Note: Below is an article written a long ago. It needs editing and more work. I don’t agree with some of what is written here, and I won’t be revisiting this article, so I have uploaded it here in hopes it may benefit someone instead of wasting away in my files, to be deleted from digital memory. It is quite dense, so beware.
Intro
“It lies not far from Temple-Bar. Going to it, by the usual way, is like stealing from a heated plain into some cool, deep glen, shady among harboring hills. Sick with the din and soiled with the mud of Fleet Street – where the Benedick tradesmen are hurrying by, with ledger-lines ruled along their brows, thinking upon rise of bread and fall of babies – you adroitly turn a mystic corner – not a street – glide down a dim, monastic way flanked by dark, sedate, and solemn piles, and still wending on, give the whole care-worn world the slip, and, disentangled, stand beneath the quiet cloisters of the Paradise of Bachelors.”
The opening lines of Herman Melville’s Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids depict an almost prophetic vision of the modern age. It unfolds in two scenes, in which an unnamed narrator guides us through both. He remains unnamed throughout the tale, however he discloses that by trade he is a seedsman, a traveling businessman who deals with what the name implies. The quote above begins the exposition of the Paradise of Bachelors. Away from the filth and grime of Victorian London, away from the busy streets of worldly concerns and of practical worries, lies a sanctuary with a mystical and sacred quality to it. This sanctuary, once the proud domain of the Knights Templar, now houses the shadows of their former presence. Men exist, undoubtedly, but not men of the order. The men here have no care for customs or tradition, neglecting their duties and growing lazy in their paradise. For them, there are peaceful gardens to lounge in, representing the ideal inner mind of an order member. There is a library, the presence of which would underscore the Templar’s fervent pursuit of knowledge as the heights of their organization. Finally, there is a chapel. They are knights of Christ, after all. Despite these facilities being at hand for the bachelors, ready to be utilized in the appropriate manner, the capstone of this Paradise is the dining experience that the seedsman and the bachelors indulge in. Indulge being the key here, for the life of consumption and apathy portrayed by the bachelors is one that rivals the likes of the lotus-eaters.
The story opens by contrasting this Paradise with the world. One, a heavenly resort for the Templars, supposedly above the earthly struggles. The other, the harsh reality of industrial London, representing the modern world. Immediately one can tell that this “paradise” mimics the horrors of a utilitarian paradise, a parody of Heaven. Perhaps Melville’s depiction of this scene acts as a critique of Benthamite utility as the principle of the Good. It was certainly picking up steam during London’s industrial period. The more important point is that this is a common trend when conceiving of the infinite Heaven; that of the extension of the finite indefinitely. Finitude, in this case satiation, is extended as far as it can go: Satiation is ‘Good’, and so you will erase the bad of unsatiation for good, so that nothing stands in its way. Through this method it is thought that one has achieved Heaven, the ultimate satiation. Unfortunately, here it acts as a cancer. Satiation wants to extend itself into what is its other until it is all that is left. It then has no purpose or other purpose and subsequently has destroyed its own structure, much like cancer has no purpose other than to reproduce and suffocate all until it kills its host along with itself. What does it mean to satiate that which cannot be satiated? For the bachelors it means a consumption that invokes perpetual hunger, gnawing at what it cannot have since it does not have itself. This description of paradise is not all different from the scene of underclass industrial London workers. They, too, work and toil endlessly, sacrificing themselves on the altar of modern society and industrialization, trying to satisfy what fundamentally cannot be satisfied in this way. This sanctuary in actuality represents not Paradise above the world, but the subservience to worldliness. The bachelors have replaced their iron boots for leather. They have exchanged their mighty swords for pens. The sage-like spiritual guidance and advice given freely to all now comes with a price. And the defense of the Holy Sepulcher has become a hindrance for bureaucracy. The bachelors of today are only Templars in name. In looking to the worldly to determine the heavenly, they have been hollowed out by secular society. This paradise is the description of an eternal torment that has left the Templars as vestigial remnants of the Temple of Solomon, the wise.
The maids fare worse. The second scene follows the seedsman traveling to a desolate winter environment in New England. Entering a hollow aptly named the “Devil’s Dungeon”, he finds his way onto a prison-like paper mill. At first the seedsman does not see the paper mill since the landscape is a bright white that makes discernment difficult. Not a brilliant white indicative of purity and spiritual life, but the pale, lifeless light of a spectral kind. Inside the mill are rows and rows of young women with blank expressions lacking vitality, folding blank paper that the machine(s) produce. Other maids are doing various tasks. The difference in scenery starts to contrast itself almost immediately, as even the seedsman’s mind is taken back to the bachelor’s paradise when confronted with this harsh and cruel environment.
To fully grasp a work’s content, we must move beyond the limitations of immediate presentation and engage with it as a totality. It is said that the Monkey’s Paw of representation is the independence of what is essential, being restricted to what is immediately shown. Whether it is the audience’s limitations, or the work’s content pitted against itself, this approach assumes a false distinction. In reality, the content of a work can only be accessed and understood through it in reference to the whole of the content. Instead of privileging isolated interpretations of a work’s content, we should consider how specific elements are portrayed within the context of the entirety. This approach recognizes the interplay between individual elements and the overall meaning, where each informs and shapes the other. This is because the work’s meaning cannot be extracted like removing the skeleton from flesh, but rather emerges from the interconnectedness of the work with itself as its content to form the body of the work. When analyzing a story, one can delve into the way the content presents itself in specific cases, such as the narrative structure, the author’s use of literary tools, or the different themes and aspects of the story. However, this can be done only in connection with the totality of the work if the interpretation is to be true to the work’s message, and not a projection belonging to the subject. Being dynamic in this way, art lends itself to meaning that validly explicates itself on multiple levels and from multiple perspectives. This can serve as an indication of good art: the conveyance of multi-layered truth. Good art brings to consciousness ideals that we may not find in everyday life, one that reveals a deeper agreement between what is and should be and penetrates layman conceptions. It is to my dismay, then, that Melville’s story The Paradise of Bachelor’s and the Tartarus of Maids has not gotten its due credit, being overshadowed by that maddening, enigmatic, and awe-inspiring white whale. On the other hand, it is not surprising that the main invocation of this story is in the halls of academia, with its employment of “lens” analysis. After choosing a lens to view the story through and picking which elements fit this interpretation, there is only the discarding of all else — the aforementioned separation of the skeleton and the flesh, which turns both lifeless and inept.
Not without standing, interpretations of the story as a critique of child labor, gender dynamics, or as a Marxist critique cannot be disqualified. The story is dense and is full of elements you can pick and choose from. The phallic and yonic imagery is everywhere. For example, the description of the Devil’s Dungeon which is in a hooper shape and a river that runs red with a blood-like color is the most explicit allusion to female genitalia. The paper mill standing tall and erected is the contrary. The bachelor’s boots turning from hardened steel to softened leather fits in with the broader theme of the inversion of traditional masculinity and femininity. Masculinity being the active and penetrating energy, with femininity being the passive and arbitrating one. In the story, there is an inversion going on where the Templars lose their virility and become soft, passive bachelors. The maids are forced to work and sharpen the scythes used in the paper-making process, which the seedsman compares to the blades guards use to transport prisoners. This implies their willingness to participate in their own subjectivity. Another overarching theme is that of social inequality. The bachelors lounge in their paradise, and maids work at the cost of their life force in order to “keep the machine going”. This can be combined with the “Marxist lens” of class struggle to focus on the brutality of what workers face in industrial era London. Additionally, there is also commentary on the psychology of indulgence. The reason that good art is universal, timeless, and can be analyzed for a great deal of time and with a wide range of perspectives is because its content is truth. Of course, with such a content, art can seem to transcend time being prophetic, and transcend place being universal. Its message is telling you how something should be by invoking sensuousness like visual or auditory stimulus. How something should be is how it will be, or else it won’t be. In the case of Melville’s story, he provides us with a cautionary tale which at first glance appears to be a negative story, merely about what human nature is not. Upon further examination, there is a reason Melville uses the Templars as opposed to any other fraternity to represent a “fall from grace”. There is a reason that he name-drops Brian de Bois-Guilbert from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, as a way to reference what the bachelors have become. The reason is that the mission of the Templars is the universal mission and ultimate purpose of man: Freedom. On top of this, the fall of man that the bachelors represent in this story mirrors the fall of man as such. For this reason, I wish to highlight a neglected aspect in this story and in modern times, exposing what we have lost in the modern day in hopes that we can once again attain it.
What is the relationship between freedom and the Templars? Why must I refer a group of heretics instead of rallying people towards the Church for salvation? Firstly, let me impart with you a secret about the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ, the Templars. They follow Christ unquestionably. Yet they worship implicitly someone, or something, far older. They worship Sophia. The Templars, despite what the Catholic Church might say, are not worshipers of Baphomet (although it has been hypothesized that using an Atbash cipher, Baphomet becomes Sophia). They are not guilty of the crime of making profane everything Christianity stands for. The group started as early as 1096 in Constantinople, originating from a group of French families with Gnostic and Cathar (Albigensian) backgrounds collaborating with a Kabbalist named Rashi and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who secretly practiced Druidism. Two members of this group, Godfrey de Saint-Omer and Hugues de Payens, a founder with Islamic mystical background (what we call Sufism these days), were sent to Constantinople with a mission to safeguard and collect knowledge, artifacts, and technologies from pre-flood civilizations. Their quest also includes the collection of apocryphal and Gnostic texts. In Constantinople, they met with a scholar from a Pythagorean order. After being initiated in the Pythagorean secret tradition, they then set forth to find these hidden treasures before the Crusaders did and preserve them for those deemed worthy. The reason being that there was a fear that the Crusaders (with the Crusades starting a year earlier in 1095) would come across the artifacts/treasures and relinquish ownership to the Roman Church, where they would inevitably disappear. The primary intent of the order was immediately to prevent this, but more broadly to usher in a new level of consciousness in the world through these recovered secrets, in this case a European Renaissance. This is the history according to the modern day mystery schools that claim Templar lineage. The reverence for Sophia (wisdom) is not only implicit in the Cathar founding, but with Pythagorean initiation as the birth of the organization. After all, Pythagoras is the one that coined the term philo-Sophia (love of wisdom). By way of Gnosticism, there is also circumstantial evidence with a seal of Abraxas that lends credence to the explicit Gnostic-Sophic-Templar connection, although it is still circumstantial.
Gnosticism and the Templars
“I am first thought, the thought that is in light. I am movement that is in all, she in whom the realm of all takes its stand, the firstborn among those who came into being, she who exists before all. She is called by three names, although she exists alone, since she is perfect. I am invisible within the thought of the invisible one. I am revealed in the immeasurable, ineffable things. I am intangible, dwelling in the intangible. I move in every creature.
I am the life of my afterthought that is within every power and every eternal movement, and in invisible lights, and within the powers and angels and demons and every soul in Tartaros, and in every material soul. I live in those who came into being. I move in everyone and I enter them. I walk upright, and those who sleep I awaken. And I am the sight of those who dwell in sleep.
I am the invisible one in all. I counsel those who are hidden, since I know the whole realm of all that exists in it. I am numberless beyond everyone. I am immeasurable, ineffable, yet whenever I wish, I shall reveal myself. I am the head of all. I am before all, and I am all, since I am in everyone.”
—Three Forms of First Thought (Trimorphic Protennoia)
Sophia occupies a central position in Gnostic mythology. The concept stems from the Greek notion of absolute wisdom, as explored by Pythagoras after his extended studies in Egypt. This idea was later adopted by the Hebrew Essenes. In the 10th century, following a period of suppression of the feminine divine, Kabbalah revived this ancient belief. This revival reintroduced the concept of God as both Mother and Daughter along with Father and Son, supposedly offering a clearer picture of the soul’s structure through shekinah. The story of Sophia is as follows: In the beginning there is One God and his emanations, the Aeons. The Aeons all have their pairings, except Sophia. In terms of divine “energy”, which precedes its instantiation as incarnation in the world, there is the unity of the Divine as both Father and Mother in a state called the Pleroma, the perfect, immaterial world. Sophia as the divine Daughter is separated from this unity and eventually started creating, or emanating indiscriminately (without Logos), creating the unbalanced imperfect material world. Already we can intuit that one-sided determination is never the full picture. A full apprehension of both sides of the divine is required as a metaphor and actual condition for completeness. A side effect of this world being created in an unbalanced state is the genesis of the Demiurge, Yaldabaoth (or the archon Yahweh, which in the Valentinian tradition is the one responsible for the creation of the material world), who is the lord of the material domain. In the disruption of the perfect immaterial world and the creation of the material, Sophia is trapped in the form of human souls and left without an Aeon to match with her. The Demiurge has as their job to keep the soul of man trapped in the material world, however it can only be done through self-imposed ignorance. As a result, the One God sends down an Aeon to match with Sophia so that we can know her within us and thus know completeness. This Aeon is Christ the Father incarnate, the most perfect Aeon. He ushers us to Gnosis, the unification of both divine principles. This, in broad terms, is the Gnostic mythos and the end goal of Gnosticism. The story of Christ from this perspective is once again the story of the salvation of man. It is the story of divinity or immaterial as presupposition for the worldly or material, returning to itself as divine. It is the story of the grace God gives us to join with them.
While not entirely Gnostic, I can recognize some truths about the myth. Truths that seem universal, for one. The import of Gnosticism is also the import of religions of the past. God without and God within, immanence and transcendence unified by love. Love here as the speculative moment. It is the moment of reconciliation, both intersubjectively and between subject and object. For example, between two individuals of equal standing or between God and man. It is the all-unifying principle of oneness found, yet obscured, in the exoteric Christian religion as opposed to the religion of exoteric Judaism which has only law as its unification. Such a unification is an empty and formal one that sources its determination externally. However, the unification of love can be applied and used at this very moment. One only needs to look within the heart and engage with this alchemy that Jesus calls the Way. The Way is this process of unification and its result as totality, as in the case of the sacred union of Christ (Christos, the Son) and Mary Magdalene (an incarnation of Sophia, the Daughter). Throughout history, the Divine Feminine and Masculine, as incarnated in figures like Thoth, Isis, Osiris, Brigid, Allat, Lakshmi, Ishtar, the Sufis, and Daoists (who literally practice The Way), have consistently imparted the same profound wisdom. This wisdom is echoed in the teachings of nature-centric religions that revere the Divine Mother. Then there are truths that seem prophetic.
Many of the challenges we face today stem from one-sided determination. This can manifest in various ways, such as low self-confidence leading to difficulties in personal and romantic relationships. Addictions to harmful substances like alcohol, pornography, gambling, or sex can create significant problems. Furthermore, unchecked ego and a lack of foresight can lead us to prioritize things that ultimately harm us, like excessive attention or material wealth. These one-sided pursuits bind us to earthly matters, and hinders our ability to achieve freedom or self-determination.
The good news is, like the Devil Tarot (and in the case of the Demiurge), this confinement is voluntary. Once we awaken and realize who we truly are by seeing what must be through wisdom, we can see that the chains of illusion are chained to illusions— Ideal moments of something greater.
The two sides of divinity incarnate themselves on Earth for us as the divine Son and Daughter, Christ and Sophia. Enough has been considered regarding these incarnated principles for us in everyday discourse. You do not need me to tell you about how you must accept Jesus in your heart. We will then shift our focus to the often-overlooked feminine aspect of divinity, Sophia, as it manifests immanently in us. We will explore how this inherent wisdom can guide us and how we can cultivate it in our lives. It may be that neglect does not begin to describe what we have done to wisdom, given that Sophia is the engine by which man realizes himself. We have a drive to wisdom such that what seems to be neglected reiterates itself and brings forth itself constantly. We have it in us to know. As much as someone can protest that they do not need to know in order for self-actualization, what is the case is that they act with respect to truth in an objective manner. Without the knowledge of what is the case and what should be the case, the move towards how to live and what decisions one needs to make can theoretically never begin. Yet it does— Eppur si muove. Despite these protests, people still act and live with that animating principle of guidance, only with the Sophia within us repressed and begging to be let out. We can reside in ignorance when confronted with this fact, or take the other move. The other move is to figure out, using the wisdom in us, what the truth is. A question that might arise at this point is, “Why is the truth good? Who cares about the truth”? The answer is simple. This is a matter of absolute ontology.
Onto-logy and Self-determination, or Freedom
To ask what the point of truth is, is to ask what the point of things being what they are is. In this sense, the “way things are” and the “way things should be” are deeply intertwined. However, this doesn’t mean there’s no room for discrepancy. We can encounter situations where things are not as they should be, like with sick bodies or dysfunctional states. However, these do not exist for very long, eventually succumbing to the disintegration with respect to the discrepancy of is and ought to be. The search for truth is not just about uncovering “facts”, but also the uncovering of the inherent “ought” within things. By understanding how something should be, we gain a deeper understanding of how it actually is, and vice versa. If we take this pursuit of truth to its ultimate conclusion, we arrive at a fundamental question: why haven’t you killed yourself? This is not a call to violence, but a way to highlight the nature of the question of being and its truth. On a fundamental level, the question of being and its truth in being being, or being itself, is as necessary as it is obvious. The alternative is self-destruction. Since there is, nothing can’t exist. The nothing people think of is in actuality the pureness of being which is identical with nothing. But nonetheless it is a nothing that is. This is the beginning of the onto-logical investigation soon to be introduced and a testament to the relationship between ontology, wisdom, and truth.
An analogy to see this link of wisdom with self-determination is to imagine a musician that has no training in music theory. They are not precluded from being great musicians. However everything they make that is good in terms of music, will have been made completely by accident. The same can be said for individuals who live without thought. It is definitely possible to live a good life. But this good life is not guided by knowledge of what is good. It is achieved by an intuition which may be false, or by complete blind faith, which can lead us astray. Plato can attest, who viewed Sophia as the link to virtuosity and justice. In Plato’s Republic, Sophia is embodied in the Philosopher-King, who rules the Republic guided by what should be, rather than being strung along by their own subjective desires. Sophia is not just limited to the ruler. In the Symposium, Plato correctly identifies wisdom as a form of love. When we engage with Sophia, we are rightfully in marriage with our true nature as thinking beings. Note that this is not merely conjecture. Plato is making an ontological claim of human nature and how humans should act based on how we are. Truth is good because the truth leads to good. Respectively, the Good is the truth that goodness leads to. It is once again this agreement between what ought to be the case (the concept) and what is the case (the object). The truth of man ought to be actual, since it leads to the fuller embodiment of what we already are. What we are is the embodiment of what we are conceptually determined to be. The way to grasp this truth is with Sophia, who happens to be what we find our truth in. It might be confusing that the method by which we attain such content is itself the content. How can it be that we are thinking beings and that we must think to arrive at what thought is? On the contrary, think about the weight this holds. Purpose is always internal to the thing which has purposiveness. Consider terms like love and friend taken in their ordinary usage. To be true love is the agreement of the love concept (what it should be, ideally) with what it is in actuality. If the action is anything but the union that the love concept determines and its object, then what is being investigated is not love. Who among us would call an abusive relationship a loving one? Who among us would call a backstabber and liar a friend? Things are ultimately determined by themselves and not from anything exclusively outside of them. It is for this reason that wisdom as thought must be determined by thought. We exist freely to determine ourselves as well. Do not mistake this for the abstract freedom from responsibility or from the laws of governance. Such freedom is abstract and has no actuality. The freedom I am speaking of only comes with the encompassing of externally imposed limits, and a recognition of those limits as constituting the conditions by which autonomy can become itself. The autonomy that follows is then freedom in the truest sense, a freedom which is not finite in cause since it incorporates all possibilities in its determination. In our case, and in the case of finding the truth of all things, we do so with our love and marriage of wisdom as a realization of who we are implicitly made explicit. We cannot use purpose that is exclusively outside of us to be free. This same freedom applies to all concepts, for if the integrity of a structure is broken, the entire structure falls apart. The integrity of love cannot be determined by anything love is not. For example, love cannot be determined by a monetary transaction since it is not in love to be a formal and contractual relation of this kind. This truth of self-determination is what the Templars have realized. Finally, we have the connection between their object of veneration and freedom. Freedom is self-determination. The Templars reify the Sophic nature implicit in man and recognize that we can all freely determine ourselves, if we choose to do so. Tasking themselves with safeguarding the treasures of mankind for those who can commit to this duty, in Melville’s work the Templars have desecrated this belief and themselves. The maids are stuck in the world of the Demiurge, forced to work with no benefit to themselves or anything greater, stuck in Tartarus. Similarly, mankind in the modern day has lost its own search for wisdom and is instead tugged on by the ropes of what is worldly and untrue. Reintroducing Sophia is the medicine for the sickness demonstrated here and one we will subsequently expose. In the end, Sophia is fittingly known as the Virgin of the World by Hermes Trismegistus, being unimpregnated by outside determination and manifesting as self-determination, pregnant with itself.
Let us return briefly to the protest of claims to knowledge, since it is the expression of a trend in the contemporary age. The protest appears as something along the lines of a counterclaim against claims of truth. When one claims to have the capital T truth, the absolute grounding of what is the case, the reaction is that such a person is hubristic. “How dare they claim positive knowledge of what is? Claim humble stupidity like the rest of us!” If I am to be honest, this response isn’t unfounded, especially when the initial claim comes unprompted. You are handing away your authority to someone that knows what is good [for you] and reacting in such a way to protect your self-determination. However, the issue here comes from seeking refuge from the false claim of absolute knowledge under the auspice of the false claim of subjectivism. This will only lead you into a deeper falsity. Additionally, there is a secret premise snuck into this response. The secret premise is that the counterclaim itself claims absolute knowledge. Saying in one breath that absolute objectivity cannot exist since everything is subjective absolutely is a direct contradiction and disproof. In reality, the claim of hubris here is a projection of the hubristic claim of already having the truth, which is purely immediate subjectivity. The greatest hubris lies in believing that accepting the limitations of your own uninterrogated understanding is enough. It suggests a complacency with the coarseness of our finite purposes, a refusal to acknowledge anything beyond our immediate needs and desires. There is a variant of this position which is of the utmost cowardice. It bypasses claims to knowledge by offloading the burden of the absolute to another source. You may have come across an evangelical or two, or someone that says “look how pious I am, for I do not claim any truths. I merely follow the Quran or the Bible, the ultimate truth”. Yet, the wisdom or logic inherent in us is what sanctions and arbitrates these Holy Books as true. It is nothing short of cowardice to hide behind another source and posture it as your sole determiner. Another example is that of the science believer. One who claims that this machinery of science is what we use to understand things, but that science itself is not capable of certainty. It is merely the best tool we have to understand the world around us, but it cannot make absolute claims. The reason that rather than saying the laws of science or physics are absolute (or in referring to the “experts”, which calls again into question how one can even know to trust experts) is because science is a product of the human mind, rather than a revelation from the divine mind which has absolute knowledge. Thus, it cannot be the source of objective and absolute knowledge. How dysfunctional of a system! If we are using an open-ended method of analysis which cannot even agree on an object of analysis to begin with, let alone the objectivity of the concepts it employs, what is the point of privileging science? The point that is revealed is that this form of “science” begins on flawed ground. This contemporary attitude is not only the projection of hubris, but it is the manifestation of the guilt of our constant masturbation. I do not mean this to be crude or only to describe self-indulgence, either. This is a matter far more sinister than we realize.
Immanuel Kant can help us comprehend this attitude deeper. In his argument against masturbation, he claims that sexuality outside monogamous marriage leads to objectification. In the case of masturbation, the loved person is reduced to a mere object of appetite. Once this desire is fulfilled, they are to be discarded with no further consideration since they have served their purpose. This eliminates any moral obligation towards the other person, as they are seen as nothing more than a thing to be used and disposed of. However, there is another aspect of objectification that Kant mentions, and it involves the folly of one-sided determination. As you are objectifying the “quote unquote” actor or actress, are turning yourself into an object— you turn yourself into a mere tool to satiate appetite. Within the Kantian paradigm, the Categorical Imperative, this is a fatal error as people are ends. To turn them into means for your own ends is to destroy the structure of you in terms of your ethical obligations, as well as destroying the social fabric connecting you to other people. Moreover, Kant says that masturbation is worse than the horror of killing yourself as it debases you below the status of a beast, involving both self-destruction and surrendering to animal instincts. Below an animal, since a beast cannot debase itself into its animalistic impulses, as it already exists within an animalistic state. A similar dynamic is the account of the contemporary attitude. When one is confronted with an object or work, be it a form of art, theology, or philosophy, the attitude is to approach the work with objectification in mind. Rather than this product being the object we subject ourselves to and learn from, we treat the work as what must subject itself to ourselves as object. We do not take the object as it determines itself. Then we must demand that the work makes itself suitable for us, or else its overall significance is irrelevant since it is not relevant for us.
The onus of pedagogical clarity should not fall solely on the object being examined. While acknowledging the complexities with certain philosophers, a core responsibility lies with the prospective student. This responsibility is to attempt to parse the meaning they confront and understand the concepts being employed, rather than shape what these concepts are as themselves to the student’s current understanding. In the case of theological traditions, the guilt that originates from this attitude is embraced as the concept of the unknowable Absolute where awe, blind faith, and the refusal to acknowledge us as being able to know supersedes comprehension. The irony lies in the paradoxical notion that delineating and defining the Absolute constitutes it as knowable. The realm of aesthetics grapples with this attitude as the problem of taste, addressed through a hedonistic lens. This problem can be described as the subjective judgment of art and its supposed disconnect with objective value. The hedonistic solution appeals to sensibility as the legitimacy of judgment, while overdetermining the objective aspect that stands independent to external determination. Aphorisms like “art is subjective” or “art only has the meaning we give it” reduce the consumer to the detriment of the artwork itself, ultimately turning the consumer into a mere instrument of self-gratification. This attitude can be extended to the ideologies we use as well. Take the cowardice of the proponents of evolutionary psychology. Such individuals take this theory that conflates a tautological how with a why. Tautological, since the claims made by this field can be represented as the initial claim being present in the conclusion in a different form. According to evolutionary psychology, our behavior is dependent on our evolution as a species. Thus, if a behavior does not have an affinity with evolution (reproduction and self maintenance), it has no significance. Yet all behaviors do have this relation. The boundaries of what fits in and out of evolution has no limit, and so every behavior can be justified and validated as a result of our evolution. There is no need to appeal to any independence or self-determination because we are largely dependent on evolution to control our psychology. A typical example of how this process plays out is as such: I am 6 foot and 7 inches, so I can attract a mate because I stand out. Why is this noteworthy? In the past, being bigger meant being able to defend myself, my tribe, or my mate. This is good. Therefore, being tall is good. The quality of tallness is not taken as what it is or what it is in a given context. It is subservient to ends which are already predetermined outside what it is predicated to. When a woman wears makeup, it is not because she has decided to, but because the potential attraction of a mate is what steered her to make that decision.
Everything is enslaved to the principle of evolution, which is elevated to absolute truth. Similarly, the trend of Marxism which privileges a deterministic view of human action abdicates accountability. The conditions by which you explain your scenario, whatever that may be, is mistaken for the reason you are in your scenario. These conditions are named material conditions and account for everything in existence, since everything has a cause (assumed to be material). It then follows that the reason for any human action is the material cause, or the condition by which an action follows. The poor do not commit crime because they have free will and have gone through a decision-making process in which a crime will benefit them in some way. The poor commit crime because they are helpless pawns to material conditions. How can it be reasonable if it excludes the role of the subject in arbitrating their decisions? This is not to say that context does not color this decision-making process or to serve as a defense of the status quo. Only to demonstrate the error and patronizing that comes with this way of thinking. The analysis of the contemporary attitude can be exhausting for quite a while. In addition, it will lead to other discussion topics like that of cause and effect, which I do not wish to focus on here. Essentially, Kant’s argument against masturbation correctly identifies the process of degrading yourself. What great shame it is to have nothing more out of common with a beast than consumption that is guided by a state of self-objectification. The beast cannot appreciate good taste because it cannot develop good taste. However, a person can. The beast does not know the difference between steak tartare and raw cattle, or between rock music with high overdrive and screeching metal in a factory. In the same vein, the layman looks upon an objective as if it were a pornographic actor or actress serving the purpose of satisfying our subjective needs and discards any independent purpose it may be presenting us with. This results in a double-sided degradation of yourself and the object. What we have here in the contemporary era is a culture of masturbation. Perhaps we must take a page from JFK’s book. When you read Fictions by Borges, and it doesn’t “do anything for you”, ask not what it can do for you, but what you can do for it.
Having now become acquainted with Sophia and the dominant trend which prohibits her, this allows us to uncover the groundwork for the exploration of wisdom, and for wisdom to explore itself. The way in which we approach this is by pure thought as it becomes cognition capable of conceptual comprehension. This includes the comprehension of itself. Why wisdom must explore itself, aside from it necessarily being the case via self-determination, is so that it does not act prematurely and leave room for error. For something to have wisdom is for thought to have turned it over in and for thought. This is why thought must be the one to give us wisdom, and why thought needs to investigate what it is on its own terms so that it can help us understand what other things are. This is also the point of departure for many people, as it involves a departure from the worldly as well as the everyday idea of thought in practice. We are delving into thought and pure thought alone, with no pre-given content to work with. Only the exploration of what is necessary and there. Another reason that we must use thought is since Logic (the science of thinking) is the tool that never leaves us. There is logic, or in other words a relationality, in everything. There is a structure in what it means to be a rock. It has relationality with itself and everything around it. There is logic in the way a chair is [structured]. There is a logic to our decision-making. There is logic to a tree and its development. There is relationality in the claims a skeptic makes, otherwise they cannot make any claims at all. There is even a logic to madness. Relationality is relationality no matter the context. Despite being a departure from the worldly, we find structure, or relationality, in everything, including the worldly. One cannot claim that this exploration is a mere product of the mind since this division between relationality as a faculty (implying it is subjective and has no independent standing) and relationality of an absolute kind, has no justified grounding. This further vindicates the Greek conception of Sophia as absolute wisdom. Even when empirical representation runs its course, the immediate existence of a thing can never tell us the enduring existence of a thing, unconstrained by spatio-temporality. It can only tell us what it is immediately and not what it was or what it will be. For those that require an explicit proof of what constitutes knowing of this kind (the kind which deals with what things are absolutely) as it relates to other forms of consciousness, like immediate sense certainty, I will refer to Georg W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and his Attitudes of Thought to Objectivity in the Encyclopedia Logic.
Another reason why this will be a point of departure is since the exploration that wisdom does cannot merely be re-presented or conveyed to another. This is meant in the same way that reading a manual for how to ride a bike, (even in all its intricacies and mechanics) does not mean we can ride a bike. In order for one to truly love wisdom, they must actually engage with it. One has to think and go through the impending developments themselves in order to grasp it. There is nothing tangible to represent it in the mind with in order to get it. This is not to be confused with the privileging of experiential knowledge above all other types. There is nothing exclusive in subjective experience that can be found in this exploration, seeing as it something universally accessible in character. Thought is something we use in our day to day. Why this coming exposition is difficult is because we do not leave the understanding. The understanding is the everyday idea of thought. It is the combination of representation and the claims of the relationship between a universal and particular. When it comes to representation, it is bundled up with what is sensible. At first the sensible makes its impression in experience, and thought first grasps this as a presentation of the sensible to our individual selves. Yet representation is bundled up with our thought as what re-presents itself to us. The distinction between representation and thought lies in the concept of representation itself— it re-presents a given content of sensible material upon our experiential knowledge, whereas thought is what stands alone as independent of given material. We cannot use any unjustified material, especially the very beginning since once again, it would not mean thought is self-developing. As it pertains to the claims between universal and particular, the understanding is only capable of making abstract and universal claims that connect a particular case with a universal principle. When confronted with a complexity beyond universal and particular, the understanding cannot make sense of it. Take for example the question of the circle. How many lines does a circle have? A line here is considered a rectilinear line. Most people would answer none, since a circle is a curve that curves in on itself, in uniform fashion. Therefore, it cannot have any lines. Understanding can only think in generalities, so as a result it understands straight and curved as the same, with identity supplying both with formal meaning. There is a contradiction in terms here insofar as the concepts of straight and curved are mutually exclusive. Maybe you have come across a person that can only think in terms of generalities. This is the hallmark of the understanding. The understanding is the first of the three moments of all that is logically actual, overall named the speculative method. In all rigorous descriptions of the process of logic, you will find the understanding (abstraction) first, then dialectical reason, which is the negatively rational. Negative in the sense that it stands as opposed to something, rather than representing a polarity, which assumes many things we do not want to in an unprejudiced analysis. Finally, the speculative moment which serves an identical function to love as the moment which unifies all prior determinations as a further self-determination. When someone is considered a wise person (a person holding wisdom), they are considered to be sage-like holders of mystic wisdom that reveals the true nature of things. Mystic in modern day is a conflation of veiled and unknowable. But what is veiled can be unveiled as aletheia or truth, the act of unveiling. This process is undertaken by the speculative method. With the same etymology as specter, this speculative method is the spectral marriage of the Holy Spirit— of Christ and Sophia in us all. It is only for the understanding that the mystical appears unknowable. The understanding which only knows the abstract law of identity leaves thought alone as mystical and absolute. A minimal effort examination reveals that the understanding is not absolute. It is not the limit of our wisdom. Mystical knowledge very well should be known as speculative knowledge. The YouTube channel Speculative Science has an exceptional video discussing in-depth this method and what it entails.
Hegel: from Being to Infinity
Now that we have set the stage for thought, all that is left is to begin. “Begin with what?”, you might ask. Well, to begin with nothing in specific. Being. The first moment is to begin with the immediate beginning. Pure and abstract being. We begin with this pure being, since mediation is not possible. Mediation implies mediation by, which would immediately destroy the integrity of thought being thought. Objections to starting with any other starting point are self-defeating for this reason. So we must begin with pure being. Think about this being in terms of the most basic concept of God as the containment of everything. In math terms, this would be the “set of all sets”. However, this moment of abstraction that the understanding provides us with runs into a problem when we try to determine what this thing we call pure being is. When trying to produce a principle from this immediate relation of pure being to itself, thought cannot produce any-thing. It produces no-thing. It then follows that this understanding of God the Absolute is nil. Without any determinate form, this understanding of God without form is without content. It does not tell you anything. What this does leave us with is another term alongside pure being. Nothing. When considering the structure of pure being, we have produced a relation to nothing. Oftentimes, this is where people that have not departed from wisdom overthink. In fact, it may be said that the entirety of thinking only in pure abstraction is an exercise in overthinking, for most. A process that is immediate has transpired thus far. Practice this now by thinking pure being. Not by thinking about a thing, but by thinking without any determination. What you produce is nothing. This nothing is generally the principle of śūnyatā in Buddhism.
A quick note on nomenclature: Because the matter under investigation is absolute in nature, it does not matter what names we use, since no such colloquial use is invoked by their usage. The terms chosen are chosen because they purport best to their colloquial counterpart and best describe the process going on, rather than drawing the content from this everyday usage into the determinations. Not only this, but it is the case that the terms selected are revealing of what their colloquial counterpart signifies. This creates a sense of familiarity with the person approaching logic and reveals a deeper understanding of the words people use in everyday language. It is for this reason that the terms are named what they are.
It is important to notice that a relation has been revealed between pure being and nothing. When we try to determine what pure being is, we get nothing. However, it is a nothingness that is. The understanding has run its course and now dialectical reason unveils for us a negative relation wherein nothing is pure being. Pure being is nothing, and nothing is pure being. They now take turns passing over into each other. The pure being we started with is ceasing to be being and passing over into nothing. nothing in being instantiated is coming-to-be a pure being. When people refer to nothing, they are referring to the nothing, which is pure being. It is impossible to cognize nothing as pure nothingness, since this nothing in being instantiated is being.
We have now a system of terms that includes pure being and nothing. The system that results from their interaction stands as a new term we call becoming. Common understanding understands becoming as one swift movement unified in identity. But this becoming is not the product of the understanding’s abstract principle making, as it is not just the unity of [pure] being and nothing. Becoming is characterized by the encompassing of the inward unrest of the system. Becoming contains with it being as it ceases-to-be, and nothing as it comes-to-be. There are 4 terms: being, nothing, ceasing-to-be, and coming-to-be. The dialectical moment of being and nothing’s interactions with each other is sublated by the speculative moment of unification. These moments of Being and Nothing, and ceasing-to-be and coming-to-be, now exist implicitly or in-itself as becoming.
What is it to become? What is becoming becoming? In all cases, we understand what something becomes by understanding what it was and what it is. What it is, is the vanishing of being into nothing, and the vanishing of nothing into being. The contradiction of being being nothing, and nothing being being no longer holds, since they both have each other as moments of each other, and vanish into one another as becoming. Thus, what becoming is, is the relation of this immediate unity. Becoming is that which vanishes. It is as if becoming is the furnace by which the fires of being and nothing extinguish themselves and vanish, since it is in their nature to do so.
Becoming can then be described in the form of being, but not the pure being we started with. It is a being that has an immediate relation, and this relation is the prior unity of being and nothing. The term Hegel uses to distinguish this being from pure being is being-there, becoming in the form of being. In being-there, being and nothing have an immediate relation of negating or determining each other. So to give an account of what has transpired, the being of becoming, the being of what becoming has become, is known as being-there. This being-there in being itself is composed of an immediate relation of being and nothing negating or determining each other. The reason we do not determine any further on the level of being-there is because the nothing of becoming returns it to the being of becoming and thus becoming is being. Next, we take the being of being-there, what being-there is as such aka quality. So we move further and take being-there in the form of one of its moments, being. This is quality. quality is determinate being. When something has a quality, we mean that a thing has a determinacy that is immediate. Popcorn has the quality, or immediate determinacy, of being white, for example.
Quality is then next to be determined from both sides. What follows from quality is the being and nothing (or non-being) of quality: Reality and Negation. This negation, or nothing, is not the empty and abstract nothing of the initial determinations of being and nothing, it is the determinate nothing that is implicit in quality. In the same way that nothing leads to being, this determinate nothing (Negation) leads to determinate being! What has essentially happened from the perspective of Reality and its other side Negation, is quality being reflected into both, determining both aspects of quality’s being and non-being, resulting in a determinate being once more.
This determinate being is not a return to the end of Becoming, but it is determinate being with the sublation of the entire process of determinations after the stated point within it. This type of being is now called being-in-itself. Something is the name given to this new determinate being’s being to differentiate it from quality. Something is the immediate determinacy of immediate determinacy, or the negation of the negation. Something is by virtue of a quality, which is a determinate being. Referring to some-thing is precisely what this implies. We call out a thing to give it distinction from a whole, or in other words, by negating it from a whole. The something is by being-there.
Something has within it all the prior determinations thus far. However, something faces a problem. First to be fully determined from all sides was becoming, being as negation aka being-there. Now it is Something, which is being-in-itself, or negation of negation. Something taken as such lacks concreteness, since it cannot use determinate being or determinate negation as a further development. However, it has not exhausted all its resources. Something can use becoming. Predictably so, not the becoming of pure being and nothing. But the becoming of determinate being and determinate nothing, which once again leads into determinate determinacy and subsequently into an Other something.
Currently, two things have been generated. One is something, and the other is an other thing. being taken as such, as being-in-itself produces for us nothing but the empty being of pure being. We have a richer form of being via the being of determinate being as something. At the same time that the being of determinate being is posited, so is the other side as negation. This negation of the richer being is known as limit, or restriction.
It makes complete sense what is meant by limit in common parlance and in this manner. When we point out a something, we are pointing out a determinate thing that is, by virtue of its quality. A further exploration of something reveals it as partly being determined by what is other to it, not as a given content that stands opposed to something, but what has been generated as other from something. When you think of a pond or a lake, it is what it is by virtue of its quality (being water). But its limit is another generation of something’s being as the other side of being. The non-being of water in this case would be the land. In other words, the limit is the restriction of something through its other, as a determination of something. What we can describe this pond as is finite, since it is definite, e.g., has a limit. You can alter the size of the body of water (its quality), however it does not alter these determinations of something and other. Insofar as land is land in this scenario, as the other of the water, its limit or restriction is the water.
Something is now determined as another. However, as other is itself a something, it too must become other. The two terms are stuck in an infinite loop, where something and other become other to themselves. We call this type of loop not becoming, but a negative or spurious infinity. The reason this is not infinity proper is that it is the finitude of each playing out forever. There is no reconciling the finite processes because they are turning into others indefinitely. This is an unending unrest. The solution does not lie in the purely negative either. You cannot define infinity by merely saying “the infinite is the non-finite”. Of course such a statement is obviously true, but it is as true as it is empty and devoid of meaning, considering it does not give you positive knowledge of infinity’s being.
It is appropriate to mention here the cowardice of those who claim that an idea of the infinite is beyond human comprehension. Instantiating an empirical model of spurious infinity might seem impressive to the misguided, but this firstly presupposes the idea of true infinity as spurious infinity. Secondly, it displays a key fact of the limit in its cognition. As Hegel says, “The very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended”. It is impossible to put something in mind that’s character cannot be fully comprehended by thought. It is a blatant contradiction to say that you are limited in thought by something only graspable in thought. How did you put it in mind in the first place? It is not of an inferential kind that one can guess the contours of the object of consciousness. The very grasping of these contours are direct determinations of the object itself. The only objection is the presupposed assertion that the indefinite instantiation of an empirical spurious infinity, is what is meant by ‘graspable in thought’. Since you cannot view a never ending highway for example, it is impossible to think infinity! Once again, this notion of infinity being infinity proper as well as the defects of empirical knowledge have been addressed earlier.
So how then do we solve the problem of spurious infinity? It comes with the realization that something in its relation to other is already an other. It is the other of the initial other. The reconciliation here lies in the fact that what something turns into, is what it always was. It was the other in spurious infinity, but a further examination of its relationship to other reveals that what something as other passed into was other. It merely passed over into itself. Likewise, the other became other to other. What is other to other? Something. This reconciliation is true infinity. Both terms have been reconciled and now are not foreign, or other, to themselves. We have started with something, and ended up with something as determined by itself and not as other. The being we have now is a richer being called being-for-itself, as opposed to the being of the prior sphere as being-for-other. External determination and unfreedom has been avoided through an immanent development using only tools belonging to thought itself. Aptly called being-for-itself, it is a being which has no other to it. It is being as a further negation of negation. This is the composition of true Infinity. The process can go further, and does in Hegel’s Science of Logic. Even so, this is enough to understand the infinity before us.
This infinity is the development of all things as they are, according to themselves. Everything is freely becoming itself, even as it seems it is coming to an end. The seed of an apple contains within itself the germ of the apple tree so that it can sprout the apple once more. Life contains within it the germ of death and reconciles it such that life produces itself again. This is the importance of true infinity, it is the description of freedom that exists freely everywhere. This notion of freedom as self-determination is known intimately in common consciousness as well. It is the implicit drive behind the concern against contradiction. Some may mistake contradiction itself as a sin against contentless formality, a violation of rigid and empty rules. But as a matter of fact, if existence were to be formalized, what the formalization would convey is that reality is static. We know this is wrong since there is flux not only between things, but within a thing itself. Therefore, the issue with contradiction goes beyond mere rule-breaking or hypocrisy. It points to the priorly stated unity between what a thing is conceptually and what it is in actuality, highlighting its incongruence. It is calling to attention that a thing is not what it is and that this is not the state of how things should be. Contradiction is then mistaken as the issue, when reconciliation is possible and even necessary. For example, we do not (or should not) condemn a marriage between two people if they have marital problems. We say that they need to work through their problems and arguments, given these problems are not threats to each individual’s well-being. In any case, the condemnation of contradiction is misguided, unproductive, and denies the dynamic aspect of things as they constantly become themselves, even if this becoming involves a contradictory aspect. The moment of true infinity is likewise this reconciliation of something’s inner contradictions.
In what way would infinity be infinite if in confronting the finite it merely negated it? What this line of thought results in is infinity becoming the other of the finite, and losing its own positive content in the process. It lowers infinity to finitude by placing it alongside finitude as its negation. Infinity is also not a separate being that stands above the finite. The finite is subsumed under infinity in a way which recognizes their interconnectedness but still privileges infinity as this overcoming. Finitude within infinity is an ideal moment in this process of overcoming, since its meaning is in reference to infinity as it is subsumed under and transformed by the infinite. Ideality is the final determination to be introduced here as the truth of reality. This formulation of infinity as ideality is not only the basis of all subsequent and true philosophy, moving beyond the dogmatic monism and dualism which preceded it, but the formulation which reveals the dynamic and interconnected character of all concepts. Everything is becoming ideal. Correspondingly, the paradise in Herman Melville’s story exhibits this folly of standing above the worldly. Paradise in that context neglected any connection it had to reality, or the worldly. To be paradise proper it must subsume the finite worldly, as a moment of Heaven, the infinite.
Heaven, the Infinite
“To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is “remains.” To be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to have been a man – to be an ex-man or “damned ghost”
—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Likewise, with all concepts and determinations explained here, the notion of Heaven we will explore is familiar yet foreign. Heaven is the home of God, and in many cultures refers to the sky above. It stands vis-à-vis infinity as one and the same. Where you find ideality, or perfection, you find God. By extension, God is everywhere there is love as the perfect union. It does not matter if it is the union of a concept with its object as it becomes itself, or with the union of complementary aspects such as man and woman or Christos and Sophia. This perfection is where God as absolutely perfect makes themselves at home. The reference to the sky is a reference to the ideal— the infinite sky, stars, and sun which subsume the finite Earth. Union with the absolute is Heaven, and we find this wherever there is true union. The ending of CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe series has this exact conception of Heaven. Apologies for the spoiler, but you have had around 70 years to read it. For those unfamiliar, it is a story set against the backdrop of World War II in which four siblings discover a magical wardrobe that transports them to a land called Narnia. There they encounter a powerful lion named Aslan (who is a metaphor for Jesus and is explicitly stated to be) and the evil White Witch as they battle for the soul of Narnia. Following the victorious final battle, Aslan (Jesus) takes them from Narnia into a place that seems like Narnia but is different. This land is called Aslan’s country. It is like Narnia but much grander and magnificent. Aslan’s Country is visible from Narnia, however it is separate. Within Aslan’s Country, there are mountains 80 times taller than ones on Earth, the greens are vibrant greens, and everything seems to be itself and more. It is as if this Narnia is a Narnia, more Narnia than Narnia. Seeing as Jesus led them to this land, this is an allegory for the fight against evil and their reward as salvation: access into heaven. It is not surprising then to realize that the entirety of the series is an allegory for the bible, from the fall of man till the New Testament. Narnia is Earth, Aslan is Jesus, and Aslan’s Country is Heaven.
Lewis did not independently arrive at this conception of Heaven. While he has been influenced by a myriad of noteworthy theologians, authors, and poets like Dante, Swedenborg, and Milton, the version of Heaven that sits as the capstone of Narnia, is the same one revealed to John in Revelation. The context for revelation is this: On the island of Patmos, where he was exiled for spreading the word of Jesus, John the Apostle received a divine vision. This vision granted him a glimpse into the future, revealing the end of days on Earth and an extraordinary glimpse of heaven. What is of key importance in this vision is Jerusalem descending onto the ruins of the old Earth to stand as the Kingdom of God and his people on the new Earth. What replaced Earth was not an imposition of Heaven as the negation of Earth, but the rejuvenation of the Earth as what it was always meant to be. It is the same Earth that was destroyed, only now being the grounds for where God finds himself at home. Worth noting, and a common mistake people make, is that the name of the book is Revelation, not Revelations. It is singular and not plural. Perhaps the single revelation worth dedicating a book to is the revelation of salvation and the way into paradise.
All talk of Heaven and none of hell would make me a hypocrite if I preach the error of one-sided determination. Hell in general terms would be that principle of division which opposes the process of self-determination. Its existence is a parasitic one on the good of infinite heaven, much like falsity is parasitic on the truth. Without truth, determinations of falsity cannot be made. Without Heaven, the state of all things in perfect unity with what they are meant to be, hell cannot have an existence. It would have nothing to oppose itself to. If they were to stand alone, these parasites of falsity and hell would destroy themselves. When someone is living through hell, they are going through a moment in which what constitutes them as who they are is being deprived of them. Perhaps this manifests as the lack of resources to make concrete or actual their existence as human. Maybe they are going through an addiction. Or this can take the form of mass atrocities or genocide. This is a living hell without a doubt. But this existence of being enslaved to other-determination is not what it means to live freely as an individual. It will, in the long run, succumb to truth. Even in cases where a loved one has passed away or you and a significant other have broken up, it may feel like hell. And it is. But they still live on as the influences carved in your heart for better or for worse, as a premise of your continued freedom.
This self-determination as a certainty is not the imposition of us, as if we were slaves to it. Only with our permission can we turn towards the becoming of absolute unity. While the saying “God only helps those who help themselves” is stated in terms of a self-help proverb, it represents a necessary step in self-determination. This step is the step which is the groundwork for all further unity. We are not slaves to Sophia or thought either. We can choose to do foolish things after convincing ourselves that it is the right thing to do. Oftentimes, people decide to be slaves to an other-determination. To go against this self-determination is to willingly choose hell. In choosing not to correspond with concepts, this willed gap between you as a living human with what it means to be human is hell. Selecting a life of substance abuse is a disservice to what it means to live as a free individual. The autonomy here is in service of other, as the other of your own autonomy. Not autonomy, as it is free to be itself. Even if substance abuse is an escape from the hell of the world, it is an escape only in fleeing, and thus circles back to being determined by this the real world hell you are fleeing from. This form of escapism mirrors once more the Paradise of the Bachelors who mistake the negation of finitude as infinity, not realizing that the infinite is that which subsumes it. Truly, if one has convinced themselves that rebelling against freedom and self-determination is what constitutes their own freedom, you cannot convince them otherwise. You can only plant the seeds of doubt so that they may come to a free position themselves. They have the final say.
At first, it seems given the choice between total unity with the absolute and with a disconnectedness that is ultimately temporary seeing as this disconnectedness is self-destruction, that people would jump on the former. Yet it is not that simple for the reason stated. People willingly choose hell because they do not see Heaven as desirable. Stuck with the branding of worldly matters, to rise beyond these matters translates to disposing of what seems to be their purpose. This can be a difficult endeavor if it is all you know. For this reason, people in abusive relationships struggle to exit them. When exiting them, they find the norms of a true relationship foreign and unfamiliar. This urges them to return to what they are comfortable with, and urges them to re-establish their attachment to finitude. This self-destructive relationship is not only applicable to romantic relationships, but with the relationships we have connecting ourselves and all things. It is through the love of Sophia that we can recognize Heaven, this state of unfamiliarity, as the familiar extension of what we are and what we always were. This is the prime directive of philosophy.
“Evil is the gaze itself which perceives evil everywhere around it”.
—Slavoj Žižek
Philosophy is ultimately not a tool for the realization of a given end. It is the very realization that everything is in itself an ends for itself. The gaze of philosophy is the gaze of all unity. If one sees evil everywhere, it means they are blind to the good in which evil leeches off of. Thus, they see this lack of good in everything. The alternative is true for this phrase as well. When one sees things as they are, they see things as they are in unity with themselves, and therefore they see unity as such. The eye that sees what things are in perfect unity sees Heaven on Earth— they see the Kingdom of God in everything, since God’s domain is infinite. Similar to Narnia, this eye sees how waterfalls are truly waterfalls, how the sky is the sky, and how the ocean is truly the ocean. It is to see and comprehend what was always there as galvanized by the light of wisdom. This is the light of the Kingdom of Heaven.
We are all Kings and Queens capable of reigning in this Kingdom, ruling in such a way that nothing changes according to our subjective will, but everything changes in accordance with God’s will. This will is the thread that weaves all things together and repeals what we assume things must be with what we know they are. Paradise Lost is thus the fall of man and the loss of innocence as the exposure and binding to the finitude of subjectivism and worldly matters. Man has been led astray by the slavery and unfreedom of external-determination, placing him in Tartarus. However, a return to what has been lost in this fall is possible and necessary for the re-establishment of our original unity. When Christ said to become like children if we want to enter the kingdom of heaven, he is not telling us to return to an impressionable state. This would cause a fall all over again. Christ means for us to return to this state not with the empty being we started with, but with a richer being as an innocence, that subsumes impressionability as a moment of its own. It is innocence that returns to itself after sanctioning impurity. Let us not take the path of the emperor, in the Emperor’s New Clothes. The emperor, who was tricked by con-men into buying spectacular “invisible clothes” that were only invisible to the foolish. The subjects he rules under accepted this as the truth for fear of looking foolish. However, it is only when a child, who holds unprejudiced thought, points out that the emperor is wearing no clothes that the townsfolk realize what has been in front of them all along. Parading around with his invisible “clothes” even after this revelation is the fallen state we find ourselves in today. These new clothes are the foreign character of external-determination, which leaves us vulnerable and cloaks us from entry into the Kingdom of Heaven. We are not stuck in this Tartarus as a result of paradise lost, wearing the invisible clothes of the emperor. The possibility of salvation is within us all and always has been. Shall we parade around the world, naked and willfully ignorant? Or shall we throw off these “clothes” that bind us, for entry into paradise?