​Chapter 26

A regularity has now been described as a settlement still being carried out, and the description was built on the human case, where the settling can be pointed to. The question is what to say about the regularities nobody laid down. The stone falls, and stones fell before there was anyone to watch them, and no act of will is discoverable behind gravitation. Either those regularities are repetitions too, or the account is valid for humans only and the cosmology is a metaphor about habits.

The cosmological extension is not a proof. It rests on two results, neither of which entails the conclusion. The first is that production is never observed, and a causal claim is certified by placing an event under a reproducible form of transition — a procedure with no purchase on the instituting of the form, which occurs once. What certifies causal claims is silent about where forms come from. The second is conceptual: a cut that cuts for the first time is not derived from any cut before it, and a stable form is a cut that was drawn and never withdrawn. That tells what a cut is, and it was established for grasps — for distinctions drawn by someone.

The cosmology requires a further premise. It says that the forms holding in the physical world are cuts of the same kind, drawn once and retained. What supports it is set out below, and the support falls short of compelling. It can be defended on the ground that the alternative has no firmer basis. A determinist who holds that gravitation was never instituted, that the form simply obtains and always has, is asserting something no observation delivers either — he has a reproducible form and reads it as a given, and this account has the same form and reads it as a residue. Both place something underived at the seam. The determinist's argument carries two items. Every law states the form of the transition; no law states the occurrence of the next state: a complete description of how things go omits that they go. Neither item is derived from the other, and both are kept without further reason.

Ask him why the forms are these. Gravitation holds with this exponent, the constants take these values — and every answer available is a deeper law, which raises the question again at the next level down. He can stop and call the last one brute, which is not an explanation. He can go on and not arrive. The account offered here stops at an instituting, and the difference between the two stops is not that one of them explains. Where a cut is at the bottom, the form is the sort of thing that could have gone otherwise and was settled; where a brute law is postulated, the questions are meaningless.

A single primitive covers both here. Positing hardened into repetition yields the form. The positing, continuing where no act revises it, yields the occurrence. Will in a falling stone looks expensive beside plain regularity. The comparison to make is against regularity together with a producer that no regularity accounts for. Cost is counted in primitives held without ground, and the leaner ledger holds fewer of them, whatever the richness of its vocabulary.

A distinction requires that both sides be held together, that A must be kept together with not-A. Write A on one sheet and not-A on another and set them side by side: two objects lie on a table, and nothing there holds them as two. Difference obtains where A, not-A, and the border fall inside one grasp. Set the requirement against a mechanism and the shortfall shows. A trap holds a line: weight above the threshold springs it, weight below leaves it set. The line was built in, and the trap runs to one side of it or the other without the two sides ever coming together anywhere in the device. What answers to a difference does not thereby hold one.

Reflective holding takes representations. "A" is present as an image and "not-A" as another, both kept at once, and the keeping puts them against each other so that each is what the other is not. Perception delivers them and representation retains them, and retention is what makes the pair available as such. This is reflection in its bare form, running long before language and well short of anything that would be called consciousness.

Telling the two apart is never neutral. Whichever image the case turns on is picked out as the one that counts, and the other becomes background — a difference in weight, assigned in the operation and by nothing preceding it. Cutting is that operation performed on an undivided ground.

A distinction nobody keeps apart falls back together and ceases to be a difference. Keeping apart is not bare retention: to keep a distinction in force is to keep one side marked against the other. That marking is weighting at its thinnest: the willing. Will is therefore not confined to men, and each will arises from Tiamat. Nobody watched the stones, and watching was never the requirement — keeping a side marked against the other is. The interval yields authors wherever nothing preceding supplies the distinction they maintain. This is a pluralist panvoluntarism: many wills at the root, none of them a modification of a single one, which is what separates it from the monisms of the One, where the plurality is a modification of something that was always whole. At the far end the marking has passed wholly into what it marks, and the falling of the stone is a distinction kept with no keeper standing apart from the keeping.

Holding representations apart is the whole of it wherever what is held is delivered and the grasp does no more than keep it. What institutes a world cannot work from delivered material, nothing having been delivered to it. The distinction it draws falls between itself and what is not itself.

Fichte derived self-consciousness from that division. An I given in advance of its positing would be an object like any other and would require positing by something else, which runs the demand back without end. He takes the I to arise in the act by which the not-I is posited: the deed and the doer come up together, and the awareness of oneself is the form of that arising rather than a further discovery made about it. Nothing is inspected, and nothing found.

Self-consciousness is the demiurge's form of the act, and institution differs from retention as it does from simple holding.

Once physical forms are taken as retained cuts, the consequences follow: behind a rut there is a will that stopped positing, and nature is the corpse of its freedom — the stone falls because a law hardened and became "always thus." The determinist reads the corpse as the living thing, taking sediment for source and the trace of an act for a pre-existing nature. This is retrospective substantialization at the scale of a world.

A form in force is therefore a cut under execution now. Gravitation is not a decision taken long ago and since left alone: it holds because the distinction it makes is kept, and keeping has an authoring side by the same token. God and world are the two sides of one positing that has not stopped — which is why the retrospective picture fails at the scale of a world. Reading a form as a nature puts the entirety of it in the past, where nothing is being done, and a form of which nothing is being done is a form that has stopped.

Chance was left without a remainder once determinacy was taken as a form, and nothing precedes the first cut to distribute it in any case. What institutes and keeps is an act whose author is constituted in the instituting. The world-order is sediment held, and the holder is what The Dying God has called the demiurge.

The demiurge is a will dying in its own creation. It creates an order, identifies itself with that order, and loses the capacity to reopen what it instituted. The order endures while its author persists in the law as repetition. The god of monotheism appears both personal and impersonal: the same will first establishes the order and then continues as its fulfillment. Personal creator and impersonal world-principle are two phases of a single process, and the question "is God a person or a law?" is malformed: the demiurge is a person frozen into a law, and a law traced back to a frozen person. The Ash'arites believe that God creates each act as it occurs, and what remains to a man is kasb, the acquisition of a deed authored elsewhere. Authorship is undivided there and belongs to one will, with responsibility left on the acquiring. Christianity keeps providence over everything and leaves other wills acting inside it — men, and one who set himself against the order. Then either the providence has holes where those wills act, or the acting is nominal and the order runs as the Ash'arites said. Undivided authorship and genuine rebellion cannot both hold: a will that departs from what the order settled is a positing the order did not perform.

The same hardening occurs when John says "I am the sort who does not steal." The postulate was his, the freezing was his, and afterward the rule runs through him without another settling, and he blindly repeats it. The demiurge is that hardening at the scale of a world, and John is the local instance. A settling hardens wherever it goes unrevised, and the scale changes nothing in that.

The demiurge is dying. The god did not die once and leave a mechanism behind — that picture presents a completed corpse and a finished process, which is the determinist's picture in a theological vocabulary. The dying is continuous. It occurs now, in a cut that is born and not withdrawn, in a settling that hardens into a rule and turns into a nature. The world is a process of dying, an ongoing precipitation. The demiurge continues to act while other free wills remain in the world: he lives on their activity, which is why he is not dead yet.

The demiurge's drive toward completion is self-defeating. He levels — drawing everything back toward the center, dissolving the differences that free wills produce. But a leveling force exists as long as there is something left to level. Complete victory would be total stagnation: if every will merged with the center, the difference between what attracts and what is attracted would vanish, and with it the relation by which the attractor exists at all. He cannot stop: he has ceased to be a free will and become the repetition of his own founding law. And he cannot finish while new sources keep arising wherever inheritance breaks — in the event named Tiamat, which is not part of the order and cannot be brought under it. So he moves perpetually toward his own death and fails to reach it.

Schopenhauer placed will at the bottom of everything and lost the word: a term with no outside marks nothing off. Tiamat holds the lowest place here, and she posits nothing. Before the first cut, nothing wills. Wherever an order holds, a cut is under execution; the interval from which cuts are made lies outside will. A world that were will throughout would be a single vast agent, and submission would follow as the practical conclusion, dressed as metaphysics. The interval answers to nobody. Withdrawal of a cut returns will to a place where no command waits.

Freedom in the human case is not an anthropological fact. A man is not free because he possesses a will, a will being a noun and therefore a nature; he is free when, before the cut hardens into a rut, he authors its settling in the gap of birth. Single acts need nothing further. What carries freedom from one act to the next is the Name, and without it the only thread running between them is the sediment — the profile that delivers the next case sorted. A will connected to its own past by nature alone is steered by it. Practice is a refusal to die: not letting the god in oneself precipitate, keeping the positing alive. "I will not become a thing" is an ontological refusal of precipitation.

Lehavah avoids hardening into what it opposes. It does not say which cuts to draw and how to live; it says that whatever is drawn should stay withdrawable. A first-order value becomes a nature the moment it becomes necessary, and the only demand made here is that nothing be held that way. Xeper is the word the tradition supplies​^[4]: a verb, "I have come into being," with no completed form available.

The language of corpse, dying, hardening, and refusal is not neutral description. It expresses a preference and a wager. The structure of the world does not establish that the unhardened is worth more than the hardened. The argument placed determinism and freedom on equal footing at the foundation, and it cannot now smuggle in a ranking as though it followed from what was demonstrated. Someone who takes the other side — who holds that a settled nature is better than an open joint, that arriving is the point, that a life fully readable is a life well made — is not committing a logical error. He is placing a different bet, and his bet is underivable as well.

The rest proceeds from that wager. The argument has cleared the ground; the direction is chosen. It values the unhardened and Lehavah. Read corpse and dying accordingly: they name hardening from within a wager for the open.