Encompassing Freedom

Ruling powers always make use of intellectual flunkies, court prophets, and the pretentions of academic flatterers. However, I wince when I think of the potential in our present situation for unprecedented domination of human thought, understanding, and life by those few with unprecedented wealth and power for whom the public forum and common library exist as personal property and fiefdoms.

It seems to me to be a dire situation that social media, information technology, etc which are now such pervasive aspects of our lives, are owned by and therefore permeated with the agendas and desires of oligarchs (actually, tyrants) and related institutional powers. What can be and is promoted with incredible force and influence, are whatever worldviews, philosophies, beliefs, aesthetics and tastes that are to the fancy of the rulers and tech potentates. I think I saw a hint of this previously with the seeming ubiquitous presence of the works of JRR Tolkien as cultural references (I spent my late childhood engrossed in Tolkien too, but the online fetish for using his works impressed me as having a source beyond simple popularity) that just happened to be to the taste of a one Peter Thiel.

Now I hear Elon Musk talking about ‘consciousness’ and the necessity of bringing it to Mars... which somehow and conveniently aligns with his business interests and ‘vision’ for humanity…

Freedom from such (pretty shallow in content, but powerful nonetheless) pseudo-ideological impositions and domination of thought is available to us all if we can recognise the limitations of even the most ostensibly persuasive ways of thinking/worldviews.

Karl Jaspers, sometimes referred to as an existentialist, was a mid 20th century German philosopher, a contemporary of Heidegger, who was keenly sensitive to the dangers of the imprisoning of human thought by ruling authority. While not -perhaps- as rich and penetrating a philosophical mind as Heidegger, he nonetheless seems to me to have hit the bullseye on the issue of freedom. He pointed to an aspect (or rather that of which everything is a mere aspect) of reality, or Being, which is beyond all intellectual grasping and so, beyond domination. This absolutely inconceivable Being, which is not separate from the very ground and source of our selves, is also the guarantee of our freedom. He called it “the Encompassing”

Everything that constitutes ordinary knowledge and understanding, that seems available and even objective as experience, in the sciences, history, philosophy and theology, lies within the realm of intelligence, is immanent to the paradigm of the human intellect. For all the elaborations and exaggerations claimed of any of the above disciplines, all follow according to the patterns of human intelligence, the ground of which is practicality in the context of the human condition as an embodied (mortal) life-form.

What does lie beyond the horizon of such intellectual products – and is in that sense, transcendent to the forms of the intellect, is not absolutely Other (which is itself a relative concept immanent to intelligence) but an Encompassing (the Encompassing); Being as it really is, unmodified.

The unavoidable paradox is that this Encompassing alone really is, and so it is beyond objectification and conceptualisation, yet to even acknowledge it it must be divested of it’s absolute nature and relativized in language (as we have just done!). It is the reality, the source ground and essence of absolutely everything that appears, yet it is completely empty of anything that the intellect can invest it with (again, another paradox).

If dealing with the Encompassing in language and analysis opens up an impossible chasm, groundlessness, misalignment, or pernicious infinite regress, that is merely revealing of the walls of the prison of the intellect. It reveals the limits to that aspect of consciousness ( which is itself an aspect not separate from of Being, or the Encompassing) and should warn us away from inappropriate exaggeration of intelligence. But intelligence is far from the only aspect of consciousness qua Being. Here is the remembrance of freedom.