Behold! Bear Witness

Preamble

Proceed to the introduction to dive in.

Only when a Man dies, does he Awake outlines:

1. the ultimately symbolic nature of Reality, a nature that mandates interpretation
2. criteria for what constitute good symbols
3. verticality and horizontality

Not Objectivity but Annihilation highlights:

1. Data is information. Wisdom needs the transformation of the subject
2. Higher objectivity is the expansion of the self to integrate a symbol’s meaning, i.e. the self participates in the symbol’s underlying principle
3. Fanaa (Enlightenment) is the annihilation of the self identifiable with the expansion of the self to incorporate Reality itself i.e. to go from self to Self

The Grammar of Disclosure introduces:

1. The principal axes along which to interpret symbols:
   1. Gender:
      1. Mercy: does the symbol open possibility?
      2. Wrath: does the symbol necessitate outcome?
   2. Clarity:
      1. Fidelity: does the symbol faithfully represent its source?
      2. Humility: does the symbol ever claim to be its source?
   3. Register: the distance of a symbol from the Real, a measure of a symbol’s particularity or contingency
2. Virtue is the increase of a symbol’s clarity to higher register principles with an act of mercy or wrath. Vice is the opposite.
3. Virtue is thus an orientation of the symbols of Reality to the Divine, towards their true purpose.
4. Exoteric (manifest traditions) must participate in the Esoteric (divine wisdom) in order to have any purpose or meaning.

Introduction

“What we call the meaning of life is precisely the question.” — Martin Heidegger

We discussed in A Matter of Why that a thing’s purpose¹ must determine everything that the thing ultimately manifests downstream: how it behaves, how it is used, how it uses, and all that it does.

Nowhere is this more true than for mankind. In the end, a man’s measure is the extent to which he has aligned himself with his purpose.

This alignment is the nature of Virtue. We haven’t, however, considered, in the specific context of conscious, intelligent beings what that goal ultimately is. There can be no Ethics without first an account of the Good.

Let us now, following the thread of Divine Disclosure, consider the meaning of life.

Being and Becoming

"Consume my heart away;sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity." — WB Yeats"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement." — TS Eliot

Consider your life.

You are thrust without your consent, kicking and screaming, into a world of multiplicity, form, transience, and shadow.

You do not see the world as it is. You do not understand what it means. You do not know what it is for.

All you do know, a priori, before doctrine, before speech, before anything at all, is that it’s there.

What is there? You do not know. Just that something is there.The very first thing you are conscious of, that you know, that you possibly can know, is Being itself.

As you acclimatise to your mortal coil, and the symbols and shadows impose themselves upon your consciousness, you slowly but inexorably draw yourself towards Becoming.

Becoming is motion, fluidity, complexity, activity, change, impermanence, and multiplicity. Becoming is the realm of contingency, the set of all things ultimately dependant on higher register principles for existence.

Being, on the other hand, is quietude, solidity, simplicity, transcendence, eternality, unity, and necessity. Being is the realm of necessity, the Real itself, upon which all contingents ultimately depend in order to derive their existence.

If Becoming is the realm of the Divine’s disclosure, then Being is firstly the ground of all intelligibility, and finally the ground of all existence itself.

Becoming is characterised first and foremost by its insufficiency. Becoming is insufficient in precisely the same way that symbols and contingent beings are.

It is simply Being made contingent, lesser, limited. If Becoming is feverishness, then Being is health. Becoming is symbol and shadow and veil. Being is light upon light upon light.

Note: A central idea we will return to repeatedly is the evocative allegory of object impermanence in little babies. They care not for Becoming at all. They do not interpret, they do not decompose, they do not abstract. They do not need to. All they are conscious of is Being itself. They are simply immersed, unthinkingly, in the plane of Divine Disclosure and aware of nothing other than the Disclosure itself. Plato really was right. We are born whole, descend into the darkness of self-consciousness, the duality of subject-object distinctions and the fragmentation of life itself. We must remember in order to ascend.

(It is not for nothing that the baby is also Zarathustra’s symbol for Nietzsche’s Übermensch.)

Critically, however, the immediacy, viscerality, and ignorance of the baby’s immersion in existence is not the Truth. We are thrust from Eden and must find our way home. The Divine Grace that led to life, first as innocence, must subsequently be reclaimed as Clarity (i.e. fidelity and humility).

This is nature of the Hero’s Journey. We are all on it, whether we like it or not.

“Attain complete vacuity, maintain steadfast quietude. All things come into being, and I see thereby their return. All things flourish, but each one returns to its root.” — Dao De Jing, 16

Ready and Present

"The ultimate perfection of the human intellectual soul lies in the contemplation of the truth." — Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles

Consider what it means for one to be conscious. To be conscious is to be conscious of something. It is to interpret it, to interrogate it, to make it intelligible.

It is to determine from it the features that make it what it is, to determine what it is for. It is to apprehend its essence, and this is the nature of interpretation.

We move from the miasma of qualia that comprise our drift through existence to a model, an abstraction of what the thing really is, what it’s for.

We notice a dichotomy in our modes of encountering Reality. Heidegger astutely distinguishes between two distinct modes of interpretation that we find helpful to invoke², but radically re-interpret:

1. Zuhandenheit (Ready-to-hand-ness)This is seeing things as tools in service of some agenda. The symbol/thing is seen instrumentally, in the light of whatever subjective goal can be furthered with it. We see hammers only when we want to hammer nails. Neither the nail, nor the hammer matters or demands attention, simply the act of hammering. It is to see things as means.
2. Vorhandenheit (Present-at-hand-ness)This is the conscious, attentive way in which we see the world, by seeing things as they are, not as instruments, but as symbols accorded their own right to exist. They are observed and pondered for what they are, for what they’re for, even if what they’re for is ultimately in service of some subjective goal. It is to see things as ends.

The critical distinction here is that the former mode of interpretation leaks the subjective, i.e. our selves, our desires, goals, activity into the being of the thing being apprehended. The thing’s essence as it were remains unrecognised, it is not seen, simply used.

Ready-to-hand-ness is to evaluate the extent to which things help other things become. To use something or subserviate something to an end is to admit (or worse, introduce) already some lack: something must require change in order for the use to have any meaning at all. This is Becoming.

Present-at-hand-ness is to evaluate what things really are and to attend to them accordingly, akin to contemplation, and therefore a genuine attempt at verticality, at apprehending something’s nature. This is Being.

The man who looks at a sunset to check the weather for his voyage is seeing it ready-to-hand. The sunset is a tool. The man who looks at the sunset and is awed by the dance of gold, crimson, and vermillion across the horizon is seeing it present-at-hand. In the former, the man imposes himself on the light, in the latter, the light imposes itself on the man, so much so that he’s not even there. The light just is.

The man who looks at his friend as a source of opportunity does his friend (and himself disservice). We instinctively know there’s something wrong here. The friend, and his friendship, instead is a noble thing, an end of itself.

Importantly, the notion of Register re-asserts itself here neatly. Something is only instrumentalised if it is subserviated to an end that is not its own, by introducing a contingency or dependence of the thing to some other thing on which it does not depend.

In the case of present-at-hand-ness, it is not simply a question of idle and passive apprehension of the thing, but rather, to subserviate the thing only and specifically to that which it is already dependent or contingent.

The key thesis here is the introduction or not of contingency.

Introducing contingency where none really is, i.e. by instrumentalisation, only obscures or diminishes the Clarity of the thing, whereas eliminating contingency or aligning an object’s apprehension and its activity to what is necessary for it heightens its Clarity.

A thing is present if it is apprehended purely in accordance with whatever necessary principles it discloses at vertically higher registers, but is ready if it is used in service of other horizontal symbols or principles upon which it does not depend.

This horizontality, contingency, and instrumentality, is an act of vice, whereas the verticality, necessity, and essentiality, is an act of virtue.

The sharp among you will note that an application of this idea forms one of the bases of Kantian ethics, “treat humanity never merely as a means, but always also as an end.” We will have more to say on this soon.

The Meaning of Life

“An hour of contemplation is better than a year of worship.” — the Holy Prophet

“There is nothing except that it glorifies Him, but you do not understand their glorification.” — Quran 17:44

Proposition: Every symbol desires discovery and recognition.

I don’t mean to naively project conscious sentiment onto the inert, but rather to deduce simply from what it means to be a symbol or a sign at all.

Symbols, as we noted first in Only when a Man dies, does he Awake (and incessantly since) are by their very nature triadic. They are fundamentally relational and reference and participate in the necessary principles that underpin them, i.e. their natures.

If a symbol was entirely acted on by Wrath, was entirely closed, disclosed nothing, then it would in fact be nothing. There is nothing that gives rise to it, and nothing that it presents.

To exist, then, is to disclose. To exist in Becoming is to bear within oneself a trace of Being, to manifest, however dimly and esoterically, that upon which it depends.

Reality, however, is messy and complex;³ it is unclear (analogous to fallen in our terminology) and difficult to navigate. Symbols act on each other, routinely introduce contingencies, mislead, and confuse as to their nature. Symbols routinely absolutise themselves.

To say that a symbol desires recognition is to say that its being tends towards the fulfilment of its nature. Symbols yearn for, point to and demonstrate their true natures.

When a symbol is recognised for what it really is, when it is present-at-hand rather than ready-to-hand, the symbol is “actualised” (made real as it were).

Obscurity, absolutisation, misrecognition, and instrumentalisation are not, then, simply neutral variations of symbolic activity, but rather they are privations, failures of disclosure.

The only thing a thing should be is itself.

“To see things as they are is the beginning of wisdom.” — the Buddha

This is the nature of Sincerity, or fidelity, to faithfully disclose and “remain true” to one’s nature. For a symbol to refuse to disclose a nature distinct to its own is to be sincere, whereas to act on a symbol instrumentally is to make it insincere.

Every extant thing is begging to be seen, to be understood. This is the basis for all social interaction, for all curiosity, for all drive to beauty, truth. That which is necessary in extant things, which they are all singing about, that they are all trying to disclose, is the Divine.

If physical phenomena under study are coy or your friends are or some artefact is, it is not necessarily because it does not have a nature that it is tending towards, it is either because it is:

1. It is introducing contingencies: it is misaligned to itself, pretending to be something it is not. This is bad.
2. It is precluding premature absolutisation: it is forcing you to think harder about what it is and to not confuse it for something else. This is good.

The former is akin to somebody being insincere, pretending to be something they are not, or lying. The latter is akin to a sincere friend behaving distinctly from how you’d expect, forcing you to deepen your understanding of them.

The latter is akin to how the most important scientific experiments elicit contradictions in existing theories of the world, forcing us to ponder the nature of Nature more deeply.

This discovery of nature, essence, this traversal from Becoming to Being, from privation to satiety, is what we mean by contemplation. It is the native tendency towards justice, beauty, truth, and the Divine.

“Real knowledge, and not its appearance or its shadow, knowledge and being are one and the same thing. This is the realization of man’s own being.” — René Guenon

Critically, it is precisely the faculty of our consciousness and intelligence that permits and enables this traversal from Becoming to Being in the first place. This is the defining and quintessential characteristic of what it means to be a man. It is what makes us God’s Vicegerent on His green earth.

That itself is a symbol, and it preciously discloses the one ineluctable fact that the telos of conscious life is the clarification of Reality’s disclosure.

"To know Infinite Possibility is precisely to become what one is to realize the contingency of the human state is to be liberated from it." — René Guenon

Creation discloses its nature and our nature is to clarify, recognise, and witness that nature. In its disclosure, Creation points to the Divine. In our recognition of the Divine, we point to the Divine.

We are here to bear witness. We are not to observe, not to study, not to affirm, we are to clarify, we are to apprehend, we are to ascend up the registers from Becoming to Being.

To bear witness, to contemplate, is not escape, as it is popularly construed, but to fulfill it. It is to be oneself as a conscious being, and as a conscious being, it is to orient the rest of Reality to what it really is.

It is to be sincere and make sincere.

This recognition of the Real, manifest only in the sincere and clear disclosure of ourselves and Creation: this is the nature of the Shahadah.

To bear witness, to truly bear witness is the sum, meaning, and purpose of all conscious life. This is to observe Becoming and discern Being.

In the most ultimate possible sense communicable, the statement “There is no God but God” is better understood as “There is nothing but God.”

The loom of Fate is no more than the yearning of symbols for their Source. The reed crying for its reed-bed.

We are all looking for home, whether we know it or not.

“Am I not your Lord?” They said: “Yes, we bear witness.” — Quran 7:172

“Know that there is no god but God.” — Quran 47:19

“You are my witnesses, declares the Lord.” — The Bible, Isaiah 43:10

“Taste and see that the Lord is good.” — Psalm 34:8

“Returning to the root is stillness; stillness is returning to destiny.” — Tao Te Ching