The essay comes at things from a confessional angle but one could easily reformulate it in a secular sense without changing the main idea. Skip to the "brief summary" at the end to save time.
And if you really want to save time, I'm going to post another thing in a little bit which will explain everything much more clearly.
In the end I conclude that self love and even self will are the correctives to all our modern intellectual vices. The good part of modernity is this discovery of subjectivity (formalized in Descartes), the bad part is antichrist, which we can read even in a non-confessional way as "denial of known truth"
I read your text, interesting. I have thought before about how the history of philosophy can be written from the point of view of this idea of confidence. This skeptical distrust about the outside world and the senses (in its modern form), or concerning the ability of the mind to grasp truth — Cartesian doubt, and later even the self itself being put into question in so-called 'post-modernity'. One can question if these things are even possibilities for the 'ancient' mind. I like how you point out that self-love only becomes an imperative in modernity, this seems very true and I hadn't thought about in such a radical manner.
IMO ancient skepticism and atheism were primitive distortions of the Socratic method of questioning (itself the earliest incidence of rational, objective, “confident” consciousness), whereas modern skepticism and atheism emerge from an excess of reason, as the natural development of reason, almost the terminus of reason. What is last in understanding is the act of understanding itself, taken as itself (seen from inside)--the very last thing one sees, from the perspective of the confident mode of seeing, is the very fatuousness /fallibility of this confidence.
And yes, I think that self love is imperative in modernity because self-hatred is endemic, even if it is not always conscious, or even about oneself as an individual. Racial / gender / religious / personal “masochism” (various forms of self hatred) are all unthinkable before modernity.
One stage which might be added is the era of naive naturalistic confidence in early-middle modernity. The invention of racism, nationalism, etc. we only have a reverse/anti-chauvinism today because the innocent implicit pre-modern chauvinism became tainted by the affect of evil when it became conscious in modernity.
This is beautiful and profound, and it is true. Thank you.
One question: is the soul that recognises itself in beauty not God? Our individual souls are mirrors of God, through which we come to contemplate the beauty of God in all created beings, and reflect that beauty in our own hearts.
Thank you for your comment, I appreciate your words.
If you ask me, whether the soul, when truly recognizing itself (i.e. NOT like Narcissus) thereby recognizes God? Simply, yes. In terms of Plotinus, there are levels to this of course.
If you ask me, whether in seeing beauty in the external, nature for example, we thereby recognize God? In a sense this is what the Platonist position is. We see something as beautiful, because in it we recognize the Idea of Beauty. And this Beauty resides with the Divine. I write about this at length in a series of texts I did on Plotinus' treatise on Beauty, if you are interested. All to be found on this substack.
Perhaps it's misleading to say, as I do at the end, that the reflective image of oneself is all another person is - or maybe it's not insofar as the other person is simply that which inspires us to better ourselves, and that we, seen as the other person, inspire others to so become better. The splitting of selfhood is then something like absolute infinity's self-scission into greater and greater infinities nonetheless always absolutely infinitely lesser absolute infinity itself and Narcissus's chief error is believing himself unable to be cut and so always being traumatized by his own tears and his own grasping. To nonetheless find the other person in Narcissus's gaze, as I state, is to see the other as ourselves as simply what we are without any hunger to stay as we are, or to possess them, or to change them. It is to know the image immortal and yet - because endlessly meaningful - meaningless.
I enjoyed your text very much, very thoughtful. I suppose we can say, from both perspectives, that Narcissus' error or his suffering is brought on by his failure to realize who he really is —the one Self—, and this creates his pain at being separated from his image. His dilemma is of his own creation, his need for love (from his image) is of his own creation, and his suffering at not being one with the image, is of his own creation. What is this creation? This is precisely the splitting of himself, which coincides with the loss of his Self. 'Seen from eternity', his image truly is himself. But Narcissus is not looking from eternity. He is trapped in a false sort of interiority, where his love of self closes him off from the world, ignorant of true interiority, where his recognition of self would open him up.
Read several of your essays and there seems to be some similarities with something I wrote:
https://8014543.substack.com/p/on-modernity
The essay comes at things from a confessional angle but one could easily reformulate it in a secular sense without changing the main idea. Skip to the "brief summary" at the end to save time.
And if you really want to save time, I'm going to post another thing in a little bit which will explain everything much more clearly.
In the end I conclude that self love and even self will are the correctives to all our modern intellectual vices. The good part of modernity is this discovery of subjectivity (formalized in Descartes), the bad part is antichrist, which we can read even in a non-confessional way as "denial of known truth"
I read your text, interesting. I have thought before about how the history of philosophy can be written from the point of view of this idea of confidence. This skeptical distrust about the outside world and the senses (in its modern form), or concerning the ability of the mind to grasp truth — Cartesian doubt, and later even the self itself being put into question in so-called 'post-modernity'. One can question if these things are even possibilities for the 'ancient' mind. I like how you point out that self-love only becomes an imperative in modernity, this seems very true and I hadn't thought about in such a radical manner.
IMO ancient skepticism and atheism were primitive distortions of the Socratic method of questioning (itself the earliest incidence of rational, objective, “confident” consciousness), whereas modern skepticism and atheism emerge from an excess of reason, as the natural development of reason, almost the terminus of reason. What is last in understanding is the act of understanding itself, taken as itself (seen from inside)--the very last thing one sees, from the perspective of the confident mode of seeing, is the very fatuousness /fallibility of this confidence.
And yes, I think that self love is imperative in modernity because self-hatred is endemic, even if it is not always conscious, or even about oneself as an individual. Racial / gender / religious / personal “masochism” (various forms of self hatred) are all unthinkable before modernity.
One stage which might be added is the era of naive naturalistic confidence in early-middle modernity. The invention of racism, nationalism, etc. we only have a reverse/anti-chauvinism today because the innocent implicit pre-modern chauvinism became tainted by the affect of evil when it became conscious in modernity.
This is beautiful and profound, and it is true. Thank you.
One question: is the soul that recognises itself in beauty not God? Our individual souls are mirrors of God, through which we come to contemplate the beauty of God in all created beings, and reflect that beauty in our own hearts.
Thank you for your comment, I appreciate your words.
If you ask me, whether the soul, when truly recognizing itself (i.e. NOT like Narcissus) thereby recognizes God? Simply, yes. In terms of Plotinus, there are levels to this of course.
If you ask me, whether in seeing beauty in the external, nature for example, we thereby recognize God? In a sense this is what the Platonist position is. We see something as beautiful, because in it we recognize the Idea of Beauty. And this Beauty resides with the Divine. I write about this at length in a series of texts I did on Plotinus' treatise on Beauty, if you are interested. All to be found on this substack.
I'd be interested in any commentary you have on this post of mine: https://artworksgod.substack.com/p/delusions-of-reference-open-individualism
Perhaps it's misleading to say, as I do at the end, that the reflective image of oneself is all another person is - or maybe it's not insofar as the other person is simply that which inspires us to better ourselves, and that we, seen as the other person, inspire others to so become better. The splitting of selfhood is then something like absolute infinity's self-scission into greater and greater infinities nonetheless always absolutely infinitely lesser absolute infinity itself and Narcissus's chief error is believing himself unable to be cut and so always being traumatized by his own tears and his own grasping. To nonetheless find the other person in Narcissus's gaze, as I state, is to see the other as ourselves as simply what we are without any hunger to stay as we are, or to possess them, or to change them. It is to know the image immortal and yet - because endlessly meaningful - meaningless.
I enjoyed your text very much, very thoughtful. I suppose we can say, from both perspectives, that Narcissus' error or his suffering is brought on by his failure to realize who he really is —the one Self—, and this creates his pain at being separated from his image. His dilemma is of his own creation, his need for love (from his image) is of his own creation, and his suffering at not being one with the image, is of his own creation. What is this creation? This is precisely the splitting of himself, which coincides with the loss of his Self. 'Seen from eternity', his image truly is himself. But Narcissus is not looking from eternity. He is trapped in a false sort of interiority, where his love of self closes him off from the world, ignorant of true interiority, where his recognition of self would open him up.