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"
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.