Category Archives: ProtoWritings

I didn’t initially read your excellent eulological analysis of prayer, properly, but I’ve had some breakfast now, lol!
It looks like you’ve read the points I offered very carefully, answering each one, in full, more or less.
I’m not going to agree with you, in outright acknowledging the notion of “addressable reality” as a “failure”, even though it was your initial point or thesis.
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The notion of an “addressable reality”, was introduced by yourself; [TL] “from the Absolute qua addressable reality, which (from the vantage of the world and our being-in-the-world) is not necessary, nor even a necessary hypothesis, meaning it only ‘is’ qua our free turning to it (and thus can in no sense be ‘read off’).”, in contrast to Jabbar’s metaphor of the ‘elusive divinity pattern’, which are characterised as “the ‘immanent sacred'” “notion or model of ‘the divine’ (general, impersonal)”.

I referred to the conditional basis of this contrast in “STROLLING THROUGH THE DIVINE AVENUE”, saying these points:

1) “Your notion of the absolute as an “addressable reality” locates the divine in the realms of addressability and realisation.”

     This means that your notion involves both the metaphysics of addressability, and the metaphysics of realisation, from which ‘realities’ are derived. I specifically introduced the notion of ‘realisation’ to indicate this condition of derivation. The ‘realms’ referred to, are the twin metaphysical scenarios of addressability and realisation, the logical possibilities of what Kant would call “transcendental conditions”, of those themes. So, it’s a kind of speculative analysis of their allegedly formal necessities.

2) At the outset, you absolutised the relation of “addressable reality”, which has the necessary consequence of producing personal access to the absolute, thus producing the scenario suggested by my statement, {AK (CJ)}: “If this ‘addressable absolute’ is contingent on voluntary relation, does this not imply the worldly feature of psychological attitude?”. This is a key statement, in a way, because it questions the contrast you introduced, between Jabbar’s metaphor of the ‘elusive divinity pattern’, and your notion of the “addressable absolute”, which is why I continued with, {AK (CJ)}: “Thus, assuming such an implication, this presentation of the divine rests on attitudinal gestures of psychic illumination, as so many flickering ‘souls’, divinely patterned flecks of existential light.”

If Jabbar’s metaphor of the ‘elusive divinity pattern’ originates at the borders of his speculative experience; he does say “survey my speculations”; then they are necessarily conditioned by his psychology, that psychological location being presumably the mode of access to the ‘elusive divinity pattern’. How then, can this not be ‘personal’, if the psychological has to do with the personal?
You suggested, however, that it was ‘impersonal’, presumably due to the elusiveness of the ‘divinity pattern’, such alleged elusiveness possibly suggesting the obscurity of fleet objectivity. Though your attribution of the impersonal must have been based on such intuitions of objective obscurity, you nevertheless do not hesitate to ascribe qualities such as ‘immanence’ and ‘destiny’ to that obscurity.

So in the case of Jabbar’s metaphor, if you predicate its impersonality on its objectivity, this neglects Jabbar’s speculative personality.
In the case of addressability, or structures of address, if you predicate personality on the addresser, this neglects the Absolute as addressee.
But, in any case, you do suggest an experiential status for Jabbar’s metaphor, which, of course, you reject due to the allegedly ‘worldly’ aspect of the experiential.

It seems to me that given the conventional nature of all the usual determinations issuing from the usual disciplinary and institutional sources, there really shouldn’t be too much of a problem in using those epistemic determinations, appropriately, at conventional levels.
We know that that is not what goes on, that there is a culture of entrenched whimsicality, in the pejorative sense. And that it is that culture, and its practices of conceptually discursive imposition, which impose various agendas of semantic mediocrity, as a kind of disingenuously ‘normative’ force.
The analysis of my previous comment was not questioning the practice of prayer, at all, or anything you wrote; but rather the shadow of that disingenuous normativity, of its fundamental uncharitability, and the tacit atmosphere of obligation that it interpolates, masking itself as ‘worldly’ convention.

In essence, if the conventional notions of ‘self’, ‘world’, ‘experience’, ‘subject’, ‘object’, ‘perception’, etc., actually are contingent, then their referential attributions are likewise contingent, too. Thus, the entire ‘web of belief’ based on the referential attributions of those conventions, is likewise conventionalised. Thus, the ‘ground has been laid’, so to speak, for unlimited possibilities of radical rewriting of the referential, beyond the present conventional sediments of customary utilitarian assumption. This is where, what I have come to call, a ‘General Conceptual Holography’, can come into play.
In terms of contemporary, intellectual conventions of recent decades, though, I should add that equally rhetorics of ‘fragmentation’, ‘completion’, and whatever else, are also contingent, conclusive critical realisations regarding earlier practices of positivist convention and their assumptions, whose critical conclusivity is specific to the seemingly inappropriate inflations of those assumptions.
The Absolute, is meant to be unconditioned, but conditions are contingencies (for a ‘condition’ to be a condition, it has to be specifically distinguishable as such, such distinguishability necessarily locating it as contingency); thus if the unconditioned conception of the absolute is the negation of all conditions, one corollary would be the negation of all distinction. But distinction or difference specifically emerges through negation. Thus, negation ‘itself’ is a ‘condition’ of distinction. Thus, an unconditioned conception of the absolute negating all specific conditions, is simultaneously and perhaps thereby, the general condition of all those specific conditions.
What can be observed in these statements veering close to paradox, are some of the originary ‘conditional grounds’, so to speak, for ‘radical rewriting of the referential’.
Thus, it is easy to see that ‘failure’ or ‘success’, are merely inventions requiring appropriate citings of suitable conditions.

If you’re going to file Jabbar’s speculations (“Sometimes when I survey my speculations”) under the category of the ‘worldly’, due to the ostensibly ‘worldly’ metaphor of a ‘moonlit surface of oceanic illumination’, used to describe them; then you would be consigning personal cognition to the category of ‘world’ (whatever that means), on the basis of the potential association of metaphorical reference.
    As if all conventional, ‘worldly’ signifiers, instantly appropriate all that they might have contact with, however directly or indirectly, exclusively to their signified order. But this somewhat hasty movement of immediate, metaphysical allegiance, only serves to obscure the essential contingency of the very basis for such impulsive allegiance! This is merely a knee-jerk absolutism of the world-concept, forever substantialising that concept and its imagined hypostasis, with the tightly clinging energies of dogmatic assumption, as a kind of worldo-, or mundano-, -centrism .
    If you’re going to follow that line of thought, in what way would the relation of ‘divine address’, insofar as it might involve personal cognition, not be susceptible to the same infection of ‘worldly’ assumption? Mutatis mutandis, the question of ‘instant’ susceptibility to world-categorical appropriation would beleaguer any other conventionally described attribute of the person, such as ‘feelings’, et cetera.
    What then is left to constitute the ‘personal’ except, by your logic, a necessary ‘soul’ transcendence of the world, and perhaps or even necessarily, union with the divine; especially if there is nothing left to distinguish the personal from the divine, all such potential differences having been in advance consigned to the category of the ‘worldly’
   
    So you get a necessary ‘hypostatic union’, I guess, in Christian theological discourse; after kenosis, which would be the Christian version of various Hindu and Buddhist transcendences of desire. The Tao or Dao, would operate similarly, perhaps with more of a ‘flow’, so to speak.
    If the worldly is considered as the realm of contingencies, then how can contingency be counterposed in any way, to anything else? Contingency, necessarily implies that formal delimitation of the identities said to be contingent, has not occurred. Therefore, their actual nature is unknown and not susceptible to any final characterisation, vis-a-vis, whether they are ‘divine’ or not ‘divine’, et cetera.
    If the quality of ‘contingency’ itself is offered as a binary polarity, in contradistinction to an attribution of ‘divine’ certainty, this has the unfortunate effect of reducing divinity to the distribution of mere polarised opposition (of mere binary understanding?), which is definitely not ‘transcendent’, in any way; not in ‘my book’, anyway. It’s possible to think up gods much, much, ‘better’, so to speak, than that. But, of course, it might be reasonable to expect any conception of the divine that’s ‘worth its salt’, to transcend the play of such evaluations, as well. Even when such hypothesised transcendence is couched in a statement of evaluative worth, lol.

So given that the logic of your assumptions ineluctably leads the essential basis of the ‘personal’ straight to divine union, from which it had never really strayed, anyway, would this not suggest that the relation of address might be redundant? That the structure of address might be merely worldly recapitulation? Because this is the necessary conclusion of entertaining binary metaphysical distributions of divinity and non-divinity, according to definitive fixations of the ‘contingent’, or the, at any rate, allegedly ‘contingent’.

I guess, there are different possibilities, different ways of looking at the divine. I take transcendence seriously, and don’t wish to fixate those possibilities, without good reason. From the perspective of transcendence, anything at all can be transcendent.

It seems to me that you want to preserve the ‘personal’, structure of addressability; away from any ‘impersonal’, structures or dialectics of the divine. Implicitly equating the personal moment with an explicitly absolute conception of the divine, through the relation of address.

By doing so, figures of consciousness and selfhood are emphasised.
One would have to exploit the concepts of ‘eternity’; ‘essence’; and ‘soul’; which are the usual mechanisms by which personal-divine addressability can be absolutised, guaranteed free of any other kinds of dialectical determination, in order to produce such an emphasis. On the face of it, it’s okay, though very Cartesian and Kantian; nothing necessarily wrong with that, though. Potential ‘wrongness’, would depend on subsequent developments.
Firstly, the conditions and rationale of such an emphasis require delineation. What produces the emphasis? Why did such an emphasis even arise? What are the factors, all of them, involved in such an emergence? And could it be, that the conventional conceptualities by which such emergence presents itself, merely recapitulate those factors according to a dialectic whose apprehension such convention proscribes in advance?
That this conceptual convention has suffered the fixation of subsequent development, to the extent of such hypostatic extremity, that not only is the relation ‘self’-‘world’-‘God’ (or ‘freedom’); the only sedimentary survivor; but a very particular, fixated distribution of it, as in a simplified, faceted structure, the metaphysics of frozen ice?
That fixated distribution is contingent, not on any purity of formal outlook or interpretation carried to its full extent, but rather on the preferred expediency of a set of perceptions granting channels of formal extension and materially substantive force, according to the construct(id) habitus of its own entrenched whimsicality.
This is the entrenchment, not of any one ‘idea’, ‘logical line’ or ‘thought’, carried through its extremities into the ‘beyond’ of any profound insight or understanding, but rather the incessant exploitation of prevailing social limitations, as precisely the conceptual convention spoken of, in order to substantialise the culture of entrenched whimsicality as a self-proposed, coercive metaphysical force.
This, essentially, is what is produced under the often derogatory sign of ‘ideology’. Back in the early 1990s, coming from other directions, my perception of this conventional conceptuality, was of an ‘l.c.d.’ (‘lowest common denominator’/liquid-crystal display) thought or force.
What could such ‘motivated cognition’ be, outside of the self-referring images of the economic procedures it calls its own? The not entirely incorrect cliche would be to suggest that answers to such a question necessarily reside beyond the ontological commitments and considerations of that ‘motivated cognition’ and its conventional procedures. But such a statement, in social practice, risks further reduction to precisely those procedures.
Or one could suggest the scenario of considerations reliant upon epistemological horizons of greater extent, from which the game of incessant reinscribings, in the light of a production line of nouveau-principles is enabled, in the service of some banal industry constructing Quinean ‘webs of belief’, the dismal commodities of which can be marketed according to the usual, sensationalist mechanisms of distribution.

So as can be seen, the issue is not so much, really or necessarily, one of ‘production’, any kind of production. In this, there is a possible correspondence to your perhaps underlying concern for the relation of divine address; a relation, moreover, which might seem to be, and always to have been, under threat by those forces of thoughtless production, so many of which positively and explicitly claim to ‘produce’ in the alleged name of that relation, or within some spectrum of ‘values’ allegedly associated with that relation.

Unless the ‘personal’ is expressed in solipsistic, pantheistic, or transcendent, form, the ‘impersonal’ is necessarily and simultaneously created. Conventional conceptuality begins to intercede, at the point when, and to the extent that, the ‘personal and impersonal’ become susceptible to relative distribution in some identifiably third scenario or medium. Once that third scenario or medium has been conceived, or otherwise constructed or requisitioned, the habitus and habitual gameplaying of conventional conceptuality can begin, functioning forevermore as a fixated screen of expressions for those unquestioned conventions and their production of entrenched whimsicality.

This mechanism purchases an alleged ‘freedom’ through innovations of conventional insularity it simultaneously both despises and celebrates, in different registers it likewise innovates, for precisely these apparently contradictory purposes. This is a very particular metaphysical story that continues to configure the mundane concept of ‘world’, the metaphysical ‘shell game’ of banal conceptual habits through which conventional conceptuality, and its ‘l.c.d.’ (‘lowest common denominator’/liquid-crystal display), sustains itself. It is the invention of a set of coercive determinations, calling itself ‘freedom’. But strangely, before the advent of that coercive setting, there was neither distribution of ‘world’, and its respective dialectics; nor the ‘necessity’ of their ‘compulsions’.
It might be as well to consider to what extent there has been a conversion into being an incessantly shuttling servomechanism of wish fulfilments, indistinguishable from the unquestioned mechanism of metaphysical fixations interpolating itself through osmotic inculcation?
Or is even the idea of such ‘conversion’ and ‘convertibility’, merely one more screened operation of that mechanism?

There is a greater context to that excerpt, the passage cited, belongs to a character, Abu Jabbar, the Possibility Merchant.

I don’t recall thinking of the elusive divinity pattern as God toying with people as ‘playthings’; that wasn’t the relation, at all, that I had in mind. The divine would be beyond such figures of control.

Your notion of the absolute as an “addressable reality” locates the divine in the realms of addressability and realisation. Whether those realms are ‘formal’ or ‘material’, ‘transcendent’ or ‘immanent’, they would all take on those respective qualities with reference to each other, such referential distribution constituting and conditioning what can be called, ‘a world’. If this ‘addressable absolute’ is contingent on voluntary relation, does this not imply the worldly feature of psychological attitude?
Thus, assuming such an implication, this presentation of the divine rests on attitudinal gestures of psychic illumination, as so many flickering ‘souls’, divinely patterned flecks of existential light.

I wouldn’t want to limit the divine to a structure of addressability, alone, or even the moonlit surface of oceanic illumination used as metaphor, by Abu Jabbar, the Possibility Merchant. But these are all perspectives that say something, and I would not wish to discount any of them out of hand, or deny them their divine share.

The notion of addressability is interesting. Because, of course, the immediate suggestion would be communication mediums, such as language, whether in greater senses, as in the entire world as a language, or more specific codes of communion, such as the range of anthropic languages. Then, of course, there is the language of ‘feeling’, the codes of ‘affect’, in which the transactions of ‘soul’ are inscribed. All these different codes write each other, affect each other. The divine would be beyond, always beyond, such ‘languages’ and ‘codes’.
But is not ‘beyond’ a semantic code? But being such, need not at all invalidate its divine possibility.