Bracketing God

Much to my pleasant surprise, I’m in Milan again for Christmas, visiting my good friend Luca. It was a much longer journey here than last year, though, what with the massive general strike in Belgium coupled with an ungodly early flight, but it has been worth it, because immediately upon arriving Luca and I launched into a conversation concerning his views of what first philosophy should be, i.e., in Kantian terms, focus upon the conditions of the possibility for knowledge, and moreover, as a holistic action that does not have praxis, much less activism as its primary goal. The key concept here is Husserl’s epoché, which struck me as a theoretical tool that has vast applicability for religion.

So, here I am, in a library in Milan thinking over this while waiting for Luca to wrap up an essay for his PhD. Once more there is a feeling of fate, purposiveness, necessity. By accident, I happen to be facing the science fiction section (I just learned an Italian neologism: fantascienza), and what do they have prominently displayed there? Copies of Asimov’s Robot Series, Herbert’s Dune Series, and Lem’s Solaris, novels that speak to some of my core interests. Herbert and Lem especially leap out at me because of the difficulties I’ve been having with my would-be Lovelock paper: my professors, although they don’t want to discourage me, have doubts and misgivings about the project, and I’ve been wondering whether I shouldn’t just give it up for something more “easy” and “concrete”, say, the recent incidents in Zhanaozen and the complexities of trying to ascribe “exploitation” in a neo-patrimonial system like Kazakhstan’s. Perhaps the universe is saying with respect to Lovelock: go for it anyway; try, if not Gaia, then something about Nature. But seeing these books also makes me feel that I am somehow supposed to be here in Milan.

I want to try right now to link together several things that have been on my mind these past few months, but there are too many copper ball strands; it’s extremely difficult to see how they wind together as a single ball, and perhaps this is decidely praxis-oriented (or maybe I’m just being surprisingly Husserlian?) So, for what it’s worth, here is my thought process, in raw, literal, unprocessed form (and for those familiar with HTML, they’ll hopefully get the double entrendre implicit here in the way I’m using the blockquote function as a way to “bracket” my internal dialogue, thereby holding it up for analysis, inspection and reflection as though it were a diamond under a lamp):

Taylor: “Sorry Chris, Averroes’ conjunctions are knowledge”; the monopsyche is not “literally” a separate dimension. He’s both right and wrong. It is not some secularism veiled in Aristotelian terminology à la Renan, and yet we also needn’t reach for anything; we need merely to step back, even away from metaphysics, and enter into theoria (we mustn’t reduce theoria to metaphysics, Prof. Taylor), the true shariah of the philosopher, truer than metaphysics. We are already conjoined. (Was *this* what Averroes and my grandparents had been really saying: deconstruction…?) + Desmond: metaxu as passio essendi as prime being as Schellingian ground or Dostoevskian subterrain = not a separate dimension; so close, we could almost lick it. + Khidr: discovery is learning how to read what’s always been in front of us + Luca: to always question is the truest first philosophy; to even question questioning: what are our theoretical intentions? –> Socratic/Foucaltian deconstruction is productive, is active (cf. Gandhi’s non-action principle as a potent political act, or consider how Desmond does it: to deconstruct is to not philosophize, it is to step back, and in doing so, is to somehow also proscribe); Socrates’ daemon led him to deconstruct, but in turn, that led him to being a citizen = theoria somehow leads to a praxis, even though praxis is not the goal (Plato’s man in the cave seeks the sun, but after finding it, must return whence he came); theoria as contemplation, i.e., Husserl: epoché as “suspension”/”bracket”, literally “to step back” and look not at the object but the way the object is given to us, which apparently he said was like a (religious) conversion, or when I deconstructed the Qur’an for my first Master’s thesis, leading me to the Bab’s own deconstructions — placing all of Islam into a bracket, so to speak — leading me to Baha’u'llah’s reconstructions = stepping back, to be out of the world while still in it: theoria is its own praxis, the doing of deconstruction is a doing, even if doing is not its principal aim.

What is the connection between this renunciation and Astrid’s ocean? Is it not only some kind of prime being equivalent to the Divine Manifestation and the created cosmos, as perhaps described in Baha’u'llah’s Tablet of the Uncompounded Reality (Lawh Basít al-Haqíqa)? “Prime being” is also a description; the ocean is also a visualization. — I just “saw” a darkness, intense, sent a chill up my neck into the back of my skull. Khidr is smiling. Monopsyche equivalent to the uppermost celestial sphere, the most intimate of the Prime Mover, but the Prime Mover is not God, only Her revealed face. “Prime Mover”, much less “God”, is also a description, i.e., of the way in which God is given to us. Is theoria the attempt to connect with that which cannot be connected? No, theoria is realizing that we are already there; there is no need to “attempt”, there is no need for will, only the slightest bit, to see what we already see, to see what we already cannot and can never see, to decide to understand givenness and not the given = the sun shining above the ocean? –> This isn’t what I signed up for; I wanted to be a man of action, not passivity. Come on Chris, you’re more courageous than that; keep going. –> Detachment from all things save God; detachment from God –> God as negation, God as beyond negation, God as not God, God as nothing, God as bracketed, God as bracket, yes, God as epoché: “I form light and create darkness” (Isaiah 45:7). Hence the impossibility of being a being within the precincts of the Divine Court, hence God as object of all knowledge and yet unknowable, hence God as the dim, cavernous, void-like center and underground of all existence, hence God as only the metaxu in Her Averroistic/Spinozan face but ultimately not the metaxu, either, hence God, hence God…