Just some brief thoughts to jot down before work.

Working through Catherine Keller’s The Face of the Deep. It has sat on my shelf for years, reminding me of the creative potency of original indeterminacy. I gathered the gist of it from a quick glance soon after I purchased it, and have sat with the core guiding insights, but not the full body of the text. Now I am looking for the body of information it carries.

She distinguishes between multitiered truth and a multilateral matrix of meaning, a pluralist hermeneutic. She makes the pity statement that “many truths do not mean any truths. The many must bear their truths in resistance to those for whom truth is either One, or None.” (pg 39) I can see how multitiered and multilateral interpretations can themselves be in harmony. Multitiered truth is a male interpretation, multilateral truth is a female interpretation. We are talking about fractals and webs. The male focus and forward/backward stepwise function, the female diffusion with radiative field effects. Male is temporal, female is spatial. Men are particular, women are waveform. Everything is a wave-particle complex. I haven’t gotten back to this train of thought since late in college. I felt there was a root of something really interesting in schematizing male/female processes. The world is a series of forests branching into spheres, the spheres associated into fractal forests. Male becomes female, female becomes male. The world is a grand union of spheres and fractals. They propagate into each other. The fern is balled up, unfurls into a fractal, deposits round spores, which unfurl into ferns. Evolution, convolution, involution.

In my mesophysics project, I’m working on the tendrils of how truth and interpretation could feasibly be pluralistic, in the vein of “many truths does not mean any truths.” Keller talks about how Augustine’s early thought relied on a neoplatonic unity rather than a literalist jewish reading. She likens this neoplatonic unity to jewish midrash. I think that the thing with unity is not so much a singular interpretation of nature, but the singular activity of phenomenal causation that happens between an observer and observed. The activity is not guaranteed to be the same for all observers, but the essential process of causal interaction, pared down from specifics, is common. The truthfulness of a specific interpretation or rendering of nature relies on awareness/groundedness in the common causal function, not as a specific pattern of spacetime, but as an orienting function. It is a hermeneutical object, in that as soon as you keep going deeper into explaining the causal layers, the very process of trying to get one level higher ensures that there is an endless beginning/opening of what is beyond the refernce frame. The being overflows into the reference frame, such that the phenomenon of perception is itself an access into the being itself, but not in its fullness. It is an open question for me if the being in itself is available to knowing. But I will always act like it is potentially beyond me. It is a moral.

Keller calls the bible a polyhedron of scripture. I love that.


June 27, 2023
Gorda