Frankenchrist and Mankind v2.0

It has no doubt occurred to you that every monster you've ever seen in a movie is just man, or a symbol thereof. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, the Werewolf, the Invisible Man, the Creature from the Barack Lagoon (Chicago) -- each is just a symbol of what man is capable of.

We are all inhabited by monsters, otherwise we wouldn't recognize them. Hollywood depicts so many monstrous capitalists because these caricatures are a projection of liberal greed and envy. Greed and envy are interior monsters, but they haunt the exterior landscape of the left -- for which reason liberals always denounce someone else's greed, never their own.

You know what Barry says: "White folks' greed runs a world in need." Which begs the question, because why don't the victims of white greed just exercise their own? Then they can run the world.

But enough about ObamaCare.

Think of those classic monsters: Frankenstein, a grotesque experiment in living death, or of inserting the brain of a criminal into the body of a man; Dracula, a nocturnal predator who feeds on the substance of others and whose bite enlists one into his soul murdering cult; the Werewolf, who simply echoes the ancient truism that man is a wolf to man; the Mummy, a restless spirit swaddled in his decaying flesh; the Invisible Man, who can only be seen phenomenally but whose essence is nowhere; Obama, the cold, dead hand of collectivism calmly administering the anesthesia mask over your horror-stricken face.

Yeah, man is some piece of work, ain't he? Of this work-in-progess -- or regress, depending -- Berdyaev begins with the obviousation that he "is the meeting point of two worlds" -- although I think we need to widen this duality out into four dimensions.

In other words, just as the horizontal has a past and a future, the vertical has an up and a down. In nether worlds, a bad monster is the meeting point of an atavistic or barbarous man and the lower vertical -- which explains why no mere animal can be a monster, only a beast.

I suppose you could say that Jesus is another kind of monster, if we take that word literally, e.g., "something unnaturally marvelous," or "one who shows a deviation from the normal in behavior or character." Thus, Christology is really the last word in anthropology, revealing to us a divine-human attractor-destiny:

"Christianity recognizes the eternal significance and the eternal value of man, of the individual soul and its destiny." Thus, "the unique and unrepeatable visage of every man exists only because there exists the unique and unrepeatable image of Christ the God-man" -- in whom we see "the eternal image of every human being" (Berdyaev).

So, I suppose this means that man has the freedom to choose which kind of monster he will be, supernatural or subnatural. For "the very fact of man's existence is a break with the natural world.... As a being belonging to two worlds and capable of overcoming himself, man is a contradictory and paradoxical being, comprehending within himself diametric opposites," "capable of great love and sacrifice or of great cruelty and limitless egotism."

Ultimately, man "is both the child of God and the child of nothingness.... His roots are in heaven, in God, and in the deepest abyss as well." As such, this problem child cannot be solved "from the viewpoint of nature and only in relationship with nature." Rather, "we can understand man only in his relation to God."

To be sure, the world -- or nature -- cannot solve the riddle of man. Or, to bring in another monster, man is the Riddler supreme. Just when you think you have him figured out, he defies your logic and expectations -- which is why the the 20th century was such a monstrous surprise to the 19th.

Even in knowing damn well he is a creature of biology, man knows damn well he isn't, because knowledge transcends biology. Although rooted in biology, man "lifts himself above it, and finds within himself a higher element than the given world, another plane. Knowledge would be impossible if man were only nature, if he were not spirit also" (ibid.).

If we pursue this train of thought all the way to the station of wisdom, we see that "True human-ness is the god-like, the divine in man." And the bad monsters among us are the caboose.

So, here is the orthoparadox: "In order to fully be man, man must resemble God." Alienated from God, man tends not only to be un-human, but "even inhuman.... It is God who demands human-ness of man," man himself being "not very demanding in this connection." To put it mildly.

I think this is the point of Judaism also, i.e., the explication of man's higher nature, or the transformation of the lower via the higher -- almost as if Jesus himself were Jewish or something.

For the Christian, one might say that Christ is simply the actual incarnation of this striving, or its teleological end made fully manifest; again, rather than lower vertical made flesh (the bad monster), this is the upper vertical made so.

Or, to put it in plain coonspeak, the lumen being triumphs over the human beastling. And just as revolutionary leftism is a betrayal of the human state, Christianity is treason against the left. So, if you're not a monstrous Enemy of the State, you're doing it wrong. Thus, an IRS audit is the new martyrdom.

For "Caesar is the eternal symbol of authority, the state, the kingdom of this world." It's simple, really: for caesarian suckups of the left, we must render to Caesar what belongs to us, and render to the state what belongs to God.

Progress would be So Easy if it weren't for F*cking History!

If progressives are on the right side of history, why then must they always lie, cheat, and steal in order to get there? This has been going on since Marx, and yet, they still get away with it.

For once I'd like to see a progressive just get out of the fucking way of history, and let it take its course. But no. They always have to force their future on a recalcitrant present by any means necessary -- for example, most recently by ending the filibuster.

This is because, for the progressive, truth is not a value. Rather, "progress" is both the goal and the measure, so history, rather than truth, provides the verdict.

Thus, if you can ram your ideas into history, you win. That's why Obama will never concede that ObamaCare is a failure, because to do so is to bow to the verdict of history. Conversely, if ObamaCare somehow survives, progressives are proved right. Simple as.

After all, no collectivist bowed to the world-historical verdict of 1989. Instead, they just mutated into new forms of cultural Marxism, e.g., climate change, multiculturalism, the redefinition of marriage -- anything to undermine history's clear winner, that is, American style classical liberal conservatism.

The Era of Big Government wasn't over, because that can't happen. That was just to lull you into letting your guard down. They pretended it was over for the same reason a terrorist with a bomb strapped to his chest pretends to surrender. Surprise!

Not only does progressivism fail to bring progress, it backfires, every time. In short, it is King Midas in reverse: the left transforms "virtually everything it touches into rubble. Sometimes it happens quickly; sometimes it takes generations. But it is inevitable.... whatever the left transforms in its direction is damaged, and often destroyed."

With education the left has succeeded in stunting, warping, and misinforming millions of souls. But they want the body too, hence, the ineradicable dream of state run healthcare.

It's one thing for clueless well-to-do liberals to sing the praises of public education while shielding their own children from its malign influence by sending them to elite private schools. It's another thing entirely to force socialized medicine upon us, because should they succeed, then the entire system goes down with it.

It's not as if there will be safe enclaves -- the equivalent of private schools -- untouched by the disaster. Rather, there will be less innovation, fewer doctors, fewer miraculous new drugs, waiting lists, death panels. It's like dumping poison into the far end of a lake while imagining it won't effect your expensive lakefront property.

Frankly, despite the leftist takeover of education, a motivated soul can still find and assimilate truth. Indeed, in spite of it all, it is easier today to access truth than ever before. But a sick man who is motivated to get well can't just track down a book or go online. It's great to be an autodidact. But autosurgery is another thing entirely.

If there are fixed rules, then the left cannot win. And for them, the most irritating rules of all -- perhaps tied with the laws of human nature -- are embodied in the Constitution, so it has always been Job One for them to find a way around it, starting with Woodrow Wilson.

In a piece called An Outbreak of Lawlessness, Krauthammer writes that "If a bare majority can change the fundamental rules that govern an institution, then there are no rules. Senate rules today are whatever the majority decides they are that morning."

It's like allowing the home crowd -- since they are the majority -- to change the rules of the game if their team is behind. Likewise, "If we could make constitutional changes by majority vote, there would be no Constitution." (Next up: the twenty-second amendment; note how the author implies it was forced upon us by Republicans, when only two states voted to reject it.)

Recall what was said above about progressives always having to lie and cheat in order to force "progress" upon us. In the case of ObamaCare, it became the Law of the Land thanks to outrageous lies, bribes, secrecy, mob rule, and procedural trickery. Okay, good enough. New rules. We'll find a way to deal with them.

But for the left, the rules are only the rules if they are favorable to the left. Otherwise, there are no rules. Thus, Obama's "violation of the proper limits of executive power has become breathtaking." In "urging both insurers and the states to reinstate millions" of canceled plans, "he is asking them to break the law. His own law" (ibid.).

Interestingly, Obama becomes indignant at the idea that congress should so much as think of changing or defunding the law legally: "Remember how for months Democrats denounced Republicans for daring to vote to defund or postpone Obamacare? Saboteurs! Terrorists! How dare you alter 'the law of the land'" (ibid.).

So, the rule of law is treacherous, while the rule of liberals is intrinsically virtuous.

Must be nice to have history on your side.

Mankind: Last Word in Creation or Lost World of Miscreants?

I suppose it's no coincidence that Genesis depicts man as God's last creation: the consummation, the crowning touch, the final act, the pièce de résistance.

How'd that work out?

Hmm. I see that Berdyaev proposes one answer to that question: "Only in Christ is the problem of man resolved."

That quote precedes a chapter entitled God's Latest Image. Recall that our last few posts explored the nature of the Eternal Being. We will now proceed to look into the claim that man is the very image and likeness of this eternal being.

One thing we're all dying to know is how man can be the image of the sovereign good, and yet, be such a flaming assoul. What went wrong? Who goofed?

One proposition we can affirm at the outset is that science does a poor and inadequate job of addressing such questions. This is because science can (honestly) deal only with the is, not the ought (and even then, only the surface of the is, not the hidden depths). We can all stipulate that man is a problem child.

But even in so-stipulating, there is the implicit suggestion that there is some way man oughtta be. And science ought not pretend it knows how or why we oughtta.

It seems that man cannot live in the absence of this Ought. And to live in the land of Ought is to know transcendence. No animal fantasizes about slowing the rise of the oceans, or giving free healthcare to illegals, or aborting babies. Rather, those battles are all fought in the land of Ought. Which hints at the nature of the problem, since the Ought cuts both ways, with roughly half the population believing we ought to do things we ought not do.

With that in mind, let's plunge ahead and see if Berdyaev has any answers. Here's one: "All attempts at external perception of the world, without immersion in the depths of man, have produced only a knowledge of the surface of things."

Thus -- and this would be a central tenet of our merry anticult -- depth of world and depth of soul are covalent. There are things so shallow that only a tenured person could believe them, just as there are realities so profound that only the deep person can see, know, and touch them.

Or, let's just say that the world has this surprising and inexplicable dimension of depth. Why surprising? Well, for starters, no other animal has it. Take away food, threats, walks, and testicles, and an adult dog falls asleep, because there is "nothing there." But for man, there is always an inexhaustible something there. Boredom is an animal holdover, an atavism.

Are there such beasts? Oh my yes, and they are the source of much mischief. Liberals, for example, are people who are so bored with their own lives that they want to mess with yours. They ought not be doing that. And yet, they spend their lives telling us what we ought to be doing! That's not irony, that's a truism.

Well, there is some irony. For example, any spiritually normal person knows one ought not lie, especially about important matters (there are degrees of lying). And yet, Obama and the Democrats promulgated a network of lies in order to commit the most massive consumer fraud in the history of the country. Why? Because if they didn't, then you wouldn't do what you ought to do, which is support the government takeover of healthcare.

Berdyaev puts forth another principle that is dear to our headlights: "The act of man's exclusive self-consciousness of his significance precedes every philosophical perception." If you take this to its ultimate conclusion -- or if you reverse direction and understand the principle it is based upon -- you will see that this is actually a logical/metaphysical way of affirming the truth that man is in the image of the Absolute, for which reason he may know or be aware of absoluteness.

And this is something that must be affirmed by theist and atheist alike, on pain of being unable to affirm anything. In other words, in affirming the non-existence of God, the atheist is implicitly affirming his own significance, otherwise why take him seriously at all? How, for example, is his testimony superior to that of a rock, or a worm, or any other contingent fact at the periphery of existence?

So: "like an absolute a priori," the self-evident significance of man "precedes every philosophic perception of the world..." This is one of those things that cannot not be the case, for "if man were to consider himself as one of the external, objectivized things of the world, then he could not be an active perceiving subject." He would be entirely contained by the world instead of being able to contain it.

But can man really authenticate his own significance? How would that be possible? It is not possible, which is why materialists always speak out of both sides of their buttocks, one cheek shouting "listen to me!," the other one admitting that we should pay no attention to his gaseous pronouncements. This gives rise to the battle cry of the tenured: "Look at me, I'm nothing!"

If we continue following our line of reason -- that man's significance precedes his philosophical perceptions and statements -- we arrive at the startling conclusion that anthropology is prior to ontology. Or again, to express the same truth in biblical terms, I AM precedes It Is; which is just another way of saying that behind, beyond, and beneath it all there is a Person, not an object, or an equation, or whatever other alternatives there are (and there aren't many).

But does this not aggrandize man? Well, yes and no. It only aggrandizes man if we yank him out of his proper context and presume that he is the reality as opposed to the image. When man makes himself the measure, then it's time to reach for your revolver.

We must always remember -- or never forget -- that "Man is the meeting point of two worlds." Now, these two worlds can be distinguished in various ways, but any attempt to eliminate the complementarity -- not dualism -- results in pathology. The leftist can attempt to drive out transnature with a pitchfork, but she always comes back. Likewise, one can attempt to make the world go away via sub-religious fundamentalist magic, but it too always returns.

So it's... complicated: "With equal firmness," man may hold "the most contradictory ideas about himself, equally justified by the facts of his nature... now one of these natures, now the other, seems to prevail." Again, this redounds to an ultimate antinomy, that man is on the one hand "the image and likeness of God," and on the other "a drop in the ocean of the necessities of nature."

Pneumacognitive dissonance. Just gotta tolerate it. For "with almost equal right we may speak of man's divine origin, and of his development from the lowest forms of nature." In short: vertical and horizontal. It's where we are, and one ought not pretend otherwise.

It is almost incomprehensible how a tiny bit of nature... should dare to rise against nature and demand his rights as a descendent of another world, as a being with another destiny.... Man is not only of this world but of another world; not only of necessity, but of freedom; not only out of nature, but from God.... In his essence, man is a break in the world of nature, he cannot be contained within it. --Berdyaev

Man is a Clearing through which Freedom Passes on the Way to its Source

The remodel marches on, now into the Food Preparation Area. But in their boyish zeal to demolish our vintage 1964 WifeSaver kitchen, the wrecking crew seems to have wrecked our telephone service. So, no internet. But the wife informs me that her car has a "wifi hotspot," so I should be able to post this. If so, these brutes will be relieved to learn they haven't caused a 24 hour setback in the progress of theology.

Still, it doesn't feel right. For example, usually I at least check out Drudge to see if there are any world-historical irruptions I need to know about. But I'm completely unplugged from the hysteria du jour.

So, yesterday we were discussing how God's freedom redounds to our creativity. One could also circumnavelgaze it the other way 'round: God's creativity redounds to our freedom. Think about that one for a moment: a genuine creation eludes even the grasp its creator, because it is never a predictable or fully determined product reducible to antecedent conditions.

In other words, the creative production cannot be explained by its necessary or sufficient causes. Rather, there is always an "x-factor" of genuine freedom tossed into the mix, and freedom is irreducible to anything other than freedom. If you are not the first one to be surprised by your creation, you're doing it wrong.

Imagine, for example, composing a song. In so doing, one is creating something that has never existed before, and which will never exist unless one brings it into being. Obviously, the canons of Mozart, or Monk, or Mingus, would never have existed if those three hadn't brought them into being. And even the most complete description of a composer's brain, right down to the last synapse, would not equip one to predict his next tune.

Better yet, imagine a person. Today, thanks to science, no one but a liberal can deny the fact that each person is an utterly unique genetic configuration that has never occurred before and will never happen again. Here we see an implicit connection between freedom and uniqueness. In a formula I have stolen in the past, freedom is individuality lived. You might say that personhood is the highest instance of freedom we can know. And since God is a person... Or, since God is freedom, he must be a person, right?

"Only a personalist doctrine of the world," writes Berdyaev, "can give meaning to creativity." Such a doctrine "recognizes the originality of personality, derived from nothing outside or general, from no other means. God is a concrete personality and therefore a creator: man is a concrete personality and therefore a creator..."

As such, there is a critical orthoparadoxical corollary to the truth that all men are created equal. That is to say, because they are created, they are necessarily created unequal. But that is a rather infelicitous way of putting it, partly because it is expresses it in the negative. What we really want to say is that because we are created, it is evil for the state to pretend that we are all identical and to force us to be the same, e.g., buy the same health insurance.

Here it is useful to distinguish between our abstract equality and our concrete differences. As it so happens, this parallels God's own abstract necessity and concrete identity. Or in other words, God surely must be. But just how he is is partly determined by how things play out in Him. Otherwise one is placed in the awkward position of denying freedom in God, and in turn placing man (assuming our freedom is real) above God.

Much of this is apparently controversial, so it is gratifying to see that Berdyaev has my back: "The concept of the Absolute is the extreme limit of objectivizing abstract thought. In the Absolute there are no signs of existence, no evidences of life." This is the God of whom we may posit blank existence, but nothing more -- similar to the abstract mankind that is created equal.

But if we leave it there -- God as abstract Absolute, a la Aristotle -- then we "deny all movement in Him," and "are compelled to deny that he has creative power." For as alluded to above, "the creation of something new is linked with potentiality." Man surely has this potentiality, in that "he is not actualized to the point of losing all possibility of change and movement." Why then should God be so deprived?

Well, in traditional theology change is identified with imperfection. Thus, God is presumed to be absolutely changeless.

But aren't there certain types of changelessness that are imperfect or evil? I'm currently reading Barbara Tuchman's classic A Distant Mirror, and in a sense, it is one long indictment of the implications of venerating the idol of Changelessness -- or what Hartshorne calls the sin of etiolatry, i.e., idealizing God-as-cause to the total exclusion of God-as-effect (which, in the process view, becomes an inspiraling new cause).

In point of fact, if one is going to be intellectually consistent, a God incapable of change makes both the world and man "meaningless and absurd." We are necessarily "useless to God," for we are denied "all possibility of novelty, creativeness, freedom, all of which mean a break-through into the closed system of being."

For Berdyaev, the whole existentialada reduces to bad comedy if freedom isn't real and meaning is just an illusion. Conversely, if freedom is real, it means that both "man and the world answer the call of God, and hence this is not [just] God's answer to himself."

Likewise, "God does not force us to recognize Him, as do material objects." Rather, "He appeals to man's freedom." Thus, God is not fundamentally stick but carrot: not a threat, but an attractor. Or in other words, humanly speaking, he is not material or efficient cause, but rather, formal and final cause. He lures us from above and beyond rather than goading us from behind or below, as do natural (i.e., horizontal) instincts.

Here we see the fundamental distinction between the horizontal and vertical worlds. Like all animals, man is in the horizontal world. Unlike other animals, he also spans the vertical world. Thus, as Berdyaev explains, "for this reason he is not included completely in this world of necessity: he transcends himself" and reveals "a freedom which does not derive from this world."

Now, only God can create a being. Man can surely create, but the one thing he cannot create is another being. And when he attempts to do so, he creates a mess. Nevertheless, the left never stops trying. The left can create perfect slaves, subjects, automatons, clones, parasites, intrusive busybodies, human ATMs, LoFo lemmings, and skin-encapsulated grievance mongers, but it can never create the New Man and New World of its fantasies.

In conclusion, God must be understood, not as a diminution of man's freedom and activity, but rather as the condition which makes these possible.... Faith in God is the charter of man's liberty. Without God, man is subject to the lower world.

Our Creativity is God's Freedom

Internet traffic being what it is during the holidays, posts may or may not appear the rest of the week. I'm thinking they probably will, because I don't want the traffic in my head to get backed up. At least until Thursday.

We've been having a leisurely dialogue with brother Berdyaev, now moving on to his thoughts on The Eternal Being, or the One who cannot not be. Of this subtle being, he makes the excellent point that

"The whole problem is that I must discover what God has concealed from me. God awaits an act of freedom on my part, free creativeness" (emphasis mine). Thus, "My freedom and my creativeness are my obedience to the mysterious will of God."

Remember, freedom and creativity are almost synonymous, for one is impossible in the absence of the other, and both are "ultimate." We might think of freedom as the last -- or first -- word in God, but freedom is meaningless without creativity, and God is obviously not meaningless. Rather, his freedom is his creativity and vice versa, and the two together generate a ceaseless flow of meaning: a trialectic of creator-created-meaning.

What about our freedom? Some people wonder why God didn't create human beings to automatically obey his will, but this would deny the possibility of both freedom and creativity in us. Rather, we must, as Berdyaev suggests, freely respond to God in our own creative way.

We are obviously co-creators of the creation, as we've already discussed. But I would suggest that God's love extends so far as to permit us to be "co-creators" of him as well. This may sound shocking when first heard, but it is precisely what is maintained in process theology, and one doesn't have to get all heretical to see that this is indeed what sets Christianity apart: in the oft-repeated formula of the early fathers, God becomes man so that man might become God.

Now obviously, we do not become God literally. Rather, you might say that God is inflected through the human person, like clear light through a prism. Human sanctity is none other than a free collaboration with God, permitting another instance of (lower case i) incarnation. Such an "imitation of Christ" is only possible because there was a Christ to imitate -- that is, a complete infusion of, and identity with, God and man.

I believe Berdyaev would say that the Incarnation fundamentally changes man, forever. Because of it, man has capacities that did not previously exist -- or existed only in potential -- one of which is this more intimate divine-human partnership.

Of this partnership, Berdyaev says that "God is the Lover, and he cannot and does not wish to exist without the loved one."

Some may object to the "cannot," but in my opinion, this is precisely the point of the Trinity: that to not love would violate God's very nature. And love obviously implies the other, who has his own freedom and creativity with which to respond to God's primordial love. Nothing in the Trinity can be "forced," or "compelled," or "automatic," or "determined." IMGO (in my grandiose opinion).

Berdyaev agrees that "love is realized in the mystery of the Three-in-one, which is equally above and below, in heaven and on earth."

And although Hartshorne came later, Berdayaev is in agreement with him that the notion of a static and absolutely unchanging God -- "pure act, without potential, self-satisfied, and needing nothing" -- is of Greek, not biblical origins.

At the very least, we must appreciate the orthoparadox that "absolute rest in God is joined in Him with absolute movement." You might say that his "need" for the other is perfect, whereas ours is clouded by self-interest and other middling relativities.

Think about it: in the Bible it is suggested that we should strive to be perfect, like our father in heaven. Now, if God were the static being described by Aristotle, this would mean that humans should likewise be "without potential, self-satisfied, and needing nothing." Does this sound like good advice to you? If so, you are more Buddhist than Raccoon Dude-ist.

An orthoparadox is not a contradiction but an irreducible complementarity. Thus, "God's longing for another, for a loved one and that loved one's free answer of love is an indication, not of incompleteness or impairment in the being of God, but rather of the plenteous fullness and perfection of His being."

We won't dwell on the question of suffering in God, because either you accept it or you don't. I do. Again, I think the doctrine of absolute immobility is a Greek import.

Longtime Raccoons will recall that I use the symbol (↑↓) to designate our creative partnership with God, or O. Let Berdyaev explain why:

"All the complexity of religious life, the meeting and communion of God and man, is linked with the fact that there are two movements and not one: from God toward man[↓], and from man toward God [↑]." Ultimately the two arrows are one open spiral, and this openness is the space of freedom, of love, of creativity.

I think people who believe in predestination essentially posit a metaphysic of pure (↓), which absolutely denies man's freedom, because everything is a monistic and deterministic (same thing) God. In such a view, our genuine freedom and creativity are denied, because God causes everything directly (as in Islam).

It is fair to say that scientism, or any other form of materialism, is a kind of pure (↑), with nothing there to meet it at the other end. Thus, it is an exercise in utter vanity, a vacuous striving with no possibility of meaning, let alone truth -- like trying to pull oneself up by one's own pathetic jokestrap.

Here again, Berdyaev agrees that a religion of pure (↓) -- based only on the "one movement from God toward man, only upon the will of God" -- "would be quite simple." That is, "life in the world would be easy, it would be easy to realize the Kingdom of God." Nor, with no freedom, would there be any tragedy.

In the face of a senseless tragedy or evil, one often hears some variant of "well, it's God's will, so it must be good." I don't know about you, but that is not a God I can accept. As Berdyaev expresses it, "Autocracy in heaven is quite unjust on earth" -- as is any top-down tyranny.

Just about out of time. We'll leave off with one more refreshing blast from Berdyaev:

God does not lord it over men.... He does not demand the slavish worship of a bond-servant. God is freedom; He is the liberator, not the master. God gives a sense of liberty, not of subjection. God is spirit, and spirit knows no such relationship as that of master and slave.

See What Happens, Barry? This is What Happens When You F*** a Hundred Million Strangers in the Pocketbook!

WALTER: Is this your handiwork, Barry?

Barry does not respond.

WALTER: Is this your bill, Barry?

DUDE: Look, man, did you--

WALTER: Dude, please!. . . Is this what you meant by "fundamental transformation," Barry?

DUDE: Just ask him if he -- ask him about the insurance, man!

WALTER: Is this your signature, Barry? Did you actually sign something written by Reid and Pelosi without even reading it?

DUDE: Is the website yours?

WALTER: Is this your website, Barry?

DUDE: We know it's his fucking website, Walter! Where's my fucking doctor, you Marxist hack? And who stole my Social Security number?

WALTER: Look, Barry. . . Have you ever heard of Jimmy Carter?

DUDE: Oh, for Christ's sake, Walter!

WALTER: You're going to enter a world of pain, son. We know why you're suddenly calling it the ACA instead of ObamaCare. We know you stole the election --

DUDE: With the fucking IRS!

WALTER: With the fucking IRS. And we know that this is your signature legislation, Barry.

WALTER: This piece of shit is beyond the wildest dreams of your worthless commie father, isn't it, Barry?!

DUDE: Congress is gonna cut your fuckin' dinero off, Barry.

WALTER: Ah, this is pointless.

WALTER: All right, Plan B. You might want to watch the polls, Barry.

He is heading for the door. The Dude, puzzled, rises to follow him.

WALTER: This is what happens when you FUCK a hundred million STRANGERS in the ASS, Barry.

OUTSIDE

Walter is striding down the lawn with his attache case looking like a charging MSNBC host. Without looking back at the Dude, who follows:

WALTER: Fucking postmodern language problem, Dude.

He pops the Dude's trunk, flings in the briefcase and takes out a tire iron.

WALTER: Maybe he'll understand this.

He is walking over to the presidential limo.

WALTER: YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS, BARRY!

CRASH! He swings the crowbar into the windshield, which shatters.

WALTER: YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS?!

CRASH! He takes out the driver's window.

WALTER: THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FUCK WITH OUR HEALTH, BARRY!

Lights are going on in houses down the street. Distant blue dog Democrats bark.

WALTER: HERE'S WHAT HAPPENS, BARRY!

CRASH!

WALTER: HERE'S WHAT HAPPENS! FUCK A HUNDRED MILLION CITIZENS IN THE WALLET, BARRY!

CRASH!

An Inspiring Post About Nothing

In yesterday's post we discussed What We Can Know. But there is no knowledge in the absence of a knower. Just as the world has its appearance and its reality, its surface and its depth, the knower is situated along a gradient of meaning within the horizon of subjectivity.

As our knower attains depth and density within this space of meaning, the world becomes increasingly transparent. The logocentricity of the cosmos assures that there is always this two-way mirror between world and mind, or intelligence and intelligibility. Nothing -- nothing that exists -- can be essentially unknowable.

As we know, there are people who see surfaces only, but this is a function of their own shallowness. There are others who see what might be called "false depths" as a result of paranoia, projection, and ideology. The left is full of such individuals.

These primitive proglodytes forge their illusions "for the triumph of the general over the individual," for politics over person, for force over freedom. The essential problem of the left is that they cannot tolerate the Nothing required for knowledge. Instead, they fill this vibrant space with the debris and detritus of their own broken souls.

As alluded to at the end of yesterday's post, the world is both being and non-being, or a dialectic of something and nothing. To put it another way, it is surely created. But not "all the way," so to speak. It has always been a principle of Judaism that the creation is left unfinished, so that man may participate in its perfection. After all, we can't bloody well imitate the Creator if there is nothing left to create!

Berdyaev agrees that "the world is not finished" and that "its completion is left to man," who must deploy both his knowledge and his freedom to "continue the world's creation."

But remember what was said yesterday about the abyss of nothingness at the foundation of freedom. This suggests that creation is very similar to what is described so well in the Tao Te Ching: for example, in building a house, we need the walls but we live in the empty space they enclose. No one can live in a wall.

Likewise, the purpose of a cup is to render emptiness useful. We need the emptiness in order to fill it with something. Just so, even God needs emptiness, which, it seems to me, is the deeper meaning of "creation from nothing." In a very real sense, all creativity is from nothing, at least relatively speaking.

This is because the future is not determined, and this lack of determinacy may be thought of as the temporal nothingness that is the basis of our freedom (or dread, depending). If the world were wholly determined, there would be no freedom, no creativity, no progress.

So "the world does not enter into me, passively." Again, there is always an element of co-creation, such that "The world I face depends upon my attention and my imagination, upon the intensity of my thought," which is naturally "determined from within, not from without."

To say this results in the world's increasing transparency is another way of saying that the light shines through the creation more vividly: "The knowledge of existence is the accumulation of light and meaning within existence; it is the illumination of being, and consequently its renaissance [literally, rebirth], its hitherto-unknown enrichment."

And speaking of birth, "Knowledge has a conjugal, masculine-feminine character," for "it is the meeting and union of the two, the possession of the feminine element by masculine sense and meaning."

It seems that most people emphasize the masculine pole, but just as a cup is useless without its empty space, knowledge is impossible in the absence of the feminine mystery that lures us into it. Vive la différence! Or rather, vice versa, for this difference is life, on every level.

Two big errors: radical union with the cosmos, as in Buddhism; and radical separation from the cosmos, as in scientism. Both deny the beautiful differences alluded to above. Thus, "fusion with cosmic life does not liberate personality, but rather dissolves and destroys it." Conversely, all the knowledge of the tenured will never add up to reality, since "the endlessness of the objectified world cannot be the cosmic whole."

In the absence of the Nothing of freedom, "Man moves in a vicious circle. To break out of that circle requires an act of spirit," and this act must be free. Again, if it is determined, then we are by definition in the closed circle.

It is useful to distinguish between two knowers in man, one who knows the objective world, one who knows the subjective world. In the Book For Which the Blog is Named, I symbolize these (•) and (¶), respectively. Why the irritating symbols? In order to preserve the nothingness without which they cannot accumulate experiential meaning. Again, think of that Taoist cup, without which you shouldn't play baseball.

About those two modes of knowing, Berdyaev writes that man "is a dual being, living in both the phenomenal and noumenal world." Thus, "On the one hand, man is phenomenon, a thing of nature, subject to the law of this world." This concrete fellow is (•).

The other fellow -- (¶) -- "is a 'thing in itself,' a spiritual being, free from the power of this world." Note the operative word: free. This is the essential bit of Nothing that makes one either a spiritual pneumanaut or a cynical and morbid existentialist. The choice is yours, but only if you know how to properly use your Nothing.

As Petey always says, our inspiration is God's expiration. And being that it can only occur now, there is no expiration date. "Spirit is, as it were, the breath of God penetrating man's being." Our in-breathing of this spirit of freedom communicates "a higher dignity, a higher quality in [our] existence, inner independence and unity...."

"Spirit is a break-through into our heavy-laden world: it is dynamic, creativity, up-surge." It is by this spirit that image transforms to likeness, in a divine-human partnership: "Spirit emanates from God, is poured in, or breathed into, man."

Even so, you still have to inhale.

God is completeness toward which man cannot avoid striving. (All quoted material from Christian Existentialism)

Nevertheless, God is a Jazzman

Christian Existentialism unscrambles excerpts from Berdyaev's thirty odd books and helpfully reassembles them under various headings, such as What Can We Know?, The Eternal Being, and God's Latest Image (that would be us). As I said, Berdyaev himself is not systematic or organized, so this approach makes him much more accessible, not to mention aphoristic and blogworthy.

For example, just what can we know? Are we really stuck inside of Kantville with the transcendental blues, or can we know stuff?

Well, first of all, Berdyaev -- proto-Raccoon that he is -- doesn't begin with being. Rather, he insists that Personality is prior to being. This follows from our understanding that God is above all else an irreducible "I."

In God's famous wisecrack -- some variant of I Am That I Am -- the accent is on the I rather than the AM. Or in other words, AM is a consequence of I, because the converse could never be true, for the same reason you can't get blood from a turnip. In a way, trying to derive persons from being is more than a little like trying to turn stones into bread.

Now, if there is something prior (meaning ontologically, not chronologically, prior) to person, it is freedom. You might say Berdyaev posits a third stance alongside existentialism and essentialism. Pardon the pedantry, but the former makes essence a function of existence, while the latter posits essence as prior to existence.

In practical terms, this means that, for the left, for example, who you are is a function of existential considerations such as race, or class, or sexual orientation. Or in other words, you're nobody 'til somebody hates you.

But for the essentialist-conservative, all the categories the leftist holds sacred are just accidents and contingencies. For the conservative liberal, the real purpose of life is to actualize our essence, not reduce ourselves to some fixed victim class of the left. The left's approach effaces identity and personhood as a necessary consequence.

But again, interestingly, Berdyaev posits freedom as even prior to essence. This makes perfect sense to me, in that it seems that real personal essence would be inconceivable in the absence of freedom.

Or other words, either we are free or we are not. If we are not free, then personal identity is just an illusion. We may imagine we are "choosing," but the choices are determined by our essence (or worse, existence).

Therefore, it seems to this Raccoon that personhood is really a dialectic -- or play, if you like -- of essence and freedom, or of I and Slack. Our essence is a mere abstraction until it encounters being in freedom, which results in our concrete I at any moment.

I mean, isn't this how it works? I think I'm being quite literal here, not at all distant from how it feels to be being someOne.

To make it even more concrete, it is exactly like jazz. Jazz, you might say, is America's gift to the world. But before that, it is God's gift to America. It is a kind of objective correlative to American-style freedom, or to the ordered liberty of the founders. Old white men indeed. Rather, the founders were funky old jazzers.

I realize this will sound offensive in the context of slavery, but the black experience in America is really a microcosm of the whole process, elevated to a plane of transcendental beauty. When we think of quintessential American music, what is it? Mostly jazz, blues, soul, rhythm & blues, gospel. Each of these, in its own way, is "the sound of freedom."

Now, why would a formerly enslaved people create such a beautiful sound? Perhaps for this very reason. Since physical -- i.e., horizontal -- freedom was restricted, blacks poured forth this longing on the vertical plane, via musical expression.

Furthermore, music was very much a way to express identity and personhood that were otherwise denied by cultural oppression. Take anyone, for example Louis Armstrong, or Duke Ellington, or Thelonious Monk. To a racist-existentialist, they are simply boy, or n-----, an anonymous designation determined by race, by existence. But the existential yoke is really on the racist, for each of these men not only expressed their unique identity via music, but created whole musical worlds that will endure and be explored forever, whereas the racist is buried in an anonymous grave that no decent person wants to visit.

So in his own way, the racist makes himself as unfree as his projected existential dunce partner. In other words, the racist needs the "inferior" race in order to imagine he is superior. The same dynamic exists in contemporary liberalism, since the white liberal's identity is thoroughly entangled in his sanctimonious and condescending attitude toward the blacks he presumes to pity.

Why more blacks aren't offended by liberal condescension is something of a mystery, but no more mysterious than the liberals who do the condescending. It takes two to engage in this freedom-denying dialectic of existence and accident, just as it takes three to engage in the trialectical spiral of freedom, person, and essence.

Returning the Berdyaev, "Personalism must recognize the primacy of freedom over being," for "the philosophy of primacy of being is a person-less philosophy." And the latter is also a deterministic philosophy, because it tries to make freedom a function of being, "which in the final analysis means that freedom is the child of necessity."

This leads to a rather controversial conclusion, radical in its implications, but no less radical than the Coonifesto. I can understand if one recoils from this conclusion, but I accept it wholeheadedly, for it makes sense of a great deal of nonsense (and vice versa):

"[F]reedom cannot be derived from being." Rather, it "is rooted in nothingness, in bottomlessness, in non-being, if we use ontological terminology. Freedom is without foundations; it is not determined, it is not born of being....

"The primacy of freedom over being is also the primacy of spirit over being. Being is static: spirit is dynamic.... spirit is subject and subjectivity: it is freedom and creative act."

And finally, "man faces, not abstract truth, but Truth as the way and the life. 'I am the truth, the way and the life.' This means that truth is concrete personality, its way and its life'.... Truth is dynamic in the highest degree.... It is given only in creative act" (Berdyaev).

Bottom line: I can imagine this on God's eternitable. At any rate, it's on mine:

One Person Signing Up For ObamaCare is Tragedy; 50 Million Losing their Insurance is a Statistic

I don't remember when I first read Christian Existentialism: A Berdyaev Synthesis, but it would have been back when I was much more interested in the existentialism than the Christianity, so I didn't get much out of it.

Berdyaev, for those who don't know, was a 20th century Russian unorthodox Orthodox Christian thinker/writer/wildman/prophet. He doesn't really fit into anyone's category, not even his own, since one frequently finds him taking both sides of a dispute, especially over time (his works were originally published between 1901 and 1953). He is not what you would call disciplined or systematic.

However, he said many things that are straight out of the Raccoon playbook. He also said some things that are downright strange, kooky, or heretical. But I repeat myself. You just have to be comfortable with the fact that truth in the mode of prophet is unlike truth in the mode of reason, or myth, or empiricism. It's definitely a divine-human partnership, and you must always tease out the latter from the former.

Nevertheless, he would have been an excellent blogger, since his posts are always sharp, pungent, confrontational, eccentric, and insultaining. He was a compulsive writer, to such an extent that "if he were to think of himself in heaven, he said, it would be sitting at his desk." Which is precisely where he died in 1953.

Which just gave me an idea. If Berdyaev were a blogger, what would he be bleating today? First, I would say that he is the only other blogger of my acquaintance who sees the cosmic error of leftism -- who traces the disease all the way back and down to the foundations of being:

"Inequality is the basis of all cosmic order.... From inequality the world and the cosmos came into being. From inequality man, too, was born. Absolute equality would have left being in an unrevealed condition, in indifference, i.e. in non-being."

Thus, "the demand for a forced leveling, which comes out of the lower levels of chaotic darkness, is an attempt to destroy the hierarchic, cosmic order which was formed by the creative birth of light in darkness, an attempt to destroy human personality itself as a stage in [the] hierarchy..."

About the inevitable totalitarian temptation of the left -- facilitated by the fantasy that the complexity of the world can be modeled by the tenured and enforced by politicians -- Berdyaev would say that power "has a tendency to be transformed into an end in itself, and to substitute itself for all other ends.... Both monarchy and socialism mistake means for ends in the very same way and admit falsehood in the realization of their purposes...."

Or just say ObamaCare: a grand Lie in the service of socialist power, for "in socialism there is always negative truth and positive untruth." This is a demonic morality whereby "evil is the only way to good, thickening darkness the only way to the light."

This intellectual and spiritual rigidity of the left is really a form of rigor mortis, for it is "one of the most dogmatic, immobile, congealed doctrines ever invented in the history of human thought.... it is the absolute suffocation of a dungeon. I have always thought that organized materialism would lead to dynamic immobility."

And so it has. At least until 2014.

As has often been said, socialism is just a banal Christian heresy, "suffused with messianic pathos" and presuming "to bring the good news of man's salvation from all distress and suffering." As mentioned in yesterday's post, it is a beautiful doctrine until it actually makes contact with reality. You might say that there is always this little glitch in the rollout of socialism: that it cannot flourish outside the minds of the faithful.

Leftism is illiberal to the core, in that it attempts to bring about the Kingdom of Necessity. In so doing, it "accepts all three of the temptations rejected by Christ in the wilderness," most especially "the temptation of the kingdom of this world," thereby becoming "a religion of the slaves of necessity, of the children of sin."

About the presumption to knowledge of complex systems that defy human control, "it wants to rationalize the whole of life, to subject it to collective reason." But in order to accomplish this, "it must make an end to freedom" -- for example, the freedom to choose your own insurance or keep your own doctor.

You idiots out there just don't realize you have no idea what to do with your freedom, and that Obama and Pelosi know better how to direct it. It's easy: just "get man to renounce this unhappy freedom, enslave him to the temptations of earthly bread, and you will be able to build the earthly happiness of all..." Or in other words, just promise free stuff to the 51% of LoFos, and you're over the hump. A little hump called the Constitution.

More subtly, "Marxism thinks of freedom as necessity, known and accepted." Such a denial of genuine freedom is really "a secularized version of predestination." Remember what Obama said about progressive predestination: "If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress."

Right. In such a warped worldview, freedom is not only unnecessary, but an obstacle. All that is required is the unswerving application of dogma. Conversely, "Christianity does not think that the Kingdom of God can be attained without the participation of human freedom -- without man's consent, without his spiritual rebirth."

Furthermore, it is perfectly understandable that a Christian should be "indignant at exploitation," or human suffering, or economic oppression. But how can this be true of those "who deny the difference between good and evil?" In a perversion of Judaism, it is as if the proletariat -- or in today's argot, all of the official victim groups of the left -- are the "chosen people" waiting for the "messiah of the future." But now that their messiah has landed, how are they going to deal with the cognitive dissonance?

These revolutionaries never begin "by organizing the evil in themselves: they want to conquer and destroy the evil in others, in its secondary and external manifestations." But "revolutions do not so much conquer evil as make a new distribution of evil, and call new evil into being."

As Stalin said, you have to break some eggs in order to make an omelet. Thus, you need to murder a few million human beings in order to collectivize the farms.

Speaking of Stalin, one poor sucker signing up for ObamaCare is a tragedy. 50 million losing their insurance is just a statistic.

Obamacare and the Systematic Denial of Reality

"Knowledge of any reality," writes Hart, "is to be sought out in terms appropriate to the kind of reality it is." This has been understood since Aristotle, at least. In short, you can't find God with a hammer, nor can you drive a nail with prayer.

And yet, most of the tenured class regard problems that can't be solved with a hammer as ultimately unreal. Which is ironic, since most of them -- or their knowledge -- are so uselessly abstract that they couldn't even operate a real hammer.

In any event, "the mechanical picture of reality" results in the arbitrary and peremptory foreclosure of "a great number of questions that a truly rational culture should leave open" (Hart) -- or should at least stop pretending to have solved with the Hammer of Tenure.

It reminds me of when I was putting myself through graduate school by working in a supermarket. I was chatting with an elderly customer who happened to be a retired psychiatrist. I half-jokingly asked if he'd ever cured anyone, and he immediately bellowed "HELL NO!" That's the difference between abstract and concrete: one man helping put food on the table while another man pretends to heal souls.

Not to shift gears too violently, but we're just about done with The Experience of God. We've been discussing it for several weeks, and it's time to move on. But what he says above about epistemology and method has a lot of implications vis-a-vis Obama's extraordinary assault on our healthcare system. Only now -- when it's almost too late -- are Americans starting to wise up and ask themselves, "exactly what does this tool know about healthcare, and why is he trying to fix it with a hammer and sickle?"

As to the first question, he knows nothing; or worse, what he thinks he knows is disastrously wrong; as to the second, the left, by definition, has only hammers made of theory, for which reason they know how to destroy but not build. They can appropriate and redistribute with the Hammer of the State, but that hammer is useless for creation or innovation.

As it pertains to Obama, the questions truly become, what didn't he know, and when didn't he know it? The frightening answers go well beyond this or that particular issue, but to the very metaphysical heart of liberalism.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine summarizes it well in a piece conveniently entitled What the Obamacare Shipwreck Tells Us About Liberalism:

The ACA is, "to put it mildly, complicated. It is over 1,000 pages long and has many moving parts that interact in various ways.... Reading and interpreting statutes is something that I have done for a living for several decades now, but there is no way that anyone can hope to read the ACA and understand how it is intended to work, or... predict what will happen when all of its many interlocking requirements, mandates and prohibitions come into contact with reality. And that is before you get to the thousands of pages of regulations that have been issued to implement the law" (emphasis mine).

In other words, even if one were to do the impossible and memorize the law by heart and know it backward and forward, this would not represent knowledge, since 1) it would be irrelevant to the irreducible complexity of the interacting parts, and 2) even a theoretical model of the system would be revealed as totally inadequate once the law came into contact with reality, i.e., when the theoretical shit hits the concrete fan.

In this regard, it is very much like models of global warming, which work just fine in theory. Just don't ask them to accurately model reality.

Like those models of the climate, "Obamacare is a vast Rube Goldberg machine that, it turns out, doesn’t work at all -- an airplane that has crashed on takeoff" (ibid.).

"One obvious lesson" -- which liberals will never learn -- "is that liberalism fails to appreciate the complexity of the world. The hubris required by the Democrats’ attempt to reorder not just a large sector of the economy, but an important part of the lives of millions of strangers, is breathtaking" (ibid., emphasis mine).

So yes, it's complicated. But not really; rather, it is complex, which is another thing entirely. Math is complicated, but it can be sorted out with patient application. But some things are irreducibly complex, such that rendering them merely complicated destroys them.

But liberals are undeterred by reality: "Recognizing, at least dimly, the difficulty of the task, the Democrats responded by trying to draft a law whose complexity would match that of the reality that it tried to control. That made the situation worse, not better: the more convoluted the statute became, the more unworkable it was" (ibid., emphasis mine).

Likewise, imagine what would happen if the governments of the world actually took seriously the models of the Warmists. Global chaos.

Another critical lesson: "Obamacare also illustrates the inordinate faith that many liberals have in the power of words. Various aspects of reality are not as liberals would like them to be. What is the solution? The magical power of words: reams and reams of paper covered with sections and subsections, commands and requirements. If they can only get the words right, reality will certainly fall into line, just as liberals want it to be!" (ibid.).

As we see, language is their hammer. Which is fine in certain circumstances. But the virtue and the danger of language lies in its very abstractness. Hartshorne sheds some light on this issue, noting that we must not permit language to eliminate the real distinction "between actual and possible, or concrete and abstract," respectively.

In order for language to "work," it must embody universals, without which it is unintelligible. But if we take this to the extreme and attempt to explain all particulars as mere instances of the universal/abstract, it also fails. Consider the violence done to reality -- for example, concrete human beings -- by the abstractions of the ACA. Its ruthless application of universality results in injuries to the particulars it presumes to help.

Hartshorne locates the key to this dilemma in the temporal structure of experience. Think about the basic contrast revealed in experience, "between the actualized happenings of the past" vs. "the possible or probable but not actual happenings of the future." In short, "particulars are all past." I mean, right? The past is what it is, and cannot be changed. Conversely, "there are no future particulars." For which reason, "to think of the future is to think in more or less general terms."

No one can predict the future, except in regard to extremely simple and linear systems that are easily abstracted and modeled.

Therefore, "there is no such thing as a fully particularized plan, purpose, or potentiality. Always much is left for the future to further define or determine." Thus, "futurity and generality are two aspects of the same basic mode of reality" (ibid.).

To bring this back to the concrete -- to liberalism in general and to Obamacare in particular -- in the insane effort to particularize the future, it is generating chaos in the present.

But it gets worse. Again, the past is what happened; it is particular, not general. But what do liberals derive from the past? General theories, theories such as Marxism, or feminism, or patriarchy, or multiculturalism, or demand-side economics. In other words, they simply use the past to superimpose their theories, and pull out whatever particularities fit the case.

So they have their metaphysic precisely backassward: generalize the past and particularize the future. This is why, to paraphrase Orwell, "he who controls the past controls the future," and why people living under communist tyranny would joke that "the future is known. It's the past that keeps changing."

Thus, remember back then, when Obama promised that you could preserve your health plan, keep your doctor, and pocket $2,500 in the process? That past is now inoperative. Present needs require a new past, in order to pave the way to our glorious new future of vibrant Health for All.

To bring this discussion further down into the concrete-particular, how does one rescue a child from the clutches of a soul-destroying liberalism? Dennis Prager suggests that "when possible, it is best that your child not go to college immediately after high school. One reason colleges are able to indoctrinate students is that students enter college young and unworldly. It is very rare that adult students are convinced to abandon their values and become left-wing.

"Why? Because they have lived life and are much less naïve. For example, someone with life experience is far more likely than a kid just out of high school to understand that the best formula for avoiding poverty is personal responsibility -- get a job, get married, and then have children -- not government help.

"Teenagers who spend a year before going to college working -- in a restaurant, for a moving company, at an office -- will mature far more than they would after a year at college. And maturity is an inoculation against leftism."

To summarize: the left proposes beautiful abstractions to save us from life's inevitable particularities. It is effectively outside time, which lends itself to the religious fervor of their faith and its resistance to correction.

***

Greenfield's The Left Side of History makes some similar points:

"Everything wrong with Obama’s attitude can be gleaned from his quote. 'If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.'

"It’s the sort of quote that sounds inspirational if you don’t think too much about the implications of a world leader who already claims to know what the right path is and believes in determinedly moving down it, without regard to consequences, because he is certain that if he persists, progress will come."

The Liberal Media: The Onans they've been Writing For

Most things are a means to some other end, but some things must be ends in themselves, otherwise the whole existentialada falls apart at the seams. Thinking, for example, is always about something else. Most people stop thinking at some arbitrary point and call it a deity.

The materialist, for example, stops his thinking at an abstraction he calls "matter" or "nature." Matter is the end of his cognitive striving, although it is a dead end.

Or, more to the point, it is a logocidal deadened end -- murdered by his prior assumptions, since no one has ever proved that matter is literally dead, not to mention mindless. If the cosmos were either of these things, it couldn't bloody well conjure materialists out of its barren womb, now could it?

In order for there to be an intelligible cosmos, some things must be, as Hart puts it, "autotelic" -- auto meaning self, telic meaning end. Thus, in the words of Professor Wiki, an autotelic entity is something "having a purpose in and not apart from itself."

Truth, for example, is quintessentially autotelic -- at least for a wholesome human being. Truth is never for the sake of something less than itself. Rather, human beings must have a "disinterested interest" in truth, regardless of the implications.

Now, one thing you will have noticed about particularly brazen liars such as an Obama or Clinton, is a peculiar relationship to truth. It is not just that they lie, which anyone can do. Rather, their type of lying is always parasitic on a consciously known truth which must be avoided.

Imagine you are having a deep, passionate, and intellectually honest discussion with another person. In so doing, you don't simply throw out predigested talking points. Rather, it will be as if you are consulting the deepest part of your own nonverbal experience, struggling to put it into words.

Conversely, if you saw yesterday's press conference -- or really, any time the president must speak off the cuff -- you can almost see the wheels spinning inside, as he recognizes a truth and then struggles to find the words to avoid acknowledging it.

There is something fundamentally sick about this. Of course, it is one of the most common tools of the dark art of politics, but for some people the tool becomes the master. From the very beginning (you can look it up), I noticed that Obama wasn't just a liar, but rather, a Lie.

Fouad Ajami has a nice piece in the WSJ that touches on this question. In Obama's case, he was able to conceal the Lie under a veneer of charisma -- at least for the weakminded souls susceptible to such a frivolous appeal:

"The current troubles of the Obama presidency can be read back into its beginnings. Rule by personal charisma has met its proper fate. The spell has been broken, and the magician stands exposed. We need no pollsters to tell us of the loss of faith in Mr. Obama's policies -- and, more significantly, in the man himself."

To quote the Poet, In my beginning is my end, and this end and beginning are always there. Yes, character is destiny, but absence of character is fate. Thus, Obama was fated to this dead end, which will be either a pathetic whimper a catastrophic bang, depending upon how soon his "signature achievement" can be erased from history.

There are deeper layers to the Obama Fail, for reasons alluded to above. Again, certain things must be ends in themselves, e.g., truth, beauty, love, and, most importantly persons.

But think about the pathological narcissist: his soul-sickness revolves around the fact that he is his own end. He is "self-sufficent" or "autotelic." Not really, of course, since the narcissist unconsciously craves the adoration of the crowd.

But consciously he is Above It All. He cannot take in new information, since this is a direct threat to his illusory omniscience. Thus, his is really an "ignorant omniscience," because you have to be rather stunningly ignorant to imagine you are omniscient -- about, say, an infinitely complex healthcare system containing more information than any human being -- or any group of human beings -- could ever master.

Jim Geraghty, in this morning's jolt, writes of yesterday's sad performance, which you will especially want to watch "if you’ve been wondering when the rest of the world would see the same guy you’ve been seeing since, oh, 2007 or so... in over his head, out of touch with the real world, banal in his off-the-cuff remarks, and unable to distinguish between good intentions and genuine results."

This goes to the fact that inside every narcissist is a withered homunculus that has been shielded from reality by a grandiose "false self." Grandiosity is always a primitive defense mechanism against its opposite, e.g., helplessness, absence of control, lack of primary affirmation during childhood -- not to play amateur psychologist, but the very things Obama missed out on in his dysfunctional upbringing. Thus, beneath the nicely tailored big boy clothes and polished babble, we see his "hapless, meandering, slow remarks."

Jonah Goldberg describes the darketypal mask Obama has plucked from the ancient gallery, old Narcissus: "In every tale of hubris, the transgressor is eventually slapped across the face with the semi-frozen flounder of reality. The Greeks had a god, Nemesis, whose scythe performed the same function. It was Nemesis who lured Narcissus to the pool where he fell in love with his own reflection."

So, Obama is indeed drowning, but the liberal media helped construct the pool -- or narcissistic matrix, if you like. The very media that has spent six or more years mirroring and reinforcing Obama's omniscience is now "discovering" that the omniscience is just a fantasy. Some enterprising investigative journalist needs to trace the fantasy back to the autotelic media hacks who made this self-absorbed adolescent president possible.

Speaking of beginnings -- and ends -- what else can "We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For!" refer to but narcissistic autoteleology? Or in other words, political mutual masturbation.

We'll conclude with a comment by Berdyaev: "For Marxism human personality is only a means, not an end in itself. The human soul is not of unconditional value, as in Christianity." Rather, human beings are simply a means to the triumph of socialism, and to this latter divinity "human sacrifice is offered."

How many millions will be sacrificed on the altar of Obamacare, no one can say.

The Sophish Gene

Hey, we take our spiritual joy where we can find it -- in this case, the epic schadenfreudian merriment of watching Obama crash and burn.

Obama has not only hit the ground, but is burrowing toward the center of the earth. Someday, perhaps "obamacare" will only be used to describe a violent clash with reality -- as in "this vehicle is designed to survive an obamacare-type collision."

Ironically, Hart's chapter on spiritual bliss provides another kind of schadenfreude, as he subjects Darwinism to a metaphysical crash-test of obamacarian proportions. And like Obama, Darwin cannot survive the impact.

I don't have much time this morning, so just read the book. I don't want to quote the whole thing.

I am, however, intrigued at how he and I inhabit the same attractor, but come at the issue from slightly different angles. That's how you know 1) that the attractor is real, and 2) that you really understand it, because it is inflected through your own personality, making it both universal and particular.

In fact, I think this should apply to spiritual know-how in general; or, the task is to convert abstract knowhow to concrete be-who, i.e., "it is" to "I am." Freud once described the process of psychoanalysis as "where id (it) was, there ego (I) shall be." Likewise, we might say something along the lines of "where dogma (or doctrine) was, there soul shall be."

But that's getting into a somewhat different subject. Back to the ananda-schadenfreude. In One Cosmos, I mentioned how the linear and atomistic understanding of genetics had broken down with advances in understanding.

Ironically, biology held to this simplistic paradigm borrowed from physics long after physics had abandoned it. In other words, quantum physics not only renders an atomistic view impossible, but ultimately reveals that there is no part of the cosmos that isn't entangled with every other part. It's all one roiling ocean of entangled quantum energy.

Turns out the genome is more like a gumbo than a computer, with unfathomable interaction between the parts. Thus, "the notion that DNA should be thought of as some kind of deterministic digital code that constructs vehicles for itself -- 'survival machines,' to use a popular phrase -- seems to be falling irretrievably into ever greater disfavor" (Hart).

You might say that if the genome were as simple as previously believed, it would be too simple to give rise to minds that comprehend it.

But "there is not really any such thing as a 'gene for' anything as such, so much as a kind of pluripotential genetic record of the evolutionary past that, in the present... can be used in vastly differing ways by cells, organisms, species, and ecologies" (ibid.). It's more like a thesaurus than a novel.

However, hiding behind a wall of inconceivable complexity is no metaphysical escape either, because it provides no inscape to the utter simplicity and unity of our subjective selves.

It is nice to see Hart give Richard Dawkins the obamacare treatment. For genes are not "selfish," and they certainly don't determine causality at a higher level -- any more than events in the quantum world determine whether or not I can type this sentence.

As Hart describes, genetic codes are not computer programs and human beings are not robots. Rather, these are just runaway metaphors, or scientistic myth run amuck.

One thing Darwinism omits -- and must omit, based upon its prior commitment to a materialist metaphysic -- is our openness at both ends, toward both the natural and supernatural worlds.

So yes, human beings are adapted to the physical world. But we are also adapted to the the world of human subjectivity -- one might call it the psychosphere -- and a world of transcendent truth -- the pneumosphere.

The result is that our genes do not survive "because they are in some mystical sense 'selfish' but precisely because the complex organisms to which they belong are not."

Thus, "Rather than genes fashioning vehicles for their survival, life has fashioned a special genetic legacy for itself," which vastly exceeds "the narrow requisites of private survival" (ibid.).

So, if it weren't for our sophish genes, they couldn't even give rise to a Richard Dawkins strong enough to resist them and fall into sophistry.

If You Like Your Prison, You Can Keep Your Prison

Within the great open spiral of reality, God is "the original source and ultimate end of all desire" (Hart).

Outside this benevolent spiral, one necessarily lives in the closed circle of nature, in which desire can have no end beyond its immediate gratification. Everything else is just distraction, pretext, or self-delusion. Love reduces to sex; truth to utility; politics to power; order to force; beauty to fashion. Most sinister of all, human beings are reduced from ends to means.

In the Matrix of the Circle, when we encounter other persons -- if we are honest with ourselves and true to our impoverished view of reality -- our only task is to determine what benefit we can extract from them: how to manipulate them to our advantage. It is silly, for example, to hold a leftist -- say, Obama -- responsible for lying to us, when the leftist doesn't exist in the naive framework of truth <--> falsehood.

Rather, the leftist knows only power <--> obedience. Thus, if Obama should be forced into conceding a bit of power back to his beleaguered subjects, it won't be because Obamacare is a fraud, a swindle, a lie. Rather, it will be because Power is threatened.

Only those outside the Matrix of the Circle can see how power is maintained within its borders: basically, He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44).

Any discerning person can see that when master liars such as Obama or Clinton commit logocide, they are speaking their native tongue. To them, lies flow as easily as does truth for the innocent. I'm sure the average person doesn't appreciate just how cosmically pathological this is.

Imagine how a normal person would feel about perpetrating the most massive consumer fraud in the history of the nation. Not only would you not defend yourself. Rather, you'd never forgive yourself. But then again, none of you would be capable of a lie of this magnitude and this level of destructiveness. Even Bernie Madoff feels a little guilty.

The Circle is an existential prison, full stop. Or in other words, existence itself becomes a prison. This makes a man cynical and rebellious, or meek and submissive. For many, the goal will be to become one of the prison guards -- to dominate the other prisoners -- since escape is strictly impossible.

Barring that -- to paraphrase myself paraphrasing someone else -- he may decorate the walls of the prison (art), or fantasize about a world beyond the prison walls (religion), or study the composition of the walls (science), or work to assure a long life behind bars (medicine), etc.

Well, we say: let the dead bury the tenured. We're busting out!

For in reality, "to exist is to be drawn toward the absolute, where alone one's nature can find its own perfection" (Hart). Do you see the difference? Existence isn't closed upon itself. By its very nature, it is open to what transcends it. In the absence of this opening at the top, life would be unendurable. I too would become a drug addict or liberal.

No wonder leftists are so obsessed with bossing others around. For it is a way of putting themselves out of their own misery by putting others into it. Think of all the misery being caused by Obamacare. Why? What is the original source of this sadistic impulse? Just the cheap tingle up the thigh from being one of the prison guards, I suppose. For some people, power is the only grace they know.

The most subversive act imaginable in the prison is to pretend it isn't one: to ignore the rules and make contact with those living in freedom on the outside, whether "dead" or alive.

Thus, for example, "Every act for the sake of good is a subversion of the logic of materialism" (Hart). For the leftist, this is inconceivable, which is why he projects his own malignant logic into us: there must be some sinister ulterior motive, e.g., racism, homophobia, misogyny, the lust for power!

Well, no. Some of us just love virtue, that's all. Like truth, it is its own reward.

The reward being what now exactly? Easy: truth and love fuel the open spiral; they are both cause and effect, so this is an autocatalytic process, the closest thing to perpetual motion we can ever discover.

Today's bottom line? "As a species," writes Hart, we have been deeply shaped "by transcendental ecstasies whose orientation exceeds the whole of nature." These are formal and spiritual causes which pull us up, over, and out, from the absurcular prison to the inspiraling telovator.

Man moves in a vicious circle. To break out of that circle requires an act of spirit, not submission to the organic cosmic rhythm --Berdyaev, Slavery

Blessed are the Low in Information, For Theirs is the Kingdom of Obama

In the end, it's all about this vertical escape hatch, isn't it? Everyone is looking for the divine sonroof, but it seems that in the contemporary world most of the preferred escapes are substitutes for the real thing. Power, fame, promiscuity, consumption, television, intellectualism, food, what have you -- all are fake exits, i.e., spiritual nul de slacks, like a door painted on a brick wall, giving the illusion of depth.

And yet, each of these is only possible because of the mind's prior intentionality. Again, this means that consciousness is always about something outside itself, meaning that it is intrinsically and unavoidably bound up with transcendence. You might say that intentionality is a side effect of our innate transcendence-drive toward the inborn TOE (Theory of Everything) grail.

As mentioned in yesterday's post, conscious intentionality can be directed toward objects, but for human beings it is quintessentially directed toward subjects.

In fact, in the final analysis, religious experience is predicated on the mind's intentionality toward the ultimate Subject, just as scientism is science transformed into the religion of the ultimate Object. Which is why science fits comfortably into a little corner of religion, whereas the constricted space of scientism has no room for nonlinear and nonlocal subjects with dimensions of more than three or four.

As Hart writes, everything that makes life so groovy lies "outside the circle of what contemporary physicalism, with its reflexively mechanistic metaphysics, can acknowledge as real."

Which means, as always, that the best things in life are free. Except that for these mechanistic grease monkeys, they aren't real. Thus, the best things in life are bogus. Only the worst things -- necessity, determinism, death, taxes, ignorance, and general cosmic slacklessness -- are real.

But interestingly, if you ask one of these tenured primates what makes him embrace such a pessimystic misosophy, he is liable to tell you with great pride that he prefers to confront reality with courage, with integrity, with unflinching realism -- transcendental categories each! So if they are honest, they will say that in their stoic religion, one transcends the world via a kind of fatalistic negation. Similar to Buddhism, minus the honesty and consistency.

But God is implicit in the very existence of human beings. This is because, as Hart describes, we are always "placed before the transcendent, the infinite horizon of meaning that makes rational knowledge possible," which thereby presents us "with the question of God" -- or something. You can't just ignore this something, because it is unavoidably connected to everything, i.e., every thought, every moment of conscious awareness.

It seems to me that faith has a lot of confusing and misleading connotations, but one of the more helpful ones is fidelity, or trust, or reliability. Thus, Hart speaks of our "loyalty to an ultimate ideal that beckons from beyond the totality of beings."

The atheist/materialist is no different, in that he too "strives to convince others that there is no God... out of a devotion to the absolute, to the highest values, to the divine." Which is why "one cannot meaningfully reject belief in the God of classical theism," since meaning is strictly impossible in a godless world.

In fact, one could even say that meaninglessness is impossible in a godless world, since it is always parasitic on presumed meaning. Only human beings can fall into meaninglessness. No animal is so lost and confused as to be an existentialist. No one misses what they can never know.

Which goes to the vertical commandments regarding idolatry and oneness. You might say that these two categories are at antipodes, for whatever image of God be rejected by the atheist, "it can never be more than an idol: a god, but not God" (ibid.), i.e., the very ground and possibility of transcendent unity.

Man hungers for truth, just as he longs for the good. But when these drives are deprived of their proper object and end, they can mutate into something monstrous. For what is the left but religious emotion in the absence of the religious object? (BTW, in this context we are referring to the ultimate Subject as the religious object, since God's subjectivity is an objective and necessary fact of being.)

Deprived of religion -- or, worse, when immersed in the degenerate religious marxism of a Reverend Wright -- the human being necessarily embraces a truth that is not Truth, and worships a god that is not God, usually the state, because it seems to be the most "transcendent" thing available to the leftist flatlander.

Remember the Democrat Convention last year, when we were assured that government is the only thing to which we all belong? This shows that liberals haven't made a dent in the most destructive kinds of poverty, i.e., mental and spiritual. Indeed, for the liberal, these impoverished states are mandatory -- sort of an inverted interpretation of Jesus's praise of the poor in spirit. "Blessed are the weakminded, for they shall inherit the state."

I have no doubt that Obama wishes Obamacare to do good. But that is no excuse! Indeed, we could call it culpable goodness, because there is probably nothing in the world that has caused as much death and destruction as misguided good.

I notice that Berdyaev makes a number of references to this problem, victimized as we was by communist do-gooders. He can be a little polemical -- like a religious Nietzsche -- but he writes that "No one ever proposes evil ends: evil is always disguised as good, and detracts from the good."

He makes the provocative point that God is located at either end, as source and destiny, whereas the devil is always in the middle, so to speak, where human schemes are elevated to divine ends. Thus, "There is nothing more evil than the determination to create good, no matter what the cost" (ibid.).

Unfortunately, Obama appears bound and determined that his signature accomplishment create good, no matter what the cost.

Human Beings are Out of This World!

Human beings, by virtue of being human, are literally out of this world. As we've been discussing, consciousness is always intentional, meaning that it is always "about" something outside or beyond itself.

But what makes human consciousness unique -- what sets it apart from animal consciousness -- is that ours is not just about objects.

Rather, the defining characteristic of of human subjectivity is that it is also about other subjects, i.e., intersubjectivity. This is not the same as being a mere "social animal," because that can occur on an essentially physical basis, with no deep interiority in the sense which human beings experience it.

Ants, for example, do not encounter another ant and ask themselves, "I wonder what he's up to?" Rather, their social behavior is fixed within an unvarying structure: the queen does what she does, the workers do what they do, and some lucky male gets to mate with the queen before quickly outliving his uselessness.

Both types of intentionality produce a "world space," so to speak. For example, vis-a-vis physics or cosmology, our perception extends further down and out, respectively -- from the roiling depths of the subatomic world, to the very horizon of the physical cosmos.

But this only highlights the fact that the real horizon is always "within"; for when the human within encounters a physical without, it never sees only an appearance. The whole project of science is rooted in a prior human drive to delve beneath the appearance of things, i.e., to understand. And even prior to science, man attempted to understand the reality behind appearances via myth.

Until the emergence of modern superstitions such as materialism and positivism, it never occurred to human beings that appearance and reality were identical, or that the within of the world was reducible to the without.

Again, it is this within-to-within communion, or human intersubjectivity, that defines man. And even then, our encounter with physical objects isn't just quantitative. When we gaze upon the world, we do not merely see objects in motion. Rather, we are arrested by qualities -- qualities that have absolutely nothing to do with genetic survival, if that's what you're thinking.

Hart, for example, writes that "We can be drawn toward objects of aesthetic contemplation that possess no practical value for us -- that cannot nourish, protect, strengthen, or enrich us -- because we delight in a certain transcendent splendor that shines through them."

In other words, when we consider the natural world, we do not see a mere utilitarian space for the acquisition of food and sex partners. Rather, we enter an aesthetic space, a dimension of seemingly superfluous beauty that is "perpendicular" to the outward, horizontal world.

Likewise, unless we are a sociopath or a liberal, when we encounter another human being, it's not like physically bumping heads with a fellow member of the hive. Rather, every human encounter gives rise to an intersubjective space between two interior horizons.

In fact, modern psychoanalytic ("object relations") therapy essentially comes down to a systematic exploration of this intersubjective space -- which is often contaminated with mind parasites that contract it or render it less transparent. Now that I think about it, mind parasites make us a little more like ants, in that they compel a certain narrow repertoire of actions and reactions. They always diminish freedom.

Now, science and religion, in a certain sense, involve the exploration of two very different spaces. One might say that they give rise to one of those irreducible antinomies, i.e., subject/object, or interior/exterior, or form/substance.

But again, until the emergence of modern physiolatry, it never occurred to anyone that these realms were radically distinct, or that the spiritual was reducible to the physical. In reality, these are two different views of a single reality. And of the two, which is the more inclusive? I would say that objects are readily included within the subject (hence the possibility of knowledge), but that the converse is strictly impossible.

Let's look at the strange conduct of the scientist committed to a material worldview. To paraphrase Hart, just like the rest of us, he is motivated by a search for truth, in the faith that the world he explores is ultimately intelligible. Thus, he essentially uses transcendence for the project of eliminating transcendence, in the faith that his faith will turn out to be unfounded. That is what you call madness, or worse, tenure.

Hart writes that "the structure of rational consciousness is ecstatic: our minds are capable of reflecting the world because there is a kind of elation in our thinking, a joy, or at least anticipation of joy, which seeks its fulfillment in an embrace of truth in its essence."

I mean, that's how it is, for both secular and religious seekers. The secular seeker can only pretend that this is not the phenomenological structure of his quest. But he then imagines that the same thing is true of the religious seeker -- that there is no elation or joy associated with "fulfillment in an embrace of truth in its essence."

In reality, the cosmos in its entirety -- meaning both horizontal and vertical, objective and subjective -- is intelligible, and a "side effect" of this intelligibility is a kind of joy. In the words of Hart, the discovery of truth is accompanied by "a kind of delight, a kind of fulfillment that can supersede the momentary disappointments or frustrations that the search for truth brings."

Just as fragmentation seems to be accompanied by a kind of existential anxiety, the experience of unity is associated with joy. I think of the joy a mother experiences in the unity with her infant, or the joy of a happy marriage, or the joy of friendship -- in short, the joy of love.

Aesthetic joy also reveals union; think, for example, of how a dog must experience music -- just a kind of outward white noise. But human beings can know the beauty of music because they are able to get "inside" the melody, or harmony, or expressiveness of the vocalist.

Now, the Subject of subjectivity is God, the I AM of existence as such. Therefore, the interiority of the world is ultimately "the reflection of absolute reality within the realm of the contingent." From our end, we experience this as "the soul's unquenchable eros for the divine" (↑) which "underlies all knowledge, all openness of the mind to the truth of things" (ibid.).

How convenient and how wonderful "that consciousness should be made open to being by an implausible desire [↑] for the absolute to inspire and (ideally) satiate that desire [↓]. The ecstatic structure of finite consciousness -- this inextinguishable yearning for truth that weds the mind to the being of all things -- is simply a manifestation of the metaphysical structure of reality."

That structure is ultimately the unending spiral of (↑↓) described in those priceless SIGNED COPIES!

Kind of reminds me of this:

Oh, how is it that I could come out to you / And be still floating / And never hit bottom but keep falling through / Just relaxed and paying attention?

****

And I will remember the place that is now / That has ended before the beginning...