Just thinking again in mockery

And after all, on this side on the coin what else can be done

In my American life as the only child of older lower working class parents born into the middle of the post-war Baby Boom in 1957, singular, unique, solitary and ordinary like everyman I adopted a Zeitgeist. For me, not my childhood, but the adulthood of the people 20 to 40 years older than I, determined my road, childishly not realizing the immediate too would be older as I aged.

The mockery naturally is found between the American life and the human soul. We are duplex. Without a soul we are not. With one we suffer this human life in anguish. In anguish we seek escape. In escape obedience to the flight permits recreation to revive flagging chymistry. Culture in the main and then childhood define recreation. As an aside how we entertain ourselves points to operations of our emotions in play in the world. I entertain myself by the down draft news. As a Dystopian science fiction writer this news is my forest of wood. Kingdoms have been built with this wood-which magically regenerates endlessly. A fully formed child of Century 20 and part of Century 21 I read the news, hear the horror, see the outcome and reflect on my arc of existence in a philosophic bohemian fashion. To be and not to not be is important. I like life. Though surely money would provide access to many enjoyable and uplifting experiences my decision around age 16 was frugality. Work as little as possible and go into no debt. By 32 the idea was changed to as little debt as possible. Now tis great to have no debt but pity to have no income at 66 in Sky High City By the Bay. As another everyman in this town I ask, who, who will stop this rain over my fair city so finely depicted by Max Ernst in Europe After The Rain?

Science carefully, step by step, seeks recipe based cooked meals to create the Spiritual.

Actually Existing Social Realism which is truly “All TooHuman” both irritably and forcefully depending on jurisdiction and disposition of laws, pointedly demands acquiescence to only the chymical world of atomies. No soul animates this chymical man. Strictly this naked ape is accident only. Mockery arises due to the intelligent accident, why the beach of sand decides that taking advantage of the odds until the inevitable erosion arises is existence. Fine grained rocks on shore are proclaiming the greatness of sand and erecting castles washed away by the random wave leaving no bones and no trace, and humans proclaim everything is subject only to chymistry. Machines we build peer into the very large and very small the better to explain the intelligent accident. The accident is not comfortable with spirit dwelling outside chymistry. If not an Accident reasons the Accident my greatness, the bigness of my littleness is diminished.

For the Russian philosopher Berdyaev, freedom is absolutely fundamental. And freedom is connected with subjectivity and Spirit, rather than the objective (measurable) external world.

All attempts to locate meaning and value in things outside the human soul are doomed to fail. Thinking of the universe as an organism, for instance, seems like an improvement over thinking of it as a dead mechanism. It turns the cosmos into a living entity with a purpose, but it also means thinking of people as mere cells in this organism to be subordinated to the larger whole. Nationalism turns the nation into a false idol to be worshipped. Neither “history,” nor “progress,” nor “the human race,” nor Platonic Forms are particularly significant or even real. They are hypostatizations and abstractions. For Berdyaev, the concrete individual personality is the full locus of reality and value. Anything else renders the personality a meaningless nothing to be used as a means to some other end.

Kant, who also saw human beings as ends in themselves, pointed out that freedom must be a fundamental aspect of human subjectivity because love exists.[1] This is known directly from experience. Each one of us has loved and been the recipient of love. Love cannot exist without freedom. We should let the datum of love determine our theories and speculations about ultimate existence. If love is possible, and we know it is, then freedom exists.

This does not explain freedom. Freedom remains a mystery. This can be compared to the existence of life or of consciousness. How life emerged is unknown, but that does not stop us from acknowledging its existence, and something similar applies to consciousness.

With regard to freedom, at times, Berdyaev uses the mystic Jacob Boehme’s word the Ungrund which means the abyss of eternity that is absolutely indeterminate subjectivity which comes before everything. Tsoncho Tsonchev, a Bulgarian Berdyaev scholar studying at McGill University, writes “this is the primordial abyss from which God creates the world (Being) and from which Being, even God, the Supreme Being, emerges as Being.” However, “freedom is not the source of God, since God Himself is freedom (but a realized one, not the abysmal darkness); this freedom is rather a shadow, a potentia, a capacity, that becomes partially revealed only after the act of creation.”[2]

Thus there is a something rather than a nothing that precedes the very first act of God. And this something is freedom.

Freedom is fundamental and comes before all. Without it there can be no creativity. Without freedom all is mechanical and dead. There could be no love, no goodness, no friendship, and no meaning. https://voegelinview.com/nikolai-berdyaev-the-primacy-of-freedom/