Monday, May 08, 2006
(11:12 PM) | Brad:
The Analogical Donut; or, One of the More Interesting Passages of Philosophical Theology I've Read In a While
The consciousness of beginning before the beginning of consciousness is the thinking now occurring for the first time. Such for the first time is the end of the end of modernity & the shape of thinking for the third millennium. Such is a consciousness other than the known & unknown: a consciousness beyond knowledge, but not beyond being: a consciousness otherwise than knowledge but not otherwise than being: a consciousness otherwise than the beginning of being but not other than being & nothing: a consciousness other than the beginning of being & nothing. This consciousness of being & beginning otherwise than knowledge, consciousness of the beginning otherwise than being, is consciousness of the beginning not a species of becoming. For the first time the new world consciousness, the consciousness of the beginning, is consciousness of the beginning not a becoming and of being other than ignorance & knowledge. This is the beginning of consciousness as complete objectivity. Otherwise than knowledge the beginning of the absolute transcendence of knowledge. What now occurs for the first time in history is the beginning of the identity of conception & perception, of acting & thinking, of imagining & accomplishing. The beginning of near instantaneous global communication, the beginning of the synthesis of practicable superconductivity, the beginnings of quantum computation, the beginning of the genetic transformation of the human organism, the beginning of deliberate tissue & organ growth -- these are but some of the beginnings that signal the beginning of the liberation of human freedom from the thraldom of self-consciousness.In order to attempt to illustrate for the imagination how this beginning of the freeing of human freedom from the thraldom of self-consciousness is grounded in the apocalyptic I, I would like now to offer you an ontological donut. I've brought a box of ordinary imaginary donuts. Please have an ordinary imaginary donut, one with a hole in the center. Don't eat the donut just yet. You might be thinking, "what good is a donut if I can't eat it?" If that's what you're thinking, you have Hegel on your side. Hegel thinks the truth of the donut is that it is made to be eaten by someone such as you. Since the donut has no truth of its own, if it is not eaten, but thrown into the garbage, it is, as we say, wasted (from the Latin vastus, empty). If it is not eaten, it is left to its own emptiness, insubstantiality, nothingness. OK. Now you may eat the donut. The donut has been food all along. If never eaten, it would be wasted food. If eaten, it is food at eact point in the process of being consumed. When thoroughly digested, it will have been, as Hegel would say, sublated or superseded or annulled in such a way that it will have realized its truth as food in having contributed to sustaining your life. In this way, in its truth as food, it will have been preserved. Now, in Hegel's understanding, just as you have consumed the donut, God consumes everything. Hegel's God has a voracious appetite! God doesn't waste anything! God wastes nothing!
But now in the case of the essentially new form of thinking which is beginning, imagine God not only not wasting anything, as Hegel understands, but also imagine God not wasting nothing! Imagine that God is not only the truth of everything but also the truth of nothing! Imagine that nothing has no truth of its own! Imagine that the beginning of the being of everything is not nothing—that the beginning is not a species of becoming. Imagine that the nothingness of nothing is the being of everything beginning. Imagine that when you ate the donut you ate the hole in the middle of the donut. Imagine that the hole -- the nothing in the middle of the donut -- was consumed, not wasted, when you ate the donut. Now you may be thinking that when you ate the donut all you ate was the dough and the hole was not eaten but disappeared because the surrounding dough was consumed. But it comes to the same thing: the nothing in the middle of the donut is no more. The waste or vastum that was the hole that was the middle of the donut is not wasted, is not left to its own nothingness: the donut is consumed without remainder: the hole is gone.
Now imagine that when you ate the donut you were God -- not the Idea of God -- the Apocalyptic god whose creative voice breaks forth when heaven & earth are no more, and imagine that, as Hegel says, and as in diverse ways after Hegel others have said, the nothing in the middle -- the hole in the donut -- the nothing -- is freedom, and insofar as it is "in the middle" human freedom. Then if the hole in the donut -- the nothing in the midst of being -- stands for human freedom and it has been consumed by God, then God is not the Idea of God, whose eternal creative process depends upon not consuming the nothing.
Human freedom is not consumed by Hegel's God because it would involve consuming the nothing. How is human freedom wasted in Hegel? This freedom is left to its own nothingness. In Hegel nothing has its own truth. In Hegel it is nature & the finite spirit that have no truth of their own. Nature and the finite spirit are consumed, but the nothing is never consumed lest the eternal process of divine self-actualization should come to an end! The consumption of nothing would be the undoing of the Idea of God. The principle of the philosophy of the absolute dialectical movement of the divine spirit is nothing wasted. [. . .]
If the God who is I -- the Alpha & the Omega -- consumes everything, and nothing is not wasted . . . then although everything & nothing is consumed something is not consumed: that something which is left to its nothingness when everything else including nothing is not left to its nothingness -- that something which is the not nothing wasted when nothing is not wasted -- that something is the I which is the beginning & end of the beginning & end of the donut that is the body and your body! The I is that something -- excluding nothing, not a self -- wasted when everything including nothing is consumed. The I is what survives when everything including nothing is consumed by the Apocalyptic God. Creating, God being the truth of everything & nothing, the divine I shares being itself with the human I.
In the history of thought the formal possibility of the consumption of everything & nothing is created by C. S. Peirce's introduction of the operation of logical addition into Boole's logic of absolutes, by means of which operation 1 + 0 became intelligible in Peirce's new logic of relatives whereas it had been unintelligible to Boole. For Boole everything excludes nothing. For Peirce everything includes nothing. In the thinking now occurring for the first time, almost everything includes nothing. But something excludes nothing. The exception to everything including nothing is the absolutely objective being of the I otherwise than presence.
[. . .]
The perfect contradiction that an essentially new thinking is to the absolute self-consciousness of modernity may be succinctly captured in the following comparison: while the Hegelian God is the truth of being and the I but not the truth of nothing, the God of the essentially apocalyptic thinking now actually beginning is the truth of being & nothing but not the truth of the I. The I which is the essence of the body irreducible to nothingness, this something not a self left to its nothingness in the absence of the subject-object dichotomy, is the person or I which discloses itself to itself immediately in the unreflected objectivity of the body and the world. In the being left to its nothingness of this I excluding nothing, in its having its truth in being itself, is revealed the created actuality of human freedom: the absolute coincidence of being & human freedom in the human person. The principle of Hegel's philosophy is that when everything is consumed nothing is wasted. The exhibition of the dialectical element in this principles takes the form of recognizing that it contains its opposite: when everything is consumed nothing is not wasted. Everything & the nothing excluded from everything are both consumed. That something excluding nothing not consumed is the I that is the perfectly transparent surface of the body. The something not consumed is the I that is the finite spirit that is the actual boundary of the body. This wasted something is the I surfacing the body. This I is the distinction of the not wasted being & the not wasted nothing. In Hegel the truth of the human I whose freedom has no truth is the divine I. In the thinking now occurring for the first time, the Creator's I is the beginning of the beginning of a completely independent I or finite spirit. Now for the first time, mark well, not the truth of this I, but the truth of this I's freedom is the divine freedom. The truth of this I is a nothingness for the first time otherwise than Owning, beyond the very notion of Self. Beyond the very idea of self, the truth of this I is a nothingness neither its own nor not its own. For the first time the nothingness of this I is full of being. For the first time essence is conceived as absolute gift of being. The I acting absolutely is the reception of the gift of being itself. The I that is the infinitely transparent surface of the body is the form absolutely of the absolute gift of being. The I is the form of the absolute gift that the body is for the first time. Now think of the nascent stem cell technology!
[. . .]
How is it that this is the transcendental ego limited? How is it that this is the experience of an absolutely manifest God? When you earlier, on God's behalf, ate the ontological donut, and didn't waste the hole, God became the truth of being & nothing, and the transcendental I became the something of which God was not the truth, the something wasted, otherwise than presence, the infinitely pellucid surface of the body. Unlike the hard-pressed Idea of God, the God of the Apocalypse can afford to waste this essence otherwise than presence. The wasting of this essence is the ontological analogue of the divine mercy that chiefly manifests omnipotence. This I that I now am, devastated by being and nothing -- the ontological donut downed -- is now a transparency within a transparency for the first time absolutely objective and completely free. The upshot of the dialectical element in the nothing wasted by the Idea of God, the core of being & nothing absolutely inedible by the Idea of God, the I absolutely other, is the now actually existing person intelligible as the foundation of a society that is the beginning of an essentially new world, at once the beginning of a new conception of essence.
Being & nothing, whose truth I am not & whose truth is not the truth of the I that I now am, being & nothing, neither left to nothingness by God, now, as such, for the first time constitute the complete matter of the body's unmirrored consciousness. The object of a completely objective consciousness beyond presence is the core of the created world. The something wasted by God is the objective I whose entire content is the created world whose truth is absolute otherness & whose form is absolute gift. This absolutely created world whose truth is absolute otherness is the perfect field of action for an I completely free for the first time. Everything I am is not mine; yet I am it completely. Everything I have is not mine; yet I have it completely. Everything I make is not mine; yet I make it completely. The infinitely transparent I is the surface identifying body and world absolutely. This is the foundation of an unqualifiedly total engagement with the world. This is the foundation for an essential transformation of the world order. Every I that I meet objectively is not me; yet I meet it completely in differentiating it. The face-to-face of perfectly other I's is a unity perfectly differentiated.
(D. G. Leahy, Faith and Philosophy: The Historical Impact, pp. 153ff)
