Participatory Coherence and Real Abstraction, II
Our Time of Estrangement
Engaging in systematic thought has always been a human capacity. We, however, in the Faustian1 West, have and have had to engage in a peculiarly disconcerting prior work, insofar as we must first construct for ourselves the very so-called “systems of thought” upon which our orderly reasoning may be founded.
We are no longer embedded in a context of meaning with which one may participate symbiotically—that is, both inside himself as to his thought-abstractions, and outside of himself as to that which informs and invites these thought-abstractions—in the ordering of coherent thought.
Due to this meaning-estrangement from one’s own context – which we will soon further explicate – what I have beforehand referred to as the quest for mental clarity is a dramatically pressing concern. All who find themselves drifting aloof from a stable ground for their thoughts, inferences, and conclusions, will likely feel their great need to have these reasonings be situated in a coherent way with their internal elements and with the external world.
There is a strong, in fact at times overwhelming, desire to know that one’s thoughts, inferences, and conclusions are in fact real. To know, in other words, that they are not illusory; but also as knowably real, that is, to know that the internal abstractions of one’s mind are congruent with the external world which impresses upon the sense data.
The mental anguish and psychological suffering (being itself a distinct but related ailment brought on and exacerbated by its generic spiritual infirmity) on account of one’s seeming inability to know, and to ground his knowing or lack thereof—which is itself an epistemic concern, i.e. can it truly be (known) that one is unable to know?—are made all the more poignant for those of us who are severed from the conceptual inheritance of our forebears' minds, circumstances, and interpersonal temperaments, and that in large part by our empiricism, skepticism, and hard-heartedness.
That particular kind of knowing in which one’s internal abstractions are known to be congruent to the external world, while perhaps appearing circular at the human level of justification, is in fact an epistemic appeal to the symbiotic inter-knowing, as it were, between one’s real, internal abstractions and real, external abstractions—the mutual self-disclosure between which results in understanding. That is to say, knowledge is gained through, and precisely in, love.
The self-disclosing between one’s internal abstractions, that is, not his mental-propositional thoughts only, but also those yet-unclarified stirrings of his heart, drawn out by God’s Spirit, and which the Scriptures call “groanings;”2 and those abstractions which subsist external to himself—by which the logoi3 are referred—is the way by and in which man may participate in the perfect comprehension of the knowing, triune God.
As Christ says, He no longer calls His disciples servants, but friends, and that because the servants do not know what the Master is doing;4 so we are made to know the nature of knowledge in the world which God relationally upholds.
Real knowledge is participatory, it is knowing what He is doing. Man may partake of this knowing in God’s timing and distribution, according to His loving will. This knowledge involves the logical ordering of propositions, and each proposition’s congruence with its respective conclusion; however, it does not subsist in such reasoning. Likewise, this participatory knowing involves the unmediated grasp of intuition, that is, knowledge of the inarticulate—or simply familiarity—though neither does it solely exist in intuition.
The triune God is He in Whom all unity and distinction coheres in perfect harmony; free of confusion between the unified, and without enmity between non-identicals. Therefore, those abstractions which exist externally to man do not themselves subsist as bare and isolated abstractions, as though they were some kind non-verbal singularities of raw data.
Rather, they exist in the personal and participable mind of the triune God, Who ever articulates His mind in and through Jesus Christ. One can only fully participate in this wealth of the mind5 by covenantal and ontological union with Him, He, that is, in Whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden.6
Spengler uses this term to denote what he views as a peculiarly European temperament and psychology, writing: “The Faustian soul — whose being consists in the overcoming of presence, whose feeling is loneliness and whose yearning is infinity — puts its need of solitude, distance, and abstraction into all its actualities, into its public life, its spiritual and its artistic form-worlds alike.” Decline of the West 386
Romans 8:26-27
“Inner principles or inner essences, thoughts of God in accordance with which all things come into existence at the times and places, and in the forms, appointed for them, each single thing containing in itself the principle of its own development.” Philokalia IV 433
John 15:15
1 Corinthians 2:16
Colossians 2:2-3