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.