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

Chapter 4

Any code can be mistaken for something that exists independently of the one who produced it. In Ethics of the Abyss this conversion was named ontologization and applied to ethics. Here the same mechanism appears across every rung of the ladder, from the sensory surface to the Absolute.

Qualities. The naïve realist takes them at face value: color, form, flavor, or texture are read as disclosures of how things are. The previous chapter showed why this fails: a quality is a product of a specific apparatus, real as a distinction and derivative as any supposed property of a mind-independent world. A milder version of the same move keeps part of the domain and concedes the rest. The Pyrrhonists already cataloged the variation: honey tastes sweet to one palate and bitter to another, a stick looks bent in water and straight in air. They suspended judgment about all of it; Democritus drew a different conclusion: by convention sweet, by convention bitter; in reality atoms and void. The secondary qualities were handed to the perceiver, the primary ones (shape, size, motion, arrangement) were kept as genuinely out there. Locke formalized the distinction with the same partition: save a core of mind-independent properties from the variability that infects the rest.

The modern scientist retreats further. Color or sound is qualia, and yet three-dimensional extension may still be received as the real container in which things sit.

Concepts. The Platonist ontologizes the whole domain and populates a separate realm with forms more real than the things that participate in them — round-ness apart from round things, justice apart from just acts. A weaker version selects. Someone uninterested in forms as such may still receive justice as a karmic law that rewards and punishes, beauty as a property things carry in themselves.

The universal claim drops, a handful of favored concepts retain their ontological weight, and a pattern the subject extracts from distinctions is handed to the world for safekeeping.

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Language. For the early Wittgenstein its structure mirrors the shape of reality.

For Heidegger language is the house of being, the medium through which being itself speaks. Certain strands of post-structuralism hold that language constitutes reality. A partial version is wherever a single word is treated as a magical hook into what it names, in the belief that the true name of a thing grants power over it or in the assumption that a moral label settles what it is applied to.

Mathematics. Numbers and their relations survive every change of content or observer. The mathematical Platonist reads this invariance as evidence of mind-independent subsistence. This invariance follows from the depth of recursion and says nothing about residence. The total case has been pushed as far as it can go: for Proclus the numbers are gods, each henad an ontological order unfolding out of the One before anything else, and the science of number becomes a branch of theology. A narrower position ontologizes selected items — the circle, the golden ratio, the Fibonacci sequence, the integers — and writes these into the fabric of things while treating the rest of mathematics as convenient fiction.

Laws of nature. The scientific realist takes the most stable extracted patterns as governors of nature, present before any knower arrived to discover them. The move also admits grades. The full realist grants mind-independent status to the entire nomological order. The selective realist picks favorites such as conserva-tion of energy or the speed of light, and treats these as the foundation while ad-mitting the rest as contingent formulations subject to revision.

The Absolute. At the end, the operation turns on its own source. The subject encounters its meta-position, projects the encounter outward, and receives the result as God, the One, the Matter, Brahman, the Dao, the Absolute. This projection is the most consequential of all, since its target is the subject. The partial case here is the most common: someone assents to no theology as a whole, may even profess disbelief in any ultimate ground, and yet receives a fragment of the projection as real — a moral order standing behind events or a meaning that history is heading toward.

What recurs across every version is the same grammatical inversion. The active voice of the subject gives way to the passive voice of the world. I see the sky as

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blue becomes the sky is blue. I find this arrangement just evolves into this is just. I extract a pattern from my measurements is now the law governs nature. The subject drops from the sentence, and the product remains in place, as though it had always been there.

This is the form of delegation: an act of distinction becomes a thing encountered by everyone. At the limit of the process stands a subject for whom every distinction has solidified into a construct — walking through a landscape of predetermined cuts.

What can be said about the subject is limited to its operations. It distinguishes.

It sustains the results of its distinctions and applies distinction to its own acts, generating new levels of code. But the one who performs the activity is absent from every description of it. Any attempt to say what the subject is, rather than what it does, produces a new object and the subject slips behind it, already functioning as the condition of the definition it has just generated. It is not that our instruments are too crude or our concepts too narrow. It is that saying what something is requires drawing a boundary around it, and the subject is the one who draws boundaries. An attempt to draw the boundary splits the subject in-to the one who draws and the one who is drawn, and the one who draws falls behind the operation again.

Activity endures through all descriptions. The subject is the distinguishing; a verb that resists conjugation in the third person. The tradition has a name for this: will. It is neither as desire nor as choice among options. Will is pure act: the doing that precedes every description of what is done.

Turned upon itself, will generates something that fails to be the subject and remains unchanged behind the generation. It is inexhaustible. Each pass leaves it ready for another. In this sense it is nothing, since every "thing" is its product.

It is Ain, Ein Sof: the nothing that is the condition of all presence.

An ontologized distinction hardens into a construct. Both a live distinction and a construct carve the field and organize further moves; the difference is in how the subject holds them. A live distinction remains available for revision: its res-

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olution can change, it can be replaced by another cut. A construct sits fixed, received as a feature of the world.

This is the mechanism by which the will becomes narrowed. The world is matter is a construct. Once the subject accepts it, the axis it defines stops generating live distinctions. One side becomes real, the other turns into a region through which the subject simply passes. Entire libraries of reports, practices, and testi-mony arrive in the field as illegible. The will avoids traveling there because the construct has pre-answered whether there was anywhere to travel toward. There is a single God who commands, mind is computation, history moves toward freedom, the self is an illusion, reality is mind-dependent — each closes a region of possible distinction and relocates a portion of the field of the will into the decor of the given.

Berdyaev called this process objectification: the subject's creative act hardens in-to an object that confronts the subject as something external and binding. Freedom, which for Berdyaev was primary, is progressively lost as the subject's own products accumulate into a world.

A construct at one level pre-answers the questions at the levels beneath it. Ontologize matter, and the status of mind follows. Ontologize God, and the question of obedience comes next. A subject dense with constructs inhabits a fully furnished world in which the work of distinction has been done elsewhere and earlier.

The counterpart of the construct is transparency. A distinction taken transparently appears to the subject as conditional on the purpose of the drawing, replaceable by another cut when the focus shifts. Transparency preserves the distinction as an instrument. Words "matter," "mind," "cause," or "self " are used as codes rather than as ontological deliveries. The boundaries remain. The meta-position stays above, ready to redraw them.

Transparency is a posture rather than a doctrine. The same proposition received in one mode becomes a wall; taken in another, it becomes a tool. Two subjects may assent to the identical formula about the One; the whole difference lies in

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whether the formula is received as a structure of reality or used as a distinction currently in play.