The Symmetrical House of Form: Aesthetics of the Lived-Experience (Part IV)
This life’s dim windows of the soul
Distorts the Heavens from pole to pole,
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, no through, the eye.1
-William Blake
God and Ontological Mystery
Many philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz and Gabriel Marcel among others, offer arguments for the existence of God. For thinkers and many thoughtful people, the existence of God is conceived as a rational enterprise. Yet, for people that profess belief in God, reflection on the existence of God is felt as existential longing for transcendence.
Man finds himself in the world, not totally lost, but awed by his being. Looking to answer the riddles of existence, we are humbled into respecting our limitations: rational, existential, and otherwise. Many of our concerns are existential in make-up. Self-reflection is in essence a creative act that seeks coherence and meaning.
The ontological question of why there is something rather than nothing sends the imagination of young thinkers racing. This is a human concern that requires humility, for people who think they know it all never suspect life as ontological mystery. Faced with the grandeur and mystery of being, young thinkers set out to explore their role in creation. This is a telling characteristic of genuine philosophical reflection that permeates the thought of ancient philosophers, for sincere reflection requires self-effacement. This means the willingness to say, “I don’t know.”
It is important that we do not argue away our existential zest for transcendence through pedantic analytic exhaustion. Philosophical reflection seeks to anchor the lived-experience in reasonable certainty, not obscurantism brought about by abstraction. Consider Plato’s response to this question in Letter VII:
Nothing good or evil worth considering befalls
that which has no soul. Only to a soul either in
the body or separated from it can good or evil occur.
We must at all times give our unfeigned assent to
the ancient and holy doctrines which warn us
that our souls are immortal, that they are judged, and
that they suffer the severest punishments after our
separation from the body.2
Heuristic Lessons and Hubris
Ancient Greek philosophy offers time-tested heuristic lessons. The Stoics are a good example. These moral instructions have kept man from experiencing a great deal of suffering. Heuristic learning supplies man with understanding of the perils of everyday existence. Yet for moral lessons to be effective moderation and a plan for life are required. To internalize the value of moral lessons, one must first be willing to recognize their truth-value. This means that to recognize the value of moral lessons man needs to pay heed to objective reality.
One reason that moral lessons are looked at as a bore in postmodernity is because they beckon man to respect the objective structure of reality. This is anathema to the moral/spiritual palate of relativists. If values are relative, moral lessons merely highlight subjective beliefs, and human reality becomes the plaything of subjective whims and passions.
Miguel de Unamuno’s re-telling of the Cain and Abel saga, Abel Sanchez, traces the infighting tragic story of two families through subsequent generations. This novel is a store of heuristic lessons. Equally poignant is Robert Musil’s compression of the passage of time and destruction of Viennese society in early twentieth century in The Man without Qualities. In both of these works, individuals discover the same truths that people before them experienced. The heuristic beauty of works like these is that they showcase the astoundingly high prize of ignoring the hierarchy of values. Wisdom literature demonstrates that the negation of objective reality leads to painful hubris.
Wisdom is the ultimate form of knowledge, for it creates a catalog of human understanding. Wisdom is not scientific knowledge. Science is the study of the nature of things, not the essences that inform them. Wisdom is knowledge of the essences that instruct human reality.
Wisdom is a hard pill to swallow in a technological age that is consumed with expediency. As the ultimate and unifying form of knowledge, wisdom is created through the maze of understanding. One reason for this is because the demands of the daily world force us to be efficient in our decisions. We mobilize our vital energy to address concerns that are leveled at us from forces that, in many instances, we neither foresee or solicit.
Wisdom organizes human existence, given that wisdom serves as a buffer zone between the actual conditions of life and our understanding and maneuvering through this reality. In the absence of wisdom, human existence is reduced to a stagnant biological condition, without rhyme or reason, that fails to find any redeeming quality in itself.
Socrates was correct that honest philosophical reflection is a humbling and cathartic undertaking. Humility is achieved by realizing that our lack of knowledge is itself knowledge. Catharsis is the ground of aesthetics of the lived-experience.
The Axis of the Symmetrical House of Form
To fully appropriate the symmetry of form, especially as this pertains to human existence, it is important to focus on man’s metaphysical/existential nature. Even when reason identifies aspects of symmetry in nature, it is man that uncovers this. Whether in the structure of quantum reality, the intricacy of the human body, or the space/time continuum, form permeates human reality.
The aesthetics of the lived-experience embraces form as the axis of symmetrical human reality. One reason that form is key in the lived-experience is because it has a one-to-one correlation with man’s ability to conceive reality as coherent structure. Whether through reason or intuition, form is what the human mind encounters as it attempts to come to terms with ultimate reality.
Because man cannot conceive a formless, amorphous reality, the coherent structure of reality that man uncovers in outward structures is, in principle, equal to existential reflection when the latter turns attention on itself. Existential reflection discovers that man can mitigate the contingencies of reality on the human person. While not giving us total control over nature and circumstance, existential reflection affords man a greater understanding of free will, as this leads man to cultivate self-rule.
This essay began by citing form (eidos) as the most profound discovery of man. Relating form to existential reflection, history, invention and man’s capacity for wisdom and happiness, it is now important to reflect about form in relation to the future of man.
The question of form is important to man’s future for several reasons. One of these is that as the sensual aspects of human life exert greater influence over postmodernity, the less that man is inclined or capable of existential reflection. This implies the destruction of sensibility that traditionally has enabled man to create through the use of imagination.
Traditionally, man has sought to understand the sensual world by utilizing all of our faculties: reason, intuition and imagination. This allowed man to put into perspective the varied aspects of human reality in relation to human existence. The physical sciences study the order of physical laws through physics, biology, chemistry and other sciences. This approach has supplied modern man with understanding of physical reality that ancient man lacked. In turn, discoveries made under the banner of science are respected for their penetrating glance into objective reality.
Of equal importance, poetry and literature have always presented human reality in broader strokes, as it were. Imagination has enabled man to close the circle of human reality by showcasing man as creator of worlds. The literary imagination pays allegiance to science by recognizing that science has a scope and perspective different from literature. Consequently, the literary arts have flourished by concentrating on man’s capacity to view human reality though a metaphysical/existential prism. Thus, human sensibility has been safeguarded from asphyxiation from one-dimensional aspects of human reality that have little to say about man’s existential concerns.
Sensual reality is not to be confused with outward reality. In a milieu that confuses human reality with sensual stimuli, man’s capacity for truth becomes truncated. This is particularly true in a time that is saturated with sensational media and boisterous forms of life. This is an important distinction that I have made throughout this essay. When form qua-substance becomes confused with forms of particular components of reality, as relativism demands, sensual experience becomes reduced to subjectivism. 3
Without the guidance and inspiration of awe and wonder, the sensual bombardment on man’s sentiment that postmodernity provides, makes sensuality debased through ever-more aggressive forms of narcissism, megalomania and erotomania. The corrosive nature of the latter is their ability to isolate human existence from reality proper, thus opening up the possibility for unprecedented pathologies. The Spanish philosopher, Julian Marías, describes philosophical reflection as responsible vision because it serves as the foundation of responsible action. 3
Human Reality and Man’s Resistance to Objectification
Man encounters subjective existence, not as the measure of reality proper, but its organizer and guardian. Reflective persons are continually awed and refreshed by their sense of self. However, man is not the measure of all things, as subjectivists believe. Man cannot make sense of human existence in a vacuum. This is not how we experience human reality. Instead, man experiences human reality in a manner that bespeaks to intuition and the imagination given that, as Parmenides proposed, truth (Alētheia) hides from man, even though man needs truth to order human existence. Through concealment/unconcealment, truth teases man into seeking it. This is what philosophical reflection demands. Yet, because truth dovetails existential reflection with reality proper, this has the effect of frustrating many people who give up on existential reflection altogether.
Philosophical reflection is necessitated by the existential dialectic that is central to human existence. This is because man experiences human reality from the inside out. Without a clear understanding that recognizes the reality of the subject as a primary condition for all subsequent possible knowledge, we can never concretize aesthetic, scientific or metaphysical concepts.
Human existence has no precedence. Man’s metaphysical/existential predicament can be apprehended through two dominant modalities: 1) As the resistance offered to personhood by reality proper, and internalized appropriately; 2) Free will as a burden. The former has been recognized since time immemorial as the human condition. This has enabled man to create civilization, as we have witnessed beginning in prehistory. On the other hand, free will, conceived as a burden, is the unprecedented predicament that postmodernity has created for man.
Lack of desire to cultivate personal autonomy is often taxed with the price of gaining the world while losing the self. However, this is only one possibility – and, for some people, a convenient one at that – of getting along in the world.
Individual human existence is an objective form of reality that we must contend with. Man ought to cultivate objective reality as the arena that makes transcendence possible, not as an alienating force. The former is the perspective of people who understand human reality as the intersection of existential reflection and the external world. The demands that reality proper makes on man are not merely physical. Suffering is an existential aspect of human reality human that transcends our physical misfortune.
The worldly is also the human. Even more, the mundane offers man the necessary resistance to discover our essence as persons. Objective reality is not conducive to self-rule and authenticity; these are not conditions that inhere in reality proper. Yet self-rule and existential authenticity are aspects of the human person that are informed by qualitative essences of respective individuals. As such, these essences inform our ability to live in the material world.
Transcendent enlightenment occurs through the recognition of our predisposition or vocation for self-reflection. Man embodies life. This condition makes biological life transparent to itself, but not to personhood as the aesthetics of the lived-experience. This is the type of paradox, the likes that we find in Lucretius.
Symmetry in the Aesthetics of the Lived-Experience
Socrates’ daemon (daimonion δαιμόνιον), an inner voice that guided him by instructing the ancient Greek philosopher what action not to take, points to the essence of existential reflection. While intuitive reflection cannot be telegraphed through what analytic philosophers consider rational demonstration, it is nonetheless divine inspiration that allowed Socrates to prosper in the world.
The structure of human reality is manifested in persons through man’s ability to appropriate form as essence in the lived-experience. Intuitive clarity that effectively coalesces form and coherent structure in the lived-experience uncovers symmetry as the ground of human existence. The aforementioned qualitative essences are not ascertained by positivism, science and scientism, given their metaphysical/existential nature. One wonders if they are even suspected by philosophical materialists?
Existential authenticity eschews forms of life that attempt to corral personhood into collectives. As future-oriented beings, the essence of man can only be understood as pertaining to differentiated persons. Throughout this essay, the suggestion has been that objective reality forces itself upon man. As a consequence, this gives individual persons no other option than to seek coherence in reality in relation to the self; the differentiated entity that reality addresses.
If objective reality is to be apprehended at all, it bespeaks of a being that serves as its filter. Without individual persons to ascertain the structure of reality proper, the inherent order of the latter collapses into meaningless physical reality. Yet, even the expression “meaningless physical reality” denotes a meaningful structure for man. The philosopher Nicolas Gómez-Dávila (1913-1994) writes in Scholia to an Implicit Text that “Even though we are forced to yield to the stream of collective nonsense sweeping us along, let us not allow it to melt us into its mire” and “Our soul has a future. Humankind has none.”5
After millennia of attempts to corral man into artificial and theoretical collectives, the essence of differentiated persons stubbornly refuses collectivization. This is a reaction to the incessant call by materialists of diverse stripes that propose theories brazenly refuting the reality encountered by thoughtful and reflective people throughout history.
Existential reflection, which is an attempt of personhood to seek the structure of human reality, is the hallmark of concrete individuals of flesh and blood. Thus, to use Gómez-Dávila’s word “implicit” in relation to symmetry of form in human reality, I will add that form is implicit in all aspects of human reality. Whether postmodern philosophical materialists ignore or negate form as substance that informs the lived-experience, contributes nothing to understanding personhood through history.
What is it about the Socratic daemon that solicits the attention and respect of existential reflection? Is this the fundamental intuitive aspect of philosophical reflection that defines the quest for form and truth? If it is, as I suggest, truth seeks the attention of people through patent unconcealment, while being unsuspected by many through latent concealment.
The aforementioned may answer many of man’s most pressing existential riddles. Enlightened existential reflection affords personhood knowledge of the universal threads that make human reality a tapestry woven by individual persons. This suggests that man ought not to seek comfort in the forest without prior consultation with the implicit wisdom of individual tress. This is the symmetrical view of human reality that the house of form rewards diligent and thoughtful thinkers.
Notes
1. Malcolm Muggeridge, Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith. Edited by Cecil Kuhne. ((San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 77.
2. Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 1,583.
3. Julian Marias, Metaphysical Anthropology: The Empirical Structure of Human Life. (1971).
4. See: Pedro Blas Gonzalez “Happiness, Subjectivism, and Subjectivity.” Voegelin View, February 7, 2019.
5. Nicolas Gómez-Dávila, Scholia to an Implicit Text. (Bogotá, Colombia: Villegas Editores, S.A., 2013), 2013.
Also available is “The Symmetrical House of Form“; “The Symmetrical House of Form: The Economics of Being and The Struggle for Existence in Prehistory; “The Symmetrical House of Form: Happiness and Joy.”