This fourth (long and rather detailed) essay in the series is both a conclusion to Part Three’s examination of the causalities of human being and an introduction of the role of attention.  Whilst this is not an essay on epistemology, it runs an epistemological course from, in biblical terms, Eden to the Fall to salvation, which correlates with the ontological one from the Primary to the Secondary Structure of causality.  It needs to be understood that there are two distinct processes here, one of those at the very foundation of the brain, and the other in a declined quality of cognition.  The latter explains all the sorrows of life which are of Man’s wilful error.  It is eminently ameliorable, as the next essay, exploring the accidental effects of NSDAP on German peoplehood, will endeavour to demonstrate.

BETWEEN DASEIN AND DARWIN

The twice lost garden, a place not only of confusion, but of lethargy and passivity.

In an age of official hostility, coercion, hypocrisy and lies, and the fear and dread which these inculcate in the innocent, the truth is at a very great premium, for it is the sole means of deliverance.  Let us begin this perfectly non-religious essay, then, with some political as well as ontological truth from St Paul, KJV, 1 Corinthians 13:12 ...

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

We will now think with - and past – Paul, and do so ontologically but always with one eye on the political.  For this is, in part, an essay about power and powerlessness, and although it begins in matters far from worldly concerns, ultimately the ontology must show us where power truly abides.

Each one of us stands raw and constantly renewing within this immediate world in all its own raw and constantly renewing wholeness, which encompasses us as it encompasses all things organic and inorganic, and from which neither we nor anything else can except itself.  “For now” in this hyper-material, primordial reality, this singular congruence no wider than a razor’s edge, we do not stand with any cognition of ourselves as beings separated out by self-hood and by the fateful time-lapse of our own thinking, or even that of our feeling or sensing in any form.  We are naïve as we are raw, and both of these only while cognition trails but a few milliseconds adrift.  Once we join with it everything changes.

This, then, is the biblical Garden of Eden, and although the holy scribes and seers of the ancient world understood that, by the serpentine order of things, processing information about it expels us from it (ie, it cannot be experienced indirectly as information in the mind), they only had poetry and myth to represent the fact.  They did not have the benefit of modern science or evolutionary theory or even Western epistemology to know why or to explicate the totality of the caesura.  They could not know that Mind emerges first from the enzyme catalysis, light- and heat-seeking, and quorum sensing of simple cells which they never saw and never suspected to exist.  They could not know, therefore, that such a defining and constitutive origin renders our cognitive process today, with all its dissonant temporality, as imminent and inextinguishable as any tribal god they might cook up.  They could not know that Mind and divine truth, should such a thing exist, rightfully have contrary dynamics.  If there are truths in the paradisal garden which are divine, they are forever beyond Mind’s necessary, disjunctive filter.

Put another way, even the most intense and elevated liberational event by which mystics self-verify Union with the All ... even that remains informational for us.  Yes, the thinking mind’s relentless, drenching chatter can be stilled, at least for a brief while.  If the subject is a serious individual, fifteen years or so tanning himself on a Californian beach while, of course, bent in the regulation lotus posture, and following every breath into and out of the body (in other words, actual prayer, not the church pew thing), then a certain equilibrium might restore itself for a time and a certain detachment might yield real profundity.  But the totality that is the cognitive Mind remains operative and absolute, and in the final analysis such efforts represent no more than a reaching towards the unreachable.  So it is that one of the two great causes of every religion - Union with the All – remains a literal impossibility in this life at least (and we need not let eternal salvation in the next detain us).  What, then, is actually taking place?  How are we to bring this entire dispensation into the ontological daylight, and order it?

As ever, there is some clearing away, some housekeeping to be done.

First, we do not, “for now”, have to concern ourselves with the epistemology: how the brain abstracts data from the form of “the Garden of Eden”, the locality of the All so to speak, and reifies World for itself, ordered informationally into the managed whole in which we ordinarily exist, and which, as living organisms, we may negotiate sufficiently well to survive and transmit our genes.  This is “the hard problem” of consciousness which was unknown to the authors of the Genesis story.  As yet, we have various theories but no definitive, working solution.  It is perfectly likely that we will never find the solution.  But although the hard problem is adjacent to our subject today, it is not our subject (or not yet).  We can use Nature to fence off not only it but all clamorous epistemology.  We can draw the ontological line to include the functional map of the brain but not the functioning modes of that map, which means we have drawn the line before Dasein’s pure witness of the world-at-hand, before the informational filter and particular interpretational language of each of the cognitive domains, and before even the sociobiological expressions in our racial Mind and behaviour ... before the actual functioning of any of the brain’s cognitive domains.  That way, also, we do not risk being drawn beyond Nature’s virile contest, and towards the abstraction of being as simple appearance, the static thereness of which leads us nowhere.

Now our philosophical subject is properly ontological and can enter upon the search for causality.  That search leads us to a second and quite distinct Fall.  This, of course, is the strange and certain, universal state of declension that Christianity terms fallen-ness and Buddhism confusion, and I have previously termed absence.

To progress toward an understanding of this we must set aside more than just the hard problem.  Everything which belongs in this Garden of Eden … the quicksilver pre-cognitive estate, the noumenal therefore, Man in himself, even the rumour of something Olympian ... we must set aside all concern for it, for we are gone from it and none of it informs our quest.  It is in the world we definitely, ordinarily inhabit – the only world we can really inhabit – that we do indeed “see through a glass, darkly”, and thereby live in error upon error.  Sleeping men, shallow men, the self-absorbed and self-satisfied, the unquestioningly conforming, the damaged and damaging abound, and abound especially in fields critical to our people’s life and freedom, inflicting yet more of the same pathologies upon us.  How does human being become this being, with all its error-strewn, fateful ordinary-ness and everyday-ness, and its profusion of artifice?

To observe and process the ontology of this estate is to be alongside it in a suitably ecstatic sense, and thus not lost in it ourselves.  For it is not simply the being of “others”.  “Others” are not alien to us.  They are each and every one of us.  Their abiding frailties and flaws abide in us also, as an inevitable result of our common, all-too-human declension; and these flaws we see in them.  Yet, miraculously, there is also a questioning, a turning, and transcendence, and thus some restitution to being.  But, then, there is also faith; and that, too, we need to understand ecstatically, even if individually we do not bear that specific higher emotional trait.

Our next necessity for this investigation is to assign this second falling to the ontological project upon which this site has been engaged.  In Part Three of this series a primary structure of human causality was proposed.  Its end products of survival, continuity, and destining supply functional detail to the great and singular cosmic contest between mechanics and the organic, as somewhat generally described in Part One:

Always, Time and Entropy drag this life back towards discontinuity and disintegration, and the cold state of mechanics.  Always life’s essential, voracious appetite for continuity, born of that initial happenstance, impels it forward and proves itself, within its own confines and by its perfect integrity, as equal as equal can be to the vast forces without.

Under the disintegrating action of the mechanical universe that voracious appetite, to which adheres the quality of reflex or recoil, is the parent of everything that then follows…

... so, nervosity, oxygenation, the sensing of heat, light, movement and of quora, the incorporation of energy sources, sensitisation to environmental change, the giving and receiving of chemical signals, the bias towards strong signals, etc … all the way to complex forms of sapience

All this framing established, our purpose now is not to sketch out a history of sapience or to wander into thinking about sapience itself.  We are hunting a pure and original foundation that extrudes into current life, unchanged in its essentials and totally free of any latter-day interpolation or anthropomorphism.  To that end, we have a third piece of housekeeping to do, namely to set aside the technical reasons for the caesura.  Solely for the sake of clarity, these are:

(i) the particular informational languages of the three cognitive domains (so sensation, feeling and thought), which are obviously different to how we might imagine a direct experience of primordial reality, and therefore are already dissevering.

(ii) the operational speeds of these language processes, each different from the other, and each dissevering (when the introduction of speed itself, as movement along a novel temporal line, cannot match the movement of the present moment, and must diverge from it).

So, this pair constitute the bare mechanics of our fate as cognitive beings.  They are interesting in themselves.  But they do not tell us anything ontological about the fallen human being.  Though necessary in other investigations, further thought on them now does not serve our present purpose.  We will focus less, therefore, on Mind and cognition, and less, even, on Heidegger’s alluring alternative of disclosure of the World to being.  As it has been all along, our modus for understanding is being’s finally dismal course from foundation to nature to enworldment.

THE SECONDARY STRUCTURE

The following chart is the proposal from Part Three.  It is a proposal for the absolute fundamentals of human ontological expression.  Its primary causal structure is abstracted from the trinity of grounds on which that expression appears.  The three primary grounds are not neutral for being, which does not therefore just casually appear on them.  Being appears against them in an event of extremely improbable separation and differentiation, fending off their cold state of mechanics by sheer reflex, and only “for now”.  The greater part of this conflicted estate, as structured in the chart, holds for all organic being.  Humans are late but unique exemplars of it.  But, as we shall see, the end products of human survival, destining, and continuity are not necessarily bound to evenly flow.

We began with the observation that there are two Falls, one on another.  In the first case we are dealing with human being in relation to primordial reality.  Notionally, that relation is the ontological difference between Dasein’s pure witness of reality and the information-based rendering of that witness by the cognitive systems of the brain.  By its association with the primordial, this relation of Fallen-ness must inhere to the being of all beings and all brains, and not just human being and the human brain.  Obviously, the functional (not functioning, remember) entity that is the brain cannot be excised from any being, as cannot any other physical organ in its functional presence.  But for Modern Man (phylogenetically Homo sapiens sapiens), his brain occupies the defining role of, say, wings to a bird or fins to a fish.  In the chart, that definition manifests ontologically not in consequence of Flux, since all organic being conforms to its dominion, nor in consequence of Space for the same reason.  But Time temporalises human being uniquely, in the linear form.  It is the brain of Man alone and, chiefly, its intellectual domain, which vouchsafes that uniqueness, and then abstracts futurity from it.  As for be-ing (ie, not only immediacy but also as activity), it is not a causal factor in itself but an action out of some essential cause, seen or unseen.  Thus it never precedes but always follows on.

As stated at the close of the Part Three essay, that abstraction of futurity develops our ontology from that of a being acting purely reflexively to that of an appropriating and affirming being which commands:

... the massive positivity which emerges – Heidegger would have said unconceals – with “normal” consciousness of, or presence to, be-ing.

What, then, does “normal” mean?  It is surely not, as Heidegger thought, an estate (or event) of witness in which entities in the world emerge as themselves, defined relationally by the entities around them.  To be in this sense is to know.  That would be to recover Eden, and for the aforementioned neurochemical reasons we humans cannot do that.  Our caesura is certain and immutable - we can never know truth directly, “face to face” in the present moment.  But we can know it at one one remove, out of that moment and informationally.  If survival and continuity is the arbiter, which it must be, our knowing is still sufficient for us to sense the presence of truth in ourselves and others and in the world-at-hand, and thus to make a preponderance of evolutionarily adaptive life-choices over maladaptive ones.  For, adaptivity is not error.  To be in this sense caught between Dasein and Darwin is to know optimally, or near optimally, what the informational brain can know.  Even given the inevitable caesura from Eden (apparently for humanity’s cognitive sins), the human norm remains cognitive optimality / near-optimality, which we might explain by the reflexive fundamentals of excess and increase that were mentioned in passing in Part Three:

… in excess, [recoil] masses its actions against disintegration such that be-ing itself is a work of flowing and radical increase.

All of which begs a series of doleful questions.  How is it that non-optimality is very plainly our routine estate?  If informationality excises human being from the present moment, does its shift into the single available temporal paradigm of past-to-future cause the human condition of cognitive error and self-estrangement allied to suggestibility?  Does that paradigm simply supply inadequate anchorage for humans to be and by being to know, such that not-being and not knowing inherit the world of men, and optimality in relational (ie, environmentally adaptive) choice-making – a primary product of the constitutionally human cause of survival - is weakened?

How that might happen is schematised in the chart by the 90º off-take from the horizontal “Time-line”, at the point where lineation orients as futurity.  This turn definitively substitutes the present moment – as noted above, no wider than a razor’s edge - with an extensible existential generality.  The extension degrades that razor-touching, existential-temporal quality which normally sits at the very heart of the experience of being.  This we may term ontological intensity, and think of as a measure of (what we know as) attention, or attention-to-being.  The measure runs from an active capacity to inactive or passive.  Degradation from an active capacity invariably produces passivity more or less instantaneously, as if a light switch has been thrown,

Even given our fallen state, intensity is recoverable much later and to a non-trivial extent through the focussing of attention via ontological effort … being-effort.  But who or what is there to perform the recovery?  Returning to the chart we see that be-ing’s descent must simultaneously pass through the “Space-line”. This it does at the point where, as a product of confine and environment, human being orients relationally (Heidegger’s Being-with).  In the same sense that the Time-line tracks temporalised human being “then” (or indeed now) in the present moment, the Space-line tracks localised human being “there” (or here) in the World.  Its futural orientation compromised, its relational orientation clouded and discomposed, be-ing does not mature into that self-originating, sublime constitutional form which stands above and distinct from the world-at-hand, ministering to it at will.  Rather, its passivity renders it enworlded.  It is become a be-ing immersed in ... literally blended into ... both internal and external phenomena such that its distinctiveness is lost and its agency bleeds away.  It is an artificialising being, made open (suggestible) and fungible by the perpetual and unnatural novelty of its circumstance.  It has succumbed to a (very secular) second Fall.

In this sense, enworldment is a more accurate and complete ontological term than, say, enculturation, in that it speaks not of Social Man but of human being in this strange descent   As already mentioned, the key characteristic, however, is attention, which we can model as follows.  I hope the suggested names are helpful:

KEY TO FORMS OF ATTENTION

Singularity: the (notional) unity of being and knowing in the primordial real, to which the informational Mind has no access.  Singularity’s disrelation from the workings of the human brain, and thus from all practical ontological and epistemological thinking, is absolute.  In consequence, there is really nothing to be profitably said about it.  Yet because so many have assumed for its relevance to the human condition, all manner of things that are wrong have been said and continue to be said, and the full gravity of our fallen plight and our too fragile transcendence of it go little remarked.  For example, if thinkers do not account for ontological intensity they do not account functionally for either.  So with that in mind ...

Concentrated Attention: This should be the abiding (ie, permanent) norm of human existence, not just in being’s immediacy but in its ontological intensity, thereby revealing:

(a) the ontological principal – in principle, ascribed by the brain, so not entirely sacred - which alone can pronounce the words “I am” with authentic power (and “We are in the context of the kin-group) ...

as well as ...

(b) an elevated witness of the world which lies before it - elevated, of course, in comparison to its existential antithesis.

Even if the degree of concentration is relatively weak, still it would be a much superior condition, and Nature’s condition, under which to pursue the survival and continuity of the organism – basically to select for fitness in the transmission of genetic information unto the morrow, in the very teeth of Time and entropy (Flux).

As a side note, and because clarity is always good, the difference between the ontological principal and the ontological principle is that the former is a constant in itself, speaking the words “I am” over a state of sufficiently concentrated attention (wherein the essentials of us are exposed), while the latter is the principle that the ascription process is constant itself, and must speak the word “I” regardless of state.  Not the principal, therefore, but the principle alone will apply in:

Dispersed Attention: When concentration is lost, a state of attentional passivity and ontological sloth ensues.  As noted, the words “I am” continue to be uttered because our sense of self ... our constant identification of the subject ... is ascribed quite mechanically somewhere in the most ancient recesses of the brain.  It is a promiscuous thing, and will alight on whatever it finds.  It doesn’t care to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic.  It does not distinguish between what is high and what is low.  It has no preference for what was there yesterday or the day before.  It does not discriminate between waking and sleeping, or between states of mind.  It merely pronounces the word “I” over whatever is in view in a given moment.

It is the ontological condition under which self-negation develops, then immersion in all the passing objects of Mind and World alike.  This perfectly usual and universal estate is characterised by happenstance in the processes of Mind and by the reification of World as the active principle in the being of our person.  World is the source of all artifice.

While Dispersed Attention is the prelude to every negative in the human condition and we are all as we are because if it, a high degree of concentration, summonable at will and sustainable as necessary, is very rare indeed.  For the vast, exoteric majority it can only exist as a spiritual ideal.  It should be understood, therefore, as a process of real-isation practically attainable only by way of specialised esoteric exercises and disciplines closed to the mass of exoteric humanity.  This in no way implies that weaker concentrations are not virtuous and desirable – and possible.  Any turn towards an authentic life is vivifying, be that for the individual or, via accretion, for the kin-group: 

We must be clear that there is nothing essentialist or vitalist or pretentiously sacred in this moment, no res cogitans, nothing manufactured or imposed, nothing illusory in any way, nothing negative, nothing held back, nothing which can be added.  What “is there” is not reducible or divisible.  Because it has singularity it has unity, and because it has unity it has will.  But it has it not as a subject but as a process of consciousness.  Because it has consciousness it cannot blindly self-harm.  It cannot be other than it is, and it is, and always was, the same -  that which abides in light and nature.

The terms of this most human settlement do not change very much at the level of population.  They simply collect

That collection is the only way, in fact, to a new epoch of truth, affirmed in the public and private life, after these long years of racial injustice, betrayal and lies.

With that lodestar in view, our turn must concern the following:

Intentional Attention: To be clear from the outset, the intention we speak of here is not that of Husserlian phenomenology.  It is an instituted turn, or re-turn, via a purposive, very functional attention.  It requires, first, an instinctual and awakened inner sense or “taste” to the effect that that the routine and ordinary experience of being is not our being.  Second, it requires a definite, willed (or ontological) effort focussed on some single point.  Thereby it may render the unruly, precarious clamour of the external-facing cognitive domains still so that, for now, they do not absorb and monopolise everything.

By “single point”, we do not only mean a point of focus in the body or its physical processes, although that is the modus of the individual,where the effort and the point are within the one organism.  However, the organism at the level of the kin-group is the whole of the group itself.  In this case, ontological effort is of a much reduced order and is referential and indirect.  The will to it can originate in an imperative from any member or members of the group, and be focused on some particular of the group itself.  Then if group members respond accordingly, the same vivifying, authenticising process will manifest within the same ontological structure but, obviously, the range of ultimate possibilities will be truncated in the vertical direction.  But whilst the individual has the higher range of possibilities, the group’s more modest range is the more stable, and thus no less substantial and precious.

Gathering Attention: This is the subsequent, effort-driven movement in the direction of concentrated attention.  Esoterically,  it goes via what I take to be Matthew 7:14’s narrow gate to life:

Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.

Difficult yes, but it is also a way becoming lighter as it goes, first gathering together and synergising two or three of the formerly unruly cognitive domains.  Their synergy delivers that detachment which Heidegger compared to walking into a lit forest clearing where his goddess of Truth might unconceal that permanence which is not of our enworldment.  Unconcealing leads to appropriating, and appropriating to affirming.  Unless, of course, the effort ceases, as it eventually must.  Then there is fracture.  Negation breaks through and drives away affirmation, and everything returns to where it was before.  Of course, that sorry chain of events can happen at any point in the attentional process.

Coincidental Attention: an inrush of remembering, finding and recognising, instinctive in origin but triggered accidentally by external or involuntary internal stimuli, and disappearing again just as quickly because no intentional Turn and no effort was involved.  Nonetheless, the memory of it, or the possibility of it, will invariably endure.

This is an important phenomenon at level of the kin-group, and explains, for example, the shock-induced flood of tribalism and patriotism at the onset of conflict between nations, that awareness of self persisting only as long as the violence lasts.  Even this unwilled form of attention shatters the notion that human being can ever really be mere thereness, factic but subsumed in and contingent upon some artificial social ideal.  Nevertheless, such politics persist.  Judaism’s yearning for the amorphousness and a-causality of the ethnic Other relentlessly turns on his worldly “perfection” as such, or he can never fulfil his required life of service as the gentile of the End Time.  Neither should we overlook the Abrahamic root of exoteric Christianity and Islam as radical re-workers, and thus artificialisers, of human being, nor the current technocratic elite’s drive for The Globality.  Likewise, the revolutionary left’s desire for the ontological universality of the radically equal man – again Abrahamically-rooted - pours forth the party dictate, the gulags, the roads of bones, and killing fields.  It is said that ninety million people died in the 20th century in communists’ failed attempts at their utopia – failed because attention to the ontological principal, which is the only way to human freedom, cannot be universalised and cannot be rubbed out of Man while he remains himself.  So far, he has done so.

In brief, existence does not precede essence, and the mere existence of some work of artifice ontologically blinded by politics can never be made to do so.  Essence is prior while human life itself persists, and attention, with its gift of freedom in being, belongs firmly to essence.  It will out.

KEY TO RELATED ONTOLOGICAL AXES

All the five attentional forms function within dynamic ontological contexts, of which there are six.  Each comprises a pair of axialised principles, obviously.  They are inter-related, and separated by quite small margins.  They can be seen as different aspects of, or perspectives on, a single event.  Nevertheless, each pair has a particular application.  The first three in the list below are functional, the next three contingent upon those functions. Together, these latter three are the essentials of human be-ing, scribing the several differences between normal (authentic) and ordinary (inauthentic) be-ing, or between active, attentive be-ing and passive be-ing.  If ethnic nationalism means anything at all, that difference is its driver ... the motive power in its reaching always upward, and its saviour from the static, herbivorous politics of Tolkien’s Shire which some nationalist critics expect of it. 

The three functional axes are:

Active ↔ Passive: This is the general, controlling axis of being’s agency, and the principal axis on which attention scales.  This it does from high concentration down via its fracture to dispersal – for it should be understood that concentration does not gracefully decay.  It fractures and then it is gone.  With the fracture of any degree of concentration being is once more enworlded and passes seamlessly into immersion and the familiarities of immersion, and a most encompassing passivity and ontological impotence.  It is a relinquishment as natural, comfortable and inevitable as our body’s submission to the law of gravity.  Indeed, in its constancy it is very much as if the active-to-passive dynamic is the work of some great and unseen gravitational force that bears upon not our bodies but our being, blindly but completely negating our efforts to take to the air.

Effort ↔ Sloth: This is the secondary axis on which attention or, to be completely accurate, ontological intensity, scales.  The willing of effort for (or in the) now is the beginning of the restoration of whole human being; as the loss of will is the fracture and loss of it.  In the chart’s iteration sloth is not the deadly sin from Catholic teaching, nor even a moral shortcoming.  It is a denying of the very fact and meaning of loss, a finding of excuses, a relentless putting off.  In the same sense that ontological effort (attention) is this willed and energising focus on being (as) present to the world, ontological sloth is the voiding of energy from being, which leads with complete certainty into an existential lethargy and forgetting of anything but lethargy.  Human beings simply are this way; and even if they are told that some manner of deliverance is possible, yet they may prefer ignorance so they may “be” this way for a whole lifetime.  It is, of course, entirely irrelevant to that preference whether they are good men or faithful unto the gods.  Their preference is for the easy and literally effort-less.  Mounting effort, on the other hand, is hard and uses a lot of resources.  It is also a fragile and easily fractured.  It will eventually exhaust itself anyway unless it can connect to some external source of energy (which, btw, is the real function of prayer).  But while it is maintained it may pass the mileposts of remembering, finding and recognising, and onward still further.

Synergy ↔ Idiosyncrasy: The axis setting out the relation of the cognitive domains to one another, always subject to the ontological paradigm of effort ↔ sloth.  Effort’s strict and singular focus on a chosen target within the organism has a stilling effect on the habitual, associative chatter from the brain’s intellectual domain which, while an interesting event in itself, allows for something to take place elsewhere.  If some seed of positivity can be planted, the emotional domain may, to quote the tragic American poet and RCAF Spitfire pilot, John Gillespie McGee Jn, slip its surly bonds, and recover its normally abiding equilibrium.  Under attention, the domains then adjust operationally and re-order in a fitting relation to the causalities of our being and its ontological principal.  Matthew 18:20 refers:

For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.

Left to themselves, though, as is the ordinary state of affairs, the domains will exhibit the mechanics of their own quite accidental and habitually fluctuating caprice.  Nothing of the authentic, nothing of freedom or will, follows from that.  It is not too much to associate this state of affairs with the entropic decay of systems which pertains in (what we routinely understand to be) the physical universe beyond the organism.  In its own way, the system of systems which is the human mind is subject to the same grand struggle between integration and disintegration, even if the running measure is not that of immediate life or death but, at one remove, of optimality in the making of evolutionarily adaptive life-choices.

Each a liberation or an enslavement, the three contingent axes are:

Appropriation ↔ Immersion: If the axis that is Synergy ↔ Idiosyncrasy is relational and ordering, its corollary of Appropriation ↔ Immersion is transcendental and destining.  We have already touched upon the existential cost of immersion, describing it as a literal blending into “both internal and external phenomena such that distinctiveness is lost and agency bleeds away”. 

We can add that in this state of being there is such endemic habituation of the cognitive domains and such estrangement and confusion, the capacity to discriminate for truth is diminished, and the causalities themselves are cloaked in the resultant, prevailing mist.  Amid the distractions and distortions of our enworldment we find that suggestibility is rife.  So the natural instinct is denied or spat upon and hate-labelled by people who will believe anything if, by it, they can do harm.  Every kind of pathology thereby enters the life of the individual and the people, whereupon it is promptly portrayed as the apex of morality and civilisational advancement.  But … damaged as we undoubtedly are through this enworldment in, politically speaking, late liberal modernity, still such error does not come from the truth of us.  It does not belong to us.  Rather, in our reduced condition of worldly personhood we belong to it.  Our living time is appropriated by it.  Sacred or not, being’s ontological principal is unrecalled.  But, as ever, it quietly abides notwithstanding.

To dispel the mist and find said principal is, of course, a problem for ontological intensity to solve.  Just the decision for it initiates a re-orientation, a turnabout, normally accompanied by a powerful, returning sense of Nature’s truth.  The turning orients us out of possession by externalia and into possession of them.  World becomes a principality.  It is an elevating and transcending event, but it is also a coming home.  This is the one moment, the ex vivo moment, the creative moment, the political moment, in which being is released unto itself and possesses its natural agency.  It possesses the power to do, and to realise its destiny to work in Time, and to make the World and the events of the World according to its wont and wisdom.  This is true culture.

Being released unto itself is also an appropriation, and it is certainly the case that there can be no appropriation of World without appropriation of self.  But the real liberation here has another, more emotionally structured ontology (remember, we are not fencing off Mind from being à la Heidegger’s caution against psychology, because in our pursuit of an epochal restatement of racial agency we are distinguishing not only be-ing from factic thereness but activity from passivity, will from acquiescence, and so on).  Accordingly, we arrive next at ...

Affirmation ↔ Negation: This liberation is inward-facing, not from the World without us but that same World’s creative hand within.  It is a like transcendence, but it is transcendence of our ruling state of negation of be-ing.

Negation is not something ordinarily known from within.  We are too much identified with it to observe it, and when that rarity affirmation comes it is already gone, its resigned and doleful acquiescence in those idiosyncrasies and mechanisms which is our personhood now dispelled.  Our sense of it is retrospective, comparative and constructed in thought.  We know that it is affirmation’s antithesis and as such it is always there when affirmation is not.  There is no third condition.

In its specifics, we can say that just as affirmation is the essential character of be-ing so negation is the essential character of our fallen estate.  It denies us a certain existential lightness and buoyancy.  It corrals us.  It is, therefore, restrictive and oppressive, and although we may know perfectly well that it is not inescapable – we may have been shown the way to leave many times - it is fated.  We dwell on in it, as complacent sheep in an ungated pen.

In Being and Time, Heidegger draws a conclusion, if we may stretch the point, not for complacent sheep but for anxious ones, the anxiety revealing an existential refusal to accept and think meaningfully - that is, philosophically - about finitude (mortality). 

Anxiety is an emotional interpolation, which I take to be a failure of logic.  But putting that weakness aside, for Heidegger such anxiety belongs to “the They”, the conventional, suggestible, ubiquitous sheep-man of every society and age whom he holds to represent us unless we think in the aforementioned approved manner.  Be it philosophical or not, thinking seems a very uncertain and roundabout way to arrive at (what is for me always) a recoil-driven positive epiphany constitutional to being, and therefore always acting upon it deep from within it, beyond reason, beyond conscience, beyond the gateway of functional intent.  Is accepting finitude intellectually - a negative futurity – as likely to generate such an event as an instinctive positive futurity?  Conceivably on occasion, but only if it triggers something instinctive in the cognition - a direct, momentary sense of fallen-ness which suddenly reveals negative and positive.  Ponderous thought may try to catch up with that, but only to later justify it.  Just on a time basis alone it may never initiate it.  Thought does not have power over direct cognition.

It does, of course, have power subsequently to initiate one or other form of attention which re-turns being towards its mileposts of remembering, finding and recognising, and onward to taking ownership and affirming. Then and only then, I think, a light-filled positivity may flow over into being.

Another point of departure.  As mentioned earlier, in Heidegger’s unsystematic and somewhat static account we encounter a light-filled clearing (literally, lichtung) as in a forest, in which the truth of being appears.  Rather, I think that the ontological principal affirms itself in and as itself, and its former simple thereness re-processes in and as its restituted act of be-ing.  In the commentary on the Causalities chart in Part Three of this series I noted that:

[Being’s] futurity inheres in the massive positivity which emerges – Heidegger would have said unconceals – with “normal” consciousness of, or presence to, be-ing.  I have previously referred to this as an emergent and reclaiming self-affirmation and appropriation in which the restless power to live life intentionally is available and the future is full not of the foreboding of death but of life’s possibility.

My entire thesis, then, is that this is how the human being is evolved to normally be in be-ings active sense.  As things are, it stands instead as a waypoint on the human journey out of fallen-ness.  That journey is an act of return and of re-finding, not, I think, so much within Heidegger’s forest clearing as along a rising upland path with World unfolding in purview below.  Either way, of course, the whole process is always beset by the tragic certainty of (to use Sloterdijk’s term) the plunge into darkness, lethargy and forgetting once again.

Authenticity ↔ Artifice: So we arrive at the final pair of opposites, between which the being of the human being migrates qualitatively.  This axis is an alternative offering to Heidegger’s never really convincingly fleshed-out scheme of Dasein ↔ false Dasein.  In speaking of artifice we speak of the actual fabric of fallen being (that is, fabric not as “a lie” but from Latin fabricationem, meaning a structure, construction, a making).  It is, then, a thing woven in personhood (ie, as personality), but it is not a person if by person we mean the individual standing next to us in a queue or driving the kids to school:

Definitionally, personality is the expression of neurological data generated by influences external to the organism, and laid down associatively in the three perceptual systems (intellectual, emotional, motor).  This data constitutes every acquired principle, ideal, belief, value, taste, attitude, ambition, prejudice, vanity, presumption, impression, impulse, accent and inflexion, action and reaction, fad and fashion … everything behavioural that is nurtured, everything that is habituated, everything that is prescribed, everything that is not native.

The human consequence is that plastic, suggestible, unruly totality over the workings of which, regardless, one of the most ancient facilities in the brain - some kind of identity spark-plug - mechanically, stubbornly ascribes the small, mighty estate of the self … “I” … “the same as itself with itself”, as Heidegger concluded in his lecture-essay Identity & Difference.  It is not a requirement that there is any truth to the event.  And, indeed, on observation, the workings turn out to be a programmatic and wholly unexamined flow of body positions, movements and impulses, emotional states, and associated sequences of thoughts, the vast majority simply reactive and running without pre-selection or management.  The claimant “I” … the directing, conscious agent thinking calculatively, experiencing the flow of life-events, making choices, setting and striving for goals, etc … that only arrives on the scene later as a rationalisation.  That’s later in cognitive time - a few hundredths of a second after initiation of the behavioural sequence.  But it is enough to falsify the common understanding of who and what we are (on which the Enlightenment project entirely rests, I might add).

Who and what a human being is, especially in liberal modernity, is a being whose being is one or other degree of artifice, and who at all times and in all circumstances lays claim to the first person singular.  Of course it is an involuntary claim.  But it does not possess the perceptible ring … the emergent integrity… of authenticity’s “I am”.  Perhaps the inner and outer alienation of artifice is adequately captured in Heidegger’s distancing sobriquet “the They”.  But the Book of Matthew goes one step further, not only addressing “the They” face-to-face but, with the last four pregnant, hyper-literal words of Chapter 7, verse 23, giving us a picture of what alienation is to authenticity’s “I”:

And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you.

This might be if not the most bible-citing essay I have ever written, certainly the record-holder for quoting Matthew.  But then the New Testament is scattered with brief, esoterically-fashioned passages.  They are isolated in a sea of exoteric faith material.  But an educated eye can recognise their particular mix of deceptive literalism and relational structure.  They season the faith narrative but raise the question as to what they are doing there at all, given that monastic Christianity never developed beyond its faith tradition – something which Islam did despite its like Abrahamic origin.  But this is a subject for another essay.

At this point, having done what we need, limning the forms and dynamics of transcendence itself, we can halt the investigation of the attention chart and return to the causalities.

A TRANSCENDENT CONCLUSION

That return takes us all the way back to reflex or recoil – the living organism’s massively energised overcoming of “the cold state of mechanics” (at least “for now”).  Every part of its ontological expression is thus endowed.  Reflex still persists and prevails, finding a supplementary and restorative strategy, when a second human fall transpires - this being so because falling or being immersed in the things of World, and even being behaviourally an enworlded person, and so negating that which is be-ing, that which is of the human truth, inevitably incurs existential costs for the organism.  This is the context in which transcendence is to be understood, as the supplementary and restorative strategy.  One might determine two types (and temporal stages) of strategising:

Simple transcendence: Transcendence by the reflexive and instinctual, interest-based imperative to be is older than faith.  It is as old in prospect as the first evolutionary consequence of fallen-ness, by which optimal evolutionary choice-making is compromised.  The causalities chart traces that compromise to immersion and negation, and it is there that the embedded primordial reflex, which must always and in everything push for organic survival and continuity, pushes to restitute human being to its place in Nature, above and before the world.  Transcendence is that restitution.  It is simply a human survival strategy.

It is worth remembering in this regard that reflex is the first organic act, described in the Part Three essay as “being’s only possible recourse to orient itself away towards homeostasis.”  It is, then, the most ancient driver of everything evolutionary in orientation, and thus present in the survival strategy that is reproduction, the survival strategy that is adaptation, and the survival strategy that is selection.  Transcendence is another of these reflexive adaptations: in simple, a reflexive turn directly to that human truth upon which rests the optimal cognitive capacity for making adaptive choices.  By shifting us out of and alongside our fallen being transcendence shifts us into be-ing, so drawing us into the immediate.  Thus in quality it is “there-then” as well as ecstatic, for the former attends on the latter.

These two qualities, ecstasis and immediacy, are functional and not spiritual contingencies.  They are signs of the individual’s detachment from immersion and from his endemic negativity.  But, then, just as fallen-ness manifests in the individual and the kin-group, so does this detachment.  If bound by kinship, individuals are the units in which detachment accretes, albeit the group’s dynamic range is reduced and its waypoints, where consonant with those of the individual, have less definition and intensity.

Indeed, the two transcendental qualities are likewise experienced with less “punch”.  But nationalists know group-ecstasis when they personally begin to detach from the conformities of the age, which continue to obtain in the thoughts and feelings of those about them, and know these conformities to be artifice.  Nationalism’s difference to systemic liberalism is ecstatic.  Likewise, nationalists have some feeling for the immediate when they critically attend to the reality of their people’s circumstance, and begin thinking on it futurally.  Further, the resultant orientation toward the lodestar of the ethnic principal, and the ever more powerful affirmation of same, is transcending.

As individuals a quarter, perhaps a third, of any northern European people will have no gene expression, or just no genes, for the trait of faith.  For those of them who find their way to, let us say, an ontological question, the simple model, with or without experience of a practical esoteric tradition, offers the only means of transcendence.  But for a large mass of other individuals, expressed genes for the higher-emotional mechanism of faith prescribe a complex model of transcendence, reliant as it is upon a proposition involving one or more gods, a creation myth, prophets, canonical writings, rites and prayers, a priesthood, and absolute belief.  Of course, some individuals with expressed genes for faith are able to function in both the esoteric and exoteric circles; and then everyone, regardless of faith possession or of circle, can enter upon the kin-group process which nationalists routinely call “awakening”.

Complex transcendence: Causal reflex is sufficiently powerful and unrelenting to create the Creator of the whole universe, or the notion of Him, anyway – not in any purposive sense, you understand, but just as a function of survival and continuity by way of the maximum possible focal point and identitarian lodestar for the awed attention of the people.  This is the way it is always meant to be with that projection, that transport we call gods.  Hence the name of the First Testament G-d is “I am that I am”.  But before there were any such adjunctive designs, before all formal religion and its dicta and its deities of life and of death, which are of the city and the town and the settled population, there was Nature and the spirits of the sky and the wind, the rivers and the sea, the mountains and the land itself, and there were the nomadic peoples who genuflected before those spirits.  Before both of these generalities, because it was their common primordial parent, there was the evolutionary emergence of the faith faculty out of the pre-existing higher-emotional (ie, non-limbic) faculties of conscience, humility, wonder, and sheer, often desperate hope.  Faith is a vehicle for transcendence.  It is emotional in expression not because it is an emotion itself but because it ties together those higher emotions with a Gordian Knot of absolute belief.  That is its evolutionary form.

Obviously, faith and belief (in this absolute form) are not the same thing, although it is a commonplace for the two terms to be used interchangeably.  I have tried once or twice to get to the living, breathing core of absolute belief and its completely untroubled, serial relegation of fact.  It’s difficult, but it must draw upon both our capacity for cognitive certainty (in turn, rooted in our role as evolutionary choice-makers) and on our profound capacity for suggestibility.:

... our suggestibility, our endless capacity for trust in the story woven out of the neurological data, has another point of arising in the ancient history of the human brain.  This is the sleep state, from which suggestibility leaks into ordinary waking consciousness through the all-too-sympatico sharing of unsecured, passive attention.  As a result, we don’t just accept the reality we are given as we do while dreaming, we are, as personality, melded with and moulded by it.  Every preacher, philosopher, political thinker, every culture warrior, every agenda-pusher, indeed every skilled salesman, advertiser, fashion-setter has always relied upon that peculiar flaw.

It is, I think, the faith faculty which would seem to be the magnifier of suggestibility while, at the same time, hardening certainty to adamant.  Evolution is, of course, a results-led enterprise.  As stated, to sustain it human beings must naturally, routinely select for the adaptive more than they select for the maladaptive.  Exogamy is a maladaptive selection.  Although steadily rising over time, the exogamy rate among newlyweds in America is still under a fifth, which shows a bias from the median exceeding 30% - even in the current, insanely pro-mixing political and cultural environment.  So we might fairly safely generalise from that and propose the same bias for faith - one would think, certainly enough for it to work within its own exoteric field of reference.  It probably also succeeds on other bases than transcendence – social conservatism and traditionalism, for example.  But however we approach human fallen-ness, it is transcendence alone, as return to the primary structure of causalities and thus to optimality, which can re-found us.