Only Subjects Experience Spiritual Truth; Spiritual Truth Resides Only in Subjects

10/6/2022

Ultimate truth is spiritual. This implies that reality is spiritual. The only way to discover this truth and reality is to experience it for yourself -- personally and directly. This implies that spiritual truth is subjective rather than objective.

Objective truth resides in reason, logic, concepts, abstractions, and ideas. Although knowledge attained through reason is accessible and, to varying degrees, true, it is also structurally flawed.

It's primary flaw rests in its need to control and cram reality into categories of requisite "truths". Controlling and cramming reality into such categories renders truth "objective". Once an objective truth has been established, it can be readily exploited and dominated via reasoning, science, society, or technology.

Objective reasoning inevitably looks for and focuses on "required" truths -- truths that are deemed necessary and indispensable. Consequently, objective reasoning ignores or neglects vast swathes of Creation and cannot fully come to terms with the fundamental spiritual truth of reality.

The spiritual foundations of reality are freedom and love, both of which can only be achieved by a subject, subjectively, at the deepest parts of inner being.

Objective reason detaches itself from what it seeks to know in order to objectify it. Subjective knowing moves in the opposite direction. It does not seek knowledge as an object of thought, but yearns to participate in that which it yearns to know.

Subjective knowing aims to know and understand at the depths of inner being. It seeks to know existentially. Thus, freedom and love can only be experienced subjectively. The truth inherent in freedom and love can only be understood from the inner depths of one's whole being.

Objective knowledge is considered superior because it is impersonal, but an impersonal way of knowing cannot fully grasp the reality of spirit, which is fundamentally personal.

For this reason, objective reality does not and cannot really exist. What exists instead is the objectification of reality -- the making of the personal into the impersonal -- the substitution of reality with symbols of reality.

The object then, is not reality, but a representation of reality. The object is not reality because it is not spiritual. It is not free and it cannot love.

Only the subject is reality. The subject is reality because the subject is being and not merely representation of being. The subject is spirit; it is free and it can love.

Those who demand evidence based on the objective reality of the "real world" insist on nothing more than symbols of reality. These objects may point to spiritual truths, but they are not spiritual truths in and of themselves.

13 Comments

george smythy

10/6/2022 22:03:32

This is as wrong as the inverse. There is both. There is physical truth and spiritual truth. Matter is not made of spirit nor is spirit made of matter. You've fallen into the error of Eastern philosophies that deny the reality of this world and say "all is brahman" or "all is emptiness." Spiritual truth can only be known via the soul and physical truth is apparent from the world itself. That a man has a penis and a woman a vagina, which they had from birth and not a prosthetic made in a lab, is truth, and it is a physical objective truth. The Eastern philosophy, Buddhistic notion of truth as spirit only would lead to rejecting this truth...not that Buddha or the early generation rejected it but that is because they didn't follow through the "truth is only spiritual, only subjective" line of thinking to its illogical conclusion. The first atheist materialists also did not arrive at the rejection of the spiritual truth that a fake vagina created in a lab does not a woman make, because they had not yet rejected the spiritual dimension of truth, but the modern ones have. To have real actual truth you must have both the spiritual truth and physical truth, because truth in this world is made of both together not one by itself.

Francis Berger

10/6/2022 23:04:50

@ george smythy - I'm not sure where all the disagreement is coming from.

Perhaps it's from the physical/spiritual truth dichotomy you introduced into the mix. I make no mention of that in the post. I focus on ways of knowing reality - objective vs subjective.

Epimetheus

10/6/2022 23:29:41

Objects are static. Subjects (persons) are dynamic. If ultimate reality includes all persons and their relationships, there cannot be a final objective knowledge of ultimate reality, because subjects are dynamic. That must be why the Bible talks about walking with God rather than knowing him as a static object.

10/7/2022 07:43:43

@ Epimetheus - Yes, that is more in line with what I was getting at, especially the point about ultimate reality including all persons and their relationships, which I would expand to include all beings.

bruce g charlton

10/7/2022 08:03:16

"Objects are static."...

From my perspective, I would put it differently. There are no 'objects' (in the usually understood sense) but only Beings (and parts of beings) - and primordial, unknowable, chaos.

What we think of as 'objects' are 'abstractions' - which exist in the thinking of beings.

So the distinction that Epi is talking about could better be rendered as God as a Being, versus God as an Abstraction of ourselves as beings.

God as an Abstraction is wrong, because it does not seek a relationship between Beings.

It is confused; because we are making an abstraction then trying to relate to that abstraction as if it was a Being... But an abstraction is not a viable and relatable Being, but only a model of a Being (simplified, distorted, incomplete).

It is analogous to trying to have a good/ alive/ ongoing personal relationship with your wife while regarding her as 'a woman'; or with your son while he is being considered as 'a son'.

If we try to relate to (the Being of) God as if he actually, truly was a collection of abstract attributes; we will Not be able to relate to God as the person, the Being, that God is.

10/7/2022 08:38:56

@ Bruce - Yes, that is exactly what I am getting at. I suspect you know that I am responding to Alan Roebuck's stubborn obtuseness concerning all of this, which is why I asked him pointedly if he believe God to be an object or a subject. He responded with the following:

"By “object,” I mean something that exists. And whose existence can be known. If God does not exist, reality cannot be what it is, because God is the source of all being."

What Alan doesn't seem to get is that his concept of God as object (and this object-God as the foundation of reality) is not analogous with his insistence that this object-God exists and that knowing this object God is synonymous with knowing reality. As you state, this is relating to the abstraction (the model of Being) rather than Being.

I don't understand why this is so difficult to grasp.

No, I rescind that. I do understand why it is so difficult, but this understanding brings me little in the way of comfort.

ben

10/7/2022 16:51:48

Maybe it could be said that a being can be known whereas an object can be only believed in. And so an object would be just a building block for a model, like a number or something. The object would only exist in the thinking of a being.

There I go setting up an object-constructed model...

10/7/2022 20:34:22

@ ben - Yes, and thinking of beings instead of relating to beings is a big part of what we do in mortal life, but I think a part of spiritual learning involves extending beyond this mode of thinking whenever possible. Every time we do, we are immersed in reality rather than in abstractions about reality.

lea

10/8/2022 05:47:47

'The map is not the terrain' - Also 'The observed is not moved without the observer'.

Sorry to fall back on bathroom tiles even though these are of the highest quality ;)

It took 20 years of preparation, albeit without a plan, to come to a point where i studied ontology for 3 days and concluded a rather large majority of thoughts and writings on the subject are literally disconnected from tangible reality. The fact that we can imagine a universe in complete inertia does not mean it is ever a point of relevant discussion, but i digress.

In retrospect i connected some of the related discussions to Algis Uzdavinys mindblowingly dense 'Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity', which in the first 15 pages makes a compelling case for philosophy as a way of life, rather then an intellectual exercise, as well as deeply spiritual mechanism.

As they say that 95% of magic is psychology, it all comes down to belief systems. If we believe in the blank and empty universe made 'joyful' by science, because your particles will make a star at some point, but then entropy ends everything, i can imagine its hard to cheer for. Yet people have their hopes pined on the new religion of technology.

Gunther

10/8/2022 22:23:12

I see no difficulty.

If God is Subject, and God is also the ground of all being, then that means the entire universe is ensouled and alive :)

Which is no more than what humanity has always assumed before modern times!

Certainly, the goal is to participate in God, and not merely to know about him - to encounter him, to know him through contact. A completely different thing than objective knowledge that can be put into words or mental categories.

But since God is not a mere being among beings, not a mere entity among entities - even the most powerful of which can only be a sort of superhero, and not the infinite ground of everything and the Good as such that our hearts yearn for - knowing God through direct contact entails participation in the sense of becoming part of, not standing outside of and recognizing from the outside, as we do with other people who we encounter as subjects.

10/9/2022 09:58:09

@ Gunther - Good comment. The entire universe is ensouled and alive, and reality consists of the relationships between beings, but this is impossible to decipher from the perspective of objectivization.

Berdyaev states that God yearns for his other. I take this to mean that He is a subject seeking communion with another subject. Trads treat idea as putting man on equal footing with God, but this is a misinterpretation. Two subjects meeting does not imply "equality". It merely implies the possibility for communion and cooperation between the divine and the human.

10/9/2022 15:06:39

Yes, I agree - "objectivization" means precisely to treat something as lacking subjectivity, as being without an interior life, without intentionality.

Such a proposition cannot be proven, and thus must always be an "ideological commitment" - a choice to view the world that way, although it ultimately cannot explain what we know about how the world works and is thus incoherent. (Intentionality seems baked into the cake)

Fascinatingly, many current philosophers of mind, and philosophical materialists in general, are actually beginning to claim that humans have no "qualia" - no emotions, sensations, feelings, no pain, no pleasure, no joy, no sadness, no intentionality, no desire, no will - and that it is all illusion and we are really just dead material objects!

Having denied subjectivity to the whole non-human world, the logical end point for materialists is to deny it to humans!

In a way this project is "heroic" in it's ferocious consistency and refusal to question it's assumptions in the face of absurdist consequences - clearly, "qualia" are irreducibly self evident "ontological primitives", so basic and obvious a fact of our cognitive engagement with reality that they constitute building blocks of our thinking, without which further thought is impossible.

Yet this level of insanity is where we have gotten ourselves to as a culture :)

Perhaps we should be optimistic - after all, it's been said "the only way out is through". In this case, the materialist premise must be applied with terrifying consistency to every last redoubt of life and thought, until it's absurdist implications become so overwhelming that we finally transcend it.

As for God yearning for the "other", indeed that seems right to me - just as we yearn for God, and nothing short of him will satisfy our restless hearts. And all our subordinate relationships are an effort to participate in the Ultimate Relationship.

It's been said God "created us for him", and nothing less will satisfy us.

The traditional idea of "theosis", as far as I understand, involves a relationship that maintains our individuality while at the same time "participating" in God in a way that goes beyond mere "encounter" (of two utterly distinct subjects), but into a sort of sharing of identity (we have a spark of the Divine in us) without loss of individuality.

As proper with all discussions of the Divine, who is beyond all our mental categories, there is a necessary residual mystery here :) As it should be - and all our "ideas" of God can only be approximations.

My understanding, also, is that notions of "equality" and superior and inferior will lose meaning in the Divinely transfigured world that is coming, where our innate "godhood" so to speak flowers into full fruition.

Well, my apologies for this long and drawn out comment!

10/9/2022 22:14:18

@ Gunther - "Well, my apologies for this long and drawn out comment!"

No apologies necessary.You have provided much food for thought. I hope to respond to some of what you have outlined here in future posts because I believe this line of thinking is incredibly important going forward.

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Only Subjects Experience Spiritual Truth; Spiritual Truth Resides Only in Subjects

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