encyclopedia ei ( エイ ) do ( ド ) li ( リ ) ca ( カ )

I’ve come to a realisation lately that while I’ve been circling the drain the past year trying to nail down what “participation” literally means, trying to make the leap from theology to action in an actual, systematised way; doing more than intuitive leaps, borrowing words from other philosophical systems that invisibly elide their origins, I’ve been unproductive, languishing, simply because I’m using the wrong language. That is to say, I think that Neoplatonism gave me a language for participation in the Good, but its hierarchical logics still tend toward instrumentalisation, toward imprinting a should onto an utterly creative, indescribable world, that I think doesn’t actually make sense.

And so I think I need to outgrow the Neoplatonic grammar. It’s an old branch that got me here and has left now incoherent traces of itself on my words.

Lately, while doing my reading I kept asking myself, “how did I get here?” Why am I reading Charles Taylor, getting myself toward Canadian Idealism, and onward to Hegel? Well, because these are systems of positive freedom and communitarianism that are about working upward through encounter with the Other toward the Divine. But I don’t believe in the Absolute working itself out through history; that makes a tragic necessity out of the violence of history, where everything is simply an unfortunate consequence of the Divine ‘working out.’¹ Why am I trying to make Hegel work, when I would need to dispense with so much of his metaphysical basis to the point where it would be unrecognisable?²

I started out believing in the notion of participating in love as being the supreme project of life. So far as I love, that is what remains after my death..

I remember seven months ago doing sketches in my notebook and realising that through following Origen I had recaptured an implicit dialectical process leading to mass reconciliation within God that hid a dialectical negation process within a Neoplatonic lens. The light and darkness within each man meets and changes each other, working out an inevitable coming together at the end of all things through grace.³ But since I take a more open-ended, creative posture toward life, I found this language contradictory, incompatible, and somewhat pessimistic. I thought I had ended up memeing myself into Hegel without ever reading Hegel.

So I kept trying to generalise my participation, reading about participatory ethics within a Christian lens, and in December, at church in Toronto, someone just said to me that I really sounded like I wanted to be reading Hegel. And so I shrugged and decided to get a little closer to the source, upward through idealism that I myself had been exposed to. This got me toward Taylor, who takes a bit from Hegel but tries to posit an ecumenical approach to Catholicism, a sort of unity-through-difference, not a unity-through-sameness.

I’m a bit more suspicious that such a Catholicism can emerge without seriously redefining its soteriology. Neoplatonism can give you some tools here; it can talk about paths toward the Good, lesser and higher goods, about the trajectory of the soul; but if Christ is the door through which we get closer to God, then we either need to admit that He is the door or find some different methodologies to define the path without falling into an amorphous, universal mysticism or gnosticism.

I also think that it’s the fall backward onto Platonism that held George Grant back from a more optimistic view on life; reading essays on his work in Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom it’s clear that after his youthful Hegelianism Strauss broke him a little bit, but then nothing reanimated him. From his point of view, something has been permanently lost from society, and there is no sign that it will improve. He wrote reactive pieces about the decline of society for the rest of his career. I see myself in Grant. I cannot hold onto ideas that will cause me to become a depressive because life won’t conform to them; this is an is/ought distinction. My faith is in a God that is the ground of all being, that reveals itself creatively, through intensities and encounters, through the trillions of Events that make up the Pauline mystery of the Kingdom, the Second Coming.

I think that through the more recent combination of Ellul’s analysis of Technique, Berdayev’s Destiny of Man, and performing a kind of personal refrain toward Deleuzianism I’ve at the start of forming another system in my own life, though the teleology is a bit uncertain.

In shorthand

• Instead of diminishing emanations, expressions of difference, being expressed singularly
• Instead of hierarchies of being, networks of creativity
• Instead of participation, composition of capacities in relationship to another with different intensities and different potentialities
• Instead of returning to the One, developing an intensification of divine creativity through engagement with the world
• Instead of an ethics of alignment to the Good, ethics is an experiment of possibilities
• Evil as a more reactive, anti-creative, or diminishing force, negation instead of affirmation
• God is dynamic, the ground within me, something identified in and beyond Love.

It is above all anti-instrumentalisation. Persons are not means to ends, but creative freedoms; all being has an irreducible singularity that cannot simply be made into inputs and outputs or resources. It is an ethics of ‘what is this in its own terms’, against instrumentalisation as such.

Think a chain through Eckhart, Spinoza (alas, I’ll read you eventually), Tillich, Ellul, Berdayev, with a sort of Deleuzian methodology here. There are open questions in ecumenicalism and teleology. And of course Deleuze is not an easy synthesis here, but it makes sense; there are Christian nondualists but Buddhistic terms are more useful at times than the extremely muddy language we have in Christian theology. All in all it’s not clear what else to dispense with, but I continue to believe in the guiding compass of the Personalists to feel the remainder of this out.

That said, I’m not sure I need to be reading more at this point. I think I need to be doing.