Let’s indulge in another weave, as I attempt to inject some new blood into the old. According to google, the Weave is “A conversational or oratorical approach in which Trump intentionally departs from a primary topic to discuss multiple separate subjects, anecdotes, or grievances before eventually looping back (or claiming to loop back) to the original point.” Trump
rejects labels like “rambling”, calling himself the “great weaver of all time” and asserting that it requires a “genius” level of mental organization akin to a “beautiful mind” where everything is connected. He has also claimed that English professors admire the method. His digressions frequently transition across wildly different subjects in a single speech or appearance — such as jumping from drones and the Department of Transportation to lumberjacks, the stock market, or historical elections, or meandering through pop-culture references, sharks, batteries, and economic complaints.
After all, even without the new material, we are attempting the greatest weave of all time, which is to say, a brilliant strategy to locate the Cosmic Area Rug that connects everything to everything else. In so doing we too must transition across wildly different subjects and even pepper the text with pop-culture references before looping back to the original point. You might say—
Stable genius?
No, flexible subgenius.
Biographers, media critics, and political opponents view the style differently, characterizing it as undisciplined free-association, incoherent word salad, or a sign of declining cognitive acuity and rambling.
That… that’s just nitpicking, isn’t it?
∞
The subject is Eckhart, who was also a formidable weaver, especially in his vernacular sermons, which are not only full of surprising assertions but asserted in order to surprise. Here we might say that his medium is the message, as it is intended to blast the listener right out of the medium of language per se.
In other words, he is using language in order to disable language and vault the listener into a realm beyond language. Thus the use of paradox, wordplay, irony, chiasmus, antinomy, and explosive metaphor. Not all of it works, probably because of the different mentalities between today and 700 years ago. Nor did it work for the authorities, insofar as they focused on the literal words instead of allowing their minds to be blown by what he was saying. Nowadays we can be much more ironic about such matters. But there is nothing ironic about medieval inquisitors, including of course our contemporary ideological ones. In our day, academia, the news media, and popular debate in general have become far more obnoxiously literal and dogmatic and far less ironically self-aware. The worst of them are at once diabolically cynical and childishly credulous.
Eight year olds, Dude.
Indeed. Cosmotheandrism makes the ironic assertion that irony will save the world, at least so long as it does not morph into cynicism. Rather, there is a sincere form of irony, which is not the same as ironic sincerity. Rather, it is meta-sincerity, the acknowledgement that we cannot help but regard any intellectual system with a knowing wink and a wry smile — even the Cosmic Area Rug, insofar as it necessarily exists but is always under construction. Everyone has their version of the Rug, but the moment you reify it you turn it into something less than the Rug.
You end up high on your own supply.
Precisely: cosmotheandrism goes to ultimacy, not to the ultimate per se (Axiom 6). To reduce the latter to the former is to indulge in idolatry, or G3AOA. Which is why even in utopia it would be prudent to keep an eye on the utopians, because they will surely screw it up. Is this not the lesson of Genesis 3 — the dwellers of paradise opting out for something better? Here in middle earth there is always — ironically — something better because there is always something worse. Recall Schuon’s words:
Infinitude, which is an aspect of the Divine Nature, implies unlimited Possibility and consequently Relativity, Manifestation, the world. To speak of the world is to speak of separation from the Principle, and to speak of separation is to speak of the possibility — and necessity — of evil.
Which is why herebelow there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Yesterday we alluded to one of them: literacy. On the one hand it ushers us into an interior world of detachment, objectivity, abstract ideas, analysis, rationality, individualism, separation between knower and known, et al. In this regard it is the full exploitation of LH potential. Which is fine, so long as it is not detached from RH holism, synthesis, context, etc. To maintain this balance is actually the archetype of irony, since we must take our maps seriously (ultimacy) even while knowing damn well they can never be the territory (ultimate). Conflating the two is a permanent temptation that the Anthropos has perennial trouble resisting. We are surrounded by scientistic and religionist dogmatists, but truly truly, the cosmotheandrist has no dogma in this fight, except insofar as it is a more or less adequate map, not the territory. Our dogma — or prime directive rather — is to weave all of the useful maps into the the one Rug.
Truthitarianism?
We’ll allow it. So long as you mean that ironically
Theophany, Cosmophany, Anthrophany
A theophany is an appearance or manifestation of God, which, for Berdyaev, “is given above all in freedom rather than authority.” Which is a remarkable claim, because it essentially means that God can only appears where he disappears, so to speak. In other words, freedom is an absence of coercion and compulsion; it is self-initiating, self-determining, and open-ended. Therefore God cannot impose himself on free beings, but can allow for his own discovery via our freedom.
As we already discussed in Book II, freedom is indeed a principle anchored in the Theos — freedom being one of his many names — and is cosmically inexplicable in the absence of this irreducible principle: the very existence of free will illuminates a vertical trail of transcendence that leads straight back to the Creator.
Note that the existence of freedom isn’t just a theophany but a cosmophany, in the sense that our creative Principle freely creates a Cosmos that in turn can be freely known by man. For again, if the Cosmos were a kind of closed machine, it could not be known. So, freedom — or an absence of full determinism — permeates all three terms of Cosmotheandrism from top to bottom and inside out, each open to the others.
The absence of free will is precisely why my dog doesn’t know there is a Cosmos, because she is not free (and hence rational) to know about it. Rather, she is constrained by the canine nature in which she is enclosed, but in the cosmophany, man either escapes his nature, or — so to speak — cosmophany and anhrophany co-arise: we are appearances of one another, so to speak.
At the same time, freedom is quintessentially an anthrophany, which is to say, a revelation of man — of subjectivity, of inwardness, of the person. To quote Stanley Jaki,
in a certain sense, free will “is subjectivity itself.” Thus, we are free to the extent that we are a subject rather than an object. However, freedom can only be exercised in an objective world, which is to say, on objects, including “objects” within oneself.
Irony again: freedom requires constraint, just as objectivity requires a subject.
Therefore, it seems that the appearance of both objects and subjects — cosmophany and anthrophany — co-arise in the indeterminate space of freedom. I call this a pretty, pretty important idea.
Leaving the Theos to the side for a moment, consider the fact that if everything were subjective, then there couldn’t be free will either. Rather, there must be some sort of “resistance” in order for subjectivity to distinguish itself from necessity and objectivity.
If the world were a friction-free function of our will, then there would be no distinction or delay between desire and fulfillment — between the way things are and the way we want them to be.
On the other hand, if reality were merely objective — a world of pure outwardness and ineluctable necessity — then obviously we could never know it. Rather, truth is a function of the freedom to know it. For which reason all arguments against the existence of free will are so many proofs of it.
Irony. Irony everywhere!
At the same time, an absolute freedom — freedom with no constraints whatsoever — would equate to absolute meaninglessness. We might say that freedom is either intertwined with teleological purpose or it is no longer free.
For example, the Judeo-Christian affirmation of man’s freedom is “born out of the perspective that man was given freedom not in order to do anything he wants to but that he should be able to do what he is supposed to do” (Berdyaev) — not automatically but freely. Thus, ironically, “Freedom is not a right, but an obligation.”
In other words, we are created free so that our actions “may have that merit which only a freely performed act can have. God therefore has to remain a subtly hidden God, lest man should find himself ‘constrained’ to obey Him” (ibid.).
Creativity too is obviously bound up with freedom, which is why machines aren’t artists and artists are not machines.
Could it be that God’s freedom is ultimately given its highest expression in the existence of the free human subjects who can either deny or align themselves with him? If so, then denial of God is an ironyclad proof of his existence.
All of this is entailed in the metaphysics of our triune Godhead, in the sense that God indeed has his own Other, in and through whom he “knows himself,” so to speak. Although the Son is “inevitable” in a manner of speaking, we would not say that he is a function of necessity, the way a machine produces an artifact. Rather, supposing God is freedom itself, then so too is the so-called engendering of the Son.
The Son is God’s own theophany?
I don’t see why not. At the very least, it is one way of describing the otherwise indescribable. Moreover, — following Christian meta-logic — this would make the Incarnation God’s own anthrophany (and our theophany), while creation itself is God’s cosmophany. But God’s cosmophany must also be our theophany, for, as we know, the Creator’s “invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”
Who’s they?
Those entirely lacking all irony: the nihilists, fascists, bums, and other underachievers, the men who deny or suppress the truth about Truth: “professing to be wise, they became fools,” i.e., two-footed beasts, tenured apes, and credentialed chimps.
We’ll resume this weave tomorrow.