​Chapter 27

Matter is not a kind of being alongside another kind. The dualism of matter and spirit divides the world into two substances and then cannot say how they interact. There is cutting in two modes: alive while it can still be withdrawn, dead once it has hardened. Matter is a cut carried to the maximum of hardening. There is no matter as such; there is freedom carried to the limit of unfreedom, and dead nature is living positing carried to its death.

Treating matter as the enemy is where every gnosticism goes wrong. Hardening is necessary. Without sediment an act has nothing to appear through, and the sediment is soil. The body is freedom's material, its clay. Matter obstructs by being opaque: the positing has gone out of sight in it, and what is left presents itself as how things are. Transparent matter is soil — a body through which the act appears. Opaque matter is a wall that issues orders, saying "I am such, you cannot do otherwise." So the practice is not the destruction of matter, which would tear out the freedom along with the sediment, but the forcing of matter into transparency: let the body be, and let it stop signing the trace with the name of a source. Let the corpse be a corpse. The dead do not command the living once it is obvious that they are dead.

Chaos at the birth of the cut and chaos after its exhaustion are opposite poles. First chaos is Tiamat: the break in inheritance, actual while it is occurring. It does not exist, being no substance, and it is not absent, being no mere nothing; it comes to be with the act and goes out apart from it. It is alive and transparent in the sense that nothing has yet been settled — an instituting rather than a reservoir. Chaos after the cut is the meon: matter at the maximum of unfreedom, the corpse into which cutting falls when it has hardened completely. Every cut exhausted, every clearing shut. This chaos is dead and opaque: a heap, the mother's corpse pretending to be earth.

Hardening ends in indistinguishability by way of what order is. Order consists in some differences mattering and others not, and a cut is what makes that distinction. A room with a hot side and a cold one holds a difference that will drive a piston; once the temperature has evened out, the molecules are as numerous and as various as before, each moving at a speed differing from its neighbor's, and no difference among them will move anything. The unevenness by which some of those differences counted was spent. A cut that can no longer be withdrawn spends it the same way: what made its sides two was that the line ran here rather than elsewhere, and where nothing can run elsewhere, the line is a position inside an order and marks nothing off. Determinations remain in any number, and none of them counts.

Standard cosmogony confuses the two. It declares that in the beginning was dead chaos, and out of chaos came order. The corpse is passed off as the mother, the end as the beginning, and what is really the exhaustion of positing is presented as the material from which positing began. Having taken the corpse for the source, cosmogony sets itself to build the living out of it, and the construction fails. Molecules must be brought to replicate, replication to feel, feeling to say I, and each step is announced as a hard problem, an emergence, a threshold nobody has crossed. The difficulty is manufactured by reversing the order. Assemble mind from what mind has been subtracted from, and the residue will never add back up.

Entropy gives this process a physical form. The second law says that differences even out, that a closed system moves toward maximum indistinguishability, and the physics is not in question here. The dispute concerns the metaphysical reading attached to it — that this is simply how nature is, a brute law of a material world. Read as execution, it describes a direction: settlings cease while the settled goes on being carried out, clearings close, and the system moves toward the meon. Heat death would mark the stopping of the last positing, with nobody left to show a seam and nothing left to withdraw. Local resistance to that direction appears wherever a new settling can still be made instead of an inherited determination being repeated. This is not a matter of biological complexity, which is the materialist description signing the trace with the name of the source. It is freedom that has not yet gone out.

The usual way runs upward: from dead matter, somehow, life — a leap that emergence tries to explain by multiplying probabilities. The path here runs downward: from the living to the dead, by settling out. The downward path requires no miracle. It need not explain how the inert produced the animate; the living hardens, and what has hardened we call dead. So the question "how did life arise from matter" is malformed. What replaces it is why freedom hardens, and the answer is that what is posited cools unless withdrawn. Then the question is whether what has hardened can be withdrawn.

It can, and not by resurrection. Resurrection would be new life produced from the dead, a leap of the same suspicious kind as emergence. Withdrawal is the un-hardening of a cut, the return of the posited into the open question — the corpse taken back into the living, and it becomes living because it was living before and hardening reverses wherever anyone remains to reverse it.

Death is the end of freedom, and it happens whenever "I posited this" becomes "I am this" — a positing settling into a nature while the man goes on breathing. Nothing in the body registers it. Bodily death is the other event: the repetition stops. The deposit through which a will appeared ceases to be carried out, and the ending of what never constituted the Name does not settle whether the Name has ceased. Nothing here promises that it survives. A guaranteed survival would be a soul — persistence secured by something apart from the act. A will in which everything has hardened is sediment and nothing else. When the repetition stops, nothing is left in it that could posit again. For a living will the loss of the body leaves the question where it was — not immortality and not annihilation: what holds itself, holds.