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(A timed reply to “Ontology of Consciousness––Percipient Action” edited by Helmut Wautischer; an advanced reaction to the to-be-published “Philosophical Faith and the Future of Humanity”, Editors: Helmut Wautischer, Alan Olson, and Gregory Walters)

PERIECH

ONTOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Webpage routed for posting 8-24-2011

SCROLL-CONTENTS:

.00 “Against derivation”––

.01 Two current book-titles that make this Webpage timely:

.02 Cost, collaboration, not collusion––Alan Olson, then Gerhard Knauss

.03 Getting blood out of the dollar’s worth––

.04 Watered down therapeutic confrontational truth; epilogue?

.05 Therapeutic confrontational words not “harangue”––

.06 Begging for handicaps via undue consideration for derivational spins––

.07 Liberation from handicaps––

.08 Webpage plan: to penetrate but keep consciousness––

.09 Periechontology’s reasonable warning to the arrogant––

                                        PART ONE

THE CONCEPT OF THE ULTIMATE SITUATION––A RATIONAL CATHARSIS––THE SYSTEMATIC FALSIFICATION OF HUBRIS––FALSIFYING BY 5 APPROACHES TO ULTIMATE SITUATIONS

1.0 Do not seek the ultimate situation––Changed to affirmative proposition (as are each of the other 4 approaches)

1.1 Indeterminate history not determinable

1.2 Particular ultimate situations are not to be sought

1.2.1 Death as the sought derivation

1.2.2 Suffering––homunculus’ artificial intelligence

1.2.3 Struggle and the human spectrum

1.2.4 Guilt and sadism unto self and others

1.3 The universal consequences of seeking ultimate situations

2.0 The unavoidability of the ultimate situation––

2.1 Unavoidability of limited thinking

2.2 Particular falsification of avoiding ultimate situations

2.2.1 Death as unavoidable––timely and untimely

2.2.2 Suffering unavoidable––shared

2.2.3 Conflict is unavoidable––the cost of freedom

2.2.4 Guilt philosophically and metaphysically unavoidable

2.3 Unavoidability of critical mass point in a one-world

3.0 The duality of the ultimate situation of being––

3.1 The mind (thinking) is limited and delimitable

3.2 Dichotomy in particulars

3.2.1 Death’s uncertainty offers alternative thoughts

3.2.2 Pain is individual, goes and inevitably comes

3.2.3 War has inescapable dualistic aspects

3.2.4 Guilt: too much and too little

3.3 Universally, there is no one-world government or church

4.0 Ultimate situation and illuminating effects

4.1 The awakening of authentic selfhood (conversion) comes through the individual not the collective

4.2 Particular falsification the proposition that selfhood can be wakened through mundane nature and established authority

4.2.1 Death contributes only partly to illumination when compared to life’s influence

4.2.2 Suffering contributes to change for otherwise without it life would be dormant and non-existential, i.e., pure happiness would not exist (stand out)

4.2.3 Struggling generates as well as stifles illumination but without conflict there would be no negotiated change between individuals.

4.2.4 Guilt, if not feigned or secondarily imposed, results in augmented individual responsibility to the degree of openness and direct proximity to grace.

4.3 Authentic selfhood is universally accessible

4.3.1 Post individualism or post-post modernity not withstanding

5. Illuminating for my self the necessity of the ultimate situation

5.1 Without limited thinking, thinking would be God

5.2 Illuminating particular ultimate situations 

5.2.1 No coming and passing away then time no longer exists

5.2.2 Suffering, pain, informed by the foregoing 4 approaches, is illuminated as necessary without institutionally sanctioned and fixated passion stations.

5.2.3 Conflict and prophetic spirit is elucidated as necessary

5.2.4 Guilt is illuminated as necessary as creative transaction unfolds

5.3 Universally, ultimate situations are primarily individual but for each other individual though some are not affected––viz. illumination’s ultimate boundary.

5.4 HITTING BOTTOM––A SYSTEMATICALLY RAISED BOTTOM WHILE REASON’S DISCERNMENT IS ENGAGED

5.4.1 Preparatory comments regarding a systematic approach to seeing the limits of feeling-states––

5.4.2 Leaning toward the invisible rather than corporeal––

Scroll-Contents cont.

                            PART TWO

DELIMITING THE LIMITS OF FEELINGS

THE BEGINNING OF A SYSTEMATIC PHILOSOPHY

5.5 A warning––avoiding overshooting self-doubt

6. Penetrating aestheticism and transcending emotionalism

6.1 Leaning away from feeling toward transcendence––

6.2 Talking about the ineffable––

6.3 Iconoclastically avoiding iconologism and emotive ontics

7. Feeling the presence, subject leaning toward subjection…

7.1 Philosophy vs. metaphysics––

7.2 Metaphysical propaganda––

7.3 Philosophical attitude––

7.4 Existenz as subject to indeterminate Objectivity––

7.5 Philosophical love and logic––

7.6 The transparency of Existenz selfhood––

7.7 Metaphysicists with philosophical leanings––

7.9 Honest Metaphysicists are atheistic––

7.10 No mediators––

7.11 Near to feeling-boundaries––

8. Born along as reborn periechontologists––

8.1 “Ontology of Consciousness” with an attitude––

9. Real individual (not corporate) feeling the necessity of indeterminate encompassing and the ambiguous quasi-bi-polarization––

10. Decisiveness and the bi-polar historical authoritative guides

10.1 The Bible as a historical reactionary movement against the ontology of “evolution” and conjured God––

10.2 Jaspers, Kant, bible on love and freedom––

12. Bible––

12.1 Jaspers on Immortality––

12.2 Jaspers on Creation––

12.3 The indeterminable source of consciousness––feeling faith or feeling the superiority complex

13. Two occidental guides for enlightened philosophical logic––

13.1 A blog example––First

13.2 Mathematical possibilities––

13.3 Faith and thinking––

13.4 Second Blog, Philip Christopher––

13.5 Retort by Philip Benjamin (World Conference on AI)––

14. What we know does not tell us how we come to think––

===============================================

AN APPLICATION OF PHILOSOPHICAL FAITH TO   HUMANKIND’S FUTURE––THE PERIECH ONTOLOGY OF    CONSCIOUSNESS (Periech, Greek, connotes encompassing and includes biblical like inspiration without completion of action)

“What we can know of the universe does not tell us how we come to think, and thus to know” (Philosophy and the World, “The Creation of the World” p. 129, Gateway, 1963).

“If we could grasp where we come from, we would cease to be human” (131)

.00 “Against derivation”––Jaspers said: as a child we begin in the center of history, and “…if as a child I become conscious, it is out of a world that produced me; if history starts it is out of prehistoric conditions (p. 803 “Reply to my Critics”, The Library of Living Philosophers, Tudor 1957). Jaspers’ is commenting in the quintessential framework of “I have expressly declared myself against any derivation”, and in the context of protesting Catholic Thomism’s agenda, in particular replying to Gerhard Knauss’ (of Catholic Thomism ilk) criticism. Jaspers--“This criticism makes correct observations, but does not interpret them in my sense” (801). Moreover it should be emphasized that Jaspers is making these comments (see 7. “The Idea of the Encompassing” in item 3 of his “Reply”) concerning the Thomism position and his Thomistic critics.

Thomism starts with an assumed “derived” divinely given authorization. It’s an undeniable institutional force having the potential for harvesting and sanctifying any consensus on derivation for the ongoing survival of that institution.

.01 Two books make this Web Page timely: One published and one coming. The first is “Ontology of Consciousness” edited by Helmut Wautischer and promoted by Alan Olson. (Although in my opinion information should not be based on one’s economic status, on rare occasions I will purchase or receive books. This book cost me around $10 including shipping.) The second book is “Philosophical Faith and the Future of Humanity”. It is not yet published (publication date Sept 30, 2011), but it can be purchased now at 25% off for…only…$141.75. Though there’s risk in doing a review of a book not yet published; here’s a somewhat informed touch:

.02 Counting the costs/Olson then Knauss––The latter book contains contributions by many, one being Gerhard Knauss (see .00 above) addressing “Philosophical Faith” immediately preceded by Alan Olson’s “Philosophical Faith and Its Ambiguities”––the latter’s title less subtle, more overt, I’d guess, in suggesting there is something non-committal in Jaspers’…faith (see below). Alan is also co-editor of this book. Knauss’ faith-commitment, I’d estimate, is Thomistic. The…late Jaspers…cannot reply. (This book’s cost is mentioned to show the unfortunate dynamics involved while under institutional pressure to publish or become obscure and the consequential cost of education.)

.03 On getting the dollars’ worth––The intent on this Web Page is to provide some independent awareness of Karl Jaspers’ views in part as an alternative to expensive books and as an alternative to falling victim to the propagations of the faiths of institutional forces. The pursuit of truthness (not hubristic truthfull-ness) should not be subject to unaffordable costs––and profits (if not the authors’ then middle-agents). Unfortunately too, it is hard for hubris to admit that one does not get what one pays for, so one can get––not necessarily the truth––but the acquired forces’ subtle drift, fashion, and style, that which one might feel obligated to absorb to get something for the dollars––and to survive and perhaps prosper within an academic realm of school thinking.

04. Watered down therapeutic confrontational truth––In the “Epilogue” of the book  “Ontology of Consciousness” Christian de Quincey apologetically speaks to the matter of opposing derivation––apparently under pressure for not taking the simple-to-complex derivation pledge. He tells of regretfully having “harangued” (remember this word) one who claimed to be able to explain how mind could emerge from mindless matter. His “harangue”, he noticed, caused the person to feel dejected. With great emphasis Quincey says: “On my God, I did that to him…If that is the price of truth, its just not worth it.” This epilogue shows how, for instance, Jaspers’ Existenz faith can be caught up in the progress of being more kind than honest, and thereby academically compromised out of existence. Cordiality like this avoids stirring the calms of dysfunctional feeling states (though, in this book, Jaspers’ name is not in the Index, his works are not found in any of the bibliographic references, and mentioned insignificantly once by Karen Akerma (p. 453). Above, bracket that word “Harangue” for further reference.)

.05 Therapeutic confrontation not “harangue”––In the context of Jaspers’ “Reply…” to Knauss––i.e., Jaspers’ spirited goal orientated criticism of Thomism––Alan Olson, also one of the coming book’s (“Philosophical Faith and the Future of Humanity”) three editors and a contributor (along with Gerhard Knauss), accuses Jaspers of improper communicative therapeutic words: Alan refers to “…Jaspers’ harangue against the notion of Catholicity…” (see “Karl Jaspers and the Role of ‘Conversion’ in the Nuclear Age” by Gregory J. Walters, p. 224, also a contributor and editor to the coming Sept. 2011 book).

I, not Jaspers, harangue! Like this: Knauss knew how to make tactical untimely submissions: just as Jaspers received Knauss’ critique too “late” for a Jaspers’ enhanced “Reply”, so this current Knauss-work is submitted while the late Jaspers cannot reply. Though that first Knauss’ critique reached Jaspers only “at the conclusion of [his] Reply” it was not so untimely received as “timely” sent, for Jaspers still had the time to safely say that the critique was “beautiful”, (that is, I say it was poetically decked out in appealing regalia). Moreover though, Jaspers then says that Knauss “draws a few basic lines in terms of his own emphases and transformations…”

A current Knauss could be encouraged due to Jaspers’ “Reply” on the earlier Knauss; the word “beautiful” can be exploited more than understood. About Knauss, Jaspers wrote: “His buoyancy indicates that he is being led by something which must have substance.” This must be read as a penult, an example of Jaspers’ reaction to Thomism––seen overall as the first and last word on derivation as a substantial force or substance (his way of “haranguing” Catholicity). http://karljaspersapplied.net/knauss.htm

.06 Begging for handicaps via undue consideration for derivational spins––So this is the trouble with collaborative works that individuals’ and corporate buffers’ (hidden individuals given individual begging rights) book-publishing efforts might produce: If one criticized Catholicity, (which is generally accepted “Christian”, or vatic approved dErivation, i.e., “evolution”) the analysis is taken as a four-letter rant worthy of censure. It is taken as improper respect for collars that beg for reverence.

A Christian de Quincey dare not disturb the calm of “E-ontology”. Jaspers’ hands-off the imagelessness of derivation points beyond the localization of thinking processes about being; points beyond localization in an individual’s thinking or in collective-thinking, points beyond the consensus of thought about Big Bang and sequential derivatives, points beyond the derivation about which there is none greater and therefore is not derived because of derivative-circularity thinking. This .06 section is presented as a beginning logical rejoinder to the handicaps given to and introduced by Hubert Markl’s “The question of why humans have developed a…[consciousness] should be answered according to the usual paradigm of Darwinian evolutionary theory…” (in “Ontology of Consciousness”).

.07 Freedom from handicaps––To limit thinking to localization forgetting the ground (Being) of existence (standing out of being) “implies the destruction of any sense of authentic life” (Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, On Reading Philosophy). The emancipation of thinking depends on, for instance, the biblical idea of the imageless God. Freedom derives from this imageless God. But God is not a mere cipher but more than a linguistic abstract. Nor is periechontology mere cipher––that is, not subject to objectification or congealing. But when we speak about such open-thinking we have to know what we are talking about to avoid being handicapped by iconic ontics––even if it means coining words that, for instance, avoids atheism. This “basic knowledge” about derivational thinking is both our limit and that which delimits limits (p. 203 Philosophical Faith and Revelation, “Ciphers of Rational Being”, Collins, 1967). This Web Page aspires to no particular way, no ontological way of life, (no logistical absolute way and not even a serious hypothesis) but nevertheless seeks a sublime capacity for seeing order as well as chaos (while through learned ignorance aware that there is enough infinite data in the finite to make chaos appear deceptively orderly). 

.08 This Web Page is designed to reach––without shaving off parsimonious reason––consciousness as such, at the periphery of Existenz. “Existenz” involves a vigorous exercise regarding authentic selfhood, the self suspended between any self-concept and the Transcendent (Imageless God). The process reaches and cantilevers off the edge of being’s surrounding existence (all that stands out of the flux of being), and hopefully get attuned to the spirit of enlightened humanity—via a process that at the same time uses antinomy-logic as well as that philosophical logic that goes beyond itself and is spirited along in the immortality of the vague mortal recognition of an original heavenly unity and the eternal recurrent of that unity teleologically: “With the consummation of the end we shall attain concord of souls, shall view one another in a loving present and in boundless understanding, members of a single realm of everlasting spirits”. To use the metaphoric, which is like it was before the beginning: “All men are related in Adam, originate from the hand of God and created after His image”. (I add: Whether the Garden’s humankind-Adam of Geneses 2, or the humankind-Adam of Genesis 1)

.09 Come with me now toward what we are using on the way; “periechontology”, the “…basic knowledge of our situation [that is] the never complete, ever-changeable consciousness that grants whatever freedom to think we can have at a time. This is both its weakness and its strength” (Phil. F and R p. 203). Periechontology connotes an encompassing of thought that is open to individual revelational inspiration in the midst of the restraints of reality. It is a reactionary and transactionary response to the hubris of those who know about life’s beginning promote universal adherence. 

WARNING TO THE ARROGANT! The way of thinking below is designed to assist the individual in reaching the place where reason is silenced––“no sound of language can be heard there”. Jaspers: “He who takes this way in philosophizing risks losing his balance in the world…In the delusion of having found the way out of the world, men may lose themselves in eccentricity. In the world they become buffoons or maniacs or criminals––all in the belief of having reached ultimate truth” (Philosophical Faith and Revelation, “Ciphers of Existential Situation”).

                                      PART ONE

THE CONCEPT OF THE ULTIMATE SITUATION––A RATIONAL CATHARSIS––THE SYSTEMATIC FALSIFICATION OF HUBRIS––FALSIFYING BY 5 APPROACHES TO THE ULTIMATE SITUATION

Much of the outline below is drawn from the Edwin Latzel’s treatment of Karl Jaspers’ views on the ultimate situation; it’s a secondary source about which Jaspers says in his Reply: “Latzel follows my philosophical thoughts carefully and with inner participation” and as regards the approach to Existenz illumination Jaspers says: “With this I agree without reservation”. Latzel has “such clear and telling insight into the lines of my philosophy” and has Jaspers’ “highest esteem”. Even though one had been a friend of the Jaspers, a classroom student, or German translator, provenance like the above would be more assuring. 

1.0 Do not Seek the Ultimate Situation––Coming to Terms with the Limits of Historical Determinateness: Particular and Universal Falsification of this affirmative proposition: Seeking the Ultimate situation is necessary.

1.1 Determining history (coming to terms with the ineffable world in which we find ourselves) involves finite thinking sometimes refined by learned ignorance––a predicament wisely not forgotten. Ideas are limited due to the predicament of the thinker’s (whether consensus determined or not) finitude. Limits tend to be delimited when limits are not sought. Limits are not sought in the mere awareness of ultimate limits. When rosy colored glasses become blinders to limits, the intent to avoid limits becomes an aggressive style of avoiding, which then can fixate into “the” ontology. A general tendency to seek limits can be further falsified through particular examples that show limits are not to be sought activity nor by passive presupposition.

1.2 Particular ultimate situations are not to be sought

1.2.1 Death––Derivation––It would be historically and existentially fatal to seek being in death. In life, Jaspers’ brother committed suicide, and Jaspers lived and encompassed death, for since childhood he had been organically ill with bronchiectasis with cardiac decompensation. At the time when he learned the diagnosis, prognosis was death by pyemia and would occur before the age of forty.

Hans Kunz and Karl Jaspers (University of Basel) spoke philosophically about death. The latter sees particular significance in the idea of death as an ultimate situation. Kunz seems committed to the concept per se or as such, and death as an ultimate uncertainty becomes the immanent derivation for Transcendence (God concept) using the concept as an absolute universal more than a particular. This indeterminateness (infinite uncertainty) of death becomes Kunz’ source of transcendence, that is, in the void one conjures. For Kunz death is the “paradigm of uniqueness” that plays a fundamental role in determining man’s uniqueness. Kunz is limiting the human potential for the ultimate potential is sought in death-concept’ limits.

But for Jaspers it is our commitment to the area beyond any willed interpretation that humankind’s uniqueness is occasionally revealed to him; for this reason Jaspers treats death as a particular ultimate situation, i.e., one particular boundary. But for Kunz the fear of death, fear of ultimate transition, the loss of being, becomes a positive trust in the negative (oxymoron). Jaspers sees this positive trust as bad faith and more real distrust; he sees it as seeking death to reach humankind’s derivable potential. Jaspers feels that a healthy attitude toward life ought not to have its ultimate basis in positive distrust (rationalism, positivism) but rather in something that is more than what is determinable intellectually through the conjured possible significance derivable from the fear of death.

Death, regardless of the name we give it, is always a matter beyond the area of knowledge and beyond the area of the positive and negative determinations. It is a faith-utterance and concomitant confessed learned ignorance, including personal experience that leads Jaspers to say: “When all things fade away, God is––that is the only fixed point.” Inner transformation is simply believed to be affected by something other than what man factually is or may become, not what man actually is not or determines to be. Hence, we do not wrest being from obscurity but give meaning to obscurity through trust in something greater than uncertainty. Trust in what’s greater than life and life’s death as we know it, trust in the Transcendent (transcending restraints to see what is really sublime so that the actual will be sublimated by a process made possible by the Transcendent). High case “T” Transcendent is always the encompassing; God as that which none greater can be conceived and is the source of learned ignorance and revelations that are inspiring for individuals.

Without seeking death, “The failure of thinking at limits recognized by thinking itself and compellingly performed, would thereby open up indeterminable realms” but does not determine the realms nor the contents and revelations. (804 Reply) Jaspers’ view here corresponds with the psychology that sees the futility of seeking exhaustion rather than remaining open to the source of all strength. Getting burned out is better if the burning is systematically raised.

1.2.2 Suffering––A homunculus with artificial intelligence reborn into the world through woman can appreciate suffering but more so the regret for having sought existence in a suffering world. One must not seek suffering, nor painful death for that form of asceticism, that terror, consequentially involves others. Tolerating such an approach can lead to misuse of drugs like alcohol, and autocrats can become insensitive to the sufferings of those having no access to relief.

1.2.3 Struggling or conflict––Conflicts (from the less intense such as mere comparisons by differentiations to intense warfare) define humankind and need not be sought. Moreover aggressively seeking existential (non-recreational) conflict redefines civilization and violates the principle of freedom. Conflict always is, from one end of the human-behavior spectrum to the other end, introspection to retrospection and prospection, beginning in the world dimension before this one into the final dimension. It need not, ought no be sought.

The Jaspers/Kunz’ conflict-example shows the differences in metaphysics and philosophy (respectively) such as referred to in the differences in the approaches to the absolute relative psychological value of death. The two main psychological schools of thought regarding death is that we avoid death at all costs, or we seek life at all cost, the latter being another way of speaking about avoiding death. Philosophical wisdom encompasses death and life with love.

1.2.4 Guilt thoughts (grounded in feeling-states) in the balanced individual are constant and not repressed. Guilt if sought can be harmful to freedom and stifling to creativity. Extreme guilt points to a proclivity for self-sadism. Seeking guilt feelings can prevent self-betterment, but seeking must not be mistaken for the need to inform oneself in matters of moral, political, and metaphysical, existential and philosophical responsibility and stemming in part from guilt though unsought.

1.3 I can falsify the universalizing of the general limits supported by the particular ultimate situations.  A general subjectivity participates in realizing ideological limits, i.e., the insufficiency of individual ideas to surmount the larger infinite and infinitely smaller inner realities (including self images).

Falsifying universal subjective limits is a historically established biblical reality: Individuals (self and others) making historical and existentially––leaning toward being rather than escape through extinction––significant particular (ultimate situations) and general determinations exhaust in an inner silence.

Humankind in history meets in that silent exhaustion, but it would be fatal for humankind (universally=all peoples) to succumb to or specialize in the nihilistic side of indeterminacy.  Universally we ought not seek through the general and particular limits the resulting conclusive unlimited nihilism.  Humankind meet between having originated “…from the hand of God…created after His Image and “… a single realm of everlasting spirits” (Origin and Goal of History, Introduction). Here faith encompasses the exhaustion of inner and outer mentalizing. The “Existenzen” mission should amount to not succumbing to the fatalism of nihilism.

This calling is impossible for all who are susceptible of disappointment in the majority, of disillusionment with the human community, its lack of understanding or honesty…The religious calling is incompatible with a view that radically negates the world as total evil, with the belief that the world is at an end, is lost, that there remains only contemplation in despair. Men like Sebastian Franck or Kierkegaard, who possessed such characteristics, attempted in vain to become ministers. (Myth and Christianity, “Background for Discussion” [debate with Bultmann])

Kant’s antinomies come to mind in this exercise in ultimate situations, but there’s a difference. The difference is seen in the distinction between modernity and post modernity. Post modernity races at the speed of light through infinite space and catapults off spinning into a more informed apprehension of the limits of the positivism in science. The mechanical predictive positivism of modernity rears again in a “Vatican’s” (with other Vatican-types competitively following) confirmation of using the word “evolution”. The effectiveness of Catholic influence and propaganda is measured by how “Christians” now use the word without question. If “evolution” becomes a cosmopolitan and providential force, temples, cathedral spires, and minarets will compete for an association with the materialism.

With this fashioned falsification of historical determinateness we have begun to implant ourselves objectively by plowing through and cultivating the transparency of empirical reality—of what simply is. But the implantation can be on the edge of a slope where it is possible to slip into groundlessness. We have begun an uneasy rather than easy path through the chaos of existence with all its infinite standouts while not seeking to control via a rowdy cynicism.

2.0 The Unavoidability of the Ultimate Situation––The limits of historical determinateness can be shown through changing the maxim that the ultimate situation is unavoidable to an affirmative ontological proposition: Being can be had as an object of thought.

2.1 To avoid an ontology from becoming an absolute truth, one need only show that it can be falsified and is therefore subject to testing. In post modernity if a hypothesis is accepted as absolute it is de facto untestable.

Ultimate situations are unavoidable and no first cause can be visualized without ultimate inimical considerations. The greatest grounded idea is insufficient to warrant indisputable assent.

Edwin Latzel has lifted out of Jaspers’ works (out of his “General Psychopathology” and his “Philosophy of Worldviews” the established idea that the ultimate situation of consciousness is unavoidable. Restating it in the affirmative subjects it to falsification. If it can be falsified in general and particular, it is falsified universally. Unless “the” or “a” thought process, an existential statement, is presumed worthy of a commanding jump of faithful acceptance, it is falsifiable. There are no existential propositions that are without contradictions. Only fictitious propositions are without contradiction and because not falsifiable they are invalid and irrelevant as ontological. Though one might prostate oneself before a throne in holy submission to authority, the unavoidable ultimate situations declare the limits of preparatory-thinking. One would have to leave reason and sneak across boundary situation to prostrate oneself before holy mundane authorities. Every conjuring, every idea uses the predicament of the limited mind to avoid the ultimate situation, so the fundamental systemic flaw in thinking has the seed of the ultimate situations’ unavoidability. It’s realities’ restraining fundament. Indeterminateness is not to be sought nor is it avoidable.

2.2 Particular falsification of the idea that the ultimate situation can be avoided.

2.2.1 Death is unavoidable; we must all experience the end of existence. This standing-out of being must end. The experience can be voluntary or unfold unwilled through the feathering-away spectrum ranging from suicide to less covert natural forces. A form of death is involuntarily or voluntarily failing to remembering, like forgetting that we phenomenologically standout (exist) of being (world). Death is not to be sought but death is eventually unavoidable though sometimes forensically and accidentally untimely.

2.2.2 Jaspers knew suffering due to his disease––as well as the threat of death during the Nazi regime. A review of his 1919 General Psychology shows that he knew the calibers, levels, of war casualties; suffering differed in intensity, from no immediate pain due to shock to terrible immediate suffering. Latzel uses this quote to show that pain is an unavoidable particular ultimate situation:

There are the greatest differences in the kind of suffering and in the degree of torment. But in the end the same thing may confront all men, and everyone has his part to bear; no one is spared.  (Jaspers’ “Philosophie” 2cd ed. Berlin. Gottingen, Heidelberg, 1948, p. 492) 

Accepting the unavoidability of pain does not mean it’s healthy to seek suffering just to get the inevitable over with, but it does tend to moderate conduct that contributes to its unset, and it involves an attitude that tends to mollify the effects of our own harsh behavior on others. One’s attitude toward individual’s suffering unavoidability prevents mollycoddling, that is, avoiding being more kind than honest rather than applying confrontational dialectics. 

The proposition that any suffering can be avoided involves a commitment, a conscious-conscience for avoiding personal suffering. That commitment to individual comfort at others’ discomfort––which introduces the unavoidability of some degree of usufruct, and that introduces liberalism’s progressive sharing through legislated enforcement. Such avoidance affects freedom and becomes immediately costly for the have-nots and then for those most fortunate.

2.2.3 Though conflict is not sought, it cannot ultimately be avoided. Any idea that by intent wholly avoids conflict is an idea held as a culminated object of thought––conclusive enough to be forced upon all. As a result of the dogmatism––thought possessed like an object––the deeper conflicts accumulate in intensity, and exponentially communication in a loving struggle provides for venting.

Legislated rights if in reality usufruct, does not avoid conflict, that is, the proposition that conflict must be avoided is still falsifiable, for it is impossible to live without cost to others. It is also ravaging to a broached fixed self-image’s boundaries.

2.2.4 The grounds for guilt feelings are unavoidable. Existential guilt is guilt inescapable simply by existing at an age of accountability. “By actively participating in life, I take…[something] from others”. “Every action has consequences in the world which the agent did not anticipate.” “Whether I act or refuse to act, there will be some consequences, and in either case I incur unavoidable guilt”. (Latzel’s Ibid., “Philosophie” 499, 506, 507 respectively.) In other words, consciousness cannot avoid the unfolding of conscience. We are not dealing here with psychopathological realities such as fetal alcoholism, and those rare cases where pain-tolerance is off the normal scale. We would not want political leaders that genetically lack or use artificial means of stifling pain.

Jaspers’ book “The Question of German Guilt” systematically falsifies the proposition that Guilt is avoidable. The system itemizes in this way: Criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt, and metaphysical (localized existential guilt including all nature groaning in pain).

2.3 Though ultimate trauma might apparently be avoided through rationalizations, trauma cannot be avoided universally in a real world. The reality is more apparent. There is no boundary egress means of escape neither in the secular or religious world of others––no utopia, rapture, nirvana, no last rights, lasting ritual, nor country of refuge. We can only put boundaries on the proposition that the avoidance of the ultimate situation is possible in the general epistemic sense, in the psychological particular sense, and the most extended conclusive sense.

Because the limits of historical determinateness cannot be avoided, i.e., because experience cannot be apprehended as a wholly comprehensible object, encompassing––any and all––ontologisms is the best chance for delimiting limits. Periech-ontology is the reasonable approach to determ (come to open and functional terms) those boundary situations.

3.0 The duality of the ultimate situation––The objective and subjective limits of historical determinateness is stated in the affirmative so that the limits of thinking as such and the particular and universal ideas can be falsifiable: There is no dual aspect to the ultimate situation; that proposition is falsifiable.

3.1 At this point, the Existenz attitude can be elucidated. Latzell puts it this way: “Every ultimate situation has a dual aspect: a negative character with respect to my existence, and a potentially positive character for me as potential Existenz” (Schilpp, The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, p. 197). Jaspers addresses the epistemic duality involved in being objective, and thinking begins with the effects and affects of the subject-object polarity (Wahrheit “About Truth and Symbols”). The healthy self-image is one that is primarily imageless, and the duality of seeing the self and others in historical perspective is to see the self suspended between itself (any fixated inflexible self image) and the Transcendent (another word for the biblical God).

Existenzen cannot remain suspended between at least two and sometimes many possibilities. The duality rudiment of every ultimate situation brings heightened awareness for being decisive.

3.2. Confronting and being confronted by a rationally insurmountable wall of variables in our search for ultimate being, we may hesitate to make decisions. Feelings are suspect as is too much questioning that protracts more than hastens decisions. One way might be the easy way due to the labor involved in prolonged struggling with data, or whether a way might be in fact a quest for self-comfort at the expense of others. Every affirmative decision is subject to falsification. It is at this point in thinking that one can fall, can take refuge in authority and consensus and thus avoid all the harmful affects of individually acquired authentic instruction. Existenzen, being intellectually honest, wonder about the ultimate origin of their being, of consciousness, the purpose and goal of the adjustable self-image’s decisiveness. Preferential leanings begin.

3.2.1    Particular ultimate situations lose the singularity of uncertainty in the temptation to fill the void with one singularity of mind. Death, i.e., ultimate uncertainty, can take on immortality and concomitant desire for repose, or the uncertainty stimulates an aversion to it that could get out of hand. Death when objectified produces decisions that must consider the suffering that is either avoided by it or that accompanies it.

3.2.2 Suffering has a dual nature: Existenzen can know or appreciate comfort only through experiencing the pain/less pain spectrum. The degree of another’s pain is dependent upon my degree of pain. Even mourning can make others suffer.  Others’ suffering can be suffered, or escaped through momentary inebriation.

3.2.3   Warfare, as an example of conflict, has a duality. There is the struggle over which side is being motivated by the greater principle. The dual nature of the struggle can help establish a decisive principle in the minds of Existenzen––as in the American Civil War.

3.2.4   Guilt has a duality that the most monistic singularity authority cannot absorb. Whether it is National leaders or the Vatican supporting a Nazi regime, a timely and untimely manifestation of guilt shows that no presumed infallible authoritative utterance can escape the duality involved in historical determinateness.

3.3 The universality of duality prevents a one-world government or a mundane “evolving” church, but promotes bicameral government, supports real or imaginary hemisphere-diversity. It takes sides in the cosmic war between God and the devil. Duality can impede the idea that unity has arrived. Duality provides lifts to both wings of the quest for the unity that evades.

Descartes is an example of an improper effort at delimited the limits of duality. He avoids duality. His giving in to a materialistic seat of consciousness (pineal gland) is an internalized submission to the exclusivity of the authoritative unity of his imposing church––Rome universal localized “Church”. Materialism, logical positivism, rationalism, commitment to a dialectical materialistic “evolving” universal church can be the result of decisions made if one stops at this point in the systematic philosophical shattering of Hubris.   

4. Indecision needs inspirational illumination through the open awareness about the limits of historical determinateness––the awakening of Existenzen in the ultimate situation. Falsifying the affirmative proposition: Authentic selfhood needs to submit to institutional authority’s claim on unity and emotional solidarity in corporeal form (the ruddy rubric rush that emerges from doing anything together).

4.1 The parsimonious simplified falsification of rationalism’s revelations is seen in the ever-present unsought, unavoidable, unobjectifiable, and inescapable duality of the ultimate situation of thinking. The affirmative proposition: Authentic selfhood or institutional Sainthood, i.e., the awakening of Existenz, depends on yielding to institutional authority.  This can be falsified in particular and universally. But first a general falsification process:

There is potentiality in the suspension that occurs with the awareness of the inadequacies of ideas, including the potential for seeing personality fixations, those ideas and personalities that could be otherwise. Whether faced with the necessity of making a decision, or whether making a decision in relativities’ “either-or”, both or the many possible directions tend to verify an intermediate area where potential decisiveness is awakened. Authentic existence can commence through being suspended between irresponsible withdrawal and dysfunction confusion––confusion, perplexity, complexity that results from a total commitment to the apparent infinite complexity of even the finite.

For Existenz to awaken, there’s a significant withdrawal from the world of images and objects, including a particular revered self-image. Here there’s the enhancing feeling that the imageless self is participating without objection with a source to which the self is subject. There occurs the passing from being an object to being subject to an Objectivity that is transcendent rather than immanent––more from beyond than from within self and/or the mundane world’s establishments.

4.2 Particular falsification of the proposition that selfhood can be wakened through mundane nature and institutional authority:

4.2.1 Death, as a particular ultimate boundary situation, becomes a simple ultimatum in that the uncertainties (including incurring pain or escaping from it, including healthy living to make the best of endorphins) can contribute to the awakening of Existenz (authentic self being). As a particular ultimate situation thought about death either sends the potential Existenz into potential orbit for reentry or a meaningless spiral within galactic circularity. Moreover, though, as a particular thought-experience death detects partially whether one has immortality potential, and the decision affects the movement toward or withdrawal from Existenz. But death, viewed as uncertainty, should not be thought of as a primary source of potentiality, for it is life not death that sublimates, i.e., life is sublime and all the more so if immortal.

4.2.2 Suffering is part of life; a particular ultimate situation that emotively infuses Existenzen with aims. But then preoccupation with suffering recoils at the thought that it is valuable as stimulation. In part pain can contribute to extreme anxiety and thereby becomes exploitable by outside forces. Pain-oriented conscience can mitigate the forces and serve to promote the quest for happiness without incurring pain on self or others while provisionally and temporarily tolerating institutions that are exploiting the fear of pain (out of control costs of health care) while justifying an insensitivity by charging imprudence and failure to cooperate with out of control costs. Here insensitivity to pain is excused by the view that it is nature’s way of being punitive.

4.2.3 Struggling or conflict can generate as well as stifle individual creativity, but the ground of healthy creativity lies beyond the struggling world, and never beyond breathing the atmosphere of freedom’s transcendental source. Conflict has an affect on the individual, but it is not the source of emotive affections. Authentic selfhood is not possible by way of external authoritatively induced conflicts. Submissive selfhood is not the authentic selfhood that arises out of an awareness of freedom’s source––where Existenz is potentially possible, i.e., individualization or socialization.

4.2.4 Guilt––if not feigned or conforming to hierarchical institutionalism, i.e., climbing the institutional ladder––in part results in individualistic responsibility and is most authentic while suspended directly between some self’s self-image and grace from above.

4.3 The process of authentic selfhood (Existenz through grace) is universally accessible but not by rising to hierarchical levels of achievement within a universal institution. The process always involves using reason but while avoiding rationalism. Reason abandons positive and negative assertions about the determinateness and indeterminateness but reason is pushed toward the ultimate Encompassing beyond the ultimate situations.

4.3.1 Post individualistic/post-post modernity––The universality of realizing the limits of thinking and the effects of the particular ultimate situations, erects a respectful stance against what could be referred to as post-post-modernity, or more revealing of intent, a “post individualistic phase of history”.  Confidence rode on the wake of positive measurements and mechanical estimations involved with what is known as modernity. Post modernity brought a waning of confidence regarding reason’s capacity for ultimate answers regarding life and its source. Post-post modernity amounts to a shift away from individualistic authenticity and back to coercion by institutional authority’s religious support for rationalism, which includes the big church’s stamp of approval upon the universal acquiescence to vatic approved scientific language. Humankind, universally, must use a lingo that if honestly admitted means humankind’s consciousness developed from the simple to the complex and then invented its own beginning and called it God.

5.  The existential necessity of the ultimate situation in the illuminating of Existenzen––The affirmative proposition to be falsified is: The ultimate situation cannot be considered necessary for the illumination of Existenz; one must get illumination from institutions promoting unity.

5.1 Historically, and prehistorically (as in the eons in Genesis, Chapter 1 and 2), existence cannot be honestly intellectually termed or de-termined, i.e., deciphered. Because the limiting nature of the ultimate situation has existed and currently exist, it is existentially vital for maturing to unfold and come to terms with its necessity––existence depends on each individual confronting the ultimate situation. Latzel puts it this way: “I can illuminate for myself the ‘existential’ necessity of the ultimate situation” (Schilpp, 197). The illumination proceeds using limited ideas about historical indeterminateness that are in need of and in position to be inspired if a flash comes.

Differentiating between the potential and the actual necessity necessarily includes the restraining nature of reality and the rudiments of reality are undeniable inherited ideas that inspire. A child senses, intuits, ideas’’ limits even before coming to terms about it. Earliest and latest ideas are illuminated by getting something positive from the limits of the mind’s ideas. The delimitation of the general limits of thinking falsifies the proposal that the ultimate situation is dispensable in the illumination of Existenzen.

5.2 Particular ultimate situations falsify the proposition that ultimate situations need not be individually confronted for illumination to transform the individual. Phenomenology is involved here. Humankind is subject to the plight of having to use mental phenomena, but illumination is not dependent on epiphenomena, but rather being open to the limits of mental phenomena (epiphenomena is generally used to promote the idea that the source of mind and its constellations is merely immanent and not possible transcendental).

5.2.1 Jaspers puts it concisely: “If there were no passing away, I would be an infinite duration as existence and so would not exist (Latzel’s reference “Philosophie”, p.484). One does not begin to stand out of being, nor end the outstanding without declaring being.

5.2.2 Jaspers’ thought continues: Pure happiness, as the lack of suffering, would necessitate a dormant Existenz. Thus, if the affirmative proposition is not falsified, the best there could be is a dormant Existenz, which immediately short circuits the move toward the illumination of Existenz. Through the necessity of particular boundary situations the intermediacy of mundane institutions that stand-in for ultimate situational facing, may illuminate but cannot illuminate Existenz. Institutionally sanctioned passion-stations are not as effective as individual personal direct suffering.

5.2.3 Without conflict there would be nothing from which to withdraw for contemplation, meditation, and recreation, and the movement would lose the source of momentum that is provided to Existenz––including individual-to-individual loving dialogue. No institution can mediate between the individual and God. No institution can absorb the dialectical tension between one Existenz and another.

5.2.4 When we determine that guilt is the feeling we have as a result of not being able to do existential justice to everyone, then we can see the impetus guilt-conscience provides. Guilt begins somewhere in the middle of humankind’s development of conscience. Guilt shows consciousness that the individual has boundaries that allow self-images to be seen. Guilt continues and illuminates the need for circumventing communicative limits universally.

5.3 Universally it is necessary for humankind to live in a world of restraint as a nether condition for our hither source of transcendence. Immanentalism (meaning: source is within not vertically out beyond the inner Existenz) would replace what would be for Existenzen the healthier transcendental process. Existenzen illuminate, through Transcendence, the ultimate situations and that contributes to transforming their changeable selfs. The illumination includes the understanding that not all have the potential for authentic selfhood through systematic shattering.

5.4 HITTING BOTTOM––A SYSTEMATICALLY RAISED BOTTOM WHILE REASON’S DISCERNMENT IS ENGAGED

5.4.1 Preparatory comments regarding a systematic approach to seeing the limits of feeling-states––The existential necessity of the ultimate situation systematically portrayed in Jaspers’ works is meant to be impossible to grasp as an objective knowable process––though there is the danger that subjective feelings might take unhealthy form in the void. Interpretation requires tapping the highest individual potential and with the willingness to risk. The individual is sailing alone. For this reason, Jaspers warns:

The experience of self-doubt is unknown only to the thoughtless ‘enlighteners” and positivists, to those who live in the obtuse self-certainty of conventions, whether ecclesiastic or non-ecclesiastic (Philosophical Faith and Revelation, “Can the Two Faiths Meet”)

If one does not realize the individualization required at this point, it is probable that an attempt will be made to systematize Jaspers’ self-hood development and move no further toward individualization. His philosophical system is not reducible to system only. The Existenz movement’s depth (or penetration) seems to be reached when we reject the identity of a suspended self with Transcendence, i.e., when the Transcendent reveals the necessity of a self’s failure to strife on its own. But in the rejection there is a radical nearness felt while simultaneously feeling that the remote can reveal something without the Existenz becoming irresponsible or too independent as an individual to be effective.

We should have penetrated the infinity of the finite, fulfilled a metaphysical quest, and reached the edge of Existenz, which “…exists only by its separation from Being, and its union with Being [only I would say being with a lower case b]” for union with Being evades our willed grasping (Schilpp, 402).

5.4.2 Leaning toward the invisible rather than the corporeal––That nothing, as in no thing, or as in object, is true and is now here in a nowhere sense, seems to be conclusive. But for the Existenz process this realization does not mean nothingness in the nihilistic sense, it means that there is no escaping the ontological dialectical predicament. What is learned is that judgments cannot be based on appearances. Existenzen put absolute trust in nothing (no-thing material) and in that trust the mysterious ground is revealed and discovered, and out of nowhere presence is felt to be now here. Existenzen should stand out of the boundary crises of existence and as determining agents. They posit feelings and ideas in the world that come from within and from inspiration after hitting bottom in reason––a systematically raised bottom for reason is never wholly disengaged.

We are standing with our face toward a primary nothingness, as in no-thing-ness (imageless God). We feel the presence that does not exist, i.e., does not stand out of being, but lives and is the source of life. We, having relied most on reason, have eliminated it as that which is the possible object of our greatest faith. By such Jaspers comes to terms with subjectivism and objectivism, with the hubris of self-reliance.

We face “…what remains after everything else has collapsed,” and it is “only in the austere situation…[that the individual is] free to hear God when God speaks, only then does he remain ready, even if God should not speak…” (Perennial Scope of Philosophy, Archon, 1968, p. 132).

                                       PART TWO

            DELIMITING THE LIMITS OF FEELINGS

  THE BEGINNING OF A SYSTEMATIC PHILOSOPHY

A warning was included at the beginning of PART ONE. It applies also to PART TWO. Now a reason-based balance and buoyancy must continue though danger can sprout from submerged engrained feelings-states and out of a void that is more apparent than real. Not all are condition for systematically confronting boundary situations. Predispositions, preconstitutions, and environmental experiences are possible ultimate boundary situations toward which individual should be non-judgmental (E.g., Karl Jaspers’ brother’s suicide, my first experiences and those of my brother as shown in the appendage of “Saving Lilia’s Cry”).

5.5 The illumination of Existenz implies that self-doubt has not over shot the unbounded possibility for self-image betterment. Lest it be forgotten, the self-default is more imageless than iconic. If all the demons of limits have left, that means there is room for the return of more intense evil, i.e., that greater self-reliance in submission to external authority. Protesting corporeal authority is carried deeper to avoid the hazards of feeling now more qualified to justify a new violent logic. Hate and love, as rudimental feeling-states, are urges that can remain unaffected by a systematic shattering of rationalism. This is why affection in the form of love becomes a vital élan, a wise life-force, in Jaspers’ philosophical will to communicate. When heaven provided affective gifts, the greatest and most lasting is love. But there are forces waiting to leap on weakening affectionate states: 

…[A] dishonest will to believe…––no telling where or when––will be violence against others. The will to believe, the readiness for ‘implicit’ faith’ and blind obedience to a concrete ‘Holy Church’, is tantamount to violence (Philosophical Faith “Common Ground”) [for institutions under momentum roll over obdurateness].

If reason becomes destitute for incarnate authentic selfhood, the once believer in God’s incarnation can engage in a campaign of terror against the believers, and the crusade all the more terrible because from beyond the bottom of rational systems, the presence of “being” is felt uncritically and protesting gives way to unconscionable hostility. 

6. Penetrating aestheticism and transcending emotionalism

6.1 Leaning away from feeling toward transcendence––Rational security having left, the loss of the protective shell of thought and thought’s bones of content remains. The reasoning process seems to have lapsed into a state of non-object, having lost concepts for which reason served as a bond. There remains but a vague feeling of being, hardly an existential feeling but closer to Being more than standing out of the source of thinking. But on the other hand, empirically there is infinite complexity and concurrent uncertainty.

Feeling, when unrestrained, is susceptible to being elevated to “the principle feeling” (positivism or negativism). The vague feeling of the presence of Being can be sublimated by being open to the illumination that the sublimating source can inspire. Sensing the presence of Being, the awareness can deteriorate into a romantic impulse to empower base feelings. We must leap beyond interpretation to control impulse.

Reason no longer appears to be inhibited but rather invigorated by the encompassing greater reason (high case Encompassing). Beyond the dichotomy (at least two poles, subject/object) of dialectical reasoning there is the vague awareness, a presence is felt, a power greater than definite feelings (feelings defined corporally). It’s the updraft of philosophical vorticity––as distinguished from metaphysical drifts and spins.

6.2 Talking about the ineffable––Feeling the presence, through penetrated ultimate situations, involves reasoning processes similar to that used in violating God’s imagelessness by talking about it:

The biblical commandment’ thou shalt not make unto thee any image or likeness’ is taken seriously in philosophical faith, and when we fail to comply with it as we hear and unfold ciphers [phenomena that reveal and must be interpreted], we know what we are doing (Philosophical Faith, “On Ciphers).

6.3 Iconoclastically avoiding iconologism and comparable emotive ontologism––Even though our determinations, our absolute ideas have shipwrecked on ultimate situations, base drives may abound and need direction, aims.  Here, now, commitment to value moves out of the area of feeling, turns and clings to the commitment to negate self ventures as if preparing for the coming of presence. The process of self-rejection continues as if to clear the subjective ground so that there can be a shameless account, a clear tablet, before the coming new objectivity. Nevertheless, the percipient’s residue of resistance to new objectivity will be detected by the presence, for not being absent from the body is not being present with God (images of the body are limited anyway).

In this suspended state of feeling the presence of indefinite power and feeling resistance to a current feeling about self; Existenz fluctuates vibrantly between transcendence and immanence––while the will to give direction to urges mollifies through the commitment to the invisible more than the visible.

While seriously avoiding iconologies, we play at being non-committal to limited feelings in preparation for a philosophical commitment in refocusing in the world. This is what Jaspers has in mind when he says: “In noncommittal aestheticism Existenz is illuminated” (Philosophical Faith, “Interpreting Ciphers’).

Ineffable as it is, it’s a fall-like leap that can take flight beyond temporal-spatial (a priori pure forms) restraints; it’s a surge not beyond feeling, but beyond forms of feelings, a recoiling resistance against influences that are at odds with individual control. Transformation can occur. With a minimum of self-feeling, and in thought’s exhaustion,

…despite the disappearance of the contents, Being is joined with Existenz precisely through this disappearance. Thought itself becomes cypher [sic.]. No longer in the sensuous, but in thought, Being becomes present. …[I]n rejecting an aesthetic, non-committal living posture…play…is indispensable (Truth and Symbol, “Consciousness of Being in the Cypher”).

In part due to the actual “…collapse of thought which, however, is precisely that which does the revealing” (Truth and Symbol) the sublime inspires. This is talk about and around the illumination of Existenz. But it’s tasteful talk at the linguistic limits: Being can become palpable when the chains that fixate thought and inhibit thinking snap.  And when feeling is free, something “…becomes apparent from the certainty of existence of consciousness up to the source of Existenz in Transcendence” (T&S). Contradiction and paradox in experience––limits of thinking, particular and universal––exist on the lower temporal-spatial levels, i.e., the empirical level. In the descent of the transcending Existenz-process, from authentic self-hood’s source comes the gift, the given potential for encompasses contradiction and absurdity.

This leaning toward Transcendence and away from immanence is difficult to communicate if the recipient gives definite form and content to the feeling of presence, presence that is put off by ontological barriers.

7. Feeling the presence, subject-leaning toward subjection to the new Objectivity and philosophical wisdom to know metaphysical myth

7.1 Philosophy vs. metaphysics––Feeling the presence is like having a vague recollection of origin, a near-touch-awareness beyond the cosmothetical, barely skirting the sensitive world-nerve after penetrating the constellations of experience. Looking back at immanence the seed of philosophy, the inner eye sees that philosophical faith increases due to being watered from above. Feeling the presence, the subject-object division is encompassed by Objectively. Reality comes into refocus as more or less than object and subject, more or less than subject-object. The Existenz movement has hit bottom and through the descent there’s an ascending spin.

Feelings of Being start to fade as they are absorbed or feather away into determinable feelings which when cognized at all are detrimental to the immeasurable essence of trust, i.e., that ability to soar while the former reality and its infinite finite abysses become spaces for freedom; “…apparent Nothingness is transformed into that from which authentic being speaks to us” (Way to Wisdom). 

Hitting bottom through seeing the limits of historical determinations, within this now illuminated systematic determinacy “…within this determinacy there occurs something derived from another source, something unresolved by the continuity of biological and psychological processes” (Philosophical Faith and Revelation, “Introduction” p. 1).

7.2 Metaphysical propaganda––Metaphysical logic has its ground in immanence, i.e., it’s a logic that gets bogged down in the infinite finite physical and though denied it cantilevers off, way off, the physical. Metaphysics transcends and gets compressed to the critical point by the perimeters of its imposing immanental limits. Being is passed by, via rationalism’s compacted energy and inwardly logic goes beyond the physical hard empirical existence and bogs down in the infinity of the finite. Peripheral phenomena become hallucinations embodied or morphed into prospections limited by preferred to-be-remembered experiences. Metaphysical schools are joined and called “science”, and a feeling of solidarity grows radical wings that are protected by the word “ontology”.

Avoiding extinction, metaphysical logic’s degree of compulsion is the weight of its consensus on that part of immanent infinity that is going to be propagated. Its appeal is its arrayal of facts, its regalia. Compressed metaphysical logic is materialism, positivism, and from the standpoint of historical determinateness it is rationalism in the form of constructivism, with a hubris personality façade that covers radical plagiarism. Consciousness in shoestring-fad lifts itself by itself with verbiage about knowing its origin, and Being becomes simple epiphenomenon. The most abstractly conjured idea is made the corner stone and religiously held as a tenet of faith giving birth to the “evolving” church.

7.3 Philosophical attitude––In the penetration of fixations, transcendence is not “a” or “the” transitive progressing by degrees like egotistical self-exaltation, not by how much more competitively is known about micro and macro objects. Rather, a precondition is reached where one is shocked by the reality of the encompassing flux of being. And while feeling for the more encompassing Being, like a flash, in the twinkling of the inner eye, effort has overshot and Being is passed by.

There is no transcending to a state of glory or meta-sophistry. The genetic cosmogonist-constructed world has been circumvented and in that sense transcended too. The constant of real Being through complex being is vaguely felt in the time and place wherein potential Existenz existed all the while. This is the new/old Objectivity to which Existenzen feels pleasantly in subjection (subject to the source of infinite freedom).

It should be noted though that to my knowledge Jaspers wisely avoids referring to Being as “new Objectivity”. Probably because therapeutically coining it thusly might tend to tip the subject-object polemic, inverting it to object-subject lending enforcement to epiphenomenalism. So if “Objectivity” is used one should know what one is doing.

7.4 Existenz as subject to indeterminate Objectivity (the feeling of more-than regarding encompassing presence)––Subjectivity is promoted to serve the newly believed Objectivity. Being(B) is neither subjective or objective mental production, nor emotive feelings related to fixated self-images. The wisdom to encompass the subject-object dichotomy conditions and commences philosophy logic (so whereas theology has its systematic theology, Jaspers introduces––as a psychopathologist––the systematic philosophy).  

7.5 Philosophical love and logic––“Being must assume a mode of being-an-object and at the same time a mode of subjectivity for which this is an object” (Truth and Symbol, statement immediately follows the importance Jaspers’ puts on love––in his Von der Wahrheit). Subjectivity is seen in a new light, new if once convinced that subjectivity was imagined limited to its own ground, or if convinced that complex experience is the source to which subjectivity is bound. Subjectivity is the functioning object (“for which his is an object”), or embodiment for an illuminated purpose. Existenz does not hold Being in subjection nor is given to objection in the presence of Being.

7.6 The Existenz-self has become transparent emotionally and rationally. The consciousness of selfhood is encompassed by the recalled awareness (and manifesting conscience) of that Objectivity to which any form of self is subjected. (O)bjectivity serves too as a reservoir for possible constant illumination.

7.7 Getting metaphysics in proper perspective––However there is no ultimate subjection to the objective outer and inner rediscovered world. Also: “When…the philosopher claims ultimate and final validity for his thinking, he falls into the tyranny of dogmatic metaphysics” (T&S). In philosophical logic the source will express itself, “it cannot help doing so in way of conception” (Philosophical Faith, Interpreting Ciphers, 5. “Source and Conception”).

7.8 A metaphysicist can have philosophical leanings and speak philosophical language. But Jaspers’ philosophy is theistic philosophy in that it could not be so without believing in the source in the sense of Being that can will to inspire the receptive Existenz––though there might not be an illumination through the systematic way of realizing the limits of thinking (and there is illumination to those that do not take the route of seeing the limits of historical determinateness in any systematic way).

7.9 On the other hand a metaphysician is logically inclined to be atheistic. The ontological commitment to the quest for the existential (only what materially stands out) source is vectored ad hoc by the predisposition to distrust Being; the percipient must express itself in conceptions that are superimposed over mundane experience. Simplified, metaphysical logic, to be consistent with its logic, must confess that Being (God) has no being or existence except as an idea produced by a complex thinking apparatus that had a simple source, and God is what the ontologist school can grow into.  But the philosopher should not judge the quiet atheist except to point out wherein lies something intellectually honest in the metaphysic, but leave judgment up to the higher force. By quiet atheist I mean one emotionally and intellectually responsible enough to avoid using language that can only mean that God exists in the mind as a delusion.

7.10 We can reason that direct contact with God with inner individual processes––rather than having to depend on metaphysical mediators and their institutionalisms––is behind Jaspers’ view that the protestant approach is more workable (but there are protestant entities in Catholic establishments, and Catholic entities in protestant groups).

7.11 The foregoing experience with boundary situations is not an end in itself, but more a coming to the periphery of our source, which ends and begins again in the in-coming encompassing. A reentry begins into existence, back to the center of history, a return to what was not wholly left, though through boundary situations––

“Yet this boundary is inaccessible unless we really set out on the mundane road to it, for while we live, we do not enter this extremity” (World, “Immortality” 137). “We can only touch the frontiers in the consciousness of our humanity, which consists in being imperfect and imperfectible” (World, “Creation” 131).

8. The faithful philosophically illuminated born along as reborn periechonologists can be ontological without succumbing to ontic specialization––

8.1 “Ontology of consciousness” with an attitude––An example of a closed eternal recurrent (circularity) manifestation of metaphysical ontological thinking is found in the book “Ontology of Consciousness”. Unlike Jaspers’ view that humankind’s limits are the strengths, the strengths being humankind’s lack of specialization, Hubert Markl’s approach emphasizes diversification because, in my view, the lack-of-specialization cannot easily accompany a refrain of buzzwords about adaptation causes. 

Markl says: “The ontology of the mind, whatever its ultimate substance may be…” diversifies and that this “…diversity can be safely assumed to have evolved by the process of genetic variation and natural selection investigated in evolutionary theory” (209). His method of investigation is a mixture of uncertainty (“whatever its [the mind’s] ultimate substance may be”) and attitudinal certitude (“”the usual paradigm of Darwinian evolutionary theory”). So much for learned ignorance. The investigation proposal amounts to an oxymoron.

But for Jaspers:

Man has avoided all…specializations of his organs…[but] remains superior in the potentialities…kept alive by non-specializations (Origin and Goal of History, “Biological Characteristics of Man”). He is compelled by his inferiority and enabled by his superiority, through the medium of consciousness, to follow paths quite different from those taken by animals in bringing his existence to realization. Man cannot be conceived of as a zoological species, capable of evolution, to which spirit was one day added as a new acquisition” (Origin, 38)

9. The individualistic determining of the necessity of indeterminate encompassing and the possible effects on the ambiguous quasi-bi-polarization.

It is important to circumvent the bi-polar predicament (while realizing that it takes two poles to strike an ark of enlightening thought) and also to circumvent the concomitant feeling states. This, while not forgetting that “…there is no separated duality of subjectivity and objectivity” (Truth and Symbol). Being, i.e., Objectivity is not a/the monism, not merely a unity of the dichotomy, nor is the Objectivity a dualism, or pluralism. Neither pole nor both poles should become absolutes to which humankind is to be subject. The Existenz philosophical logic cannot be restricted to either side of the dichotomy in the knowing processes. To miss the importance of this insight is to cut off further possible inspiration from the transcendent whether inspiration comes through the world that the individual is or the world in which the individual collectively lives––while giving credit to lessons learned from prehistoric-historical predecessors.

10. Decisiveness and the bi-polar historical authoritative guides––There is something left unclear in Jaspers’ expressions. Though he elucidates the necessity of seeing the alternative situation in which biblical authority exists; he does not show to my satisfaction that the bible, whether Old and/or New is clearly reactionary, i.e., responds to the degree that humankind sinks into a hubris singularity.

The Bible reveals an alternative system of thinking that’s opposed to powerful trends that are potentially disastrous for humankind’s immortality. Jaspers sees it through his philosophical awareness, his consciousness regarding dangerous powers, such as his standing on creation and immortality (Philosophy and the World). But to my knowledge the bible is never shown to be a historical reaction and transaction to “evolution” and its “catholicity”. The Bible’s reactionary and transactionary aspects are also reacted to in-kind. The Koran competes biblically in the same way that Mosques and minarets are reactions to churches and steeples.

10.1 The Bible as a reactionary movement of thoughtfulness against thoughtlessness, as a voice against “evolution” (that the simple when progressed to the complex conjured God, i.e., atheism)––In other words Jaspers’ could be clearer about the Bible’s argument against those trends. The Catholic certainty about biological source and consequential consciousness presents a situation similar to that at the time of Galileo. Now if one refuses to use “evolutionary” lingo, which is clearly atheistic, the loss of opportunity for those not taking the pledge is paramount to Galileo’s confinement. 

I mean it is not clearly indicated that the Bible is the compilation of arguments against the hubristic trend in Greek evolutionary thought (all that preceded and existed in the Anaximander school of thought about evolving from the sea).

The biblical idea that “If we are in the world from elsewhere our mission in the world transcends the world” (World, “Creation”, 123) is the mission that existed as a reactionary force against rationalism during the millennium before Christ including the eon before the written word was codified. The Bible is a remedial revelation that inspires, from Genesis to Revelation. Specifically, Revelation’s emphasis is on “the beginning of the creation of God” (3:14) and on the “beast [coming] up out of the sea (13:1). It is revealed that “all the world wondered after the beast” (13:1) but though wounded by the Word, “another beast coming up out of the earth” (13:11) “causeth…them…to worship the first beast whose deadly wound was healed” (13:12). (See the October 1996 “John Paul” proclamation.)  Jaspers: “Darwin…reduced this vision (exploratory research after the manner of K.E.von Baer) to a system of causalities, which implies the destruction of any sense of authentic life” (Wisdom, 189).

10.2 Jaspers appreciates and promotes the necessity for ciphers, for the historically grounded word: “hence the efforts to express the inconceivable in such imagined ciphers… [but] we remain suspended in this fictitious language” the bible as an alternative to fictional vatic (predicting by papal decree) authority is the better independent source “that illuminates the source of our existence” for the independent individual (though he is speaking here of Kant’s ideas of freedom and the consciousnesses’ fulfillment of conscience in love––I add that the biblical Paul penetrates all given-concepts to where love survives as the eternal presence).

12. The Bible––

12.1 “A mere historic fact will give us pause: for thousands of years, the best and wisest of men have believed in immortality” (World “Immortality” 135). And none “knows what will become of him after death. Most of us have always believed and still believe today that they will go on living. The faithful Christian trusts the pledges of the Bible” (Philosophy and the World, “Immortality” 134).

12.2 “The Creation of the World”––“There are the age-old cosmogonies (theories about the origin of the world)” like “an evolution from the primal egg, or from the sea” or the “creation of the world [as] a flash of this non-being in the seductive guise of being” …” and yet “again the source defies inquiry” (World, “Creation” 126 and 127). Even though the trend is that “Where measurements and mathematics reign, modern man is inclined to submit” and “[the] purely mathematical view of the world provides no better explanation than our past mechanical one of the playing atoms” (World, “Creation”129)

12.3 The indeterminable source of consciousness––“What we can know of the universe does not tell us how we come to think, and thus to know” (World, “Creation” 129). It is conclusive: “If we could grasp where we come from, we would cease to be human” (131). When the source of consciousness and the world is known, this hubristic conscience follows: “Their proponents seem to know what happened [in the beginning]” and “The inquiry does not halt before the mystery; instead. It ceases thoughtlessly in the answer” (World “Creation” 126).

13. Two occidental guides for enlightened philosophical logic—One has symbolic worthwhileness for freedom––The other is: “If the world is eternal, it is from the world that man has come into the world: he is its product [that is immanent catholicity]––Philosophical logic is more open to not having to repeat history. We now have “the insight to resist fixed dogmas and creeds, we are aware of something lasting…”(332). This awareness bewares of sophistry and Gnosticism, in the logical positivism, in comments about the cause of “consciousness”.

13.1 Here’s an example from a blog: Consciousness is caused by the activity of cellular neurons (about 150.000 billions of  billions). The result of this activity is reversed in the USC (unified synaptic channel) that runs measure about “160..000” Kms in the cortical brain stratus. Therefore consciousness is represented by the five “sensoriality” and is constituted by neurotransmitters’ chemical products, or in other words, metaphysical lingo like mind or spirit.

If serious, the above is an example of circular talk that is a poetical force plus a mathematical way of saying “I know what happened in the beginning of consciousness”.

13.2 “Constructions of mathematical possibilities are as speculative and deceptive as the old, conceptual ones of metaphysics, and equally tempting” (World “creation” 129).

13.3 “Freedom”, “Immortality” and “Creation” or transcendence in philosophical logic––I heard a “scientist” say: When you believe you quite thinking. Then I heard a scientist say “Those who do not believe have one thing in common, they know what happened” in the beginning (World, “Creation” 127). A more truthful answer, beyond mythical cosmogonies, lie the concept of creation from nothingness, “which is part of the world” the occidental (western) world, and appeals to those less likely prone to submission.

13.4 Another blog sample: Here is another case of metaphysical rationalism, logical positivism gone ballistic: Noting the lack of definition regarding “consciousness”, Philip Benjamin questions why the term “consciousness” at all, and says: “Why CONSIOUSNESS?  Why not Brahman+at, am=brahtman or bratman, or spirit+soul?”

Philip Christopher ans: “Because (Sentimental+Analytical) Mind=Consciousness is more of a mathematical equation…and it would mean rehashing it in terms of x,y as variables and z as a dependent constant. (x+y)z=c  x=sentimentality y=analytical ability  z=mind  c=consciousness, if x is inversely proportional to y i.e., x=1y?

13.5 Philip Benjamin offers an in-kind mathematically enhanced poetic retort that does not, as Jaspers says, “exceed the realm of possible experience” but remains falsifiable while delimiting the restraining nature of real experience. Benjamin sees what Jaspers means in saying: “Wherever deductions exceed the realm of possible experience and the results will not be subject to experience…we are about to delude ourselves” (World “Creation” 129).

Benjamin’s retort is immeasurably devastating: “The primary concerns in a mathematical/physics equation are the units involved and the identities of the quantities on both sides of the equation. If (x+y)z=x.z+y.z=c, then c should have the same units as x.z and y.z. And if x is inversely proportional to y, that does not automatically mean x=1/y unless the constant of proportionality is unity (1). I do not know what your basic training is in, but at least you have forgotten the fundamental fact that Analytical Mind+Sentimental Mind=a MIND and nothing but MIND. So, your dependable CONSTANT which the Tao physicists called the undefined and undefinable CONSCIOUSNESS cannot but be MIND and MIND only. It may be a big mind, small mind, colorful mind colorless mind, complex mind, simple mind, simpleton-stinking mind of an “acade-median” (no spelling mistake here) or an innocent mind of a fetus in the womb, it is still a MIND and nothing but a mind. I a dog or a cat has an analytical and sentimental mind, then in your terminology the sum of them is a DOG MIND, be it a live dog fetus or an adult dog, it has a DOG MIND. A DOG MIND is different from a CAT MIND and each has a “chasm gap” from a HUMAN MIND.

What the Tao physicists could have done and science would have certainly accepted it with no qualifications is as follows: 1. Brahman+atman=brahtman or bratman=big atman or cosmic atman or bio-atman or bio-brahman or whatever else, it is still atman. This would have at least enriched the English language with two new words!! Or 2. Spirit+soul=spiritol=a spirit/soul.  This also would have enriched the Queen’s English by another word. Here the ending “ol” will be meaningful with relevance to “spirit” of the organic chemistry as in alcohol (from alkane+hydoxyl group), “ethanol” etc.

It cannot be and should not be an underfined/undefinable “CONSCCIOUSNESS”, unless consciousness is defined as “mind” or “spirit” or “soul” or “hoopty-doopty mind”. Moreover it is just commonsense that if MIND is operating as integral part of the PHYSICAL body must of necessity be also PHYSICAL. If that PHYSICAL MIND is invisible, then it must necessarily be made of invisible matter, most likely BIO DARK-Matter.” [Here Benjamin is cantilevering off the physical but with one wing on firm ground and the other wing in like firmament but while quietly remembering the illuminating source of being. He remains grounded while flighty known-originers flutter in artificial artifacts.]

Benjamin: “The smartest of AI [artificial intelligence] cannot and will not produce one single ‘biophoton’!” (2010 World Conference of AI in Las Vegas).

Philip: “It is highly questionable that a scientific methodology that cannot “detect” the source of biophotons (other than the crude speculation of DNA which is structurally and chemically very similar while the biophoton characteristics are wildely and vastly different across the taxa), will be able to detect the source of other “anomalous” but physical phenomena such as OBE [out of body experience]. How do you know that the two-Biophoton emissions and anomalous phenomena- are not related? At least they are both of undetectable or “dark” physical origins––not mystic origins.”

[Philip is referring to]: “1. ELF (extremely low frequency) Biophoton energies much lower than the lowest known bio/chemical energies [he is referring to research that shows that] 2. Biophoton emission rates per sq.cm/second are 10 times more in plants than humans [and that] 3. Magnetic fields are negligibly small in plants, but measurable in animals and significant in humans [and prospectively] 4. Stability factors predict an emission rate ratio in agreement with experimental data.”

14. Jaspers: “That there is life, and that we are human beings, and that consciousness appears and becomes capable of knowing…to an unpredictable extent…[yet] [w]hat we can know of the universe does not tell us how we come to think, and thus to know”…

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