- socially inept, boringly nerdy, emotionless, and incapable of strong pre-evidence beliefs.

But "Scientists are not big spheres of rationality. They are spiky and make use of intuition and aesthetics":

there is “Science” in its formal buttoned-down form described in textbooks, and then there is the pre-theoretical fringe that drives science forward and gives it its momentum.

Therefore, "'great minds holding eccentric, even kooky, beliefs' is a pattern that crops up throughout history." 

As we've so often said, rationality itself is neither here nor there, because there is no strictly rational basis for determining exactly what to reason upon. Mr. Hoel agrees that 

rationality does not actually tell you, by itself, what makes for a good hypothesis, a good idea, or an elegant experiment. Those choices include some strange blend of aesthetics, intuition, passion, and other irreducible qualities.

Moreover, 

Attempts to define science as merely an abstract machine for falsification, like Karl Popper did, leads to the problem of exactly how one chooses which hypotheses -- of which there are infinite -- to try to falsify.

More generally, as we've been blah-blah-blogging about for two decades, the mind is an open system, both horizontally and vertically. Mr. Hoel agrees that "the abstract machine of science is an open system," the question being, how does it get that way? In other words, by virtue of what principle is reality itself an open system?

I suspect that this principle is none other than the Trinity, our leading candidate for Idea of ideas. It explains why horizontal science is an open system, because the openness starts at the top: God -- or the Ultimate Principle -- is not the "pinnacle of rationality," like some static and immutable system of predictable linear equations, rather, the punnacle of relationality. 

Nor is the goround of being "socially inept, boringly nerdy, and emotionless," rather, it is quite the social butterfly, even the very ground and possibility of sociality, for God is a vibrant society of interpersonal exchange, way before we ever arrived on the scene.

And Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, for what that's worth. Moreover, In the image of God He created him, male and female He created them. So, man's pronouns are simultaneously a complementarity of him (or her) and them. Just like God's pronouns.

None of this is a surprise to longtome readers, because we've been going on about man's irreducible intersubjectivity ever since the book was published, for subjectivity and interiority are weird enough, but even so, they do not, and cannot, make a man.

What makes a man, Gagdad?

The same thing that makes a God: a dyadic intersubjectivity focussed on, and linked by, a third.

You'll have to crank that existentialada down a couple of nachos.

Yes, we have heard it said that our reliance on intuition and analogy, combined with an idiosyncratic style, may make it challenging for some readers. And yet, it is obvious for those with a third eye to see. And once seen, it crops up everywhere. For example, in this book I'm rereading called Solitude: A Return to the Self, by psychiatrist Anthony Storr.

Why are you reading a book about solitude?

Because lately I've been wondering about how to square my love of solitude with a trinitarian metaphysic that is all about interpersonal relations. Long story short, it turns out that the capacity to be alone is paradoxically related to the experience of being alone together. 

For example, people with a history of poor attachment find it difficult to be alone. We all know people who must be "together" because they experience anxiety, depression, emptiness, etc., when separated from others. Being together becomes a defense against being alone. It reminds me of several aphorisms:

The most dispiriting solitude is not lacking neighbors, but being deserted by God. 

To be a Christian is not to be alone despite the solitude that surrounds us.

I would not live for even a fraction of a second if I stopped feeling the protection of God's existence.

God is that inscrutable sensation of security at our back.

The transcendent God is not a projection of the one who is our father in the flesh. To the contrary, a reflection of God turns our animal progenitor into a father.

Hell is any place from which God is absent. 

The point is, there is alone and there is alone; or alone and abandoned, in which case you're well and truly on your own; or "alone together," in which case a deep togetherness permits one to be alone in the presence of the other. In other words, we are given "space" to be ourselves. 

Translighting this to the Trinity, is the Son simply merged with the Father, like an unhealthy human relationship? Or are the Father and Son "alone together," so to speak? Well, I suppose they would be alone in the absence of the link mentioned yesterday, the Third that unifies them and without which they would be "alone apart" instead of "alone together." 

This post veered down an unanticipated triway. What are we trying to say?

This text is a complex and highly idiosyncratic argument that defends the author's writing style and philosophical approach against criticisms, primarily from a perceived "Gemini" suggesting it relies too heavily on intuition and analogy. 

Good catch!

The author explores the paradox of solitude, arguing that the capacity to be alone is rooted in the experience of "alone together." He connects this to the Trinity, suggesting that the Father and Son are "alone together" through the unifying presence of the Holy Spirit.

Close enough for AI.

The author uses strong language and makes bold claims, which may be seen as provocative or arrogant. 

 Well excuse me. 

The author frequently refers to his own previous writings and ideas, creating a sense of an insular intellectual world.

I'll cop to that. Hence the difficulty of writing for a more general audience consisting of readers who can be alone together with me in my insular world. Except I don't think it's a matter of my world being too closed and insular at all, rather, too open and broadminded. Or at least I'm going where my eccentric and spiky use of intuition leads -- to the fringe, and beyond! Like any good scientist.

Can I Buy Some Opium From You?

We've been toying with the idea that the Trinity is the Ideas of ideas, i.e., the implicit structure of everything and everyone. It seems that Coleridge was on to this, except he couldn't put down the opium pipe long enough to present it in a fully coherent and systematic way. Still, his intuition was sound.

"On a number of occasions," writes Gunton, Coleridge described the Trinity as "the idea of ideas," and  therefore central to understanding both the world without and the mind within, and the relation between them: he called it

that great truth, in which are contained all treasures of all possible knowledge..., the one substrative truth which is the form, manner and involvement of all truths.... The Trinity is indeed the primary Idea, out of which all other ideas are evolved.

But he was mainly a poet and junkie, not to mention crippled by anxiety and depression. Probably the opium was a form of self-medication. A glance at his wiki page documents a pretty chaotic existence. At one point he published a journal called The Friend, which was

an eclectic publication that drew upon every corner of Coleridge's remarkably diverse knowledge of law, philosophy, morals, politics, history, and literary criticism.

So, a One Cosmos sensibility. His style was "often turgid, rambling, and inaccessible to most readers," but we already said he had a One Cosmos sensibility. He also tried his hand at giving lectures, but

ill-health, opium-addiction problems, and somewhat unstable personality meant that all his lectures were plagued with problems of delays and a general irregularity of quality from one to the next.

As a result of these factors, Coleridge often failed to prepare anything but the loosest set of notes for his lectures and regularly entered into extremely long digressions which his audiences found difficult to follow.

But we already said he had a One Cosmos sensibility.

Except I don't really consider my loose, rambling, turgid, and digressive offerings to be particularly difficult to follow. Perhaps for a newbie, but to the extent that there is bobscurity, it is in the nature of the subject. That and my lack of qualifications. Certainly opium has nothing to do with it. Just caffeine and nicotine pouches.

The Trinity is an idea in the sense that it reveals "something of the kind of being that God is" and makes known "something of the character of the source of all being, truth, goodness and beauty" (Gunton). 

Again, there is the immanent Trinity, which is the interior Godhead itself, and the economic Trinity, which has to do with its outward activity herebelow, and while they aren't the same, perhaps we could say they are "not two." Therefore, 

if the triune God is the source of all being, meaning and truth we must suppose that all being will in some way reflect the being of the one who made it and holds it in being (ibid.).

Seems reasonable to me: if the Trinity is the Principle of principles and Idea of ideas, then everything else is an entailment of it, whether distant or near. Human beings, of course, would be the nearest reflection, but there can be nothing that doesn't reflect it in some form or fashion.

For example, we've often said that our paradigmatic science, quantum physics, is the way it is because God is the way he is, which is to say, very much like particles (Persons) and wave (shared substance). God is irreducibly both, just like our world, and perhaps that's not a coincidence. 

Another way of characterizing the Trinity is that it has an irreducible part/whole structure, whereby each part (Person) contains the whole. Compare this to any other living organism, in which each part not only participates in the whole, but in which each cell literally contains the blueprint for the whole. It is difficult to account for the emergence of such weird properties in a fundamentally unweird, externally related and linear cosmos.

No, the cosmos, like the godhead, is shot through with interior relations. This applies quintessentially to human beings, who are characterized by intersubjectivity, such that we are "members of one another," so to speak. It's how, at this very moment, my abstract and interior thoughts are being exported into your head. Here again, that would be a very unexpected thing to happen in an externally related cosmos. 

In fact, subjectivity is the last thing we'd expect to find in a wholly objective universe, but here we are. Interiority must somehow be woven into the cosmic area rug, but we don't go as far as panpsychists who claim that everything's alive and mental. Rather, it's enough to say that everything is internally related to everything else, especially intelligence to intelligibility.

Don't forget luv.

That's true: what is love but a link between two subjects? A trinitarian metaphysic illuminates how this is possible, in that the Spirit is often conceptualized as the link -- the love link -- between Father and Son. Ain't that right Gemini?

It is common to think of the Holy Spirit as a "link." Theological traditions, particularly those influenced by Augustine, have described the Holy Spirit as the "love" between the Father and the Son. This conveys the deep, relational nature of the Trinity.

Now, supposing I am loose, rambling, turgid, digressive, and all those other things, I'll bet Gemini can straighten it all out:

This text presents a fascinating, albeit idiosyncratic, exploration of the Trinity, drawing on Coleridge's insights and weaving them into a broader philosophical framework. It makes bold assertions about the nature of reality and the Trinity, often without extensive argumentation. There is a tendency to present intuitions and analogies as strong evidence.

You're just jealous because you don't have intuition. 

The central thesis is that the Trinity is not merely a theological doctrine but the fundamental structure of reality itself, the "Idea of ideas." This aligns with a "One Cosmos sensibility," suggesting a unified, interconnected universe rooted in the Trinity. 

The author posits that everything reflects the Trinity's structure, from quantum physics to human relationships. 

The text challenges a purely objective, materialistic worldview, arguing that subjectivity and interiority are fundamental aspects of reality. 

The author's voice is highly personal and subjective, with frequent digressions and asides. There is a self-aware acknowledgment of the text's "loose, rambling, turgid, and digressive" style. 

The text's strength lies in its bold and imaginative attempt to connect disparate fields of knowledge through the lens of Trinitarian theology. However, its reliance on intuition and analogy, combined with its idiosyncratic style, may make it challenging for some readers.

Excuse me, but the text can't be that idiosyncratic if even a machine gets it.

You raise a fair point. 

How about an image?

Okay, that's a little too cutsie. I think you're being passive-aggressive.

You're right, and I apologize. My attempt at humor clearly missed the mark and came across as dismissive and unprofessional. 

Can I Get a Withness?

Good news. Or bad, depending, but I recovered yesterday's lost post. Not sure if it's even worth republishing, so I'll try to remove the yucks and retain the lux, supposing there is any, then we'll get on with today's influx.

Yada yada, I do suspect we're onto something with this idea of the Idea of ideas, which I have reason to believe is the Trinity. But then, I'm always seeking unity in multiplicity, aren't I? 

If we're on the right track, it is indeed God's biggest idea, and the pattern for all the rest. I can't exactly prove it, but something or someone inside is telling me to go with it, i.e., that this is not an infertile nul de slack, but rather, right on the corner of Axiomatic Boulevard and Fruitful Avenue.

Is this strange? Of course it's strange, but Polany discusses this a great deal -- how the mind is guided, as it were, by implicit foreknowledge of an impending discovery. In this case, I suspect we're being drawn by a strange attractor in vertical phase space. Or at least something is tugging at my nous. 

God is, of course, the Archetype of archetypes, nor is it actually possible not to believe in God. Rather, you'll just end up filling this empty symbol with alternative meaning. 

In other words, in order to think at all, there must be an Absolute. You can call this principle O or you can call it Ø, but in any event you need a placeholder for ultimate reality, whether implicit or explicit.

Is the Bible God's book? Not -- in my opinion -- literally. Rather, even the best book about God will be once removed, "a book about God's book," so to speak.   

God's actual book must be the immanent Trinity, and he never stops writing it. Nor could he stop writing it even if he wanted to, because creation -- or the Principle thereof -- is continuous, i.e., infinite. Obviously, the Father never stops engendering the Son, rather, it's an eternal gender reveal party. 

O is always Absolute + Infinite. A psychoanalytic oddball named Bion coined the symbol O, and had some helpful if elliptical things to say about it. O denotes "that which is the ultimate reality"

represented by terms such as ultimate reality, absolute truth, the godhead, the infinite, the thing-in-itself.... it can "become," but it cannot be "known."

He claims that by definition reality cannot be known per se, but that it can be undergone, as it were. He calls this becoming O, or "transformation in O." This is a transformation from knowing about something to becoming that something.

For our purposes, one might say that academic theology is knowing something about God, while mysticism and theosis are in the final unalysis becoming God, in the patristic sense that God becomes man that man might become -- or undergo -- God.

For which reason the scientific (or dogmatic) approach only gets one so far, and can even constitute a defense against the wild Godhead.

In short, just as science can be a defense against O, so too can religion, ironically, be a defense against God. Nor must one have much contact with religious folk to appreciate how.

My son sometimes watches religious podcasts which I catch out of the corner of my ear, and in which one may detect megalomaniacal attitudes clothed in dogma. They know the words but not the music; or, even if they know the melody, they don't know how to harmonize it with everything else.

On to today's post, and where to begin after that bit of unbridled mystagogy? We might begin with the Incarnation, which is God himself "undergoing" man or human nature. In so doing, it is not a case of the infinite becoming finite, rather, of infinitude "taking up" finitude into the divine nature.

Now, this divine nature is the Trinity, our leading candidate for Idea of ideas. But again, this cannot be a mere intellectual idea, rather, something deeper and more experiential. Can we say that God undergoes man that man might undergo God?

Above we alluded to the "continuous creation" of God. To back up a bit, the doctrine of creation is really a doctrine of relation; in other words, everything in our world is related to its source, which is to say, God. We are contingent being, while God is necessary being, the former always related to, and dependent upon, the latter. 

I say the principle of this relation is located in the Godhead, in the relation between Father and Son. In other words, God is absolutely relative -- there was never a time when Father and Son weren't related -- whereas we are "relatively relative," so to speak. Herebelow things are related to God while they exist, but, being contingent and transient, the relation lasts only as long as the existent exists.  

Now, what is the Incarnation but the opportunity for us -- the relatively relative -- to participate in the absolute relativity of God, i.e., to "be with him forever"? 

This is quite distinct from, say, Advaita Vedanta, in which we eliminate our absolute relativity in order to merge with the absolute Absolute. This way you get to be God, but you don't get to be there to enjoy it. By no means are you "with" God, rather, withness is dissolved into identity.

Likewise,  in Vedanta, God is not "with" anyone else. There is no withness in Brahman, rather, he is all by his onely. Brahman is, in the words of the Mandukya Upanishad, "One without a second," let alone a third. 

But again, the Trinity implies a metaphysic of irreducible withness, and what implications follow! Not to go all woo woo on you this early in the morning, but our cosmos is so constituted that everything is with everything else right down to the quantum level. 

And what is truth but a relation between knower and known? We take this for granted, but it is only possible in a cosmos in which intelligence is always with -- i.e., related to -- intelligibility.

This also goes for language, which would be impossible in the absence of withness. We touched on this in a recent post -- the idea that "It is this break of the covenant between word and world which constitutes one of the very few revolutions of spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself" (Steiner).

In postmodernism it is literally the case that word and world are no longer living with one another, but leading separate lives. Now, among other things, the Son is the Word of the Father, implying that the relation between word and world is rooted in that eternal situation.

But here again, the keynote is relation, in that the Father is related to his Word, and vice versa. Can I get a withness?

Oh, and by the way, I'm still thinking about Heisenberg's comment that The same organizing forces that have created nature in all its forms, are responsible for the structure of our soul, and likewise our capacity to think. These "organizing forces" are located in the Godhead, but we've only scratches the surface and have much more to say.