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?