The Vanishing Point: A Left-Hand Path Reading of Philosophy by Denys Spirin - HTML preview

Chapter 13

The sixth rung is the last to be examined and the first to have been occupied in the history of human thought. The numbering of the rungs, as it was introduced earlier, moved from the most concrete and perception-near content to the most abstract and reflectively distant. The sixth rung, projection of the subject's own meta-position, was placed at the top of this ordering as it is the far-thest from any perceptual material and the closest to pure abstraction. And yet in the historical record it appears first in almost every tradition.

The sixth rung is not a high-altitude abstraction that the subject arrives at after long training. The subject, reflecting, finds that it stands behind every distinction it draws and is not itself on either side of the cut. Then it projects the meta-position outward as the ground of everything.

Being and distinction are not two things. To be is to be bounded, separated from what one is not. Without a boundary there is no determinate being. Parmenides saw this, drew the consequence that the One-Being must be perfect-ly homogeneous and internally undivided, and thereby painted himself into a corner: nothing can be said about Being. The Parmenidean corner is the first appearance of a problem that the sixth rung will repeatedly encounter.

The same mechanism applies to the subject's attempt to know itself. Every partitioning produces an object; the one who partitions slips behind it, uncaptured. The Cartesian cogito makes this mechanism visible, although Descartes himself read his discovery the other way around. He wrote, I think, therefore I am, and took the conclusion to be the foundation of certain self-knowledge.

What he actually found was the existence of his thinking — which, the moment it was found, became an object. A thought, once noticed, stands on the same side of the boundary as a tree, a sound, or a sensation: it is something distinguished, not the one who distinguishes. The cogito performs the elementary operation of self-demarcation (I, not-I) and delivers the not-I side. Descartes mistook the delivery for the deliverer.

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The act of distinction produces objects: thoughts, images, concepts, entire philosophies. Each production leaves the producing side untouched and ready for the next. No matter how many times the subject turns the operation upon itself, it generates new objects and remains behind them, undepleted. This in-exhaustibility is the experiential root of the concept of infinity.

Why, then, is the result always a projection? Why does the subject not simply register this and continue, but instead externalize what it has found into a cosmic principle?

A finite, situated, mortal being discovers at its own center a capacity it cannot exhaust. The disproportion is unbearable. A body that will age and die, a mind that forgets and distorts — and behind all of this, an activity that shows no sign of limit. The subject cannot hold the two together: its finitude and its inexhaustible center. It projects. The capacity is relocated outward, inflated to a scale that matches its apparent boundlessness, and installed as a ground behind the world — a source from which all distinctions flow, a One that precedes every cut. The sixth rung is the name of this installation.

Tat tvam asi, Thou art That, of the Upanishadic tradition, identifies the Atman (the innermost self ) with Brahman (the absolute ground). This looks like the recognition the present chapter is working toward. What the tradition then did was to take the identity in the wrong direction: rather than recognize Brahman as the subject projected outward, it elevated the Atman to the status of Brahman, placing the subject at cosmic scale and preserving the ontologization in its most extreme form. Advaita Vedanta developed this to a technical pitch and created a sophisticated philosophy of non-duality, in which the entire framework of ordinary distinctions is illusion and the genuine reality is the one undivided Brahman-Atman.

In Daoist tradition the Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao, says the opening line of the Daodejing, and the rest of the text proceeds with this constraint in mind. The sixth rung is occupied, but its occupant is defined by its resistance to occupation. Any positive statement about the Dao is marked in advance as inadequate, as the Dao is what lies before any naming. A critic who says the Dao is only a projection has not refuted the doctrine; the doctrine al-

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ready says that anything one might take the Dao to be is not the Dao. The projection has become elusive on purpose, and this solution is beautiful.

Zhuangzi radicalized the Daoist refusal, attacking the operation of distinction directly. The butterfly dream dissolves the boundary between dreamer and dreamed: Zhuangzi does not know whether he is a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming it is a man, and the point is that no available distinction can settle the question, because it is drawn from within one of the two positions and carries no authority over the other. The "pipes of heaven" passage extends this to all judgment: the sounds of the wind through hollows differ with each opening, and the preferences of the listener are one more hollow, not a tribunal above the rest. The subject's distinctions are perspectival; no meta-position above them is available from within the act of distinguishing, and the attempt to secure one is comic. But the Dao, unnamed and unname-able, still holds the place of the ground from which perspectives arise; the sixth rung in its most elusive form. Zhuangzi's humor that made his philosophy bearable is also what kept it from pressing the last question: if no perspective is privileged, what is the status of the claim that no perspective is privileged?

For Parmenides, being is one, unbroken, undifferentiated, whole. Plato kept the Parmenidean ground but connected it to the ordered world by a hierarchy of forms, at the top of which stood the Good: the sixth rung in its developed form.

The structure is now articulated, but the top of it retains the Parmenidean silence — the Good cannot itself be treated as one more form among forms. Plato's system is the first in which the sixth rung is explicitly connected to all the lower rungs through an ontological chain.

The six-rung ladder undergoes its most striking transformation in Neoplatonism. Pursued to its limit, the route collapses all six rungs into a single structure.

The numbers are gods, as the Pythagorean ontology of number had been integrated into the Platonic tradition long before Plotinus wrote. The gods are forms, because the theological tradition identifies the divine names with intelligible realities. The forms are names of the One, for Nous is the second hypostasis, the way in which the One is reflected in a domain of intelligible articulation. And the One is the source from which the subject emerged, because the soul that philosophizes is itself a moment in the unfolding of the One and

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returns to it through the ascent that philosophy and mystical practice together enable. The ladder closes into a ring. The subject finds itself at the end of its work derived from what it has ontologized. Plotinus is the climax of this movement, and his system is what later philosophical-theological thought has repeatedly returned to whenever it wants the most fully articulated form of the process.

The closure is what gives Neoplatonism its remarkable staying power and what reveals where it can be undone. A system in which every rung refers to every other absorbs any objection as a moment of its own unfolding — Hegel would rediscover this property in the nineteenth century. From inside, the system is impervious. From outside, the hierarchy reads as a map of one act and the subject finds itself at the bottom of a chain whose top it manufactured.