“So there I sat and smoked my cigar until I drifted into thought. Among other thoughts, I recall these. You are getting on in years, I said to myself, and are becoming an old man without being anything and without actually undertaking anything. On the other hand, wherever you look in literature or in life, you see the names and figures of celebrities, the prized and highly acclaimed people, prominent or much discussed, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit humankind by making life easier and easier, some by railroads, others by omnibuses and steamships, others by telegraph, others by easily understood surveys and brief publications about everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who by virtue of thought systematically make spiritual existence easier and easier and yet more and more meaningful—and what are you doing?…
So only one lack remains [in our time], even though not yet felt, the lack of difficulty. Out of love of humankind, out of despair over my awkward predicament of having achieved nothing and of being unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, out of genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I comprehended that it was my task: to make difficulties everywhere.
-Søren Kierkegaard, 1846
The seed which would eventually grow into the project at hand, oddly enough, began as a joke. Between the years 2002-2004 I was working on a project attempting to understand Heraclitus’ concept of the logos in terms of the Kantian notion of the epigenetic spontaneity that serves as a precondition for experience as such and is revealed in positive judgements of taste. To this end I was working with Jay Bernstein at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research on Kant’s Third Critique while spending a great deal of time with Peter Manchester at Stony Brook University working on the presocratics and the neoplatonics.
Manchester, at the time, was finishing his book, The Syntax of Time: The Phenomenology of Time in Greek Physics and Speculative Logic From Iamblichus to Anaximander, which he had been working on for forty years. In his earlier book, Temporality and Trinity, he argued for a “deep homology” between the temporal problematic in Augustine’s On The Trinity and Heidegger’s Being and Time.
Manchester proposes that Heidegger’s phenomenological framework, particularly the concept of ecstatic-horizonal temporality, provides a lens to understand Augustine’s trinitarian theology and the structure of the human being as imago dei contrasting Dasein’s (whose Befindlichkeit is a result of its Gewhorfenheit) temporality in Heidegger as past, present and future (ecstatic temporality) to Augustine’s description of the human mind in On the Trinity as memory, understanding and will.
Manchester’s employment of Heidegger’s phenomenological language in order to better understand Augustine, in effect reading Augustine as influenced by Heidegger, a method he devised in Temporality and Trinity and which features prominently in his book, The Syntax of Time as a general methodology, is something I am bringing to this project both as thoroughgoing methodology but also as underpinning ethos as I feel that Manchester’s “looking backwards” method is more than a mere method but how our epistemic cognition evolves and exists.
Manchester’s method of defying historical time constraints and reading ancient materials through the lens of modern discoveries was groundbreaking. Working with and learning from him in those days inspired me to employ his methodology in reading Heraclitus through the lens of the Kantian critical project in my monograph The Feeling of Life, Liberty and Transcendental Hedonism: A Look at Kant Through Heraclitean Eyes.
For this current project, I intend to take it a step further than Manchester did in arguing that a collapse, rather than a synthesis, in epistemic epochs will result in our emergence forward into the past (re-envisioning the Hegelian historical dialectic in such a way that a synthesis reproduces its own thesis if the antithesis is found with internal contradiction and falls into reductio ad absurdum). In short, it is not just ancient texts that can be understood through the lens of modern thinking, but the entire human cognitive apparatus shifting back to a fundamentally Christian one which we will only be able to understand through the lens of everything that comes after.
I, to the best of my abilities, assisted him and was incredibly fortunate to receive his help on my work in return. It was a running joke between us that we could find a common ground to marry our ideas and publish a ten volume book on Thales simply titled “Water.” While the current project is not the masterpiece we laughed about all those years ago, it is the child of it for sure.
I remember back in ’04 thinking how odd it was that Peter had taken 40 years to finish his project and now, here I am, over twenty years later, just beginning the long journey of my own project, a project I started thinking about with my late friend and mentor. Life is funny sometimes.
With that said, the current iteration of the project in the form of this website is a way for me to reproduce the practice of teaching graduate seminars in order to better articulate otherwise inchoate ideas which, through constant refinement, articulation and feedback, will eventually be pulled together into a book.
What I am attempting to do is to show how narrative is the fundamental epistemological framework by which humans interact with the world. In the early part of the 17th century, the scientific revolution, starting with Francis Bacon and Renee Descartes, began to incorporate a new framework by which we see the world, the rationalist empirical reductionism of the scientific endeavor. Because of how easy it made life and the rapidity of the immense production of new technologies, it was an impossible tide to stem. Starting from where alchemy and natural philosophy left off, this new epistemic epoch soon eclipsed the hard fought and long evolved narrative model superimposing the artificial scientific framework replacing meaning as the fundamental building block of truth with matter….matter, rather than what and why things matter: matter over meaning.
Over the course of several dozen article posts on this site I intend to closely examine the western intellectual history beginning at at the end of the last ice age, roughly 14,000BC, leading up to the Enuma Elis, the Mesopotamian creation myths, ontology and political philosophy, to the marriage of the Hellenic and Hebraic philosophies which merge into and are fulfilled by the works in the New Testament and its co-equal understanding of arche, logos and theos in John 1:11
After doing a large scale biblical analysis covering both Old and New Testaments we will look at the sixteen hundred years after the death of Christ and how the scientific revolution was only made possible by the Christian worldview and mindset that permeated Europe for all of those centuries.
Having set the ground for understanding the epistemological epoch ushered in by Christianity we will see how that epoch was eclipsed in 1605 by Francis Bacon and shortly after by Renee Descartes at the beginning of the scientific revolution. Following this, we will go through the enlightenment era philosophy, science and ideas from Descartes all the way to Kant. With this complete we will turn our attentions towards a look at the counterreformation and the romantic period as failed attempts to undermine the scientific epistemological epoch which leads to Nietzsche’s famous 1883 proclamation in Also Sprach Zarathustra that “God is Dead” and what the death of God meant for Europe, the west and, indeed, the whole world.
Finally, understanding that the Christian epistemic epoch had in it the seeds of the scientific worldview which would eventually eclipse it, I will look at how the scientific cognitive framework was built on an incoherent and contradictory foundation, was superimposed rather than naturally evolved, one which never considered the observer as part of the natural order — a mistake later addressed by Einstein in both Special and General Relativity — which would eventually collapse inward as reductio ad absurdum leaving us to evolve backwards so to speak.
The question which has occupied me for all these years is: if the scientific project collapses in on itself and is not eclipsed organically into something new (the way Hellenistic and Hebraic philosophy converged and eclipsed their contemporary cognitive frameworks with Christianity) what would be left behind in the rubble? The answer made itself manifest to me in 2020 for reasons I explore in the essays that will populate this website.
The reason for the extended biblical analysis both of the Old Testament and, along with Hellenic philosophy, it’s fulfillment in the New Testament, is because the epoch eclipse which I believe is occurring will collapse back into the Christian epistemological framework which, I will argue, is the natural account of humanity which evolved cognitively as well as biologically and which was, for the last five hundred years, overlaid by the artificial scientific epistemological mode of being-in-the-world. As such, revisiting this often maligned and reemerging Christian cognitive framework will allow for an understanding of how we can navigate ourselves from dead matter back to that which matters. At its heart we will be looking at the biblical library though the lens of our present state of affairs so we are better able to understand what it tells us and what we can expect in the future.
Over the course of the essays I will publish on this website I will go through the intellectual history of the western world from not just a philosophical perspective, but from theological, scientific, psychological, sociological, artistic, literary and political angles as well as looking at works of popular culture as expressions of their contemporary epoch and as participating with meta-narratives which form low resolution patterns on which all thinking is indebted. Since the subject matter deals with the underpinning framework of thought as such and how it is the human being enters the world it will touch on all matters of human endeavor.
The claim I am attempting to make here is that human consciousness undergoes long epochs which are typified by the prevailing epistemic framework and that these epochs are periodically eclipsed drastically changing the entire panoply of human endeavors by changing the way we interact with our world and how we understand ourselves, our culture and our God, while leaving in tact the underpinning meta-narratives that they are both built upon and contradict. Further, while former epochs have given way to newer models of thinking, because the scientific endeavor began with an idea which was contrary to the native human cognitive reality and the patterns it is built upon, rather than evolve forward the collapse is backwards such that we can see a reemergence of the importance of reality qua meaning which finds its most sophisticated explication in Christian theological thought and the biblical library.
My biggest hope for this project is for my readers, should there be any, to find as much enjoyment, edification and satisfaction in reading these essays as I find in writing them. The collection of ideas I present to you here have all been on my mind for three decades and this website represents my absolute best effort to analyze and articulate the progressive revelatory co-evolution of man and God over the past sixteen thousand years and to anticipate what is to come as the collective epistemic epoch returns to the Christian ontology and epistemology while reincorporating that which came after it. For now, all I can do is try my best to articulate these ideas in a way that does justice to them and is enjoyable and meaningful to my readers.
1 Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.