Meaning .The Primordial Impulse The way for idealists to deal with the problem of epistemology is to circumvent it. Redefining the primitives does this. I take meaning to be primitive. I am talking psychology rather than semantics.
The meaning of life, which happens to be love, is the logically mandated primitive of all existence. The felt meaning of love is the force and organizing principle of reality. But must there not be a subject and object of love? Not with ‘self-love.’ Subsequent duality arises from and in support of that primordial impulse.
The primordial impulse might be more accurately be characterized as the mystical experience of ‘cosmic union.’ This impulse is highly resistant to analysis. This is the primary organizing principle for all of reality. This is the Alpha and the Omega and, of course, the x-event. It is the ground of being and the root of all existence.
Love exists, so we know that it is possible. If it is possible then I claim that it is logically mandatory since it is the motivating, organizing and creative principle par excellence. Give love a metaphysical inch and it will take over the cosmos, or, more accurately, it will create the cosmos.
Imagine a primordial chaos. What is it a chaos of? Mainly of potentiality and potency. It would be potential experience, that to become actual would have to be organized into something meaningful. Experience is polarized into a who and what only under the influence of the primal impulse as it actualizes and coalesces into felt meaning. Temporal terminology is being used only in a metaphorical or logical sense since time and space are not primal.
The primal polarity is between coherent actuality and chaotic potentiality. The push toward actuality is logically the ruling dynamic. Within that dynamic there will be ‘cyclical’ patterns.
The primal state is necessarily malleable with respect to the primal forces. There is competition between the various systems of organization. The most effective strategy prevails. But this does not mean moving pieces on a chessboard. Recall that existence is relational. The strategy is to facilitate relationality.How does one thing come to relate to another? If we set aside spatial relations, then we must consider mental connections. The prototypical relations in this realm are that of thinker and thought, and experiencer and experience, but we are left with the dichotomy of subject and object. Another possibility for a primal relation is that of two subjects, each conjuring the other. Self-conjuration might be the more basic form. Even the strict materialist would be hard pressed to offer an alternative to self-creation as an explanation for the phenomenology of the self. The primal entity could only be self-created.
Spontaneously generating selves would come to interact at a primitive stage. Mutual nurturing would be the basic expression of love. If that interaction were possible it would become the prevailing principle. There would arise ‘families’ of selves and so on.
We might wonder if we are just the lineal spontaneous descendants of such a process, or if we are somehow more contrived in the sense of there being some sort of ad hoc creation responsible for our existence. It seems reasonable that our remarkable apparent self-containment would have to be partially contrived. To just that degree we would be the creatures of a special creation, rather than simply being ‘off-spring.’ To what extent might any of these processes be usefully explicated? Do we need a metaphysics of love?
.
- | Contents |
rev. 8/29/98