Irwin Lieb, R. G. Collingwood, William Poteat, Soren Kierkegaard*

David Goldman

America’s journey is the Christian pilgrimage that cannot end with an earthly goal. Thus, Huckleberry Finn is an exemplar of Christian literature as much as is The Pilgrim’s Progress. The journey is motivated not by the destination but by the restlessness of the pilgrim. There is only one possible conclusion to Huck’s adventure: His journey must resume, as he announces in the book’s last line: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

To the ancient Greek a person can come to know reality, meaning, the Real is finite. To the ancient Hebrew and Christian a person can never know reality because it is essentially unsearchable. Created beings can never fathom the divine will. This comports with the old Hebrew idea that Gods’ name is unpronounceable – being vowels only – Yod He Vav He rendered in Latin as YHVH. It also is more a verb than a noun. The doctrines in the Qabala are precursors of Christian orthodoxy. So, even though unknowable in ‘this’ life, the fruit of ascending to heaven is full revelation of the Real in the after life. Here, below, we must live by grace. Put another way, for the Hebrew/Christian, the full truth about reality is in a separate realm accessible only when certain conditions are met in the death of the individual. Is this not prideful of man to think by the grace of god that what is in essence a man generated account of the ultimate workings of the cosmos have been revealed only to him?

     Hubris is to make the world over to one’s own design, to shape the cosmos to one’s own purpose. It is of impiety. It is tampering with the cosmos. Another essentially Greek idea.
     For the Greek the cosmos is finite and orderly; its meaning can be grasped for the real itself is finite, a thing in itself. For the Hebrew and Christian it is governed by divine will. But neither account for Don Juanism, that is, restlessness, tumult, infinity. So, how, then, does Christianity posit spiritually qualified sensuousness? It is an outgrowth of the idea that it will be fully available in the future, when one passes into the after life. So, it exists for us on the horizon, hovering there like a jewel, attractive, beautiful, infinitely fulfilling. We want that, live, race towards that fulfillment. It becomes an object of longing which keeps us from fully attending to our life in the flesh, and really, we come to despise our supposed limitations as embodied creatures. Remember, to the Hebrew reality is equivocally manifest in appearances, that is, it is not exhausted while the Greek view is that reality is wholly manifest in appearances; it is exhausted, there not being a supra-real.

     So, “As principle, power,….it is Christianity that first posited sensuousness into the world.” (Kierkegaard) Western sensibility can best be understood if looked at in this light. As principle, arché (from or in the beginning), sensuousness was first posited by Christianity, and this is opposed by the Hebrew davar, meaning word, or speech. The Greeks thought the cosmos finite and equivalent and that logos and psyche inform reality throughout. The Hebraic universe is orderly because God would not deceive us; he is bona fide, as Descartes put it. For Christianity, God informs reality, creating it anew each moment. For Greeks, logos, psyche, cosmos inform reality by being, becoming, or keeping reality. The word of God is not reality, not divine, not any more than our words are us. Logos is the real, and it hides behind appearances. God is faithful, but unsearchable; his being is not exhausted in his deeds. Neither is ours. We are complete only in an ever disappearing event on an ever receding horizon. Gratification of the senses supplants having this future completion; we’re deprived of being whole so the unfillable void in us becomes a daemonic urge – Don Juanism. Satiety ever escapes us remaining forever unachievable like that point of being fully real in an ever disappearing future event.

The historical corollary is the Israelites being ‘brought’ out of Egyptian bondage. Likewise the world, in the biblical account, was ‘brought’ out of the void. This pattern repeats when, we will be, in the fullness of time – upon the perfect realization of creation – ‘brought’ out of this world, apocalyptically, and into heaven and into complete, whole eternal beings with perfect incorruptible bodies.

Kierkegaard, through his “Author A” states that Christianity posits sensuousness as its own opposition in that the spirit sees the ego as separate and evil. “Beware of worldly things, the ‘ways’ of the flesh.” So not only is man irrevocably incomplete, he is self loathing, which feeds the daemonic urge adding or enhancing his restless tumultuous race to infinity. Poteat thought, along with Kierkegaard that in the music of the opera Don Giovanni, Mozart actually expressed in sound this restless urge. In Christianity and Don Juanism the sensuous is not related to the “senses” so much as to a kind of spirit. It is a discarnate sensuousness. Coming to dwell in this feeling is an elevation or transfiguration of the sensuous out of the body to the level of a spirit. This is the birth of the daemonic. The daemonic prevents us from having proper reverence for the absolute other, if, indeed there is that – I don’t think so – and leads us on a blind path searching a universal culmination of the restlessness, tumult, the erroneous sense of infinity that is its heritage. We literally and forever teeter on history’s brink ever racing to a disappearing point on the horizon the sense of being complete in ourselves, the sense of wholeness impossible to reach.

This is a most abstract idea and has a minimum of bearing on me as I am in the world and which thus tends to take me out of the world. The most abstract medium is the medium which makes a minimum of reference to man as a spatial temporal creature and which thus tends to take him out of his being in the world. Put another way it is an escape from what is to what might be. Don Juanism, in one sense the erotic in nature gone wild, was sprouted from the seed of the insane drive to achieve salvation, personal completeness, only by union with an absolute other in a reality disconnected from life.

There is no cure for this malady unless it might be complete annihilation, which seems to be where we are headed. Western man has morphed into a creature that is permanently estranged from himself and reality.

 

A Zen Moment

Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form.
The Heart Sutra

When I say something is done in a void, I mean the doing constitutes the entire universe. I write; the whole world writes. I am the world, there is nothing else. The world is nothing but the writing at that moment.

     The Buddha is reported to have said there is no abiding reality. Thus “you drink from an empty cup and listen to the sound of one hand clapping.”

     How best to cope with estrangement from reality.

     Alienation is a mode of experience in which the person is estranged from himself and/or reality. To the existentialist life is a project to end this estrangement. From the ancients to Hegel the philosophical task was to find the universal essence, the immutableness of being – key Buddha’s statement. Hegel was the last of this trend. Kierkegaard rejected this classical notion that man should seek universal essence objectively (Heaven) asserting that it should be found subjectively, within man  himself.

     If there is no abiding Real then whatever fills the moment becomes realities’ surrogate.

     Does this mean that everything is permitted? Perhaps. Is the boundary condition only that there is no boundary? If there is no abiding reality on what basis is there morality?

     Plato uses Beauty to describe a way out of this conundrum. We can come to understand what is really going on here by realizing that we actually “see right through beauty, past the object, to the real itself.” The Buddha, of course, is right. Were there an abiding reality then it would take on the characteristics of a material object. We need to understand that though it is indefinable, unknowable, unfathomable, the abiding reality is there, just not in a way sentient life forms can grasp. One cannot grasp, hold, own, Beauty, Truth, Moral Justice. A kind of Ontological Undecidability (Kelly Ross) is the result.

     Though unknowable we yet participate in the Real. And, since Faith is, at least I think so, a facet of the same Divinity as Beauty, the we might see right through Faith to to God ‘himself’.

     And, finally, the Buddha’s saying there is not an abiding reality is tantamount to saying there is no God which is what Soren Kierkegaard said, though he added salient context. God Does not Exist. He is Eternal. To me that is beautiful beyond words – we see right through the thought to Reality itself. God is not – because material existence doesn’t pertain.

     An abiding Real is not, because material existence does not pertain.

Subject/Object

We are not the subject of the Real.  We are the object.  Its not what.  It’s who.  The subject is material, the object, spiritual.  Also, the Real is what we perceive. (Merleau-Ponty)  That’s good enough.  Question not whether It is Real.  Whether it is an ephemera, a dream, matters not.  It’s the hand we’ve been dealt.

Neither must one go through guilt to reach salvation. Heaven is within; its not a destination. This place we find ourselves actually is the promised land of the Bible. To become self-centered is the essence of the Christian fall from grace. Adam and Eve partaking of the forbidden fruit is a metaphor for this. It represents the move from living in the spirit to living in the material, to identify with the body instead of the spirit. From there we tend to project our being as an object onto the whole of reality. So reason pertains only to the material aspect, principle. When Pascal said “The heart has its reasons which reason can never understand.” he is saying the heart is the faculty of spirit. Clearly he places the heart above. Spirit over matter.

The subject of the Real is the soul, the person as a self-realizing spirit, and the role of the material in this play is as a mere facilitator –  it is the mechanism whereby the soul grows its self knowledge and more importantly, understanding. The emergence of Religion and Science in the forms they have taken are based on the person identifying not with the spirit but with his material side. Religion posits the source of Truth in an absolute other, material other – God as a thing (among things). It then places that material object on an ever receding horizon and sets man up to eternally chase after it, forever to end his longing in frustration. Science, similarly, posits the source of Truth in mere measurement – which is always measurement of ‘something’, a material object, again, on an ever receding horizon. It eternally reformulates its measurements to ostensibly close in on a final grand unifying theory.

Ultimately, these are infinite regresses of effort by man to define his material self in a spiritual world, doomed to failure. The more you cling to the Real, the more it slips from your grasp. How can one own Beauty? Truth? Its easier to own something like the color Red. Meaning, we chase after qualities of the Real hoping that we can fill the void at our center that is best filled with understanding that discovery is the action of the unknown, the unknowable.

Soren Kierkegaard: “Life is a mystery to live, not a mystery to solve.”

Night Baseball (redux)

     NIGHT BASEBALL

Halo of light.
Small figures,
Moving mundane ritual.
Crickets chirrup.
Bats c r r a c k!

Gene pools encounter
In self predatory embrace
Of pedagogue time’s
Geologically
Choreographed cascade
Of tumult tormented evolutes
Chained
In perpetual awakening
To combat and
Death.

    April 27, 1991

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    The voice of the void:  “Alive, I can’t die; Dead, I can’t be born.”

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China Hegemon

“The People’s Republic of China thus holds the key. Beijing realizes that the DPRK’s rogue regime is highly destabilizing regionally and bad for business throughout East Asia. Combine that with internal instability which could send refugees streaming north into Kirin and Liaoning provinces, is something PRC policy planners fear. If Beijing wanted to make the difference they could; China supplies half of DPRK’s food and 90 percent of oil supplies. The PRC could pull the plug on Pyongyang. But it won’t likely do so.”

This is a good article. I think the answer is obvious. China needs North Korea to keep the United States unbalanced, to sow confusion and discord so THEY can play the insectoid games of the great human hive that they are. Raw survival of the clan. Monetized. Militarized.

For some excellent background see here.  Exerpt:

“…there are radical differences among the three cultures. America is apocalyptic; Russia is messianic; and China is pragmatic. By apocalyptic, I mean that Americans define themselves with respect to an unattainable point in the future, the goal of a Christian pilgrimage whose endpoint always hovers beyond the horizon. In a recent essay for Tablet Magazine I tried to identify what was unique in American culture…

“China’s attitude towards the world is paranoid, but even paranoids have enemies: China fears Western attempts to promote independence in Tibet, or to radicalize the Uyghur Muslims in its extreme west, or to build up Taiwan as an alternative state….

“What appears in the West to be a courteous gesture to religious freedom (visits by the Dalai Lama) or hospitality to political refugees (official US funding of the World Uyghur Congress) are viewed in Beijing as evidence that the West is keeping open its options to attempt to destabilize and dismember China.”

I Heed This

     I heed this; I have all my things around me and I am at ease.

    With a cool hand on extreme urgency I stand waiting for something to happen to generate growth out of the plane of my faculties as I extend them into the world. I imagine tendril like growth, quickly along some avenues, slowly along others. An omnipresent consciousness monitors the growth, shifting emphasis here and there to accommodate the obstacles to growth and the places of peace and piety as well. There are places of aggression and places of vulnerability. The art of life consists in part on deft manipulation by the person, of these elements. How does one learn this art? Recognize that patterns arising out of the alternating currents of aggression and vulnerability are pulses in an ever generating play of self. We must live under the weight of our doing. If the body is our agency of primary activity, we will live by what the body learns to need. If the mind, or, say, the aesthetic sense of mind, dominates, the world will come to us in that guise. If we read and hear of opening spiritual doors and persistently travel the inward path, that too is a cloud around the self which, itself, is clean…

My mentor, G.V. Desani, taught that the mind was like a flawless white diamond on a colored surface. While it was perfectly clear in itself it reflects, takes up the color of the surface.

Birth Astride Graves

    Estragon:  We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist.

    Pozzo:  ….one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second … they give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.  On!

    Waiting for Godot
    Samuel Beckett

Hermann Hesse quote

    “It seems to me that everything that exists is good — death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my living understanding, then all is well with me and nothing can harm me.”

    Siddhartha

Discovery

…to have it all you must first lose it all. Discovery comes when you take a chance, which, ultimately is every event.

     The freshness of the new as experienced in personal existence in the living present is in direct proportion to the depth of personal surrender to the moment. The depth of discovery is merely the depth of involvement. Concentration.

December 12, 1976