Tuesday Night
December 21st, 2010
Addison Court
Benjamin Skinner molded his behaviorism on the model of hard natural science as he construed it. So here in giving a vision of life, I begin with a transformation of the physical background to make it compatible with life as intentional and free. The pieces are holographic and chart, each one, the same, in various aspects of that.
Friday Night
September 10th, 2010
Addison Court
In The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking joins Richard Dawkins in asserting a world without God infolding from physical law alone. This asserts design without designer and law without lawgiver and is false.
I turn to this.
We find God when the trumpet of history sounds and we stand at attention. I say, then, in the highest height above us and the deepest depth below is the Divine Will which meets in thunderclap before our faces urging gigantically that the future be just. Only in hearing this summons and doing the deed do we achieve the universe. For man’s choice of deed is at the center of all the worlds, and the good then attained is the sole reason the stars shine.
Now I have placed this evocation at the frontier, the sharp ethical edge of the historical world where the future not yet here is to be achieved in deed. America has gone to the frontier since her founding – the place where history is not yet written down and will knows freedom and the risk and daring to attain the new. That new, good, there alone, I say, the cosmos stand in the starlight.
But yet world is often paved, closed and fallen and the powers that be leer and the will itself is wanton. Here, without concelling the good and its imperative that I maintain, it is still hard to get out of bed for all the woe both inside and out. Here it is, my friends, that against great odds the ordinary heroism takes place. Here we follow after God. And His hands are scarred, scarred but full of love.
Monday Night
November 8th, 2010
Addison Court
Our bright blue borderless world is an abstract image, a sacred reminder to look in intent concern to the living land before us where in frontier the given present opens on the new future to be achieved in deed. Here at this frontier at the center of all the worlds is choice guided by law. Copernicus looks away to the sun. But here, I say, in man’s good deed against odds is the key to why the sun shines down. As law proposes ultimate justice, so man striding There across the ground is the hero of all worlds as he struggles to answer the divine calling in his nighest name. As in this great time the world falls into our hands we must find our stature to rightly, carefully proceed. The Hebrew adam-adama (man-ground) shows how deep and primordial is our belonging to this task. Of course, now this is an age of high abstraction and we must each touch ground to be. Tonight, as the puma stalks through the forest, the air is this room is just as wild: invisible lightening, law points out the Way. Yet to this first testament in sabbath brass kerygma sounds: salvation is created. And in faith so converted the will is healed, law becomes Grace. And the deed required, each time an act of simple love. So The Way opens on the Glory beyond. For unlike the perfect image, world is distorted, out of balance because of evil. In the breakage under stress, God Himself leads on – and not as a stranger.
Let us proceed.
Tuesday Night
April 27th, 2010
Addison Court
The darkness began in Athens when Anaxagoras construed the Sun a hot stone. Soon Copernicus pointed us away from the moral crux towards this stone. And then, completing the trap, Isaac Newton drew a line from stone to ground and called space completed mathematics. Now actually between the Sun and ground a great wind blows from Paradise to the towering justice yet to be.
Here the hero strides to that great good that will liberate the sky as the Sun shines glory into the unquenchable freedom and spirit at the center of each of our incomparable hearts.
Sunday Night
June 6th, 2010
Addison Court
Current cosmology follows the impetus cause: everything moves as moved, projected stately from a simple beginning in an ever-expanding voyage out.
And to be sure, God tosses the world in his hands as he dances on Himavant. That way, one appreciates being merely pushed around.
But I say, as we behold Shiva there and look into his eyes we see a twinkle of freedom.
And that is contagious.
So I say each thing is enselved with initiative and origin.
Where is the edge of universe? It is before us all as a vast frontier where freedom is to be realized in future deeds and thus alone the universe is achieved.
The satellite, to be sure, pictures cold and static the cosmic background energy. But pictures are memory for recall. And each particle is going to the future up from the page. Where each of us and the sun Himself are summoned to achieve. In each star’s shining there is in fact the right deed. We know this, each one of us, as we walk into the public square and warmly take our neighbor’s hand.
Sunday Night
August 1st, 2010
Addison Court
Let us loosen the necessity of the Galilean invariance by reconsidering the inclined plane experiment. At this distance what strikes me is the substantiality of the tangible plane laid out from beginning to end, from A to B as laid down route symbolizing the complete surround of space and time an interval within its procenium.
Now why we exercise ourselves here is to prevent the savant from necessitating God, prelude to canceling our own freedom in a similar necessitation.
The body on the plane proceeds, I say, in deliberate intention down in which Time proceeding space is open in each new moment on the as yet ungiven future. In that open moment the rabbit may spring from the magician’s hat and that moment is what is there in the emergency of all times severally.
Galileo supposes the beginning and end at once in space, which includes time as closed and which measures the motion.
But I say, to the contrary, the “motion” is of the body which moves into new future in each instance in deliberate free intention for the good before it from God’s hand. It is, the body, a’move in this intent and all time is so await. Neither freedom nor good can be left out of move without sinking into an abstract void, a mere memory.
So these words are launched. Let us look up from the page.
Monday Night
September 27th, 2010
Addison Court
Isaac (Newton) asserts mechanism the mathematization of motion.
Now, motion cannot be mathematized because at its heart is spirited free intention of new future good at the frontier of the world where that future is achieved in deed. All motion is so a’move. Math resumes motion by considering its de-lineate memory as complete apart. And so the machine is abstracted away from the moral frontier where act achieves new good. Instead it goes round in a closed circle apart.
You stride down the sidewalk and the car goes down the street. These go differently. For you go each step in freedom into good as your spirit transcends circumstance in the soul’s independence. The car rolls by completing abstract circles in closed rote repetition. And the stars: once they were saved by such circles. Now, I say, they are as free as you are as you stride into the public square and take your neighbor’s hand.
Newton brought Heaven to earth. Here I lift man’s freedom into the shining sky.
Afternoon
September 28th, 2010
University House Grounds
A Corollary to the above (September 27th):
Galileo’s inclined plane experiments show mechanism as change of place on a close route laid down in prior space. But, I say, time is new and prior to space so construed – the ball moves as intentionally a’move, each time to new future not yet written down.
Where is the ball going?
What does the clock tell?
Await, it reflects apart what the Heavens above tell in freedom live.
And they are going into justice, to future Glory. This is constant in every word ever written down.
Let us look up now from the page.
Thursday Afternoon
September 30th, 2010
The Corner Room
On Placing Freedom at the Heart of the World
1. The edge of the world is not the far beyond, but rather the ethical frontier where the now breaks into new future deed in choice of good guided by living law. The future in not written down. In the deed that achieves it alone the universe is attained.
2. The Mars of Kepler orients on this new future in inceptive intentional deed. Of this daring intent in act the orbit is epiphenomenon.
3. In Galileo’s inclined plane the ball orients on this new future in free intent transcending conditions. In each moment of his descent the new unwritten future is to be in act achieved. So the ball is a’move.
4. Newton united Heaven and Earth in mathematics. This makes an abstraction apart – in the time of theory, a resume of the past, a forecast of a guide to the future not yet achieved.
For Heaven truly reaches earth in one way only: in the choice against resistance of the good deed in freedom in the open now that makes the future. It is an heroic world. At its center is the moral choice of man. Upon it the sun brilliantly shines.
But yet I hesitate – I say, finally, that the proud Olympian will of this deed so evoked must be broken in order to open the heart in which alone the true deed is possible. For there is only one real Gateway to the world when all is said and done – and that is love. There is often ferocious resistance here, but in so doing we are joined by an Ally from beyond the sky. And on a fine summer night looking up this is patent in the starlight.
Love is what the Heavens tell.
Let us proceed.
Tuesday Night
June 8th, 2010
Addison Court
Cosmology is quest for reality. Here the Center for Gravity and the Cosmos has beautiful instruments which look through the windows of the four elementary forces towards the Origin from which we have proceeded far away and long ago.
This is false, because it looks the wrong way – the true window on the cosmos is the day’s newspaper headlines which show in a cry of stress and pain that the world is out of balance, broken open by the problem of evil. Any attempt to apply mathematical treatment to this obfuscates, for its idealism covers up the Crack in the world where the tyrant arrogates, the banker extracts his profit on the backs of the poor, and desire itself so central wails wanton and leads astray.
With Copernicus, we looked away to stars and particles without this complication.
But I say we looked away from here where world is what it always was, out of balance because of evil, not a beautiful order at all, but really a disorder which starts in the individual will.
Now register this truth at the root, personally in conscience, and you will hear Word proclaiming the real curse’s cure, as the true Way opens in great supernatural love, and we follow God Himself onward against resistance unto Glory. That accomplished and then alone, we can look up and draw perfect circles round the stars.
Friday Night
October 22nd, 2009
Addison Court
John Wycliff treated the bread and wine in their seeming remaining after consecration as a kind of signate reality. Seeing all natural beings as creatures morally together with a spirited transcendence of circumstance and a living intention to new future good. I am led to a similar ruse in explaining science’s categorization of the creature as body apart with immanent graspable matter -- contained-bound.
For the essence of body for me is spirit with living intention, not graspable matter.
I answer that science accuses the creature indicting him, under de-lineate image, and this frame or container allows the immanent inert. But, in fact, this de-lineation is a reduction of the creature to underground means for profane power from detachment.
And this, I say, in a manner like John’s analysis of the Host, is a simulacrum. It is useful as calculated convention for forecast, to be sure, but it is not the creature identical, but something abstracted aside.
Galileo asserts matter inert.
I respond: all natural body is spirited and intends new future good individually in freedom ethically together. The Tyrant would bind this intention and Grasp spirit. He fails because he has only a simulacrum apart, a shadow, a profane image. And in the good we all really do intend one great day the tyrant will fall. And the good will be all in all.
Sunday Night
January 2nd, 2010
Addison Court
Corollary to John Wycliff’s Signate Reality
I had claimed that body imagistically reified apart and containing matter to be mined for profane power was a simulacrum because we are not morally so apart and spirit individually transcends occasion to the future and cannot be grasped in immanence bound.
Now we could present the same point considering Protagoras’ dicta: Man is the measure of all things. For things here in Greek are things that one uses. Now, if we say that all natural beings, mineral vegetable animal have at core a spark of origin which individually intends future not yet written down, and this initiative is its own cause as Plato suggested -- Put this way, we see that Protagoras’ mastery is achieved by replacing self-cause with external manipulative cause. Presto, one looses shining primary moral reality which one encounters personally as equals, and falls underground to a world of means apart, of tools controlled impersonally without. And this devil’s bargain, this grasp of “matter,” is the beginning of science. In it, as Robert Lowell sings, “A savage servility slides by on grease.” We must recover the sky in freedom that this position would cut down. Here the sun, like a great champion, rejoices to run his race and all creatures only cry concord.
Let us focus this through Bernard Wuellner’s scholastic definition. In the dictionary of scholastic philosophy, matter is defined as the essence of body independent of spirit and accident. Here, to the contrary, we say that spirit is the essence of each natural creature and spirit is who we are in person before the ultimate, which, to tradition, is the justice and holiness of God. And body articulated by delineate image part is a schema for resume of past and forecast of future to be realized each time by returning “it” to the person who is your neighbor and from whom you are not detached, but interinvolved morally in the project of justice which is the world. Matter is then left as spirited being felled for food or full by sacrifice, and machine a habituated memory in laid down time of prior inspiration. Where in primary inspiration time is not so laid down, but ultimate and immediate as the lightening flash – from That these words come forth.
Sunday Afternoon
December 5th, 2010
Addison Court
Natural science is the attempt to identify physical process with mathematical necessity. This always satisfies something deep in the mind, but brought home from the object to the subject it insults, it crucifies, the freedom of the will.
We may deliver man in this way.
Johannes (Kepler) associates the movement of Mars with the ellipse. Rather than saying that he identifies the orbit and the ellipse, let us say that he likens Mars’ a’move in act with the ellipse to know it.
In this sense the ellipse acts as an auger for predicting the future and does not cancel the free nisus and initiative of Mars in act.
For with Mars and all of us the present is open, the future not yet here, but to be achieved in deed.
In deed the imaginary ellipse in the mathematics book is an abstract dia-gram to be seen through to the definition which is invisible intellectual conception, which, arrived at, the illustration is put down.
So the ellipse is a speculative instrument, an auger for predicting where Mars will be. There is no cement track in the sky. And as I have said often, the orbit is epiphenomenon of the intent of Mars in act. And this intent transcends occasion in freedom and initiative and so the orb itself transcends its optical circumspect image. Mars, like the universe, is finite but unbound. And so are all of us. Although all things are interrelated in a sometimes antagonistic pattern, there is freedom at the root of the world.
Sunday Night
December 5th, 2010
Addison Court
Chaucer – scientist – measures thus his height: “as though my length parted were 6 feet equal of proporcioun.” One sees here that measure is essentially different from measured; not a congruent identity, but rather a proportion of likening, arrived at by soul in free independent judgment. As in the case of the ellipse of Kepler, here the rod stands as analogy, as auger. There are two reasons for this separation. First, the rod of “feet” is a dia-gram to be seen through to produce independent, spirited invisible conception of greatness in act – it is not a creature, not a thing. And, second, more importantly, height has a puissant Spring of individual spirit which cannot be bound.
This said, we see the “ruler” which assets this very binding as a treason of clerks, of serving secretary who asserts his hegemony over free spirit in a falsely imagined identity – who would encompass Origin from “apart” in profane control nailing down the world.
Fie on it. It blasts, black-blasts our world. It could never succeed. It will not now stand.
Wednesday Afternoon
October 13th, 2010
Riemann identifies the geometric object and matter to strengthen it, exploiting an ambiguity in the German Grund.
Yet this has always seemed to me fateful, for the intellectual object – the idea and definition are above matter as intellect is above sense. This is so because Soul is above body in a theological sense of “above.”
In fact, in Plato, matter is only clear as supposed under idea; otherwise, “it” is inchoate and surd.
In short, at the beginning of the West, the strength of idea alone made matter definite. So, to find Bernard identifying the intellectual, the spiritual, the right line, with matter suggests an ominous nadir. “The king is passing through the guts of a beggar.”
William (of Ocham) is the pivot here, nominalizing the intellectual and “liberating” matter.
The only way I can understand William is to say that matter exists in the imposition of reference frame, in de-lineate imagistic accusation. This pulls world underground as an abstraction, a means. For at first, the creature exists in freedom intersubjectively as part of the great project of justice which is our moral world. And this indictment, this imposition, alienates the subject and forces world as freight underground, which may be what Martin (Heidegger) means by Gestell.
Now, for me, the delineation of this frame is already hardened beyond the real mathematical, which exists as perfect definition above sense with the diagram only an illustration to be put down when the proof is complete.
Thus these developments in which intellect is swallowed by matter are a feint into the unreal. It is one form of the house of mirth, of the leering illusion which is what Christianity means by “world.”
To answer it it’s enough to say that the real mathematical is an invisible spiritual perfection which applies to the creature only by a proportion, an analogy. It will only truly fit us when we see each other’s faces, justice is complete, and ground and sky sing out the Glory of God.
Monday Night
December 13th, 2010
Starbucks West College
Atomism in Democritus is a purge of our personal passional lives into a realm that contains nothing of that. In modern science, it is the view that “the world is granular,” as Rutherford said. I turn its disintegration thus – the corpuscle, whether proton or quark, is as a whole. And if there are wholes there, there may be wholes in our gross domestic world, as well. I say each creature is as a whole in the perfection of which is health. To be as a whole – to transcend conditions in person to the new future in intentional deed.
Every creature here is so enselved. The world is the moral drama of their interinvolvement.
Monday Night
December 6th, 2010
Addison Court
One sees here, if you understand me, that we are in part in the position of demonizing science which has built our world from nature apart from God as it steps back in detachment outside and the object comes into view to be nailed down in prosecution with death powerfully behind.
To the contrary, avoiding a while the temptation and the glory of the great poison tree and its closed hypersphere apart of total knowledge, let us rather set the world together again in each other’s eyes in mutual moral rapport and primal wonder, as the child first sees the dragonfly, crying out in delight. As Adam names the animals in the great wonder and privilege of being man and friend of God. So seeing, I say, we see beyond us in hope in the fullness of time the real world fulfilled in peace and hope and joy. There the sky touches the land in glory and death and prosecutions are finally far left behind.. Let us go there now together upon our great and common way.
To be sure, the lean savant will go beyond the stars and tear the brain to pieces apart, and in his efforts there is reward, but the final piece of the puzzle is not part of the puzzle at all. You solve it there in the public square where you take your neighbor’s hand in greeting today. To be sure, there is nothing in the hand, nothing but honor and the hope of good and weal and cordial love. But thus it is, I say, the brilliant sun shines down.
Thursday Evening
June 19th, 2011
One wed to science says, “The soul is not a scientific object.” And he is right, for the scientific object is bound in math and caused from without, whereas the soul in person is free, self-caused.
Let us soulfully convert the scientific objects, earth, sun, and material space to freedom, Eudoxus-bound earth in math figure. This is incorrect because on the living ground time is immense and open – the future ungiven, is to be attained in great ethical deeds.
Sun is clock-bound to the tyro, let us reverse this, and time clock by the sun’s free intent as he spontaneously runs his course.
And universe as Albert says is unbound. Let us, as the Stoic says, construe it as unhindered and on the march. Glaring into their figures, the savants at the Centre for Advanced Studies demand – “Where do we see it so a’go?” One sees it in the public square where in free time in kindness you take your neighbor’s hand. For the human face is key to all the worlds there at the moral crux where time is open and he aspires against resistance to greatness. His context, the living ground ethically charged, and the shining freedom of the sky. Their context, the smile of God.
Science figures, to be sure. But these are not their images, but invisible concepts. They are augurs of forecast. But because the soul, my friends, is free, they are not spells to bind time, but rather conventions to support the hero as he advances toward where the world should be.
Friday, June 10th, 2011
Friday, June 10th, 2011
Willard Plaza
“Energy (mass) (motion) is neither created or destroyed.”
“Each day is created new.”
The first interprets the unity of the universe. The second gives the ethical summons of time.
These great organizing principles are not empirical but prior to experience organizing it.
I prefer the latter, because with it it is possible to say, “Each man can make the turn – convert and come to wholly new life.” I say time surrounds space and miracle time. Each new day is the footfall of God who is advancing on Zion, the great city where the poor are fed and we each one recognize each other the great miracles that we are.
Now I recall how Lavosier’s conservation of mass delighted Kant. But for me if not recast, it settles the world as mechanical transformation of a constant material same without the possibility of emergence or the new.
So to protect that novelty and emergence, I recast Anton as follows – The key in, say, H2 + 0 à H20 is not the masses on each side, but in the dynamic of open time in the à. The future is not yet given and this formula is but a forecast or guide, the conserved masses but a post hoc check.
So in Geometry the right line is as Euclid defined it heuristically as a gesture direct out. And the two point determinism but a post hoc check.
And in the calendar the moon phases are forecasts to look up to where in free time the moon may be. Kant would object from the mind’s abstract perfection. But I say, taken literally, the opposite opinions are false because the present at the center of the world is unbound.
Here the tiger one day may spring and God will save the world.
Thursday Afternoon
June 23rd, 2011
Hermann (von Helmholtz), writing in Erhaltung der Kraft, asserts that nature, to be intelligible (begreiflich) must exhibit necessary causality which excludes freedom and spontaneity. Now to this, hear Samuel (Johnson) in the coffee shop in London -- “Sir, you know the will is free.” Enter into his stentorial force and know this, and place the whole Begreiflichkeit of science in his century or ours, to be an orrery, a calculative convention, resuming the past to forecast the ungiven future. For I say in power now, the present is unbound.
Herman would retort – “Situate the freedom for which you upset my elegant perfection.” I situate it there, sir, where sense becomes sign and demands interpretation – that interpretation is free. Choice is at the center of our morally dramatic world.
The clock, to be sure, goes round its perfect circle – it is but reminder to look up to where the sun in brilliant freedom does now up from the page run his race in very deed.
Monday Afternoon
June 27th, 2011
Where does science stand to measure the world?
In Uranaborg with Tycho. In Stonehenge amid immense pillars of hard stone where the power of the living ground assists us to see, to frame the high and shining constant around which the world pivots.
Without this rectitude we wander wayward and out of control.
But that said, for me there is still the wild card, for all of august establishment, Shiva is tossing the world in his hands as he dances an Himavant. All the poets join him in his great laughter, up from the page, right now. On occasion, it is good to put down the world, for all of the dignity and power of monuments of stone.
In fact, dear Tycho, it is not easy for man to capture the sky.
Now, I feel the possible anarchy of this wild card and I hope you will forgive me. I too know the stars are constant for us to ride through the sea in storm to our planned destination, our appointed home.
Let me put it this way: It is true that the helical rising of Sirius measures the Nile flood and its ensuing human plenty for the mind, the shining pinnacle of our souls. But I still say – I am compelled to say – Sirius only exists in the free intention of God – God.
Who might meet us on the street tonight and tell us something surprising, new and very, very wonderful.
Sunday Night
March 7th, 2010
Addison Court
On the Beginning of Biology
One begins with the surprise of elemental wonder that the superlative creature could be. In this surprise the kind above time articulates the especial particular, “This is Finch, a finch.” And this is so as idea poses sense and soul outstands body. So alone the finch stands, essentially, in Darwin’s mind. Being must be put before becoming. Logic preceeds history and species is a form of divine perfection, reduced to time the grand ideal end of desire, the final uniting gesture of the whole, in harmony, world.
But is there not struggle chance and change?
To be sure, there is resistance to pattern. But every footfall advances on Zion and all the creatures in their appointed definitions sing out praise.
Classification is prior to mutation and the beginning of science.
Tuesday Afternoon
June 1st, 2010
Electrical Engineering West Plaza
On Species
Charles (Darwin) observed variation in Galapagos finches and Gregor (Mendel) observes changes in garden peas.
I say, to see these changes and variation the science of species must come before their minds.
All science begins in classification and comes back to the Same, the Idea of Plato through which alone change and variation can be measured. This Idea above transitory contingency is ethical: it appeals to the Good, the excellent, the perfect, the ideal finch or pea.
Knowing this, with our mind we see what finch or pea we see in particular articulated and singled out. And without this, pace the empiricists, we would see nothing at all.
It is the privilege, the uniqueness of man, thus, to see time stand and know this Same, this Good. In this we are God’s witnesses, God’s friends, God’s spies. Now, I know that James (Watson) and Craig (Ventner) would say this is but a word, a nominal abstraction, and they hold the secret of life in their hands – the genetic material.
But I say Ms. Franklin extracted this post hoc from the living virus whose unique spirit first rises to the species, the idea, the good of kind as guide – and is only so clear definite and defined. James and Craig handle their extract, their material; they separate it and recombine it; they sense “it” as a manipulandum for power. But, I say in response, the spirit in the virus from which it came could no more be manipulated, technically grasped, than you could put the soul in prison, or burn the Saint on the pyre. And above the free independent unique spirit shines the species, the ideal Good of kind. It is, I say, nothing less than the immanent world of God. In this alone, our words sharp articulate and clear.
Wednesday Afternoon
November 4th, 2009
Sackett Building
For Alan Walker
Thank you for your talk on the achievement of Charles Darwin in which you casually said, “What is within is just meat.” Let me comment as follows –
To the contrary, meat is extracted from the living being by sacrifice reduced to a manipulandum for food or fuel. And sacrifice is the beginning of biology.
What is within, in truth, is life, who in person transcends situation to act new future in connate rapport. Who you youself are. Where vision begins.
This is invisible, occult to detached empirical observation. But there as the reason the creature lives and is.
Consider the semicircular canal – to be sure, the without is subject to measure and manipulation, but the within is undisclosed to external sense, however finely anatomy cuts.
This within, I say, is individually sacred, known morally in the creature as a whole who faces you, whose is the transcendence of situation, which is the life.
Material, meat, is in our grasp. But life, however hard the tyrant grasps, is not so. This fact each time saves the world.
Thursday Afternoon
June 30th, 2011
Mall South of Willard
Geofrey (Vesey) wrote of the myth of the within. Looking at National Geographic’s Body: The Complete Human, one can agree with him – This solid block of flesh can contain no homunculus. Yet this can be analyzed differently.
Man has always in part believed what he could clearly see before him. The prominence of the eyes only grew after the Renaissance and its gorgeously beautiful displays.
Yet, for me, sight only discloses a surface and however finally one atomizes, the within is a matter of inference. Thus, be it body, organ tissue or molecule, these displayed objects are dis-closed – an apparent surface concealing a within available only to intellectual inference.
This is true of our body, brain or blood.
Whereas spirit or soul is where we begin to see, a self evident invisible spiritual whole whose unity is our moral integrity as person.
This, in us, is the within. And as in us, so I declare in all the living: brilliantly, vigorously animate beyond the reach of the outside eye.
One must not try to imagine here the wrong way -- analyzed with a hollow inside.
The age is saturated with hypnotically fascinating images. We look into each others windows. We fall into the mirror which catches us out.
This is secondary mimetic imagination. And it is not the right way.
The right way is primary imagination by which, say, we imagine that invisible
dynamic Cause which informs the whole apparent world. Our soul or spirit is invisible and must be imagined like this, embodied for good.
But this is as simple as to say – soul is self evident as the moral integrity where we begin. Before this clarity, all external body is an apparent whose within must be inferred. We sense this realized inhabitance in the tonus, the grip of our neighbor’s hand as we turn together to fulfill the age.
Friday Night
July 1st, 2011
Addison Court
Is the last pieces we are left with some uneasiness as to how soul and body come together and cohere -- one way: in the commanding urgency of law which strikes, and strikes fire our freedom that the future be just.
This forges soul to body as a unit. For there, invisible to the surgeon, is a sheath of virtu round each heart that becomes the tonus of the hand shake, the virtue of the regard, the cadence of the speech, the modesty of the loins.
This mobilizes soul to body to the good until that great time when we will meet in that joy and peace and justice that will fulfill the age, as all the stars in appointed freedom shine brilliantly down.
Sunday Night
August 29th, 2010
Schlow Library Bench
A Friendly Letter to the Biology Department
So, Dear Ashley, the blueberry plant individually is Spirited being and must be felled to be supposed – sub-posed – a container for food or fuel.
How do you recognize spirit?
You do this mutually person-to-person in reference to Justice. If you can’t do this, you don’t see the blueberry and have joined the monsters that are eating the heart out of the world.
To Ashley I had claimed that “the blueberry contains antioxidants” was false, because blueberry alive individually intends new future Good following his kind in daring aspiration and adventure, transcending his circumstances in spirit, and this can be grasped apart – bound – as container, only as corpse when the intention ceases. In the intent we join the plant as fellow being in rapport with our common intended Good as part of the great moral drama for justice which is the world. Only so do we face the blueberry and see him. In the supposed container he is not seen but rather felled, reduced to a thing of use for food or fuel or medicine by the healer in sacrifice.
And not first seeing him face-to-face morally is the root reason the whole world of nature and of man himself is in jeopardy now. In this materialism we are mining the “stuff” for our graves.
November 10th, 2010
Addison Court
The moral difficulty with genetic engineering is in the first step. Engineers manipulate materials as means for ends following physical laws.
Is the seed a material means in this way?
It has always seemed to me that the phenotype leads the genotype and that the seed is a precipitate of the glint in the parents’ eyes.
This glint is in their intentionally choosing each other, in free elective mutuality when time wells up to ultimate significance.
The seed is the gift of this exchange, and as the parents should not be means, so the seed should not be either.
And it seems to me, the other view, so popular now, for all its manipulative sophistication, leads often to the conclusion that life comes from chance and is not alive – alive in the sense that the glint behind the seed most definitely, deliberately is.
Friday Afternoon
February 5th, 2010
Sackett Building
Richard Dawkins emerges asserting the gene selfish.
He seems to think gene information and its hard to see how information can be selfish, since selfishness is a characteristic of persons as moral agents. As I read The God Delusion, I am not convinced that Richard believes in agency, let alone personal agents who act in freedom for ends. He seems to believe in necessary process and products all ascetically impersonal. At the core of his belief is that genes replicate and I sense that he conceives this rather like transforming images on a computer screen: they don’t desire or intend to replicate; they just “happen to” in agent-less “purity” which is yet “mathematically” satisfying.
Perhaps I misread him here.
But as I think about this, I think that the genetic comes about when the cell wall breaks down and as the cell-self lapses, the seed is released. This abstraction is supported by my sense of love – here the self surrenders, gives itself away to something greater, the beloved as ideally important. This is ultimate and cosmogonic. The whole tide of the world crests here. So, to me, the seed comes only from putting the self down, transcending it, and, thus, the last thing the genetic code could be is selfish.
Monday Evening
November 29th, 2010
Sackett Building
On Biochemistry
In chemistry one thinks of molecules as literal representations of the notation in chemistry books.
Actually, these are abstract diagrams which represent the combinatorics of weight equivalences.
At the heart of combinatorics is valence, which is an old and vital phrase was elective affinity between substances in mutual free act.
World falls and thus this passes to blind reactions in which everything in the universe is forced from the outside.
If we resist this compulsion and embrace the vital, one can see in valence elective choice. Envisioning valence this way is biology’s contribution to chemistry. As Baruck Spinoza says, “All substances are in varying grades of animation,” or as Humphrey Davey says, “There is nothing inert in nature.”
You can respond that at least the artifact is inert. But it is the memory of the inspiration that created it. And artistic creation is the highest, most animate choice of all. It is said that freedom is the theme of modernity. Actually, freedom is at the very root of the world.
Friday Afternoon
November 26th, 2010
Sackett Building
Dear Rebecca,
Thank you for your visit. Let me focus our issue –
Science is material mechanism. All things baldly are material and that material is inert (Galileo) – it does not act. But is acted upon by the external impetus cause which acts through the materials as a system (quantum and celestial mechanics). Since the synthesis of urea, life has been considered an instance of this hypothesis.
To the contrary, I say, material is spirited being felled for food or fuel. Unfelled, being is spirited and individually transcends its occasion in independence.
Let us consider the rocks in the Peace Garden. These are considered material in Galileo’s sense: They are construed as inert, occupying space and having weight. They are the mirror of all things under the scientific hypothesis.
I construe each one of them as, not inert, but rather intending individually to endure and so, in act, occupying space and having weight.
As the rocks, so is each life. Intent is your mind when you think – formidable and impressive.
Thank you for coming in.
The best,
John Harris
Saturday
November 27th, 2010
Addison Court
Two Corollaries
1. As spirited, each being transcends conditions and so is more than its appearance, as quantity or bound circumscribed optical image. The image as de-lineate is always a reduction, a deflection to memory apart. For in original transcendence the creature reaches spiritually to the universal kind as guide above, and ex-sists, Stands out toward future good so guided, and is not apart, in the hallucinatorum of of the image, but rather in rapport with fellow beings, together in solidarity within to sacred within, in the open moral now.
2. This solidarity of spirit shows that each of us co-exists and is involved in a system of moral interrelation. That community today is all life in the uniting world.
There is a shining gate to that world before us all – it is the choice of good future in freedom which requires our neighbors in solidarity. This choice is the center of the center. Upon choosing for good hangs the fate of man and all the worlds. For there in choice two greatnesses, law and freedom, meet. To be sure, the good is in play against resistance in the world. But behind law at ultimate is God. Whose word is the sharp black fire of justice on the brilliant white fire of compassion, holiness, and great love. Today let us go forward together in great good cheer. For that black and white meet in the flesh in a Bethlehem stable on a recent winter’s night. Suddenly the heart opens in a new direction and all the stars are full of joy.
Monday Afternoon
June 20th, 2011
Willard Commons
The doctor applies his stethoscope to the chest. What does he hear?
He hears the heart construed as a pump – object.
No. This is a reduction to the opaque manipulatable underground.
He hears through vital sign of the spirit of life which is in the personal soul there immanent as significance. And this spirit transcends occasion in its on-going momentarity and conditioned embodiment itself.
Where do we see the transcendence?
When the tyrant holds the sword to the hero’s throat, but he refuses to submit.
The materialist responds – “That sword is very sharp and slays.”
“Well, yes, “I say, “but the body felled, the hero in his free intention of good joins the smile of God.” The tyrant is left to grind his teeth alone.
Night
Tuesday, February 10th, 2011
Sackett Building
For Herschel Liebowitz
What is physiology?
It systematically considers the activity of organs considered as tools. Thus the eye you scrutinize.
From where does one wield the tool? From the soul.
Where is the soul?
Educated, he stands in person with the ancestors vigilant for the justice yet to come.
Only when the light strikes here do we hear the calling in our names and answer together the summons of the age. Sight otherwise is blind.
Sunday
February 20th, 2011
Corner Room
The materialist asserts “Show soul as we see body, or abandon spirit as atavistic nonsense.”
Actually now, dear friends, body is only body alone only when it is corpse, fallen from spirit and dis-integrant. But, I say, you find soul when you join your neighbor in common cause. Joining him, you join the charity at the center of the world and sense the goal the end, the final community fulfilled in peace and joy and love. This, I say, is the true Object before us all together.
There imagistically in Vessalius Body object is only a calculative conversion.1 For, my friends, the sky towers in liberty above the firmness of the ground. They are united in the hope of final justice. We know this, from our souls, when we grasp each other’s hand.
1 An out-point to be whole only in-souled beyond image and beckoning mutually to the final hope.
Friday Afternoon
March 25th, 2010
Addison Court
Brain object there in the CAT scan is sub-posed under the invisible idea brain – brain is the ideal – before the soul who is present for any object to be. Right now, my reader, in person, soul is the beginning of knowing. Soul is who you are before the Ultimate. There you will be asked what kindness you do.
For the soul is completed in kindness against odds – where you recognize your neighbor’s human face.
Thursday Night
November 24th, 2010
Addison Court
The archdeterminist would stuff the sentence in the object brain where it can be in seizure grasped.
But one sentence obtains here and it is this: “This is the brain.” And it obtains in transcendent generality -- above metaphysically above – any brain as object image articulating it. This fact rightly seen, we see too that the bound imagistic object in its fascination in the gallery apart is not the brain at all. For as I have said often now, the real brain is your neighbor’s personally in transcendence in moral mutuality in freedom.
The rapport rightly entered into the future justice of us all together comes into focus. And this, etched in prophetic fire, is the real object, not the brain at all.
Monday Night
July 19th, 2010
Addison Court
William (James) takes psychology in light of physiology, the living organism in the laboratory.
Let us redirect this. The right place for considering the soul is the lightened stained glass in the great Cathedral. For soul looks through that glass to completeness beyond in the holiness of Heaven where the Ancestors stand vigilant.
Our every true thought rises into generality there above the hurly burly for all men in freedom as these words Physiology with Harvey goes around in an automatic circle. But in truth life is intently going into the open future for good through soul step by deliberate step.
That good of all the several creatures is the subject of the ancestors’ vigilance.
It is where the Cathedral aims.
It is in the tenor of all just words.
Thursday Afternoon
July 14th, 2011
West Pattee Entrance
The savants grasp brain a ball of jelly and ask its reactionary mechanism.
They will have their reward for this reduction of self to impersonal automatism.
As they stare ferociously at the CAT scan images localized in the body they have cut out apart, they seek the physical property of brain as objective mechanism. But the essential property of brain is the face, who in person proposes justice together in telling words, each one sounding meaning ripe with the hope of the world.
If I am right in this, the CAT scan images are symptoms of our souls too, opaque, but like the words. Symptoms that we read hermeneutically as we would a great art work, rather than properties of a clock-work brain we take apart for external power.
The savant replies – show soul in brain.
I respond. Soul is where the brain is when we join our neighbor in deliberate intentional freedom in person to advance the health of the world.
for Aung San Suu Kyi
Wednesday Afternoon
August 3rd, 2011
Sackett Building
Soul Made Flesh
Free Press
New York
2004
Carl Zimmer tolerantly, wonderfully evokes many opinions, but he seems to profess that soul is brain, brain a contingency of atoms founded in void, blindly chancing unintentionally on –
In short, Thomas Hobbes’ position dominates the book: “The body is all that is.”
This leads to nihilism and world depression.
Let me recast: Fear is associated with the amygdala, agency with the anterior cingulated cortex, consciousness with brain as whole.
If one places cause with the latter term, one gets a materialism where personal intentional spontaneity is produced by, is an epiphenomena of, something which is none of these things, which is an impersonal mechanism.
But, if one emphasizes the first term, the soul, and say that it shows as a sign in the flesh of the brain to the MRI scan – if soul is expressed through the brain, then we are as persons, as selves, masters of our thoughts and embodiment.
Now, Carl says correctly that science doesn’t see soul as an object. But I say all objects depend on soul, who steps back into detachment to entertain them. Soul is, it seems to me, that personal unbound origin where we begin to see, to carry out our vision of good within the project of justice which is the world and which requires all of our neighbors as moral compliments. But I know that science demands an object like the brain slices illustrating this book. They are images in the nowhere of illusion, incomplete reminders to look back to where our real neighbor, whom we meet face to face, we turn to together to do the future good which invisibly is the real object before us all.
As I say, science’s objects depend on the soul stepping back outside in detachment. But the soul is seen only when we leave our sequesterment, step forward morally and take our neighbor’s hand. Brain, taken apart for study, is only then completed when restored to the neighbor in person. Only then is it the brain. If not so restored, it is just dead flesh fallen from reality, part only of a corpse.
Afternoon
July 15th, 2011
HUB South Lawn
The primary exhultation of the spring dawn suggests that it is patent to the birds that each day is new and a miracle – it might not have been and yet it is. It comes forth from void as by real magic. It came fresh from the divine hand, a Gift to all the living to be received in joy and praise.
Because this is patent in the Spring dawn, when the technologist comes and draws his circle joining to-Day to yesterday and to tomorrow, he reduces time to repetition, to now and again.
Here, to be sure, the trains run automatic on their tracks, piercing through the land.
But this is a reduction abstract of the greater world where the birds sing out to heaven.
I say the heartbeat within us is also new each beat, new like each dawn. And thus it is that Harvey’s perfect circle circulation is also reduced like the train on its track and embodiment becomes written down automatic and repeating – bethinging – the robot body.
But I say that this is underground and what the doctor really hears in his stethoscope is each beat new full of sacred freedom, praise and joy.
This joins the dawn and says to the clockmaker: “You may write down the sky for prediction, but there is that in the present which is forever unbound. In it all the stars are each one superlative and free. This is there deliberate in each of our heartbeats and it says to the technologist, ‘So far you manipulate, but at core don’t tread on me.’”
For each life individual is in the soul and the soul is unconditioned independence. Neither technologist can bind, nor tyrant seize this deliberate freedom in his hands.
Robert Hook said life is a machine. He miss-takes. For machines are controlled from without. Life individually is controlled form within, with moral liberty that in each life looks up and beholds all the brilliant shining of the sky.
Wednesday Afternoon
July 13th, 2011
Willard Plaza
Above I had written that sight alone only dis-closes a surface, leaving within opaque.
But we ourselves are the Within. For here in freedom we begin to see in light of a vision of Good honed by living law which proposes justice, a justice which will ultimately unite the whole world.
And this Within is in considerable tension with the without of appearance – the ugly woman who is a saint, the beautiful woman who is cruel and evil.
Thus the public world can appear a masquerade full of feigning and dissimulation valuing the surface show, ignoring, denying the within.
In this tension comes Rousseau’s democratic candor, comes the Confuscian clear character.
For word is magic and has the power to break the surface show and reveal the heart.
True words seed the future that I hope. The poet’s clarion, true word can show what light alone can not.
The Christian would say that the culture – the clothes we wear – conceals the incorrigible weight of sin apparent on the shame and the genitals taboo in public.
This is so in part; and clothing has the sanction of law that shame be covered and so alone make virtue possible, as Greek beautifully says in the word aidós.
But it is deeply Christian as well to say there is that gaze of judgment, the glare of anonymous and concealed accusation in the public world against which in part we have each fashioned our official identities. Here the clothes come to our defense, saying, “there is more to us than what meets the outsider eye.”
And here the candor of Rousseau – in the Confessions, say -- and Confucian discipline join the singing of the true word to suggest that in final triumph this tension with be resolved, we will be “masters of our faces” and the good of our neighborliness will meet the shining unequivocal brilliance of the sky.
For word is that sacred place where the posed but opaque apparent parts, soul shines, and truth is clearly declared.
Monday Night
August 8th, 2011
Addison Court
So it came to me -- the swarthy paysan asserts: let me look at the legs of the girl before us on the street.
I retort: the legs rise to the face where we encounter each other personally face to face – leg and body are thus in whole alone soul and not so to see is base.
Paysan retorts in turn: these legs are part of nature, part of physiology.
I retort in kind: it is not so; it is base. We are men. This is not natural. It is consorting with demons dancing underground. And there is much of it.
The paysan retorts: show then soul.
I say look to the shining of the sky. For one must look up. This takes efforts. It is what I undertake here.
Wednesday Afternoon
August 10th, 2011
Willard South
Art imagines man in illusion on the radiant white stage at the center of the world. And science nails down man in the mirror apart where he can be made identical to their reified measuring instruments. At ultimate, it is art which provides the mirror from which the scientist takes his measurement apart. Thus the poet is in the primary sunlight. But man exists in open moral time and can be seen, not just reduced in illusion or image. Oedipus meets his father at the crossroads. And all of us, as our times crest, are Oedipus.
But, I say, there is a wildcard in the deck – the curse which haunts us on these charged grounds can be eluded.
For there in the crux, the heart can open. We can see our neighbor face to face. So Oedipus recognizes his father, the Sphynx is foiled and the great city is saved.
Abetted by the mirror and the book apart, the shining mirror, this brilliant book time can open. But it is primarily of Grace, and Grace is the immediate Gift of God.
Let us thus proceed with the great courtesy of the world.
Now the scientist retorts: I see facts – body in motion.
But, mon brave, you see this “external” body in the mirror. And I say you behold it from invisible personal soul there at the crossroads when brilliant elemental reality comes to pass.
Saturday Night
August 13th, 2011
Addison Court
Reacting to blind forces, outside the soulless body is construed as an engine of blind metabolic energy inside controlled by machine-like impersonal brain, the whole merely chanced to be.
Under this hypothesis biological psychology is now popular. But, I say, prior to biological psychology there is psychological biology in which the soul animates the body in freedom to personal intentional ends in a world providentially meant to be. Thus each “organism” from virus to man culminates morally in the face where soul in freedom envisions new good according to kind. Soul animates. Without this, what science has apart is but a clock-work without a face nor time to tell. Sacrificed from face to face encounter, “it” is but the abstraction the profane mind grasps apart for power – the handleable machine – after intent life absconds and all the demons laugh.
But, I say, to the contrary, the face of the demons and the scientific consensus this – to the last cell and atom embodiment is inhabited in person by the soul. In this transcendence alone is each unique life, each one meant to be here and an appointed vessel of the meaning of the world called together by name to be each one a hero of the great common justice yet to come.
So all lives, each one unique and superlative, in common are on the march for good.
Tuesday Night
June 28th, 2011
Addison Court
Ludwig (Wittgenstein) says, “A difference between consciousness and brain process would be uncanny, like a logical sleight of hand.”
Let us take him at his word and say, yes, artwork comes from the brain, something that is what it’s not: Vincent’s slashing brushstrokes and, presto, “The Starry Night.” So perhaps soul comes through the flesh like the riveting theme comes through the pain.
And seizing the paint apart as the materialists would will not bring victory, but desecration through blind ignorance.
Or, one might say to the physiologist this: You see currents running here to there. But, I say, souls is where current stops and stands and is beyond mutation. It is where the buck stops and sense declares. This out-stands the body you would grasp apart in block and is concurrent with the living ground where the future is to be achieved in deed commanded by law which proposes final justice in the united world and clothes us in culture full of rich symbolic meaning. As our world unites this is patent in each face. Brain is behind the face who hopes with each telling heart beat, in person in intent freedom for that great time, when the age will be fulfilled and even this tyro’s puzzle will at last be solved.
Why you can’t see this in the C-scan is because you have defaced the reality and taken the flesh apart. And this at ultimate, my friends, is your fate, not the patient’s. Recall yourself. Face your neighbor and together we shall assemble the whole world. Have you not heard? Each heart tells the hope of the soul for the final goodness of the world.
Friday Afternoon
July 1st, 2011
Willard Building S. E.
Is mental illness brain damage?
Let us place the relation of mind and brain this way – The Show of the T.V. may be construed as caused by the wiring of the set and its mechanical energetics which may be efficiently pushed around, engineered.
So Brain.
But the Show may be construed as caused by the director and actors who appear there susceptible to art criticism and the beauty to be attained.
So mind, which may be heard of and persuaded in reference to Beauty, to Truth, and to the Good. And the Brain, the Body is only there, as the T.V. set mechanically.
Because of the Mind, because of Art.
So, for me, in face of the stress of life which is life-and-death in earnest, a therapy face-to-face of verbal persuasion takes precedence over the engineering of neurotransmitters, as the soul of which mind is crown is more than body and explains why it is here.
For the context of body is imagistic space to detachment, where the context of soul together is the mutually ultimate which explains why the whole world, morally dramatic, life and death in earnest, is here and why our lives together are so in play.
For spiritually, the context of body in person and meant to be here is the hurly-burly of this very interplay, contingent and incessant, while the context of soul is the peace and transcendent perfection of the Kingdom of God.
And pointing this out with ethical force will cure: We are here because we are loved, with a love bigger and more ferocious than the whole world.
June 4th, 2011
Antonio (Damasio) asserts, “Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain.”
Responsio: The brain is not conscious; the soul is conscious through the brain. And soul gives in person the transcendence of transitory circumstances and so in political independence is free to act.
How much does the soul weigh?
The soul is weighed by his response to history, by his response to the justice which is the goal of the moral project which is our world.
Soul is known in pure love – that unique Importance for which the world was made.
Body is arrow show by soul for the justice which is history’s end, estoped for study, if not restored to flight, to wholeness in the soul “it” is but fallen remains, dead-weight corpse.
Both Antonio (Damasio) and his reviewer in the New York Review of Books, John
(Searle) construe body as impersonal necessary process which “causes” mind in its personal intentional spontaneity. Actually, soul, who we are in person before the Ultimate, causes body as hearing law, we choose the future greatness in very deed. In this choice at the center of the world, our neighbors are semblables, moral compliments. In this great time these neighbors are the whole uniting world.
June 22nd, 2011
Yesterday in the New York Times Nicholas Wade repoted work in the neurology and genetics of the round worm C. elegans done by Cornelia Bargman of Rockefeller University.
Nicholas writes of “how individual neurons interact to control the worm’s behavior.”
As a first step to this kind of explanation, this shifts agency from the worm to the neuron, from whole in person to impersonal past.
Next the agent is reduced from actor to reactor, thus arriving at complete mechanism. Now, however, knowing this worm well, I would say that the agent is the worm’s spirit who transcends occasion to act and this act is through the neurons in concert and in fact through the body as a whole mobilized to ends; and this is not capturable as mechanism because spirit is personal free and self-caused, while machines are caused from without.
As Plato so recently says, this kind of explanation through “external” causes explains life by explaining it away.
One senses life person to person: Cornelia was on the right track when she considered mice before joining engineers pushing inertis underground.
Between the sensor and the motor is unimageable spirit and his transcendence of situation; this you recognize person to person above ground in the great moral drama which is our world.
These savants wish to grasp the secret of life. In part, you grasp this when you recognize that it is ungraspable technically, but morally recognizable in person.
For the face faces where life is going – in freedom to the whole world united together in peace, justice, and great joy.
Sunday Afternoon
June 26th, 2011
It is to be noted, in great wonder, that as Charles (Sherrington) says, “In a brain examination one does not see sense.” And Sigmund (Freud) says that, unlike brain, a pictured object, soul is not susceptible to picture thinking.
Why is this?
I think that, metaphysically, it is because of what us behind the gaze that “takes” pictures apart, and where the pictures are taken off to – the demon in his dark cave with his guarded horde.
But, practically, it is enough to say that, as Shep Nuland once remarked, to get the body of anatomy and surgery, the person must be bracketed, held in suspense.
Now I say in power that all the results of anatomy and surgery must be finally returned to the unpicturable person or they lose their validity and become parts of corpse.
And corpse is fallen from spirit, from soul, from person there patent on the face and his moral appeal. This face is the first face of our human reality. You say – picturable in the mirror apart. I say – this is but an analytical check until we meet; the right frame of our face is our moral regard mutually. And now in this great time, we can sense that this mutuality is going somewhere. When we face each other mutually in honor and due regard, we face into the ultimate justice which will unite the world in joy. In this joy heard, let us say, in the end of Beethoven’s Ninth in anticipation, we will see
all life individually sacred, and man the champion of this life, as he stands fully in the very presence of God.
August 5th, 2011
New York Review of Books
August 1st, 2011
Marcia Angel: “I know very well that all thoughts, emotion and behaviors have their origin in the brain” and Friedman and Nierenberg evoke “the biological basis of depression.”
I would reply that biology is founded in psychology, which proposes ends to the organism in freedom in person. Without this hierarchy biology is just a clock-work without a time to tell.
And to say that thought originates in the brain is just like my saying that gripping your hand in greeting in the public square originates in the bones of the hand or language is the movement of the tongue. I say that all physiology is a necessary concomitant, but that thought and behavior originate from a moral crux, a cultural complex which transcends embodiment. And this is so because at ultimate culture transcends nature because soul transcends body.
Now, perhaps one could capture thought in the electrical excitement sen in CAT scans in the brain. For me, at least, that would be just like saying my thought can be captured on this page. Formally it is right in an idiotic surreal way. Actually, my thought is free lightening as I respond to destiny in community in the open moral now where the ungiven future is answered. And taken up, your response to the page is just the same.
Tuesday Afternoon
January 4th, 2011
Sackett Building
The Darwinist would contend that primary aggressiveness and priapic desire is sublimated and made almost taboo by the normalization of civilization, and that in brutal realism this smiley face normalization is really an obfuscation and distortion that dulls primary life in its elemental intensity as an opiate.
To the contrary, religion responds that there are ethical reasons why the lion tears the throat out of the gazelle and the ichneumon fly deposits her eggs – and this is Good from their instinctive perspective. We as men have stepped back from instinctual momentarity and have world. So weaned we see this Good in the brilliance of each sunrise and the sun in the hands of God in whose immense Providence which places aggressiveness and lust in a transformed light, the light of fundamental belief and trust: “His eye is on the sparrow and He keeps his eye on me.”
Here the Darwinist appears in his true light, as lost in a benighted jungle of strife and selfishness without end. Over against this, we are as human beings called out of night and dark into the great city of comity and Peace Wonderstruck, we have looked up and seen the shining sky and heard together the great divine calling in each one of our names. In this alone de we see the Galapagos finch of Darwin, the snails of Steven J. Gould, the ants of E. O. Wilson for what they are in themselves universally – individual marvels fresh from the hands of God. To see this way, to observe, eternity stands above time and weaned of instinctuality we enter a rational dispassion and God’s care of the world. In this, we see the Origin of species in each creature we come personally
face to face with, where the other impersonal view leads to a strife without an end, one in which mind itself eventually falls apart, why is unanswered, and the Ordained world is mistaken for a contingent void, “out of essence, perfect accident,” as Alan Tate sings. “Prove this ordination,” they respond. It is proved at the center where the buck stops and why is answered. It is proved when the hero draws the sword from the stone and saves the world. It is proved when we call the Kingdom of God.
Friday Afternoon
January 7th, 2011
Sackett Building
In the last piece I have said something about the Darwinian side of genetic Darwinism. Here, let me address the genetic side. This follows the mechanism and atomism of physical science that I have discussed at the beginning of this work. Earlier I have said that, for me, the man is father of the child and the phenotype precedes the genotype. In the adult there is in play the social other in intense passionate affiliation and the free intent, the realization of Good as end, the Good whose vision is unique in each life guided by Kind, all this in ethical time where the future is not yet and must be achieved.
The genetic suggest life being held in a rational test tube distance. Whereas, it seems to me that in procreation that distance is suspended and the self of detached analysis is surrendered to the other in the light of ultimate Good that is there, let us say, as the elephants cry out and mate in ferocious joy. When James (Watson) would explain life in the test tube he would then as a self of rational distance have “it” in technical control. This apartment of the mind must be critiqued. For now, it is enough to say that all of anatomy’s excisions however fine must be returned in person to the person of your neighbor who you have not in control, but in honor of love and freedom before the ultimate justice divinely proposed to us together.
To be sure, anatomy has its use. But not returned to the person it is like a clock which has no face or time to tell. In fact, one great day time will tell. For now it is enough to say that what is had apart in the test tube is there by sacrifice and must be returned to the person at the end of the analysis – a person who you do not so have, a person who is free, and with whom you might fall in love. There alone in fact, Origin is in play and time does stand and tell. The seed and then the unfolding child are only there as a gift of that elemental commitment and that joy.
December 7th, 2010
Addison Court
For Phil Skell
Thomas (Huxley) essays man’s place in nature. Nature to science appears as object apart to the critic in the gallery of his speculations. Nature is like the diagrams Archimedes stared at before Syracuse. If he, as moral subject, is to enter this riveted object, suddenly there is a gestalt transformation and he finds himself in history clothed in culture an individual focused in moral resolve and choice as Archimedes woke up from his abstractions to face the enemy soldiers.
In this book man appears a naked body for abstract comparison. Here in history the undressing of the body is moral act fraught with peril because the clothes are changed with the city’s law which socializes him as he rivets, together with his neighbors on the ultimate justice that one great day will surely come.
I say to Huxley, “Man is as unlike animal as animal is unlike plant.” For animal guided by instinct has his ripe moment, while man invested with mind has a world like the nature of your title. And with world he must seek cause, seek God. Who in freedom finding he is singled out ensouled in person as more than animal or nature either, and who, not so finding, is not animal either, but something incomplete, a point of tension where, in some idolatry, demons may come to play.
Thomas writes of the physical basis of life rejecting all of what I say. From virus to man life is in varying degrees ensouled and so alone animate. The author then would grasp apart soul the sacral within embodiment who is in all of us radiant and terrible, like a flash of sudden lightening. You do not grasp the soul, but rather turn and join your neighbor in person in honor and love and so together fulfill the moral summons of the gathering Age. Thomas rejects all this and so mistakes, grasps dust and in an ultimate without Ultimate, hurls it at last into an empty void.
Wednesday Afternoon
December 8th, 2010
Sackett Building
At first glance, when the book of nature is brought home after Darwin to ethics, it seems to counsel utterly selfish rapacity – like the lion tearing the throat out of the gazelle in contrast to the book of scripture where one practices self-sacrifice, deferring to the neighbor in love and forgiveness like the father forgiving the prodigal, like the Samaritan bandaging the wounds of the stranger left by the roadside.
Actually, now God creates both the tiger and the lamb and feeds them all and plays with the sea monsters in the deep and has created man to rise above animality and be His special friend and witness. And this Above includes rationally an intellectual dispassion that entertains all creatures with wonder and disinterest for themselves, rather than just for himself; and this for themselves at core is a structure of care and conservation and concern for all; and this care recognizes that at the root of the world is not Malthusian desperation, but providence and great volcanic divine love. This we enter into supernaturally and do respect the tiger’s intent, but realize that we are each one called to a higher station with powers and privileges no tiger could suspect: through God the whole world is given into our hands as we enter into His great Care for all things. As the rabbis say, when one of us goes down the street, a divine trumpet sounds out – “Make way for the Image of God.” And, thus, if we strike our neighbor in anger we risk shattering the sacred core of the whole natural world, into which we are each one called together as citizens in great compassion and final concern.
Wednesday Night
December 8th, 2010
Addison Court
What I wrote this afternoon is a kind of Jewish embrace of the world guided by Psalm 104. A Christian would vindicate Luke’s parables vis a vis Charles’ naturalism in a more radical way. He would say that as Redeemed he is not “in” the world of Charles’ observations, or of Isaac’s mathematics, nor of the newspaper reader in the secular city. No. In Christ he is converted and born anew, and in Spirit as pilgrim on the Way that leads through darkling difficulties unto Glory Beyond. And this Way and this Beyond open through what Christ so recently accomplished in Jerusalem and into Which we are called by faith. Thence, the tigers world, or the political world we are in, but no longer of, being not conformed to it, but transformed by the power of God’s Spirit.
In the Iliad Apollo says to raging natural Achilles: “I am not in fate.” And in this the Christian is just like Apollo, and so free despite resistance within and without to love and care in a radical way as the Spirit and special Providence grants. To be sure, the Christian is in the world, but rather like the lights are on the Christmas tree, to suggest a Beyond and a Way to it that “world” cannot see. To Charles and Isaac as scientists this is neither evident or apparent.
And they are right, for it is utterly magical. But it goes to suggest that just beyond the world of the ordinary is wonderful supernatural beauty and loving kindness in grace into which we are called by faith and in which the Jewish care above, is deepened and made gentle and perfect.
Friday Night
December 25th, 2010
Addison Court
In biochemistry the elements of body impress one another with ballistic cause, clack-click-clack riding round in a closed automatic circulation. I say, in power to William Harvey and his followers, that from the heart in the ethical dimension of choice this abstract circle is going intentionally in freedom to new good in future to be achieved. And the great central Gó of this is from soul who transcends occasion in person and so is free to choose and to act in the great moral drama which is our world.
Science does not see this soul, the first face of our reality, because it has alienated subject to object by detachment and grasps through object for manipulative power apart. This will have its reward. But soul is not so grasped, is not ever a manipulandum, but rather known in connate rapport in honor and love mutually, radically free and person to person in a great bond of living law which proposes to freedom ultimate justice in which all this will finally be clear under Heaven, whose first face is benediction, providence, and great, great love.
The autonomic and the parasympathetic at ultimate are integrated in the voluntary, which is in the soul who transcends conditions in person to the future in which brillance alone is any body alive. Science has the body apart. But body is in the soul, who is not apart, but your neighbor. When you face him morally the pattern clears and together you face that great justice which will ultimately answer the age. And in this transcendence and this justice, the world and all life is in man’s care and man is in the hands of God.
Tuesday Night
December 21st, 2010
Addison Court
Considering these last evocations, I long to simply identify with the wolf howling at the moon, the geese flying in the moonlight, the salmon swimming up river to spawn, and die – to say that I am brother of each one of these both in common mortality and in our great common aspiration.
But I cannot yield, for man is more than animal and in his symbolic complexity demands a spiritual solution: for me, he is both greater and less than the animal world – That is, until converted he emerges whole a pilgrim singing on a great and shining Way – in this brother to all the living in one great final hope.
Friday Night
April 1st, 2011
Addison Court
I have written this little book, focusing on abstract details of genetic Darwinism.
But, finally at root, the issue is not abstract at all. For this account of life construes each of us as essentially alone in a world of Malthusian desperation in which our only recourse is mercilessly focused selfishness expressed in violence and priapic lust. Life as so construed has chanced to be here. Behind it is violent amoral blind powers and behind that a meaningless empty void.
To the contrary, the world is Providentially organized. We are all meant by name to be here and to celebrate our lives together in conviviality and great zest and joy under the brilliantly shining sky.
It is time now, dear Reader, for you to choose between.
Copyright © 2011 by John Harris. All rights reserved.
Greate Blog!!! Seeding
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