αὑτὸν ἄρα νοεῖ, εἴπερ ἐστὶ τὸ κράτιστον, καὶ ἔστιν ἡ νόησις νοήσεως νόησις.
“Therefore it must be of itself that the divine thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking.”
—Aristotle, Metaphysics, XII, 9, 1074, b74.
THE human being—as an “I”—first, in a pre-conscious activity of destruction, strips reality of its coherence. This is not something he does so much as something he is. To wit, the human being is situated in the world in such a manner that he bifurcates and disintegrates it’s structure in the manner indicated above as a condition for his perception and cognition of it. Hence, the activity of his consciousness consists in an initial reduction of being to pure chaos and nothingness—to non-being.
We learn that we have slept not by sleeping, but through inference—by the fact of waking. Similarly, we know that we disintegrated the true being of the object of our perception by the fact of its manifestation to our consciousness.
The initial annihilation of being proceeds by the extraction of (a) the concept from the wholeness of reality. This leaves (b) a field of percepts to which (a) the concept was lending coherence, organization, and intelligibility. The latter (b) instantaneously disintegrates into dust, like matter without life. The Book of Genesis depicts the function of the concept as soul:
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul…you return to the ground–because out of it were you taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” (2:7, 3:10)
Sense-perception effaces from a being everything that is not sensory, including its form, life, soul, reality, and essence. When I sit across from another person, I see how she looks with my eyes, hear how she speaks with my ears, and so on. But I only know who she is by a higher form of cognition. Hence, knowing consists in restoring the elements which I first effaced as a condition for my sensory-perception.
In this way, the sequence of sense-perception can be grasped: from the provisional duality of concept and percept, the human being effects their reunion, in the bower of his consciousness, out of his own free creativity. Put another way, following an unconscious process of disintegration, the spiritual activity of the I seeks to resurrect the fallout from this event to unity and to life.
The above describes the process of cognition, which ordinarily only becomes conscious in the product of knowledge and not in the process. And yet, in a recognition of the architectonics of this process lies the possibility for consciousness to awaken at a prior, more energetic stage. In this way, consciousness would be kindled in thinking itself and not only in thoughts. The I would awaken to an integral participation in the evolution of Creation.
In this light, every being would be known afresh—not as mind to object, but as cause to effect, as the sun to its light, or as speaker to speech.
It follows from the above that there can be no “problem of knowledge” in the classical epistemological sense of Descartes and Kant any more than the meaning of the words I write is withheld from me. Certainly the words of others are opaque to my understanding in this way, to begin with, but only until I undertake this same process of death and resurrection described above in respect to them, at which point the speaker and I are one in spirit and I share in the meaning of what was expressed.
The archetype of knowledge is creatio ex nihilo. Hence it is an imitatio Christi in identitatem Logos—“an imitation of Christ in his identity as the Logos”—for as it is written, “in the beginning was the Logos…All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” (John 1:1, 3) As Christ rose from the dust on the third day, so knowledge is the final moment following death and entombment.
The new Creation shimmers before the backdrop of non-being. It is perennially fresh because it has never existed before, like the virginal birth of Venus, who floats on the foam of chaos, born on the scallop-shell of consciousness to arrive on the shore of knowledge.
The order of being (ordo essendi) seems to end where the order of knowing (ordo cogniscendi) seems to commence. But of course, the order of knowing carries forward the order of being since knowing is also part of Creation and not something external or ulterior to it. Hence the human being contributes to being by knowing and thereby lends his voice to the chorus of Creation.
Love this bit: The new Creation shimmers before the backdrop of non-being. It is perennially fresh because it has never existed before, like the virginal birth of Venus, who floats on the foam of chaos, born on the scallop-shell of consciousness to arrive on the shore of knowledge.
I have also been digging into the pre-Cartesian notions of subject / object due to chapter 4 of TPOF.
How is the word subject (hypokeímenon) most often understood today? When
we think or speak of a subject, we primarily think of human beings, beings
capable of thinking and making decisions; that is, rational and free beings. In
this sense, a subject differs from mere objects and things. A subject also differs
from the world of animals; while we do not call animals, things or objects, we
do not call them subjects. Human beings are primarily subjects, and since they
are subjects, they cannot be treated as mere things or objects. This is how it is
understood today, but the way to this was rather long and complicated.
Like the word ‘object,’ the word ‘subject’ is a literal translation of the Greek
word ‘hypokeímenon,’ and the corresponding Latin term ‘subjectum.’1 The word
indicates what was thrown (keimai, jacere) under something (hypo, sub), and what as a result of this lies under something and is a foundation (substantia, hypostasis). This etymological analysis of the word subject appeals to the imagination, but in philosophy it had a very subtle meaning, especially when it took on a technical meaning.