As Matthew Stanley noted in O.G. Rose Conversation #125, Karl Barth taught that we could gain “real knowledge” about God because God gave us Himself through Grace; if we had to “get to God-in-Himself” without Grace, we could only fail. Since God has acted, God can be known and it not be an act of idolatry. Similarly, Hegel argues we are part of “The Absolute” in being part of the world and “The Absolute Situation,” and so the Absolute has “put itself in us,” and so we can gain “real knowledge” about the world. We cannot reach “things-in-themselves” by our own power directly, as we cannot so reach God, but the Absolute is in us, and so we can gain “real knowledge” about things insomuch as we can gain actual knowledge about situations, mainly “the world itself.” We cannot access “things” (for there are no “things”), but we can access “relations,” and furthermore we can encounter and access “the world.” No, we cannot know “the whole world,” as we cannot “fully know God,” but the inability to know something fully is not an inability to know something at all.
Though I ultimately agree with the sentiment, I sometimes wonder if it’s actually the case that “we can’t access things-in-themselves,” for we can indeed cut down a tree and examine its internals, as we can learn about waves and their collapse relative to probabilities. Also, if “things don’t exist,” then focusing on the question, “Can we access things-in-themselves?” is as nonsensical as asking, “Can I as a human be a bird?” I simply am not a bird, as the tree nearby simply isn’t a “thing” but a “situation”; thus, asking about reaching “the thing-in-itself” is nonsensical, but because we “understand” the world according to “things,” this mistake doesn’t seem equivalent to the mistake of thinking we are birds (we understand through what can misguide). Furthermore, perhaps we don’t reach “things-in-themselves” because they don’t matter? We seem to assume that what we cannot seemingly access is that which is most important, but, as Filip Niklas has mentioned with Lew, what if the exact opposite is the case? Indeed, perhaps “visibility” is a sign of a strong and vibrant essence?
Anyway, the Christian God is preparing us to meet Him; likewise, the Absolute is always “situating” us to know it. “The Absolute” is working in us as we are working in it, in the same way that the Christian God created us to create with God and to be in community with God in “The Trinity.” Because this is the case, “real knowledge” is possible without falling into the error of believing we can gain access to “objects,” which reduces objects to our ideas and also removes incentive for us to engage in a “relation” with objects. This also suggests the problem with “certainty”: if I can be certain about what my spouse is going to do, I don’t have to relate to him or her as much, suggesting that “certainty” can be a vice. In fact, certainty seems like it must always reduce situations to objects and things, “objectifying them” into things that cannot threaten or change me. I’m safe, for I have given into the temptation for power.
Thought itself seems to work in a manner that makes me vulnerable to believing in “things” and also “thing-in-themselves,” for thought works by reducing and focusing. This is a blessing, for otherwise I couldn’t make sense of the world in a “coherent” way, but this also means that what makes the world “coherent” to me is also what is at risk of keeping me from accessing the world. Thinking works by “bracketing out” the world and making me focus on a bookshelf, but in this act it seems like the bookcase is all there is, and yet I still have a sense that something is lost. What is lost is the world “around” the bookcase, but in the act of focus all there is before me “is” the bookcase, and so it is easy for me to then locate that feeling of loss “in the thing” versus “from the world.” And so “the thing-in-itself” is born, which I might also have psychoanalytical incentive to birth, because I feel like I have power over the thing, and even if I cannot know it, I know I cannot know it because it is behind some noumenon, and thus I “know why I don’t know” while I am also not responsible for my state (I’m free from that anxiety). If instead what I lost was the world, though there would be no excuse for me not trying to know that, and so I am responsible for trying to do something. This interpretation of the loss still leaves me vulnerable to “the other” and “difference,” and furthermore the world is far larger than me. But things — I have power over things, and if the loss I feel is something I cannot access, I am free and not responsible. I am safe, and I am in power. There are no relations with “others” who can hurt me. And so I am “a snake eating my own tail”; I have forsaken God for something “God-like” that is only transcendent of me because it doesn’t exist…
Because “The Absolute” is hidden, it is possible for me to fall into the described mistake and believing in “things” (as Owen Barfield warned against), as perhaps the hiddenness of God makes it possible for people to not believe in God. Wouldn’t it be better if the Absolute was totally unveiled? A fair question, but if the Absolute was not “hidden” at all, that means we would know it entirely and thus the Absolute would be dead; similarly, only God can know God fully, and so God must be “hidden” to some degree or else we would be God and/or reduced to ash. “God’s Hiddenness” is a product of God’s Divinity, and God uses finite things like Beatrice in Dante and love to work thought and us gradually toward God at a rate we can handle. Similarly, we as thinking subjects are gradually moved by “The Absolute” toward the Absolute at a rate we can handle so that the Absolute stays meaningful to us and always feels like a “gift” versus something forcing itself upon us. If God forced us to believe in God, our relation to God would be very different then if He gradually moved us “toward” knowing Him; so it goes with the Absolute. “The Absolute” is best qualified by freedom, choice, and love, but that means there is a risk. However, if we could “know everything with certainty,” and thus the Absolute wouldn’t be hidden at all, that would either mean we were God or that the world was very small. The lack of certainty is evidence that the world is vast, interconnected, alive, and undergoing creation. Not only then would a loss of “hiddenness” mean we lost the possibility of the Absolute being a “gift,” but it would also mean that the Absolute wouldn’t be much worth knowing — after all, we tend to get bored with what we are used to (which suggests we are “fitted for” the Absolute).
“The Absolute” must be hidden, and that means we require a way to know the Absolute, which is thinking. But where there is thinking there is the possibility of “thinking only thinking itself” (“coherence for coherence”), which leads to self-effacing “autonomous rationality,” as there is the possibility of thinking “getting it wrong.” There is a risk, but if there was no risk, it would either be because God didn’t create or because we were God. Since we are not God, the only choice is risk, for a God or Absolute that was fully known would be boring and the universe might be more like Hell. The risk is needed, which includes the risk of us hating the fact there is such a risk. We might hate the world and its structure, even if that structure is justified by the Absolute, and so this would suggest that we can only reason and think well if we are the kind of subjects who are willing to accept how the world is (Children, Absolute Knowers…). This suggests that we cannot draw a hard line between epistemology, ontology, phenomenology, or psychoanalysis — it is all connected in “The Absolute Situation.” If we hate the world, we will likely think in a way that believes in “things-in-themselves,” for that way we have power over what we can have power over (and what we cannot have power over cannot be known). We learn from the Absolute that we can only ever know a world.
We cannot know “thing-in-themselves,” for there are no “things,” but we can know “the world-in-itself” because we are part of the world as it is part of us, and thus the Absolute has “given itself” to us for us to know the Absolute. We cannot access things directly, but we simply need to trust how the world has given itself to us in the “form of things” for our own sake. “Things” are representations for us: they are “gifts” so that we might be part of a hidden Absolute that we can know gradually, and because of that gradualness we can help create it (in the same way that God’s Hiddenness is why we can help create the universe with God, for we are not God and exist at all). What is described in Kantianism is a realization of a condition that is “for us,” in the same way that Beatrice’s unwillingness to smile for Dante is “for Dante” so that he might ascend to the place where Beatrice can smile.
Because God is hidden with the Absolute, it is possible for thought to be like a dream that only relates to itself and misses the revelation of dreams that we can only live in worlds: dreams never arise to “things” only “relational situations” (of “worlds”).¹ Hiddenness makes it possible for thought to itself, but without thought we could not “bind” the possible interpretations of things in the world (in terms of how we respond to them). Because we can think, we can “limit” all the possible ways we might interpret Beatrice into an interpretation that leads us toward the Beatific Vision; likewise, because thought focuses and “limits,” it is possible for us to be guided into the Absolute in a manner that makes it meaningful, related, and created. This means it is possible for us to love and for this love to be meaningful. In Christianity, this is the price we require for Eternity to be Love — and, in the big picture, it is a small and necessary price indeed.
There is “both-ness” to everything, and dialectical thinking today is becoming more popular, which is good, but we must ultimately negate/sublate it into “situation” and “speculative Knowledge.” For Hegel, love and freedom are paramount, which require an “Absolute Choice” which requires Hiddenness; otherwise, we cannot be Absolute in “the image and likeness” of “The Trinity.” The Kantian mistake is concluding the impossibility of “the thing-in-itself” as evidence of deepest “thingness” versus evidence that nothing makes sense outside a world. Ultimately, we can only “correspond” with a world, not with things, and this correspondence must always be humble, for it is more like Dancing than possessing. What we have “real knowledge” of is always a gift, never our own making, and it emerges where we manage to Dance well (we must stay active). Mr. Stanley noted from Chesterton how the poet tries to put his heads in the clouds, while the madman tries to put the clouds in his head — the later is exactly how we have used rationality, I fear, which describes when knowledge is toxic and psychotic. The Absolute would have us all be more poetic, as the Christian God would have us all be more romantic. We have described here a Story, but deeper still is this Dance.
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Notes
¹It is then possible for rationality to “scapegoat” dreaming as “other” and something rationality is not, while rationality and dreaming are two-sides of the same coin to themselves (rationality only seems different because it is “thrown” into Determinations). Rationality and experience are “similarly” of the world, and so are possibly engaged in rivalry (“the intellectual” versus “the practical”), and both end up scapegoating “the dreamer,” which is actually like them both in always being of a “world.” The dream is then discarded as irrelevant, but it is later deified as “all life is about.” In this, we might see a dynamic like what is described in Girard. “Dreaming, “rationality,” and “experience” are all similar, but “dreaming” is the one scapegoated because it cannot easily defend itself as “corresponding” with the world. I see ways all three could be mimetic rivals with one another, but “dreaming” ends up “othered” when really it is a revelation of what “rationality” ultimately “is.”
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