bread or stones?
“turning” from the world that doesn’t exist and “turning” to the world that does
IMAGINE yourself across from another, situated in the three-dimensions of space as well as the reality designated by the three persons of grammar. In this scenario, the reader can grasp his own situation in respect to “I,” to “you,” and to “he/she/it” even if it cannot ultimately be conveyed coherently by anyone else. After all, “I” is a title only we can give to ourselves, for to everyone but me, I am a “you.” And if someone calls another by the word “I,” it is evidence that he has not grasped the meaning of the word and hence can only pretend to speak it. As long as I recognize the other as an I, he is a “you” to me and we stand “face to face” and “know even also as I am known.”1 This much is obvious.
Imagine further, however, that from my perception of the other, I form a representation of him, as a model cast from a mould, or like the imprint of a seal in wax. Just as I can then remove the model from its mold and the imprint from the seal, so I can imagine this person as a representation in my consciousness irrespective of, and in abstraction from, his relation to me as a “you” and through which his “I” is mediated to me. Now I can refer to him as “he.” Yet notice that the grammatical third person is the last to arrive and follows on the coattails of the other persons as an echo follows the cry of a gull or a “splash” follows a pebble cast into a well.
Suppose, however, that I forget our common origin and begin to seek for it among this “third-person” world of shadows—this model of abstract representations that I project as husks of my perceptual encounters. Suppose I begin to imbue the latter with the seal of my epistemological authentication and go on to develop an entire method and institution of research designed to ratify and promulgate—under the imprimatur of “science”—the absolute reality of this exclusively third-person conceit. It will, I think, be clear that what has come to seem most real to me is in fact most illusory and this “physical world” that I imagine to exist around me, and which I imagine to have pre-existed my arrival by eons untold except by illustrious physicists and astronomers, in reality never existed at any time except in my imagination and the collective consciousness of this generation and as a jewel on Satan’s belt of lies. The shadows on the back of Plato’s Cave would be more real than the supposed “scientific image” of things because at least the former are qualitatively of a piece with the rest of the narrative while the objects of scientific study are conceived as transcendental “things-in-themselves.” If this were not the case, it would make no sense to seek to derive explanations for the phenomena we do experience from conjectured ones we don’t.
Still, the comparison to Plato’s Cave is apt. What if we were to undertake, in the manner that the Philosopher describes, “a turning the soul from day that is a kind of night, to true Day—the ascent to what is, which is to say, true Philosophy”?2 What would this mean in the terms familiar to the present argument. It would be a turning like Mary in the Garden,3 which is a “turning,” and a turning about, and perhaps a turning-inside-out of the “whole soul.” As Plato describes:
just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of Being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of Being, and of the brightest and best of Being, or in other words, of the Good.4
It would be a turning about to recognize the spirit that shines through the “you’s” around us in all created things, which turn their backs to us and hide their faces as long as we turn our backs to them. It would be a turning upwards towards the source of this “true light,” the light that shines from from behind our eyes, the light from above “which lighteth every man.”5 “And I, if I be lifted up from the Earth, will draw all things unto me,” says Christ.6 Grammatically speaking, this person is the most real of all, and a vision of it and a partaking of its substance7 as members of its body8 is only granted through the I9 and not by any other means. Only through the I and not by any other means can we see you’s and only through the I and not by any other means is it possible to become “
We.”
1 Corinthians 13:12
Plato, Republic, 521c
Cf. John 20:
11 But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre,
12 And seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.
13 And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.
14 And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.
15 Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.
16 Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.
Plato, Republic, 518c
John 1:9
John 12:32
Cf. 1 Corinthians 10:
16 The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?
17 For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.
Cf. 1 Corinthians 12:
12 For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.
13 For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.
14 For the body is not one member, but many.
15 If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?
16 And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?
17 If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?
18 But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.
19 And if they were all one member, where were the body?
20 But now are they many members, yet but one body.
21 And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.
22 Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary:
23 And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness.
24 For our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to that part which lacked.
25 That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another.
26 And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.
Cf. Galatians 2:19-20:
For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me…
3rd-person, “scientific” reality is none at all but rather that shadow or negative image of the real. reality is subjectivity whereas to every subject a point-of-view emerges by which it can enter into 2nd-person relations thus drawing together the fabric of being through filaments of love—which makes things One—but insofar as the potential objects of these relations are reified as such in their unrealised state, a 3rd-person framework emerges which is then corroborated and rehashed through the testimony of others to the point that the model begins to assume the mantle of its source and we imagine the physical world could somehow have preceded the spiritual one, that the causes of our perceptions could have preëxisted their effects
DBH on a similar subject: https://iai.tv/articles/the-absurdity-of-mind-as-machine-david-bentley-hart-auid-2479?_auid=2020&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
“The reason for this is almost banal: consciousness, uniquely, is not a third-person phenomenon available to objective description; it is first-person all the way down. And yet it is an indispensable prejudice of the modern method that a verifiable scientific description must be an entirely third-person narrative of structural and causal connections and correspondences. On principle, it is precisely the first-person perspective that must be subdued, and even ideally banished from our investigations, in order for a properly “scientific” account to emerge from observation and experiment and theory. Any remainder of the pure subjective constitutes only an area of unintelligibility. And this, needless to say, becomes a fairly intractable difficulty when the phenomenon under investigation happens to be subjectivity as such. The problem is one not merely of appropriate scientific technique, but one of logic.“