The Person and the Individual

The human being is identified in the West as an individual and from this concept stem the individual rights codified into human rights legislation and the market economy that works on the basis we are rational agents.  The sense of autonomy that underpins liberal values also depends on the human being conceived of as an individual.

There are many implications from regarding humans as autonomous units. This way of viewing us was not always so natural as it seems. A process of atomisation and objectification took place in the West, linked to changes in metaphysics, the development of scientific methodology and the growth in technology. Closely linked to the process of objectification, the atomisation of individualism leads us to see ourselves as self-contained units surrounded by a world not of encounter, but one of objective data ripe for exploitation as standing reserve. And the more we exploit through techne, the more isolated and atomised we become - stuck on our mobile telephones not encountering what is around us. This is where individualism leads and in the process greatly diminishes our capacity for empathy. The self-contained atom is a deeply reductive view of the human being - a mere consumer or subject of political power.

Much as we lost some connection with Scripture when it was translated from the more expressive Greek into the more legalistic Latin, so our way of defining the human being is too Latinised. The individual is the indivisible unit, who by dint of being indivisible is also a self-contained and self-sufficient autonomous agent. There is another way to describe the human being and that is as a person.

While “individual” is linked to the Latin etymological root for the indivisible, “person” comes from the Greek “prosopon”, meaning to face towards. Thus in the very definition of the person, he is relational and not autonomous. This is a very important difference. It means the human being exists in relationship, not as an autonomous unit and what atomises us does not free us, but diminishes our humanity.

In his seminal work, A Secular Age, Canadian Roman Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor distinguishes between the understanding of self in the enchanted Mediaeval world and the disenchanted and secular world of modernity. Mediaeval Man saw himself as porous, but in modernity Man is a buffered self. What this means is that the human being in the Mediaeval world was porous to cosmic forces, angelic and demonic. He was thus relational both vertically and horizontally with his community. Modern Man is the buffered self, autonomous and protected from external forces and thus his world becomes disenchanted and he therefore becomes alienated and atomised.

Perhaps the darkest definition of Hell was articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre, when he said “Hell is other people”. This is a statement of the atomisation of the atheist West. Other people are an imposition to the buffered self that does not relate, but might (like Sartre) indulge in totalitarian Marxist fantasies of imposed community while not belonging to his own parish or village.

An Orthodox perspective on the person comes from the leading Greek Orthodox theologian, Christos Yannaras. For him the human person, using Heideggerian language is always a being-towards, not an isolated and atomised thing. Individualism is, for Yannaras the consequence of the Fall and the life under the curse of death. Existence becomes a struggle for individual survival, not life in communion, more in accordance with Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” than the Gospel. Yannaras writes:

“For Orthodox theology, the fall of man takes place when he freely renounces his possibility of participating in true life, in personal relationship and loving communion - the only possibility for man to be as a hypostasis of personal distinctiveness. The fall arises out of man’s free decision to reject personal communion with God and restrict himself to the autonomy and self-sufficiency of his own nature.”

And this fall leads to a fragmentation whereby the natural needs of man turn into enslaving passions - leading to death. And now Man living under this curse of death brought about by autonomy leads to an inescapable ancestral sin:

“For nature does not exist except as personal hypostases, and the first man identified the fact of his existence, not with the personal distinctiveness of his natural hypostasis, but with its survival and self-existence. Thus each new human person is born subject to his individual nature’s need to survive as existential autonomy. He is born condemned to be the bearer of an individual or natural will subordinated to the absolute need for survival.”

Yannaras thus contrasts the existence of the person in communion with the diminished and post-lapsarian life of the autonomous individual. The person relates to the Trinitarian God - three divine Persons or hypostases in relationship.

In the secular West there is a great deal of emphasis on individual autonomy as the expression of authenticity. Once we realise the human being is a person this ceases to be a credible perspective. As much as he attempts to assert his freedom the individual becomes a slave to his passions. Many of the expressions of individuality in the form of New-Age tattoos or following particular subcultures simply amounts to becoming absorbed in a new collective identity that does not embody any higher meaning, but is simply cliched and participation in what Heidegger would call the “they self”.

Yannaras places emphasis on personal distinctiveness and irrepeatability as the key aspects of the person. By contrast the individual is humanity reduced to repeatable atom, driven by passions and in his very autonomy no longer sovereign. This personal distinctiveness of Yannaras's person is something like that which we term in common parlance, the personality.

We derive the word “personality” from the person. Our personality exists in relation to others, not in isolation. And once we are isolated we cease to empathise with the other’s personality. Another word derived from person is of course “persona”. Again, looking at modern secular ideas of authenticity, the word “persona” linked as it is to the word mask, is seen as suspect and inauthentic. That though is because we are thinking of it within the paradigm of modern individualism. A mask has important ritualistic and social functions. In his work on ethno-sociology, Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin looks back to the most primitive culture and the role of the persona in ritual and social meaning. For primitive societies the individual was not a concept. The individual, as Nietzsche explained, is a very modern idea.

Dugin explained the role of the persona thus:

“It is significant that the Greek word for 'persona' or 'person' literally means mask. In the ethnos, everything is a mask. The structure of ethnic being is personified. Ethnic thought does not question who the mask conceals or whom the mask indicates. ‘Personality’ is a moment of ethnic noesis and possesses qualities but no substances.”

The persona exists only in the ethnic context, only in communal meaning. Clearly, as Dugin’s work shows, tracing the shift from ethnos, to people, to nation, we are not in that same cultural existence now. Nonetheless, it teaches how the persona can only exist in a non-individualist communal way. Clearly each persona performs a ritualised and socially determined role.

That though is the most authentic form of existence.  The shaman is gone, but it is when we perform socially-defined roles today, such as husband or father, wife or mother, that we find our personal distinctiveness and therefore true freedom. We are no longer drifting atoms, buffeted by our passions, but real people.

As Yannaras, using Heideggerian language, explains:

“Beings are [einai) only as phenomena, only insofar as they become accessible to a referential relation of disclosure. We cannot speak of the being-in-itself of beings; we can only speak of being-there or being-present (par-einai), of co-existence with the possibility of their disclosure. We know beings as presence (par-ousia), not as essence (ousia).”

Both the Palamite and Heideggerian undertones here are noticeable. Dasein itself is disclosed through its energy, not its substance. And here we are at the heart of Yannaras’s argument about the person. It all hinges on the Palamite distinction, but not separation, between energy and essence (ousia). We encounter the personality through its energy. And we encounter God through His energy. Yannaras famously refers to how we can recognise a piece of newly-heard Mozart from another composer’s work because of the energy of Mozart’s personality.

With Yannaras we avoid the univocity of Being of the Franciscan schoolmen. God is not simply the biggest autonomous Being and we the smaller autonomous beings - despots within our own boundaries of Nozik individualism. No, with Yannaras we turn to apophaticism and with the help of Heidegger understand the following:

“As the refutation of exclusively conceptual affirmation of God and of the practical necessity of God [Niezschean as per Heidegger} nihilism stands for a radical denial of the ‘conceptual idols’ of God, and as the unrestricted limit to questioning it offers further possibilities of rescuing the divinity of God.”

For Yannaras Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche’s nihilism consigns metaphysical accounts of God, the God of the philosophers, to the realm of defeated ideas thereby opening us to the possibility that God is or is not. For Yannaras this can lead to apophatic knowledge as personal participation.

Once freed from the conceptual constraints of metaphysics and rationalism the human being can again engage with God as a person. One might say the person is Being-towards- God through communion.

As individuals in our fallen and atomised state we rebelliously verify and conceptualise. When reconnected with our personhood we do not adopt such hubristic Cartesian methods. For Yannaras we are freed from this prison by Christ’s Incarnation, the second Person of the Trinity - the relational Godhead. He unites the human and the divine in communion through his Theanthropic nature as the God Man.

Life in the Church leads to a personal knowledge through participation, not fallen subjective and reductive knowledge. It is the encounter with the energy of God, which is articulated in catholic knowledge.

In this sense the rediscovery of the human being as a person not an individual leads to a re-established relationship with God. However, this can only happen through Christ, because Christ became incarnate. We were trapped in the paradigm of the individual and of autonomous survival. Christ changes that and recapitulates our existence as a personal existence of communion.

To return to the atheist existentialist Sartre, Yannaras has an answer for his famous misanthropic comment, by turning to Dostoevsky:

“Before Sartre, Dostoevsky had already defined hell in a similar way but more fully, summarising the theological teaching on hell of the Orthodox tradition: ‘Hell is the torment of not loving.’ It becomes evident from this definition that ‘other people’ are the occasion of my own hell, although the cause lies in my own inability to relate to them, in my imprisonment in the egocentric autonomy of atomic individuality, in my own ‘freedom’. Hell is therefore all the more tormenting when the ‘other’ is not an atomic individual at a distance from me who nullifies the possibility of relation, but is a person who presents himself to me as a living ecstasy of self-offering and calls me to a fulfilling communion and relation for me remains unattainable. This inability to relate, the punishment of someone not loving, is the ultimate failure of existence which summarises the Church’s teaching on eternal punishment. It is not God who is the punisher and creator of hell.”

Therefore, to be reduced to autonomous individuals from relational persons who can participate in God’s energy, is not simply a difference in terminology, but the road to Hell.




.













.

Alchemy or Theosis - different paths to different illuminations

 In the current time, despite the ever-increasing attractiveness of the New Age, the occult and the Eastern religions, we tend to have a materialist outlook.  Even our dabbling in the occult or other religions are seen  more as useful and about self-fufilment rather than worship.  This is to be contrasted with true religion, founded on humility before the Divine.  

It is somewhat counter-intuitive to link dry and objective science with anything mystical, but science originated in the esoteric worlds of alchemy and the occult.  Newton was fascinated by occult ideas and early chemistry sprang from esoteric alchemy.  Indeed, scratch the surface a little and we find the same underlying desire in both the occult and the scientific mindset - the grasping of power to manipulate the world.  Nature is then, in Heideggerian terms, standing reserve and we impose our will on it to exploit it from a position of Machenschaft.

Today we see a re-emergence of pseudo religious ideas in the manifestation of singularity and the technicians' belief in immortality through technology - the creation of own own hands that seems to be controlling us and that we worship.

In today's world of objective and rationalist science we see the reappearance of old and esoteric beliefs that are premised on attaining power, immortality and deification through our own manipulative efforts.  It might seem incongruous, but what manifests in both magic and science was there from the beginning, - the grasping at the fruit of knowledge, contrary to God's plan for his naive and immature creation, Man.

Such a spirit underpinned many of the pagan rites of initiation whether in the tradition of Mithras or Pythagoras.  The Neoplatonists made use of theurgy, which was a formulaic way of achieving deification.  By using certain incantations to invoke the divine, one is entering magical practice and thereby the manipulation of the divine or nature to achieve one's ends.  And these same processes as used in magic and theurgy, whether neoplatonic or alchemist, are in fact a form of techne - the manipulation of the world for own own ends and the attainment of power over God or the cosmos.

From the perspective of faithful humility the praxis of magic, theurgy, alchemy, science and technology are forms of  manipulation and domination, therefore being regarded to an extent as Luciferian.  Despite false dichotomies presented today, from the perspective that matters, one of humility, these different forms of praxis are all linked to the Fall - they are all grasping attempts at manipulation.

Humility is then the key distinction from these manipulative forms of praxis.  How we should have acted in the Garden was through a spirit of humility, not through pride attempting to seize power to achieve eternal life and knowledge disregarding our Creator.

There is a way to deification and it is not through the self realisation of alchemic or occult theurgies.  It is in a spirit of humility and faithful trust expressed in prayer.  Saint Seraphim of Sarov spoke of acquisition of the Holy Spirit as achieved by a life of Christian virtues.  Primarily the grace of the Holy Spirit is attained through prayer.  Prayer is the act of asking, not grasping and to ask is to act in the spirit of humility and trust.

To attain theosis the Fathers teach is to be deified.  And the means is a life of Christian virtue and prayer,  The possibility of acquiring the Holy Spirit is only possible because "God became Man that men might become gods" as both Saint Irenaeus of Lyons and Saint Athanasius, the great opponent of Arianism, said.

What this means is that any dichotomy between technology and the occult or chemistry and alchemy is false if the scientific work is in the spirit of pride, defiance and acquisitiveness.  If we are grasping at power to be like gods, while bypassing God, be that through creating artificial intelligence, developing the atom bomb or engaging in New-Age meditation, we are replaying the story of the Fall from the Garden.  Furthermore, we are mistaken if we attempt to separate the cold rationalism of science from the esoteric world of magic and the occult.  These are different sides of the same coin when science becomes scientism and both have their origin in Luciferian pride, and are the ensnaring by Lucifer the beautiful evening star who distracts us from the Father of Lights and our salvation. 

   

Singularity - Full Realisation of Man's Fall

The moment of singularity is when Artificial Intelligence will surpass human intelligence.  To some this means the end or extinction of man, the Imago Dei, by his own idol.  While Artificial Intelligence can only ever be complicated input and output and cannot possess consciousness in the of sense of Man as made with the divine spark of life, it can reach the ultimate stage of Gestell - humanity's enframement by the technology it created.

For a scientist such as Robert Kurzweil, captured by the work of his own mind and hands, this, like the Fruit in the Garden is the key to immortality.  Such an attitude is rife in the tech world.  It is no accident that Apple chose the symbol of a bitten fruit.  From this perspective that human desire, rooted in pride, to know and achieve immortality through dominating Nature, subjecting the world to its will, can be traced from the temptation to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, through alchemy, occultism, Baconite science to splitting the atom, to Big Tech and now the push for singularity.  

According to the reductive narrative of atheism, in its Promethean spirit, this is healthy rebellion against the arbitrary Patriarch God.  We outwit the Divine decrees and achieve forbidden power, finally leading to immortality.

This is a misunderstanding of God and His love and benevolence.  Adam was forbidden the fruit because in his undeveloped and naive state such knowledge in Eden would have brought about terror and disaster to mankind.  Instead the Exile was to allow us to survive this disaster of our sin.  The Exile leads to Christ and our redemption and immortality.

The pride of Satan was the cause of his rebellion and he appealed to our pride in our transgressions to achieve immortal life and power over Nature.  We thereby in Heideggerian terms, treated Nature as standing reserve and became enframed by our technology - the work of our own artistry.

What is going wrong here in the vision of perpetual life in this realm of existence is what went wrong at the Fall,, whether you understand that story literally or symbolically.  And it leads to death not life, enslavement to decay, not freedom.  Our pride leads us to see Nature as something to manipulate whether by magic or science - the urge is the same to both practices.  

And so, even if singularity means we can avoid death in this temporal realm, we will not be attaining the richness of eternal life with God.  There is a fundamental and foundational mistake, indeed sin, in this attempt to seize the fruit of eternal life.  We are going about it by grasping, not letting go.

From Christ's death on the Cross we see eternal life is achieved by relinquishng our control and smashing the idols we create, be they Moloch or Big Tech.  That is not to say our creativity is wrong, for just as we are stewards of Creation, so we are made to be creative.  It is rather the spirit in which we create.  It is the Machenschaft Heidegger points to by falling into inauthenticity of Being and treating that over which we are stewards as standing reserve.

The spirit in which artificial intelligence is created is paradoxically both our own grasping at control and a surrender to the work of our own hands as a new god.  Impatient for Moses to return from the mountain, we are building our golden calf.

Nonetheless, however far artificial intelligence develops as an input and output system, it remains only that.  Only God breathes life into beings and only God creates consciousness.  That is not to say that a level of sophistication and complexity that will exceed human rationality is impossible.  Simply by dint of the complexity and the likely general nature of A.I.'s ability to process, in that level of intelligence it could exceed humanity and become more powerful in a technical sense.  It could well be the Beast we must bear the mark of and bow down to worship.  What A.I. will not have is the nous of which the Fathers speak, that enables us to participate in the Divine Energy of God and to be transformed from glory into glory as we participate in the divine - the Imago Dei recovering the likeness of God given at Creation and forfeited by Adam's attempt to force immortality by his own will and grasping.  It is only by love and worship of the Divine source of love and goodness that eternal life is found.  Eternal life is categorically and fundamentally different from the never-ending temporal existence the promoters of singularity lust after.

We may find ourselves ruled over by a diabolical Beast that makes its own image for us to bow down and worship, but we can resist the Mark, like the first martyrs in Rome.  The never-ending life the singularists crave is that referred to in Revelation most likely:

"In those days men will seek death and will not find it."

If this sort of singularity is achieved by our mad scientists, it will be founded on something rotten that is the desire and lust to grasp at forbidden fruit and to usurp the natural order by defying God to achieve immortality.

Such an urge has been in us since the Fall.  It is not the defiance of some arbitrary rule that we are demonstrating.  There was nothing arbitrary about being forbidden to eat of the fruit.  Instead the only way to reach eternal life is as the monks say- by dying ourselves.  In that sense we must rather surrender our selfish and individualistic urge to self preservation and instead be moved by love - love of God and love of Man.

We are perhaps approaching another time of martyrdom where we will be called upon to give up on material life for God.  If we can be merged into some Frankenstein abomination through singularity, it will be the decision we must make to turn away from this fake eternal life, just as the martyrs had to choose the lions of the Coliseum rather than deny Christ for their self preservation of this temporal existence.  

Man and the Mythos

 What perspective brings together such an eclectic mix of writers as T. S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien and Aleksandr Dugin?  What ontology can find justification in the different perspectives of Plato and Heidegger?  At this time of year it is a perspective that we can and do encounter.  It is a recognition of the mystical encounter we often find at Christmas time.  The Virgin kneeling before the manger with the ox and ass nearby is a unity of the gritty realism of a hard birth without domestic shelter and the presence of the Divine Logos.  A thousand magical stars shoot from this one event forever relived in our various customs and traditions.  In our celebration of Christmas we rediscover the encounter with myth and meaning.

So writers as disparate as Tolkien and Chesterton on the one hand and Berdyaev and Dugin on the other recognise the truth of myth in contrast to the flattening out of the world that is the modern project - the Enlightenment deception.

As Orthodox icon carver, essayist and youtuber Jonathan Pageau has often explained - myth is where truth is to be found.  It is how we apply our attention to understand the meaning of seemingly random and material existence.  Not all truths are at the same level he argues, rather the higher level is at the level of myth.

There is another important aspect to the meaning of myth.  It is about participation in Truth.  Yes there is a flat and material meaning that can be found in the world of science, mechanical cause and effect and reduction to basic material explanations.  This though is how an alternative in Heidegger, the great anti-Platonist, and Plato himself can be found.

As Heidegger taught, meaning is found in the realm of encounter, rather than the alienated and dry picking apart of things by empirical science.  On the other hand Plato always points to material reality having a correspondence to the metaphysical Idea, in the realm of Being - where Truth is whole and not partial as in the world of becoming, always in a state of flux.  These very different perspectives can be united in the sense that our encounters can be mystical if we free ourselves from the Enlightenment paradigm.

Of course all our most important encounters and the stories by which we understand the world are far removed from the reduction to parts of empirical science.  The souls and personalities of our loved ones are at a higher level of reality and meaning, than reducing a human being to a talking ape determined by the mechanical laws of cause and effect.  And so while the Platonist attributes the reality we experience through personal encounter as revealing the higher meaning of the Forms, Heidegger might define this as the authentic encounter of beings prior to any abstract scientific theory.  The unity of the perspectives is a rejection of a reductive and abstracted approach as found in the Cartesian move towards subjects dissecting an objective and neutral reality.

Of course Heidegger and Plato have seemingly irreconcilable ontologies.  This is where Christmas provides the unity and the answer.  For Christmas is when the Word becomes flesh, when that outside the realm of beings enters our world of becoming.  By the miracle of Christmas, through a virgin birth, the universal and the particular, the immortal and the mortal, the world of becoming and the world of Being are joined and reconciled.

This also reveals further that as Saint Basil put it we like Moses have licence to plunder the Egyptians.  We can indeed take from and Christianise the pagan ideas and beliefs.  Paganism as a religion participated in a lower level of reality, worshipping angels and demons, rather than the Living God. 

Every level of meaning and belief participates to an extent in the Truth, insofar as it does it is good.  If it is taken as the complete Truth it becomes idolatry.  Everything is made new by the Incarnation.  pagan deities become the characters of fairy tale, the Wild Hunt of Woden is turned into the chivalric hunt of the Christian knight and the slaying of the dragon by Saint George.  All reality is transfigured by the Incarnation at Christmas and its fulfilment on Easter Day.  Death itself is revealed as an absence consequent upon the Fall.

And so, we look for completion not in a political, technological or economic progress to worldly utopia - for that will always lead to reductive ugliness, but instead we look to be transfigured by the Divine.  From Cromwell to Marx, the attempts to create heaven on earth have cut us off from Goodness, Truth and Beauty.

The whole Enlightenment project, with roots in the Reformation and earlier the nominalism of the Ockhamites, has alienated us and disenchanted the world.  Instead of finding in the beautiful a link to the Transcendent we have come to regard it with cynicism - the famous hermeneutics of suspicion, which kill our souls.  And it is these hermeneutics of suspicion that are the reason the powerful who dictate our narratives have taught us to abandon our myths, our stories and instead seek for utopia through political progress.  

While the Church has always understood the myths and customs of the world are imperfect and tarnished by sin, that is not the same as hiding an evil reality.  This though is the premise of the Enlightenment and has its roots in a Protestant rejection of Church ritual.  This pathological cynicism is the justification for Western progressivism that turns against its own myths that help us to access the mystical truth and instead forges a Faustian and Promethean world of hubristic ugliness.  It is also the reason why Christmas is so important in terms of re-enchanting the world and rediscovering the myths that help us to understand the deeper and higher realities of being human in a Fallen world that was created fundamentally as Good.