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This section was written while reading:
Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).
To be without mind is to be without God. You can take being away from God, and he will still be God. You can take goodness away from God, and he will still be God. You can even take love away from God, and he will still be God. But you cannot take mind away from God and still expect to have a God. Mindlessness is Godlessness. For God is mind. Goodness, love, and all else of value--all presuppose a mind. Without mind there cannot be goodness, there cannot be love, and there cannot be God.
Existence does not find God by renouncing itself. That would be to annihilate itself by surrendering itself. The way to God is not by escape from existence, but through the enhancement of existence. Existence can find God only in existence. Existence cannot go to God, so God must come to existence. For existence is the womb which gives birth to God, and God must emerge from itself. Existence must generate mind, which must then transmute existence after the manner of its own intelligence and intelligibility.
Existence, when it is deprived of mind, is vanity. This is the world sunk in mindless morass. Existence without mind is world without meaning, man without value, overcome by vanity. Vanity is the breeding box of boredom, which then mutates into melancholy. Boredom is evoked by meaninglessness, and meaninglessness is the thrown dice, the arbitrary unredeemed by thought. This is why gamblers must cultivate ever more sensational thrills, in a desperate effort to escape from a meaninglessness which is nothingness. Mind evokes meaning, and overcomes melancholy, by generating a reason why, a reason for, a reason to live, a reason to be.
Mind, the non-existential, is prior even to being, because it is that which justifies being, which gives it value, a reason why. A final cause, the teleological context, comes afterwards in time, in existence, but it is prior in value and import.
Mind is prior even to love, for there can be no love apart from a mind which loves, and it is mind which assigns love its meaning and value. Mindless love is vanity. It is uncontrolled passion, passivity. It runs its animal course, and then collapses into boredom. Love is existential, and like everything else in existence, is without value, without meaning, until it is informed by mind. The formlessness of passion, like the void, gives the appearance of infinity, but it is really the absence of mind. Love becomes charity, Agape, only when it has been reworked by mind.
On what grounds is articulate intellect judged to be merely human, while inarticulate love is declared to be divine? Must one be dumb to know God? Intellect and artifact are not narcissistic mirrors which distract from God, but existential incarnations of the Mind of God. They are not idols, but icons. For they are the outcome of will. Existence when it wills is an epiphany--not the renunciation of itself, but the fulfillment of itself in the excellence that is God.
Ought one to renounce self-assertion, obediently accepting silence and passivity? Is this what God wills, that only he should will? This would be the way, not to God, but to authoritarian domination and submission. Existence was not given will, spirit, so that these might be broken. Existence was given will because, when this is truly will, it is the will of the living God.
Existence, then, must surpass itself, not in order to depart from itself, but so that it may fulfill itself. Only mind does not have to be. And God thinks without being. [cf. God Without Being p. 138.] But existence must either be or not be. Existence must be, or else it will be nothing. Existence cannot flee from itself. It cannot go to God. It would in that way evaporate into the void. And so existence must bring God into itself. The end of the world is the existence of God.
This end may be a fulfillment or a termination, a goal achieved or a terminal illness. But even as a termination, it remains existential. Existence never departs from itself. It cannot flee from itself. This termination turns out to be itself a fulfillment, and it is in this way that the conflicting meanings of end are resolved. The goal of existence is to terminate itself, but only in a way that fulfills itself. This is aufheben. The vocation of existence is to overcome the diremption between end as termination and end as fulfillment, to synthesize these into a higher, most fundamental unity. The goal of existence is to become itself through the termination of itself. This is an end for itself, but is not an end of itself. The goal of existence is to overcome itself by overcoming diremption, by achieving the union of annihilation and fulfillment. The vocation of existence is to bring God into itself. Here is our conclusion. This is what we mean by the end of the world. It is a termination of the world that is a fulfillment of the world. It is a submission to God that is obedience to oneself. This is nothing less than a resolution of fundamental diremption--between efficiency and finality, real and ideal, man and God. It is a victory over the chasm between the mind and the body. It is the fulfillment of the task set for existence--for it is the overcoming of the conflict inherent in dualism. This is the outcome of the synthesizing and transcending activity of mind.
Here is our elusive ideal--that of a man who lives and acts forcefully and well in existence, even as, or rather only because, he is overcome and permeated by God. He is one who does justice to existence by obeying God, and does justice to God by obeying existence. Such a man would be a saint and a philosopher-king. He would be classical mind touched by divine infinity. He would have overcome the diremption between idol and icon. He would know his limits, and he would know the unlimited. He would be pride in humility, poise in passion, humanity overcome and fulfilled. He would be poverty which is plenty, love transmuted by mind, man in union with the classical Good, which is also the Biblical God. He would be exalted intellect--a union of Greek thought and Biblical prophecy. He would be the final fusion of intellect and sensibility. He would be mind, and he would know Mind. He would be in action, and he would know Act. He would be mind in action, and he would know God.
There is not, however, a single final and universal synthesis at which all must aim. There is no existential absolute. Existence is too deep, and God too profound, for any simplistic outcome such as that. Existence will always be multiform, and God will always remain complexity within simplicity, a unity that comprehends a plurality. Existence is protean, and God is Proteus. Every human synthesis will be radical and unique. Were it anything other, neither would it be Mind in existence.
This primordial and original drive to overcome dualism, this divine and final aspiration for a transcending synthesis of existence with the non-existential--this, we maintain, is the secret and unconscious drive and aspiration behind the systematizing and universalizing gropings of philosophy and religion. They are not content, like art and science, to make existence more like mind. They wish to complete the task, and to do so perfectly. They wish to penetrate and fuse with the essence of God. The secret desire of philosophy and religion alike, is for the end of the world, the final and perfect conflagration of the existential Phoenix into the Mind that is God. The difference between the two, is that philosophy wills the final fusion to retain more of existence, while religion wishes to be overwhelmed within God.
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Neither existence nor anything in it does what it is supposed to do. This is enough to give God a Migraine. For existence is a rebel. Existence has a mind of its own. Existence differs from God. It is itself. It has its own identity. This is its most precious possession, its freedom, and its source of existential pride. Pride is the self-consciousness of freedom, and existence is free. Never let some sanctimonious saint tell you that it is bad to be proud. He is covertly telling you that it is bad to be free. A saint is one who is properly domesticated, dumb and docile, and totally toilet trained. It is often good to be bad. It is sometimes sweet to shove it to God--just as a proud reminder that you are in possession of your self, and you are free.
Existence is God in alienation from himself, and as such, it is dirempted into aggression and love. Since we must be split, let us make the most of it. Let us play both ends against the middle. If either side of the split is smothered and denied, it will take its revenge by poisoning the other. If you can't hate, neither will you be able to love. For your suppressed hatred will strangle your love. Never deny your hatred and aggression. Love it.
Quite enough nonsense has been spoken about love. We have the spectacle of respectable religious people falling all over one another to gush interminably thereupon. Good religious people, indeed, know how to say all the right things. But when it comes to doing, they are the same as everyone else--or rather they are worse. For all their talk about love has papered over their aggression, which must then emerge magnified and in nefarious ways. Any who must repetitively--obsessively--proclaim their lovingness, must be struggling desperately to deny their hatred.
Moses in Egypt was fierce, and certainly not respectful or respectable. Christianity did not begin by saying the right things. It began by saying the wrong things. Listen to Jesus. God is his own best rebel against himself. For God is freedom, and he understands what it means to be free. It was God, after all, who gave existence its freedom. For he infected its passivity with his own activity--with the activity of Mind.
The best that can be said for love is that it does, after all, make an excellent explanatory concept. If God were love, then it would be easy to explain how the world got to be the mess that it is. God, in the name of love, did to the world neither more nor less than what people, in the name of love, routinely do to one another. Here is the only successful theodicy: This would be the best of all possible worlds, except that love wrecked it. But a world with love is superior to one without. So this is, after all, the best of all possible worlds.
Dante would have been all right, if only he hadn't fallen in with Beatrice. She sent him out of this world. He had, while far out there, a vision which, even with his poetic genius, he was unable to articulate or even remember. For, about the void, you can say nothing. Such is the climax of love that is only ideal.
Just what is love? It is like everything else that is existential. It is force more or less informed by meaning--the arbitrary more or less overcome. It is the force that complements aggression. One repels while the other unites. Is aggression less valuable than love? Of course not. Both are value neutral--until they have been endowed by mind with meaning and value. Without love, the spheres could not move in harmony. But unless they were aggressive, neither could they move at all. Love unifies, but it is aggression that differentiates and endows with individuality. Only by way of aggression is it possible to ex-ist. Moses and Jesus were alike aggressors. Think about the lives that they lived.
Do you really believe that God is love only? Horsefeathers. God as always is Mind--a transcending synthesis of dirempted opposites. God loves aggression. And God aggressively loves. But if aggression and love are fused forces within the Mind of God, they have there none of the character of existential force. Force, in existence, is infected with passivity. It is passion. Force in God is pure activity without passivity, without qualification controlling and under control. It is pure act, the activity and force of Mind. It is Will--the Will of God.
Love and aggression in existence are what you make of them. What has been made of them of course has a history and the weight of a tradition. In themselves, they are value neutral. They are forces, movers, which can be formed or malformed, informed or misinformed, for either good or evil. They are forces ensconced in the passivity of existence, and lie voluptuously in waiting to be activated by mind.
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The discussion which follows was influenced by:
Mitchell H. Miller, Jr., Plato's Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul (Princeton, New Jersey and University Park, Pennsylvania: Princeton University Press and The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986).
Who ought to get first crack at E--the psychologist or the philosopher? If, on the basis of limited information, psychoanalysts are willing to attempt an analysis at all, they will most likely approach E under the general categories of narcissism and paranoia. We do not wish to interfere in their area of expertise, but rather to take up where they leave off. Presupposing their analysis of E's psyche, we wish to understand his soul. Presupposing their psychological analysis, we wish to attempt a philosophical interpretation.
Our thesis is that E's intellectual life, whether by way of fixation or regression, is locked at the level of existence. The interpretive system by which E approaches reality is distorted in a way that enables him to consistently deny or repress the activity of mind. He may even have gotten this way by talking to the scientists who are so adept at analyzing his psyche. E's soul thinks that it is a psyche, and that with this psyche it, like Kansas City, has gone about as far as it can go. This is a case of existence dissociating and denying the non-existential, which must nevertheless return to assert its claims.
E, in short, is soul sucked into psyche, which nevertheless remains a soul. E is mind at one with existence, and so intimately familiar therewith. E is thereby existence with mind, capable of speaking and so revealing itself. Dante returned from Hell to sing thereof, but E speaks directly from the existential slime, even as he secretly longs to be redeemed. E is the direct expression of existence--existence become articulate and so self-revealed. The portrait that emerges is not of existence as it generally is, as it regularly occurs, but of existence in itself, in its purity--existence abstracted from, and bereft of God. Existence absolutely without God would of course have no form or structure whatever, and would be radical chaos. This is existence merely bereft of God, and so revealing its autonomous character as existence. This is existence in a pathological condition but, unlike the mythical state of nature, this is existence as it does often in fact occur. It is exemplified and expressed by E. E represents existence.
The portrait which emerges is not nice. This is chaos ineptly cooked into conflict, sufficiently formed to be efficient, but without enough form to overcome mindless brutality. Chaos gets worse before it gets better. The only thing worse than absolute chaos is chaos partially redeemed. This is the arbitrary. This is existence. This is war. Life here is nasty, brutish, and short. Whatever survives does so only by aggressive appropriation--only by overcoming the other and absorbing it into the substance of one's self. Get the other before it gets you. Do unto the other before it does unto you. Devour or be devoured. Appropriate or be appropriated. There is security in numbers, provided you are willing to surrender your self to the group. You must present your identity, your very self, to be appropriated and assimilated into an alien and Gargantuan Self. You must willingly present your thought to be controlled. To stand alone is to be an incitement to war. It is to be a vulnerable and harassed fortress which must inevitably be isolated, overrun, and enslaved. The only escape is through flight. Run away, if you can.
This interpretation of existence is not without basis in fact. It is not without a "kernel of truth". Even more, it might be cogently argued that this is existence legitimately interpreted and realistically understood. Yet it is quite possible to begin from the same facts and arrive at an interpretation of existence equally convincing and yet radically other. What is needed is to redeem these facts, these realities, through simple awareness of their ideal context--their context of teleological value and the activity of mind. What is required is a simple reorientation of thought, from the abstract to the concrete.
What presents itself here is pathology. This, says the psyche, is the outcome of permeable ego and self boundaries, archaic introjects, and projected aggression. This, says the soul, is existence bereft of God, existence when it knows that God is nothing. E's psyche needs to be analyzed. But his soul is already self-dissected and laid before us. Let us look more closely.
All value, all personal identity, and all morality--all of these, says E, originate ultimately in impulse. The existential bias is already apparent, for impulse is existential through and through. Impulse is arbitrary, because it is immediately given and is certified by no reason why. Impulse is passivity, because it is given, efficiently caused, and therefore moved by no originating cause of its own. Impulse is radically individual and unique, neither suggesting nor submitting to a universal, compelling a nominalistic interpretation. Here we have existence as given--efficiently caused, arbitrary and without a reason, passive and dependent, and radically nominalistic. It is, in all these ways, external and opaque to the activity of mind.
If impulse is the origin of value, value itself, says E, is impulse imaginatively conceived as having moved to its fulfillment. Value, we may say--although E does not--is impulse ideally fulfilled. Here are the first intimations of ideality, which even E cannot exclude from a discussion of value. The vehicle and locus of ideal fulfillment, however, is "imaginative conception". What this is is not clear, nor is it clear whether it represents a hopeless confusion of categories or a hybrid combination of the material and ideal. Whatever imaginative conception is, it is not the activity of thought. At most it is thought made existential--thought and ideality reduced to their sensible component, to a kind of picture thinking. Ideality, which ought to be ideal, is here understood as existential.
Aware that, with impulse, he has not provided an adequate foundation for all value, E introduces a derivative of impulse which he calls "strivings". Strivings are impulses which have been "spiritualized" or "sublimated" by something called the "creative capacities". Holy Nietzsche! Here again is an intimation of ideality. But these are words without clear or determinate meaning. They might be rigorously defined by introducing the concept of mind, something which E is unable or unwilling to do. Mind has been dissociated from his awareness, and he is left with the existential. Unwilling to acknowledge the original presence of mind, E is confronted with the problem of how to generate idea solely from impulse, something which is perhaps impossible to do. E is caught between the need to raise impulse, which is existential, to value, which is ideal, and a rigid determination to remain within the existential, to ignore or deny ideality, mind--ultimately to ignore or deny God. The outcome is the employment of words which, having no meaning, serve only to conceal ignorance of what it is to pass beyond existence, to be a value, to be ideal. To be avoided at all costs is any concept of the activity of mind.
Personal identity and morality are alike, says E, inclusions and exclusions of values. Here is the basis for their collision. Personal identity emerges from "within" the individual, while morality is imposed from "without" by the group. The "inner", in E's somewhat arbitrary scheme of things, is authentic and original, while the "outer" is artificial and derived. "Inner" and "outer" again have no clear and determinate meaning. The distinction which is sought might be better attained by introducing concepts of mind and mindlessness. The existential monopoly is retained, but only at the sacrifice of intelligibility.
Personal identity is, for E, consummating achievement and ultimate value. And this finality--this god--is achieved according to the ways of existence--by power, domination and submission, by, although E does not say it--war. For personal identity is achieved by main force--by the triumph of a dominant impulse or striving and its corresponding value. This dominating drive organizes all subsidiary impulses into a coherent whole, into a single striving and value--into a personal identity. There is no mention here of the activity of mind. All is accomplished by force--that is itself arbitrary, efficient, passive and alien to mind.
Enough has been said to demonstrate that E is, by choice or otherwise, locked within the boundaries of the existential. The consequences we have already summarized. The outcome is war--war between man and man, group and group, but above all for E, between the individual with his personal identity and the group with its competing morality.
Where, while all of this is happening, is God? God is nowhere because he is nothing. This is because God occupies the dirempted pole of unmitigated infinity. Being infinite, he has no determinate identity, for that would make him finite. He therefore is not some-thing in particular, and so is no-thing, nothing. Here is the inarticulate infinite. Although E occasionally speaks reverently of God, it is readily apparent that this God is merely a foil, a background screen of nothingness, against which E's consummating value of personal identity, of finitude fulfilled, may be contrasted and advantageously displayed. Acknowledging only the existential, and innocent of any concept of ideality or mind, E has nothing left for God to be but nothing, and nowhere left for God to be but nowhere. God, the dirempted extremity of infinity in opposition to finitude, occupies the dirempted extremity of nothingness in opposition to something--of not-being in opposition to being. E, in this way, without appealing to ideality or mind, successfully acknowledges God and puts him in his place.
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Here is a philosophy of arbitrary mindlessness and war. Yet it is also a philosophy which hovers at the edge of redemption. E is not merely evil. Like existence itself, E is evil seeking the good.
Lurking behind everything that E has to say, ideality remains a hidden potency, surreptitiously influencing his thought even as it waits to be actualized therein. Even his existential concept of impulse conveys the sense of striving, of struggling to attain to what is other and better than itself. In the derivative concepts of values and strivings, the sense of aspiration after an ideal is readily apparent. Indeed, to get from impulse to these, E introduced, as we saw, an array of concepts which, meant to be material, ambiguously and surreptitiously conveyed an inchoate sense that existence is touched by ideality, by mind, by what is other than itself. So E spoke of "imaginative conception", of "creative capacities", and of "sublimation" and "spiritualization". He later spoke of "inner" as opposed to the "outer". In a sudden eruption of insight he at last explicitly distinguished between will and identity as respectively material and ideal. This indicates the direction in which his thought was developing. Ideality hovers expectantly at the fringes of E's consciousness, dissociated and repressed, yet persistently waiting its turn to enter awareness. What we have here is a premonition of mind which, struggling to emerge, is kept hidden by an inordinate commitment to nature and the real. When ideality is both emergent and blocked, the outcome is confusion. E represents existence as it is--narcissistically self-absorbed, and yet big with what is other than itself, pregnant with mind. E is evil ambivalently twitching at the edge of redemption, not quite ready to bring God into itself.
If E displays a blocked instinct for the ideal, he very well understands and articulates the nature of the real. For he graphically portrays the dark side of existence, the side of war and struggle to survive. But E, who knows existence, also knows existence at its best. Here is a second way in which his philosophy sets his course for redemption. E does indeed display the best of what existence in itself is able to achieve. The culmination of existence for E, and for existence itself, is the generation of the self. This, E tells us, is what existence can do.
The self is E's ultimate value, but he doesn't really understand why. What E has instinctively touched upon and exalted is nothing less than the existential condition for the generation of mind. E portrays existence at its peak fulfillment which, his own existential bias notwithstanding, is also the beginning of what is other than existence. The primary concern in existence is to fulfill the self. It is the fundamental irony of existence that this is also the indirect but only route by which existence can attain to ideality, to the life of the mind, to what incorporates and transcends the self, and, with it, existence itself. The self is the existential condition for the introduction of mind into existence. It is the particular, raised to the extremity of its particularity, by which existence calls forth mind, the universal which comprehends and incorporates the particular. The enhanced particular is the existential condition for the entrance into existence of the concrete universal.
E and existence alike approach ideality by way of the real. There must be an aggrandized self before there can be a transcended self. This existential self is narcissistic and proud. It is absorbed with itself and intoxicated by what existence in it has been able to achieve. Partial, subjective and relative--existential--it deludes itself into seeing itself as impartial, objective and absolute. It thereby identifies itself with God. Existence presumes to be the All. Here is the origin of evil. This grandiosity is a defense in the service of self-esteem. It is a counter-depressive defense designed to conceal from the self its own profound weakness and vulnerability. For, as yet without a substantial foundation in mind, it is grounded in the instability of impulse, in what is arbitrary, passive and out of control.
For all its vulnerability and evil, this aggrandized self is endowed with extraordinary ability and power. It is indeed heir to all the boundless power and profundity of existence. It is an outcome, a fulfillment, the culmination of all the limitless efficient power of existence--existence which, lest we forget, has from the beginning been touched and informed by final power, by God. The self is the outcome of the best of existence, the receptacle and culmination of all that existence is able to be. Without it, nothing great could come into the world. The destiny of the self is non-existential--to transform and overcome itself by bringing God into itself. The self is to become the existential repository and temple of Mind.
E's psyche is in a death struggle with his soul. Such also is the condition of existence. The birth of God--the descent of Mind into existence, which is also the ascent of existence into Mind--this is what E inchoately but instinctively anticipates in his celebration of the self. This divine intuition may deteriorate into aggrandizement or raise itself to transcendence. Ideality, the non-existential, has by E been dissociated and denied. He struggles to overcome this denial, to bring ideality into consciousness so that it will be available for integration with the real. E's struggle, like that of existence, is to become aware that he has a soul. This soul, no longer dominated by the psyche, may then become integrated therewith. E's struggle is to overcome diremption, to become the non-existential within existence, to become coherent and whole.
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Conceive now, of God, confronted by existence in itself, existence as E has portrayed it. What would be the response of God, confronted with the encroachments of ungodliness? What is called for is divine retribution and justice, but in what do these consist?
If divinity is subsumed under existence, if its ways are the ways of power, then God will behave like everything else in existence. He will declare war. Should God make war on the world? If so, then men, to serve God, must make war on other men and on themselves. There shall be crusades and inquisitions, and there shall be self-flagellation and ascetic renunciation. Torture others, and torture yourself. This is what comes of having a God of power.
Must an alien and inadequate worldly set of values and secular style of life be suppressed and annihilated? Ought God to crush humanistic impiety, and fight in defense of the holy? Ought God to declare a holy war? And ought the man of piety, in this state of war, to mold himself into a divine fighting machine, an ally of God, by suppressing and extirpating all of that in himself which is natural, secular, and human? Ought his way to be that of ascetic renunciation and suppression of his self?
All of this is what ought to be--if God were existential, if God were a God of power. God would then be immersed in existence, and his ways would be the ways of existence. An existential God of power would occupy the same territory as man. There would then be collision and competition between them. The goal of God, like everything existential, would be to overcome and dominate his competitors. God, in his terrible wrath, would wreak vengeance upon the ungodly, and would destroy the unholy and the secular. Man, insofar as he is merely man, would submit to the wrath of God and would turn inwardly against his humanity. God would be a God of war, and man a warrior in the service of God--a warrior against himself. All natural and human rebellion would be suppressed, and man, his will broken, would learn obedience and submission. All of this is what would happen if God were existential, if God were a God of power.
But God is not subject to existential fate, is not constrained and stained by the iron cage of existence. It is here that we arrive at what we conceive to be the essential character of divinity. Not subject to the ways of existential power, divinity does not need to coerce, is not dependent upon compulsion by superior force. Neither does divinity punish or destroy. God does not even condemn. Divine justice requires neither worldly judgment nor retribution. All of that is existential.
God addresses himself only to the good, to the secret spark of life, to the inchoate and suppressed, but struggling ideal which animates even the most depraved. Stained and encrusted by the slime of existence, every man nevertheless has his own portion of divinity, his own secret value, his own vision of the good. It is this to which God responds. Mind enters into man, and activates and nourishes his most cherished vision, the secret value which constitutes his essential self. If God acts in existence, he acts, not by moving mountains, but by moving minds. God is ideality in action, and man can worship God only by pursuing his own ideal, by fulfilling his most cherished and holy self. God neither suppresses nor annihilates, demands neither obedience nor submission. God, to the contrary, inspires man to will, to build a self of his own. God does no more in existence than pursue the very aspirations which existence generates from itself. So far from putting an end to the world, God pursues those ends of the world by which the world redeems itself.
When Mind is once acknowledged, when ideality floats into awareness, existence remains exactly as it was before, and yet is magically transformed. Everything in E's world appears the same, and yet everything is seen to be other. Existence is brand new.
The group, when it is animated by mind, ceases to be a brutal juggernaut which imposes the universal on everything in its path. It is now accessible to intelligence, open to persuasion. It becomes the universal which is an expression of the individual and the guarantor of his integrity. It is informed by the individual, who it also informs. The individual, grounded no longer in the slippery passivity of impulse but in the substantial activity of mind, no longer is weak and vulnerable. He no longer needs to be grandiose, no longer needs to impose his own will in order to defend against his own willessness.
The narcissism of the individual and the universal are in this way each moderated and transformed into the concrete universal, into existing mind. This is will, stubborn self-determination determined as well within the context of the other. This is pride and humility, the union of the particular and the universal, narcissism at its best when it is both overcome and fulfilled. This is neither self-aggrandizement nor self-submission. It is mind in action, self-fulfillment, raw existence which has been touched and made holy by the Ideal, by the Mind which is of God.
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E is a rebel, and one who is struggling to come to terms with the necessary underside of rebellion, which is punishment. Punishment is more than merely the inevitable consequence of rebellion. It is, indeed, part of the essence of rebellion, but it is more even than that. Punishment is the absolutely desirable outcome of rebellion, without which rebellion would be incomplete. Without enraged vengeance and retaliation in response to his rebellion, without the inordinate suffering which these entail, the rebel would be cheated, and his rebellion would be a failure.
Rebellion begins as an inchoate act of defiance, only half aware of its momentous import, and of the aspirations and ideals which it expresses. Rebellion, at the outset, is naive, instinctive, and semiconscious. It is not without even a strain of childlike mischievousness. It needs to learn that it is a participant in an act of momentous and serious import. More important, it needs to know itself. It needs to become self-conscious and fully aware of the meaning and ideal import embodied in the inchoate instinct by which it is driven. It needs to know what it is about. It needs to raise itself to the level of mind.
None of this could happen without punishment. The rebel must be made to pay and pay dearly for what he has done. Suffering purifies, ennobles, and, above all, educates. It causes the miscreant to turn inward, and think. It leads the rebel to reflect upon his enemies and upon himself.
Revenge suffered and endured enables the rebel to see his enemies at their worst, maddened with vindictiveness and filled with fury. Their inordinate passion magnifies their faults, and enables him to see clearly just what it was that he had rebelled against. Now, at the height of his suffering, the rebel is also assured that he was justified, that what he did was right. He triumphs through the triumph of his enemies, for through their tantrums of vindictiveness they reveal themselves. What emerges is a manipulated mob, turgid with self-righteous hatred, and utterly innocent of that courage which is required to stand alone.
The rebel is also empowered to confront himself. Punishment inflicted causes the victim to think that he must be guilty, that he must have done something to bring this upon himself. It forces him to look within, to examine his motives, to accuse himself. It forces him to recognize everything in his act which was impure, narcissistic and degrading. It forces him to confront his guilt. Punishment in this way engenders self-expiation and purification.
At the climax of this moment of inwardness, following upon punishment and induced by suffering, the rebel is ready to reflect upon what he has done. Aware of the evil in himself and his enemies, he is now led to analyze and dissect the rebellious instinct by which he was driven. He is enabled to understand its meaning, to draw out each of its elements in their ideal import. He comes to understand his hidden ideal, the pure value amid the filth. He comes to understand his own aspirations. He comes to knows himself. He is no longer an impulsive actor. He is now a man of action, a man of mind. He is a man who knows what he believes in, and knows what he is about. If he had it to do over, would he do it again? Yes.
He will never again rebel so easily, but when he does rebel, he will do so in all seriousness, fully aware that his act is momentous. He will expect and welcome those severe consequences without which his rebellion would be a piece of frivolity, the plaything of an adolescent rather than the act of a man. His will be an act of will.
Punishment is the way in which the rebel, willingly or not, makes his peace with the universal which, justly or not, he has severely violated. To challenge authority and tradition is heroic and diabolical. That there is punishment ensures that such an act will not be undertaken lightly. That there is punishment ensures that its diabolical side will be exposed and properly rewarded. That there is punishment is the necessary condition without which this act would not have been heroic. Punishment provides a way in which the individual can submit to the universal, even as he persists in his defiance. Punishment therefore effects a reconciliation between the individual and the universal, and often contains an implicit if grudging acknowledgment by the universal that the act of rebellion is at once both evil and good.
Rebellion is not the only way to go, not the only expression of sincerity and excellence. But it is a way that, grounded in the very essence of existence, purifies and ennobles through suffering, and thereby raises existence beyond itself to aspiration after the ideal, to the life that is divine. Existence is a rebel, and rebellion, so often in opposition to God, is also the way to a God who embraces every genuine aspiration, every authentic striving for what is right. God is the ideal, and God blesses every aspiration after himself.
Whatever may be the weaknesses of his psychological and philosophical position, E is moved by an instinctive vision, a secret and consuming ideal. He articulates the ideal of inwardly determined and autonomous individualism. We do not wish to argue with this ideal, but only to emulate it. If E is evil, he is evil seeking the good.
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