Fish In the Afternoon

Interlude: PhilPapers 2020 Survey

September 16th, 2024
This is for fun and not to be taken as a final statement of my positions. Here is the original.

Questions
- A priori knowledge – no or yes – no – The a priori is a patterning of the a posteriori.
- Abortion (first trimester, no special circumstances): permissible or impermissible? – permissible – Every body is someone’s body and that body is theirs to do with as they will.
- Abstract objects – platonism or nominalism – nominalism – Everything is Unique.
- Aesthetic experience: sui generis, pleasure, or perception? – Sui generis – Aesthetic experience is a synthesis of appearance into a sui generis experience.
- Aesthetic value – subjective or objective – both – The aesthetic experience is subject-objective, being a synthesized relationship between the Unique and the world.
- Aim of philosophy – wisdom, understanding, truth/knowledge, happiness, or goodness/justice – wisdom – Loving-Wisdom.
- Analysis of knowledge: other analysis, justified true belief, or no analysis? – no analysis – Knowing is a collection of patterned motions and cannot be analyzed in itself.
- Analytic-synthetic distinction – yes or no – no – The analytic is a patterning of the synthetic.
- Arguments for theism (which argument is strongest?): design, cosmological, ontological, moral, or pragmatic? – ontological – All the world patterns the One; this One is God.
- Belief or credence (which is more fundamental?): neither, credence, or belief? – credence – The Unique leans in its knowing and this leaning is always a maybe, a possibility inherent in the relationship between Unique and world.
- Capital punishment: permissible or impermissible? – impermissible – The self-ownership of the Unique precludes its annihilation by the state.
- Causation: nonexistent, counterfactual/difference-making, primitive, or process/production? – process/production – From nothing, the cosmos patterns itself into an echoic ocean, with each event linked to others by their position in the pattern.
- Chinese room: doesn’t understand or understands? – understands – Knowing is a doing and it is the room as a whole that does the act of knowing.
- Concepts: empiricism or nativism? – empiricism – The Unique in itself is a creative nothing; only through relationship with the world does the Unique come to inhabit meaning.
- Consciousness: functionalism, eliminativism, dualism, panpsychism, or identity theory? – (hylomorphic) pan(proto)psychism – All matter is spiritmatter, blessed with the immanent potential of consciousness, realized in the relationship between subject and object.
- Continuum hypothesis (does it have a determinate truth-value?): indeterminate or determinate? – indeterminate – Mathematics is an a priori patterning of the a posteriori in our thought and practice; because of this, it is a tool that contains its own indeterminacies and contradictions.
- Cosmological fine-tuning (what explains it?): no fine-tuning, design, multiverse, or brute fact? – brute fact – The pre-conditions for knowing the fact and the pre-conditions of the fact being true are the same.
- Eating animals and animal products – vegetarianism, veganism, or omnivorism – omnivorism – In right relationship, we can eat animals; in right relationship, they can eat us.
- Environmental ethics: non-anthropocentric or anthropocentric? – non-anthropocentric – Though our perspective is rooted in the human Unique, it stretches out beyond it in a way that does not assume human primacy.
- Epistemic justification – internalism or externalism – externalism – The world is prior to the interior. There is no private language.
- Experience machine (would you enter?) – yes or no – no – The experience machine is just one experience out of many.
- Extended mind: no or yes? – yes – The mind is identical with the world and the tools that extend our en-minded activity are themselves en-minded.
- External world – skepticism, idealism, or non-skeptical realism – idealist non-skeptical realism – The world and the mind are identical. The appearances of the world are facets of the world as the summation of en-worlded experiences.
- Footbridge (pushing man off bridge will save five on track below, what ought one do?) – don’t push or push – indeterminate – One wisely does in the moment.
- Foundations of mathematics: set-theoretic, formalism, constructivism/intuitionism, logicism, or structuralism? – constructivism/intuitionism – Mathematics is an a priori patterning of a posteriori thought and activity and thereby the structure of mathematics reflects the structure of that activity.
- Free will – compatibilism, no free will, or libertarianism? – compatibilism – Free will patterns the will that patterns it.
- Gender – unreal, biological, social, or psychological? – all of the above – When I woman, is the anima that does it biological, social, or psychological?
- Gender categories: revise, preserve, or eliminate? – revise – Let a million genders bloom.
- God – atheism or theism? – (pan)theism – The divine inhabits the world as perichoretic kenosis, the indwelling, self-giving love of creating-begetting-proceeding.
- Grounds of intentionality: phenomenal, primitive, inferential, interpretational, or causal/teleological? – phenomenal – Intention is an orientation of en-minded activity that is experienced self-reflectivity in that activity.
- Hard problem of consciousness (is there one?): yes or no? – no – Matter and en-minded activity are the same.
- Human genetic engineering: impermissible or permissible? – permissible – The possibilities of implementation are too varied to decide the permissibility of them as a class.
- Hume (what is his view?): skeptic or naturalist? – naturalist – Hume demonstrates the limits of philosophy to ground a Newtonian stance towards the natural sciences.
- Immortality (would you choose it?): yes or no? – no – The horizon of death manifests the arena of our mattering.
- Interlevel metaphysics (which is the most useful?): grounding, supervenience, identity, or realization? – realization – Ways-of-talking about the world are bound together in our experience by the mutual realization of those ways-of-talking in the world.
- Justification: infinitism, reliabilism, nonreliabilist foundationalism, or coherentism? – reliabilism – Knowing is a doing. We only know to the degree that we do in knowing.
- Kant (what is his view?): one world or two worlds? – one world – Kant synthesizes his quasi-idealism for the sake of reconciling the Humean picture to philosophical knowledge, showing how the limits of experience relate to the world in which that experience occurs.
- Knowledge – empiricism or rationalism? – empiricism – The interior is a patterning of the world; thought synthesizes experience into reason.
- Knowledge claims: relativism, contextualism, or invariantism? – contextualism – There is no knowledge, there is only knowing, in a place, in a time, in a world.
- Law: legal non-positivism or legal positivism? – legal positivism – The law is a patterning of human activity that has a law-like authority in a given social system.
- Laws of nature – non-Humean or Humean? – Humean – The cosmos patterns the laws like deep canyons in a mountain range.
- Logic: classical or non-classical? – both – Logic is a doing; types of logic do different things.
- Material composition: restrictivism, nihilism, or universalism? – universalism – Everything is the same thing patterning itself infinitely as the many-in-one.
- Meaning of life – objective, nonexistent, or subjective? – both subjective and objective – Life means.
- Mental content – internalism or externalism? – externalism – The world is prior to the interior; the interior is part of the world.
- Meta-ethics – moral anti-realism or moral realism? – moral anti-realism – You cannot touch the good, but only that which the good belongs to.
- Metaontology – anti-realism, deflationary realism, or heavyweight realism? – heavyweight realism – Though at base all there is is the flow of en-minded matter-in-activity, this matter composes all that there is, which exists just as much as the matter that composes it.
- Metaphilosophy: non-naturalism or naturalism? – non-naturalism – Philosophy is a patterning of thought that interrelates with, but is distinct from, the natural sciences.
- Method in history of philosophy (which do you prefer?): contextual/historicist or analytic/rational reconstruction? – contextual/historicist – Philosophers write from a place and a time and a body, and only with these locations in mind can we unravel their thought.
- Method in political philosophy (which do you prefer?): ideal theory or non-ideal theory? – non-ideal theory – To change the world we must first start from attention to the good of the particulars around us.
- Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? – physicalism – All matter is en-minded, though matter it remains.
- Mind uploading (brain replaced by digital emulation): survival or death? – death – The dis-assembly of the anima that enfleshes a particular subjectivity ruptures that subjectivity. Even if it is re-assembled, the subjectivity will contain that rupture.
- Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? – non-cognitivism –Moral judgment is a type of mattering, an intertwining of subject-object that normatively and affectively colors the world
- Moral motivation: externalism or internalism? – externalism – We are always driven both by what is within us and by the world; there is no desire that is not an intertwining of self-and-other.
- Moral principles: moral particularism or moral generalism? – moral particularism – All moral commitment is to a Unique or a Unique together.
- Morality: non-naturalism, constructivism, expressivism, naturalist realism, or error theory? – expressivism – The mattering of moral judgment is affectively-laden, creating an emotional landscape that one navigates in doing-good in the world.
- Newcomb’s problem: one box or two boxes? – two boxes – Rob that robot.
- Normative concepts (which is most fundamental?): ought, reasons, value, or fit? – value – Mattering more specifically, but mattering is closest to value.
- Normative ethics: consequentialism, virtue ethics, or deontology? – virtue ethics – Morality is learning to navigate, disclose, and co-constitute the world as intertwined with the matterings of others and oriented towards the good of those we are committed to. This is accomplished through practice and the training of our intentions and attention.
- Other minds (for which groups are some members conscious?) – all – All matter is en-minded.
- Ought implies can: no or yes? – no – Our commitments many times brush up against the impossible, a tragic limit of our virtue that also creates the horizon of our mattering.
- Perceptual experience: sense-datum theory, representationalism, qualia theory, or disjunctivism? – representationalism – We perceive the space-between as a representation of the intertwining of our faculties and the powers of things-in-the-world.
- Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? – psychological (narrative) view – Our identity is one that we narrate and which is narrated by others.
- Philosophical knowledge (is there any?): none, a little, or a lot? – a little – I know that Schopenhauer was a fucking dork.
- Philosophical methods (which methods are the most useful/important?) – all – Philosophy is an orientation, not a method.
- Philosophical progress (is there any?): a lot, a little, or none? – a little – I am better than Schopenhauer.
- Plato (what is his view?): knowledge only of forms or knowledge also of concrete things? – knowledge also of concrete things – Even if things-in-the-world are shadows of the forms, one knows the shadows in knowing the forms.
- Political philosophy: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? – egalitarian communitarianism – Political community is an extension of friendship and neighborly-care and requires both the attention to the community as a community and an equality between those within the community.
- Politics: capitalism or socialism? – socialism – Capitalism is a death cult.
- Possible worlds: concrete, abstract, or nonexistent? – concrete – At the highest level of representation, the real is a landscape of possibility, within which lies the gradient of worlds.
- Practical reason: Kantian, Humean, or Aristotelian? – Humean & Aristotelian – Practical reason is a pairing of attention and intention that overlaps both with the desire-focus of Hume and the more complex habitual reason of Aristotle.
- Principle of sufficient reason: false or true? – false – The cosmos allows for uncaused possibilities.
- Proper names: Millian or Fregean? – Fregean – No naming is devoid of sense.
- Properties: transcendent universals, immanent universals, nonexistent, tropes, or classes? – tropes – Properties are patterns that we bundle in our activity.
- Propositional attitudes: representational, phenomenal, nonexistent, or dispositional? – dispositional – A propositional attitude is a type of intention, disposing us to particular forms of activity.
- Propositions: structured entities, nonexistent, acts, sets, or simple entities? – acts – Propositions are doings which flow into and out of our propositional attitudes.
- Quantum mechanics: hidden-variables, epistemic, many-worlds, or collapse? – many-worlds – Fuck if I know, but that sounds right.
- Race: unreal, social, or biological? – all of the above – Race is not a static thing, but a doing and a process: racializing. This activity is simultaneously imaginary, constituted from social and historical processes, and bound to biological characteristics that are not racialized prior to these social processes.
- Race categories: revise, eliminate, or preserve? – revise – In the long-run, eliminating race categories might be the goal. However, so long as racialization is a major form of oppression, the goal is instead to revise our racial categories so as to undermine that oppression and allow for solidarity among oppressed groups.
- Rational disagreement (can two people with the same evidence rationally disagree?): non-permissivism or permissivism? – permissivism – Reasons appear differently in the knowing of different people.
- Response to external-world skepticism (which is strongest?): semantic externalist, pragmatic, contextualist, dogmatist, abductive, or epistemic externalist? – abductive – The external world is a required assumption for our abductive practices of knowing, and these abductive practices are generally reliable and central to our epistemic schemas.
- Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? – scientific anti-realism – Scientific knowing does not represent the world as it is, but the world as it operates in our doings.
- Semantic content (which expressions are context-dependent?): minimalism (no more than a few), radical contextualism (most or all) , or moderate contextualism (intermediate)? – radical contextualism – No utterance exists outside of its location.
- Sleeping beauty (woken once if heads, woken twice if tails, credence in heads on waking?): one-half or one-third? – one-half – Sure, that seems right.
- Spacetime: substantivalism or relationism? – relationism – Spacetime is an entanglement of en-minded matter.
- Statue and lump: one thing or two things? – two things – Things are constituted by their intertwining with subjects, and this intertwining allows for multiple patterns of conceptualization to layer on top of the same spacetime bundle.
- Teletransporter (new matter): death or survival? – death – I have a suspicion that if I get zapped and vaporized that I die.
- Temporal ontology: presentism, growing block, or eternalism? – growing block – In some sense time is eternal, in that the highest representation of the universe is a landscape of possibilities. However, time as it is experienced grows from our intertwining and echoing.
- Theory of reference: causal, deflationary, or descriptive? – deflationary – There are multiple, rather than solely one, practices of reference.
- Time: B-theory or A-theory? – A-theory of a sort – Time as it is experienced is form from our intertwining and echoing, and these doings are sequenced, creating the perception of ordered time even as time at the highest representation is eternal.
- Time travel: metaphysically impossible or metaphysically possible? – metaphysically possible – Extremely unlikely, but theoretically possible. I do not know how you do it but I don’t have a good reason that you could not, in principle, navigate time.
- Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): don’t switch or switch? – indeterminate – The right decision is made in the moment through attention to the particularities of the situation.
- True contradictions: possible but non-actual, impossible, or actual? – actual – Our matterings may be contradictory, creating normative and affective landscapes that are internally in tension with themselves.
- Truth: epistemic, correspondence, or deflationary? – epistemic – Truth refers to a wide spectrum of doings and ways that those doings matter to us.
- Units of selection: genes or organisms? – organisms – A gene is nothing without its conjoined expression in the organism.
- Vagueness: epistemic, semantic, or metaphysical? – all of the above – Our sayings are vague, our knowings are vague, and the universe itself has blurred and many times indeterminate lines.
- Values in science (is ideal scientific reasoning necessarily sensitive or insensitive to non-epistemic values?): necessarily value-laden, can be either, or necessarily value-free? – necessarily value-laden – Science is itself a mattering (or a set of matterings), such that it cannot be effectively done without being value-laden.
- Well-being: hedonism/experientialism, desire satisfaction, or objective list? – experientialism – Well-being is a mattering that is unveiled in our lived experience.
- Wittgenstein (which do you prefer?): early or late? – both – There is no contradiction.
- Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? – inconceivable – Our perception of doings already contains the assumption of consciousness; there is no way to have the doings of an organism and not the experience that occurs with those doings.
The Cornucopia of Being

September 13th, 2024

…in the case where we are speaking of human beings, it is said to be necessary to know them before we love them… but the saints, on the contrary, when they speak of divine things, say that we must love them before we know them, and that we enter into truth only by charity; they have made of this one of their most useful maxims. – Blaise Pascal, Pensees

For Katie.

Adapted from a paper for a Heidegger course.

Katie and I met after a tornado. Or, rather, seven tornadoes. Growing up in the Arkansas River Valley, I was used to tornadoes, going up to Papaw’s to huddle in the shelter and peek out at the cyclones. Rogers, however, up in them hills rather than down in the hollers, used to be relatively safe, tornadoes forming more and more as the world warms. This time, seven cyclones ripped through the town, my friends and I hiding under blankets and holding our pets while the electric lines spewed sparks and the winds uprooted oaks. Unbeknownst to me, Katie was at her parents’ place a few miles away, sheltering with four dogs and a cat. Displaced by the tornado, we’d go on our first date a week later. Who Katie was I didn’t yet know, but loving and knowing are both rooted in mystery. To begin to fall in love is to say, “I do not know you, but I want to,” to attend to their unfolding as the Unique that they are, an unspoken but never-silent intention.

Does love come from knowing, or does knowing come from love? One knows by charity, an act of loving-faith that invites the other to reveal themselves. Loving-faith wills the free unfolding of the other without possession or direction; it is a leap of faith into the world of the beloved. In love, we attend to the unfolding of the beloved, nurturing and inviting their Uniquing without possession or direction. Love wills freedom; freedom apocalypts joy. Joy in the unfolding of another opens the space of possibility, mattering new worlds into presence. Only by love can one know, as only by love can one unfold freely, the doma receiving the Uniquing of the together and gifting the Uniquing of each.

The activity of love reflects the activity of all: perichoretic kenosis. Perichoresis refers to the indwelling, or interpenetration, of the persons of the Christian Trinity and the divine and human natures of the Begotten One. The being of each is not separate but co-essential, dwelling-together in the hypostatic union. Though the activity of the Trinity personalizes itself as Creating, Begetting, and Proceeding, the essence of the Trinity is One, such that each person acts essentially, but freely, in concert with the others. The unfolding of each person is thus also the unfolding of the being of all, with this unfolding manifesting both as the internal life of the Trinity and its external energeia, or activity-in-the-world. The energeia reflects the essence of the Trinity in the union of its internal life, the divine doma, and in the intertwined becoming of each person in their personhood. Perichoresis is intimately connected with kenosis, the self-emptying of the Trinity in creation and incarnation. Kenosis is the voluntary humbling of God in becoming-human and in creating that which lies outside of herself. This kenosis is part of the energeia, in which the essence of the Trinity acts-in-the-world, so that the internal life of the Trinity is also emptied and made powerless in creation and incarnation. It is this self-emptying in both the activity and essence of the Trinity that unites the divine and human life in the Begotten One.

Katie collects Depression Glass, especially pink glass. Though the differences between original Depression Glass and reproductions made in the 1980’s are subtle, she can spot them, pointing out when seams are machine-made rather than hand-made and noting how manufacturing processes for glass differ between decades. She hates it when men casually think they know her hobby, incorrectly lecturing her about radiation (men love to think they understand invisible dangers). She loves pink both because it’s pretty and because it obscures and amplifies. To queerly-perform femininity can be an act of subversion when directed against power and towards liberation, part of the “trickster” nature of lesbian femme identity. I am also a trickster – a transfem butch, a strange apparition of queerly embodied womanhood. The essential nature of our relationship remains hidden from much of the world yet is always unfolding-within. She’s the first person whose witnessing me as a woman feels automatic and primordial, whose queering of womanhood already includes me. Everyone underestimates the woman in both of us and are mistaken by our worldly performance. The power of trickster genders is in concealing from power a hidden utopia, a space-of-openness. Our presentation tricks patriarchs, whose gender perception remains stunted, suspicious but not knowing why. But in dwelling in our co-becoming, we are able to manifest the depths of who we are, to act as our own queer utopias.

In attending to the unfolding of another, we will their freedom, and this willing is kenotic insofar as it (a) empties the self through powerlessness, and (b) opens itself to, and delights in, the unfolding of the beloved. Our powerlessness in love is a foregoing of possession and direction, emptying oneself of expectations for, and claims on, the being of the beloved, instead acting as a home for their free unfolding. In the poetry of Christian kenosis, the Begotten One empties herself of Godhood and takes on the free and unconstrained essence of being human, delighting in the being of creation rather than in God’s power-over-being. Likewise, in taking joy in the unfolding of the beloved, we empty ourselves of our power-over-being and instead welcome their free Uniquing. In acting as a home for their Uniquing, we act perichoretically, co-dwelling in our being-in-the-world as the doma, allowing their unfolding to interpenetrate with ours, accepting and appropriating our being-with-another as part of our being-in-the-world.

This perichoretic and kenotic form of love must be mutual. One loves not only by loving another but by loving-with-another. Love is not self-sacrifice, negating oneself in favor of the other, being only a prop for their unfolding. That is not love but being-possessed – having one’s being possessed. Instead, in love, one’s attending to the unfolding of the beloved is met by their attending to your own unfolding, the beloved of the beloved. Lovers joy with one another in their free unfolding, co-constituting the doma as a site of common love that is also a common project of openness, a site of possibility that is radically open to the unfolding of lovers. This being-at-home is a being-with-another where the unfolding of each is made free and gentle, where the past-and-future of the world is met and journeyed together. Being-at-home is unfolding together in a common-world. Falling-in-love is entering into that being-at-home-with-another and requires faith and charity through giving up one’s power and becoming open to another’s free unfolding. In theological terms, being-at-home requires kenotically emptying-oneself of power and possession, but in doing so one enters perichoretically into a commonly unfolding being, a being-with-another that allows for the free and homely unfolding of each. Like how the persons of the Trinity are united in essence but remain distinct persons, those in love at-home with one another are united in their unfolding but remain distinct, neither directing nor controlling the unfolding of the other.

Katie got a new house recently. I knew she would; she knew she knew she would but knowing she knows wasn’t comforting. There’s not much in the way of housing protections in Arkansas (not much in the way of protections in general), but she’s resourceful. She built her own business while in poverty and learned all the required upkeep herself. Changing a tire? Yes. Electrical work? Yep. Knowing how to haul a giant metal trailer and upkeep it every day? Absolutely. Doing this, all while performing the femininity that rich WASPs expect? Of course – performing gender is also performing gender in-a-world, thrown into a landscape of norms that one must navigate, concealing and revealing through one’s guises. I’ve generally used masculine presentation as a survival technique – men turn violent when faced with trans womanhood, and especially with trans womanhood divorced from cis-femininity, but they’re also very bad at spotting it. Similarly, she both experiences and navigates oppression in the context of her feminine presentation, our expressions being both genuine incarnations of our unfolding gender-life while also concealing a much more complex interior. I’m helping her move this weekend, and in taking-apart her old home to build a new one, I notice the ways she reflects that interior life in the world around her – her grandmother’s lamp, her Depression glass, her dried flowers, the different cups and plates and stuffed animals and pictures and writings that she’s kept from loved ones, both here and departed. Taking joy in her unfolding is also witnessing the dialectic of her performance – both how she takes up guises again-and-again to be-in-the-world and how she architects her own space to reveal herself, to communicate how she finds herself. I find myself in love with her and so find myself always encountering her own finding, her own attunements, her own loves and joys, again and again in the unfolding.

Freedom is being-at-home in one’s unfolding, being-held in the faith of another. Joy emerges from freedom through the eudaimonia of Uniquing, the good-of-the-Unique that is also the good-itself. This joy is a mattering, one’s own freedom appearing as significant, as the mattering of the beloved emanates out into the mattering of all, intertwining Uniques togethering in their common-world, the joy of the doma. The reciprocity of love allows for the Unique of each to be willed, for the doma to become a dwelling of the freely unfolding being of beloved and beloved, inaugurating a new everydayness populated by the good of each Unique. One does not love a secret internal nature, the esse of the beloved, but instead their unfolding life, their being-in-the-world and the multiplicity of forms that their being takes, linked together in their Uniquing. Openness to the unfolding of the beloved is an openness to their essential fluidity, the creative self-becoming of the Unique.

In being-at-home with one another, lovers find-themselves in a common pursuit, the project of the doma. “I love you” discloses one as finding-oneself falling-in-love, an affirmation of this common pursuit. If love marks a mutual openness to the unfolding of the beloved, then being-in-love is taking up the project of being a home for the unfolding of those you love. Being-in-love invites the other into being-at-home with oneself, and in this invitation and common pursuit, lovers are disclosed as always-and-already unfolding together, the togethering of intertwined Uniques. Likewise, the world is disclosed as co-constituted by the project of the doma, populated with matterings that receive-and-gift the unfolding of each Unique in their togethering. Lovers discover the world as not only mattering-to-them, but mattering-to-another, mattering-to-her. The home of being-at-home is a world of matterings shared by those in love. Pursuing this common project, lovers are invited to unfold as they are, just as they welcome the unfolding of their beloved, each freely enacting their being through their common project. One never loves through self-sacrifice, because to attend to the unfolding of the beloved is also to receive their love, to attend-with-them.

In being-at-home with another, the world is populated by love, love dwelling in our matterings. Freedom is revealed in joy and the world is transformed into a reflection of the doma. In finding-oneself in love, one encounters a world that affords paths through that love, where the telos of our conjoined activity is the unfolding of lovers in their free Uniquing. The final end of the Uniquing of each thereby becomes the perichoretic kenosis of lovers being-at-home, a charitable and faithful love by which one comes to know both oneself and the beloved. To love is to attend to the unfolding of another, and one can only attend through openness, through a faith that empties oneself in powerlessness and is open to the free becoming of the beloved. To love is to wander possibility hand-in-hand.

I have to leave again at the end of July. One of the troubles of being-at-home is that you’re not always there, even if they’re always with-you, present in their absence. Being-at-home implies being-away-from-home. Yesterday, I helped her move into her new place, and we’re slowly setting it up, architecting a new physical home even as we continue to architect an en-spirited one. Putting everything away and back again, I re-encounter Katie over-and-over, her beloved things acting as scaffolding for my memory. This is hers and she feels this way about it; that is hers and she got it when this occurred. But more than that, in doing this with-her, I encounter her in her infinite freedom, the fact that who she is in herself is not captured by the world she has formed, even as that world reflects her unfolding. The depths of her disclosure, of how she has communicated her finding, is still only the shallows, waves of being echoing an uncharted, ever-moving ocean. Love is knowing I’ll never know everything, but also knowing that knowing is still only secondary to love – I love faithfully, dwelling in the mystery of the beloved. I started writing this paper because I knew I would be leaving at the end of the summer, and I knew that I wanted to continue loving Katie, to continue knowing her, even apart. But that kind of intentional knowing, of encountering mystery again-and-again, requires intention, contemplation, attention. My intention, my hope, my life goal is being-at-home by being-with-Katie. To start that journey is to say again and again each morning, “I do not know you, but I want to.” Two Uniques Uniquing together in the cornucopia of being.

One does not enter into truth except through charity. – St. Augustine, Reply to Faustus the Manichean

Image: Cupid & Psyche by Francois Gerard (1782)
The Myth of America

September 11th, 2024
At a signal from the Principal the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the flag the military salute — right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together, slowly, ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.’ At the words, ‘to my Flag,’ the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side. – Francis Bellamy, The Youth’s Companion

1776 is not a year but a signifier. In the agon, matterings war with one another, emanating history. Long ago, Luther’s children escape the restoration, taking Cromwell’s skull to Turtle Island. Their God chooses, baptizing in water and pneuma. The first baptism is a sign of the second; the second is God’s will. Either way, the earth-soul breathes. The roundheads fence the world, reifying God in the market and separating themselves off as white. The Puritans mistake their flesh for divinity and case their hue as cosmogonic. The white world is birthed from idolatry, enfleshing the violent superego of settlers, slavers, and conquistadors. O woe to you, Vespucci.

The proletariat is an invention. In the dusk of the Black Death, the bourgeoisie emerge, exchange eclipsing feudalism as peasants are stripped of their land and women are burned on stakes. Capitalism is a witch hunt – the witch of rebellion that haunts history, the world turned upside down. Making the yuletide gay. Puritans are theologians of the market, crushing the un-chosen carolers with the God of enclosure. The kingdom collapses and its grave births Leviathan, Hobbes’ nightmare of man against man, the myth of the terror. Together, this terror and the Puritan God re-write history, capital crawling snarling out of the pit of England. America never left Plymouth Rock.

Capitalism starts from covenant, from the predestination of the saints. TULIP is an acronym for the Time-Machine. Lost on Mt. Ararat, the Rushdoonys whistle Yankee Doodle Dandy, burying theocracy in the heart of the slaver’s republic. In July, the plantation billionaire signs his separation, the teeth of the dead rotting in his mouth. Leviathan finds fathers for its parasitic creation: settler democracy. A demos of occupiers and property-owners, the double-image of the Athenian executors. Tyranny masks itself in the guise of the people, the general will confiscated by the homeowner’s association. Race becomes a mark for the covenant as women are privatized and the land is terraformed into territory. The mark of the pneuma is race-capital, the fetishization of value reified in flesh.

The fasces is a Roman invention, appropriated from the ash of Minos. Caesar glimpses the chi-rho written in the sky and the Carpenter is crowned king. No longer an executed criminal, the Begotten One is re-made in the image of the enslavers and occupiers, the temple of Augustus built on the ruins of Golgotha. The axe returns again-and-again, inaugurating Charlemagne, Washington, Bonaparte, and Hitler. At its core is the imperium, the synthesis of God and Caesar, carried from Augustus to their Puritan offspring. Yockey imagined what was already being born: a white imperium, carried from Europe to the occupied lands. Romulus kills Remus and spills his blood on the steps of the Capitol. The challenge of the Carpenter remains: to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. To not put your faith in false gods.

And in princes who cannot save.
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As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labor, within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation, between men, themselves, which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations, both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is, therefore, inseparable from the production of commodities. - Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1
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Image: American Dream by Brett Whiteley (1969)
Among the Willows

September 7th, 2024

Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque revenit. – Horace, Epistles

Slow. I am at rest. No. I am not resting. We beings breathe the three-in-one, creating-begetting-proceeding. The divine does; the imago deis. We are parched, desert-time frosting catabolic catastrophe, the dust unsettles in place. I am kudzu. Body. My soul hurts. Mind. I am a vine. Spirit. I am reborn. Earth.

Tree sap syrups the forest. Evolution paints ants along the aphid-dotted floor, the rococo of the Oversoul. Walk / Stay. Heaven drips mercy into amoral nature, strife recomposing into unity, the dance of the Dao. I am a many-worlded being, stardust teeming with bacterial galaxies. Harmony is woven difference, needles threading anima into the theater of time. I am a place I am always arriving-at. Here. When? There. Now? Being swallows the sooted pine, life ticktocks the dawn. I am a willow.

Stop and breathe. Pause. Silent. Still. Do you move or does the world? You have turned the earth into an icon and humanity into an idol. The common-being can’t be found. (You cannot locate the universe.) We seek the already-here. Take a step back and ask: when was the last time you let the world speak? (Pity the philosopher who speaks of transcendence.) The immanent is an expanse far greater than eternity. You paint the sky and pretend it’s art; butterflies burn civilization. Wait. Brain-deep in the swamp of concepts we drown our lungs in thought. Breathing is a forgetting; knowing is anamnesis.

Hades is a place you can touch.

Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher. – William Wordsworth, The Tables Turned

Image: The Forest Edge by Gustave Courbet (n.d.)
The Pluricosmos

August 29th, 2024
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Thus there is nothing waste, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearence. We might compare this to the appearence of a pond in the distance, where we can see the confused movement and swarming of the fish, without distinguishing the fish themselves.

Thus we are that each living body has a dominante entelechy, which in case of an animal is the soul, but the members of this living body are full of other living things, plants and animals, of which each has in turn ita dominant entelechy or soul. - Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology 69-70
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The self is both real and not-real; it is here and nowhere. The mind is a no-mind, but a no-mind that en-minds, enfleshing sensation. Touch pianos being. I heal; over-and-again. I heal.

Holy One, we dwell in you. We dwell in us. Us. I am also an us, galaxies of micro-life unfolding their species being. I am the cosmos for others. Others are a cosmos for me. There is never only one world. Hear. Every rustle is worlds-in-motion, the universe shimmering eternities in a modal sea. We are infinities.

I sit still. I listen. Wait. Beauty appears first; sensation sparks aisthesis. Being poems life. Take a step back and the real swallows you, the real caresses. Where do the archons go in the winter? I spellfree my past-selves, the archipelago of ashes. I unfold like an ethic. The pluricosmos composes you; you are a many-unfolding. History owls the presentfuture. In the many-unfolding the Unique appears as awareness, the appearance that appears to itself. This Unique orients, it intends, it leans, it attends, and it acts, it means. Meaning is planted in the first Uniquing.

Loved One, I attend to you. I attend to us. Attending is always attending-with-another, painter, painted, and paint intertwined. One experiences as the subjectobject, entangled-becomings sculpting a world-together. Ontology is attending to the entangled worlds of our togethering. Time re-members in the dreamsleep of awakening. Shhh. Wait. Listen. Silence does. It is the silence that speaks. Look. The silence rests in you, the hearth of your heart, the creative nothing that unfolds the many-worlds. The many-unfolds as the one-unfolds. We.

Everything-together.

Deus seu Natura. – Baruch Spinoza, Ethics IV: Preface

Image: Cosmos No. 3, Martha Boto

Interlude: PhilPapers 2020 Survey

Questions

The Cornucopia of Being

The Myth of America

Among the Willows

The Pluricosmos