DESPARATE AMERICA
DESPARATE AMERICA
Metaphysics of the Catastrophic Enantiodromia
(Please read last line to connect what was written first immediately after…)
This is a pathological psychic condition described by the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung in several early works, but spelled out in full alchemical symbolic detail in his last, Mysterium Conjunctionis. It results from a one sided conscious approach having been carried to such an extreme that it is openly confronted by its unconscious opposite at every turn.
The pervasiveness of this condition defines the desparate situation America finds herself in today. The following Three Steps set out the analysis of the situation in terms of sign-use, through which its existence is sustained.
******
First Step in analyzing the situation: Irony and Beyond
The eye of this psychic hurricane, not unlike that which struck Hitler’s Germany in the 1930’s, is a DUPLICITOUS WAY OF BEING, in which the truth is turned inside out and upside down. It was organized in national discourse by neocon Republicans when, in l996, they promulgated a document called “clean break”, referring to the position of swapping land for peace which had historically been US policy in the Middle East for settling the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They changed the policy agenda, meanwhile pressing a weakened, soon-to-be very stressed out President Clinton to work, work work for a settlement, later presented by PM Barak and himself to Yasir Arafat under hurry-up conditions, which he had to refuge. The ironies there were: Arafat gets blamed for not signing the deal he had no part in shaping; suicide bombs begin in earnest, after Ariel Sharon waddles across Jerusalem’s Temple Mt. in 2000, in open provocation of Muslims, to which the site is sacred. One of the documents signed off on by the little neocon coterie of to-be American policy setters added the provision: “Using such force as to make any opposition suicidal.” That particular irony has been the hallmark of the ensuing process. “The suicide war” Tom Friedman dubbed it. Among other things used to describe America’s road to Baghdad.
The sheer quantity, if not quality of the prevailing ironies are proofs of something that goes beyond them. That would be the psychic condition in which they originate. The storm does not appear overnight; except, if a historical span of thousands of years is used as a scale, it can be adjusted to make it appear to emerge overnight. Just like Katrina did. And Ophelia hovered off the Atlantic coast threatening to do. One came out of nowhere; the other went nowhere. Stange dyad. Ophelia wandered off into the northern sea. These were continental/global weather events. They intervened in a political situation rapidly developing between the president, the public, and the disappearing neocons into an ultra-sticky, stinky mess, and I do mean Karl Rove, Guckert/Shiavo queer-death glamour, and the sudden insertion of (rumor has it) gay Catholic John Roberts up the arse of the U. S. Supreme Court as Chief Justice for Life. Here we are beyond irony, over with Mel Gibson’s crucified Jesus, of whom more later.
…Taken over by a DUPLICITOUS WAY OF BEING that arises suddenly at this end of history, like a psychic storm that, from the ground, has been brewing up for a long time. Our meager 200 years or so; the Pisces/Christian age 2000 years or so; 4000 to the First New Age (recorded in human history as such: Z. Sitchin) as the sun began rising in Aries following its Taurus residence … seen from this end, if Katrina really is an act of God, the same one the Bible speaks of as causing the great Flood (Gen. 6.17 “And behold, I Myself am bringing floodwaters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on earth shall die.”), it will look like two storms, psychic and cyclonic, have suddenly come together like three convoluting low-pressure systems to blow out America’s Atlantic rim. As the tsunami did the Indonesian ocean.
As historical irony, nothing could be greater than what has happened to America and oil as a result of the Iraq war. The sub-text of going to war, openly discussed across all blogboards, was it would bring the flow of oil under US company control. Now Katrina and Rita have taken away just this which it had. One can call it irony, but calling Katrina an act of God goes further.
The irony of ironies was marked by the shift of signs from “St. Rita”, to just plain Rita, as events carried the public mind from the tragedy of New Orleans parish nursing home drownings,…. to 24 old, incapacitated nursing home victims incarcerated when their oxygen canisters exploded, fleeing the wrath of “Rita”. Learning from google that the 15th century saint was patron of “impossible cases”, and caring for the abused, having been abused and suffering greatly herself, overcoming it with a life of devotion to Christ in a Benedictine nunnery. It was said that she desired sharing Christ’s passion so fervently a thorn from His crown pierced her forehead as she prayed one day, leaving an unhealing wound the rest of her life. If “she” is a personification of the force of Mother Nature, the flip-side of “St.” would be the natural girl, woman, person returned after abuse by parents, husband, system, church, for revenge on them all. If “God” according to masculine Archetype is the one under which the neo-con Bushes invaded Iraq for oil, then the double irony of including Rita under “act of God” is: 1. “He” goes over to “She” – as in Dan Barry’s comments (NYTimes, below. 9.28); even as 2. the real result of America’s announced project to bring women more “rights” in the Arab world (carried out yesterday by Karen Hughes in Saudi Arabia) is a reversal: fewer rights, under stricter religious-conservative rules. Rita, without the “St.” could be taken as representing* that, too (*vorstellung).
****/
Second step in analysis of the Catastrophic Enantiodromia situation, Beyond Irony):
Psychosemiotic sin: Absolutizing the Relative.
This phrase stuck in my mind, I think, from reading Reinhold Neibuhr in the 50’s. He, as a German pastor in Henry Ford’s Detroit in the 30’s, had seen the dehumanizing effects of assemblyline work required for America to enjoy its monumental automobile fetish. “Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932?) argued brilliantly through the major social-educational-religious texts of the day that liberalism won’t save America. It won’t be possible to educate the effects of original sin out of man (that’s what he called people in general) by teaching them the social sciences and waiting for the muddy water to recede on its own. Man has a moral nature; nations do not. It’s metaphysical. They are ego, only; no soul. But the temptation to claim their particular historical ego formation absolute is a constant. As a practical theologian, he wouldn’t give “God” to Henry Ford, or General Motors, capitalism, communism, even Eisenhower. Neo-orthodox theologians, he and Paul Tillich (who had been a student of Heideggar’s in Germany before escaping with Neibuhr’s help), kept “God” communicating something on the token (existential) side, after it text had been drained by science.
Sin (of nations) in these terms would be violation of this rule not to ansolutize the relative. It amounts to equating one side (one’s own) with the totality.
The process goes with idolizing the ideal, though the connection is not on the surface. Idols are projections of a higher spiritual content onto an external material form. Talking statues is the paradigm. Once made of stone, today talking statues are called “Movie Stars”. YHWH’s prohibition of graven images (Exodus 20.4) conveys that. It is the second commandment, violation of which is a “sin” in the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition some honor. That is a very deep authoritative sanction. It divides the contents of experience into two kinds, one communicated only through word/speech tokens, the other through picture/material tokens. This distinction is incorporated into formal psychosemiotics as that between the upper (7-6-5) and lower (3-2-1) triads of content under sign-use. The upper triad is cognitive/spiritual, wholly contained in consciousness through the sign; the things under the signs of the lower triad are completed outside consciousness (in matter; phenomenality; neuropsychic reaction).
As the notion of “object” is to things in the material world, as unities predicated through names associated with sense-quality repetitions (lower triad, presupposed space and time of three-dimensional radii around the body), so the notion of “God” is to things of the inner, or spiritual world: names associated with things independent of sense-quality repetitions (“ideas”, “forms”, “Archetypes”). (This is generally neo-Platonic, but with definite staged forms of emmenation from The One to the Many qua ultimate multiplicity. )
Idolization, then as explained, consists in universalizing the particular: taking a statue as God. This would mean identifying a Spiritual, God-content with a material one, as if “He”, or what “He” is, could be handled, poked, sorted, destroyed, etc. The universal belongs to one realm of being (the upper triad); the particular belongs to another realm of being (lower triad). When the particular thing is related to as if actually contained, or were, the universal, which is detached from qualitative instances by memory in any case, is absorbed into the divisible: “finitude”, was the metaphor medieval philosophers used. After Jesus introduced the notion of the “kingdom of God” as a reality to which it is possible to be connected, the sharp division, as well as finely threaded juxtaposition of the two triads stood out: The Godly, above, through the Spirit, aligned with things heavenly; the unGodly, gross material, despiritualized things below, aligned with Hell-demons, in esoteric tokenspace, about which more cannot be said at this point.
The distance between them is as the distance from plane 7* of sign use (God*, predicate of all predicates), to plane 1* (neuro-reactive anatomical pulse). The continuity between the polarities are the planes of the ordered hierarchy of sign-uses according to logical type of tokens. These correspond to the psychosemiotic categories of individuals given in experience under sign-uses. One who can say to himself “Was that dream from God?” is connecting the circuits on the conscious side that are hypothesized to be connected on the unconscious side, through the discharge of energies in the way sing-use differentiates. (Not: that it is recommended as self-consultation!)
The other side of universalizing the particular is particularizing the universal: taking one thing among others (uniquely related to the ego, on the psychological side) which is relative value – value it has only in relation to other things of thef same order, as if it WERE the value all had.
This is the reverse of idolization; idolization introverted. When conscious, it is narcissim of the ideal. The ideal here, now. Immanentizing the eschaton. This refers to the psychological attitude and condition Jung called “inflated”. (In Freudian terms: “fantasy cathected”; also, “full of him/themselves”, “self-imporatnt”, DeMause: “identified with traumatic childhood experiences as a returned psychic state”.)
Both these sins are a source of being-illusion prohibited by proper hierarchical ordered in the use of sign. “God” directly governs or controls the upper triad, only, as a spiritual force. That is why, after Christianity, this token of the completing totality is present in form as a grace, and in response to it as a free will. Its use calls for mastery and control over the body, while at the same time calling for energies the body must be maintained with great care to provide. The new man in Jesus called “Christ”, in Pisces, refers to the Three Crosses in esoteric astrology (Alice Bailey). As Aquarius comes marching in. The signs in astrology are part of the great illusion themselves, she points out. There are no real marks in the sky through which the sun passes each year mapped by “The Zodiac”. However, on the esoteric side, on the map the Three Crosses on the Great Wheel of 12 houses correspond with the three crosses in 0 a.d at Jesus’ crucifixion: The Hidden Christ: -- the cross of the unrepentant thief; the Fixed Christ: the esoteric Cross of Jesus, himself; and the Risen Christ – the cross of the repentant thief. This touches a point in projected cosmic unity beyond human comprehension. The metaphysical objection – and it is an obstacle – to the Way of Legal Duplicity (Third Step) is its foreclosing the reality completion loops onto the lower triad, to maintain physical at the expense of spiritual existence.
In sum: the consequence of violating the second commandment, sinning against the distinction between universals and particulars, predicates and individuals, in the logic of sign-use – taking universals as particulars, or particulars as universals – is self-contradiction, antinomy, paradox, reversal, breaking out everywhere. This completes the second step in elaborating the metaphysics of the situation “beyond irony”.
****/
Third Step in analysis of the process of Catastrophic Enantiodromia
Introduction of the Catholic Way of Being. Sealing the development of sign-use loops under the Hidden Cross (of perpetual suffering), preventing emergence of energies of the Fixed and Cardinal Crosses. Thus, it stands against the tide of history in this New Age.
If the implication of Allan’s analysis are drawn out, the gap between the wrongly absolutized ideal and the allowances judges are required to make for human nature in the breach (read: … the crud and corruption he will allow for to protect cronies) is scheduled to be filled by enlarging his discretionary powers. He will have to decide individual cases that could go tough, or go easy on the defendant, on the basis of his personal honor and integrity, as a Solomon-like human being. To repeat: the system of Duplicitous Law – “Here is what the law is; we know you won’t follow it.” – winds up giving supra-ordinate discretionary power and authority to precisely those who have abused the law to get in that position.
The legal way of thinking of the Italian/Catholic ideal is set forth by John L. Allen, Jr. “At the Vatican, Exceptions Make the Rule”, NY Times on-line 9.27.05). Here is an except:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/opinion/27allen.html
September 27, 2005
At the Vatican, Exceptions Make the Rule
By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.
Rome
THE forthcoming Vatican document on gays in seminaries will unleash a wrenching debate about Catholicism and homosexuality, but one thing it is certain not to mean is that in the future there will be no gays in the priesthood. The continued presence of gays in the priesthood will be the product not just of difficulties in enforcement, or the dishonesty of potential candidates, but also of design.
Although this is a difficult point for many Anglo-Saxons to grasp, when the Vatican makes statements like "no gays in the priesthood," it doesn't actually mean "no gays in the priesthood." It means, "As a general rule, this is not a good idea, but we all know there will be exceptions."
The categorical difference between these two approaches to the law from the religious side is profound. The way of the Catholic I call “deliberate duplicity”, and expect them to defend it, although I shall not do it for them. It calls for defining the ego-ideal (Freud’s original term for the super-ego) over against a forever-unattainable standard of perfection, so that “saint or sinner” is the destiny dividing mankind.
The other way, credited to “Anglo-Saxon” heritage, does not posit this metaphysical separation. It does not judge and punish itself for falling short of perfection – then delegate to a ‘judge’, or priest, the authority to make things right. It is not up to society to set norms of personal being, but to reflect the norms individuals establish by their own best efforts. No. That is not the way. It imposes a limitation on psychological development by decreeing all to be under a system of legal sanctions they had no hand in framing, cannot influence the enforcement of except by extra emoluments, and are at the mercy of judge’s discretionary rulings for borderline cases.
One point in Mr. Allen’s otherwise very perspicuous remarks stood out in contrast. He is citing “British historian Christopher Dawson ..describ(ing) the “erotic” spirit of cultures shaped by Roman Catholicism. Catholic cultures are based on the passionate quest for spiritual perfection, Darson writes, unlike the “bourgeous” culture of the United States, which, shaped by Protestantism and based on practical reason, gives priority to economic concerns.” So, to get this straight: here is Mr. Allen, Jr., announcing out and out duplicity in sign-use as the rule –‘AT THE VATICAN, THE EXCEPTIONS MAKE THE RULE’ – “Statements like ‘no gays in the priesthood’ don’t actually mean “no gays in the priesthood” – Quoting people who say they don’t mean what they say, but brazenly putting down money-mad “bourgeous”, sexually repressed New England Protestants ?
: -(
****/
At this level of discourse, at this juncture of time, with the vote on John Roberts pending this week, this succinctly stated philosophy of practical law, has the effect of installing the product of the duplicitous way of being responsible for the punishment of Katrina, Ophelia, Rita in the highest seat of law, whose mind oversees how we think of ourselves “under law”, by those speaking in the name of law. It is the ultimate penetration of American spirituality and way of being, in its innermost precincts – Ironic Reversal Theologized in History.
…the truth has been turned inside out (and upside down)
Metaphysics of the Catastrophic Enantiodromia
(Please read last line to connect what was written first immediately after…)
This is a pathological psychic condition described by the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung in several early works, but spelled out in full alchemical symbolic detail in his last, Mysterium Conjunctionis. It results from a one sided conscious approach having been carried to such an extreme that it is openly confronted by its unconscious opposite at every turn.
The pervasiveness of this condition defines the desparate situation America finds herself in today. The following Three Steps set out the analysis of the situation in terms of sign-use, through which its existence is sustained.
******
First Step in analyzing the situation: Irony and Beyond
The eye of this psychic hurricane, not unlike that which struck Hitler’s Germany in the 1930’s, is a DUPLICITOUS WAY OF BEING, in which the truth is turned inside out and upside down. It was organized in national discourse by neocon Republicans when, in l996, they promulgated a document called “clean break”, referring to the position of swapping land for peace which had historically been US policy in the Middle East for settling the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They changed the policy agenda, meanwhile pressing a weakened, soon-to-be very stressed out President Clinton to work, work work for a settlement, later presented by PM Barak and himself to Yasir Arafat under hurry-up conditions, which he had to refuge. The ironies there were: Arafat gets blamed for not signing the deal he had no part in shaping; suicide bombs begin in earnest, after Ariel Sharon waddles across Jerusalem’s Temple Mt. in 2000, in open provocation of Muslims, to which the site is sacred. One of the documents signed off on by the little neocon coterie of to-be American policy setters added the provision: “Using such force as to make any opposition suicidal.” That particular irony has been the hallmark of the ensuing process. “The suicide war” Tom Friedman dubbed it. Among other things used to describe America’s road to Baghdad.
The sheer quantity, if not quality of the prevailing ironies are proofs of something that goes beyond them. That would be the psychic condition in which they originate. The storm does not appear overnight; except, if a historical span of thousands of years is used as a scale, it can be adjusted to make it appear to emerge overnight. Just like Katrina did. And Ophelia hovered off the Atlantic coast threatening to do. One came out of nowhere; the other went nowhere. Stange dyad. Ophelia wandered off into the northern sea. These were continental/global weather events. They intervened in a political situation rapidly developing between the president, the public, and the disappearing neocons into an ultra-sticky, stinky mess, and I do mean Karl Rove, Guckert/Shiavo queer-death glamour, and the sudden insertion of (rumor has it) gay Catholic John Roberts up the arse of the U. S. Supreme Court as Chief Justice for Life. Here we are beyond irony, over with Mel Gibson’s crucified Jesus, of whom more later.
…Taken over by a DUPLICITOUS WAY OF BEING that arises suddenly at this end of history, like a psychic storm that, from the ground, has been brewing up for a long time. Our meager 200 years or so; the Pisces/Christian age 2000 years or so; 4000 to the First New Age (recorded in human history as such: Z. Sitchin) as the sun began rising in Aries following its Taurus residence … seen from this end, if Katrina really is an act of God, the same one the Bible speaks of as causing the great Flood (Gen. 6.17 “And behold, I Myself am bringing floodwaters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on earth shall die.”), it will look like two storms, psychic and cyclonic, have suddenly come together like three convoluting low-pressure systems to blow out America’s Atlantic rim. As the tsunami did the Indonesian ocean.
As historical irony, nothing could be greater than what has happened to America and oil as a result of the Iraq war. The sub-text of going to war, openly discussed across all blogboards, was it would bring the flow of oil under US company control. Now Katrina and Rita have taken away just this which it had. One can call it irony, but calling Katrina an act of God goes further.
The irony of ironies was marked by the shift of signs from “St. Rita”, to just plain Rita, as events carried the public mind from the tragedy of New Orleans parish nursing home drownings,…. to 24 old, incapacitated nursing home victims incarcerated when their oxygen canisters exploded, fleeing the wrath of “Rita”. Learning from google that the 15th century saint was patron of “impossible cases”, and caring for the abused, having been abused and suffering greatly herself, overcoming it with a life of devotion to Christ in a Benedictine nunnery. It was said that she desired sharing Christ’s passion so fervently a thorn from His crown pierced her forehead as she prayed one day, leaving an unhealing wound the rest of her life. If “she” is a personification of the force of Mother Nature, the flip-side of “St.” would be the natural girl, woman, person returned after abuse by parents, husband, system, church, for revenge on them all. If “God” according to masculine Archetype is the one under which the neo-con Bushes invaded Iraq for oil, then the double irony of including Rita under “act of God” is: 1. “He” goes over to “She” – as in Dan Barry’s comments (NYTimes, below. 9.28); even as 2. the real result of America’s announced project to bring women more “rights” in the Arab world (carried out yesterday by Karen Hughes in Saudi Arabia) is a reversal: fewer rights, under stricter religious-conservative rules. Rita, without the “St.” could be taken as representing* that, too (*vorstellung).
****/
Second step in analysis of the Catastrophic Enantiodromia situation, Beyond Irony):
Psychosemiotic sin: Absolutizing the Relative.
This phrase stuck in my mind, I think, from reading Reinhold Neibuhr in the 50’s. He, as a German pastor in Henry Ford’s Detroit in the 30’s, had seen the dehumanizing effects of assemblyline work required for America to enjoy its monumental automobile fetish. “Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932?) argued brilliantly through the major social-educational-religious texts of the day that liberalism won’t save America. It won’t be possible to educate the effects of original sin out of man (that’s what he called people in general) by teaching them the social sciences and waiting for the muddy water to recede on its own. Man has a moral nature; nations do not. It’s metaphysical. They are ego, only; no soul. But the temptation to claim their particular historical ego formation absolute is a constant. As a practical theologian, he wouldn’t give “God” to Henry Ford, or General Motors, capitalism, communism, even Eisenhower. Neo-orthodox theologians, he and Paul Tillich (who had been a student of Heideggar’s in Germany before escaping with Neibuhr’s help), kept “God” communicating something on the token (existential) side, after it text had been drained by science.
Sin (of nations) in these terms would be violation of this rule not to ansolutize the relative. It amounts to equating one side (one’s own) with the totality.
The process goes with idolizing the ideal, though the connection is not on the surface. Idols are projections of a higher spiritual content onto an external material form. Talking statues is the paradigm. Once made of stone, today talking statues are called “Movie Stars”. YHWH’s prohibition of graven images (Exodus 20.4) conveys that. It is the second commandment, violation of which is a “sin” in the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition some honor. That is a very deep authoritative sanction. It divides the contents of experience into two kinds, one communicated only through word/speech tokens, the other through picture/material tokens. This distinction is incorporated into formal psychosemiotics as that between the upper (7-6-5) and lower (3-2-1) triads of content under sign-use. The upper triad is cognitive/spiritual, wholly contained in consciousness through the sign; the things under the signs of the lower triad are completed outside consciousness (in matter; phenomenality; neuropsychic reaction).
As the notion of “object” is to things in the material world, as unities predicated through names associated with sense-quality repetitions (lower triad, presupposed space and time of three-dimensional radii around the body), so the notion of “God” is to things of the inner, or spiritual world: names associated with things independent of sense-quality repetitions (“ideas”, “forms”, “Archetypes”). (This is generally neo-Platonic, but with definite staged forms of emmenation from The One to the Many qua ultimate multiplicity. )
Idolization, then as explained, consists in universalizing the particular: taking a statue as God. This would mean identifying a Spiritual, God-content with a material one, as if “He”, or what “He” is, could be handled, poked, sorted, destroyed, etc. The universal belongs to one realm of being (the upper triad); the particular belongs to another realm of being (lower triad). When the particular thing is related to as if actually contained, or were, the universal, which is detached from qualitative instances by memory in any case, is absorbed into the divisible: “finitude”, was the metaphor medieval philosophers used. After Jesus introduced the notion of the “kingdom of God” as a reality to which it is possible to be connected, the sharp division, as well as finely threaded juxtaposition of the two triads stood out: The Godly, above, through the Spirit, aligned with things heavenly; the unGodly, gross material, despiritualized things below, aligned with Hell-demons, in esoteric tokenspace, about which more cannot be said at this point.
The distance between them is as the distance from plane 7* of sign use (God*, predicate of all predicates), to plane 1* (neuro-reactive anatomical pulse). The continuity between the polarities are the planes of the ordered hierarchy of sign-uses according to logical type of tokens. These correspond to the psychosemiotic categories of individuals given in experience under sign-uses. One who can say to himself “Was that dream from God?” is connecting the circuits on the conscious side that are hypothesized to be connected on the unconscious side, through the discharge of energies in the way sing-use differentiates. (Not: that it is recommended as self-consultation!)
The other side of universalizing the particular is particularizing the universal: taking one thing among others (uniquely related to the ego, on the psychological side) which is relative value – value it has only in relation to other things of thef same order, as if it WERE the value all had.
This is the reverse of idolization; idolization introverted. When conscious, it is narcissim of the ideal. The ideal here, now. Immanentizing the eschaton. This refers to the psychological attitude and condition Jung called “inflated”. (In Freudian terms: “fantasy cathected”; also, “full of him/themselves”, “self-imporatnt”, DeMause: “identified with traumatic childhood experiences as a returned psychic state”.)
Both these sins are a source of being-illusion prohibited by proper hierarchical ordered in the use of sign. “God” directly governs or controls the upper triad, only, as a spiritual force. That is why, after Christianity, this token of the completing totality is present in form as a grace, and in response to it as a free will. Its use calls for mastery and control over the body, while at the same time calling for energies the body must be maintained with great care to provide. The new man in Jesus called “Christ”, in Pisces, refers to the Three Crosses in esoteric astrology (Alice Bailey). As Aquarius comes marching in. The signs in astrology are part of the great illusion themselves, she points out. There are no real marks in the sky through which the sun passes each year mapped by “The Zodiac”. However, on the esoteric side, on the map the Three Crosses on the Great Wheel of 12 houses correspond with the three crosses in 0 a.d at Jesus’ crucifixion: The Hidden Christ: -- the cross of the unrepentant thief; the Fixed Christ: the esoteric Cross of Jesus, himself; and the Risen Christ – the cross of the repentant thief. This touches a point in projected cosmic unity beyond human comprehension. The metaphysical objection – and it is an obstacle – to the Way of Legal Duplicity (Third Step) is its foreclosing the reality completion loops onto the lower triad, to maintain physical at the expense of spiritual existence.
In sum: the consequence of violating the second commandment, sinning against the distinction between universals and particulars, predicates and individuals, in the logic of sign-use – taking universals as particulars, or particulars as universals – is self-contradiction, antinomy, paradox, reversal, breaking out everywhere. This completes the second step in elaborating the metaphysics of the situation “beyond irony”.
****/
Third Step in analysis of the process of Catastrophic Enantiodromia
Introduction of the Catholic Way of Being. Sealing the development of sign-use loops under the Hidden Cross (of perpetual suffering), preventing emergence of energies of the Fixed and Cardinal Crosses. Thus, it stands against the tide of history in this New Age.
If the implication of Allan’s analysis are drawn out, the gap between the wrongly absolutized ideal and the allowances judges are required to make for human nature in the breach (read: … the crud and corruption he will allow for to protect cronies) is scheduled to be filled by enlarging his discretionary powers. He will have to decide individual cases that could go tough, or go easy on the defendant, on the basis of his personal honor and integrity, as a Solomon-like human being. To repeat: the system of Duplicitous Law – “Here is what the law is; we know you won’t follow it.” – winds up giving supra-ordinate discretionary power and authority to precisely those who have abused the law to get in that position.
The legal way of thinking of the Italian/Catholic ideal is set forth by John L. Allen, Jr. “At the Vatican, Exceptions Make the Rule”, NY Times on-line 9.27.05). Here is an except:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/opinion/27allen.html
September 27, 2005
At the Vatican, Exceptions Make the Rule
By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.
Rome
THE forthcoming Vatican document on gays in seminaries will unleash a wrenching debate about Catholicism and homosexuality, but one thing it is certain not to mean is that in the future there will be no gays in the priesthood. The continued presence of gays in the priesthood will be the product not just of difficulties in enforcement, or the dishonesty of potential candidates, but also of design.
Although this is a difficult point for many Anglo-Saxons to grasp, when the Vatican makes statements like "no gays in the priesthood," it doesn't actually mean "no gays in the priesthood." It means, "As a general rule, this is not a good idea, but we all know there will be exceptions."
The categorical difference between these two approaches to the law from the religious side is profound. The way of the Catholic I call “deliberate duplicity”, and expect them to defend it, although I shall not do it for them. It calls for defining the ego-ideal (Freud’s original term for the super-ego) over against a forever-unattainable standard of perfection, so that “saint or sinner” is the destiny dividing mankind.
The other way, credited to “Anglo-Saxon” heritage, does not posit this metaphysical separation. It does not judge and punish itself for falling short of perfection – then delegate to a ‘judge’, or priest, the authority to make things right. It is not up to society to set norms of personal being, but to reflect the norms individuals establish by their own best efforts. No. That is not the way. It imposes a limitation on psychological development by decreeing all to be under a system of legal sanctions they had no hand in framing, cannot influence the enforcement of except by extra emoluments, and are at the mercy of judge’s discretionary rulings for borderline cases.
One point in Mr. Allen’s otherwise very perspicuous remarks stood out in contrast. He is citing “British historian Christopher Dawson ..describ(ing) the “erotic” spirit of cultures shaped by Roman Catholicism. Catholic cultures are based on the passionate quest for spiritual perfection, Darson writes, unlike the “bourgeous” culture of the United States, which, shaped by Protestantism and based on practical reason, gives priority to economic concerns.” So, to get this straight: here is Mr. Allen, Jr., announcing out and out duplicity in sign-use as the rule –‘AT THE VATICAN, THE EXCEPTIONS MAKE THE RULE’ – “Statements like ‘no gays in the priesthood’ don’t actually mean “no gays in the priesthood” – Quoting people who say they don’t mean what they say, but brazenly putting down money-mad “bourgeous”, sexually repressed New England Protestants ?
: -(
****/
At this level of discourse, at this juncture of time, with the vote on John Roberts pending this week, this succinctly stated philosophy of practical law, has the effect of installing the product of the duplicitous way of being responsible for the punishment of Katrina, Ophelia, Rita in the highest seat of law, whose mind oversees how we think of ourselves “under law”, by those speaking in the name of law. It is the ultimate penetration of American spirituality and way of being, in its innermost precincts – Ironic Reversal Theologized in History.
…the truth has been turned inside out (and upside down)
posted by Sid Thomas | 5:24 PM
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