Archaeology of Mist

1 Letters on the history of my thinking

Part 1

Part 2

2 Pursuit

3 Aesthetic Theology

4 Teleologies

5 The Cloud lion

6 Lyceum

7 At the Tomb of a Polish King

8  Manifesting Phantoms

9 The ethics of unhindered sight

Letters on the History of My Thinking

(Complete, parts One and Two)

My dear Alicia,

I’m so full of vivid memories of our talks over all these years, through woods, through mountains, or hopping stones across a stream. In our conversations, we went through so many facets of philosophy’s history. Some of the happiest memories of my life have been with you in the woods, in the labyrinths of ideas.

In this time, my beautiful one, when all things seem impervious to light, may we find refuge in things that guide us back to center. For me, right now, our intellectual conversation is what starts to heal me.

Through the years, I never really gave you an over view of my ideas, or really shared with you the story of how I came to work with them. I know it’s a paradox, that in time of such tumult, I sit and write to you letters in philosophy. May it give sustenance, but also when we look back on this, perhaps through this paradox, we will find a fresh step in our collaboration.

I think of these letters as being part of our ongoing dialogue, though by necessity, if I’m ever going to accomplish this overview, It will be a good deal of monologue on my part. Please, throughout this, remember my intentions.

My thought is to begin with the more difficult portions first, then, in a latter letter, speak of the process and teleology of philosophy, as I understood it. After this, I think, might come more autobiographical portions, getting more at the history of what these ideas meant to me at the time, and what the process of philosophy has brought me through. A part of this might be a review of various little booklets, starting at age fourteen, and what I intended for them at the time.

And of course, in my present inspiration I have a hope of continuing letters into the present, to grapple presently with certain problems of this philosophy.

One of the things you will notice right away is, despite my profession of the Schopenhauer model of writing, I worked in large part by inventing my own vocabulary of philosophic terms. I have every intention of avoiding this in the future, but it is a central feature of my adolescent attempts, and I believe it enabled me to go where otherwise I could not have found my way. And so, my beloved one, I begin with Form and Essence.

I know the words Form and Essence are confusing, given the previous meanings of these words in philosophy. But I used these words from the beginning of my work at age fourteen, so in my mind they have their own traditional connotations.

The beginning of the Form and Essence idea is perhaps what you would expect from me. Form is what contains, Essence is what is contained.

The world, the non world, and the present moment are each in infinite varieties of what contains and what is contained. So Form and Essence became a major branch of my juvenile investigations.

At the earliest point, I began with only two broad categories. Form is the world without, Essence the world within. The world without I described as the Formal Essence. Again, you’re probably smiling to yourself and of course it would make sense to me that the world without is still the essence of the perceiver. When materialist thinkers begin philosophically outward, and work their way within, they none the less begin with the Formal Essence. The atoms in the void of Democritus are atoms in the void, but are also Democritus, the most outward expression of what is within him.

Essential Form is the equally infinite world of discontinuity, what is intuitively seen as subjectivity, containing such forces as memory, creative imagination and interpretation. Parallel to the Formal Essence, these are smaller worlds, passing in and out of the fragments of time.

It seems natural for humans to confound the entire realm of Formal Essence, the world without, with sense experience. But really, the outward world is a vast body of semi consistent imaginings. (I’ll explain semi consistent in a moment.) For the actual world of sense experience, I used the phrase the surface fragment. In the forthword movement of the present moment, we perceive the world with our senses. But what we perceive is fragment and surface of the Consistent Imagination, or objective world. Our senses perceive the table, but only the fragment and surface. The rest is still imagining, however inferred from sense they may be. The human experience is to move in a complete picture of the room, but if only the fragment and surface of the room is the physical world, the world of sense experience, then what dose lie beyond each surface, the complete room, the house, the city , the world, the trail of human history, geology, cosmology, everything ,

Everything, is the outward world, non physical and within us.

I don’t feel I denigrated the Surface Fragment. On the contrary, I called it holy. It is a moment in forthword movement, and one to the next in sequence, it is the most consistent and continuous thing in the human experience. If I hold in my hand an ancient artifact, I hold it in this moment of the Surface fragment and it passes again to the semi consistent imagination. It is a forthword moving center of time, and a gate way from the immanently expected to the immediately remembered. What the surface fragment touches, it seemed to me, is uniquely sacred, and what does it pass over? So small a part of the room? And when we stand at the summit of a mountain, a magnitude.

I remember when you were reading my aphorisms, you were amused by, and curious about my use of the phrase The Cloud Lion. So here, my love has been a fuller explanation. In the human person, all that is not the surface fragment is the Cloud Lion. And that is infinity of things, meanings, rooms, forests, cities, and universal orders. The Cloud Lion is both the Formal Essence of the outward world, and the Essential Form of the inward, beginning and ending with the ending and beginning of the Surface Fragment’s passing. And of course, as we would both delight in, the surface fragment is not itself the noumena, and is also within us.

Obviously I was working in the idealist tradition, and I had to acknowledge how the COGITO ERGO SUM affected me in deciding to begin from within. The materialist arguments seemed to me too convenient and a side stepping of a necessary step. So, as I recall you asked me, as I was idealist in epistemology, what was my actual attitude to the world outside my consciousness? When I said the Surface Fragment was alone the physical world, I could only assert this from the view of the human consciousness. But my actual supposition was somewhat in flux. Over all I believed in objective nature, except for a brief time in my early twenties when I was more transfixed than usual by Berkley’s ‘Principles of Human/knowledge.’ At this time, I tried to work my way through a subjective idealism, but it seemed too untenable, too dogmatic. Over all, before and after this brief attempt, I was closest to Kant.

But what could I say about objective nature? That I believed in it, but not methodically? Really, solipsism is at least as reasonable as the infinite world beyond me. If I consider both as closely as I can from a first encounter, from a fresh and untaught view point, that the cosmos is outside me, and I am a most insignificant part with no answers as to origin or teleology, is equally mysterious and beyond understanding as the view that it all exists in a single perception, being my own. Beginning from the Cogito, solipsism has the more methodical argument, but as with any thinker who goes into this caldesak, my whole being cried out against it.

What presents itself as less logical, but pressingly true, is first and foremost the existence of other selves, like mine, who are centers of perception, and might reduce themselves and encounter the cogito, and find themselves at the logical stand still as they look at me, and can’t account for my being outside them. Yes, I show every sign of being a center of perception, but why can’t I as easily be a highly consistent illusion? One thing that became clear to me was, even if the world did exist solely in my subjectivity, I could arrive at the same ethical dilemmas and dimensions. If other centers of perception exist within me, they would still be semi consistent centers of perception, with lives and generations, and subjectivity. The non human creatures would still be semi consistent and experience pleasure and pain and the life urge.

But the reality of the world outside my subjectivity seems inescapable. For myself it was above all an assertion that reason by itself can only go as far as it will, and in doing this work of thinking through the world, there has to be a many layered approach to a many layered reality, all in synergy with reason. For me, the reason, with all its pitfalls, should be the guide. But in following reason, reason must also look upon itself, and perceive its dangers. One of its dangers is perfect reason.

Passing through the cogito was my christmation. And encountering outward nature and the selves of others was to witness a sacred drama whose truth I could not escape. This truth of course couldn’t be truly accounted for, but the infinite world beyond my perception I believed in completely.

The world beyond human perception I called the Consistent Imagination. This world of objective nature was not for me the imagination of human beings, but of existence itself. Thinking through Descartes’ orderly way, it was somewhat akin to his ‘clear and distinct things’ though I confess that his own way out of the caldasack seemed to me unconvincing compared to the way in.

If I had any idea about objective nature, it was that it seemed CONSISTANT in some way, though always through the lens of our perception. But finding my way through the great Cloud Lion, and witnessing firsthand the forthword movement of the Surface Fragment, I wanted to find a scale of consistency in this world, not that consistency itself ‘necessarily’ equals reality, but the direction of consistency seemed to be what held the realities together.

So what did I mean by Consistency? And of course I gave mathematics as the perennial example. The experience we have with the certainty of number is as close as we come to Consistency. It’s something analogous to number that we feel and long for. The sciences assert their hegemony by coming as close to this as possible, and the history of philosophy is largely a history of trying to lay claim to it. So Constancy in part a certainty. It is the ONE PERSPECTION. And so the Cloud Lion contains in itself the myriad perceptions, some moving ‘toward’ Consistency, some away, while some just play in place.

When I was seventeen, I remember walking down the street to the library, and suffering from such a crisis of certainty. Philosophy led such towering minds to towering systems, but overall it didn’t seem to make much progress. (Except in the minds of philosophers.) Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer each made the last contribution, only to await the next. Up to that point, I had some form of faith that philosophy could find ‘some’ consistency, but if that was the aim, the entire project seemed laughable. I couldn’t imagine it serving any purpose other than the discovery of irrefutable truth.

In another letter, I’ll explain how I approached the question of philosophy itself, but here, I want to continue to explain the Cloud Lion and Form and Essence. So I’ll just say that part of my way out of this crisis was to deal with the question of constancy. As I led myself into philosophical contemplation, I could begin by trying to understand what I believed about reality, but I never wanted to be a Fichte or Hegel in the sense of arrogance. At the same time I strongly upheld the value of the system builders, the great unfolders of massive tone poems of philosophy. My encounters with positivism and analytic philosophy left me frustrated. Referring to the phrase of the early Wittgenstein ,in ‘passing over in silence what can’t be spoken of’, philosophy becomes a mere adjunct of the sciences, and leaves off from what philosophy dose uniquely, that is, face fearlessly those questions that science can’t answer. I loved the system builders for leading the mind into insights that would be impossible without such systems, but I wanted to approach my own work with an affirmative and creative humility. In my working through the intangible questions, may I build, and destroy and build, but only as best I may, always, always seeing from other world views, and see from what I build what insights lead to new directions.

Just a science seeks the Consistent Imagination, so should philosophy, knowing from the outset that philosophy deals with what possibly can’t be dealt with, and is noble for engaging.

I pictured a flexible modal to begin with, with human thought extending from a point as close to Consistency as possible, in gradations to creative conclusions that are intelligible but further away from the Consistent pole. In my model, I divided the spectrum into four gradations.

The first of these include statements that are as close to Consistent as possible. “All people will die.” The second includes an interpretive wisdom based on the near consistent statement. “Death can teach us how to live.” The third of these further develops this idea through reason and creative interpretation, as close to reality as it can move. “The purpose of death is to teach us how to live. If this is the purpose, then what is its nature?”

The fourth emerges from the thread of reason into the realm of myth, as in the Platonic parables. “If we do not learn how to live from death, we will be reborn to a new incarnation.” Philosophy, in its unique role, really begins with the second gradation but aims for the first.

In the first gradation, I understood those branches of knowledge that seem measurable, and use the scientific method to find the most likely answers given what is known at the time. But again, philosophy approaches the unmesurable. Philosophic propositions presented as the first gradation are always subject to radical dispute. Scientific theories are of course also open to dispute, but the nature of measurable matter is not the equivalent of unmeasurable meaning.

I have to keep myself to my purpose. I hope to write out for you some of my work on the four gradations, but I should really go on with ideas about consistency. It’s the situation of wanting so much to make you a starting map to this world view, I pass by, and point, and I don’t develop the ideas I mention. Please accept this as what it is, I promise to revisit what needs revisiting.

Philosophy aspires to emulate Consistency, the One Perspective. It longs for it, and in measuring the numerable, it enters into that part of the world that science cannot reach. But in this work I preferred the phrase Consistent Imagination to ‘Reality’ because I saw the whole of the Cloud Lion as natures of Reality, and Consistency only as the containing Form. As I understood, in these natures were three realms beyond the Cloud Lion.

At the Cloud Lion’s center was the surface Fragment. To one extreme beyond the Cloud Lion was the Consistent Imagination. And to a far other extreme was the Non World, an infinite place of all things never conceived of by the human perspective, or by the Consistent Imagination.

Do you remember I mentioned the Semi Consistent world? By that phrase I understood that part of the Cloud Lion which is the ‘communal’ world of human perspectives. Where two or more are gathered, each with their subjective worlds, there is a shared world of consensus reality. This day to day shared place of our subjectivities, interacting in the labors of this world, we believe in everyday consciousness, to be the Consistent Imagination. Every day action occurs with the illusion that it is the One Perspective. Misunderstandings seem to arise because of some minor differences in view point.

The Reality, as I understood it, was that each ‘self’ is itself a world. Extending from the oceans within out to this world of the Semi Consistent, from planting apple trees to the contemplation of the cosmos. In the communal world, there are no minor differences of view point, but the complete interaction of subjective worlds.

In the illusion of the Semi Consistent, Time moves in an unbroken line. But the actual human experience is completely different. No one has witnessed unbroken time in the Surface Fragment. Even to begin with is the cycle of sleeping and waking. Then, the day dream, the drug vision, or the splitting off into madness. All of which tend to depart from, and return to, the semi consistent. But in the Semi Consistent, the vast Cloud Lion behaves in a way of unbroken time.

I mentioned the departures from the Semi Consistent, the day dream, memory, parallel times that come in truncated time lines, and dissipate. The whole area of departures from the Semi Consistent was my main interest in all the Cloud Lion. I had a suitably descriptive phrase for this too, the world of Essential Fluidity. These splinters of time, in multiplicities of parallel realties, were of course the principle areas of my interest.

But in turning my gaze toward the whole, of everything I’ve discussed so far, It was always Form and Essence which helped me approach the subtleties of its parts. Honestly, the concrete qualities of Form and Essence were always elusive, and difficult to place in words. But the very categories of what contains and what is contained seemed a powerful pathway through the intellect, to the place where descriptions will falter.

In existence I witnessed Form, in the non world, Essence. In the Surface Fragment, the Form, in the Cloud Lion, the Essence. In the Formal Essence, Form, in the Essential From, the Essence. In the Semi Consistent, Form, in the Essential Fluidity, the Essence. But for the purpose philosophy in practice, one of the most crucial understandings of these distinctions was that between the Knowledge and Experience.

The Form of Knowledge and the Essence of Experience were present in my earliest work, and were central to my view of the human being. The distinction was between what we understand cognitively, and our capacity to fully experience, and intuitively ‘enter’ into the content of our knowing. In daily life, our experience of things can be closed or open. Most of the time, our experience of things is fairly closed, hardly surprised at, and hardly entered into. But our faculty to encounter the world of things, with all the wonderment of a first encounter, in an innocent reverence, that faculty is what I described as Experience. In so far as we are capable of this, it is a quality of the true human being, that is, in the development of Knowledge and Experience we approach the highest characters of our nature.

But it was always the ‘balance’ of Knowledge and Experience. The development of our understanding and critical faculties were never to be diminished in favor of Experience. Or vice versa. When one develops at the expense of the other, an imbalance occurs. As one can imagine, an open heart of love for others, without a critical power, can lead to all manner of disasters, and the intellectual cynic is in a state of hell.

That these two elements might be balanced is a good. But in balance, the two have a deep interconnection, as the Experience drives us into knowledge, and what is known is Experienced. This dynamic I thought of as an ethics of ontology, meaning by ethics a ‘practices’ of philosophy in Being, and a question of how we should act in the realm of the Cloud Lion.

As a way of pressing into the higher realms of human practice, philosophy, when both cognitive and Experiential, may lead us into crevices of intellectual possibilities. One can picture the difference between studying Spinoza as a cynical scholar, and conversely reading his work in a reverent innocents of ‘encounter’ with the building of reason.

Now over all, I thought there were relationships between the different Forms and Essences. But just as I saw these categories as a reason-vehicle for approaching a very real dynamic in the world, the relationships between the Forms and Essences I thought of as highly interpretive, by means a concrete system of nature’s correspondences. But in some sense, one Essence might reflect another. One example that was very important to me was a reflection in Knowledge and Experience of existence and the non world. In intellectual Experience, one approached the world again and again, in a sense, as a new revelation. This seemed to me very related to closeness to the non world, in what ever manner the Cloud Lion can approach it, in some ways, passing always into nothingness, and looking at the context of existence with the eyes of amazement.

In this way, approaching the intellectual world at once with all things as if a new encounter, unstinting the mind by opening out of the expected and the outworn, we encounter in reason an element of the sacred. This quality of the sacred could be equally true of an atheist thinker, but for me, in finding the sacred in all portions of the Cloud Lion, in all concepts of what lies beyond the Cloud Lion, I believed that reason had led me to a glimpse of the holiness of existence.

And I wrote of God unfolding from it self, of all things as the body of God, the Cloud Lion, the surface fragment, the Consistent Imagination and the realms of nothingness, all as aspects of divinity. By God I understood the totality of all things, and all non things, of all contradictions in a place where distinction passes away.

Of all worlds that the reason can try to trace, this last, the absolute, is the resolution and undoing. Existence and the Non world them selves are passed into the final reality.

Over and again, it seemed, reason would lead me to regions approaching theology. But I wanted very much to preserve a separation. But despite my self, I could never escape the shadow of the Absolute.

I had no concept of a God creating nature, but only of a divine nature, self-unfolding, so its body is its revelation. Very early I entered into a highly speculative place, in contemplation of cosmology. Especially at sixteen, I was trying to make sense of the order of things. I was struck by Spinoza’s argument that Man is not a kingdom in a kingdom, (that is separate from nature), but in fact is inseparable form Nature. But I had a very different perspective, and I thought of the human person as precisely that, a kingdom within a kingdom. In the line of evolutionary consciousness from non human animal’s perception to human self –awareness, the reality of the human ego I saw as catastrophic to unity with nature. That we each are a center of perception, with myriad reflected reflections of a self –aware subjectivity, made the human being entirely distinct. Each self is it self a universe.

So this is how I understood the teleology of God’s unfolding. As all things are within Divinity, Divinity, in yearning for understanding, unfolds it self internally. For the Absolute, all knowledge is Knowledge of itself. And so the pilgrimage of the universe,

The birth of uncountable worlds, and evolution of myriad selves of the human kind.

Which brings me to my adolescent sense of horror. The wrecks of commercial culture and technological waste I found extremely jarring. It seemed to be an indisputable sign of the human conflict with nature, and what had once been an ethereal disunity was now a disaster. This crisis I saw as an extreme case of the imbalance of Experience and Knowledge. For the human is so full of information, but acts out of closed experience.

As we can know things without their being in any sense real or entered into in our consciousness. We are capable of the most foolish form of knowledge. Dulled by efficiency, we fall into an experiential blindness, not seeing what we know, indifferent to both the mansions internality and the world without, except that is how they relate to efficiently.

This, I believed, was the entrance point of ethics. The most basic practice, it seemed to me, was restoration of the balance of Knowledge and Experiential relationship.

I remember when I met you, you were serving the poor at the Bijou house, and we sat on the floor discussing ideas. Do you remember our amazement, that this particular idea, the spontaneous ethic of seeing the other, was one we found our way to in different ways? It was reason’s understanding of Karuna and Agape, a philosophy of awe at the person one encounters.

Very related to this ethic is another Form and Essence, these being Context and Decision.

In this ideal of entering the world, learning of other’s lives, encountering their existence, there is always the problem of action in a world of determining forces. This problem is perhaps inseparable from ethical considerations.

At The time of this conversation, Alicia, though it’s now hard to imagine, you were entirely new to questions of determinism. I met you only months after the breaking of your catholic faith, and you were in mourning for the collapse of you mystical home. You sought in Buddhist practice a new refuge, and this was a language between us, but most strikingly I recall your approach to the sciences as a mystical contemplation. This struck me as incredibly beautiful, your notion of imperfect scientific method as a way of partial revelation of the Absolute. Rather than reducing things to a mechanistic cynicism, it was for you a method of adoration of the universe. At a future time, I’ll write from my journals and recollections our conversations, and try to record your words and descriptions of your thinking about science and contemplation.

But for now, I remember, while Buddhism was a powerful common language between us, we enjoyed our discussions of ethics from our very different disciplines, that is, science and philosophy. We spoke for hours is seemed, comparing your research in Neuroscience to perspectives of Kantian and Post Kantian Idealism.

From that initial conversation at the Bijou house, regarding our common ethical discovery, we looked at it from several different angles. We began to speak of Determinism and Free will, because in all your zest for the works of mercy, and mine for nonviolent politics, ethics seemed to strongly precede political philosophy, and ethics hinged on free will and determinist distinctions. I gave at that time a description of my own findings, and you were my first guide into questions of free will and genetics. I also began notes for a new essay, addressed to you, and based on our first conversations. It was to be an updated and fuller version of an earlier fragment, called ‘The Teleologies of Goodness’ from 1991, when I was 19.

As I write this, and look over the notes for that essay, the first flush of that pain which started these letters is a week old now, and passes into numbness. I can do almost nothing in life in these days. The emotional pain is entrapped in my body completely. I force myself to write these. The first group of letters I gave to you. These, I don’t know yet. They may be to you, but the ideal of you… maybe someday you will find them somewhere, and read them? May the world of Reason take me out of this present, and give me some modicum of life. May I be like you, an historian of ideas. And looking at myself, find safety in an artifact of paper.

If one has been hurt so deeply, one is faced with the l interconnection of philosophy and life. The question of free will and responsibility for our actions can no longer be academic, but is personal to the point of speechlessness. I wonder if this paradox is apparent in these letters? A strange vacillation between a heavy death of spirit, and a frantic escape to Reason? If it is, it is true to this moment.

I will go back to a record of ideas. That essay I was addressing to you in 1998 was maybe a precursor to these letters, in that it tried to recount the history of my thinking, especially in compatibilism and ethics. I didn’t have the fragments of ‘Teleologies of Goodness’ with me, but I did my best to give a synopsis.

It began by explaining how much I had wrestled with these questions over the years, and how, like my music, all that was recorded was the barest of notes for a future time when I could better express myself. My aphorisms and fragments gave only the vaguest outlines of directions. My notes were more complete. As you know, I came to life as a poet long before I did as a prose writer. My main philosophical fragments, ‘Philosophic Pursuit’ (’87) Aesthetic Theology (’89 ) and Teleologies of Goodness (’91) While embarrassingly marred by jargon traditional and original, also have the strange quality of being written somehow around the margins of my most constructive thinking. Starting at least around the time of Aesthetic Theology, I started a tradition (which I keep to this day) of a small pocket size notebook, a key to my philosophy as I called it, which would sketch an outline and synopsis of my system, giving definitions of my home spun words. The one I keep now is a new version of the original, small enough for me to pull out as I wrestle with thoughts, listing a progress and development for future challenging and refining.

From the beginning of Philosophic Pursuit to recent aphorisms, I had an unfortunate conviction, which I was only partly aware of, that I should write as if I had already made the skeleton of my thinking clear. I refered ambiguously to what was never presented. As a classic example, in Aesthetic Theology, I suddenly declare, “God is Essential Form!” As if that phrase would have any meaning to a reader! Meanwhile, in my little pocket notebook, I’m hammering out definitions of Form and Essence, Formal Essence, Essential Form etc, however imperfectly, it at least would have made my writing somewhat intelligible. I think I had a basic instinct that a philosopher can write ‘symphonicly’ (as I describe Heideggers’ for Example) and move human language between the crevices of subtlety, and thereby get at ways of thinking which would otherwise be closed to us. I think I was doing valid work as a young philosopher, but I was in no way ready for a presentation of my work. If I could only go back in time, I would whisper to myself, “Arius, write about your notebook! Write transparently about your process! then write symphonicly, if you must!”

When I started to sketch the ’98 essay for you, I had a strong feeling that my prose abilities maybe ready for new growth.

The introduction was briefly an account of my approach to philosophy, as my letters were concerned with aesthetics and mysticism. I explained how, in the Teleologies fragment, I wrestled with the free will question through a synthesis of two obscure ideologies, alchemy and anarchism. At 19, I was as infused with these subjects as now and both I hoped would be vehicles for philosophy. I was, in the original fragment, delighted that proponents of free will, in philosophy, were called Libertarians. As a young Libertarian Communist in politics, I was encouraged to carry this further. I had the idea of giving anarchism a philosophical basis, just as Kropotkin had tried to give it a scientific one. But in these fragments I was careful not to try to rationalize a political posture, but rather, to wrestle with eternal questions through anarchism/alchemy.

The word ‘anarchist’ in this work was reserved for someone who has achieved a larger degree of freedom of will. The anarchist fights against restrictions, especially internal ones. To do good out of obedience to a moral code, rather than from compassion and critical thought, is neither good nor bad, but is, ethically, a sort of blank page. The anarchist moves though a long alchemical process of challenging moral assumptions, even committing conscious moral transgressions, as a means of truly acting in the world. The anarchist, in the end, achieves a genuine union of critical thought and obedience to conscience, the active outflow of knowledge and compassion.

In the Teleologies fragment, I quoted freely from my earlier book, ‘Aesthetic Theologies’, written at age 17. I quoted and developed the line “Imagination is itself freedom of will”, and made this line the basis of the second chapter. The third would develop the title idea, the purpose or end inherent in archived and chosen goodness.

So in my sketched out Teleologies of ’98, I followed the same structure. The first chapter was a recounting of my analysis of achieaved free will from determinism, as proposed in the ‘91 fragment, as developed up to ‘95; and the second an analysis of achived free will in subjectivity. I gave a far clearer account without the use of 19 year old jargon and neology.

The first chapter, in outline, is as follows:

What is freely chosen is in large part achieved. Without a rigorous analysis of determinism, what appears to be free choices will often be ‘determined’ choices, for example, determined by patterns of preinclination. This investigation is foremost in approaching philosophy. A philosopher actively chooses what he or she proposes, how he or she approaches a given problem. And the direction of approach will often predetermine the outcome.

It is possible to extend the domain of true choice. To deny the existence of true choice seemed dogmatic, while to ignore the overwhelming Determining factors seemed foolish. By initial observation, we are raised into a firm foundation of determining factors, or ‘blocks’ both external and within us.

When I was writing the Teleologies of ‘91 I was enjoying the latest in Biblical scholarship, and was quite taken by the early concept of Satan as a Shaton, or block in the way of righteous action. So the idea of a block in the way of free action was a pleasing image. Outward blocks are the most obvious. You can’t go straight for long if you’re in a maze. We are clearly determined by the extension of our bodies, and the forms of the environment. Circumstances of outside origin (ex, an unseen falling acorn lands on your head) are external blocks, that is, external in appearance at least, recalling previous discussions on internal externalities of the Cloud Lion.

At the time, I outlined what seemed to be several areas to examine for determinism.

1) The extension of our bodies

2) The shape of immediate environment,

3) The history of ourselves by nature and nurture

4) The shape of our present personality.

5) How items 3 and 4 ‘preincline’ us to make determined choices between options.

Looking at the possibility of choice, determined or free, I saw domains of external blocks move like bodies, and end and pass, and make way for the beginnings of new bodies. These brief spaces between them could be the momentary portals to our free choosing. Will I chose this set of determining factors, or this set? In choosing will I open the way for completely unforeseen domains of determinism? If my choosing is a preinclined and determined choice, am I not closing a portal and creating a bridge between domains of determinism?

In addition these terms, domains of determinism, the temporary bridge or portal between them, I also called for the investigation of types of choice. For example, most generally, choosing between

1) Two choices, not known to be favorable or unfavorable

2) Two choices, where one may possibly be favorable, one not

3) One is known to be approximately favorable, one not

4) One is known to be clearly favorable, one clearly not favorable

5) Both choices are known to have an equal outcome.

6) One is known, the other is unknown. Etc.

The above areas for investigation, and their interaction would be the main focus of the first part of the essay.

As for the existence of free choice, or the journey toward extending the domain of free choice, it would be, as we said, an awakening from the veil of illusion, a progression toward seeing what we now cannot see. Related to the ethics of Socrates, freedom demands knowledge, but knowledge as a chariot of intention.

The extension of the domain of freedom would rest on a growing consciousness of determinism. Then, on the intention of overcoming it, on the turning of bridges into portals. This process would be an examination of origins. The origins of action, the origins of intention, the origins of a self which intends and acts. The origins where the self has origins, that is, the language literature and culture it is born to, etc.

In the Teleologies of ‘91, I began by exploring, as a sort of philosophic exercise, the idea of determinism as inherently negative. Part of this has to be understood as the philosophizing of a young pacifist with very strong ethical convictions, for example, vegetarianism, tea totaling, practice of resistance to a violent State. In an opening examination of determining factors of choice, ethical outlook, for me, was paramount. So in the opening of the original fragment, I explored the idea of conscious braking of moral codes as a resistance to determined choice. Could I as a pacifist contemplate violence, using philosophy instrumentally, giving it justification? Only by stepping out of pacifism, experimentally, could I reapproach and understand my own convictions. But then, Could philosophy be twisted to what I chose to intend? Of course this revisited the questions of philosophy’s own validity, and its inseparability from questions of determinism.

‘Like Oberobos,]]] the tail swallows itself.’ In our intention to analyze determining factors, our intention to act on ourselves to make portals of bridges, what are the origins of the initial intention? What is the inner history of our analysis, and our preinclinations to freely choose? These are the questions which occupied my responses to this fragment, ’91 to ’95, and which I sought to delineate in the ’98 fragment. ‘How can philosophy be free of these questions? It cannot. But what are the origins of these questions?’

The strong proposal was, by the rigorous examination of determinism, and then of original intention to examine, we can start to move our selves toward an understanding of the collective origins of the self which chooses; understanding is itself what potentially turns the bridges to portals. When portals are chosen, we potentially chose between domains of determinism, and begin to use them instrumentally, as vehicles of free intention. This progressive movement would be toward the beginning of chosen ethical action, toward the realization of freely chosen goodness. Or its converse.

Lastly, in reference to the ’91 fragment, a section began to deal with a proposal from the earlier work, ‘Aesthetic Theology.’ The proposal there was “Imagination is itself free will.” I’ll try to say more of this latter, but for now, in summary, the ’91 fragment reexamined this, taking its cue from Blake’s use of the word Imagination in the fullest sense, that those who do not imagine in firm liniments have no imagination at all. I tried to develop my proposal by qualifying True Imagination as imagination which moves by liberated intention. In the subjective realms of existence, the external blocks can become outdone by intention, maze choice can be altered by a single will, and the extension of the body can be anything or nothing we choose. In the imaginative world, free will has the potential to be complete. The fact that this was considered of consequence had all to do with my views of the Essential Form.

So this summery, in the ’98 fragment, would open out into our Bijou house discussion and the spontaneous ethic of perceiving another self. I came to feel that determinism must be examined before ethics, but the basis of my ethical orientation far preceded my thinkings about free will. When you said, in the Bijou house that night, that ‘to know is to love’, or as in later years you stated it, “consciousness is adoration”, I recognized immediately a close kinship to my earliest and most enduring approach to ethics.

I first remember beginning to work with these questions in ’97, and it was from a visceral reaction to Nietzsche as I misunderstood him. I was immediately taken by the Idealism (in the ethical sense) of approaching the question of ‘what ought to be’ rather than acting blindly in the framework of ‘as things now are’. The latter seemed to be a careful road to mediocrity and repetition of old mistakes. I actually liked the idea of a coming Obermench[[, not a Darwinian thug, but a philosophical saint. The idea was close in my mind somehow with that passage of the Republic, where Socrates speaks of the imitation of the Form of justice in the world. I immediately resonated with this process, of enfleshing ideals in the present. The Oubermench[[, for me, was one who witnessed his Ideal self in the philosophic imagination, and found the path way to this transformation, against all obstacles, to attaining its likeness. This ideal self was a seamless marriage of Knowledge and Wisdom, that is, of the Form of intellectual acuteness and the Wisdom of Experiential insight, or compassion. This would require an almost superhuman strength to undo what has been done, in terms of previous shaping of our selves by culture and inherited values etc.

This Form and Essence of Knowledge and Experience of what is known was from the outset the center of this ethic. Most crucial is the empathy of one for another, or all that’s implied by the instinct for compassion. But compassion of itself, without reasoning powers, is good in itself, but can easily lead to disaster. In contrast, intellectual training and the power to reason through ethics, undirected by compassion, is at best a frigid vehicle. Over and again we see highly educated people act in such privileged and selfish ways, it seems evident that intellectual training and reasoning power have only become vehicles to magnify a means to selfish ends. Compassion without intellectual power, it seemed to me, is at worst, helplessly noble. In contrast, a PhD in ethical philosophy, for a self absorbed person, is almost counter to ethics, maybe the worst of all moments in ethical action.

But how is a person seemingly compassionate? Upbringing? Are there unhealthy origins for compassionate action? These questions of Determinism wouldn’t be faced till latter. Whereas intellectual training, in contrast, I saw as intricately linked to class privilege, which appalled me.

I felt deeply akin to Kantian ethics for the values of intentionality. Emersion in Spinoza was amazing for me, but I wasn’t resonant with ethics of self interest. I went too far in the opposite direction, valuing self sacrifice for others. For a young man who was intensely anti Christian, I seemed to be vary taken with the Sermon on the Mount, and sought this ethic through Reason rather than revelation. Always against blind obedience to moral codes, this free ethic of intellect and compassion would have to be a thunderbolt of individualist action, striking against illusions.

But compassion in and of itself was a great bridge in the Cartesian leap from self to others. Philosophically, it paled in clarity compared to the clarity of our existence. But again, referring back to and understanding of Consistency, the Consistent existence of others made their objective reality, not indubitable, but pressingly likely so as to demand our assumption of their own existence.

By compassion, we may have some insight into the world from another’s eyes, and in this, the great bridge crossing, compassion is spontaneous, inevitable. As you said, that night in the Bijou house, to know is to love, I used to write the precept as “we cannot injure what we truly see”. This is the entry to the natural law, the direction of action which moves us toward a social order, and away from hegemony.

In the ’98 Teleologies, I finally reached for this balance of self-and-other interest. I even, amazingly, quoted scripture and took Christ’s injunction to do unto others as we would have them do to us as a statement of this balance, of nonviolence to ourselves as to others, as a new interrelated way of ethical practice. In a Kantian sense, we would wish others who we care for to be good to themselves, how could a Philosopher model otherwise? But from ethics in imaginative reason, to ethics in the world, was a moving to vast ambiguities. Particularly when the two are in conflict. Conflict of rights would need to be its own area of investigation.

From ethics into the details of the world, of course, is the beginning of political philosophy. From about age 18 especially, I was referring a good deal to what I called The Four Glories, a diagram of ethical progress from the individual into the social/historical realm, and beyond it, as I then conceived of it. The diagram was meant to be a rough guid to a much more complex social theory, uniting asthetics, contemplation and political revolution.

The diagram, (marked with Greek letters, each with their own significance) is roughly as follows:

At its base is the first glory, or knowledge/experience of the self. Essence.

Above this, the second, knowledge/experience of the world. Form.

Next, the third, transformation of the world. Form.

At the top, the fourth, fulfillment of the world. Essence.

These are connected by a serpentine movement, beginning at the second, descending to the first, curving up to the fourth, and descending to the third. That we are born into the consciousness of the second, that the world is without us, and we somehow reflect and interact in it. (The empirical model.) Some people may find their intellectual base at this level of consciousness.

It deepens as we grow self reflective, as epitomized by the meditation of the cogito. Knowledge radiates outward with consciousness. (The Idealist model.) By the synthesis of the two, we move toward the philosophic life, with the sense of the interconnectedness of consciousness and what is known. History, the sciences, psychology, whole of the Cloud Lion within us. This whole is declared an aspect of the One, or the totality of existence, and the synthesis of the first two glories finds its highest language in the fourth, or highest glory, the ‘fulfillment of the world’, a deeply refined union of Form and Essence, giving birth to a new essence, a high Experience of the Knowledge of the previous two.

I’ll describe some details of the fourth glory, as it’s an embodiment of so much of what I’ve outline above, the contents of the Aesthetic Theology. I’ll just mention that in the diagram, this world fulfilling activity of the aesthetic realm itself becomes full, and reaches down into the third, or world transformation. In a moment, I’ll present the aesthetic and political philosophy which results from this.

The forth glory itself is divided into three ascending degrees of reality, the aesthetic realm, symbolic theology, and mystical silence. The artist moves into the imagination of the Cloud Lion, and distills the quintessence of human experience into a deeper existence, capable of transmitting direct experience through a highly rarefied myth. This new creation is rich with the ‘neverbeforeness’ of the personality. It is a myth making activity which fulfills a yearning of the entire process described so far, a process toward the fullness of experience and enactment in a deeper realm.

Symbolic theology is the use of symbol and myth as a grammar of the self for a language of communion with the deepest center of experience. It is aesthetics brought into a ritual transformation. In this sense, the philosopher approaches ancestral traditions of worship, and understating them as a collective art of ages, in infinite levels of meaning, myth is enacted and enfleshed in the silence of the world. The highest point is interior silence, where the philosopher returns to the center, and then journeys back from the center to the world of existence, to the new creations of conscience. This is the descent to the third glory.

I belive if you met me then, if you asked me pointedly about this diagram, whether I regarded it as the only way to see such a process, I would have emphaticly said no, is a mythic structure of philosophy, an area of Reason to explore, and use as a vehical of philosophy.

In a sence, its at this point I met you, in the search of the fourth golry.We sought together to remake the world in ideal of justice and compassion. So many of our early disctiones were explicitly about this movment, from silence into actions of the consience.

Moving outward into the struggles with conscience in this world, ethics seeking to find its’ way in a myriad of conflicting details of this world, I think this last letter will try to trace my various hopes for political philosophy, how to take part in change in the world, and always seek the roots of our ideals. From age 19 onword, I was primarily a pacifist agitator. It seemed to be my place in society. All the while, over the years, I lived in myself the life of philosopher and poet. At every chance, in the fray of organizing, I was struggling with Plato and Hegle, seeking a larger veiw of justice.

I would say, from early on, I had a strong inclination to try to think politically in two distinct ways. One would be a generalized political approach, the other, a utopian community for the fulfillment of philosophy in this world. The second I’ll describe in just a moment.

For more generalized political movements, I was very impressed from the outset by mother’s anarchism and pacifism, though I envisioned both in a radically different way. As you well know, my belief in the interconnectedness of these two philosophies became the basis of my political life. At age 16, trying to find my political place in the world, I was introduced, by way of Shelley, to Godwin’s’ Political Justice. Philosophically, I was immediately at odds with Godwin’s materialism and ethics, but regarding ends, it was a wonderful introduction to anarchism. I started to put together summaries of anarchism onto one page flyers, which I circulated secretly in our sleepy little town. The text improved over the years, but was still vary on the utopian side. By the time we met, I was much more realistic in my pacifism and anarchist communism.

But my own vision for a system of communities, based on philosophy, was from the outset vary distinct. Anarchist, certainly. Communal, yes. But vary specific, an evolving conception of a new culture. My hope was, in future anarchist socialism, that maybe this form of community would be one of many movements in a free society, and would even gain momentum and become prominent.

I devised several names for this form of constructed culture, none satisfactory, but the best of them was simply ‘Thalia’ for the sense of wholeness and joyfulness. I know you’ve heard me give some outlines, and you always seemed taken with its direction. But here in writing is a most basic introduction.

The Thalia community is a formed culture, based on everything I’ve been writing to you so far. It is a physical culmination of this philosophy in daily economy. It is a synthesis of Aesthetics, philosophy, egality and scholarship, a culture of compassion and group process.

The myth, ritual, and educational program, from the outset, raises children into a culture of compassion, critical thinking and the skills of direct democratic process. The goal of the community is an economy and culture which prioritizes education and reason as their own ends. It is a synthesis of University and anarchist city-state.

In an anarchistic reversal of the Republic, there would be three ritual rites of passage, the Scholar Worker, Philosophic Council, and Adept. Each rite is added to the next, so the Councilor is always also a Scholar Worker. The Scholar Worker ceremony is given at adolescence. All of one’s previous life has lead up to the balancing of these Forms and Essences, Scholarship/compassion, labor and interior life, community culture and individualist critical thinking.

All one’s life, one is raised, in household settings, in the organs of direct democracy. The Scholar Worker is trained now, even more vigorously, in group process and the values of plurality of thought, again, in the framework of community culture. Eventually, the Scholar Worker is ready for the next public rite, and is brought into the Philosophic Council, where she or he can take part in the decentralized direct democracy. This, conferred on all community members in good standing, is the highest political office. Councilors work by libertarian delegation, and movement of power from local committee to coordinated higher bodies, as needed. The last rite is of Adept, and is as much myth as actuality. The Adept is one who has, in essence, reached illumination through contemplative scholarship. There is no public ceremony, and if someone reaches such a state, they are silent in their inward journey.

At the center of each community is The Maze, which is the University around which the community is built. The organs of direct democracy, for example, are under the auspices of its departments of political philosophy and ethics. In this way, there’s a seamless link between community, knowledge, and the organs of democracy.

As much a part of community life is direct or ‘organic’ technology, the making of one’s own clothes, the growing and cooking of food, the building of buildings, all from organic materials. This is central to the life of the Scholar Worker, and focuses a direct cultural link between pristine nature, and a direct relationship to technology, in sharp distinction to the shallowness of the culture of capitalism.

The political life of the Thalia community is a political aesthetic, full of pageantry and bursting always with original art, music, and books, and pages of self reflection. There is an aesthetic for ritual and official gatherings, certainly from the world of Romanticism, with a distinctive style of flowing garments of deep blacks and reds and make up. At the community’s heart is a ritual monarch, a Silver Queen, elected each year, masked, anonymous, with no intrusion on political decisions by decree, existing only as a center of ritual pageantry. The Silver Queen is the same as appears in the Liturgy of Art. A ritual queen of anarchist scholars.

Certainly, the Thalia community has certain inherent challenges. It’s a highly structured culture which values above all things originality, spontaneity and individual thought. The paradox could be impressively creative, or easily ossify into formalism. Likewise, with the central values of Scholarship, presumably from a classless foundation for higher education, some will be exceptionally intelligent. Will this give rise to a new class society? The hope was that by identifying problems, the culture itself might be designed to avoid them. But can we design a culture? This should be the first question to examine.

For now, this evening, my main point is the social criticism which would make one see the need for a new culture. The internalization of capitalism, the ‘culture of commerce’ has always been a main concern of mine. Traditional culture was fraught with oppressions and class divisions, but its amelioration by a market culture is anything but benign. The idea of having any measure of democracy while the people are indoctrinated into consumerist passivity would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. If it were possible to construct a new traditional culture, could it be designed as an organ of free and critical thought, be structured and inherently non authoritarian? Participatory, and decidedly not hap hazard? Above all, could it be a culture of Philosophy, the love of wisdom for itself?

This gives a synopsis of my work up to the time we met. I haven’t recounted work in aesthetics, as this is the side of my philosophical thinking I think you’re most familiar with. In one of our polite, troubled recent meetings, I brought you my adolescent fragments, in their scrawled and ciphered penmanship. We spoke of seeking to salvage our life as intellectuals, and this, at least in part, as been a hope of these letters. You took them in your hands, and with these letters, planed to read them immanently, and maybe write commentaries. But tonight, at the end of all this writing, the candles burn vary low. Maybe now, only darkness and sleep can heal.

Once, in our world together, when all was beginning, nearly ten years ago, you became enraptured by philosophy, and made your ecstatic way through Kant and Nietzsche and Heidegger, and struggled with your own internal search into things. Our mountain walks were rich with conversations, the interplay of our differences, all from a natural home of pantheism, German idealism, and concerns with ethics of compassion. Our intellectual collaboration had abundance to fulfill for several lifetimes, even if in this life it has come to its close. But I will in my way be faithful to our mutual projects, and when, someday, Time again regains its motion in a new existence, I will revisit your work and words, and seek with you, despite our silence, the carving waters of reality.