Widely-published author, speaker, and lawyer, Eric Scheske, offers weekly commentary on a host of matters, ranging from current events to philosophy to religion.
An Analysis of Eric Voegelin's 4th and 5th Gnostic TraitsShow notes here
Did you take a sociology class in high school or college?Did you know sociology's founder, August Comte (1798-1857), was kind of a dick? The Encyclopedia Britannica says he was “ungrateful,” “self-centered,” and “egocentric.” If those aren't bad enough, other biographers say he was a megalomaniac, cruel, and downright nuts.Comte, on the other hand, considered himself a relevant man, to put it modestly. He was born at the end of the Enlightenment and fully embraced its ideals,[1]which Isaiah Berlin summarized as:1. Every genuine question can be answered. If it can't be answered, it's not a genuine question.2. The answers to the questions can be discovered, learned, and taught.3. All the answers are compatible with one another.Those ideals are captured perfectly by science. Science is the discipline of power: it answers questions and puts them into neat boxes. Physics is especially good at this.Comte concluded that the principles of physics could be applied to society: “social physics” is what he initially called it before calling it “sociology.”Show notes here
This is a podcast episode from “Outside the Modern Limits,” a newsletter geared to help people understand and thrive in modernity. You can subscribe and find the show notes here.
“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” RousseauRousseau's passage from the beginning of The Social Contract contends for the most famous in philosophy.Rousseau's point was simple: Humans are good, but there's a lot of suffering, so social institutions must be corrupting everything.Significantly, Rousseau didn't see any problems with himself. He was arguably the most self-centered philosopher of all time. He was so self-centered, biographers wonder if he was even capable of love.Show notes here.For notes regarding the first trait, click here.
A Diagnostic of the GnosticEric Voegelin was to modern gnosticism what Knute Rockne was to Notre Dame football. Rockne didn't start the ND football program and Voegelin didn't discover modern gnosticism, but they took their subjects to much higher levels.The Swiss theologian, Hans urs Von Balthasar was supposedly the first person to draw parallels between the ancient gnostic heresy and modern theories in Prometheus (1937), which examined modern German thought. Albert Camus did a similar thing with modern French thought in The Rebel (1951).[1]But Voegelin took the strain of thought much further in The New Science of Politics (1952). The book became a Time cover story and, voila, gnosticism was in the limelight, a least among nerds.Granted, later in life, Voegelin said he wasn't sure “gnosticism” was the best term to use and thought perhaps it received too much attention, but he didn't remotely conclude that the term didn't work. Far from it. Later in life, at age 67, he published his most popular work, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (1968).Show Note Here
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For the fortunate few, that router is hard-wired with fiber optic. Most of us only get a wireless connection, and a wobbly one at that.Show notes here
If you want to understand how gnosticism flourishes in our modern world, you need to understand why it developed in the ancient world.Show notes here
Solon opened Athens to true order: the transformative order found through the Tao.Show notes here
Within 100 years, the Cartesians used impeccable logic derived from Descartes' I think there I am to reach two conclusions: there is no earthly agent of movement and there is no matter. There is only God and mind. Hume yanked God and mind out of these conclusions and the Cartesian Jenga tower came tumbling down.Show notes here
Something really bizarre happened around the year 500 BC, all across Eurasia. We started to realize that we live in the metaxy: an area comprised of transcendence and immanence. These ten thinkers, from Italy to China, led the way.Show notes here
Out of this paradoxical mish-mash of empire, Fascism, Catholicism, tradition, and modernity stepped a big dose of genius. Men who became giants in their fields, ranging from music to economics to psychoanalysis, many of whom fled Fascism to settle in western Europe or the United States. A partial list: Carl Menger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolph Carnap, Sigmund Freud, Martin Buber, Karl Popper, Viktor Frankl, Arnold Schoenberg, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek.And Eric Voegelin.Voegelin is possibly the least known but possibly the greatest among them. He was poor at self-promotion, his prose was difficult, and his ideas were nearly impossible to appreciate. To compound the problem, he refused to “write down” to make his prose more accessible, insisting the reader make the required effort to understand the problem that was modernity, and then he compounded the problem even more by using neologisms that no one understood. Voegelin biographies spend a lot of time defining words, some even including a separate glossary at the end.But I suspect the real reason Voegelin never really caught on like, say, Freud or von Mises: He simply didn't resonate. Luther wouldn't have resonated in the 11thcentury; Nietzsche would have lived with the wolves in the 8th.Voegelin, with the analytic precision of a mathematician, tried to explain how transcendence plays into earthly politics. It wasn't a song that played well in the exuberant and optimistic days of post-WWII America, which cared for such things about as much as Stalin cared about the Pope's legions.On top of that, I believe Voegelin set himself an impossible task. The Tao can't be explained in mathematical terms. But he was also correct: The Tao can't be ignored, whether currently or in historical explanations.Show notes here
Before he published the Prince, Machiavelli published the seducer. Before he published a masterpiece of political philosophy, he published a comedy.The Mandragola (The Mandrake) tells the story of Callimaco, a handsome young man and seducer of women. He hears about the Florentine beauty Lucrezia and begins a conspiracy to seduce her. The problem is, she's married. She's married to a wealthy old man who can't get her pregnant and they need a son to maintain their political position.Callimaco shows up, disguised as a doctor, and convinces her husband to give her a mandrake potion to increase her fertility. The problem is, Callimaco tells the old man, the first man who sleeps with her after she takes the potion will die. They decide to find an unwitting dupe to have sex with her. Callimaco, in different disguise, becomes the dupe, much to his delight. And Lucrezia's. She at first was hesitant, but she relented and, convinced it was divine providence, takes Callimaco as her lover indefinitely.Everything turns out well. The old man get his male heir and Callimaco gets Lucrezia.Show notes here
A 50-year-old man had ritual sex with a 12-year-old girl while adult women assisted. And everyone was cool with it. That's just part of the bizarre story told in Netflix's Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey and the exploits of its prophet, Warren Jeffs. Show notes here
You're soaked in modernity. You think like a modern. It's not good. Consider doing the opposite of whatever your rationality tells you to do.Show notes here
“Modernitis”: A mental disease, rarely diagnosed, marked by intuitive confidence in one's ideas and the findings of science.Show notes here
Descartes was a philosophical surgeon who lobotomized common sense from the modern mind without most people even noticing. It helped that western civilization was thoroughly prepped and anesthetized for the procedure.Show notes here.
Lycurgus put the “Spartan” into Sparta.Before Lycurgus, Sparta was like other Greek cities. Its citizens sang, celebrated love and good food, wrote poetry, and crafted fine pottery.After Lycurgus, Sparta became grim and tough, determined to keep its slave class under control despite the daunting slave-to-citizen ratio (10:1?).Music, poetry, fine pottery, and good food vanished. Family and love remained, but in twisted forms.Men were discouraged from marrying small wives. Men with vigorous wives were encouraged to lend them to vigorous men. Men who grew too old to service their young wives were expected to make her available to young men.Show notes here
Issue 11 of The Lamp features a review-essay about David Foster Wallace that is written by a man who is obviously conversant, not only with Wallace's postmodernist prose, but also with the Wallace scholarship surrounding him. The writer of the absorbing essay? Edmund Waldstein, a Cistercian monk. A monk? Yeah, yeah, I know: “Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton.” Monks write, often very well. But still. A man so conversant in something so postmodernistly cultural . . . a monk? It's a snapshot into something important. Very important.It's a snapshot of a thing I call “The Bridge Option.” Modernity was The Great Rejection, which was western civilization's rejection of the Tao.The Great Rejection, being a rejection of the fundamental truth of our existence, wasn't sustainable, so rejections of The Great Rejection started cropping up with increasing frequency as modernity rolled on. Counter-rejections were evident at the beginning of modernity in Blaise Pascal (a healthy counter-rejection) and the irrational Rosicrucian movement (not so healthy). As modernity steamrolled everything before it with increasing contempt and disregard for anything not steeped in its unholy trinity of Rationalism, Empiricism, and Progressivism, the counter-rejections have picked up steam as well. Show notes here
He sat on his mother's couch, smoking marijuana and watching the McCarthy hearings, cheering Tail Gunner Joe. He was 32 and it was 1954. In his 20s and the 1940s, he said he'd like to join his Russian comrades and fight against Fascism.He coined the term “Beat Generation” which became the proto-countercultural movement of the 1960s. He detested the 1960s counterculture, noting that the Beatnik's was a movement of enthusiasm and glee, not one of disgruntled whining.He took Benzedrine, morphine, marijuana, hashish, LSD, and opium. He saw a statue of Mary turn its head.He died at age 47 from hemorrhaging of the esophagus, the drunkard's classic death. His corpse held a rosary and his funeral Mass was held at St. Jean Baptiste Catholic Church.Such was the short life of Jack Kerouac.He was hip before it was hip, crisscrossing America in the late 1940s, from New York to Denver to San Francisco, with stops in Des Moines, Chicago, New Orleans, and points in-between, with a jaunt into Mexico City.Show notes here
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Montaigne was the godfather of modern skepticism. His was a “negative skepticism,” which disturbed Descartes enough to prompt him to come up with a positive response, which in turn gave us modernity, its fierce subjectivism, and the parade of “little gods” that have marred the last 200 years.Show notes here
Show notes here1. The wise know they start each morning as beginners. Robin Daniels2. "In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention." Simone Weil3. "My experience is what I agree to attend to." William James4. "To enjoy the kind of experience you want rather than enduring the kind that you feel stuck with, you have to take charge of your attention." Winifred Gallagher, Rapt5. "Choice of attention--to pay attention to this and ignore that--is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be." W.H. Auden6. Your life is the sum of what you focus on. Winifred Gallagher7. "The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another." William James8. "Attention is the withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others." William James9. The best response to distractions is no response. Robin Daniels10. "Energy flows where attention goes." Amishi Jha11. If you stay focused on the right things, your life will stop being a mere reaction to circumstances but rather a work of art. Winifred Gallagher12. Every saint's life is a work of art.13. Being focused is the next best thing to being happy. Winifred Gallagher14. Resign yourself to mere concentration, and you might get some happiness too.
Show notes hereBacon's books proposed a new method of inquiry.In technical language, he proposed that we rely on induction instead of deduction.Put a little more simply: Instead of trying to deduce truth from a priori principles and making our observations match the principles, he said we should make our observations and reach a posteriori conclusions from the observations.Put as simply as possible: Instead of using dogmas to tell us what the science says, let's just see what the science says.Bacon was very serious about the rejection of dogmas. He admonished readers to eliminate “Idols” that cloud scientific studies and conclusions. His was a complete rejection of metaphysics when it came to the realm of physics. Separation of church and science. He is properly considered the Father of Empiricism.
Show notes hereThe 1300s. Europe in the grips of economic depression, war, and natural catastrophes. Europe still experiencing the spiritual wake left by the lives of Saints Francis and Dominic. A deep concern with the interior life seized large numbers of people, both clergy and laity, and the pursuit of inwardness became an intense and exclusive goal of many.The ones who made the most progress were like today's American Idol contestants. They made it to the top and everyone wanted to listen to them.10. Richard Rolle (1300-1349)“Little wonder when a man is first made a true contemplative, and tastes the sweetness and then feels the warmth, that he almost dies through excess of love.”Richard Rolle: ladies' man. Women were a source of temptation in his youth, an object of tender concern as a spiritual father in his prime. Most of his written works are devotions for his female listeners. Our culture can't imagine this, of course. Or rather, our culture can imagine this only too much, letting its imagination run to the lascivious. He lived 31 of his 49 years as a hermit. The only Englishman on this list. Never canonized, but inspired a flourishing cult in England, where his books were more widely read than Chaucer's in the 1400s. Sometimes credited as the first master of English prose.9. Gerard Groote (1340-1384)
Rene Descartes was kind of a dick.His famous saying, “I think, therefore I am,” is nothing less than a wholesale rejection of all authority—even objective truth—in favor of a defecated rationality and fierce subjectivism that belittles anything outside one's own mind.The modern attitude created by Descartes does two things:1. It enshrines one's own beliefs or preferences as the exclusive source of truth (fierce subjectivism).2. It elevates the logic that flows from that fierce subjectivism (defecated rationality) into a truth (my truth, your truth, his/her/its truth, etc.).If you draw a thick cocaine line from Descartes to today's Trans Wars, you'd be drawing coke lines better than Hunter Thompson.Accused of being an atheist, Descartes claimed to be a “devout Catholic,”[i]but he left his Catholic France to live among the Calvinists and Jews in the Netherlands. He espouses odd (and bizarre) theories about the soul. He spent his final days as the court philosopher for the Lutheran Queen Christina of Sweden and died without Last Rites.One academic thinks that Descartes was such a poor Catholic that a priest thought his example would prevent Queen Christina from converting to Catholicism, so the priest poisoned the father of modernity by lacing a host with arsenic. The story doesn't ring true—a priest who cares enough about Catholicism wouldn't desecrate the host like that—but hey, the Queen converted after Descartes' death so maybe.The Pope thought Descartes was kind of a dick. Urban VIII put Descartes' writings on the Index of Forbidden Books about a dozen years after Descartes died.Pascal Surpassed DescartesBut most people thought Descartes was brilliant. He was the toast of Europe. But Descartes wasn't the smartest guy in Europe. Heck, he wasn't even the smartest guy in France.A young upstart was his intellectual superior. Descartes knew it and resented it (did I mention Descartes was kind of a dick?).When the 16-year-old Blaise Pascal published a mathematical paper on conic sections when Descartes was 43, Descartes knew he'd been eclipsed when he was at the height of his intellectual power and reputation. At first, he refused to believe someone as young as Pascal could've written something so impressive, but when he learned that it was true, Descartes turned to belittling him. When Pascal invented the syringe and the hydraulic press, Descartes mocked him and said Pascal had “too much vacuum in his head.”Show notes here
World War I shook European society.The first 15 years of the 20th century were la belle epoque—the banquet years. Society was more optimistic about its prospects than Harvey Weinstein at a cocaine-fueled casting session.And then came the genocide against English, French, and German youth that occurred when the great nations combined Lincoln's “total war” with modern industrial innovations. Ten bodies exchanged for a foot of ground; men losing limbs to mud-induced disease. Nasty stuff. Harvey Weinstein's life today.Then came the aftermath. People previously looked at existence with optimism. Now they looked at existence as nonsensical. Disillusion was the dominant feeling.The WWI wake brought us the Lost Generation, T.S. Eliot's “The Waste Land,” the devil-may-care excesses of Weimar Germany, the sheer fictional existence of a guy like Gatsby.But it also brought us a wave of Utopian movements that have faded from memory. We all know about Communism, Socialism, and Fascism, all of which picked up steam after WWI, but there were a lot of smaller movements that tried to capitalize (so to speak) on society's collective disillusionment with the industrialization of modern life that, they thought, manifested itself in the mechanical horrors of World War I.Mustard gas, land mines, tanks, and machine guns come from factories. Therefore, factories are bad. Factories come from capitalism. Therefore, capitalism is bad. Capitalism flourishes in urban areas. Therefore, urbanization is bad. It was time to get everyone off the grid, living in common.These reformers took that line of thinking really seriously.Remaining show notes here
No, that isn't a passage above the front door of Jeffrey Epstein's residence on Little Saint James.It's a popular saying of a medieval sect known as the “Brethren of the Free Spirit,” which has long been regarded, according to historian Norman Cohn, as “one of the most perplexing and mysterious phenomena in medieval history.”So perplexing, in fact, that Cohn himself conflated a genuine mystic, Henry Suso (1300-1366), with the Brethren. Suso, a disciple of Meister Eckhart, was one of the most Zen-like mystics in Christian history. Zen has Gnostic tendencies, but Suso was a legitimate mystic, as evidenced by his beatification in 1831.Suso lived in Cologne, Germany, which was the stronghold of the Brethren, but he was hardly like the Brethren of the Free Spirit. Consider Suso's direct contemporary and fellow Colognian, John of Brunn, who lived at the Brethren's House of Voluntary Poverty.According to Brunn, since God is free, everything should be free: held in common. If anyone had more than he needed, it was merely so he could give them to the Brethren. If an adept ate at a tavern, he shouldn't have to pay and, if the tavern keeper insisted on payment, he should be beaten. Cheating, theft, and violent robbery were all justified for Brethren adepts, according to John Brunn, who also testified in 1340 to lying, fornicating, orgies, incest, sodomy, and murder (including infanticide).Full show notes
The Renaissance Believed in Magic Like Moderns Believe in ScienceIn 1598, a huge renegade friar organized a revolt to liberate Calabria from Spain.Tommaso Campanella started the revolt with astrology: he announced to his followers that the stars portended great changes and revolution. He then added numerology, noting that the numbers agreed with the stars: the year 1600 was approaching and 16 is numerologically significant.[i]The new century, Campanella preached, would mark the dawn of a new age—an age with a better religious cult, better moral laws, and an excellent ruler (to wit, Campanella, who thought he was astrologically destined to bring the world into the new age).In order to prepare for the new age, Campanella taught it was first necessary to overthrow Spanish rule, but he believed so strongly in his personal magical powers and the magical signs that he scarcely prepared for Spain's inevitable response. His “revolution” was quickly crushed and Campanella was imprisoned for 27 years.During his imprisonment, he channeled his Utopian-magical desires into writing. In Citta del Sole (The City of the Sun), he drafted a blueprint for his ideal city, a mountain city ruled by a priest named Hoh. Hoh and his bureaucratic aides would rule over sex relations, which would be organized to bring about the best humans. There would be no mental or physical disabilities. All things would be held in common, including the women, and children would be raised by the community. Both sexes would be trained to fight. Everyone would work, but only four hours per day. Everyone would practice perfect virtue, and there would be no crime.[ii]The City's structure would be dictated by astrology. It would be divided into seven divisions named after the seven planets (Neptune and Pluto hadn't been discovered yet). The walls which divided each division would be covered with astrological depictions. In the middle of the City, there would be a vast temple with an altar containing a great "mappamondo" on which all the heavens would be depicted. The dome would contain the greatest stars with a listing of the powers each has over the earth. In short, Campanella's City was "a complete reflection of the world as governed by the laws of natural magic in dependence on the stars” and was "saturated through and through with astrology."[iii]The Magical RenaissanceShow notes here
“Torture enables the torturer to capture the soul of the victim”Mexican drug minion Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo conducted an odd mix of magical rituals, a mish-mash of ceremonies that combined his mother's Cuban magic with ancient Mayan and Aztec practices. He also used a dose of nagualism (a form of black magic that solicits magical powers from animals).In the 1980s, he convinced the northern Mexico drug lords, the Hernandez family, that his magic could help them keep their market against drug lords from southern Mexico and help them against the United States' stepped-up narcotic efforts. Constanzo and his cult of sub-minions became an integral part of the Hernandez drug trade. His magical abilities were considered a key component of his success.Part of his magic entailed human sacrifices, which were often particularly cruel (including one sacrifice where the victim was slowly skinned alive) and, in keeping with Aztec tradition, involved tearing the victims' hearts out. The sacrifices were designed to give Constanzo spiritual power in the form of slaves in the nether world. It's a common belief in Mexican brugeria (black magic) that torture enables the torturer to capture the soul of the victim, who, through the ordeal, comes to fear the torturer completely, eternally. An added plus: The energy from the pain and fear of the victim is appropriated sacramentally by the torturer, and this energy gives him increased magical strength. After a human sacrifice, the Constanzo cult boiled the body parts in an iron kettle with animal blood, which they drank, believing that the blood made them unstoppable in battle.Remaining show notes here
We intuit the Tao. That's why our active hobbies engage us.Show notes here.
Thomas Aquinas was an existentialist, in his own way. His existentialism was forgotten . . . to western civilization's detriment.Show notes here.
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Complete show notes. The new McCarthyism? Probably not, but still unsettling.
Warning: Tough sledding here. Lots to absorb. Check out the show notes
Why do the spiritual masters unanimously seem to insist on that lame piece of advice: “Live in the present moment"?
My daughter sent this Existential Comic to me. It shows three ancient philosophers competing in the Philosophy event at the Greek Olympics: Thales, who declares everything is water. Zeno, who declares motion is impossible. Socrates, who declares they're full of bulls***.Socrates won.But of course, he didn't really win: he refuted nothing.His refutation was even worse than Samuel Johnson's stone-kicking “refutation” of George Berkeley.It's a well-worn anecdote: Samuel Johnson and his companion, James Boswell, stood outside church in 1763, talking about George Berkeley's startling philosophical conclusion that matter doesn't exist.Here's how it works: We only perceive matter's characteristics. That green thing has four legs, a flat surface, and a horizontal surface. Our mind then combines those things to declare “chair.” But we don't perceive chair. We only perceive the things that comprise the chair and, therefore, the chair itself doesn't really exist. Since all things are mere combinations of other things that we perceive in their relation to other things, nothing really exists. Everything is just our ideas. All is mind. There is no matter.Boswell said, though it can't be true, it's impossible to refute.“Johnson,” Boswell wrote in his famous biography, “answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone . . . ‘I refute it thus.'”That ended the discussion, but Boswell concluded the story by noting that he would've loved to have seen a genius like Johnson contend with Berkeley since Berkeley's ideas could not be “answered by pure reasoning.” David Hume reached a similar conclusion about Berkeley's ideas: “they admit of no answer and produce no conviction.”They cannot be answered by pure reasoningZeno: There is no motion. Berkeley: There is no matter. We could add a few other philosophers into this tradition: Parmenides: There is no change. Derrida: There is no reality.None of them could be refuted but none of them convinced anyone with a shred of ingenuousness or common sense. They probably didn't even believe their own conclusions, and I can guaran-freakin'-tee to you that they didn't live by their own conclusions.But they couldn't be refuted.Why?I think that lecher (and tosspot) Boswell hit on the answer: they could not “be answered by pure reasoning.”There is something about reality that transcends reason: something not subject to reason, something that can't be defined, something that defies capture by words.Enter the realm beyond language and reasonThis piece is a follow-up of sorts to last week's post: “Are You Engaged in the Act of Existence? Then You're a Man of the Tao.”The “Act of Existence,” I pointed out last week, is prior to all else. The Act of Existence is prior to essence and attributes, which are prior to existence itself. Because the Act of Existence is prior to all else, it informs all else.Importantly, all else doesn't inform it. The part doesn't capture the whole, the son doesn't define the father.So the world of essence and existence isn't going to define the Act of Existence.Words and reason are the tools of the world of essence. Essence is prior to existence, so essence's tools paint existence as well.But the Act of Existence is prior to it all.That's how Berkeley and Zeno and Derrida can be 100% logical and 100% wrong at the same time.Ah, a paradox! Now we're getting someplaceIt's a paradox.Get used to it.Everything informed by reality (the “Reality Spectrum,” I called it last week) is a paradox. I remember listening to an interview with Ian McGilchrist last year. He was describing a roundtable discussion with other heavyweight intellectuals that hit upon two contradictory statements that were both true. One of the participants lit up and said, “Ah, a paradox! Now we're getting someplace.”Exactly.The Reality Spectrum is someplace. It's everyplace. If you deny it, you'll never get anyplace. You'll reach conclusions: but nothing will be concluded. You'll be right: but you'll be wrong.If you deny the Reality Spectrum, you're playing poker without the face cards. You might draw a straight flush, 6 through 10, and reach for the pot, then the other guy will lay down four kings. You'll see that you lost, but you won't understand why. The full deck of the Reality Spectrum transcends your partial deck of essence/existence only. The partial deck can win hands, but in the long game, the full deck will win.Maniacs are commonly great reasonersIn Chapter II of his classic book, Orthodoxy, G.K Chesterton describes “the maniac.”“Maniacs,” GKC observed, “are commonly great reasoners.”But they're still maniacs because they reason within a very closed circle.The maniac's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory.If the maniac says six guys have a conspiracy against him, then you tell him, “I spoke to each one of them. They assure me they don't,” the maniac says, “That's what conspirators would say.”And he'd be right.The argument itself can't be broken. In order to get anywhere with the maniac, you have to break open his little world.For the maniac who relies solely on reason, you have to break open his reality of essence à existence only. You have to get him to see the Act of Existence: the Tao. You need to get him on the Reality Spectrum.But you can't use reason to do it.Something else is needed.It's sometimes humor. When you juxtapose something next to the maniac's stilted reality that he didn't expect, he might laugh and inadvertently let in more reality.But sometimes something harsher is needed. A jolt of sorts. Maybe a near-death experience. Maybe the birth of a child.Or maybe someone wise just telling him he's full of bulls*** and kicking a rock at him.
My daughter runs.She runs in the morning, she runs at night. Runs, runs, runs.People around town see her and go, “Look at that girl! She's a runner.”But I know she's more than that.My daughter breathes. She breathes in the morning, she breathes at night. Breathes, breathes, breathes. She's a breather.And you know what else?She exists. She exists in the morning, she exists at night. Exists, exists, exists. She's an exister . . . a being.It's All Absurdly AxiomaticIt's all common sense, right? Almost so obvious that it borders on stupidity? “Scheske, we get it: Your daughter engages in the act of running, so we know she's a runner. She engages in the act of breathing, so we know she's a breather. She engages in the act of existing, so we know she's a being. It's axiomatic to the point of absurd common sense.”Perhaps.But just grant me this: There's something different between “engaging in the act of running/breathing/existing” and “being a runner/breather/being.”I don't even want you to explain what the difference is. Just concede the point: they're different somehow.And then focus on the “being” part.Let Me Hurt Your Brain a LittleEach person is engaged in the act of existence. Therefore, each person exists. We know a person exists by seeing her (and the traits that distinguish her from other things), so in that sense, her distinguishing traits are prior to her existence (we know the traits before we know the being), but even before the traits can be seen, she is engaged in the act of existence. If she weren't, there would be nothing for the traits to latch onto.Now let me give you a simple formula:Act of existence–>essence–>being.I call it the “Reality Spectrum.” It's the full spectrum, in three points of reference, of our reality. We are engaged in the act of existence, which allows essences (attributes, traits, characteristics, “accidents”) to attach, which then makes our being accessible to the rest of the world.A lot of philosophers have rejected it. They reject the “act of existence” altogether, either saying that it's synonymous with “being” and therefore isn't even a thing, or saying that it's axiomatic to the point of absurd common sense.But they're obviously wrong. We know my daughter is a runner because she engages in the act of running. They're different things. It's Not Even Worth Talking AboutWell, the axiomaticians aren't really wrong. They have a point. It is axiomatic (one thing necessarily leading to the other).In fact, the axiomaticians might be the most correct. The whole thing is so axiomatic, there's nothing left to be said about the “act of existence.”“Okay, Scheske. We know your daughter is a runner because she's engaged in the act of running. Everything else about the condition—her personal best, her preferred running shoes, her form, how it makes her feel, how it affects her other life activities—all focus on the attributes of running or her. To explore her running, we don't ever have to revisit the premise that ‘she's engaged in the act of running.' So drop it. We don't give a s*** about the act of running.”And they'd be right. The Running Reality Spectrum for purposes of everything we know (for purposes of observation, discussion, debate, data, experimentation, records, the Olympics, TV, a varsity letter, etc.) looks like this: Attributes of Running–>Runner.No “Act of Running.” It's there, yes, but it's not even worth talking about, so it can be properly (efficiently) discarded from our mental view.When it comes to the Act of Existence, we tend to do the same thing. The Reality Spectrum is just Attributes of Existing–>Being. Everything we can see, hear, talk about, and measure pertains to one of those two things. The Act of Existence is prior to all that, of course, but so what? It's not worth talking about.But I'd take the axiomaticians one step further:It's not that it's not worth talking about.It's that we can't talk about it.Enter the TaoThe first line of Lao Tzu's Tao Teh Ching tells us that “The Tao that can be put into words is not the real Tao.”The Zen master, Wen-yu, when asked for the First Principle of Zen, echoed Lao Tzu: “If words could tell you, it would become the Second Principle.”The Tao. The First Principle of Zen. There's nothing to be said about them. In fact, if you try, you eliminate them. You can't talk about them any more than you can catch your shadow. The mere attempt to catch it is a failure to appreciate what a shadow is. The same with the Tao and the First Principle of Zen: The mere attempt to talk about them (to catch them) is a failure to appreciate what they are.The Tao. The First Principle of Zen. They are labels for the Act of Existence.The Tao, the First Principle of Zen, and the Act of Existence can't be defined because they are prior to the world of essence and being. Language defines subjects and objects. The Tao comes first, before language, before subject-object. The mere attempt to talk about it is a failure to appreciate what the Tao is.But that doesn't mean the Tao is irrelevant.Far from it. It's the most important thing, even if we can't articulate how and must try to obtain glimpses of it in ways that don't use the world of subject-object and language.I'll write more about those ways in future pieces.
In one of his last works before his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.The DreamIn this story, the narrator goes to another solar system and lands on a planet where the inhabitants are people just like us, but untainted by the Fall in the Garden of Eden. They live, the narrator tells us:“In the same paradise as that in which . . . our parents lived before they sinned.”But the narrator, being a fallen man, corrupts the inhabitants:“Like the germ of a plague infecting whole kingdoms, I corrupted them all.”They then begin to act like us on earth. In the words of Russian literature professor Arthur Trace:“They invent morality because now there was immorality; they make a virtue of shame, whereas before they had no need for shame; they invent the concept of honor because now there is such a thing as dishonor; they invent justice because now there is injustice; and they invent brotherhood and friendship because there is hatred.”Arthur Trace, Furnace of Doubt (1988), 24.In short, on the unfallen planet, there was no virtue or morality because there was no vice or immorality in contrast. There was no distinction between bad and good.
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