Introduction
There can be no bookish introduction to philosophy. It is possible to state a few of the main ideas used in a work or even in the whole of philosophy, but from that the reader must still do the long work of gathering toward an understanding. It will be a quiet dark work. The lights will be few. The path will be slippery, steep and forked. The idea may lead nowhere. In fact, all philosophical paths lead nowhere, but no matter, visions happen along the way and that is philosophy. The relationship established excludes the writer. It is rather between the reader and Philosophy. In a sense, the reader must be intimate with that before he begins. He slowly moves his hand and caresses him in the glorious night until that inevitable ecstasy. What greater delight could there be?
There exists no entryway into philosophy. Each philosophical writing is an attempt to look for it. Just as there is no entryway into love, and each act of love becomes a temptation to give up the search. So I begin anywhere at all, knowing full well that my reader knows perfectly well what I have to say, but will probably see no way from what I do say to that that he knows, and I wonder why I write. Yet, if he is a lover of philosophy, a lover of this love, then any writing that speaks of his love will be inviting and he will want to find his beloved once again in there. He is on the look out. I am in a dangerous place.
This is Platonism. Or so I suppose. It seems that Plato himself may not have been a Platonist. Platonism may be an antedated invention of the Victorian Age. It seems that everyone in the schools is against it and thus I am alone in being for it, especially in that I also tag along the boy Jesus with me. We together are invited to none of the wholesome gatherings. Is this decadence? The fall has been far, but necessary. The dawn is even now appearing on this boy’s downy cheeks. I advance and I recede at his bidding. I have no defense. My paragraphs soon reach their end.
Platonism is usually thought of as a contemplation of the eternal heavenly forms that are mirrored in this visible world. That’s not too far from how I see it. To do ontological analysis, one has to break up the ordinary object into pieces that are nowhere in this world. These ontological things are somehow related to that ordinary object. Plato said they were mirrored in, reflected in, the object. He said the object participates in these ontological things. Today’s realists want to say that they are constituents of ordinary objects, but they draw back from having such a nexus. They leave off without having any connection between what they see in their contemplation and the world. The idealists say that the things of this world “fall under” the mind’s concepts. They don’t really mean it. We are left with only Plato’s names for this most baffling togetherness. I fall into the gap. The vortex I find myself in is my agitation in these writings.
The thought that I here attempt to write a Platonism of Separate Forms will instantly leave many of my readers exasperated. The others it will leave in confusion. Plato is majestic, all agree, but his ideas are gone the way of religion – the Majesty is dead – it was just a silliness to begin with – surely it is so, the exasperated will think. But nothing has changed; the exasperation was always present. The giants of the earth have always found the gods ridiculous. The Separate Forms have always been a lovely mystical erotic confusion. And the exasperation was always just another form of the erotic.
Philosophers cut the things of the world into their abstract pieces. Then they worry that this distraction has left them outside the warmth of home in the cold intellectual night and they disown their own. These retractions have no traction on the road back home and all are left to languish, shut away by the state in schools. Their job is only to keep the kids out of trouble for a while, contracted into tight erotic constrictions. The Separate Forms are the things of cut off places compressed before the Glorious release into the blanking out night fight right there.
If the Platonic Separate Forms didn’t exist then we couldn’t think the cut up things of ontology. We think universal and nexus and bare particular and entity and existence and on and on and on right nicely and there you are. Philosophers and the things of their lovely thoughts exist. And they are surely a separate lot, ask anyone. Those who eat the forbidden fruit can never return. That’s us!
The distinguishing mark of Platonism is its belief that universals exist separate from the world. A precise expression stating that idea is impossible. Perhaps there is no such thing as Platonism. But if you know the literature you somewhat understand. I am such a Platonist. Thus I am a questionable thing. And you somewhat understand me. Let me only say that I think you will agree that the thoughts of philosophers, the things they expound into students’ heads, the strange questions insisted upon, are far from the ordinary man’s world. It is philosophy and the philosopher that are separate from the world. Philosophical things are separate somehow from ordinary things. Therefore most who call themselves philosophers, the professional philosophers, wanting the safety of the ordinary, defer in the end to the world and acquiesce in making themselves and their studies comic. They are each a Socrates who willingly gets into the basket of Aristophanes.
Platonism is a circus full of freaks, its boys are imps and urchins and fags, its old lovers are just old. Its reaching for the divine was hubris and the fall was precipitous. Its separation from the orderly cosmos widens.
The object before your mind’s eye and the object that is your act of knowing that object and which is now also before your mind’s eye, both divide into being a particular that is just that particular and a form that is a thing that has been exemplified by endless particulars for us lost in the vastness of spaces and times. The ontological things that account for there being particulars in our world and for the forms that all those particulars are united to, those ontological things are the topic of this writing. Particulars stripped bare of all form and the Forms with the particulars themselves stripped away. Philosophical things not of this everyday world. Things only a Platonist, only an erotically desperate man, could hold to be really there. The cut is deep in Being. The Eternal Platonic Forms that startle and dismay the young student. But perhaps he falls in love with them. Only perhaps.
I talk incessantly in my philosophy of the nexus. It’s not a common word but it stands for an exceedingly common thing, but a perplexing thing if gazed upon. Let us say that it is the meaning of the word “is” in the sentence “This is very sweet music.” Here it is the connector between the particular and the universal. It is there sometimes called, and I often called it, the nexus of exemplification. There are, however, other connectings profound enough to be called ontological and they too need a nexus to ground them. Between word and meaning, set and element, idea and its object. Perhaps they are there, perhaps not; it is the task of philosophy to argue the case.
The idea of the nexus is difficult for everyone. That of the universal for the dull and materialistically minded. For the lover, the idea of the universal is easy, because he sees that one thing, that one elusive form of the beloved everywhere, that one fragrance and touch, that face, that glance, that spirited thing. It is the only real thing he sees. And the idea of the nexus looms large when he tries to grab hold of himself in order to calm his perplexity, when he wonders about that one thing being in every where. The nexus is the togetherness of the one thing, the beloved one thing, with this and that and that and that and on and on into the whirlwind that is the world. The one is with the many and the many without its being together with the one thing is nothing at all. The idea that they are together stares at the togetherness, at the nexus. That complexity, the nexus, the idea that, the very world forgetful of all that, are one and not one. There is no nexus between wonder and the not wondering. The lover and the philosophizing lover trying to control this serpent of love are left out. In the great isolation. Even I cannot think them together with the ordinary. And should the ordinary read these words they will be transformed into what they aren’t. Thus the idea of the nexus will remain difficult and an aberration from out of the mania so blithely called love. There is much cause for anger here.
It may seem strange that philosophy and its philosophers would come up with such a thing, but to ground the phenomena presented is what ontology, first philosophy, is all about. Should we say that grounding is the nexus between what we see and what there is that accounts for it? Perhaps. Or if the complexities we see are constituted by simple things is there the nexus of constituting? The confusing game of the One and the many has been played it seems forever, which brings to mind another possible nexus. Are the temporal phases of the existence of a substance tied by nexus to the substance? Are they maybe “in” the substance? Are they “created” by it? Is each now in the Now? And is each place of the playing in the one placeless Place? So many things to consider and the object is so fine and refined.
If these matters, these very immaterial matters, seem unnecessary or tiresome to you then philosophy is not for you. If they hint at a paradise of thought then attack and command the beings there to fulfill their promise. Sweet water will pour forth and in the end it is you who will be called and then gently seduced. The nexus between you and that grows in uncommon importance.
There could, I suppose, be an ontology of the nexusness of the nexus. Why not? And of the particular in each instance of it (is it an it?) in a fact and of the number of them. But why? Infinite regress sits close, not to mention utter confusion. So let’s just say that Nexus itself is its own ontological essence out there in transcendent ontological space, there being no nexus anywhere in any world I have ever seen. Or is that too much for you? There is, I admit, something wrong with that thinking. The fact remains that we can think this maker of facts and we can think it quite nicely if uncomfortably. And it is everywhere in its being nowhere at all. That we can think these matters and speak of them, pace Wittgenstein, is amazing and, yes, with Wittgenstein, deadly. No doubt a Minotaur lies at the end of the thinking. Or worse, the need of an ordinary boy to have you explain it. He knows all about it already, being one himself.
I see you’re lost. So am I. So are we all. Still, all in all, the considerations, the starry thoughts, are lovely. So why not? No one has ever made much progress in understanding the Nexus, but there is the great demand that we do, or at least pretend that we do. I shall elevate thought of it to prayer and on to theology. Do you object? We are not dealing here with knots and wenches.
So let’s bring up the matter of artificial intelligence and electronic sensors, as we inevitably must in this so very technical world. Take, for example, the fact that you see your wallet lying empty on the radio, the money taken by your lover. That is a disconcerting but easy mental act to perform. Upon analysis the wallet and the radio, sweet music, and the feel of the money being gone are complex indeed. So many geometrical and emotional shapes are involved, so many relations and so many possibilities of change of shape and relation, the underside, the other side and the insides enfold with flourish, not to mention color and smell and on and on and the erotic confusion. The analysis is never ending and, I suppose, a computer could perform, whatever perform means here, all the requisite tasks to get some kind of comprehensive read-out that would mention even the agitation in you. The mental act, though not the computer act, was so simple. You saw in an instant the “face” of the wallet and the radio and the lying, and of his face all in one simple knowing. That face, which I suppose to be the great analysis at once, is never arrived at by means of analysis. The analysis remains a many, not a One, and the infinity of that many never arrives at that one simple face. Nor do our electronic sensors have the ability to “see” that face of things. The prospect of arriving and seeing is no prospect at all. Artificial intelligence is not intelligence. Electronic sensing is not sensing. These metaphors have led us down a deathly primrose path.
So the nexus again. The one thing, the wallet, is somehow tied to its multifarious forms, but what is the nexus and how? A lovely problem. Does that nexus that ties have a face? Can we hope to see it? I do think that in philosophical intuition or whatever you want to call it, we can, and there at the heart of Being we are close to the place of the breaking out of the gods. Intellectual vertigo beckons and threatens and seduces the willing mind. Nothing has changed.
In philosophy ordinary things are broken up into ontological things, the things of Being. A brief list would include: universals (mental and non-mental) and universality, bare particulars and particularity, sets as distinct from elements, facts with the forms of atomicity and molecularity, and pervasion by actuality and potentiality, logical connectors and all the various nexus needed to unite all these things into a unified world, also existence, difference, sameness, identity and category itself. The great argument is not really what things are on this list, but whether they exist as mere words, vague concepts, something in ordinary objects, or whether they are things in themselves separate from ordinary objects in timelessness and placelessness, plain or Majestic. And if outside mind and language do we really have phenomenal awareness of them or do we only dialectically reason our way to some sort of ontological necessity for their being there. Things of Being, then, are for some merely things about beings. From the superlative to the mere.
I choose Being to match the intensity of the drive within me. I tear my self and some beloved thing I see there away from beings to That. Thus this philosophy is violent in its insistence on separation. It is extreme. I have seen something. I have directly seen the counter-intuitive.
I have not stayed put in my philosophical imagination. I have gone out and felt the real coming at me. Reality is always an attack. Even when it is sweet, it is violently so. And the hardness of the open road that is the real space-time is the cut of the intersection and the falling off because there was never enough time or money to finish the thing with a nice smooth finish. The real is the disjunct junction. The Boy sits there staring at me, incorrigible, able and willing to leave you alone. But sometimes Reality yields.
At times I do write so matter-of-factly and academically and then in the same spirit I name the spirit and the land of strange things and the rhythms are seen to have begun long ago. Dead-pan philosophy and dead Pan and an eerie longing. Jesus, hold my hand and walk with me in the sunlight.
It is important that you distinguish between a fact and a sensum. A fact such as – his hair curls gently behind his ear – is out there and separate from you. The sensa of the curling and the gentleness are close in your mind giving you no comfortable distance from it. The fact is known in an act of perception and the act and its object are distinctly other. The sensa, because of their invasion into the mind, give no room for any distinction of act from its object. Sensa are always questionable and that unsettling closeness is close to sin. Sin being the questioned and the suddenly too close.
Still, there is the question of the factness of facts and the separateness of the separate and then there is the second level questionableness of the questioned. Ontological things. They are even closer than sensa, known immediately, without any distinction giving act. The subject of these writings. Also perhaps sin. But then sin is such a highly questionable thing, so let us just say a slow moving uncomfortableness.
So I make a distinction between fact and sensa, act and sin, closeness and distinction. I cut. That is analysis. That is Platonism. This Platonism lies gently in the Cut. That is deconstructing, which in high parlance is also known as deconstructionism. The boy’s room is a mess. A lovely mess.
As you read this you are probably not sitting in a monastery. You should be. This is a thing cut off. I am ever speaking of the boy cut off, who is being cut off from family and all things familiar. Cut off from himself. Cut off from the hiddenness of the night. Thus the sacrificial victim. Finally something not human. This is the uncanny. A herm was at the gate, in case you didn’t notice.
This is a book of philosophical love, the love that sees the form of the beloved and that flesh, from afar, crawling all along the Beginning. And that has been called the Word, but that is surely a misappellation of this the Most Appealing.
This rushes on to be a book of philosophical love, that love which feels and tastes on the flesh of the beloved that sword that was in the Beginning.
Therefore these are rhythmical writings. Each paragraph is a solid self-turning. Each page expands and retracts. They are the workings of The One.
If they are breath, I don’t know whose breath. Perhaps I know. I know.
The hushed drum beats. The blanket is thrown back. The spirit is continuous.
Such rhetoric is necessary because this is Eros. He has nothing aside from the ability to turn over so easily. To flash. And to wonder about himself.
And Jesus. It’s inevitable that this god be here. He’s all we have. Or at least, he’s all I have and I have been drowning in Western thought for so long. I don’t mind if you have another god; in fact I would prefer it, because I know jealousy well.
The incessant questioning of this boy, sitting on the edge of the bed, makes him shimmer in the dark.
Everything comes out of a swoon.
Jesus is claimed by so many that it probably makes no difference that I do also. That he is always in the company of lovers is a matter of often bitter contention. What to do? Jealousy is wild. This bastard son came so close to making his mother an outcast, and then claimed to be of the house of the highest. Just like his kind to do that. Such audacity. It’s enough to make me a believer. I have seen that sure look out on the street. I fall for him. The entourage is clamoring. I drink in his ruby nighttime.
In this book of philosophical love, I will write the love that is his death and my drinking his spirit into me.
