Not Objectivity but Annihilation

Reject the View from Nowhere. Embrace the View from Everywhere.

Table of Contents:

1. The Wager and the Promise

2. The Sound of Falling Trees

3. I have no need for that Hypothesis

4. What Higher Objectivity is Not: New Ageism, Postmodernism

5. Towards a Higher Objectivity

6. Collisions with Reality

7. What does it mean to know?

8. Indications and Hallmarks

9. A brief note on Annihilation

10. Appendix: Desiderata for an Epistemology

11. Appendix: the best Intentions

---

---

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" — TS Eliot

“Knowledge that does not lead you to God is ignorance, even if it appears to be knowledge…. Perhaps knowledge is granted to you, but wisdom withheld.” — Al Iskandari, the Book of Wisdom

The Wager and the Promise

Considering the inescapable need to interpret Reality, let us think a bit about epistemic standards. What are the standards by which interpretation is currently undertaken? Where might they be lacking?¹

With roots in Pythagorean Geometry, passing through Christian moral universalism, finding fuller expression in Newton’s declaration of the universality of the Laws of Motion and culminating ultimately in the dualism of the Enlightenment Project, objectivity is the defining standard by which truthhood is currently ascertained.

What do we mean by objectivity?

Objectivity is formally defined as the extent to which a description of an aspect of Reality (i.e. a truth) is independent of any particular mind, such that the truth holds for anyone, not merely for someone (the subject).²

The wager I make here is that modernity’s understanding of objectivity has gradually grown insufficient, and ultimately been deracinated entirely. As Eliot notes, the wisdom we once sought in reality has decayed to knowledge, and ultimately withered to mere information. The consequences of this, of course, range from the meaninglessness, the loneliness, the instrumentality, and the ugliness of modern life.

I propose here, an alternative: one that does not pit mysticism contra reason, refuses to wallow in the sea of meaningless subjectivity, but also which ideally culminates in the transformation of the subject in the pursuit of Reality.

The problem is not the methods of science, but the desanctification of the scientist.

The Sound of Falling Trees

Objectivity is the aspiration to transcend one’s own perspective. It is the bracketing of the features of your experience that don’t necessarily follow from the truth you’re evaluating. i.e. the process of detachment, generality and abstraction. Objectivity is the aspirational “view from nowhere”³.

“If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?”

Importantly, objectivity as conceived of in the post-Enlightenment period presupposes a kind of mind-matter dualism taken for granted post Descartes that presupposes that the facts and objects of Reality are entirely divorced from the mind that perceives them. Knowledge then becomes no more than the accuracy of the mechanistic representation of material reality in the mind of the subject. I will call this understanding of objectivity lower objectivity (bear with me).

I will call higher objectivity the practice by which transcendence (verticality) is subsequently followed by immanence (manifestation), i.e. by which one not only seeks to ascertain how something works independently of me, not only, why it works this way independently of me, but also what does this mean for me?

This immanence is not an acknowledgement of inescapable subjectivity, it is rather an act of agency: the fundamental transformation of both self and illusion.

Once essence (principle) is discovered from form (transcendence), i.e. the signs that comprise sensate reality are interpreted, then this knowledge must transform both the sign and the interpreter. Both sign and interpreter are, to greater degree, identifiable with the principle.

Said plainly: the critical feature of higher objectivity is that all understanding must necessarily have an impact on who you are and to make you something else. It demands both existential and moral alignment. It is the discernment and apprehension of moral value from Reality’s self-disclosure.

This is the nature of the distinction between ilm and m’arifa.

“Education is not putting knowledge into souls…but rather turning the soul from a day that is like night to the true day.” — Plato, the Republic, 518c

“Wisdom is not knowledge alone…it is inevitably bound up with character.” — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI

“Do not go outward; return within yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.” — St. Augustine, De Vera Religione

“Learning without thought is labor lost” — Confucius, the Analects

“It is better for wisdom to enter through the heart, than through the tongue.” — Al Iskandari, The Book of Wisdom

“Knowledge that is not lived is a burden on the back.” — Rumi, Masnavi

“Whoever knows himself knows his Lord.” — Ibn Arabi, Fusus al Hikam

“You have read thousands of books, but have you read thy self?” — Attar, the Conference of the Birds

“The intellect binds, while unveiling liberates” — Ibn Arabi

I have no need for that hypothesis

Napoleon "'M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.”
Laplace: “I have no need of that hypothesis.”

Before we study lower and higher objectivity further, we note that all this begs the question: why did our epistemic standards shift? Why did our notion of objectivity eventually result in the fracture I’m describing?

We chalk this down to 3 distinct factors:

1. Lower objectivity ultimately prioritises quantification, replicability, and control, properties that are materially advantageous in an industrialising Europe⁴. A participatory epistemic standard akin to higher objectivity, if lazily conceived, blurs subject-object distinctions, and introduces context sensitivity to knowledge, obscuring the standardisation and legibility that modern polities demand.

2. Lower objectivity outcompeted other epistemic standards as a result of overgeneralising from the spectacular success of Newtonian science.⁵

3. Higher objectivity is frankly just hard, and involves an abrogation of the self on contact with Reality. It requires receptivity (humility), verticality and the subsequent reintegration of this disclosure of the Real back into the self. It requires a transformation of the self.

To clarify: it’s easier to ask how something works, than to ask why it works, and harder still to ask “what does that why mean for me?”

This is the intuition behind TS Eliot’s distinction between wisdom (reintegrated verticality), knowledge (verticality), and information (horizontality).

Napoleon: “Ah! But it is a fine hypothesis, explaining many things.” (referring to the Divine, in response to Laplace)

What Higher Objectivity is Not

There are two things to be wary of here.

Firstly, it is absolutely critical here that we not devolve into a kind of “boundless” subjective mush where all attempts at determining Reality are reduced to expressions of power or social constructions a la the postmodernists. This is even worse than the lower objectivity, since if modern science and objectivity aims at a kind of transcendence without return (i.e. incomplete-ness), postmodernism gives up on Reality altogether, doubling down on illusion, and insufficiency. In this frame, since we can’t separate the ego from Reality, we pick the ego and reject Reality. (This is why postmodern discourse is so inherently political, where politics is construed not as the just ordering of society, but the exercise of and abuse of power at every level of abstraction, from Bourdieu’s symbolic violence to Foucault’s ideological domestication to plain physical violence.)⁶

This is precisely contra the project, since this absolutises illusions, conflates form for essence, and only cements fundamental alienation from the Real. This is a great evil.

Secondly, it is also critical to remain disciplined and resist the lazy impulse to say “everything is connected” or “we are all one” or “everything is love”. The lack of sufficient clarity here about what constitutes appropriate epistemic standards and hygiene, i.e. what is really Real as opposed to what is just our egos projecting onto Reality results in three unwanted outcomes:

1. While there may well be an enhanced appreciation for Reality, there are no consequent actionable norms that necessarily entail from mushy ideas. There is simply the passive and useless acceptance of the difficulty of interpreting Reality. This is an admission of defeat.

2. This may well result in even further confusion since the lack of standards about what constitutes cogent interpretations could well lead to us being led astray by our own impulses and what is natively salient to us, only doubling down on our biases and illusions.

3. Following from 1, the lack of even an attempt at rigour results in the impossibility of standardisation, predictability, engineering and useful endeavour. This is why so many people who say “everything is love” or “we are all one” are suspicious of all technology and order in society, because that’s the only coherent continuation of their worldview: one that abnegates all useful activity.

All this is why so much New Age spirituality and science sounds like bullshit - because, despite good intentions, it really is.

Towards a higher Objectivity

The fundamental claim here is that the modern epistemic standard is not wrong, but rather that, while necessary, it remains deeply insufficient.

The pursuit of lower objectivity seeks to eliminate the subject as best it can: to de-personalise, atomise, and reduce Reality. There is an epistemic evacuation here: the belief that knowledge must become more Real as the knower disappears. Of course, precisely the opposite takes place. Reality is never diminished, we are.

Lower objectivity’s impulse to transcend the self is noble insofar as it attempts to ameliorate the particular in favour of the Principled, but remains fundamentally incomplete without reintegration downwards into the self. The self must expand in order to accommodate principle accordingly. To be Insan al Kamil is not simply to be perfect: it is also to be complete, to become more.

Knowledge and man are completed in fact by virtue of participation (i.e. manifestation or instantiation), lest it render itself fundamentally alienating.⁷

What are the consequences of this alienation? Two that immediately spring to mind:

1. Wisdom is reduced to data, a collection of arbitrary propositions that describe efficient causes in a random universe without meaning, purpose, or point. We remain divorced from Being itself, in denial of the very deepest, noblest impulse of all creation, that of coming to terms with one’s telos. This is not simply death, it is Death.⁸
   
   “A man with a why can endure any how” — Nietzsche
   It follows, then, that the modern man without any why can’t endure anything at all.

2. In the absence of meaning, i.e. the Real’s reintegration into the subject and through him into material reality, impulse, drive and will do not disappear, neither does this bastardised knowledge either. It is instrumentalised instead in service of baser ends (themselves meaningless, but sufficiently deep to obscure their meaninglessness). Our objectivity is doomed to become simply the horizontal reduction of aspects of particular reality, it is the attempt to ascertain mechanism, to categorise, and to find efficient, rather than ultimate, causes.⁹

   
   Consider the study of aerodynamics and chemistry in service of ballistics itself in service of the projection of national power. Why do we want to project power? We don’t know. Consider the study of economics in service of financial investment, itself in service of the acquisition of wealth. Why do we want to obtain wealth? We don’t know.

   
   This is the Idolatry of the Instrument. This is the Golden Calf.

To the doomed modern man, means become ends. These illusory ends are like a bright lamp shining overhead. Are these illusory ends meaningful? Yes, but only if you don’t think about it too much, so long as you don’t look at it head-on, lest you recognise it is simply a lamp and not the Sun.

Collisions with Reality

The modern identity is predicated on the notion that:

1. I am a neutral observer

2. My beliefs don’t fundamentally change who I am

3. The Truth is independent of, and has no bearing on, my character¹⁰

Lower objectivity springs from this, assuming a fundamental safety: I can look at the world without the world looking back. I can touch truth without being touched by it. Knowledge here, like wealth, is an asset, something to manipulate, store, trade, and instrumentalise.¹¹

However, if the world is ultimately symbolic in the strict sense we have argued, if contingent beings are all signs that borrow their being, then this is not merely an incomplete psychology. It is a false epistemic standard.

Meaning is not dyadic, but triadic: sign-source-interpretant. Once we accept the interpretant, a new possibility appears, and with it, a new demand:

Truths are not merely true about objects, they’re also true about you - they implicate you. This is the distinction between lower and higher objectivity.

Lower objectivity asks of the sign: “What is this?” and is satisfied with a description. Higher objectivity asks further: “So what?” and cannot permit the knower to remain intact as is.

This is not intended to be mere moralisation, so we attempt formal definition:

Definition: We define the collision of a subject with a truth technically when the truth is apprehended as self-involving such that the interpretant undergoes a non-optional update in salience, evaluative priors, and practical identity, subsequently followed by return (i.e. alteration in attention and conduct). Where no such update occurs, the subject possesses at most a proposition (data), not knowledge.

This also clarifies what higher objectivity is not. It’s not simply expertise, since that can increase resolution without increasing Reality. The distinction is really between:

1. Technical competence: the manipulation of symbols, predictive power, cogent classification, and

2. Epistemic integration: allowing what the symbols refer to to transform the interpreter

What does it mean to know?

We regularly say, “I know” when what we really mean is “I can state”. What do I mean by this?

1. Lower knowing: assent to a proposition P, the ability to recite P, P stored and manipulated as information

2. Higher knowing: P taken up into the interpretant such that salience reconfigures (i.e. the return occurs). P becomes a constraint on and/or an opportunity for life.

Higher knowing necessarily entails transformation. If transformation does not occur, the truth has not been known in the only sense that really matters, regardless of what the subject can or cannot profess.

This is not sentiment, it’s simply a natural corollary of the triadic nature of meaning: if the interpretant remains unchanged, the sign has not been interpreted, it has merely been scanned or memorised.

For a simple, but fundamental example: think about what it means to be in love. Nobody can state or argue propositionally for why they’re in love or even what this love means. They can discuss love’s downstream effects on behaviour, biology and lifestyle, but it is the knowledge of one’s love that entails the material changes, the material changes are not what love is.

This is additionally why akrasia, addiction, habits, fear, social pressure, depression, time-inconsistency in the face of clear objective knowledge are simply diagnostics for how so very much of modern knowledge is lower.

Lower objectivity is an epistemic technology for the reproduction, and manipulation of propositions while fundamentally insulating the self from what they mean. Higher objectivity is the courage and willingness to collide with Reality instead.

As stated in “Only when a Man dies, does he awake”, this is decidedly not simply a question of personal preference or inherent subjectivity. Higher objectivity is constrained by the following 4 Criteria:

1. ontologically: symbols can disclose only what is capable of accounting for their being, not whatever the interpreter happens to impose. (A chair can be seen for its “chair-ness”, not its “table-ness”, for there is none.)

2. semiotically: meaning is triadic (sign, source, interpretant), and interpretations that are false fail to transform the interpreter in ways that deepen intelligibility, coherence, and orientation.

3. existentially: ascent without return fractures life, and interpretations that cannot be reintegrated into attention, action, and conduct thereby disqualify themselves. Interpretation must result in positive activity (either appreciative or determinative).

4. aesthetically: as Scruton notes, “The Truth is hard to pin down, Justice is complicated to enact, but Beauty is immediately graspable.” He’s correct to note that our aesthetic impulses carry with them both moral as well as epistemic (and I’d argue, ontological) implications. Beauty is Truth’s smoking gun.

Hallmarks, and Examples

Given all this, let’s consider further what the hallmarks or indications of higher objectivity really are.:

1. Attention is exposure (semiotic discipline)
   Simone Weil’s attention is the refusal to protect the ego to premature closure, the refusal to absolutise signs to their sources. Lower objectivity uses attention like a spotlight: extract, reduce, manipulate. Higher objectivity uses attention like a gateway instead: receive, endure, transform.
   
   This is the key insight underpinning all apophatic descriptions of Reality, everything from:

   1. Zen’s Mushin (no-mind)

   2. Eckhart’s Abgeschiedenheit (detachment)

   3. Ibn Arabi’s “I see Him through Him”

   4. Advaita Vedanta’s Neti-Neti (not this, not that)

   
   This isn’t just poetry: it’s an injunction to preclude premature absolutisation, and instead to persist and continue to attempt to expose yourself to and collide with Reality.
   

2. Transformation as Criterion (existential entailment)
   As highlighted above in the definition of collision with truth, if the truth does not necessarily entail a reordering of your loves, time, posture, conduct, then it has not really been understood.
   
   This is the nature of the difference between knowing something in your mind, and knowing something in your soul. This is the nature of all conversion experiences and Road to Damascus moments.
   “To truly know is to be moved in being.” — Mulla Sadra
   

3. Beauty as Diagnostic (aesthetic constraint)
   Beauty is not a bug, as in lower objectivity that threatens the sterility and detachment of the experiment or analysis. It’s a feature - the epistemic register of the Absolute.¹² (A word of caution here: that which appears beautiful by itself is not necessarily true. It is easy to be seduced by glamour and propaganda. We distinguish here between beauty that deepens coherence and adopts a moral weight over time, rather than simple hedonism.)
   
   Beauty here is not ornamental: it is the experiential sign that mind and reality have momentarily aligned. None of this collapses into the sloppy claim that “the truth is whatever we feel.” The point is almost the opposite: higher objectivity disciplines feeling by disciplining attention, so that feeling becomes responsive to Reality rather than projective onto it. Think not about invention. Think about discovery, instead.

Let’s now consider some examples of what I mean here.

1. The Smoker’s Paradox
   Every smoker “knows” that smoking is bad for your health. The proposition is available, the evidence is absolutely overwhelming, and yet very many never quit or even try.
   
   This shows the difference between truth held as information (lower), like a file stored in the mind, and truth undergone as verdict (higher), which becomes both a constraint that totally reorders your salience, and an opportunity to elevate life.
   
   At that point, quitting is not some heroic decision: it’s simply the only coherent continuation of the self. If the person can recite the truth and still live as though it were irrelevant, then the truth is not known: their self has not expanded to accommodate it.
   

2. The Unreasonable Intelligibility of Nature
   When a mathematician experiences the inevitability of a proof, or a physicist confronts the intelligibility of nature, awe springs up, not simply as feeling, but as the recognition of asymmetry: you are a witness to and not an author of Reality. (This, of course, is the nature of the Shahadah.)
   
   Lower objectivity writes this off as noise, at best a by-product of the positive selection effects of coherent mental models. Higher objectivity instead recognises this as the interpreter registering Reality’s priority over the self.
   
   This recognition of priority is not merely descriptive, it is normative. It places you under obligation: fidelity, humility, respect, and ultimately gratitude. To deny this is not to remain “objective”, quite the contrary, it is to relapse into fantasies of ultimate, rather than simply instrumental, control over Reality so rife in the post-Enlightenment age.
   
   “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” — Albert Einstein
   

3. I-Thou Encounters
   Buber makes an interesting point here: thinking of the signs you’re interpreting as “I” interacting with “It” is a way of insulating the self, of absolutising the aspect of the sign you’re interacting with.
   
   One must instead attempt to reframe our interactions with the signs of reality as “I” interacting with “Thou”. This is not just anthopomorphisation or sentimentality, it is an attempt to draw on the native drive for empathy and identification within us to collide with and dialogue with Reality. The source of the sign under interpretation is conceived of as a whole, as having value, and that disclosure comes with demands on the subject himself. (Of course, we must be disciplined here not to devolve into lazy pantheism.)

   
   “It”s don’t talk back. “Thou”s do.
   Reality is in fact attempting to communicate with you, all we need to do is pay attention.
   

4. Falling in Love/Friendship
   Returning to the example offered earlier, nothing clarifies the distinction between lower and higher knowing faster than falling in love.
   

   Lower objectivity can talk about love: hormones, incentives, pair-bonding, attachment, compatibility, generating clean explanations leaving the knower fundamentally untouched. But love is not a proposition you acquire. It is a transformation you undertake.
   

   To fall in love is to suffer a dramatic and profound reordering of salience. The beloved stops being an it—a manageable object in your field of view—and becomes a thou: a disclosure that implicates the interpretant. The semiotic claim becomes concrete: the sign does not merely inform; it transforms. Reality touches back. The collision and its entailment is unforgiving. Love is higher knowing precisely because it makes the old self so painful and difficult to inhabit. The lover must become something new.

   
   Friendship has comparable structure, and this is why friendship has always served as an example of an intrinsic good contra naive utilitarianism: a friend is not a means. A friend is a claim. If you can treat him as expendable without inner contradiction, then he is not a friend but an instrument. Ergo, love and friendship are not simply “private feelings”, but collisions with Reality instead.
   

5. Ritual Sacrifice
   The man of higher knowing does not see different things. He sees the same things after collision, after the interpretant has been remade such that the sign becomes stably transparent to its source.

   
   To the sleeper, a tree is lumber, scenery, a carbon sink, a node in the ecological graph, and a source of wood. To the awake, the tree is a contingent being borrowing existence from the Absolute, it is not simply a datum, but disclosure. It demands appreciation, respect, gratitude,
   
   This is also the nature of the distinction between killing an animal, and its ritual sacrifice. The former is detached, the latter is personal, intimate, transformative. The physical act could well be identical, but this tacit, implicit transformation of the self that takes place with the slaughter is what distinguishes meat that is forbidden, from that which is permissible.
   

This is what I mean by return: not ascent that abandons the world, but ascent that transfigures it. The sign remains the sign. The world remains the world. But the interpretant no longer treats the world as inert. The illusion becomes an enduring reminder of its source, of Being itself.

Lower objectivity produces correct descriptions while keeping the self safe. Higher objectivity is the courageous refusal of that safety. It is truth as entailment: self-involving reality becoming non-optional, reorganising salience, and forcing return.

This is why genuine learning does not feel like accumulation. It feels like conversion: again and again.

A staccato of small deaths: each time an old salience order collapses, each time a new world becomes livable. It is to realise that you are always on the Road to Damascus.

The view from nowhere is a method for handling signs without being handled, an ossification of the ego that obscures the nature of the signs’ sources. The view from everywhere is what happens when that evasion fails: when the ego is allowed to be destroyed and rebuilt at every moment, when the Real is allowed to flow.

Reject the view from nowhere. Embrace the view from everywhere.

A brief note on Annihilation

Modern lower objectivity may thus be understood as a perversion of fanaa (Self-Annihilation): it preserves the discipline and discloses the impulse of self-effacement while severing the self fundamentally from reintegration in the Real.

Where fanaa seeks to annihilate the ego in order to resituate the knower indelibly within the fabric of Being itself, the drive to lower objectivity instead annihilates the knower altogether. The goal is not Being; it’s oblivion.

Reality is fundamentally disclosed through the convergence of differentiated (often diametrically opposed) perspectives, not their elimination. Don’t think subtraction. Think saturation.¹³

Don’t remove the self. Expand it.
Reject the view from nowhere. Embrace the view from everywhere.

---

Appendix: Desiderata for an Epistemology

In a sense, what I am proposing here and looking for is a kind of post-Kantian realism. One that attempts to resuscitate the possibility of direct contact with reality via intuition rather than simply propositional manipulation. This is what I mean by verticality.

Following the largely abstract arguments above, the higher objectivity I refer to here becomes increasingly necessary when you recognise that:

1. Values matter

2. Attention shapes perception: one must spend more time thinking about why than how: more important than the optimisation is defining the objective function

3. Knowing ought to turn being towards Being

Furthermore, I’m uninterested in aesthetic posturing, but rather, in the synthesis, fundamentally, of analytic thought and rigour with the mystical and contemplative traditions.

Part of this is inevitably going to be an acknowledgement of the inescapability of the moral dimensions of understanding, something often intuited and easily conflated for pure subjectivity. There is an extreme risk here of devolving into “new-age” skepticism about science and its successes, talk of “quantum physics”, “ecological webs of interconnectivity”, and ultimately an aesthetic posturing about how beautiful and connected everything is and how it’s all one, how important love is, and that this is enough.

No, this is a grave and severe risk. I don’t want you feeling good and throwing up your hands. I want you feeling moral duty, falling in love with Reality, and importantly finding it impossible to distinguish between the two.

This is not enough, the new perspective needs to be both rigorous enough to be propositionally communicable (contingent perhaps on certain metaphysical commitments), but also philosophically, scientifically, ethically, socially fecund and useful, and it ought to be the case that with the appropriate frame, the pursuit of the view from everywhere cannot help but be fecund. A necessary consequence of facilitating Reality’s self-disclosure. Identity, co-creation, love. It is necessarily “hermeneutic”.

---

Appendix: the best Intentions

This aspect of Modernity has been much maligned in recent history. The issue has never been the pursuit of the objective, the universal, the Truth. In many ways, this pursuit was revivalist and holy insofar as it recentred the goals of human activity towards transcendental objectives. In this respect, modernity was sacred.

Historically, the focus on the transcendental was not (and could not) have been problematic since it was mediated by the Christian love for and desire to ascertain the Divine. What appears like “lower objectivity” or desire for detached universality on the part of Newton now, was at the time conditioned by their religious impulse, and did in fact result in a transformation of their souls, the knowledge did, in fact, have spiritual and ethical implications.

But just as history hollows itself out, and the disenchantment of Reality qua secularism unfolded, this impulse for objectivity, no longer tempered by a feel for the Sacred, grew timid, tepid, and eventually was doomed to become instrumentalised in service of first social (qua colonialism) and ultimately material (qua corporatism) aims. This is the subserviation of a noble impulse for lower ends. (Social and material ends are not at all bad. The issue is putting the cart before the horse.)

We are living at the end of that period.

1. This essay now predominantly concerns the epistemology of the modern world, the primary standard and mechanism by which knowledge is apprehended and the “truth” judged.

2. This, no doubt, is why Plato elevated Geometry so highly among the fields of knowledge

3. See Nagel, The View from Nowhere

4. Consider the social and political technologies that characterise modernity: ballistics, engineering, national bureaucracies, and markets. For more on the dialogue between material and ideological phenomena, see Matter and Spirit.

5. It’s worth highlighting the great distinction between Newton’s own approach to the Divine and that of subsequent thinkers enamoured with Newton but who dispensed with the Divine like Voltaire or Diderot. Maybe it really is as Starkey notes: “all the worst ideas are French.”

6. Yeah, okay, maybe all bad ideas really are French.

7. A man who is complete is a man capable of manifesting (or participating in) all of the fundamental principles that constitute or give rise to Reality.

8. A man’s life is a means. His telos is its end. We mourn the loss of a man’s life, how ought we to react to the loss of his purpose?

9. This is McGilchrist’s left-brained ascendancy in the modern world.

10. It is a fundamentally consequentialist viewpoint, one that subserviates your deepest commitments about what Reality means for you to your “outward” presentation, motivations, and activity.

I think this fundamentally highlights why I sit uneasily with comprehensive liberalism or New Natural Law.

11. A symptom, of course, for the Mercantilism rife in the Kali Yuga, for those of you with an affinity for Guenon.

12. That we are drawn to the beautiful, of course, should only further highlight the extent of Divine Mercy. We are being beckoned, seduced, entranced back into the fold of the Real.

13. McGilchrist discusses this at length in his effusive set of lectures on Cusa’s Coincidentia Oppositorum: Unity and Division.