Surface Bound: Tension's Front
On the Shoulders of Giants: A Series
Rigidity is the enemy of stability. The former is frangible, the latter flexible. Dug in: burial-ready.
—Eva Brann
Lunations Everlasting Part I
Apoptosis
Once was a time to show your stripes,
to walk a line in the direction prescribed,
and to heed unsolicited proscriptions
in service to the greater good.
Until came a time to say no more,
to let go, and to bid her body goodbye.
Time and space are genetically tensile: inherent
adaptations assigning an open program's close.
The facts of my life have fallen away.
Information shrinks into the bedrock—digested
by an impalpably fixed stellar resonance.Architectonic homeostasis is engulfed in paradisiacal signs of life. Every surface winds up burnt. And sweet earth ensures everything ever established or razed is outgrown by her given ground. Even in spite of that which is kept in memoriam, the garden would seem to swallow all. But, some say, the written word remains.
It sounds counterintuitive. Even a well-kept book, if it is of good use, is bound to wear out in a few decades. Withered pages grow as vulnerable as delicately refined and digestible plates of husk: solvent, vital minerals awash in a caustic ocean. Yet here, this instance, stand these books. Straight spined and patient—they wait.
My legend’s reflective face is held fast upon this wholly unfinished and ephemeral droplet’s meager scope, to belie a completely balanced account of history. Mankind’s story is individualized through you and me, separately, as well as the uniquely inimitable states achieved in our accord and discord.
Moonlight has emptied from the world and gifted another cycle with unrealized potential. A new phase of extension is delivered. We sit with Eva T.H. Brann—at work through the first three books that made up our initial encounter.1 Hearty exposition piles upon the flame as I am suddenly taken with the timeliness of her arrival, back then. I’m left to wrestle against what chokes the fire and encumbers the conversation’s light with unwanted smoke signals. Please, forgive the lack of composure.
Let it be enough to say that when she became a known entity to me, I was delirious with pride, practically penitent with my person, but verging on distraught—like a locomotive King Midas with an incendiary tongue instead of a golden touch—not yet fully aware of the accursed folly in my longing. I had scratched an itch for seven years and stewed on a world dressed in tea leaves of ill portent, until a quagmire of current events found me transfixed in a corner. I drank from the trough and echoed the fevered cries of its import until the propaganda was self-fulfilled. Only after my identity’s collateral began to smolder, did the extent of my culpability dawn. By then it was too late for the world that had been afforded my old reputation. Too often had it suffered my rebuke.
There was, at that point, nothing left to do but recalibrate objectives and move forward austerely—in avoidance of pursed lips, hot curses, and cold-bloodedness for their costliness. To that end, Eva Brann’s work played no small part in the circumstances that rescued my trajectory. Without her it’s doubtful the pivot from news to philosophy and the common ground of myth and legend would have persisted so fruitfully. With her help the night brightened. And the breath of my flame was rekindled.
Until
Entropic trends salt the wind.
And, like a whisper
on the air, the word encodes.Fluent offshoots nourished by extant fragments of a third-hand nature give rise to an ancient, original future. Long lost, mortal worlds wholly felled by time suddenly germinate as spirited vestiges once vaulted from me. Paper thin flesh holds space with an unsustainability that seems almost illusory in nature. It seems only to keep time in the way it is undone, yet, timeless in the ledger, a true count is written by the author’s body upon the vessel. Impermanent corporeal connections entitle everyone to an eternal link in life’s unbroken branch.
We’ve been beheld by this truth about the exoteric facade for an era. It set us on a decided path of pursuit which prioritized physics as the only serious way forward for self-discovery. As it shaped physical science, so it shaped computer science. Now, emergent Large Language Models (LLM’s) have taken the world by technological storm.
A new Renaissance could be on the rise. Perhaps a dark age impends. I’ve known people who have seen it either way. A laundry list of risen empires now fallen has helped to foster ambivalence about civilization’s latent state. But mania has bent the circumstances into purview to dovetail nicely with my own interests:
curiosity around terms and their grammatical equivalents,
the imitational and symbolic modes by which we communicate ideas through physical or material mediums,
and the dynamic process of definition and division by which these modes function to evolve.
Thankfully, Ms. Brann and friends are here to help. Also, a new thread has materialized in an ongoing search to uncover and uproot the object’s adjective hold of reality, as a descriptive article afforded to facts that exist independent of mind. This personal aversive bias extends to popularly wielded tropes like existentialism and pragmatism for the culturally imminent concreteness of such a mindset’s incumbency. It cannot be assumed that the people here cited are in league with my thoughts. At best, they might have made allowances in service to my process.
Enough with the disclaimers. Let’s address this ‘new thread’, so-called. It’s an excerpt taken from Friedrich Trendelenburg:
“In the Middle Ages, subject meant substance, and has this sense in Descartes and Spinoza; sometimes, also in Reid. Subjective is used by William of Occam to denote that which exists independent of mind; objective, what is formed by the mind. This shows what is meant by realitas objectiva in Descartes. Kant and Fichte have inverted the meanings. Subject, with them, is the mind which knows; object, that which is known; subjective, the varying condition of the knowing mind; objective, that which is in the constant nature of a thing known.2
Eureka! There’s evidence that connotations ascribed to the subject and the object were inverted—by Immanuel Kant of all people. I’ve not read even a morsel of Fichte although I recall Mr. Manly P. Hall wrote about his contribution to the philosophical tradition:
The philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a projection of Kant’s philosophy, wherein he attempted to unite Kant’s practical reason with his pure reason. Fichte held that the known is merely the contents of the consciousness of the knower, and that nothing can exist to the knower until it becomes part of those contents. Nothing is actually real, therefore, except the facts of one’s own mental experience.3
This seems to affirm Trendelenburg’s statement. But how would Kant and Fichte go about inverting the meaning of object and subject? And what consequence if any could there be for me having forgotten that such presently meaningful distinctions once stood in opposite places?
Perhaps, I’ve found a proverbial sleight of hand to satisfy the first inquiry until a better answer arises. It comes from Ms. Brann’s work on Kant’s categorical imperatives within his Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals. The first formulation is:
Act only according to that maxim by which you can at
the same time will that it should become a universal law.Eva Brann responds:
Let us see what this formula contains. It contains a new term “maxim.” a maxim is my private, individual, “subjective” reason for a choice. It is intelligible enough, but it is individual in being contingent on my desires. A maxim is whatever subjective reason articulate beings give themselves for acting.”4
Do you see what I see? Did Eva see it then? Does maxim not appear to be interchangeable with one’s object? Let us try it.
An object[ive] is whatever subjective reason articulate beings give themselves for acting.
The sentence seems perfectly suited by my replacement. I look to Eva with hungry eyes but cannot make out her mood through the shadows. The midnight mist is too thickly diffuse. Perhaps I’ve taken her point out of its context. Perhaps not.
Eva wrote on the object in accordance with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:
Kant’s usage is by no means rigorous, but he very often uses this word for something given, which confronts the understanding, just as he often uses “thing” for the hidden source of reality in appearances. This given something which confronts us is there for the understanding. Blind in itself, it is the potential object of truth, that to which the understanding equates its grasp.
And now the understanding shows itself to be functioning toward a definite end. For in grasping the appearances, in conceiving them, thinking itself makes objects of them… But since the grasp itself molds the thing, the fit cannot help but be an adequate one—to be objectively valid and to be necessarily universal are exchangeable notions. Our material knowledge is “objective.” That means it is both about something and also true, because we ourselves provide its material as well as its form. The form is imposed by the subjective origin of the functions of our understanding, which ensures that they cannot be altered adventitiously… This enumeration is given in the “Analytic”, or element-finding part, or the Transcendental Logic, which is therefore a logic of truth. Using an Aristotelian term, Kant names the pure concepts of understanding “categories.” Furthermore he gives names, taken from traditional metaphysics, to exactly four groups of three each. But it is of the greatest importance to remember that these names carry no meanings and are nothing but labeling characters. We can know nothing objective of our own thinking functions. For to do that would be to grasp our own conceiving, to treat the categories as if they, by themselves, constituted an object.5
Perhaps I’ve been infatuated with elementary notions so long that I’ve grown nose blind to the stench of mundanity around my concern. What seemed like an unrecognized hazard above the pitfall of oblivion, looks like nothing more than a road well-traveled to Eva’s mind. Consider me humbled.
Before any awareness of Ms. Brann, I had persistently obsessed over the narrative that objectivity was best understood as a matter of method. We establish an objective. We combine observations and measurements to bridge us to that objective. If the objective was achieved, the method was objectively valid. When someone said an objective judge was impartial, I wanted the mind to interpret the statement to mean that the judge’s objective was to be impartial. Likewise, objective science was so-called for having been driven by its objective.
Such a conviction still seeks angles of support and sometimes falls upon the loosest terminological associations with differing degrees of success. The next two excerpts, for example, were found years ago reading Robert N. Proctor: the only historian called to the stand on behalf the people of 46 states and the District of Columbia against the United States’ four largest tobacco companies. Prominently marketed objective science had at that time, led many people to believe cigarettes were a safe and possibly healthy product. Mr. Proctor had the difficult task of making clear the conflict of interest inherent in an industry’s monopoly over commissioned scientific literature, as it had manifest in the people’s case against 'big tobacco’ without ruining the game for ascendant markets like the pharmaceutical industry.
First, one must point out that neutrality and objectivity are not the same thing. Neutrality refers to whether a science takes a stand; Objectivity, to whether a science merits certain claims to reliability.6
This astute distinction garnered interest for having definitively recognized a crucial confusion beleaguering people like me, who, as applied to the legal system, had long ascribed ethical connotations to objectivity which were not relevant to the objective state of science.
The appropriate critique of these sciences is not that they are not “objective” but that they are partial, or narrow, or directed towards ends which one opposes. In general, knowledge is no less objective (that is, true or reliable) for being in the service of interests.7
Crossed narrative wires had, in Proctor’s case, afforded objectively obtained empirical data unlimited credibility in the market of ideas, and left the public powerlessly suggestible as the tobacco industry commissioned confidently scientific claims about the safety and efficacy of cigarettes. Small discoveries like these have served to invigorate my search. Still, miles of time often yield little else than a fingerhold’s worth of relevance toward the goal of breaking the masterfully industrious and stupefyingly authoritative grip around common conceptions of science.
Apotheosis
Aseity principally envelopes
all that is made manifest
in the objective cosmos
of its wholly subjective realm. Passion has been meaningfully triparted by others into the desirer/subject, the desired/object, and the revelatory/occlusive surface of exchange. Such a bittersweet economy suits personal experience well. If this characterization feels rightly familiar to you, perhaps we might break bread over the magic by which words facilitate language’s capacity for fluency. This subject also feels useful in the direction of understanding the self in relation to emergent technologies and their impact on economic infrastructures. Great thinkers like James True have recognized the qualities of the oracle in AI. I, in a similar spirit, see the foundation of new technologies buried in the pedantry of human knowledge that predated material science as we now understand it.
The Tree of Porphyry, for example, illustrates the inverse relation between extension and intension of terms in addition to the relation between these and definition and division. The former relation possesses gravity of law:
…as the intension of a substance is increased (by adding the attributes material, animate, sentient, rational), its extension is decreased. Substance, the summum genus, has the greatest extension and the least intension. Man, the infima species, has the least extension and the greatest intension, that is the greatest number of characteristic notes: man is a rational, sentient, animate, material substance.8
The Tree of Porphyry affords us a medieval glimpse at the Neoplatonist interpretation of Aristotle’s Categories as laid out in The Isagoge. It was an important teaching tool during the Middle Ages and afforded the imagination noetic space for a progressive, essential, dichotomous division leading from substance to species. There’s great excitement in saying so. It’s like letting the mind breathe.
Lines of Western thought embodied by scribes like Sextus Empiricus—whose zetetic principles survived the collapse of Alexander’s as well as the Roman Empire—and Porphyry appeal to me for how they carried important aspects of the ancient world into a new era. Also, even without time to explore them now, John the Scot’s contribution deserves an honorable mention. Eriugena’s philosophy is similar to Porphyry’s for having been cut from Ammonius Sacca’s ilk but stands singularly for having survived the apocalyptic Vandalization historically associated with 476 CE, unbroken to now, thanks to the protective solitude of the Scottish Highlands. Pyrrhonism and Neoplatonism, on the other hand, traveled through time as dormant seeds—vaulted during the dark ages—while the vine of great intellections from the western world seem to have withered for almost a millennium, between Augustine and Aquinas, according to my aged Britannica set.
Neoplatonism appeals to me for how it blended Egyptian, Persian, and Greek wisdom into a practically secular philosophy capable of working adeptly with more mystical concepts like animism. Porphyry and Iamblichus piqued my passionately intuitive sense that collectively untended credulity in an empirically established encyclopedia of natural reality had rendered too many terms recalcitrant. The Isagoge taught me Aristotle’s Categories comprehensively, in a way that no one from Aristotle to Aquinas could. That’s despite the fact that Aristotle’s categories shaped the schematics of natural science all the way up to the present.
I say objects devolved into something which exists independent of mind. While every subject became slave to a mentality seeking merely to coexist with passive matter.
“What is more, we ourselves are a part of rule-bound nature. For nature consists of ordered external appearances, the physical appearances of space, but also of inner experiences, the psychological events of our temporal consciousness.”9
Consequently, this conviction has given rise to fondness for the merit of subsistence, in the ancient sense, as an alternative to merely languishing in existential crises under the presumption that the orchards of my dwelling were an uncultivatable “destiny.”10
Daylight approaches. The moon begins to wax again. The time to end this session has come. Thank you for your patience. Thank you to Eva and friends for their contributions, as well. Much has been left on the table to sort out between the several terminological relations that bewilder me so enduringly.
Intension: Extension
Subjective: Objective
Subsistence: Existence
Join us, next time, as we continue to explore my confusion with the help of our great literary giants.
To be continued…
Brann, Eva. Doublethink/Doubletalk: Naturalizing Second Thoughts & Twofold Speech. (Philadelphia, 2016, Paul Dry Books, Inc.)
Brann, Eva. The Logos of Heraclitus: The First Philosopher of the West on Its Most Interesting Term. (Philadelphia, 2011, Paul Dry Books, Inc.)
Brann, Eva. How to Constitute a World: Outside In, Inside Out. (Philadelphia, 2017, Paul Dry Books, Inc.)
W.T. Harris, C.S.C., Ph.D. Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language. (Massachusetts, 1922, G. & C. Merriam Company) pg. 1482
Hall, Manly P. Secret Teachings of all Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy. (New York, 2010, Dover Publications, Inc.) pg. xxviii
Brann, Eva. How to Constitute a World: Outside In, Inside Out. (Philadelphia, 2017, Paul Dry Books, Inc.) pg. 108
Brann, Eva. How to Constitute a World: Outside In, Inside Out. (Philadelphia, 2017, Paul Dry Books, Inc.) pg. 52-53
Proctor, Robert N. Value-Free Science? : Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge. (Massachusetts, 1991, Harvard University Press) pg. 10
Sister Miriam Joseph, C.S.C., Ph.D. The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric. (Philadelphia, 2002, Paul Dry Books) pg. 79
Brann, Eva. How to Constitute a World: Outside In, Inside Out. (Philadelphia, 2017, Paul Dry Books, Inc.) pg. 104
This characterization is owed to Yukio Mishima who marked his spiritual turning point at the moment his body and what it expressed were reclaimed by his own authority:
“If my self was my dwelling, then my body resembled an orchard that surrounded it. I could either cultivate that orchard to its capacity of leave it for the weeds to run riot in. I was free to choose, but the freedom was not so obvious as it might seem. Many people, indeed, go so far as to refer to the orchards of their dwellings as ‘destiny.’
One day, it occurred to me to set about cultivating my orchard for all I was worth…”
Mishima, Yukio. Sun and Steel. (New York, Harper & Row, Publisher, Inc., 1970) pg. 7
Fascinating exploration, thank you! I'll return to this and have to read it again, too much to take in all at once.
Kameron, your post explores profound ideas about objectivity, perception and language in a deeply fascinating way. As a poet, I find it all so compelling because last week I had an experience where I felt I 'became a poem' - one spoken aloud and released through me under a tree elder similar to the one featured in this post. That's what caught my eye first, the image.
And now you leave me thinking about how words are not just tools for communication but are living forces that we embody. Your rich reflections here on knowledge, subsistence and existence resonate with that in a way I hadn’t considered before. Thanks so much for sharing and musing.