The psyche is the first actuality of a body which has the power to live. It is the form and life of the body. The soul, also, is the first actuality of a body which has the power to live. The soul, also, is the form of the body. The definitions are identical. Are the psyche and the soul then identical as well?
They are identical only in first actuality, in the body as slumbering or vegetative. When the body begins to live, when potentiality becomes actuality, when there is movement from structure to function, from essence to process, when static form is actualized in the activity of living, then psyche and soul go their separate ways. They are each form, and they are each form as function. But they are functions radically apart.
For activity has a direction, and the difference between the psyche and the soul is a difference of direction. They are identical in their origin, but differ in their destiny. The vector of the psyche is horizontal, the direction of efficient causality. The vector of the soul is vertical, the direction of final causality. The psyche is form turned to existence. The soul is form drawn to the non-existential. The psyche aims for efficacy and efficiency. The soul seeks meaning and value. The psyche thrives on the mechanical. The soul seeks the context of the mechanical in the teleological. The psyche is immersed in the world. The soul seeks union with God.
Both psyche and soul are form, so that the psyche, no less than the soul, is holy, and should be treated with reverence. The psyche is soul, but soul as existent and as subject to the conditions of existence. The psyche is form functioning as form of the body. The soul is form of the body functioning as form in itself. The psyche is non-existential form in its destiny as existential. The soul is existential form in its destiny as non-existential. The psyche is the entrance of God into existence. The soul is the exit of existence into God. And yet they are both the existence of God. The function of the psyche is to transform existence. The function of the soul is to transcend it. The soul is existential form functioning as finality in itself. The psyche is formed existence functioning as finality in its other. The psyche is God turned toward existence. The soul is existence turned toward God. And yet both are the existence of God. The psyche is man's existential destiny. The soul is his destiny as non-existential and divine. The division and separation of the psyche from the soul is inevitable and essential for an intermediate being such as man. Each limits the other, so that the loss of either would be a loss of human essence. Man would become either subhuman or superhuman. Plato knew of both the psyche and the soul. The soul is the philosopher, and the psyche is the king. Man is, or ought to be, a philosopher-king.
The existential status of the soul is most certainly ambiguous. The soul is non-existential. It therefore neither exists nor does not exist any more than it is colored or colorless, for the category of existence is to it irrelevant. And yet it is the non-existential in existence, so that it may also be spoken of as existing. The soul is mind in itself which is nevertheless the mind of a body. The form of the body is the non-existential in its other. But the soul is form in itself, and yet it too is in its other.
Is the soul a cause or a consequence? It is a non-existential cause and an existential consequence. The psyche is the existential or efficient cause of the soul. For without it the soul could not exist. But the soul is the non-existential or final cause of the psyche and of itself. It is that which calls upon the psyche to become itself, for without it the psyche would have no reason to exist.
The psyche is non-existential form that is nevertheless directed to existence, and so it is through and through existential. The psyche is form or mind embedded in the explosive power of existence, a formidable fighting machine. The psyche is indeed the heir to and culmination of all of existence. It is encapsulated and concentrated magnificence. But like all of existence it is dirempted into opposites. For every moment of magnificence there is another of diminution. The psyche is a lion, but it is also a snake. And as a snake, the psyche loves to crawl. The psyche is existence at its dirempted height and depth. It is power without meaning, existence without God. What the psyche needs is a soul.
If God is the end of the world, the soul is the end of the psyche. It is what the psyche becomes when it is functioning at its best. If the psyche is the life of the body, the soul is the sanctification of life and of the psyche. The soul is the final cause and fulfillment of the psyche. It is the ideal of the psyche. Existence is illuminated by the non-existential, and man lives in the light of God.
The psyche is the arbitrary, the dice as they have been thrown. But the arbitrary is what is meant for meaning, what must be made intelligible. The given requires a giver. The existential function of the soul is to overcome the arbitrary, to give meaning to the surd, to the psyche. The emergence of the soul is the submergence of the arbitrary, and the beginning of the soul is the beginning of the end of the arbitrary. The union of the psyche with the soul is the union of efficiency with teleology, of mechanism with meaning, of essence with value, of existence with God.
Will is the point of penetration of the psyche by the soul. It is form in itself in merger with form in its existence. It is the pinnacle of existential power in union with the luminescence of non-existential mind. It is informed passion, intelligent but stubborn power, human identity. The psyche by itself is an existential engine for survival. The soul by itself is a non-existential vehicle for immortality. The will is the temporal touched by the eternal, man, not in his divinity, but in the fulfillment of his humanity, the psyche made soul and the soul entrusted with its power.
A psyche which generates a soul is outwardness now turned toward inwardness, and the real now living in the presence of the ideal. It is Paul on the road to Damascus. It is existence now come upon and overcome by the non-existential, the real touched and transformed by God.
And therein lies big trouble. The idyllic union of the psyche and the soul turns out to be but a temporary and unstable harmony. The honeymoon is over. For each has a different agenda, and they are drawn in opposite ways. Fulfillment of the psyche in salvation by the soul would be the termination of the psyche. Nothing wants to be aufhebened. Nothing wants to be transcended. The soul is the end of the psyche. The psyche would lose its identity in the soul, and become something other than itself. From existent it would become non-existential. From living it would become beyond both life and death. Its fulfillment would be its finish.
And so the psyche asserts itself in opposition to a soul which lures with its brilliance even as it repels with its other-ness. The soul is to the psyche at once friendly and foreign. This interaction between the psyche and the soul is, as we shall see, the dance of ambivalence between man and God.
A great earthquake occurs in the Book of Job, leaving the entire spiritual landscape radically altered and never again to be the same. An attempt is made, in the end, to conceal and deny what has happened.
The world of Job and his friends is comfortable and secure. If you are good you will be rewarded, and if evil you will be punished. There is a good and just God who guarantees both. The concept of God and the world radically alters in the course of this work. The movement is from goodness to greatness. It is from the limited to the unlimited, from God as the model for virtue to God as the epitome of overwhelming power and intellect. God, speaking from the whirlwind, proclaims, not his own righteousness, but his power and his understanding. On the issue of his righteousness, God is conspicuously silent. A neat and orderly bandbox world, in which everything has its place and you always know where you stand, is replaced by one of magnificence, profundity and mystery. The prosaic is replaced by the poetic, security by adventure, the beautiful by the sublime. All bets are off, and the emphasis is no longer on what men call justice, but on divine justice, omnipotence and omniscience. Set against an infinitely powerful and unfathomable deity, human evaluations are all presumptuous. This is a great upheaval, a revolutionary shift in religious consciousness, a movement beyond good and evil, beyond morality. Nietzsche ought to have been entranced by the Book of Job.
And yet, in the end, the safe little world, with its neat and predictable God, is reinstated. One has to ask why. Perhaps the poet, having achieved his radical new vision, recoiled in horror. He would then be like Plato's prisoners who, having first emerged from the cave, found the intense bright light too powerful and painful to bear. This would be the romantic interpretation. More likely, however, the poet wrote a happy ending in order to save his own skin. The age was not prepared for this revaluation of values, and heresy would not be taken lightly. This was the cunning of the artist, who knew how to both reveal and conceal his insight. The poet wrote for all time, but he had to live in his own time.
What we have in the Book of Job is nothing less than an emergence of the soul from the psyche. The psyche seeks adaptation to existence. It seeks survival. It wants neither mystery nor magnificence, neither sublimity nor adventure. It desires the predictable. It wants no surprises. The psyche seeks success. The psyche insists on a world where virtue is rewarded and evil punished. Then you will know how to behave. Virtue will be nothing but prudence, and prudence is what the psyche understands well. The psyche does not want to be left free to generate its own ideals. It wants the rules revealed and clearly spelled out, so that there will be no misunderstanding. The psyche is caught in the existential conflict between dirempted opposites. It wants to be good so that it will not be evil. It wants to be secure in order to avoid risk. It wants to be happy so that it will not be unhappy. It wants rewards in order to avoid punishments. In a world that is both hostile and supportive, precarious and assured, the psyche wants to be safe.
When Job finally abases himself before God and surrenders his own self-interested concerns, his soul emerges from his psyche. For it is the soul, not the psyche, which can respond to the God who is great. Job is for the first time able to see God, with the eye of his newly emergent soul. The psyche knows the world only in its immediate and practical import. The soul, which is mind in itself, is indifferent to existence or nonexistence, survival or destruction. The soul, indifferent to existence as instrumental, can see existence as it is in itself. The soul, beyond the dirempted opposition of good versus evil, is able to respond to a God whose greatness shatters the categories of good and evil. The soul transcends the pride of the psyche, which thinks that existence is created for itself, and that God is there for its own well being. In a humility and pride that transcends both, the soul worships in a way that the psyche was never able to do, seeking neither reward nor punishment, seeking nothing in return, seeking finally, although Job does not say it, to be one with the will of that God who is Soul in itself. Soul is born of suffering. This is the message of the Book of Job.
We are fascinated by the ambiguity surrounding the penultimate speech of the Book of Job. Elihu, unlike God himself, unambiguously affirms the righteousness of God. What is ambiguous is Elihu's status and credentials. At the end of the work, God gives his judgment on the statements of Job and his three friends, praising one and condemning the others. Elihu is conspicuously not mentioned. What does God think of Elihu's speech? God is not saying. Elihu is a young man among elders, which casts doubt on his credentials. And yet he claims to be inspired, perhaps by God. Is this claim valid, or is it the excessive zeal of youth? The poet does not tell us.
Is God great? The answer is a resounding yes. God himself tells us so. Is God righteous? God Himself isn't saying, and the poet deliberately leaves this question open, undoubtedly because he did not know himself. Here is another case of artistic cunning. Elihu's unambiguous assertion of God's righteousness was enough to clear this work with the authorities and conventional opinion. But God's silence, and Elihu's ambiguous status, is the poet's veiled statement of his own uncertainty and doubt.
The dominating trait of existence is power, and the existing soul, no less than the psyche, must come to terms with the reality of power. The soul, no less than the psyche, is a seeker of power, but power of a different kind. The difference is between activity and passivity, between being in possession of power and being possessed by power.
The psyche seeks externalities--outward power, honors and possessions--all of that which is accidental to itself. The soul seeks to empower its own essence--all of that which is essential to itself. Both indeed seek power. But the psyche seeks material power--power as possession of what is other than itself. The soul seeks formal power--power of form, personality, character, identity, of what is essentially itself. The psyche seeks to possess power. The soul seeks to be powerful. The psyche seeks power through efficiency. The soul seeks power through inner wisdom. The psyche seeks to alter externality. The soul seeks to alter itself.
The psyche, in its folly, seeks possessions. The soul seeks freedom from possessions. The psyche, therefore, is a consumer, one who is given. The soul is a creator, one who gives. The psyche becomes dependent upon its possessions. The soul becomes independent by virtue of its achievements. The psyche places its hopes in the world, and thereby becomes dependent upon the world. The soul places its hopes in itself, and thereby becomes dependent upon only itself. The psyche possesses the world. The soul is in possession of itself.
The psyche worships in a place of worship--a building made of stone and mortar. The soul is its own place of worship, for it is an incarnation of form, of the God who is within. Prayer, for the psyche, is conversation with an external other. Prayer, for the soul, is communion within itself. The psyche is at best instructed through prayer. The soul is renewed.
The psyche, in its obsession with what is other than itself, becomes hopelessly absorbed with only itself. The soul strengthens itself until it is able to overcome itself. The psyche is aggrandizement of self that ends in obsession with self. The soul is empowerment of self that ends in transcendence of self. The psyche ends in introversion, with the particular locked into itself. The soul achieves extroversion, with the ego expanded into its larger self. The psyche ends as a narcissist. The soul ends as a saint. The power sought by the psyche ends in weakness. The power sought by the soul ends in empowerment. Only a powerful self can transcend itself. A weak self can only collapse into itself. The psyche and the soul each spin out their inner logic.
The psyche, in the end, finds only man. The soul, in the end, finds only God. The psyche culminates in passivity. Hopelessly split off from God, it wishes to be saved by God. The soul culminates in activity. Secure in its union with God, it becomes an agent in the service of God. The psyche dies in the world as it lived in the world. Its immortality is such as an expensive gravestone can provide. That in the soul which has become worthy of God is taken up into the Mind of God, and therein preserved. The soul, existing mind in itself, finds immortality in God, non-existential Mind in itself. The way to immortality is empowerment of self, but empowerment of a kind that culminates in transcendence of self.
The psyche, then, chooses the horizontal way of efficient cause. It seeks power upon power which it expects will lead to further power, and so it remains forever immersed in the cycle of power. The soul chooses the vertical way of final cause. It seeks a concentration of power that ends in the transcendence of power, a heightening and intensification of existence which finally passes beyond existence. The soul, in its cunning, teases existence to come out of the closet and become what it was always meant to be. For the non-existential is, after all, the true destiny of the existential, that at which existence has always unconsciously aimed. It is the soul, finally, not the psyche, Jacob not Esau, who is the spiritual first born of existence, and its true and essential heir. The end of existence is God in existence, the information of the real by the ideal, of efficiency by finality, of existence by its teleological other.
The psyche is a fighter and competitor, made for strife and war. For the goods of existence are limited, and cannot be shared. There is not enough to go around, and what there is must be possessed by some to the exclusion of the rest. Existence is press and pressure. It is a struggle for bread, for love, for honor and for power. But the goods of the soul, of the non-existential, are liberal and free. Knowledge may be possessed by one, but it is enhanced when possessed by many. The intellectual love of God elicits neither jealousy nor exclusion of others. Knowledge requires discipline and effort, but it is a perfection of peace, and disdains strife and war. Psychic life is one half destruction. It is enmeshed in the given. But the life of the soul is free. It is the unimpeded activity of the giver. Existence is the scene of illness, suffering and death. But the soul is robust in the non-existential, beyond peace and war, illness and health. The soul is active, not passive and subject to circumstance. It is a giver, and is independent of fate, of the given.
The psyche is Achilles torn and controlled by passion, unable to sleep, seeking impotent revenge on the dead body of Hector. Only when redeemed by reconciliation with Priam, the father of his slaughtered enemy, was Achilles able to sleep. For he had then risen to the level of soul, to the transcendence of existential conflict and hatred. As psyche he was driven to mutilate his dead enemy, insanely dragging his body in circles. But as soul he knew how to sanctify him, interrupting even war to allow for a proper ceremonial farewell.
The psyche must intervene. It is form fighting its way through the thickets of existence. The soul supervenes. It is form in itself, the hand of God which calms the turbulent waters.
The psyche is form seeking its fate in the nightmare world of grandeur and power. The psyche is at home among the pimps and the prostitutes, the kings and the queens, and relishes life in the street. The soul is a sinner reborn, worldly-wise from its experience as psyche, and now seeking to purify itself, to cleanse away the filth. The soul is form seeking redemption in baptismal waters, seeking perfect peace and perfect love in that which is pure value and purely ideal. Man is twice born. He is born first into existence, and then into non-existence. The first is the generation of his psyche. The second is the emergence of his soul. The psyche is in love with the world, but the soul is driven by love unto God. Augustine had to live in his psyche, before he could live in his soul.
The psyche is God in his otherness. The soul is God in his return unto himself. This is the existential Odyssey--experience followed by contemplation, Ulysses struggling and enduring, so that he might at last return home. Experience provides the content for contemplation, until contemplation becomes strong enough to rise beyond experience, and contemplate only itself.
Form is joy. The psyche is joy in living, lusting and loving. The soul is joy in the freedom and fulfillment of love in its finality. The psyche knows about life, and thinks that it knows about love. The soul knows more about both, for it is mind in the midst of passion. So far from being antagonistic, mind and passion chase and climb upon one another, each achieving heights which, by themselves, neither could attain. Even as the soul lives, it also understands, and even as it loves, it also knows the meaning of love. Passionate joy in existence, in living and loving, is pushed to new intensity by passionate joy in the non-existential context of existence, in the love of knowledge and the knowledge of values. The world is now seen in its significance, living and loving in the light of their ideal. Lust is the life of the psyche. But love is the desire of the psyche to become soul. It is the aspiration of form to become free. The psyche burns in order to become cool. The conflagration of the psyche is its re-emergence as soul. This is the mystery of the Phoenix, as well as of the Resurrection.
The psyche, confronted with becoming soul, is like one who, torn with ambivalence, resists falling in love. Love is desired and desirable, yet implies a loss of one's old self, to be replaced by--one knows not what. The paradox of the psyche is that, when it fulfills itself it transcends itself to become non-existential, to become soul. The paradox of the soul is that, when it becomes most godly, most non-existential, it fulfills the psyche, it enhances existence. The psyche posits the problems, and the soul signifies the solutions. The psyche is diremption, and the soul is synthetic union.
The soul is the psyche touched by God, a subterranean mean laborer suddenly raised out into the open air and the light of day. Rubbing his eyes until they are at home in this thing called light, he does not stop living and loving for all of that, but now he sees what it is to live, and perceives what it is to love. Now he knows. What had been caged vitality and lust under cover of darkness, is now life and love, free in the open air and under the light of the sun.
Existence and the psyche are abstract. For they are oblivious to their teleological context. The soul is the psyche made concrete, immersed in non-existential meaning and value. The psyche by itself merely lives. The psyche with a soul lives in the presence of the ideal. The psyche with a soul lives as one touched by God. Even as the world struggles to bring God into existence, the psyche strives to bring the soul into existence. The world gives birth to God, and the psyche gives birth to the soul. Even as God is the end of the world, the soul is the end of the psyche.
The psyche is power and plasticity--the current conclusion and heir of all the ancient evolving energy and force of existence. The psyche is a bomb--a time bomb.
The psyche is elastic at its limits. It is determinate but malleable potentiality. It cannot become anything at all, but can become more than ought to be permitted by the prison house of existence. This is because the psyche is more than existential. It is existence permeated by form and, thereby, susceptible to the influence of mind. You can, within limits, make your psyche into anything you want it to be--with the help of God. As is appropriate for a dirempted existent, the psyche is thus caught between the limited and unlimited, between finitude and infinity. Mind can intervene, but only after the dice have already been thrown.
The psyche is power--power as efficiency and power as potentiality. It can do and it can become. It is active and it is passive. Power as efficacy is an engine for formation, the efficient cause of meaning. Power as potentiality is the recipient of form, the receptacle of meaning. The psyche is potency and plasticity, everything that existence is, and everything that it has been able, over time, to become. The psyche, with the help of God, can as giver act upon itself as receiver, and can, in this way, create itself. Always, as the essential existent caught between dirempted opposites, the self which it makes can be either magnificent or diminutive, finite or infinite, ridiculous or sublime.
All of this presupposes a minimal good fortune and good health. Luck must be willing. The dice must fall at least not unfavorably. For the psyche is vulnerable to existential rot and disease. There are circumstances that cannot be salvaged. The loss of the capacity for at least minimal thought is the loss of the reason to live. Existence is free--free to destroy itself as well as to fulfill itself. The door is open.
Suffering, vegetative existence, and death are a horrible price to pay for freedom. But this is the price exacted by the inner logic of existential freedom. If existence were radically rational or radically coherent, everything in it would be healthy and in harmony with everything else, and nothing in it would be free. For all would be compelled to abide by the strict laws of organized arrangement which alone could make this harmony possible. All would be in bondage to intellect. Existential freedom presupposes the arbitrary, the nonrational, the empirical, the throw of the dice. Only in the non-existential, in God as soul or God in himself, can freedom be identical with perfect and coherent harmony. For this is the union and transcendence of both. The reward of existential freedom is autonomy and possession of one's self. Its price is suffering unto destruction and death.
The psyche relates to the soul as did the children of Israel to the Lord their God--stubbornly and with stiff-necked ambivalence and resistance. Without mind the psyche is chaotic nothingness. But neither does it wish to be overwhelmed and absorbed in what is different from itself. It wishes to maintain its existential identity, to remain itself. The psyche fears engulfment by God as much as it does abandonment by God. The overcoming of abandonment is intellect. The overcoming of engulfment is will. Mediated and finally fused together by feeling, these are existential mind, the immanence of God. Feeling is thus the existential expedient which heals the dirempted separation of will and intellect. In the non-existential, feeling, will and intellect pass beyond themselves into something better than themselves, and in God in himself, they are one.
The psyche is a bomb--a plastic bomb. The only uncertainty is whether its release will be chaotic and destructive, or controlled and directed by form--or whether it will be disarmed and rendered harmless before it can do anything at all.
The way to disarm the psyche is to pervert the soul. The soul ought to be the fulfillment of the psyche, and ought to rejoice in every psychic success. It can be perverted instead into the oppressor of the psyche, its whoremaster and slavemaster. This is a condition euphemistically called false consciousness.
The soul and the psyche together are coerced into believing that they are something other than what they are. The soul becomes the evil master of what the psyche is permitted to think, and the psyche becomes the recipient of an identity which is not its own, but which it is nevertheless forced to believe in, to live in, and to own. The soul, which ought to be the ideal which the psyche generates and toward which it strives, becomes instead an alien ideal which is imposed from without and by which the psyche is twisted into a grotesque caricature of its authentic self. What ought to be an expression is instead an impression and an oppression. The proper existential order between the psyche and the soul is reversed, and the soul, instead of being free to soar, becomes chained to and dependent upon its successful suppression of the psyche. The master is also a slave. The psyche, which had been made to erupt outwardly, instead explodes inwardly, and turns its immense energy and power against itself.
The superego, at its best, is an integration of the form or identity of the individual with that of his social context. At its worst it is an alien and controlling externality. The function of the superego, at its best, is to control psychic excess and overflow. It, like morality, whose instrument it ought to be, is there to hold and maintain a stable identity or system of values--to perpetuate form. But, when the soul is alienated from itself, this same soul becomes the stuff of the dominating and sadistic superego. From being a transcendent union of freedom and determination, it becomes a man trap, an iron cage.
The superego in general, whether healthy or pathological, is the soul co-opted, materialized, and frozen into rigidity. It is the soul overcome by existence and coerced into its service. The superego is a material precipitate from the free play of form. It is the soul returned to its existential origin and become psychic. It is thought solidified and hardened into a weapon of coercion, the soul frozen in the stiffness of death.
Without a soul there could be no superego. The soul is a function become independent of the psyche from which it originated. There is now an autonomous principle, and this provides the potential for opposition to the spontaneous animal interests of the psyche. Only pure form in itself could be so free and malleable as to either create or introject an alien ideal which the psyche could never have generated from itself. That it comes from the soul rather than the psyche is what gives the superego its psychological sanction and power to dictate, as if from above.
The soul is an existential function become non-existential, which, freed from the press of existence, can represent imperatives other than those of existence. The soul teaches the psyche to seek more than success. The soul is a fateful addition. For it makes possible intrapersonal conflict. It transforms what had been a self-confident and spontaneous organism into one fraught with conflict, criticism and self-doubt. It does nothing less than transform action into thought. It changes what had been an existential automaton into a thinking substance. The challenge then becomes to regain the power to act without losing the ability to think--to achieve spontaneity that is also self-critical and controlled. This is the overcoming of dirempted opposites, and is nothing less than the existence of God.
The general principle is that, in existence, action is primordial and thought derived. Before there can be thought there must be inward conflict and opposition. There must be a separate principle with an opposing vector. The existential must be countered by the non-existential, the psyche by the soul. It is not conflict with the world that generates thinking. Thought is not instrumental. It is conflict with the world within. Thought is self-derived, fundamentally and essentially contemplative, an end in itself. Thought is not a problem solver. Thought is the problem. It must resolve itself. This is the existential vocation of man and God.
The soul is at once the fulfillment and the nemesis of the psyche. So God stood to the children of Israel. God is the end of the world as both its fulfillment and its annihilation. God is the activity of aufheben.
The instinct of the children of Israel was sound when they rebelled against God, as also when they rendered obedience unto him. The former was an expression of their existential identity, threatened by something new and alien to itself. The latter was also an expression of their existential identity, recognizing now that what had been alien was also most truly itself. What was needed, and what repeatedly had to be tenuously and imperfectly achieved, was an integration of nature with God, of existential power with non-existential value, of the psyche with the soul. The vocation of the psyche is to integrate itself with the soul. The vocation of man is to reconcile himself with God.
The psyche and the soul together constitute the two-edged sword of freedom. The soul slices away the bonds of nature. The psyche severs the shackles of God. The soul is the non-existential freed from existence. The psyche is existence freed from God. To live well is to live in that which is best--that which is best in the psyche, and that which is best in the soul.
The tension between the psyche and the soul is the necessary condition for freedom. Freedom is freedom from natural determinism and freedom from determination by God. Without dualism, neither could there be freedom. The soul is the condition of freedom from nature. The psyche is the condition of freedom from God. The psyche represents the claims of existence, and the soul represents the counterclaims of the non-existential, of God. And yet, this war of contraries is a lovers' quarrel, and the ideal toward which it strives is perfect union. This is the fulfillment of nature and the realization of the divine. It is the culmination of existence and the existence of God.
The psyche in itself is a union of existence with non-existential form. The psyche is in this way trapped in the existential diremption between determinism and freedom. It is mechanically determined and spiritually free. It is in perpetual contradiction with itself. The soul is the non-existential transcendence--destruction and preservation--of existential contradiction. It is the higher synthesis of freedom and determinism into something other that is more than either, and, in its radical determination, it is radically free. And yet, the diremption of the psyche is its freedom from the soul. It will not conform to the soul. It will be itself. It will not slavishly imitate the non-existential. In the midst of contradiction, it exists. It is free. It has its own thing. It is itself.
The psyche is caught and torn between the two opposite and antithetical moments of existential freedom--the arbitrary and the rational. You cannot have freedom without reason, which places you in control. But neither can you have freedom without the arbitrariness of will, which breaks the iron necessity of reason. One contradicts the other, but freedom can do without neither. This is existence radically dirempted. Existential freedom is of necessity a matter of checks and balances, an uneasy compromise between opposing powers--between the psyche and the soul, the will and the intellect, the arbitrary and the rational. Existential freedom is First Freedom.
Final Freedom is the freedom of the non-existential. So far from being a prudent and calculated compromise between opposing powers, it is their transcendent union in a higher synthesis, in which contraries are--not reconciled--but overcome, transcended and fused into a profound harmony. First Freedom is the freedom of the psyche, but Final Freedom is the freedom of the soul. A prime illustration of the latter is the creativity of the artist or thinker, which is spontaneous even in its obedience unto law.
The very circumstances which make First Freedom an issue also guarantee its success. That which makes it questionable also answers the question. The very conditions which make First Freedom desirable, also make it assured. For were there no diremption, the question of freedom would never arise, nor would there be a need or drive for freedom. Freedom is only called for when there is something you need to be free from--a second external and alien principle which is therefore a genuine threat. First Freedom is freedom from. For example, mechanical determinism would not be an issue or an abrogation of freedom unless there were something other--mind--to be compared with it and set off against it, to be threatened by it. Why would the human animal be fearful of, or even aware of, mechanical determination--unless he had a mind? In a radically monistic world, freedom would not be an issue, because the concept of freedom would never arise. But this posing of the problem is also the positing of its solution. The very fact that there is a second and opposing principle is the guarantee that the first will not hold absolute sway. There will be resistance. There will be a fight. So First Freedom is not given, but is the outcome of war. Rarely is there unconditional surrender, but rather an uneasy truce between opposing powers which eye each other warily. First Freedom is born of conflict and, at its best, ends in compromise and cooperation. Final Freedom achieves a different solution--not by the balance of powers, but by the balance of mind--not a compromise, but an overcoming of opposites through their transcendence and union. This is the finality of freedom, and the existence of God.
One who has never challenged God is a soul without a psyche. And that, for an existent being, is to be a eunuch. The psyche is the principle of rebellion against God. It is, therefore, when left unchecked by the soul, the principle of evil. Never forget that you are both a psyche and a soul. Without one you are evil. Without the other you are impotent. We here arrive at a new understanding of evil: the subjugation of the soul by the psyche; or, the assimilation of the soul to the psyche.
We may generalize this further: Evil is a trait peculiar to existence, and is the outcome of its diremption. There are two principles in existence--the existential and the non-existential, the psyche and the soul. Evil may be understood as any imbalance between the two. Existence, as always, is a balance or compromise between opposing forces. Evil is any disruption of this compromise. This applies as well to the triumph of the soul over the psyche as to that of the psyche over the soul. This, too, is evil. For this is a turning away from existence, a deficiency in being. And existence, being, is good. This, paradoxical though it may seem, is Augustinian evil.
Evil, then, may be understood as an imbalance in the diremption of existence. The non-existential, which transcends diremption and compromise in a higher synthetic unity, is therefore beyond good and evil. The non-existential, in itself, is not susceptible to corruption. There are, then, two kinds of evil--a turning away from the non-existential and a turning away from existence, a turning away from God and a turning away from man.
Evil is loss of the human in what is other than the human--a loss of man's naturalness to his divinity, or a loss of his divinity to nature. To man alone it pertains to be good or evil. Human nature is the good, and a loss of this nature to either nonhuman pole is evil. Evil weighted down by existence is a turning away from God. Evil denying existence is an identification with God. One denies God, or one presumes to be God. These are really two sides of a single phenomenon. The former is animality--anger, lust, gluttony, greed and sloth. The latter is hypertrophied spirituality--envy and pride. Evil is either piety or spirituality unrestrained by the other. Evil is piety or spirituality without charity.
But even evil as flight from existence--as unrestrained soul--is nevertheless an evil of the psyche rather than the soul. For the psyche alone is dirempted and therefore susceptible to evil. The soul is, in itself, non-existential and therefore incorruptible. The soul, when it lives within itself, acknowledges its true status as God in his partiality. It does not assert itself to be God in himself. For, in itself, it is not impelled to error by psychic lust for power.
Evil, then, is the denial by existence of its own nature as dirempted. It is the loss, by existence, of its existential identity, just as it is a loss, by humanity, of its human identity. Existence thinks to overcome diremption by asserting either extreme and denying the opposite. The opposite nevertheless remains, and must inevitably assert its claims. This is a poor caricature of the non-existential freedom from diremption, which is an inclusion of opposites in a transcendent unity.
If existential freedom is a balance between opposing powers, evil is the reverse image of freedom--the subjugation of either power by the other. The opposite of evil is not goodness. The opposite of evil is freedom. If evil is a denial of existence and a denial of humanity, it is also a denial of freedom. Evil is a betrayal of man's identity as human and free.
Evil may finally be defined, most succinctly, as the dissociation of the psyche and the soul. Simple evil is when you live either in the psyche without direction by the soul, or in the soul without ground in the psyche. Compound evil is when you do both. You satiate your psyche and hypertrophy your soul. You deny God and pretend to be God. Existence is rent asunder. This is voluntary servitude unto two masters. It is a violation of humanity and a violation of freedom. It is evil.
Evil, whether it be satiation of the psyche or hypertrophy of the soul, whether it be denial of God or identification with God, and whether it be simple or compound, turns out finally to be a single phenomenon--the unbalanced aggrandizement of the self by itself. Humanity, like existence, is diremption and a balance between opposing forces. Imbalance is disaster. Each side of the self must be balanced and held in check by the other. Otherwise the self will swell and magnify itself into that self-delusion which thinks that, by destroying God, it is able to become God.
What, then, of the soul when, in itself, it achieves union with God in unimpeded contemplative activity? Here is the epitome of existential achievement. But is not this the extremity of dissociation of the soul from the psyche? And is not this a collapse of the balance of power, and a consequent loss of humanity? Would not this, then, be evil?
This is not dissociation. It is rather transcendence and aufheben. So far from separating itself from the psyche, the soul takes it into itself, integrates it, incorporates it and achieves with it a transmuting and transcending union. The existing soul is a function of the body. It can never leave the body, but transforms it into an instrument of itself. If the soul were to attempt to deny the psyche, to dissociate from it and wish it away, the psyche would nevertheless remain and would assert its claims. It would make the soul psychic, subterraneously infecting it with lust for power and causing it to confuse itself with God.
As for the balance of power, that is not here destroyed but also transcended. Existence has jumped vertically to a higher plane, to the non-existential, where the diremption and balance of opposing forces is no longer an issue. First Freedom is indeed lost, but only because it is no longer relevant or desired. It has been transmuted into Final Freedom. The diremptions of existence are here overcome, and this is the beyond of good and evil. This is both a dissolution and a fulfillment of humanity. If this is, finally, a victory of the soul over the psyche, it is one in which the psyche is not defeated but raised and magnified into all that it is able to become. And if the stubborn psyche is nevertheless still not satisfied, it knows that it has time and circumstance on its side. Existence cannot long maintain this level of achievement. The psyche will reassert itself, and will smite the non-existential. First Freedom will be restored.
The correlative concepts of a creator and a creature are the most pernicious imaginable, the most corrupting of virtue, and the most destructive of humanity and human freedom. They are at once an excuse for, and an incitement to, evil. No wonder Adam and Eve ate the apple. Anything to get rid of that intrusive tyrant who was pulling their strings. In this one decisive act of rebellion, they canceled the creation, refused to be creatures, and became human and free. They became autonomous selves, no longer creatures of God, who had created and thereupon decreed their nature, whose possession they had been. Their departure from the pet home was thereupon abruptly requested. Man is of a character so rowdy and unrefined that he will invariably get himself kicked out of any decent hotel. God said it: Man has become as one of us.
Why is it less pernicious to be thrown together by chaos than to be created by a creator God? Because a creator is an intelligence and, therefore, a dispenser of meaning, of form. It is a giver. The pot cannot tell the potter what it wishes to be good for. Its meaning is given--and given from without, from what is other than itself. But chaos is without meaning, and therefore leaves a vacuum of meaning. It generates the arbitrary which, being given no meaning, can give itself its own meaning. The arbitrary is not created--given meaning from without. It is the creator of itself--giving meaning from within. The very limitations imposed upon the arbitrary by its own arbitrary weight, its own accidental character, become a medium out of which it fashions itself. It is, to this extent, autonomous and free. It is free to call God into existence, to inform itself. The arbitrary is opportunity, as is also the chaotic. Do not fear chaos. For form is irrepressible. It is omnipresent and everywhere self-insinuating. Largely unlimited by form, the chaotic and the arbitrary are the potential for the production of form. They are the indispensable condition of freedom, for freedom is form generating itself.
The self-information of the arbitrary is at once the action of soul and the genesis of soul. It is the self-generation of soul. An informed arbitrary and an informing soul enter existence simultaneously. They are two sides of a single process. This is the process of freedom, for it is the self-generation of one's self. Even the arbitrary begins with some accidental form. But form, however accidental, terminates accident. It is the giver of meaning. For form is incipient soul. Form generates further form. Soul generates itself. The soul is a giver, and a giver cannot be given. It cannot be created. The soul is a giver, the creator of itself. The function of soul is to give meaning to the arbitrary, to inform the chaotic, to bring God into existence. Such is the form-ative power of mind. Here is the creator God.
An organism is only equivocally generated by form. An organism is generated by matter which happens upon form. It culminates in form, perhaps is guided by form, but nevertheless achieves form through that which is other than form itself. Not so with mind, soul. For this is form generating form. Mind, alone, can generate itself. You cannot create a mind. God is the cause of Himself.
And yet man is not God. Pure form, God in himself, can purely create himself. Man is form struggling to inform the arbitrary and the chaotic. Soul is a giver, but it must work with what is given. The arbitrary, accidental but determinate form, is what is given. Man, defined as existing soul, is by definition freedom limited by the conditions of existence, a giver limited by the given. The given is there to be given meaning, but it is nevertheless given. It is an opportunity for activity, and a limitation on what activity can accomplish. Human soul can make itself, but it can make itself--not anything whatever.
The one and only function of the soul, then, is to overcome the arbitrary. This is its reason for being--to endow the arbitrary with meaning, with a reason for being. The information of the arbitrary is the self-creation of the soul. Meaning and what is meant emerge simultaneously.
The psyche is the arbitrary risen from the chaotic. It is what the soul has to work with. The function of the soul is to give meaning to this arbitrary, to transform the psyche from a meaningless surd to an end in itself--to that which contains its own form, its meaning, its identity, its justification for being, entirely within itself. The soul is the self-formation of the psyche. The psyche, by the activity of soul, informs itself until it becomes the final cause of itself. A new meaning, a new reason for, has come into being. It is this particular arbitrary made translucent with this particular intelligibility, and it is something new under the sun. It is new and unique because it is the outcome of itself which has been created by itself. Such as this could never be kept by a creator in his hot house, never possessed as a pet, not even through the lure of a creature's comforts.
Man is born free, and yet he is everywhere in chains. Iron externalities ensnare man, pin him down, and, over and over in perpetual repetition, inform him and impress upon him that he is other than, and less than, everything that he is able to be. These are sweet whisperings from without, the voices of the world, which insinuate and generate themselves into an alien and controlling mental structure of steel, innocently and innocuously named--the superego. This rigid externality, this foreign body, is the living soul necessarily deadened and hardened by the exigencies of existence. It is the voice of death from without, without which life in the world cannot succeed. It is the controlling introject which civilizes man, but too often by destroying that in him which is aggressive, vital and best.
Do you want to become everything that you are able to be? Then your superego, like Carthage, must be destroyed. You must dissect in order to murder. Know yourself, and you will find everlasting life. Vital form, in its fertility and flexibility, must be extracted from the hard rind of death. Exorcise your introjects! Like Ulysses, slaughter the usurpers, the pretenders to what is yours. Reject the sweet and seductive whispers which enslave. Castrate the alien interloping god within. You are the god. His power is yours. The superego is within, and it is yours. It has only the power which you have given it. The power which you surrendered, you can reclaim. It was yours to give, and it is yours to take. Seize your own boundless power. Choose freedom. Take possession of your self!
The soul is the giver of meaning, the creator of truth, and the representative of God here on earth. Absolute truth, if there is such, and what it might be like, can be known only to God in himself, who is unknown to us, because he is beyond existence. But God in his partiality, God as human mind or soul, is the creator and knower of relative truth, truth for man, truth as we are able to learn it. Existing soul is the source of meaning for existence, without which existence is arbitrary, chaotic and absurd. Soul is the giver of the reason why and the reason for--mechanical law and teleological truth. As existing, soul is immersed in the mechanical. As non-existential, it belongs to the Telos. Soul gives form to existence by taking form from existence. It both elicits and creates. If there are universals or forms or laws, it is because mind discovers and creates them in that which is without mind. Existential form is the outcome of a cooperation between the giver and the given.
The nominalist position would be valid only if the world were without mind. For without mind there would be no form. What truth nominalism contains is merely abstract, because it abstracts from the existence of mind, of the non-existential. It is plausible only to those who believe that what can be perceived and therefore is real, is exhaustive of all. If they once acknowledge that they think, and truly understand that thought is not reducible to something other than itself, to what they say exists, then they must acknowledge that their position is, at best, partial. Nominalism holds that form must be real, or else it will be unreal. Form either exists, or does not exist. This is an abstraction from the non-existential, from what neither exists nor does not exist, from mind, from soul, from God.
Soul is the hand of God which imparts form. Form is light, and soul is the voice of God which says: Let there be light. Without soul, without mind, without the non-existential, the arbitrary would fade away into the chaotic, which would dissipate into nothingness.
But never underestimate the solidity, the resisting force and stubbornness, of existence. Any contemporary philosophy, to be adequate, must incorporate the insights achieved by Existentialism and Realism, as well as those of Idealism. Existence is not submissive or possessed, because existence is not a mere creature that has been created. Existence does not need to be created. Existence exists. Existence is stubborn and free. It will not be dominated. Soul is an alien in existence, and it cannot control what is fierce, independent, and other than itself. It can at best only cooperate with it.
The good is the self-assertion by existence of its own claims and right to be. Evil is the accompanying self-delusion by existence that it is exhaustive, that it encompasses all. Pride is therefore both good and evil. As the self-assertion by existence of itself, it is good. As the denial by existence of what is other than itself, it is evil. The good is justifiable self-assertion. It is positive. Evil is presumptuous denial. It is a negation. Evil is pride without humility--self-assertion that excludes all else. Humility is acknowledgment of the claims of the other, of the non-existential, of God. Humility, on the other hand, without pride, would be destructive of the existential, of self. Pride and humility therefore belong together, for either alone is pernicious. Existential virtue is, as always, a mean, a compromise between dirempted opposites. God looked at existence and saw that it was good. It became evil only when it denied the God who alone could pronounce it to be good.
The tragedy of the modern is the loss of the soul. What has been lost is nothing less than an entire human function. What has been lost is the meeting place of man and God. Our success in dealing with existence has also been the cause of our failure. For it has caused us to forget, or worse, despise, that which is beyond existence. The modern is spectacular goodness which is also evil to its core. It is pride without humility. For evil is the dissociation of the psyche from the soul, of pride from humility, of the existential from the non-existential.
The epistemological is parallel to the existential. For pride and humility are also the two moments of knowledge. Humility is the acknowledgment by existing psyche that without itself as soul or mind, as non-existential, neither could there be form. Pride is the acknowledgment by existing soul that, without itself as existing, as psyche, neither could it find any content to be formed. Our knowledge is of existence and is existential, and existence, as always, is dirempted. It is split into the knower and the known, the rational and the empirical, the a priori and the a posteriori, form and that which is formed, meaning and that which is meant.
The epistemological counterpart of existential evil, which denies God the non-existential, is nominalism, which denies form the non-existential. Each asserts the claims of the individual to the exclusion of what is other than itself. Nominalism is the epistemological counterpart of existential pride. The epistemological counterpart of exclusive existential humility, which asserts the claims of the non-existential to the exclusion of all that exists, would be a relentless a priori rationalism or idealism which would deny the importance of perception and experience in knowing. This otherworldly humility would assert the claims of the universal to the exclusion of those of the particular.
All of this is not to be confused with the free activity of soul or mind in itself, the activity of the non-existential as non-existential. Knowledge is existential, and is subject to the conditions of diremption, but pure thought is beyond both knowledge and existence, uninhibited by the diremptions of each. It is beyond good and evil, pride and humility, perception and reason, particular and universal. It is beyond these because it transcends them, synthesizes them into a higher unity. This is the pure activity of Mind or God in himself, and of God both in his partiality and impartiality. It is the free play of form in itself, pure act, the conversation of the gods. When accessible to the human mind, it is called philosophy, poetry and religion.
Faith is the power to act. It is readiness for action. It is the bow bent, taut, and eager to sing. To be without faith is therefore to be paralyzed by doubt--doubt about the objective, about the world, doubt about the subjective, about oneself, and doubt about the knowledge of both. The opposite of faith is skepticism, and this is inability to act. It is the bow unstrung, slack, and rendered harmless.
What gives faith? What gives the ability to act? What is the Giver?
Action presupposes a goal or end--a final cause. Without a purpose action is impossible. For action is active, and without a purpose there is but undirected passivity. To be passive is to flail chaotically. To have a final cause is to take control--to be active. Without an ideal there is at worst, paralysis, and at best, passivity. Action therefore presupposes ideality, value. Without the vertical there can be no action in the horizontal. Without the non-existential, existence can only let go, and passively flow. It can but give in to accident and necessity. This is efficient causality without final causality. Skepticism is, indeed, immersion in the efficient to the exclusion of the final. Faith is the overcoming of efficient causality by final causality. The striving of existence is from efficient to final causality, from psyche to soul, from the arbitrary to the intelligible, from skepticism to faith.
Only through faith, through that immediate contact with God which is awareness of the ideal, can existence come into its own, take charge of itself, stand up and act. Act presupposes pure act. Faith is existence when it is touched by God, freed from impotent passivity, and endowed with the power of action. So was Michelangelo's Adam activated by God. Existence is potentiality brought to actuality, to activity, by the lure of the ideal, by the immanence of God.
Faith, then, is empowerment by the ideal. And so faith is the presence of God in existence. It is the existence of God. And pure act, when it exists, acts in existence. It is action generated by faith in action, generated by faith in the living God. The existence of God multiplies and perpetuates itself. And so faith, the existence of God and empowerment by the ideal, is existence in action. This is the very opposite of skeptical self-doubt and inability to act. That is existence without its ideal, existence chaotically roughed up by efficient causes in the absence of their final cause.
The man of faith, then, is the man who is permeated by the ideal, who is an incarnation of the divine. The man of faith is the man who is well-formed, who possesses a powerful identity. Possession of identity, of form, of activity, is to have a mind. This is the existence of God and the power of action. A diffuse identity, a self that is weak and pallid and besides itself, is existential failure, failure to bring God into itself. This is skepticism that has stumbled and stopped short with itself.
Skepticism ought to be the beginning, and faith ought to be the end. Skepticism is the efficient cause of faith. Skepticism poses the problem, and faith posits the solution. One who has never been a skeptic will never be worth anything. For he is blissfully unaware of his passivity and lack of self. Skepticism is the beginning of faith. It is the acute awareness that there is a problem, without which that problem can never be solved. Skepticism is existence first touched by the non-existential, the incipient movement of existence towards God. Skepticism is the first taste of nectar, the opening round. Skepticism is, indeed, the commencement of soul, the birth of the soul from the psyche. Faith is the soul grown into its fulfillment. It is the psyche transformed from uncertain and hesitant passivity into pure and unimpeded activity. This is the psyche as authoritative, the psyche with an identity, the arbitrary risen to meaning and become mind. It is the psyche become soul, and it is the existence of God.
What, then, of existence by itself? Is existence nothing but lack, flaccidity, pure passivity? This would be to misunderstand existence, to reduce existence to nothing but a shadow of itself.
For existence is permeated by form. If existence is passive, it is also everywhere active. Existence, even apart from God, is animated by God. Existence is the anointed of God, without which it would also lack its profound talent for trouble, rebellion and heartache. Even existence without faith is filled with faith. Existence is never purely passive, never totally without faith, never entirely alienated from God. Existence, radically severed from God, would be impotent, but it is never hopelessly split from God. It is this presence of God in what is other than himself which empowers existence to rebel against this very God who empowers itself. Existence, even in alienation, is empowered by God. It is so empowered that it is existence, and existence alone, which can call God into itself.
Existence is act seeking to become pure act, the malformed seeking to become well-formed, psyche seeking to become soul. Existence is the striving to bring God into itself. Existence is the desperate desire and tearful longing for a God who will please, just exist.
Man is at war with God. And the war between man and God is a war between man and himself. The enemy is within. But which is the enemy and which is the self? This is one fight you cannot escape, for what is at stake is your self. Your self, like all that exists, is split. You cannot escape from yourself. Which self will conquer? Which will prevail?
Man is nothing if not existent, and man is nowhere if not in existence. Man loves strife and unreason and self-assertion. He exults in existence. He loves the accidental and contingent, the stubborn and the stupid, even as he loves also the necessary and the rational, the flexible and the prudent. He is at home in the middle of strife, and thrives on world war between dirempted opposites. Man luxuriates in his own sweet sweat. He is a lover of life.
And yet life strives for fulfillment. Existence aspires to become all that it is able to be. Existence, because it loves itself, is enraptured by the lure of its ideal self. But this ideal self, it soon discovers, transcends its self, even as it transcends existence itself. Existence is appalled. The ideal is the fulfillment of the real, but rapidly passes beyond the real. Psyche becomes soul, and soul soon slips away from psyche to pursue an agenda of its own. The sweetness of existence is overcome by the fullness of God. Existence, seeking to fulfill itself, becomes other than itself.
And so existence rebels. The psyche says stop. It returns to the real. Existence exults in the filth and beauty of sensation, and in the luminescence and opacity of intellect. There is no place like home, be it ever so brash and loud.
And yet existence is recalled by the ideal. Existence, true to its nature as dirempted, oscillates between itself and what is not itself, between existence and the non-existential, between the real and the ideal, between the psyche and the soul, between mind in the body and mind in itself, between the City of Man and the City of God.
Pure thought is not death, for it is irrelevant to death. Neither is it life, for it is the beyond of life. It is, perhaps, the best of both death and life. For it is peace without boredom, love without hate, and war without destruction. It is passion freed from the bondage of passion, vitality without mortality, and death without dying. It is the termination of life beyond which terminates all termination of life. This is the reward of the non-existential. This is what calls existence to itself.
And yet existence rebels. It desires its diremption. It longs for that lust which must fear disease, and that life which is shadowed by death. It flees God even as it desires God. It asserts its self, but will not fulfill itself, because that means to lose its self. It chooses that self which defines itself against the not-self, and disdains that self which is beyond the self and which is not itself. It fights for its identity, and takes pride in its triumph and victory. It takes pride in pride, and justifiably so.
And yet, in a moment of emptiness and despair, it longs to end its oscillation between pride and humility, and its need for both. It seeks to escape from diremption, from the perpetual vibration between reason and passion, love and hate, life and death. It seeks not peace, but what is beyond peace. It seeks not to escape war, but to transmute it. It seeks to retain the lust and violence of war, even as it overcomes its destruction and evil. It seeks to retain the lucidity and freedom of peace, even as it overcomes its stagnation.
It seeks God, even as it has rebelled against God. Existence is, indeed, part God which is other than God. And so existence is aspiration after God even in rebellion against God. Always dirempted, existence is torn and at war with God, even as it is at war with itself.
Paul was one step beyond existence, and so he was a saint. He was a psyche who wanted to become a soul. He, at least, knew what he wanted to do, never mind his inability to do it. Existence does not even know what it wants, never mind whether it is able to do it. Paul was torn by inability, but existence is torn by indecision. Paul was at war with his psyche, but existence is at war with its soul. Paul was at war with existence, which he hated. But existence is at war with God, who it loves.
Reason is a lucky find, a treasure elicited from the Mind of God. Reason is a work of art, a statue sculpted by man from Mind. Like any statue, it is dependent upon the medium, the Mind, out of which it is carved. But the carving itself was done by man rather than by Mind.
For there is nothing prior, nothing ingrained in Mind, which dictated that reason must come out the way it did. There were endless possibilities which have now been lost to us. Pure act, Mind in itself, what we call God, is infinitely fertile because it is not subject to existential limitation and rigidity. It is neither structured nor without structure, for it is the beyond of both. Reason is an extract, an abstraction from Mind, poured out and frozen into an existential stability which stubbornly resists inevitable existential change. There is more in Mind, this infinitely fertile source. So what we call reason is only what we have now. What it will be a millennium from now, we do not know. What it has been in the past, we are only able to reconstruct.
Feeling, sensation, imagination, will--and these are only the beginning--these are also carvings from Mind, splinters from the non-existential that have been drawn into existence. The physiological and physical conditions which cause sensation, for example, to occur, are the existential instruments for extracting this precious jewel from the Mind of God. Like any diamond, sensation is an extract and an abstraction. But unlike the diamond in the rough, that from which sensation is extracted is not crude ore and waste material, but a rich and complex mental context apart from which sensation is limited, alienated, and other than itself. If you were to pull a star from the sky, it would be magnificent. But it is greater by far when seen within its heavenly context.
Existence is an analysis of the Mind of God. The conditions of existence make possible these abstractions from God, and, thereby, the analysis of Mind. It is the great privilege of existence to be able to see God in his partiality--to be able to isolate and know fragments of Mind. Existence is able to know God in a way that God does not know himself. This analysis is not confined to the illustrations cited, such as sensation and reason. Existence is everywhere and at all levels analytic of God. This is true of the motion of inanimate matter, the activity of the simplest forms of life, and the creation of the great scientific, philosophical and religious systems and works of art.
But if existence is an analysis of the Mind of God, it is an analysis that is arbitrary, unsystematic, and unplanned. It all depends on the throw of the dice. Existence flails out blindly and brings whatever it can grab from God into itself. What it can grab is not a fixed atom or element, but a molten fragment, an arbitrary extract from a higher unity. This can, and indeed must, evolve over time. The more that evolution occurs, the more that there is change amidst permanence, the greater the variety of forms that present themselves, the more we know of the Mind that is God.
What are the means by which existence is able to analyze God, to bring abstractions from Mind into existence? Matter is the instrument of analysis--above all matter organized into living forms. Without the organism, sensation, for example, could not exist. It would remain non-existential, present only to the Mind of God. Existence, then, uses matter to analyze God. For matter is, by its very nature, limited, partial, and therefore exclusionary. Matter is a natural instrument of abstraction. When it achieves form, it achieves only partial form. It must be something in particular. It therefore captures only a part, a fragment, and in this way automatically abstracts, picks apart, and analyzes. What, regarded from one point of view, is a "fetching" or "pulling down" or "abstracting" from God, may also be regarded as a rising up, a concretion, a fulfillment of existence. It is realized potentiality, the material organism in unimpeded activity, informed matter, matter in act. Existence strives to fulfill itself, and the fulfillment of existence is the existence of God. Without matter, then, neither could reason--nor anything else--exist.
If sensation and imagination are extracts, abstractions from the Mind of God, does God then receive sensations, or think with pictures? These are, to repeat, abstractions or partialities only as existent. As non-existential they are neither abstractions nor elements. They are there raised, transformed and incorporated into a concrete context and unity. Existence, which we anthropomorphically presume to be concrete, is really abstract. God alone is concrete. God, furthermore, is pure act. The divine Mind is active and never passive. It is therefore productive and never receptive. The Mind of God does not receive, as if from without, those forms which correspond to what we call sensations and pictures. The Mind of God is all in all, and produces these from itself. Existence is given, but God gives. The Mind of God is form generating form. Only in existence, only when these forms are captured in matter and thereby materially transformed, do they become what we call sensations and pictures. The Mind of God is form in its purity, but the Mind of God is beyond existence.
Existence dirempts, and whatever passes into existence enters, at its own peril, into the realm of diremption. Diremption is itself a kind of analysis, and is part of the analytic power of existence. The grabbings from God, when they have been dragged into existence, automatically have a bipolar nature, dictated by their origin as divine and their destiny as existential. This provides a natural line of cleavage for existential diremption and analysis. And so we may expect to find these abstract extracts dirempted in existence into existential and non-existential poles. We may also expect to find them caught in diremption between finitude and infinity--two existential categories--so that it is possible to argue cogently that they are either one or the other. Mind in itself is alone beyond finitude and infinity, beyond existential diremption, because it alone is beyond existence.
So reason appears as either practical or theoretical. Furthermore, interpretation of reason with an existential emphasis shows it to be instrumental and analytic, essentially a means. But a non-existential approach shows it to be contemplative, speculative and synthetic, an end for its own sake. Reason may be understood as an instrument of finitude, or as an opening to the infinite. Feeling may have the quality of importunate pressure, driven and demanding, essentially aimed at action. But it may also be liberal and free, a cause and concomitant of insight and peace, essentially aimed at cognition and contemplation. As passion it may enslave with the weight of its finitude. As emotion it may liberate and raise one to the infinite. Sensation may be a sign for action, a matter of desperation, or an object for contemplation, an end in itself. Mathematics is caught between practice and theory, between technical application and theoretic delight in the play of mind in itself. The concept of imagination has evolved from one pole to the other--from a prosaic thinking with pictures to a synthetic, creative and speculative activity. Will can be understood as a practical determinant of individual action, or as a supersensible metaphysical substrate, the underlying essence of the real.
By lining up all of these dirempted opposites according to their opposite poles, we have the beginning of the distinction between the psyche and the soul. The psyche and the soul are indeed themselves partialities, abstractions from the Mind of God, caught up in the oppositions of dirempted existence. The psyche, immersed in existence, is analytic and pragmatic, an instrument of finitude. The soul, directed to God, is contemplative, synthetic and speculative, called by the infinite to what is beyond both finitude and infinity. There follows an illustration of this cleavage between the psyche and the soul.
History is the outcome of existence operating at the level of psyche, which occasionally rises to soul. History, like existence in general, is an analysis of God, an epiphany of form. It is an analysis generated by the actions of psyche and soul.
This revelation of form is, for the most part and for better or worse, chaotic, unplanned and accidental. The advent of epiphany does indeed occasionally pass beyond chaos, and may even become deliberate and rational. This happens when form, already revealed, finds itself through good fortune in a position of power and able to seize control. Then form generates and perpetuates itself, and history, for a time however brief, becomes rational. Form, once achieved and then overthrown and cast aside, enters a background reserve of intelligibility and pressure for the ideal. This works to counter the forces of chaotic unreason.
Much of what history is depends on how it is told--on whether it is written by the psyche or the soul. The psyche will attempt to tell you what happened. The soul will attempt to tell you the meaning of what happened. One attempts a literal statement of facts, the other a rendition of their ideal import. History as related by the soul is necessarily speculative and synthetic--a work of art. The psyche will analyze history into its diremptions, but the soul will attempt to bring these together into a higher unity. The great minds of existence are both psyche and soul, and the best historians will attempt to be both.
But what of those who make history? It is a matter of overwhelming import whether they be men of the psyche or men of the soul. The psyche may be a competent craftsman, and an expert at efficiency. A man of the psyche can accomplish much. The psyche may also be a calculating and amoral actor, pretending to be soul when he is not, disguised by appearance of reverence for the ideal, and accomplishing any end by any means that will aggrandize himself. The psyche may be a craftsman or a crook, but it will never be a soul. For the soul acts always in the presence of God. It lives in the union of time and eternity, and its actions here and now capture the light of the ideal. The soul as a maker of history is an efficient cause guided by a final cause, an expert at mechanical technique immersed in its teleological context. The psyche may be a prosaic master of men, but the soul is a maker in the service of God. The psyche is a politician, perhaps a good one. The soul is a philosopher-king.
What finally emerges as history, then, is the outcome of the interaction between the man of action, the doer, whether he be psyche or soul, and the man of contemplation, the chronicler or poet, whether he be psyche or soul. The tale that emerges, when it is accomplished with excellence and is history at its best, is a partial epiphany of the Mind which is God. It is an abstraction accomplished by a synthesis which is also an analysis. It is the ideal in the real, God in existence. It is the end of the world, the existence of God.
How can you bring God into existence?
By building your mind and cherishing your body. Read everything. Care for your self. Form is joy. Pursue both form and joy.
You must tolerate sorrow so that you can appreciate its opposite. Form is light. You must endure the darkness so that you can know what it means to live in the light. You must in any case suffer both sorrow and darkness. Heroism cherishes these as the way to light and joy. For existence is dirempted, and the way to either pole is through its opposite. Existence must first destroy you, before it will permit itself to be conquered. You are a Phoenix. Despair is the way to salvation. Happiness weakens and suffering makes. Use your torment to make yourself. Make yourself transcend weakness and strength, suffering and happiness. Make yourself transcend your self.
This is the holy joke and sacred surprise. You have nurtured and built yourself in order to surpass your self. You are a Phoenix, but you emerge as something new. The psyche is crucified by existence, and redeemed by its determination to live. The will to survive is more than biological. It is existential stubbornness and incarnated mind. It is the will of the living God. Mind wills that, through suffering, psyche should emerge, not as psyche, but as soul. For soul is born of suffering. Read the Book of Job. This is how mind makes itself. This is the new born king. This is the birth of soul, the birth of the blues.
That is one way to generate the non-existential--through the mortification of existence. The other way, paradoxically, is exactly the opposite--through the enhancement of existence. An empowered self will overcome its self. Existence fulfilled will transcend itself. Suffering generates soul, but so also does success. Overflowing power magically passes beyond power as if, having conquered all and thereby threatened with boredom, it feverishly seeks a challenge that is exotic and new.
So the way to soul is through either crucifixion or creation, through either death or life, through either Jesus or Apollo. Soul may be either resurrected death or enhanced life. In the hotbed of incest which is existence, these two near relations may, indeed most often must, even cohabit within the same person. Most paradoxical of all, each incorporates the character of the other. Apollo was a killer, a marksman of death, and Jesus the giver of everlasting life. Christianity achieved joy in the midst of suffering, and ancient Greece, as Nietzsche has taught us, saw the darkness which crept upon the light.
The two ways finally become one, as they must, when the movement is from dirempted existence to the transcendent unity of what is beyond existence. Soul is the beyond of sorrow and happiness, annihilation and fulfillment, suffering and success. Mind is more than these because Mind is immortal. When psyche becomes soul, mind becomes Mind, passive and active, impassive and impassioned, temporal and eternal, suffering and at peace. The tragic is the comic, and the soul is the author of both.