Strange Lifeforms

With our expanded definition of Life Itself, a lot of unsuspected things join us in the club, while many formerly living things -- books, people, ideas -- fall on the inanimate side. I suppose Aristotle is the one who first defined the discipline of biology, and it hasn't changed much since then. Or has it?

We are told that untutored children come equipped with the ability to distinguish animate from inanimate -- just as they are able to distinguish between human and nonhuman or mother and all nonmothers, who are second place or lower.

Which is interesting, because it seems to me that biology must be rooted in this unstated and implicit assumption that we already know what Life is without ever consciously thinking about it. I mentioned in the book that no biologist works inductively or additively, examining the particulars and then concluding that the thing is alive. Rather, it's something we are born knowing.

Which is a shaky foundation for a science if this preconception is not examined, or if it is subtly altered. In other words, you can't start with a preconception that needs no justification, and then arbitrarily change it. I'm trying to think of an analogy. Imagine I have the unexamined preconception that Jews are inferior. I then build an ideology around what to do about them, without ever examining the initial assumption. Not a very good example, but let's move on.

Aristotle, like the human child, has a much more general and expansive definition of Life. He maintains that "From the biological perspective, soul demarcates three sorts of living things: plants, animals, and human beings. In this way soul acts as the [formal and final] cause of a body’s being alive. This amalgamation (soul and body) exhibits itself through the presentation of a particular power that characterizes what it means to be alive for that sort of living thing."

But even this is begging the question, because he begins with an intuitive preconception of life, and then tries to account for it, i.e., it is something with soul (or better, anima, to distinguish it from its purely human connotations):

"The [anima] is the form of a living body thus constituting its first actuality. Together the body and soul form an amalgamation. This is because when we analyze the whole into its component parts the particular power of the amalgamation is lost."

I remember reading in The Phenomenon of Life -- my books are still stored away, so I can't get to it -- that for early man (man in his childhood?), Life was the rule, not the exception. For us it is the other way around; we might say that physics is the rule, life the infinitesimally rare exception, and mind an impossibility.

The secular world would call this "progress," but is it necessarily so? Have we lost anything in coming to regard the cosmos as fundamentally dead as a doornail?

I can't help thinking that this is what motivates those extra-terrestriologists to hope beyond hope that there must be life somewhere else, please!!! For to fulfill this hope would be a roundabout way of reverting to the primordial notion that life must be much more general, not just an inconceivably rare exception. If it pops up everywhere, why then it must be built into the nature of things.

Which I believe it is and must be, regardless. Remember a few posts back, about our right to Truth? I think this is one of those rights: you have the right to know that this is a fundamentally living and breathing cosmos with throbbing arteries running hither & yon and up & down, not just an iron mathcage or oneway physics machine.

In the past -- who knows, maybe even in this context -- I have mentioned the crack that it must not have been difficult for Shakespeare to produce his works, for if it were difficult, it would have been impossible. Get it? No one could have struggled to achieve such transcendent excellence, because no amount of mere struggling would cut it. There had to be something else going on, even if we have no idea what it was.

Well, I would say the same of Life. If Life is completely reducible to physics without remainder, then no amount of material shuffling, whether random or determined, could have resulted in Life: you can't get here from there.

Lifewise, if the mind is reducible to neurology, then it couldn't have happened and is not happening now. Rather, it is ultimately just atoms flying about in a statistically rare manner, nothing more, nothing less.

Yesterday I mentioned how certain texts are more alive than others. How can this be? Is there some mysterious force, an elan vital, animating the living text from the outside? No, I don't think so. It's much weirder, and yet, more plausible than that. Again, if Life is everywhere, in this case it would be a matter of arranging words in such a way that they render latent Life present. Hello, noumenon!

Er, how does one go about doing that? Well, for starters, if it were a struggle, it couldn't be done! Let's examine that quintessentially living text, Genesis. It's been with us for a few thousand years, and yet, folks never tire of it. What's going on?

One of the virtues of this translation is that it tries to answer that question by attempting to approximate the original Hebrew much more closely, as the sound itself -- the rhythms, alliterations, wordplay, echoes and reverberations -- conveys the experience of Life before we even undertake an analysis of its meaning. Much of this is lost in, for example, the stately language of the King James version. The latter conveys, say, majesty, but is often stilted where it should sing or scat.

According to Alter, various translations "have placed readers at a grotesque disadvantage from the distinctive literary experience of the Bible in its original language." He notes that translators have generally been preoccupied with conceptual clarity at the expense of this more direct transmission of meaning. Furthermore, the clarity or closure is often superimposed on what is intended to be mysterious, open, and unsaturated. The Bible

"cultivates certain profound and haunting enigmas, delights in leaving its audience guessing about motives and connections, and above all, loves to set ambiguities of word choice and image against one another in an endless interplay that resists neat resolution." I've mentioned before that if in the beginning is the Word, then Wordplay comes right after.

In short, some things are better lifed nonexplained, which is not to say unexplained, but rather, explained in a more nonlinear, or right-brained, or imagistic, or playful, or musical fashion. The language is not necessarily wideawake and cutandry, but rather, provokes vertical remesmering, or maybe facilitates a trancelight of its preverberation.

How to Tell Your Friends from the Zombies

A little sidetrip from the main road, being that I don't have that much time anyway. Still, a critically important topic, especially if one wants to be happy and adjusted to cosmic reality.

Reader Magister commented that "Feminists seem to be perpetually at war with their own bodies." However, this resentment is projected into men and into babies, as if it's our fault that their bodies are so sexually alluring, or the baby's fault that they have a such nice cozy womb just perfect for perpetuating the species. It's almost as if the female body has a purpose or something.

However, feminists reject the sufficient reason of their body -- for readers living in Rio Linda or laboring under the delusions of gender theory, that means the reason why your body exists. I mean, everything has a reason, right? Can we at least agree on that? Or do feminists now regard logic as an abusive form of mansplaining?

No? I see. It's a form of rape. Besides, that's not funny!

Did you know that 90% of workplace deaths occur to men? So, why isn't everyone freaking out about MORTALITY INEQUALITY!

In my response to Magister's comment, I wrote that, "Speaking of cosmic rights, the baby certainly has a legitimate right to the mother's body, which is why, you know, breasts. (Which are to be distinguished from boobs, which is what breasts look like to a man.)

"More generally, as we've discussed in the past, not only are our minds intrinsically intersubjective, but our bodies are too. Man and woman point beyond themselves and 'refer' to one another. So to say that we 'own' our bodies and that's that is a little simplistic, to say the least, and certainly not humanistic."

The reason it is not humanistic is that a) human beings could not have evolved from such a static situation, and b) no existing human being lives as an isolated body, cut off from the rest of mankind. Rather, a living body is an open system at every level, biologically, emotionally, cognitively, and spiritually. Or supposed to be, rather.

Now, in order for language, or information, or meaning, to exist, one thing must be capable of standing for another thing. This is an extremely simple and basic concept, so simple that everyone has it as a background assumption without ever thinking about how it got here and what it implies. There is no reason to take meaning, because everything is always giving it away.

Of note, this feature is woven into the very fabric of existence, and was here long before human beings hit the cosmic stage. Consider DNA, for example, through which a gene, or combination of genes, stands for -- one might even say "symbolizes" -- this or that trait.

But even prior to that, we know that the world is always susceptible to intelligible abstraction, which is why, for example, we can talk about a "big bang." We can talk about a big bang because of background radiation that encodes information referring to that primordial event -- just as light striking your retina can tell you that a star existed a billion years ago, or however long it took the light to get herenow in spacetime.

This means that at the moment of luminous impact, our present and the star's past, or the star's past and future, are thoroughly entangled in this moment of knowing. When the star gave out that light a billion years ago, little did it know that it would someday arrive at the back of the eye of a lifeform that didn't yet exist. But stars were bigger back then. It's the cosmos that's gotten smaller.

Now, the one Big Idea I have retained from the Christopher Alexander books, and has been haunting me (in a good way) ever since, is that Life Itself is latent or implicate everywhere in the cosmos, but becomes manifest or explicate under certain circumstances.

This is an extremely handy idea for discerning the Living from the Dead at every level of the cosmos. But it is really helpful in sorting between the humans and the zombies, because the language of the latter is dead. There is something wrong with their whole encoding system. They radiate Death from every pore.

Let's see if I can auto-plagiarize some stuff from those old bobservations. "Recognizing this life in things is equivalent to saying, 'The universe is made of person-stuff. I always thought it was made of machine-stuff, but now I see that it is not'" (Christopher Alexander).

Yes, exactly. Person-stuff. Among other things, this means that human beings -- better, Persons -- are not late arrivals to the cosmic manifestivus, but its whole basis; or rather, its quintessential expression, only made explicate and local.

This is why everything makes so much sense, but it also explains when and why it doesn't, because things are supposed to make sense. Absurdity is the exception, not the rule -- just as most things in the world -- unspoiled nature, that is -- are oddly beautiful. Why? What's with all this useless beauty? Indeed, what's with all this useless truth? And Life. More generally, could Absurdity be the ultimate ground and source of all this life, love, logoi, and laughter?

From an old post:

For example, this is why language is even possible, because the person-stuff of the universe is interiorly related and therefore capable of encoding and transmission from one body or region to another. Our ability to see the beauty or apprehend the deep structure of the world represents one cidence of of the same coin-. It is to receive the Memo and be in the Loop.

For this reason, we now understand how and why scientists are guided by feeling and artists by science. In other words, a scientist wouldn't even know what to investigate in the absence of a feeling that reduces the infinite field of phenomena to something 'interesting,' something that attracts his attention.

More good stuff in those old posts on Alexander, but the main principle I have retained is the idea that when something is Living, there is a complex interplay of elements echoing and referring to one another. I would say that this is why Genesis is so "alive" with inexhaustible meaning, just as it is why one senses so much life in one of them big ol' cathedrals. Indeed, the Geometry of Love is anterior to the love of geometry, otherwise the latter couldn't exist.

Back to our original question, which we might formulate as What is the Message of the Human Body? As it so happens, Schuon has an essay on just this subject in one of his best books (most of which go to ten, this one to eleven). But I'm just about out of time, so we'll have to reserve that subject for another sidetrip in the cosmic rambler.

Cosmic Perverts & Your Transnatural Right to Truth

That question I posed at the top of yesterday's post: does man have a right to Truth? -- I'm not sure I answered it in the way I had intended. I didn't just mean this in terms of human institutions and whatnot. Rather, I meant it in cosmic terms, i.e., whether man qua man has this right.

It's actually a much more strange and radical question than implied by the rest of yesterpost, because it wouldn't constitute just a natural right, but a transnatural right to know Just What the Hell is Going On Down Here. Seems like a minimal request to me. But the secular world doesn't even believe in natural rights, let alone transnatural rights. Literally. The google machine has never heard of them.

What, there are transgendered rights but no transnatural rights? What then are transgendered rights grounded in? That's right: just a boot to the face, i.e., judicial bullying. For what else is there when we have no intrinsic, which is to say, cosmic, rights?

There are few things in life to which we are entitled. To say we have rights is not to say the world is fair; rather, vice versa: the purpose of rights is to create the possibility of justice.

One thing to which we are entitled is infantile omnipotence. Mature adults are entitled to little, but the helpless infant is genuinely entitled to everything (one reason why being the mother of an infant requires such superhuman strength). You cannot spoil an infant, and people who think otherwise can end up with a child who spends the rest of his life in search of the Lost Entitlement. Is it any coincidence that the growth of the state mirrors the growth of single and working motherhood, and that the latter are the most reliably Democratic LoFos?

If people thought about this beforehand, they wouldn't bring so many children into the world without being able to fulfill their entitlement.

For among other things, a child has the transnatural right to a loving mother and father in a stable and enduring union, without which he will be psychically handicapped from the very outset. No one could seriously argue that a child has a right to a mother only, or two fathers, or cheap daycare, let alone to be aborted. If abortion were a natural right, then it would be present at conception, and few babies would choose to abort themselves.

Back to our right to Truth. This is truly central to man, because what would man be in the absence of Truth? He would be an inexplicable cosmic freak, an existential birth defect, the hopelessly absurd case of an effect with no cause, that is, a tragically unrequited love of Truth.

Irrespective of whether we are children of the Light or merely sons of the bitch Gaia, man's standard equipment includes this inborn epistemophilia, a cosmo-global positioning system which is ultimately in theosynchronous orbit around the strange attractor that ceaselessly pulls us onward, upward, and inward.

I want to say that this is not debatable, nor is it figurative, but rather, literally true, for it is what is happening -- and why it is happening -- when we pursue Truth.

If not, then what are we doing? Just solipsistically chasing after a mirage, or our neurology, or tenure? This would be like being born with a lust for the opposite sex on a grotesquely asexual planet, like a man -- or worse, woman -- in a feminist studies program.

With rights come responsibilities. We have the transnatural right to Truth. What's the corresponding responsibility? Well, there are obvious things, like valuing it above all else; or, to put it inversely, Truth has its own rights, to such an extent that nothing is more privileged than Truth (although some branches are coequal, being that we live under tripartite cosmic rule).

So, we have every right to demand Truth, but Truth has every right to expect us to cherish it, defer to it, honor it, assimilate it, live it. We can only be in a reciprocal relationship to Truth, and then only because we are ultimately composed of Truth, as intelligence to intelligibility: these are just two sides of the same transcendent coin (just as the human unit, on another plane, is "man-and-woman"). Or, one might say that one side manifests as immanence (world), the other as transcendence (knowledge).

We could no more have an inborn spiritual relationship to falsehood and illusion than we could have an inborn sexual attraction to another species. Yes, that obviously happens, but it is called a perversion, and there are spiritual perversions just as there are sexual ones. Do some people have a textual orientation to the Lie? Ya' think?

Note that in such a case, the same metacosmic attraction is at work, only misdirected. Think, for example, of Obama's comically mendacious blowing smokesman, Jim Carney. If you are remotely normal -- i.e., not a cosmic pervert -- it is simply impossible to imagine doing his job. Can you see yourself casually but insistently peddling damaging and destructive lies to millions of citizens? What comes after irony?

So, Jim Carney earns his keep by denying us our transnatural right to Truth. What an unrelenting assoul.

About some of those epistemophilic perversions, or perverse attractions. Haven't you ever had an unnatural attraction to something other than Truth? What was really going on there? What were you searching after, and how did you come to accept {x} as the answer? And why were you so self-satisfied and belligerent about it?

If there's a problem here, I think it needs to be traced all the way back down to the foundation, the roots, the ground. For there are opportunistic parasites all along the way, just waiting for you to fall to the clayside, when we are always properly situated between the realms of clay and spirit.

Speaking of which, this wonderful translation of Genesis -- AKA The Origins of Everything -- can offer some clues. Let's zoom into Genesis 3. Alter has a footnote to the line about our embarking up the wrong tree, stating that the Hebrew word typically translated as "delight" actually means "that which is intensely desired," "and sometimes specifically lust." Thus, our inappropriate attraction is linked to a kind of intense lust.

Lust for what? Well, the text implies that it is bound up with the desire to be God instead of being in relationship to God. Thus, it is none other than the misplaced omniscience and omnipotence to which we are only entitled in infancy, a kind of grandiose spiritual infanity.

I don't have time to get into details, but I am reminded of how, at the root of a sexual perversion or fetish, is the pathological defense mechanism of omnipotence. In fact, I no longer remember the whole thing myself, but this guy explains it (interesting book, by the way): the "central feature" of sexual perversions is "the degradation of the object to an object under one's omnipotent control," etc.

Just transpose this to the key of Truth, and you have a perverse regime that insistently attempts to control reality with words, narratives, and childish Barrytales instead of being in a loving relationship to the one Truth that unites us.

*****

Speaking of light and children, here is the boy visiting one of his baseball teammates in the hospital, where's being treated for leukemia. Poor guy is all puffy from the chemo, but has a great attitude:

Living in the Penumbra Between Time and History

Does man have a right to the truth? Or Truth rather? If so, then they -- you know who they are -- have no right to deprive man of it. In the name of what is it permissible to deny truth? I mean, besides liberalism?

Now, if we have a right to freedom, then we have a right to truth, since the one is inconceivable in the absence of the other. No wonder the two covary everywhere and everywhen, e.g., the self-evident TRUTH that human beings are created in LIBERTY. Freedom without truth is nihilism, while truth without the freedom to discover it is academia.

Note also the term linking the two: created. This speaks to an unbreakable metaphysical triangle, because both truth and liberty imply creation, being that they can have no natural explanation; each is the very essence of transcendence. Conversely, if freedom and truth are real, then we are created -- whatever that means -- and not a random accident.

This is exactly -- even if implicitly -- what the Church was worried about in the Galileo affair: scientific theories come and go, but the truth to which man is entitled does not and cannot change, unless one redefines truth to mean mere scientific truth, which is then no truth at all (because it is subject to continuous addition, subtraction, extension, and revision).

Something must transcend science, or there's not even the possibility of science. Either man has science or science has man. If the latter, then scientific objectivity is impossible, because man cannot observe the phenomena from an external and disinterested perspective.

I mean, look at this: physicists discover a new particle, and now they have to tear down the whole damn edifice and begin again from the ground up; yesterday the science was settled, today we realize that, er, "we still don't *fully* understand our universe." No. Really?

And physics is easy compared to the complexity and nonlinearity of the earth's climate.

So, what does this mean for all those physicists from the 1930s on who imagined they were living in reality? Turns out they were just living in an imaginary cosmos. But that will always be the case so long as one confuses scientific abstractions with reality, or placeholders with principles, variables with constants.

I was thinking about this yesterday on the drive to work, specifically, about the difference between abstract and concrete historical time. Every educated person has a rough chronograph to organize historical time, e.g., neolithic, paleolithic, ancient, medieval, renaissance, etc. But the more history I read, the more I realize that these abstractions are completely misleading, and basically a cover for ignorance.

Even something as proximate as "World War II" looks quite different if we magnify a small slice of historical time and examine the details. You think you understand something, only to discover that you have simply superimposed a cloud labeled "World War II" over an infinite space.

It seems that many approaches to history resemble the infamous hockey stick of of global warming: examine the details and the stick turns out to be pure fiction; it leads the mind by misleading the mind.

This is one of the recurring themes of Narrative and Freedom, which has basically blown my mind in terms of being able to formulate all of its implications, or reduce them to a manageable swarm. Where to even begin?

Headline you won't be reading, but is nevertheless as true as the one about physics: Obscure Slavic Scholar Proves We Don't Fully Understand History.

I suppose he begins with a trivial truth that nevertheless explodes like a depth charge: that time is open, not closed. But history, in contrast to time, is closed: what happened happened, and that's all there is to it. However, when we write history, we cannot help doing so from the closed perspective, which is fundamentally misleading.

Morson is a literary scholar, not a scientist or historian. Thus, he demonstrates how certain novelists have attempted to depict a more realistic view of time -- much more realistic than any historian can accomplish. In order to do this, the novelist must depict the present as present, not as a mere point inhabiting a closed and linear narrative in the novelist's head. Only in hindsight can we see the narrative, but in the present the future is radically open.

Many times I have watched a movie with the boy, and he will ask why this character had to make that stupid decision, or why this unlikely event happened. The answer is that without the stupid decision or unlikely event, there would be no movie. However, I doubt that any human being, faced with personal calamity, wonders why it happened and thinks to himself, "in order to make the narrative of my life more interesting."

Going back to those vast swaths of time that we cover with names to conceal our ignorance. If this is true of history, how much more true must it be of prehistory -- say, of the 4 billion or so years of prehuman life, or the 9 billion years of prebiological cosmology?

It seems to me, the larger the expanse, the more room for ignorance. If we don't understand World War II, what makes us think we understand something as remote as the "big bang," the emergence of life, or the appearance of human beings? Science can only approach these thingularities in the most abstract manner imaginable, so abstract that they are essentially devoid of content except what the imagination fills in.

Which means that they are essentially myth by another name. And not even good myths. For what is myth, really? I would say that myth operates in the penumbra between prehistory and history, or the known and the unknowable; William Irwin Thompson said something to the effect that at the horizon of history is myth.

Consider Genesis, which addresses all of our most conspicuous existential and ontological edges; it works at the edge of cosmogony, of history, of anthropology, of sexuality, of freedom and responsibility, etc. Please bear in mind that these edges are necessary and inevitable. We will never be rid of them, nor can one be human without thinking about them.

For example, even if physicists totally understood the big bang, it would nevertheless give rise to obvious questions such as "what caused the big bang?" Likewise, even if we knew the precise point that man "entered" history, the period prior to that would still be an ultrabeastly infrahuman dreamspace we'd have to fill with imagination and myth.

So, no matter how long we try to defer it, we eventually confront myth, which is one of the Big Things religion knows but secularism doesn't. As such, the latter thrashes around in those infertile manmade myths instead of floating upstream in the very pregnant God-given ones.

To be continued...

What Time is It?

Well, almost no time again, just enough to quickly proofread this brief blast.

We can't know what abstract time is like, if there is such a thing. Rather, we can only experience time concretely. And even then, we can only experience human time, or what time is like for human beings.

I suppose this is no different than the experience of space. I'm sure an amoeba, an ant, a bat, and an ape all have very different perceptions of space. I'm not sure if it's even possible to truly imagine the space in which the premodern mind existed, with a solid earth floating on the waters below and the closed, dome-shaped firmament above, any more than they could imagine an infinitely open cosmos.

Morson suggests that it may be "misleading to assume a single temporality for all disciplines and all aspects of experience." Rather, we may require different "chronotopes" at different scales.

Again, imagine how the earth rotates on its own axis while revolving around a sun that in turn revolves around a galactic center. Maybe time is like that too: cycles within cycles within cycles.

Think of the different spaces we simultaneously inhabit, from the most intimate, to the private, to various public spaces, and on to the abstract-cosmic. Some people are frightened of the confined spaces -- claustrophobia -- while other are frightened of the expansive -- agoraphobia. (Or think of Pascal's dread of the "eternal silence of the infinite spaces," i.e., agoraphobia on stilts.) Some recoil from the intimate spaces -- e.g., schizoid and narcissistic personalities -- others from the worldly -- raccoons.

What time is it? There is developmental time, biographical time, biological time, historical time(s), etc. Thus, "Just as Galileo maintained that the earth was but one of many planets, so it might be useful to assume that there are always a multiplicity of temporalities to consider."

But of all these various times, there is only one in which this thing called "freedom" comes into play, and may effect the course of time. This is a very mysterious reality, for how could time produce something that transcends time? Or in other words, how can a timebound entity, something produced in time, rise above time?

Some people get around the problem by simply saying it's impossible. While we may feel as if we have free will, this freedom is impossible in principle. It cannot exist because it cannot exist.

I actually appreciate the argument, because at least it is intellectually consistent, following necessarily from first principles. For how does a deterministic world suddenly escape itself and go all indeterministic? How does biology become history? When did this happen? On whose watch? Who goofed?

Speaking of first principles, if the Absolute is Trinity, then it seems to me that God is eternally escaping himself, so to speak. That's what love is like, isn't it? A constant chase with no literal capture, because if you succeed at making the capture, the chase is over. And there are people who are like this, aren't there? Think of the compulsive womanizer who thrills in the pursuit but immediately devalues the conquest.

Thus, it seems to me that transcendence is woven into the cosmic cake, or rather, baked into the cosmic area rug. I read something similar in this book about The Geometry of Love. It is in the context of a discussion of the Eucharist, to the effect that "Eating, before sex, is biological evolution's first step towards transcendence in the animal species because it initiates physical openness to and need for the Other."

But isn't Life Itself already evidence of this cosmic transcendence? In other words, isn't Life, by definition, the transcendence of physics? If it weren't, then physics would be fully sufficient to account for it. When you were sick, instead of going to a doctor, you'd consult with a physicist or mechanic.

But that's not so funny, because there was a 20th century school of psychology called behaviorism which amounted to just that. The human being was reduced to its behavior only, so treatment consisted of rewarding the desired behavior and punishing the undesired.

You will note with the appropriate dread that liberalism attempts the same, only on a massive scale. But at least it is intellectually consistent, since it denies the soul up front. No one with a living soul could be forced at gunpoint to purchase some shoddy state-mandated product.

Back to the question of transcendence. Even before Life Itself, doesn't Physics Itself transcend matter? If not, how do we know physics? In other words, if not for transcendence, then physics would consist of the unreflective sense of touch, if that.

How Wide is Your Spiritual Aperture and What is it Like to be Dead?

It seems to me that the forthcoming post is radically undetermined, and that if I don't write it, it will never be written. It's not as if it will write itself.

Then again, I suppose it will write itself, but not without my participation. It's more like I'll organize what is presented to me, or something.

Yes, but what do you mean by "it"? Is "it" there all at once -- in which case you just transcribe it -- or does it appear serially, partly conditioned by what you've already written?

Yes, it has to be that way, otherwise it would make no sense. There would be no continuity, as each new word would be disconnected from what has just come. So each word has to be connected to the past, and yet, must also converge upon a future which is not yet known.

How do we pull this off? What is the nature of language such that this is even possible?

It seems to me that this nondoodling process must be a microcosm of our-moment-to-moment existence, which is indeed always conditioned by the past and transforming into the future, and yet, only experienceable in this infinitesimal, immeasurable moment of choice, of freedom, in which we can, as it were, tilt the past toward one of many possible futures.

We cannot experience the past, which is gone, nor the future, which isn't yet here, only this momentary moment, which is also never here, since it has already vanished by the time we even notice it.

My wife has seriously taken to her new hobby of photography, and one might think that photography is the quintessential art form for capturing "moments."

For example, she'll take a rapid fire burst of photos of the boy in action in a baseball game, but this captures images so fleeting that they weren't actually experienced -- any more than we experience things at the quantum level, even though they are obviously occurring.

The photo slices up the temporal continuum in such a way that it reminds me of what we said the other day about the length of a coastline being infinite. Analogously, you could say that the faster the lens, the the slower the time. If I understand the concept.

Morson describes a similar literary device used by Dostoyevsky in The Idiot, something he calls "vortex time." Have you ever been in a temporal vortex? When you are, it is as if you are in the gravitational field of a dreadful attractor. As you are drawn closer to it, freedom narrows until there is no choice left except to submit to the attractor. One imagines that death must be like this, even the essence of it. (There are also blissful attractors, but that is the subject of a slightly different post.)

In fact, The Idiot contains "repeated descriptions of the last moments of a person condemned to death." Now, we are all condemned to death, but most of us put off thinking about it until it is visible or palpable.

It is as if we have been dropped from the top of a building. No one knows how tall the building is or was until he hits the ground. The condemned man is in a somewhat unique position, since he has full conscious awareness of exactly how tall his building is: tall enough to reach the SPLAT.

Thus, Dostoyevsky "dwells upon the speeding up of time experienced by the prisoner as executions nears" (ibid).

This is all a bit abstract and theoretical, isn't it Bob? Er, no. In 1849 Dostyevsky was arrested and condemned to death, "but at the last moment a note from Tsar Nicholas I was delivered to the scene of the firing squad, commuting the sentence to four years' hard labour in Siberia."

So the man knows of what he speaks. On the way to the execution "it seems to the prisoner as if he has plenty of time. He imagines that his last half hour has room for an immense number of sensations and thoughts, for his mind now works at an extraordinary rate in order to concentrate the energy of a lifetime into those last moments" (Morson).

So the aperture is wide open, allowing a lifetime of light -- even the dimmest -- to be perceived. Remember: the faster the aperture, the slower the time: "As the time remaining diminishes, the mind speeds up still more, so that ten minutes, and then five, and then one, and then a fraction of one, contain the energy of a lifetime" (ibid).

Like Zeno's paradox, it is as if the distance to the street below is divided and subdivided endlessly: "The agony of knowing that the absolute end is near... increases geometrically, and with ever-increasing rapidity it transforms all thoughts, all stray impressions... into reminders of the imminent horror."

The Attractor is now in full view: "There is one point that can never be forgotten, and one can't faint, and everything moves and turns about it, about that point" (Dostoyevsky). Then, as the prisoner's head is right on the chopping block, "parts of a second shrink, [and] the mind speeds up virtually to infinity" (Morson).

"[T]ime itself has been deformed, intensified, sped up more and more as it is sucked into the vortex. The lifetime's worth of agony that has been concentrated into a tenth and then a hundredth of a second must now be lived through a hundred times if that severed head can remain aware for an entire second" (ibid).

Now, the first thing I think about is Christ's Passion, and how his execution is elevated to nothing less than the cosmic vortex around which all of creation is oriented and into which it is drawn -- as if all of human history is pulled into that vast and inconceivable white hole.

Then I think of Revelation, for example, "Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last. I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, Amen."

Then, oddly enough, I think of the Cosmobliteration section of the book, in which I try to demonstrate what happens to language as we approach the singularity. Not saying I succeeded, since I'm still alive.

Lost my aperture. Just apophatic nonentity. Cut me down to sighs. Too old, older than Abraham, too young, young as a babe's I AM...

Closing Time in the West

People are always trying to close time. It seems to me that a singular cosmic achievement of man was to enter time, but as soon as he did so, he began searching for ways out.

This is understandable. Indeed, I've plotted a graph into the next 100 years, and if present trends continue, it looks like we'll all be dead by then. Unless we can somehow arrest time.

What is Marxism but a quite literal attempt to close down time? For Marx, "history" is just the side effect of ironclad laws, and the sooner it ends, the better.

One reason the Marxist has no qualms about stealing your slack is that you don't actually have any slack to begin with -- similar to how you didn't know how substandard your health insurance was until Obama took it away.

Morson writes of the fall of the Soviet Union, a nation we might think of as a kind of parentheses within TI(ussr)ME.

In other words, the Soviet Union came into being with the idea that the end of history -- or the beginning of the end -- had been reached. But then, in the blink of an eye, it was all over, and history came crashing back in: "Statues of the man [Lenin] who established the final system," which was "destined to survive forever, were overthrown in a kind of ritual return to 'history'" (Morson).

Of course, history had been taking place all along, just as Michael Jackson was still aging despite the decades-long attempt to freeze his development at age 12.

So, who goofed? Who caused this obnoxious return of history? Ironically, one thing you can't have in Marxism is "responsibility," since responsibility is a consequence of freedom. To affirm that consciousness and behavior are determined by class is to exonerate one of all responsibility. And yet, the Moscow Times reports that Marxist and leftist lawmakers in Russia want to investigate Mikhail Gorbachev "for his role in the 1991 collapse of the USSR."

Indeed, what is a Marxist "lawmaker" anyway? If everything is determined by the laws of scientific materialism, isn't this analogous to investigating the head of the biology department because some animals are so damn ugly?

Ho! "We are still reaping the consequences of the events of 1991.... People in Kiev are dying and will continue to die at the fault of those who many years ago at the Kremlin made a decision to break up the country."

If this is true, then Marxism is untrue. But there is no cognitive dissonance, any more than an American liberal has cognitive dissonance in believing increased energy costs will reduce demand while increasing the minimum wage won't reduce the demand for labor.

Ironically, the Clinton years were called a "holiday from history," when they were quite the opposite. Rather, the fall of the USSR "was a kind of metahistorical act, in this case asserting the openness of time" (Morson) and of history -- just as the murder of the Tsar had been a kind of blood sacrifice to the god Chronos, initiating a system of sacrifice for keeping history at bay.

Mmmm, bourgeois long pig:

So, with the implosion of the USSR, "for good or ill, the future was no longer guaranteed. After decades of certainty, the possibility of possibility was reborn..."

However, the Marxist parasite is embedded deep in the human soul. It is a retrovirus, always waiting for favorable conditions to attack the host. We will never be rid of it, because it is an expression of human nature -- that part of our nature with which it is our task to do battle, this battle being the primary drama of life.

Once one forecloses vertical space -- as do all secular fundamentalists, by definition -- then this battle is over. You might say that eliminating the vertical is to individual development what Marxism is to history. In short order, maturity becomes history, a thing of the past, gone with the tradition that nurtured it.

Our Ten Commandments provide a summary of how we are supposed to carry on the battle with our(lower)selves, especially the latter five that govern human-to-humam relations; in short, honor tradition, and don't lie, steal, envy, and fornicate. Liberalism turns each of these on its head and celebrates the mirror image.

Obamacare, for example -- probably the most steaming pile of liberal legexcretion ever -- is built on a foundation of envy, theft, and the obliteration of tradition, and at this very moment the Supreme Court is deciding whether businesses can be compelled by the state to subsidize sexual license. And if the whole catastrophe works as it is supposed to, then the death panels are coming, AKA rationing of services to eliminate the unworthy.

So the progressive succeeds in stunting history and therefore progress. For the ones who have been waiting for themselves, the wait is over, and closing time -- and therefore freedom -- may proceed apace for the rest of us.

In the Beginning, Now & Forever, Worlds without End

This is the best I could do under the oppressive workumstances. Straight off the top of my head in a very short span of time. Consider it a brief pause or lateral sidetrip in our ongoing discussion...

It all comes down to time, doesn't it? If we could just figure out that one enigma, then the rest might fall like dominoes.

You can understand why no real progress has been made on the subject since Aristotle or Augustine or Aquinas. If you want to get a sense of how little we really know about time, just ask a childlike question such as, is the past real? Where is it then? Does the present emerge from the past or does it come into being from the future? Either way, how can choice exist?

When we arrive at a fruitless paradox, it's probably a sign that we're going about things the wrong way. It's not that the questions are wrong, but that our whole paradigm is off. We need to examine our assumptions at the very foundation of things.

Existence "takes place" in space and time. Or, one could say that we are "contained" in these two. But being contained in space is very different from being contained in time. Schuon writes that space is "static and conserving" while time is "dynamic and transforming."

That's helpful, for it suggests that classical liberal conservatism is woven into the very fabric of existence, i.e., change within conservation.

Must you politicize everything, God?!

YES and NO.

We are subjectively at the center of space, otherwise we could never conceive it. Objectively -- or abstractly -- we can see that space has the three dimensions of height, width, and depth, but subjectively (or concretely) we experience things from our center to the periphery, the latter extending up and down, forward and back, left and right (paraphrasing Schuon).

Likewise, time has subjective and objective modes. Concretely, time is "the changing of phenomena," whereas abstractly it is simply the "duration" or measurement of the change.

Now, just as abstract space has the three dimensions of height, width, and depth, abstract time has the three dimensions of past, present, and future.

Is time nested in another kind of time -- divine time, say? Think of how the rotation of the earth measures our days. But this takes place in the more expansive time it takes for the earth to circle the sun. And the sun too orbits the center of the Milky Way, one cosmic year taking around 225-250 million years, give or take.

But that's objective time. What about subjective time? Does our time have something analogous to the cycles within cycles? Yes, in the obvious sense that we celebrate birthdays, or the sabbath, or the new year, or bar mitzvahs, or anniversaries, or beer o'clock, etc. Thus, there is the "ordinary time" of mere duration, nested in more concrete markers of slackramental time.

Yes, but are there only these manmode markers, or are there objective, which is to say, God-given ones?

Hmm. Schuon suggests that time is not just abstract duration, but that it has four phases. We may think that our experience of the seasons gives rise to the idea of temporal phases, but Schuon says it is the other way 'round, so that time unfolds as spring, summer, fall, and winter; or morning, day, evening, and night; or childhood, youth, maturity, and old age; etc.

Is it just me, or is it getting a little chilly in here?

What about all of history? This is where I would tremulously disagree with Schuon, for he regards it as essentially cyclical, whereas I can't help seeing it as spiroidal.

In short, we both believe time necessarily has an "origin" or source. But Schuon believes that history is essentially a departure from the source, and therefore a privative and degenerative phenomenon. However, the whole idea of Resurrection seems to me like the hope of an eternal spring coiled inside that last cold winter we endark upon

God's Troubles with the Cosmic Rollout

As I mentioned in a comment the other day, this book on the nature of time, Narrative and Freedom, is quite provocative, so much so that it's provoking more ideas than I can assimilate. It's like each idea is a seed for its own tree. Although not difficult, it is thick, or rich, or dense. Just the kind of book I like.

That is, most books -- even from the nontenured -- contain one or two ideas swathed in reams of self-indulgent verbiage. Cognitively speaking, such books are totally saturated and therefore dead.

The good book is the opposite: it is alive with ideas that are efficiently expressed with a minimum of fuss and pretension. Instead of being self-important, the writing is soph-important, in service to the idea that is its attractor and leading edge. Or in other words, it is transparent, in Polanyi's from-->to sense.

I suppose the problem is that the postmodern rabble doesn't understand that ideas are real, and instead pretends that words are just about other words.

Therefore, not only are we sealed into a closed cosmos (as per scientistic dogma) with no possibility of escape or inscape, but we are equally -- and for the same reason -- enclosed in language. Because transcendence is a priori impossible, throwing out words is no more (but no less) effective than tossing bricks in the sky.

Which all goes to the central theme of this book, which is: is the universe closed, or open? There are two main ways to live as a shut-in within a closed universe, one religious, the other scientistic.

As we've been discussing in recent weeks, if predestination is the case, then this is another way of saying that time is closed. From our standpoint in the now, it certainly looks as if there are any number of potential paths into the future, each path in turn branching off into additional choices.

In other words, from where we stand phenomenologically, the future looks like a tree, with its trunk planted in the now, and its branches and leaves representing possible futures. But then, a new tree extends forward out of each branch and leaf. We can never embrace or embody the tree, which is always up ahead. (One of the difficulties of writing history is appreciating the unknown future -- the tree -- from the perspective of the past; or in other words, we know the future but they don't.)

But now that I'm thinking about this for the first time, it looks to me as if the tree very much has a fractal structure. Which is to say, it has similarity across scale. Examine any point in time, and we see the self-similar tree structure. The question is, is the tree only similar in form, or also similar in content?

It seems to me that both must be true, or the cosmos would degenerate into chaos. This is another way of saying that there exist attractors within the structure of the tree, i.e., forms, archetypes, ideas, what have you.

To cite one obvious example, we are told that "random evolution" has "discovered" the eye on many separate occasions. Or in other words, it is as if so-called "independent" evolutionary branches are guided by the strange attractor of the eye-idea.

This would also apply to personal development. For the existentialist, in each now we are radically free; there is no past that compels us, nor any future that limits us.

But of course, this is not what it feels like, at least in the absence of chemical fortification. Rather, we are always shaped by our past and constrained by both virtues and mind parasites. Both are attractors in vertical space, the former located above and ahead, the latter behind and below. No one is radically free, least of all Jean Paul Sartre!

(Interestingly, a perversion subjectively feels "free" to the pervert; or the pervert feels existentially liberated while engaging in the perversion, which is why movements that celebrate various perversions -- whether sexual, political, or genderoid -- usually have the word "liberation" in their self-designation, just as one can be sure that a country with the word "Democratic" in its name is a tyranny.)

Anyway, the other way to enclose oneself in time is via scientism, but we've debunked that bunk so many times that I don't want to rub it in. Not sporting.

Among the Big Ideas -- or let's say Big Questions -- that have struck me while reading this book is, How far to take this view? I am all for taking it all the way to God, which I know upsets some readers, but I think the converse is much more upsetting if you really think about it. In short, do you really want to live in closed time, in which choice is an illusion, responsibility a mirage, and meaning impossible?

Let's go All the Way Down and Back, to the free launch of Genesis 1. If you approach the text without preconceptions, you will notice something striking. That is, God does not create the universe all at once, in one big abba-kabbalah, but rather, in stages. But if he already knows what's going to come out, what is the point of this?

The way the narrative is structured, it is as if God is surprised -- for why would he be pleased? -- by what is produced. For example, he begins by creating the heavens and earth, but the latter comes out a mess -- a dark and formless void -- so he tweaks it by shedding some light on the situation and dividing light from darkness.

But even then there are some problems with the rollout. No need to reprise the whole thing, but you get the picture: it is very much as if God creates and then stands back to judge what he has created before taking the next step. And this would be completely superfluous if God knows everything ahead of time.

It's just another way of emphasizing that God is really and truly Creator, and that his very own existence is the quintessence of openness and choice. There are always a multitude of possibilities, even -- or especially! -- in God. To me that's a comfort, not a conceit.

Indeed, I would say that the only reason we are open is that God is. Otherwise, an open mind in an open creation is completely inexplicable. It makes no sense at all.

However, I might add that, just as we are constrained and attracted by various transcendentals, e.g., love, truth, beauty, justice, unity, etc., so too is God constrained by his own nature, so to speak.

Which is why prophecy is indeed possible. Prophecy, which is a memoir of the future, is clearly distinct from history. History deals with the past, which is closed; but prophecy is a foreshadowing of the open future, therefore it cannot be as "exact" as history. Rather, it can provide general outlines and shapes of things to come, since it is apparently a vision of various attractors up above and ahead. But it's about the Big Picture, not the infinite and unknowable details.

Faithlessness Renders All Things Impossible

No sooner do I suggest that IT'S ALL SOMEHOW TRUE than, through a series of synchronicities, a fellow I'd never heard of with similar gnotions crosses my peripatetic readar. Looks like he calls it the Believing Game.

We all know about the Doubting Game, AKA critical thinking, but this must be supplemented by the Believing Game. Each is "needed in order to examine and accept an idea as true."

I infer from Professor Wiki's brief explanation that Elbow believes that in the West we are disproportionately devoted to the Doubting Game. Like everything else, that's true as far as it goes, but we need to bear in mind how the most critical thinkers are often the most credulous wankers.

For example, it takes an offal lot of rancid meatheadedness to arrive at something as dubious as scientism, or leftism, or catastrophic manmade global warming. Which is just the instantiation of a more general principle, that certain ideas are so foolish that only a person with a great deal of formal education could believe them.

(Look at the heroically tortuous reasoning laid out yesterday in Justice Breyer's dissent. In it he goes to great lengths to reveal everything we detest about lawyerly thinking -- the "lawyer game" -- which abuses reason to arrive at the desired result. There are now four idiots on the Supreme Court who have convinced themselves

"that speech is a sort of public good held in a collective trust, to be limited or banned whenever the majority feels that the speech in question might not be being used in furtherance of the proper ends."

Or in other words, that we have the right to free speech so long as it pleases the state. Bottom lyin': the founders were way ahead of their time, in that they created a totalitarian state before Marx, Hitler, and Stalin were even born.)

Anyway, it looks to me as if Elbow is proposing a kind of methodological orthoparadoxy that will be familiar to Raccoons. "Skeptical doubting" looks for "flaws in thinking that might look good." But "really good thinking also calls on a complementary methodology: conditionally trying to believe all ideas in order to find virtues in thinking that looks wrong."

That's not the clearest of explanations, but it strikes me as similar to what we've discussed before under the rubric of mental metabolism and assimilation. In short, there are catabolic (tearing down) and anabolic (building up) components to productive thinking.

Or, one might consider the Believing Game to be thinking in the mode of faith. The irony is that the excessively critical thinker doesn't even realize he's playing the Believing Game, because he has covertly elevated doubt to the axis of his belief system.

For example, this is precisely what Descartes is driving at in the cogito: not I think, therefore I am, but really, I doubt that I exist, therefore I must exist (as the doubter).

But how could we possibly define ourselves in wholly negative terms? This is the problem with Popper's principle of falsification, which is true as far as it goes. That is, he maintains that a statement can only qualify as scientific if it is falsifiable, i.e., if conditions can be specified in which the statement would not be true.

Again, that's a wholly negative way of defining truth, so it leaves us with no leg to stand on except for our own corrosive doubt. Which then starts eating through the floor.

The problem is, how do we prevent doubt from being omniscient? After all, there is nothing essential to the human condition that we cannot subject to our ruthless doubt, including love, language, God, beauty, natural rights, free will, meaning, and the very possibility of knowing truth.

It's not so much that all things are possible with faith, but that faith makes all things possible. Monomaniacal doubt only renders all things impossible.

It's All True!

If religious predestination or secular determinism are the case, then becoming is pointless -- because we are already there -- and freedom is nothing -- since it is only the illusion of choice.

And to say there is no becoming and no freedom is another way of saying there is no time, only eternity.

Or -- stick with me here -- time is reduced to space. Thus, any so-called "choice" one makes in the present is actually just the backward extension of a future which has already happened. What looks like a photograph to us is just part of a giant flip book, in which the next picture is already in place, giving the illusion of motion (motion being synonymous with change).

Weird, I know. But plenty of people believe the cartoon, both religious and secular. In fact, speaking of animation, this would mean that Life Itself is also a kind of illusion of movement.

Which is precisely why physics is powerless to deal with Life, because there is no principle in physics that can distinguish between living and nonliving matter. It's all just the same atoms in a different pattern, that's all.

As we've said before, this profoundly unbiblical idea is a Greek import. One reason why science never developed in ancient Greece was that time and change were considered existential defects, so to speak -- like rust, or corrosion, or dandruff. Everything available to the senses is just a more or less imperfect copy of something from the timeless world of pure form. There is appearance and there is reality, and never shall the twain meet on the same twack.

In fact, when Paul makes that cwack about the gospel representing foolishness to the Greeks, this is what he is referring to. The Greek mind could never wrap itself around the idea of the timeless world getting mixed up in the temporal, or of the loftiest principle taking the form of a filthy, screaming infant, no matter how breathtaking the baby.

Yes, there is an absolute and there is a contingent. But for the excessively Platonized mind, the absolute is not "in" the contingent, any more than you are really in a photo of yourself. Just as it would be absurd to suggest that you could jump into a photograph of yourself, God by definition cannot enter the contingent, i.e., that which only exists because it is a distant reflection of, or accidental emanation from, the One.

Note that in the Greek view, God is wholly abstract, a point to which we will later return. Unlike in the Christian view, the Greek One is definitely not a concrete person. Which is why neoplatonism involves ascending up and out of the body and extinguishing all traces of one's accidental self.

I read somewhere that Augustine was once a neoplatonist and that he never quite shook its acute somaphobia. The greatest neoplatonist of them all, Plotinus, was said to be absolutely ashamed of the mere fact of having a body.

I'm thinking maybe he was just embarrassed about the nose:

I say that predestinistas and other fatalists are tossing out the most essential and shocking news in the good news -- or even the news that makes it good. Indeed, what does make the news good? That everything that has ever happened and will ever happen to you is preordained, so you might as well give up now?

That would be a tough sell, in my opinion. You think the Jehovah's Witnesses have a rough time of it? Imagine Paul going door to door and announcing,

"Hello. I have some good news for you. I am here because I am predestined to be here, as are you. I am compelled to tell you about a vision I had about this Jesus fellow, which you will either accept or not accept, depending upon how God has programmed you...

"And if I refuse?"

"Doesn't matter. God already knows who's saved and who's damned, so I wouldn't worry about it."

Now, it would be a mistake to minimize the appeal of this metaphysic to certain spiritual types. As we've said before, all valid big-box religions are all full-service operations that cater to the individual. This is more explicitly expressed in the East, in particular, with the various paths of yoga, e.g., karma yoga, hatha yoga, jnana yoga, raja yoga, bhakti yoga, etc. Different yokes for different folks.

I would suggest that the innocent fideism of the simple predestinista is an example of bhakti yoga, in which there is an absolute trust that whatever happens happens for the best. Naturally this helps to cultivate spiritual peace in the face of all these damn cosmic fluctuations, oscillations, enigmas, and annoyances. It's an easy yoke, but not everyone gets it -- specifically, those with a different makeup and different spiritual needs.

You could say that it is a transparently childlike approach, and not necessarily with any pejorative connotation. Bhakti yoga is "efficacious for fostering love of, faith in, and surrender to God. It is a means to realize God, and is the easiest way for the common person because it doesn't involve extensive yogic practices."

And as a matter of fact -- and I've been thinking about this lately -- just as all philosophies are "true," there is a little bhakti in everyone, right?

Wait -- all philosophies are true? Yes, I've been noticing lately how virtually every philosophy has an element of truth to it. It's just that the philosopher gets all carried away with his little piece if the puzzle, and elevates it to the whole existentialida.

You name the philosopher, and I'll show where he was right, even Nietzsche, or Hegel, or Kant, or Derrida. (Was that distant thunder, or was that Van's head exploding?)

To come full circle, I would even say that the predestinistas are ABSOLUTELY CORRECT. As far as they go.

I wanted to get into an allied subject, to wit: what is necessary in order for existence to be possible? Or in other words, what are the necessary conditions of existence, or conditions without which existence cannot exist? I think that by answering these questions, we might be able to understand how it is possible for it All to be True, i.e., how all these halfwits can be half right.

God is a Mathmagician

It seems to me that if existence is to exist, there are certain things that even God cannot know about it. This would necessarily follow from his own infinitude.

In short, if God is infinite, then he cannot be known, even by himself, because to know something is to render it finite, and God cannot be something other than God, i.e., infinite.

Take for example, number. Does God know the last number? Of course not. Numbers go on forever. There is no end and therefore no boundary in which to enclose them.

To exist requires boundaries, which is why it is proper to say that God doesn't "exist" to begin with. Creatures exist. The Creator does not. "Existence" is a property of, or analogy to, something else.

Schuon defines matter as "the sensible manifestation of existence as such." This implies that there are insensible manifestations of existence, which indeed there are. That is to say, all matter in existence is suffused with boundaries which are the effect of ideas.

Or in other words, as Schuon writes, "form is the manifestation of an 'idea,'" or "of a particular possibility." Thus, both form and substance, idea and matter, are limitations on possibility, rendering the infinite finite.

Even so, there is always nonlocal unity beneath the local diversity, which one might say is a shadow of the Absolute.

For example, although number goes on forever, there is no conceivable number that could be so far out as to become "detached" from the rest. Underneath the diversity of mathematics is always a continuum of unity; math is just multiples of one, or the endless variety of One-ness: unity prolonged. Even a fraction -- i.e., less than one -- must still partake of oneness, or it couldn't be defined.

Ah, but what about irrational numbers such as pi? Pi has "no solution." It has no end and therefore no boundary. As such, even God cannot know it, since it trails off into infinity, just as he does. So, does pi exist?

I don't know. I've never thought about it before. I would say that this only goes to show that there exist truths that cannot be proved with strict logic. In other words, we know that there must be a constant ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle, even if it cannot be reduced to a fully rational expression.

Maybe the problem is that circles don't actually exist, any more than points or lines do. Rather, these are mental abstractions, pure forms that are never seen in matter. Or to plagiaphrase Benoit Mandelbrot, clouds aren't spheres, mountains aren't cones, coastlines aren't circles, and bark isn't smooth.

Speaking of Mandelbrot, one of his bestest ideas is that -- and I'm expressing this in my own way -- the immanent is just as infinite as the transcendent. For example, a coastline is not actually a finite boundary, but rather, is infinite. Thus, Tonga, for instance, is actually "enclosed in infinity."

How can that be, since infinity by definition cannot be closed? Well, let's say you are tasked to measure the coastline(s) of Tonga. Now, we all know that Tonga consists of 176 islands. Forget about that. We just want you to measure one of them. How would you begin? With a big tape measure? What about all the little nooks and crannies along the coastline, all the individual grains of sand, not to mention the molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles?

It turns out that nature is such a rough place that even the toughest Tongan couldn't possibly measure it, because

"the measured length of a stretch of coastline depends on the scale of measurement. Empirical evidence suggests that the smaller the increment of measurement, the longer the measured length becomes. If one were to measure a stretch of coastline with a yardstick, one would get a shorter result than if the same stretch were measured with a one-foot (30cm) ruler.

"This is because one would be laying the ruler along a more curvilinear route than that followed by the yardstick. The empirical evidence suggests a rule which, if extrapolated, shows that the measured length increases without limit as the measurement scale decreases towards zero" (Professor Wiki, emphasis Professor Wacky).

Wo. Let's pause here for a moment so as to allow you to assimilate this wonderful orthoparadox: the more accurately we measure something, the longer it is, to the point that perfect measurement equates to infinity?

CIBSPFY! (Can I buy some pot from you?)

This truth can be depicted visually via fractals. Magnify the itsiest bitsy of a fractal and you will see another beautiful fractal. There is no "last fractal," any more than one could find the last snowflake before they start repeating themselves. Or write the last poem. Or compose the last melody. Or bleat the last blog post.

(Which reminds me a line from the Wake that sez When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit.)

Again: the infinitude proceeds both up, into transcendence, and down, into immanence. And I would suggest that the same principle can assist us in thinking about God, who overflows and spills into and out of everything, just as Meister Eckhart claimed.

What exactly did he claim? Oh, for example, "Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God. If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature -- even a caterpillar -- I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature."

Or "Earth cannot escape heaven. Flee it by going up, or flee it by going down, heaven still invades the earth..."

Or "God forever creates and forever begins to create, and creatures are always being created and in the process of beginning to be created."

I guess that's the "end," even if no such thing is possible...

Where Reason is Going, Religion is Already Gone

The wife has become fascinated by the figure of Saint Paul. His story exemplifies many of the issues we've been discussing, because if everything he accomplished was foreordained, then what's the point?

Again, that kind of vulgarized omniscience reduces to absolute nihilism. I don't see any way around that conclusion. If someone can explain otherwise, feel free. But a cosmos without freedom is a cosmos without even the possibility of meaning.

It's not just the risks Paul took in traveling to strange places and preaching to usually hostile crowds. Think about the fact that he would only spend a week or two, but apparently leave with a handful of converts.

But what did it mean to "convert" back then? It certainly had nothing to do with sola scriptura, since the Gospels were decades away and the New Testament wouldn't be canonized for centuries.

Even more astonishing is how the message "stuck," and how the newly converted didn't simply revert to what they had previously believed before the excitement of the apostle's visit. To insist that it was all simply predetermined is to drain it of all majesty, mystery, and heroism. Nothing to see here. Literally -- any more than there is anything to learn by interrogating a cog in a machine. The cog simply does what it does because it has been preprogrammed to do it.

Now, was there an element of divine causation here? Obviously. It's called the Holy Spirit, AKA God. But how does the HS operate? Via material or efficient causation, again, like a linear machine in a Newtonian cosmos?

I don't think so. Rather, it seems to me that the HS is the quintessential case of formal and final causation: it doesn't so much push from behind as pull from ahead or above. But we are always free to resist the attraction.

I mean, c'mon. Is there really a human being who hasn't passively ignored or actively resisted this attraction? What is sanctity if there is no resistance to the sanctifying energies? Does it really make sense to insist that Charles Manson and Pope John Paul II simply followed the path of least resistance? For there is no conceivable path with less resistance than predestination, since there is nothing to resist and no one to resist it.

I feel like I'm championing the obvious, but there are obviously many people who believe the absurdity of predestination, and not just Muslims and Jansenists.

Rather, it is an implicit secular dogma, the reason being that there is no scientistic principle -- and no possibility of one -- that can account for our free will, which mysteriously dangles from above like an invisible thread of possibility. Therefore, it "must" be impossible and illusory.

Which immediately begs the question of how one could possibly know this if one has no choice in the matter. It's not even incoherent, because being incoherent requires the possibility of coherence.

As alluded to yesterday, the very first thing we learn about God is that he creates. God has many names, but the first one -- before redeemer, before judge, before math wiz -- is Creator. Does this word have any real meaning, or is it just poetic, not to be taken literally? Because to literally create must involve freedom, which is why machines, Marxists, and Muslims (collectively speaking) do not create.

How did we reach this point of madness? By losing our mind. Topping writes that because "modernity pretends to offer a creed more universal than the Church's," the West needs a "renewal and recovery of its own mind."

The western mind has a source, a ground, a purpose and a destiny, but now the tenured spend their days tediously sawing off the diseased branch they sit upon, and then pretending it's a new and better tree.

"When religion is gone," writes Topping, "reason is going." Or in other words, where reason is crumbling, God has already left the building, since God is the principle that renders reason more than an absurcular tautology. And an enclosed world without reason or freedom has a name: hell.

Torn Between Two Nothings

Let's try to summarize, which we rarely do, since we don't look back as often as we should in order to make sure previously colonized ground hasn't reverted to unsettled bewilderness and repopulated with native parasites.

We started down this cosmic artery -- well, to be honest, I think it all started sometime last fall, with Hartshorne and then Berdyaev, and has ramified into various iterations since then, never quite getting back to the point, which is what now?

Near as I can tell, it all began last October, with the shocking annunciation of my cosmic orientation, and we've been circling that strange attractor ever since: freedom, necessity, process, creativity, contingency, predetermination; in short, the universally necessary truths of existence.

Or, more specifically, I suppose you could say we've been trying to play Tradition in the key of process, or to weave an area rug out of God's facticity and human freedom -- a freedom which is pure nothingness in the absence of God's facticity, but another kind of bupkis if it is totally predetermined and foreknown by God. I say man is torn -- and (re)born -- between two tempting nothings: existentialism and predeterminism.

As I've said all along, in order to make this work, I think we need to tweak what we mean when we refer to divine omniscience. With the usual understanding, we render the term more banal than it actually is, basically turning God into the ultimate human know-it-all. But I think we need to dig beneath the surface of human thought in order to seek a better analogy.

Speaking of thought, I came across a provocative but self-evidently true statement in Topping, to the effect that "No other institution has been thinking about thinking as long as the church has." One of my problems with protestantism is that it doesn't adequately think about thinking, but rather, assumes a lot of thinks that end up predetermining how scripture will be interpreted, so that its conclusions are often metaphysical assumptions in disguise.

To cite one prominent example: if predeterminism is impossible in principle -- if it simply cannot be the case without rendering everything else we know incomprehensible -- then if our theology ends there, we need to rethink our assumptions.

To put it the other way around, if predeterminism is the case, then neither truth nor thinking are human possibilities. They are absolutely foreclosed, for the same reason freedom is nullified. Thus, truth and thinking are entirely bound up with freedom. This is a true ontological trinity: freedom/truth/thinking, or, in a word, creativity.

I have devoted many posts to thinking² (thinking about thinking), and one recurrent theme is that it involves not one but two distinct processes, one more developed than the other. Anyone can think. But thinking about thinking is an open system -- a dissipative structure -- on a higher level.

If we borrow an analogy from biology, you could say that the body as a whole "thinks about cells," so to speak. Each cell is alive, or like an independent thought. The organism is a higher thought that organizes all the subordinate cellular-thoughtlings.

Now let's abruptly shift gears and see how this applies to theology. Topping writes that faith "impart[s] to our freedom a distinct form." Oh? How could that be, if faith is simply assent to closed and settled "truths"? Isn't that the opposite of freedom?

Yes, in the same sense that if one of your cells decides to go rogue and metastasize into cancer, it is finally freeeeeeee! While it lasts. It seems to me that that sort of cancerous freedom is analogous to the absolute nothingness of existential freedom.

Perhaps we need to posit a Thinking³, which is God thinking about us. For there is revelation, and there is our response to it. This is clearly different in principle from thinking about our own thoughts. Revelation is "about God," but it is really more "about man," in that we obviously cannot comprehend God -- again, in principle -- but it is possible for God to provide a way for men to think about him. Thus, we could say that revelation is "God in the mode of man."

I might add that this would be the Whole Point of the Incarnation, wouldn't it? Prior to that there is incargnosis and there are incarnotions, but this is something entirely apart: Word made flesh, and therefore flesh made Word -- a text, a narrative, an intelligible corpus.

For Topping, "faith makes you truly human." It "defines and so limits thought through its dogmas, its institutions, its traditions," but that is hardly the end of it. Rather, only the Beginning, for faith "also liberates": "By imposing limits faith frees thought and action from futility and can render them divine."

I think this is perfectly analogous to Polanyi's distinction between tacit and focal (or from-->to) knowledge. That is, revelation provides God-given boundary conditions that allow thinking to vault to a higher sphere. This is the quintessential expression of human freedom, just as the fixed rules of spelling and grammar allow us with virtually every utterance to say something we've never said before in the same way.

Which is why, if you follow me, postmodernism is a terminal cancer of the mind. Or in other words, it consigns us to mere freedom, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

The Accidentally on Purpose Driven Life

This post is either a leisurely ramble through hyperspace or a self-indulgent burden on loyal readers. Either way, you might need to read it slowly in order to digest it, assuming it is digestible.

To say that we are free is to say that things are possible. To say they are possible is to say they aren't absolutely necessary. Necessity is a prolongation of the absolute, while possibility partakes of the infinite. So there.

But there are two kinds of possible, one of which being necessary. To paraphrase Schuon, since the past happened, it was obviously possible. But now that it has happened, it has transitioned to necessity, although it can bring about new possibilities in the present.

Is man possible or necessary? Or what? The contemporary view is that man was (obviously) possible but completely unnecessary. I think Gould said something to the effect that if (hypothetically speaking) a mudslide had wiped out one of those freakish organisms in the Burgess Shale half a billion years ago, it might have resulted in a nul de slack in the road that leads directly to us. We are so tenuous as to have one foot on a banana peel and the other on a mudslide.

Can it all really be that contingent? After all, it isn't just that one mudslide. Rather, the chemical, geological, geographical, biological, and meteorological accidents leading to the emergence of man would have to be infinite, literally incalculable. That's not a very satisfying explanation. Doesn't mean it isn't true. But it does mean that there can be no possible ontological foundation for our existence -- nothing whatsoever on which to stand, nothing to hold, nothing necessary. Nothing but a somehow generative matrix of nothing.

No wonder man has always wondered about the Great Changeless Being behind, beneath, or beyond the world of appearance and contingency. We intuitively realize that there can be no change in the absence of the changeless, or the world would be pure chaos. Therefore, it is easy enough to prove the existence of "God" with our natural reason, but that doesn't get us very far, does it?

"Which, among all the innumerable possibilities of a world," asks Schuon, "are the ones that will actually be manifested?"

Or in other words, is there some kind of restraint on possibility, some type of boundary condition that channels possibility in certain directions? Modern thought has eliminated this way of thinking, even if it is impossible to think without it. Being that it is one side of a complementarity, it will simply return through the side door in deusguised form.

In response to the question posed above, Schuon suggests that there is indeed a divine constraint, so to speak, on the realm of infinite possibility, in that the latter will manifest as "those which by their nature are most in conformity, or are alone in conformity, with the realization of a divine plan."

Thus, the "divine plan" causes certain possibilities to undergo the formality of becoming. If the world consists of flowing water, then the divine plan is the banks of the river. If not for the banks, then history would be just a... a chaotic flood.

One is reminded of Genesis, where the spirit of God is hovering over the primordial ocean and proceeds to divide the upper from the lower waters.

The primordial ocean is nothing, since it is without boundary or distinction. Thus, that first boundary is the mother of all fruitful boundaries, say, between self and other, man and woman, subject and object, etc. Existence is a tapestry of these fruitful complementarities, but not a directionless one. Rather, they seem to be guided by the longing or gnostalgia for a return to wholeness and unity, back to their undivided principle

If the intellect is not a mirror of God, it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to explain how it got here. I say this because intelligence deals in necessity. Indeed, the true and the necessary are somewhat synonymous, as in mathematical and logical truths.

As such, how can a purely accidental being know anything of the necessary? Recall also what was said above about man's perennial search for the necessary behind the contingent. How does man even posit such a thing, let alone know it?

Apropos of nothing or maybe something: is a church God's embassy on earth, or is it our embassy in heaven?

In any event, it seems to me that it is the quintessential meeting place of accident and necessity, or where we consciously set up diplomatic relations with the land of necessity, and hope to assimilate some of the latter into our accidental substance.

Where we differ from God is that he knows all the principles with all of their possibilities (and the facts that crystalize out of infinite possibility), whereas our intellect is limited to an excellent grasp of abstract and necessary principles, limited knowledge of possibilities, and just a tiny fraction of the facts.

It seems to me that the best things in life are free of pure order and pure chaos. Hartshorne suggests that the most interesting -- and beautiful -- things are composed of "unity-in-variety, or variety-in-unity; if the variety overbalances, we have chaos or discord; if the unity, we have monotony or triviality"; and "infinite triviality would be as bad as infinite chaos, since neither would have any value whatsoever."

So, could it be that God wants an interesting, beautiful, and valuable cosmos? If so, he has succeeded. I'm thinking that's what he means when he calls it "good."

Rebelling Against God and Darwin

If we're going to fall, we need a space in which to do so. This would be vertical space.

The fact that we fall provides the space with directionality. In other words, once we realize there is a down, this implies that there must be an up. We can also feel as if our lives are going nowhere, which implies being stuck at a certain level with no upward movement, just horizontal drift.

Now, I think everyone recognizes this space, even if they pretend to be otherthanwise. Even a nihilist wants to be a better nihilist than those other nobodies. Look at Nietzsche: he longed to be the superstud, even though I don't believe he ever kissed a girl.

Sometimes vertical space can be in-verted, so the person imagines that worse is better and lower is higher. Think of Miley Cyrus, who is convinced that if she can only debase herself a little more thoroughly, she will reach some sort of pinnacle of crudity. Why is this perfectionist so driven, so hard on herself?

These inverts think they are pushing the envelope when they are just being pulled by gravity. Being consciously unaware of vertical gravity, they don't realize that the whole point is to push back against it.

My son has been learning about space, so he knows that on the moon he could jump much higher, since gravity is only one sixth of what it is here. However, if we lived on the moon, our bones would be much thinner and our muscles much weaker. So, resistance breeds strength.

The same applies to vertical space, where adversity is the mother of evolution. Indeed, Obama didn't have to do anything for the world to know he is a weakling. He's a doctrinaire leftist, and that's enough. The notion of "San Francisco liberal" evokes the image of a flabby being devoid of substance because he lives in a world without restraint. As such, he never develops any vertical bone, muscle or sinew.

Some people think that religiosity is actually a covert form of surrender to vertical gravity. This is implicitly what they mean when they accuse us of, say, weakness, or intellectual cowardice, or an infantile need for security. I assure you that Bill Maher believes himself to be above you in vertical space, even while he categorically denies its existence.

Topping makes an interesting point, that scripture and tradition do not, as it were, chain us to the port, but rather, "serve as a fixed rudder" for our journey across an unknown sea.

I mean, you are free to build your own little dinghy and set off without a map, but it is doubtful that you'll get anywhere or even survive the trip. Or, you'll go "somewhere," just as you will if you put on a blindfold and get behind the wheel of your car.

At the top of vertical space is God. In my opinion, this is a necessary truth that should be self-evident. In other words, if there is a vertical scale, it has a top. The top is what conditions everything below, and allows us to know the hierarchy.

Conversely, to say there is no top is to say there is no truth and that all is relative. And if all is relative, there is only power. To the extent that there is truth or right, it can only be a cynical mask for power and might.

Schuon makes the soph-evident (which means as evident to wisdom as are material objects to the eye) point that "To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence."

For the same reason, "Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses."

Collapses into what? Yes, into nothing. But nothing is never empty. Rather, this is the Machiavellian or Nietzschean nothing of raw, amoral power.

To say that man uniquely partakes of the vertical and horizontal is to say that he is both free and determined. But freedom and determination exist in both modes. Our fundamental spiritual freedom is vertical, but this freedom would mean nothing without certain restraints, boundary conditions, archetypes, and final causes that help orient and vault us upward.

Horizontally we are restrained by such things as genes, culture, custom, and the like, but we are also "free" in the existential sense of being "condemned to nothingness."

This latter must be the conclusion of any honest atheist or materialist, in that the denial of vertical space means that man has this absurd and inexplicable freedom with which to do or be anything he wishes. There are no restraints except horizontal ones. Again, in this view freedom equates to nothingness, as Sartre well knew.

Schuon suggests that our determinacy and indeterminacy, our restraint and freedom, are iterations of Absolute and Infinite, respectively. Here again, this is something "everyone knows" by virtue of being human, even if they express it in a confused and garbled manner that generates absurdity.

For example, when some tenured yahoo claims that we have no free will and are completely determined by our genetic inheritance, that is Absoluteness in action.

Being that Absolute and Infinite are complementary, we must ask: where did the infinite go? It comes out in the doctrine of radical relativism, in which things are "good" merely by virtue of being instantiations of "diversity." In other words, since nothing can be judged on the vertical scale, infinite plurality takes the place of a vertical standard.

This leads to the absurdity of, say, Facebook providing users with 51 options for gender. The idea of male-female is rejected on vertical grounds, of course; but also on horizontal grounds. In other words, they don't just reject metaphysics and theology, but biology and natural selection as well.

So, if Darwin tries to claim you're a man or a woman, well, you tell Darwin to fuck off! Who does he think he is, God?