Ocean

Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me:
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight,
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night,
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!
— William Blake, A Letter To Thomas Butt, 22 November 1802

Before the Age of Enlightenment could shroud the body of society in it’s shadow it had to first decenter man from pre-existing traditional structures of control and understanding of knowledge. Enter René Descartes who augured in across multiple domains of human thought, a vision of the natural world that continues to exude a gravitational pull upon modern discourse. This reconfigured the mystical character of neo-scholastic natural philosophy into one built upon a budding mechanistic paradigm of his era.

For Descartes his radical notion of doubt was only a detour to a more secure edifice of knowledge one that Descartes believed resided in the power of the mind to capture and represent reality in a box. Ironically, or perhaps unironically, reframing the question of what is true to be what one can be certain of, was a Trojan Horse of a particularly corrosive strain when the object of interrogation is of the theological character. Considering the political climate Descartes found himself in it isn’t surprising that it maintains the dogmatic attributes of Christian faith while simultaneously attempting to render it epistemological.

The cartesian self is built as a function that serves to reason insulated against the swamp waters of alterity stripped of the relations other than those mediated by divinity. As Oswald Spengler put it, “The symbol of the West is an idea of which no other Culture gives even a hint, the idea of Function” - plotted here in Cartesian coordinates. Reason is an assiduously crafted function that acts as a fort against this ocean It is a fortified boundary, sealing out everything uncertain, irresoluble, a sea-wall much like those built by the Dutch during the 1500s against the unknown. Cloistered within the bounds of such a sea-wall, one is well protected from the existential oceanic despair that exists beyond, a Faustian memorandum of understanding deal with the evil demon that resides beyond these walls. An amphibian stuck on dry land.