SIMULZDAT

Five Golden Rats

Model 1: Lullaby

I have read this passage every morning since we brought my son home from the hospital, at around the time the sun is just beginning to come up. It is referencing Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which I went through as best I could last year. My son is two months old now and I watch him from midnight until six am. His mother takes over until noon and then we go about our days together:

Abraham seems to offend against “the universal” in four ways, all closely related. First, he makes of himself an exception to what universality demands (one ought not to kill one’s innocent offspring). This—secondly—amounts to the “paradox” that the “single individual” stands higher than the universal. The problem with Abraham is that his private relationship to God is given priority over his duties as a social creature. Thus—third—Abraham stands in a direct, unmediated relation to God and so—fourth—he cannot explain his actions in publicly available, shareable language. The radical privacy of his God-relationship is key… The stories of Agamemnon, Jepthah and Brutus each offers another case of a father feeling the obligation to sacrifice his own offspring for a cause conceived of as “higher”. The key difference is that each of these can explain himself by giving a publicly comprehensible account of his actions (such as a military leader’s duties to the state overriding those to his own family). These explanations are within the realm of the ethical conceived of as the universal, whereas—according to Johannes—Abraham has no such explanation available to him. His faith is a “purely personal virtue”.

Crucial here is the idea that God’s promises are for this life, not just an after-life. The true measure of Abraham’s faith is less his willingness to sacrifice Isaac than his trust and hope that he will “receive him back”—in this life, not just in eternity. (John Lippitt and C. Stephen Evans)

Most times I read this passage—after I’ve slipped into the warm divot left behind by my wife, taken a kiss good night in the dark and given one for her good morning—I seem close to understanding it, though that might be a trick of the exhausted body. There is a compulsion to wrestle something useful out of it. I have no formal practice in any of this sort of analysis. Here in the kitchen, I am looking at it like a Cocteau sphinx. I’ll take whatever it gives me as the answer to its riddle.

My aims here are less dignified than Kierkegaard. He is describing the paradox of faith as the linchpin of a kind of truth that might transcend human capacities. I am attempting here to reduce his model to something useful in the local. I am not quite writing about fatherhood, nor the acts and obligations of being a son, but about the thing I am in the middle that is forever ongoing. And more so the pivot that occurs when one becomes the other and so is both at once. Every father, in the context of his own family, has been an Isaac made into an Abraham.

This is a sketch, not gospel and certainly not philosophy. Like Braitenberg said: I am trying to get used to a way of thinking in which the hardware of the realization of an idea is much less important than the idea itself.

From pg. 83 of my copy of Fear and Trembling:

The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which can be put from another point of view by saying that it applies at every moment. It rests immanently in itself, has nothing outside itself that is its telos [end, purpose] but is itself the telos for everything outside, and when that is taken up into it, it has no further to go.

Seen as an immediate being, the single individual is the particular that has its telos in the universal, and the individual’s ethical task is always to express himself in this, to abrogate his particularity so as to become the universal. As soon as the single individual wants to assert himself in his particularity, in direct opposition to the universal, he sins, and only by recognizing this can he again reconcile himself with the universal.

Whenever, having entered the universal, the single individual feels an urge to assert his particularity, he is in a state of temptation, from which he can extricate himself only by surrendering his particularity to the universal in repentance.

And from pg. 84:

Faith is just this paradox, that the single individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified before the latter, not as subordinate but superior, though in such a way, be it noted, that it is the single individual who, having been subordinate to the universal as the particular, now by means of the universal becomes that individual who, as the particular, stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.

I read this as Kierkegaard conceiving of the universal as a common morality that has been derived through reason and shared by all humans. The universal is disclosed to the individual as he asserts himself in it. To sin, under this framework, is to take individual action that betrays one’s understanding of this common morality—to act against what is “right”—in such a way that the act itself can still be explained in the language of that moral establishment. A man who kills his son is just that—a murderer. Faith is this same act in demand of reconciliation with the infinite. Here our finite nature makes of this an impossible task: follow God, even in his suspension of the very morality he underwrites. For this, Abraham cannot speak of his task, because how would he? His divine and absurd behavior is only constituted as hope in his solitary conflict with the impossible. There is no explanation available because there is no one else capable of participating in the same plane of existence.

Kierkegaard rightfully asks if this irreducible, private relationship supersedes the morality the collective remains beholden to. He seems to conclude that yes, it must, otherwise faith is rendered inconsequential, relegated to the easy and commonplace. And if faith is plain, Abraham’s actions can be dismissed as simple and reprehensible.

Faith, then, if we follow Kierkegaard, is at best a daunting, isolated venture. But it remains a worthwhile commitment in his estimation as the only true pathway to a self-hood that reifies unique experience. And it is precisely due to this experience’s incommunicability that it is proofed from the trespasses of others.

From pg. 99 of my copy of Fear and Trembling:

Luke 14.26 presents a remarkable teaching on the absolute duty to God: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple."

From pg. 101:

This is shown by Abraham. The moment he is ready to sacrifice Isaac, the ethical expression for what he does is this: he hates Isaac. But if he actually hates Isaac he can be certain that God does not require this of him: for Cain and Abraham are not the same. Isaac he must love with all his soul. When God asks for Isaac, Abraham must if possible love him even more, and only then can he sacrifice him; for it is indeed this love of Isaac that in its paradoxical opposition to his love of God makes his act a sacrifice.

From pg. 102:

Furthermore, the passage in Luke must be understood in such a way that one grasps that the knight of faith has no higher expression whatever of the universal (as the ethical) which can save him. Thus if we imagine the Church were to demand this sacrifice of one of its members, then all we have is a tragic hero. For qualitatively the idea of the Church is no different from that of the State, inasmuch as the individual can enter it by common mediation, and in so far as the individual has entered the paradox he does not arrive at the idea of the Church; he doesn’t get out of the paradox either, but must find either his blessedness or his damnation inside it. An ecclesiastical hero expresses the universal in his deed.

Abraham’s love is the predominant factor in the possibility of his faith, as it provides his sacrifice its import. Essential to realizing the faith in that sacrifice is its context—that it must exist outside and above the impersonal institution of the Church. Faith requires a liminal environment oblivious to dogma and tradition and must avoid the Church’s tendency to reduce the religious task to a set of beliefs and practices. Faith, then, is incompatible with the Church’s intent to maintain order and stability as a partitioned structure within the universal.

Niklas Luhmann interprets the institution as a system that recursively reproduces itself from its own elements. Communication is the raw material in this process of autopoiesis, such that institutions are constituted as self-generating, self-sustaining networks of decisions that define their own boundaries in the process of maintaining their ongoing existence.

The institution is born as a coalescence of communications around a specified endeavor or question and becomes concrete when it is able to differentiate itself from its environment. It accomplishes this by establishing the ability to decide on its own coordination of decisions, i.e. regulate its regulation. Institutional rationality is about self-preservation, accomplished by establishing internal structures of expectation that render further communications, thereby reducing again and again the complexity of an otherwise infinite, chaotic world. The mature institution is stable enough to concern itself with battles of organizational legitimacy in its environment. Through a program of consistent self-reference, it leverages its low-entropy approximations of a high-entropy world to make judgments as to what’s real, relevant and right.

The Church, for example, is not constituted by the clergy, cathedrals, sermons or sacraments, but of nothing but communications decisions and related communications. One can imagine a coalescence of debate around ultimate questions of meaning and purpose calcifying into various frameworks for understanding existence and providing a sense of transcendence. The Church, as an institution, becomes adept at producing and reproducing religious meaning, the ways of distinguishing between the sacred and the profane, the divine and the human. It learns to regulate its regulation, i.e. it operationalizes replicable reference communications in the form of rules, procedures and routines. These reduce the cost of further decision-making by decreasing the amount of information involved in processing uncertainty. Through these, its boundaries take firmer shape. It distinguishes itself from other social systems, such as the state, the economy, or the law. This boundary maintenance is crucial for preserving its unique identity and function. But it is not static; it scours its environment for impulses, modifying its practices, beliefs and organizational structures to remain relevant and attract new members. The state exists as a similar organization, instead functioning to distinguish the government from the governed–leading to a definition of citizenship, the allocation of resources and the provision of public services. And the legal system, functioning to distinguish between legal and illegal, guiding decisions on the interpretation of laws, the adjudication of cases, and the enforcement of legal norms. This analysis can be carried out across each discrete part of the universal.

Kierkegaard is able to speak semantically of faith without enacting it, and admits as such [This I am very well able to understand, without claiming thereby to have faith, pg. 97], and perhaps this is because he has seated his argument in the universal, or the language, of the institution of the Church. Here the absolute is called God and faith the paradox of the individual standing in absolute relation to the absolute, i.e. enacting an interiority that is incommensurable with the external.

But the legal institution, for example, does not necessarily speak of the absolute in terms of God, rather centering it as something closer to Truth. Luhmann describes a legal institution capable of estimating portrayals of events and the associated rulings on ownership and directionality of harm. The courts in particular play a central role in resolving disputes, interpreting laws, and shaping legal norms, precedents, and procedural rules. Courts are constantly engaged in a process of self-observation and self-correction, ensuring the consistency and coherence of the institution. The courts are chaperoned by a whole host of other communications, e.g. briefs, memos, contracts, arbitrations, depositions, databases, etc. Altogether these communications embody the institution in the process of mediating the variety of its environment into internal logic and processes that can be reapplied in the future function of the system. And through these aggregate communicative goings-on, the institution establishes ownership over its allocation of the universal.

Despite all of this activity, the legal system cannot describe Truth completely, in the same way the Church cannot describe God. To do so would require a subversion of the absolute’s omniscience. This challenge lies in the tension between human language and “divine” reality. Human language (and thus human experience) is inherently limited and finite, while the absolute is infinite and beyond human comprehension.

William Rasch, in a paper on Luhmann’s ontology, writes:

There is an external world’, Luhmann affirms, ‘which results from the fact that cognition, as a self-operated operation, can be carried out at all.’ But, he continues, ‘we have no direct contact with it.’ He thus asserts that ‘cognition is a self-referential process. Knowledge can know only itself, although it can—as if out of the corner of its eye—determine that this is possible only if there is more than mere cognition. Cognition deals with an external world that remains unknown and, as a result, has to come to see that it cannot see what it cannot see.’ Knowledge can know nothing but what it constructs by way of the manipulation of distinctions. In consequence, ‘constructed reality is...not the reality referred to.’ In a word: ‘Reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it.’

Knowledge, on this view, cannot depict or represent reality, but must be thought of as a construction, a self-production. Nevertheless, the simple fact that reality per se is unknown does not mean that it does not exist; it means only that it does not exist for knowledge. Luhmann concedes as much: ‘At any rate there are some grounds for the belief that were the reality that remains unknown totally entropic, it could not enable any knowledge. But the knowledge of that which is the condition of one’s own possibility, as seen from our perspective, cannot be brought into the form of a distinction.’ Here, reality, as negative entropy, is assumed to be a precondition that enables operations (cognition, observation) to ‘construct’ knowledge. Yet, since this reality cannot be the object of the knowledge that it makes possible, it serves knowledge merely as a presupposition.

This external world, this unknown reality as the condition of possibility for knowledge, cannot become the object of that knowledge and thus remains not just unknown but unknowable. But precisely in this way, reality per se (Realität an sich, so to speak) returns, or rather, remains as an ineradicable blind spot, inaccessible to knowledge but in an unknowable way constitutive of it.

To hold all of constructed reality alongside reality per se in focus—to hold both knowledge and the complete condition of its possibility—is the omniscience of the absolute. While the “teleological suspension of the ethical" as refracted through the Church produces Faith as a product of the individual standing in absolute relation to the absolute (God), the same suspension viewed through the institution of the legal system produces Justice.

Here we find the same qualifiers of Kierkegaard’s Faith: One who seeks Justice makes of himself an exception to what universality demands (one ought not to disregard a legal ruling, seek extrajudicial punishment, etc.). This—secondly—amounts to the same “paradox”: that the “single individual” stands higher than the universal. The man’s relationship to Truth is given priority over his duties as a social creature. Thus—third—the man stands in a direct, unmediated relation to Truth and so—fourth—he cannot explain his actions in publicly available, shareable language. The radical privacy of his Truth-relationship is key. He cannot give a publicly comprehensible account of his actions. He has no explanation within the realm of the ethical conceived of as the universal. The Justice he enacts is a “purely personal virtue”.

These semantics can be extended across institutions, e.g. following the notation of Church (Faith); Law (Justice): Politics (Power); Art (Beauty); Economics (Prosperity); etc. Each of these outcomes is as elusive and incommunicable as the last.

Love inaugurates the institution of the family, such that each one is a network of communications shifting under and maintaining the distinction between those loved and those not loved or left unconsidered. Such that to be loved is to be a member of that family despite the status of its reciprocation and to not love is to forego access to a family. The word has been used to describe the traditional unit and all manner of its modern evolutions, the royal and political, the commune and the collective, the simply close-in-proximity. And there are its supposed defining properties—the meeting of basic needs, freedom from necessity, relationships that meet the human need for giving and receiving. It is sometimes but not necessarily governed by sentiments of trust, co-operation, and altruism. It is sometimes but not necessarily responsible for instilling virtues such as courage, justice, and temperance in its members. It is sometimes but not necessarily a condition for political life, a necessary precursor to the polis and a common good. That is all fine. But when I am using the word here, I am speaking of organization around that initial distinction which is the only property I can find in common with all of them. It is just as likely to be an ugly, disappointing, dangerous mess. But that distinction will be at its genesis.

I claim Dignity as the absolute of the family institution. Though Dignity has been engaged as a judgment of the worth of a human being per se, or as the entitlements and rights of those at the receiving ends of our actions, or as inherent, normative, or an essential connection to one’ legal status, these are conclusions for the universal. I claim Dignity in the absolute is the infinite set of all potential conclusions about it. I claim it is grounded in the initial distinction of the family.

And, whereas boundless variations exist of the claim that humans have Dignity in virtue of their capacity for (or exercise of) “choice” or “rational agency”, I claim the opposite, that Autonomy is rather grounded in absolute Dignity and is a cognate to Abraham’s Faith. Only when the individual steps outside the universal of the family and stands in absolute relation to absolute Dignity does he understand what it means to enact Autonomy, while the real shape of it remains his alone and unspeakable.

The absurdity of this achievement seems as circular as the machine that comprehends it—we are centers of useless splendor exacting what abstractions we can on the reality of the world. Kierkegaard writes that this is ok, that life has tasks enough…and when [one] loves these honestly life won’t be a waste. Still, I am learning already that I will demand more for my son from the world than I ever did for myself.

From pg. 145 of my copy of Fear and Trembling:

Whatever one generation learns from another, it can never learn from a predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh, has no task other than that of any previous generation, and comes no further, provided the latter didn't shirk its task and deceive itself. This authentically human factor is passion, in which the one generation also fully understands the other and understands itself.

Abraham’s faith lies among the other passions. The journey to any of them is lonely and must be constantly reaffirmed. A father cannot teach his son to ascend to them, to find his own autonomy among them. I only hold influence over a few basic variables of the family just beginning to emerge from us. None of this complexity has reached my son yet, but lives for now in conversations between my wife and me. The future remains a fiction we are inspired to write. If that pretend model can be considered an offline reasoning mechanism, then here are the things I can commit to now while my beliefs (and their associated risks) are still disconnected from actions occurring in the real world:

I will replenish again and again (as often as it is needed) the initial distinction of the family—that is love. The only time I can remember my father telling me he loved me was the night before my wedding. We were both very drunk, near each other among a crowd of people dancing along to ABBA. He had a crazed smile when he approached. He hugged me and said it quietly into my ear, then moved off as if something else had distracted him. He did not drink often, and never this much, so there was no real precedent for his behavior. I’ve come to the conclusion that he was, in many ways, afraid to vocalize a feeling he’s always had. I understand why the words might’ve felt foreign in his mouth; I’ve met his father. But the absence of them has left a lot of silence in my memories of him. My son will not inherit that doubt. I will remind my son that he is loved any time I have a moment to and I will be sincere in my actions such that they make the truth of what I’ve said evident.

I will provision the family with all that I can. It is easy to ask what my son needs from the metaphysical, the spiritual, the abstract. It is a privilege to have the time to entertain these questions. The opposite is true in the material world, where the list of necessities is short and the work to earn them is arduous. I hold many conflicting views about my father, but I am certain that I mostly understood his motivations, which were directed by his family, always. That was clear to me even when they seemed incidental. He left each day to do exacting work in service of others so that he could return with the world wrapped in a bow. I will strive to meet this standard.

I will be a tireless partner to my wife. So many people go through life with someone just to not quite feel alone in it. This is not my case. Most nights I fall asleep wondering how I can spend the next day tightening the thread between myself and her expectations of me. She is sanctified in this house. Assign me any trouble that life has brought to her. Dedicate to her every small novelty, laugh, moment of tranquility I can assemble. More than just my love, my respect and admiration for her will always be on display for my son.

I will prepare my son for the inevitability of growing up. I was not taught any healthy methods for communicating about my experience of having to be a person. It has always been easy to ignore the questions that were imperative to understanding myself. It was easy to avoid making earnest into something other than a slur. How lucky I am now to be able to show grace to the person I am outgrowing, to appreciate much of him though he is no longer needed. I will remain both a sanctuary and an advisor to my son as he becomes again and again a fresh idea of himself.

I will encourage any and all curiosity about the world. Story has been a predominant force in my life. There is no place safer than the imagined worlds of fiction. And how strange and wonderful it is that we react so intensely to characters, even though we know they aren’t real. It is through our interaction with characters that we learn to practice curiosity towards others, the kind necessary to break the fourth wall of an everyday life that has become too commodified in its fragmentation. This practice is a bridge to empathy, which has in many ways been replaced by selling out as a virtue. I will provide my son with the space to situate his nervous worries, his aspirations, and his big-headedness in an authentic account of how he is experiencing the world, without the pressure of relating his story to a measure of external value. I will help him learn to do the same for others.

I will not take anything—including all of this—so seriously that it affects my family’s enjoyment of life. Otherwise, what was all of this for? So, like the critic said: not as authentic and uncompromised as it claims to be–more of a matinee fantasy than it wants to admit. There will be more ambitions to come and I suspect none will be executed perfectly. The value of a family stretches as far as the ongoing work to earn one’s space within it. Hopefully these are enough to start us off in the right place: not yet a dreamwork, not yet Chernobyl.

Model 2: Silhouette

Tomorrow I will inherit the morning watch over my son. I have gotten used to going to sleep at dawn and suspect for the first few days of my new shift I will feel like something has been taken from me. I enjoy him in the hours I have him now. He is tired and sweet, smiling when he’s awake or dreaming quietly. I sit next to him and wonder at him doing nothing. Sometimes we listen to old records quietly and often I can find a few consecutive minutes to write or read. These slivers of free time are generated at the moment cosmic luck intersects with a perfect schedule and their half-life can be hastened by a sneeze or the knock of a knee on the coffee table. These little intervals are really my only anchor to the idea of the person I was working on becoming. Strange to long for more of something you were happy to give away. Though I am working on recognizing it for what it is—a dividend on a larger sum of personal fulfillment.

Roberto Calasso wrote in The Ruin of Kasch: It is said that sacrifice is the origin of exchange: but exchange is the set in which sacrifice is a subset: and exchange, in turn, is included in another category-substitution which alone makes it possible: this stands for that: the one who gives this takes that.

There is such a depth of counsel on patience here. The choice word can become a bludgeon designed to motivate the contrivances and conspiracies of an exhausted, panicky animal. Calasso suggests we might avoid the initial flinch toward agitation—even in language. Rest a measure and cascade backward into a softer connotation. Internal terrain resolves under this recasting. And life becomes much more navigable when approached as a series of substitutions rather than sacrifices.

I feel a growing tendency toward this sort of productive ambiguity. It tempers the paradox of meaning, which depends on continuously deferring closure: every decision or selection excludes possibilities, yet this exclusion generates the horizon for further meaning-making. By increasing the tolerance of our mechanism for reducing complexity in a world of infinite possibilities, circumstances that at first appear as crises are tamed. Each becomes less a personal or moral drama and more an act within a larger system of balance or reciprocity. The individual is stabilized without the demand for absolute answers or the pressure for resolution. This gradual coherence permits the individual to shift paradigms with a rebuilt narrative structure that accommodates both old and new meanings.

This is the pivotal substitution of the moment. Faith is revealing itself to be the auxiliary of a profound change in my life, no matter how frivolous I would’ve found that idea five years ago. Doubt still echoes from that antecedent, which I suspect is the premise of the whole thing. But I am beginning to understand what my mother’s rosary meant to her. Less a key to paradise than a relic of that Calasso retreat. The device remains the same, she just requires less from it.

I don’t know how to report the experience of this faith. It feels individual but of a kind, and therefore describable. I have tried to get at it laterally here. The texture of this sketch is rigid and a bit sterile but it produces in me something closer to the thing poetry does; coercing a shape out of things that resist one; putting a collar on a wild dog:

There is an account that says knowledge means having a justified, true belief. If a claim 1) is true, 2) you believe it, and 3) you have good reasons to believe it, then you know it. A man named Edmund Gettier offered counterexamples to this account in the form of cases in which subjects had true beliefs that were also justified but for which the beliefs were true for reasons unrelated to the justification.

A concise example from Roderick Chisholm:

Imagine that you are standing outside a field. You see, within it, what looks exactly like a sheep. What belief instantly occurs to you? Among the many that could have done so, it happens to be the belief that there is a sheep in the field. And in fact you are right, because there is a sheep behind the hill in the middle of the field. You cannot see that sheep, though, and you have no direct evidence of its existence. Moreover, what you are seeing is a dog, disguised as a sheep. Hence, you have a well justified true belief that there is a sheep in the field. But is that belief knowledge?

My own, less articulate:

The Belief (B): A man feels the itch of a belief in something like God beginning. Not a king in the clouds but something closer to that described by Kierkegaard, who frequently emphasized God's transcendence. God as infinite and absolute, fundamentally distinct from the world of human existence:

God is indeed a friend of order, and to that end he is present in person at every point, is everywhere present at every moment… His concept is not like man’s, beneath which the single individual lies as that which cannot be merged in the concept; his concept embraces everything, and in another sense he has no concept. God does not avail himself of an abridgement; he comprehends actuality itself, all its particulars…

Justification (J): The man has a child and begins to discern a new kind of compassion available to him. He recognizes it as more than kinship or camaraderie, and thinks to call it communion. And whether he is tickling the child to coax out a smile or rocking him in the dark to ward off the squall of a new distress, that communion is present, not of him but between them, dense enough that he can’t escape its orbit.

His wife offers inter-subjective corroboration—her independent experiences confirm his, create a shared understanding of this communion. Together, they repeatedly affirm and interpret these experiences in ways that align with each other and the system of the family begins to grow in new directions.

Systems at their base create meaning through distinctions (e.g., sacred vs. profane, divine vs. mundane, family vs. not), rituals, and shared experiences, and integrate observations in ways that sustain their own operations. In performing, a system learns how to continue being.

The arrival of the child is not merely an isolated moment; it becomes a focal point for generating new meaning within the family and manifests as a symbol of renewal, continuity, and the family’s role in sustaining and shaping life. The event might be ritualized through celebrations, traditions, and the framing of the child’s life as part of a larger, meaningful story. These actions not only reinforce bonds but also connect the event to a broader sense of existence. Through these processes, the family system transforms the event into a central node in its meaning-making operations. The family comes into focus as an observable, coherent structure capable of interacting with its surroundings in ways it was not capable of before. The family’s ongoing ability to process, explain, and utilize this newfound communion becomes the measure of justifying his belief.

Truth (T): The belief is true—that is, there is indeed a sort of cosmic organization unfolding—but it is out of reach of our understanding.

William Rasch outlined Niklas Luhmann’s ontology like so: cognition is a self-referential process: it does not depict or represent reality but constructs its own reality through distinctions. Luhmann asserts that “knowledge can know only itself,” and while it recognizes the necessity of an external reality for cognition to occur, this reality remains unknowable. In Luhmann’s words, Cognition deals with an external world that remains unknown and, as a result, has to come to see that it cannot see what it cannot see.

Reality per se is not nonexistent but functions as a presupposition for knowledge. Luhmann suggests that if the external world were completely entropic, it could not enable cognition. Instead, it must possess some form of negative entropy, providing an ordered structure that allows for the construction of knowledge. However, this enabling reality cannot itself become an object of knowledge; it remains an inaccessible blind spot, unknowable yet constitutive of the processes that make knowledge possible. The paradoxical role of reality: it is both indispensable for our ability to make meaning of the world and forever beyond the grasp of being known.

In Chisholm’s framework:

Imagine that you are observing the world. You see, within it, evidence of something you might call God. What belief instantly occurs to you? Among the many that could have done so, it happens to be the belief that there is God in the world. And in fact you are right, because there is the thing you called God. You cannot see that God, though, and no direct evidence of its existence is possible—knowledge can know only itself, although it can—as if out of the corner of its eye—determine that this is possible only if there is more than mere cognition. Moreover, what you are seeing is your love for your child manifest, disguised as a God. Hence, you have a well justified true belief that there is, in reality, something that meets some definition of God. But is that belief knowledge? Or is this where faith takes over the work?

Then faith might be defined as a commitment to meaning-making in the face of the unknowable, where the individual chooses to live in accordance with their beliefs even in the absence of full epistemological certainty. Faith, in this sense, is not simply the acceptance of something without evidence or reason, but rather an ongoing process of trusting in the value and necessity of a belief that has been partially justified but cannot be fully known. It’s a reliance on meaning in a world where certainty is impossible, and it may even be a moral stance—recognizing that human understanding is limited and that certain existential commitments, such as believing in a greater cosmic purpose, are what allow individuals or communities to navigate a complex, often unknowable world.

This kind of faith acknowledges that any cosmic organization, while unknowable, may indeed require continued belief for the system of meaning-making to function at all. If everyone were to abandon belief prematurely, there could be consequences for the individual’s sense of purpose and for the cohesion of the larger social or spiritual system that supports and affirms the belief. From this perspective, faith becomes an ethical act. The individual or community is participating in the co-creation of meaning, contributing to a larger cosmic order that they believe to be unfolding—even if knowledge of it cannot be fully attained.

In this context, continuing in belief could be seen as not merely irrational, but as necessary for the cohesion of reality per se. It might even be argued that abandoning the belief would risk a kind of epistemic nihilism, where all meaning and purpose dissolve into uncertainty, potentially undermining the very sense of direction that drives human existence. Faith, in this case, is both a practical and ethical stance: one that upholds the integrity of a system of belief, maintains hope and purpose, and preserves a sense of connectedness to a larger cosmic order—regardless of whether or not the composition of that order can ever be fully known.

The silence of the universe is not an affront but an epistemological boundary. Our lives do not embody a singular existential truth. We are free to stop trying to understand God. We are permitted to call the derivatives of his existence by his name.

I do not like the word “God” in any of this. It comes equipped with too many connotations. There are endless varieties of God that are made of human meaning, consolidated through the internal operations of various religious and spiritual institutions as they each settle on a useful narrative. I am not trying to imply allegiance to or invoke the purpose of any institution when I use the word.

In Problema III of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard writes: God is that all things are possible. This is what I mean when I use the word, and my appreciation of the definition proceeds from its grammar. It is not Through God all things are possible, i.e. God is how all things are possible. The latter implies that God is the manner or process by which possibility is brought into being. I’d propose that is the work of life, not God. God remains the truth of possibility, which cannot be brought into being, but is already given in all being.

Kierkegaard wrote in vol. 3 of Journals and Papers that by reason [a man] understands … a linking together of truths, a conclusion from causes. Faith therefore cannot be proved, demonstrated, comprehended, for the link which makes a linking together possible is missing, and what else does this say than that it is a paradox. This, precisely, is the irregularity in the paradox, continuity is lacking, or at any rate it has continuity only in reverse…

Faith belies reason because its target is infinitely present through it but absolutely inaccessible until we no longer need it. We meet our faith pressing through it like a breeze against the trajectory of our lives—determining causes from a conclusion.

This is a consolation. A state change in my life does not demand a corollary from God. Then and now are just possibilities brought into being by the meaning we continue to make. They wash out in the infinite. We are free to exercise our own reactions to the odd existential crisis:

Sacrifice → Exchange → Substitution → Replacement → Trade → Shift → Modification → Change → Difference → Distinction → Alterity → Ambiguity → Indistinction → Inexpressibility

Hope sits delicately between meaning and its attenuation. Whether we move toward the vague (where hope is formless yet vital) or back toward sacrifice (where hope takes on depth and direction), it remains a response to what is unknown or yet to come. Hope is both engine and yield of faith.

Model 3: Creature

I am conditioned to derive some measure of my merit as a father from a perceived competency in a particular kind of heroic violence. History says I should look at life as a series of defensive positions if I am not to be presumed a burden. I am a shield, my wife and son vulnerable, the house a stronghold in need of constant upkeep, the person at the door unpredictable—a threat? How fortunate I am to have a family that allows me to dismiss this notion, to find it fearful and a little pathetic, rather than a necessary condition of the future. I am reminded often that facing outward leaves them only my back to talk to.

The common provenance to this: A generation of fathers was raised by the haunted remnants of men. Those fathers had sons and those sons raised us. Anachronistic vigilance was triple-distilled into an anxiety over something we are told is now everywhere in the world, but that we cannot locate: a tangible, clear antagonist. That those who purport to see it are often quickest to engage in violence is evident. The act of defending ties a person to a cause. It is an easy way to make certainty out of complexity. But emotional complexity is often stripped away as a consequence, reducing man to a narrow and transactional role.

I don’t want to negotiate this trade-off in order to make a generative contribution to my family. I don’t want to engage in a conspiracy of fatherhood that balances “If I can’t help” with “I can certainly hurt the right people”. It is vital the initial impulse inclines toward quietude and permits more constructive future action. A better answer to the question of self-definition.

I’ve written elsewhere of the turn to faith as a revised approach. Neither there nor here am I advocating for anything clerical, but something closer to Kierkegaard’s dismissal of external rules and predefined norms. His faith points inward, a deeply personal commitment that allows one to bridge the fracture point between reality per se and the meanings we make out of it. He wrote that faith cannot be expressed directly, for in that case it would no longer be faith, and anyway—a man can’t share that kind of faith with his family—Isaac learned that much at least.

Still, I watched my son discover his hands. Though he is still working through the pervasive, consistent repetition required to develop his motor skills, it is not hard to see the inevitability of action’s growth into something more deliberate. Becoming a person is the formal means of working through the problem that there are other people. Contact between us is less the meeting of two forms of life than the production of modes of behavior that enabled such an encounter. The creative labor of our reciprocity permits me an opening. There are shapes other than a fist that one’s hand can take.

The experience of faith, as with violence, can’t be understood without a body. When we speak of it, we only do so in terms of its observable patterns. So this is the target then: the information of faith, rather than its attention. The idiosyncrasies of the latter do not prohibit the former from serving an essential function in addressing the problem of living with others.

Roberto Calasso wrote in The Ruin of Kasch: Seen from outside, the actions of beings who are without, even though they obey its ritual order, are entirely indistinguishable from those of enlightened beings. They eat, fight, sacrifice, make love-with just the same gestures. The only, invisible, difference is the detachment of enlightened beings from the fruit of their action.

Faith, the word, what it does—cannot be located in distinct actions. It is as fluid and alive as the human struggle to define it. This dynamism reflects a kind of self-discovery, in that faith is learning to understand what it itself means. There is a utility to this imperfection, and it is most at hand when the term is grappling with its own complexity.

Kafka wrote the following retelling of the Prometheus myth:

According to the first, he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.

According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.

According to the third, his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.

According to the fourth, everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.

There remains the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.

Across four narratives—punishment, transformation, forgetting, and exhaustion—the myth reshapes itself, bending to the needs of those who tell it, taking on new layers with each telling. The rock endures at its center, not a passive object but an active participant. It absorbs, resists, refracts. It is shaped by the stories but also shapes them in return. The rock is alive to its context, not static but dynamic. It plays a role in its own becoming.

Faith works the same way. It is not a fixed object or a vessel for static meanings. Faith is a system—an active, adaptive entity whose meaning comes from how it engages with the world around it. Religious doctrines, personal convictions, cultural traditions—these are the stories that surround faith, pressing against it, shaping it, and in turn being shaped by it. And like the rock, faith resists definition even as it compels the stories that try to define it. It holds something inexplicable, something essential, at its core.

This movement is not a failure of faith but its essence. Faith grows and changes through its interactions, finding new forms in the interplay of context and meaning. It acts, almost like a kind of cognition, adjusting and ensuring its survival across the vast range of human experience. The word itself is alive to its situation, responding to its circumstances with a kind of quiet intelligence. It is not faith’s clarity that sustains it, but its complexity. Through this complexity, faith endures, elusive and yet indispensable. The word finds way of ensuring its relevance and resonance across the diverse terrains of human experience.

This does not mean that the word holds its own memories; we keep those safe. But there is a template for a kind of embodied thinking that avoids the need for internalized renditions of the world. Rodney Brooks’s "Creatures," embody a design he names subsumption architecture, a concept that challenges traditional notions of planning and representation. These machines bypass the familiar sequence of sense, model, plan, and act. Instead, their sensors are hardwired to behavior-generating mechanisms. Allen, one of these robots, operates through three such mechanisms: Avoid, Wander, and Explore. The Avoid layer responds to obstacles, halting Allen’s movement, turning him aside, and setting him back on course. Wander sends him forward on a random trajectory, while Explore drives him toward a chosen destination. These behaviors are not isolated; they compete, interrupt, and override one another. Wander yields to Avoid at the sight of a wall. Explore suppresses Wander to keep Allen aimed at a goal. Out of this interplay arises something unexpected: behavior that appears purposeful, even adaptable.

According to Brooks, these Creatures have no use for representations. Drawing from ecological psychology, he asserts that their activity layers link perception directly to action. They do not map the world or simulate it internally. Instead, they rely on the world itself as their model. Movement shifts the sensory inputs, which in turn prompts new movements, creating a continuous loop. Nothing mediates between what is sensed and what is done—no intermediary, no representation. Allen, for example, navigates a hallway not by holding an internal image of it but by responding in real time to the conditions around him. His existence is a chain of immediate reactions, not a process of deliberation.

This approach has proven effective. Compared to their predecessors, Brooks’s robots are remarkably capable, a success echoed in the industry’s adoption of his ideas—Roomba vacuums owe their lineage to this innovation. But does this represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of cognition? Some enactivists think so. Yet doubts persist. The sensors on these robots send signals to behavior layers, which then signal one another. Avoid tells Wander to stop; Explore signals it to step aside. These signals are not without meaning—they direct, command, and respond. This, in essence, resembles representation.

Brooks’s Creatures, for all their elegance, may not have fully escaped the paradigm they challenge. But as a model, they can offer insights into faith’s relational and collective dimensions.

One of the most compelling qualities of the subsumption architecture model is its ability to capture the complexity of meaning through the interplay of competing and complementary layers. Unlike traditional models that focus on fixed definitions or even context-dependent fluidity, subsumption architecture introduces a multi-layered dynamic where various behavior-generating mechanisms operate simultaneously. These mechanisms, or layers, engage with environmental conditions in real-time, creating a responsive and adaptive system that reflects the richness of meaning. While philosophical traditions like Wittgenstein’s language games or pragmatism emphasize the contextual use of words, subsumption architecture offers meaning as arising through the tension and collaboration between autonomous layers.

Subsumption architecture relies on multiple, autonomous layers. Each layer represents a distinct way in which a concept is activated or deployed depending on the situation. For example, in the model’s original application to robotics, behaviors like Avoid, Wander, and Explore act independently but interdependently, responding directly to external stimuli without centralized communication. Applied to conceptual meaning, this suggests that words or ideas do not function through a single, unified essence but through layers that simultaneously interact with their surroundings. Some layers may come into conflict—such as one emphasizing protection while another encourages curiosity—while others align harmoniously to reinforce a shared response. This autonomy and interplay create a system of meaning that is richly textured and adaptive.

Subsumption architecture is also defined by its non-centralized structure. Unlike models that depend on an overarching definition or essence—such as a singular understanding of faith—this framework emphasizes distributed meaning. In a non-centralized system, meaning emerges not from a central authority but from the distributed reactions of the layers as they engage with specific contexts. Each layer competes or collaborates dynamically in real-time, creating a decentralized yet coherent system of meaning. This non-centralized approach moves away from static or hierarchical conceptions of language and thought, offering a model that embraces the fluid, distributed nature of meaning as it responds to the demands of the moment.

Most important is the concept of emergent complexity. The interplay between layers produces behaviors and meanings that cannot be predicted by analyzing the layers in isolation. Meaning arises from the dynamic feedback loops between layers—sometimes competitive, sometimes collaborative—rather than from a single definitional source or contextual frame. Skirting contextualism subsumption architecture introduces the idea of competition and interaction between layers. These competitive and cooperative dynamics result in meaning that is not merely fluid but actively emergent, shaped by the real-time tensions and alignments of the system.

This emphasis on autonomy, decentralization, and emergent complexity reveals the intricacies of how concepts function in practice. Words, ideas, and systems of meaning are not fixed or static but alive with the interplay of competing layers, responding to the shifting demands of their environments. By highlighting this dynamic, subsumption architecture provides an understanding of meaning as endlessly adaptive.

This reliance on sensory feedback and contextual adaptation highlights faith’s deeply iterative nature. Like Brooks’s robots, which recalibrate their movements with each new input, faith aligns itself dynamically with its circumstances. This loop of adjustment keeps faith tethered to the present, making it resilient and responsive. Unlike models that reduce meaning to symbolic representation or abstract theory, this framework insists on faith as an act—something lived, expressed, and experienced in its unfolding layers. It is a process, constantly refining itself through its own enactment, carving new shapes from the collisions and contours of its environment.

The emergent dynamics within this model elevate faith’s adaptability. The interactions between its layers create unpredictable evolutions, where faith responds to unexpected challenges and produces unforeseen interpretations. It moves across personal, relational, and societal dimensions, shifting between stability and exploration, vision and action. Faith, in this view, is a living process—resilient, responsive, and perpetually unfolding, perpetually becoming.

Violence, too, fits into this architecture, operating as a similarly layered, adaptive system. Far from being a singular phenomenon, violence emerges through behavioral layers that respond to its context. We might categorize a layer like Suppress actively silences or neutralizes opposition, while Amplify escalates conflict, magnifying its impact to draw attention or force a response. Stabilize, paradoxical in nature, disrupts systems to reimpose balance or create a new equilibrium. Symbolize transforms violence into an abstract or metaphorical tool, framing acts as provocations or reflections. Fragment tears apart relationships, structures, and identities, breaking them down into pieces. These layers interact, adapt, and evolve, creating an endlessly shifting system that reflects both the immediate and the systemic pressures acting upon it.

Violence’s reliance on feedback and context mirrors the architecture of faith. Its layers dynamically interact, building complex expressions that adapt to shifting circumstances. Suppressing dissent may provoke amplified responses, while symbolic acts of violence, like the tearing down of monuments, fracture collective narratives while inviting introspection. Stabilization efforts often lean on legitimized violence to enforce order, highlighting how violence reshapes the systems it enters. By modeling violence through subsumption architecture, we step beyond reductive definitions, revealing its layered complexity and its ability to simultaneously destroy, reinforce, and transform.

These forms too can interact via a sort of reciprocity. Faith and violence, as subsumption-driven beings, are not isolated forces. Their layered systems interact in ways that are neither entirely collaborative nor purely oppositional. In moments of alignment, faith’s vision of justice may find an uneasy ally in violence’s capacity to dismantle entrenched systems, creating pathways for transformation. Yet, these paths often diverge: faith’s healing and protective instincts meeting violence’s fragmenting and destabilizing forces. These tensions generate feedback loops, where faith refines its purpose in response to violence’s challenges, and violence adapts to the contours of faith’s resistance. The interplay becomes a system of evolution, where each shapes and reshapes the other in the face of new demands.

This interaction is not just a collision; it is a transformation, a process of mutual adaptation and counter-adaptation. These emergent interactions illustrate how faith and violence are not isolated phenomena but deeply intertwined forces that evolve through their engagement with one another. Together, they navigate the delicate balance between creation and destruction—between fracture and restoration—in a world that demands both resilience and change. Their interplay can catalyze profound societal change, perpetuate cycles of tension, or inspire novel resolutions.

Human life unfolds in the paradox of coexistence—bound together yet divided by competing wills and needs. Faith may call us toward the eternal, but it is lived out in the finite world. To imagine a world entirely absent of violence is to imagine a utopia, an Eden—a realm where the collisions of will, desire, and survival no longer exist.

Conflict is one of many possible distinctions that arise as individuality interacts with shared reality, shaped by the competing needs, perceptions, and actions of those involved. Where these differences create friction, and where friction escalates, violence often follows. Violence, then, is not an aberration of existence but a condition of it—a force emerging from the interplay of competing systems in a shared world.

The unavoidability of violence is not a justification but an acknowledgment of its emergent nature. It arises when competing pressures collide in ways that destabilize peaceful resolution. Suppression, stabilization, and amplification all play their roles, creating moments where violence surfaces as a mechanism of engagement. These interactions are not merely the products of individual choices but are woven into the structural dynamics of life itself.

There will come a time in my son’s life when the question of how to proceed with violence will arise. It is an unfortunate but necessary condition of being alive in a world shaped by competing forces. Whether the challenge takes the form of self-defense, the defense of others, or a moral confrontation with systemic injustice, violence will assert itself as an option that must be weighed. Faith must become the reins to violence—not denying its reality, but guiding its restraint. It ensures that violence, when unavoidable, serves ideals that heal rather than harm and transform rather than destroy.

Faith and violence are not just forces of action but players in a symbolic theater, vying for legitimacy in the narratives they inhabit. Their interactions extend beyond physical confrontation into the metaphors and symbols that shape human understanding. A regime may sanctify violence through religious imagery, turning faith’s language into a tool of oppression. Yet faith can reclaim these symbols, transforming them into emblems of resistance and resilience.

Ultimately, the struggle between faith and violence is a battle for meaning, shaping how we understand and respond to the world. Violence tears down and fragments; faith restores and inspires. Yet their interplay—whether oppositional or collaborative—reveals their mutual capacity to transform systems and stories. When faith consciously incorporates violence into its enactment, the relationship becomes a delicate balancing act, requiring vigilance to ensure violence serves its purpose without displacing faith’s higher principles. Leaders and movements must ask whether their use of violence still serves their vision or has strayed into self-justifying destruction.

The risks of this alignment are significant, but faith’s adaptability serves as a safeguard. By remaining responsive to its circumstances, faith recalibrates its strategies, ensuring violence remains purposeful and proportional. Pairing acts of resistance with restoration and unity, faith can navigate violence as a tool of transformation, preserving its integrity while engaging with the fractured realities of the world.

There is no paradise here—we are on trial in a world where anything is justifiable. Faith out loud is the argument we make, not for innocence, but for a chance to feel we’ve offset the worst of what will remain of us once our capacity for subjective experience fails—that my son’s memory of me will carry more grace than grief, more restoration than ruin, and reflect the better parts of what I tried to be.

In Book IV of Paradise Lost, Eve recounts the experience of her fledgling moments:

I first awak’t, and found my self repos’d

Under a shade on flow’rs, much wond’ring where

And what I was, whence thither brought, and how.

Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound

Of waters issu’d from a Cave and spread

Into a liquid Plain, then stood unmov’d

Pure as th’ expanse of Heav’n. (IV. 449–455)

She wonders at her own creation and the singularity of herself. A whole life made to satisfy what has overwhelmed Adam: the abundance of Eden has failed to fulfill his need for an equal in companionship. She has not yet grasped that her position has superseded Adam’s in God’s intentionality. She has made whole the experience of human existence by establishing the conditions for discourse absent a representative from Heaven.

Much later, Adam looks back on his prior solitude in dialogue with the angel Raphael:

In solitude

What happiness, who can enjoy alone,

Or all enjoying, what contentment find?

Thus I presumptuous; and the Vision bright,

As with a smile more brightened, thus replied.

‘What call’st thou solitude? Is not the Earth

With various living creatures, and the Air

Replenished, and all these at thy command

To come and play before thee? Know’st thou not

Their language and their ways? They also know,

And reason not contemptibly; with these

Find pastime, and bear rule; thy realm is large.’

So spake the Universal Lord, and seem’d

So ordering: I with leave of speech implored,

And humble deprecation thus replied:

‘Let not my words offend thee, heavenly Power,

My Maker, be propitious while I speak.

Hast thou not made me here thy substitute,

And these inferiour far beneath me set?

Among unequals what society

Can sort, what harmony or true delight?

Which must be mutual, in proportion due

Giv’n and received; but in disparity

The one intense, the other still remiss

Cannot well suit with either, but soon prove

Tedious alike: of fellowship I speak

Such as I seek, fit to participate

All rational delight. (VIII. 364–389)

Here Eve’s occasion has already exerted some influence. Adam’s recollection is a reflective one, and he is now better equipped to articulate the depth of his earlier longing with greater clarity. Milton provides us a theological meditation on the necessity and purpose of our shared existence.

Kierkegaard seems to agree this interconnectedness is foundational—love, as he sees it, serves as the highest expression of divine and human connection. In Works of Love, he writes, To love another person is to help them love God. Relationships are not merely about alleviating loneliness but remain vital for spiritual development by encouraging a tension between the internal and external: Adam and Eve are distinct beings with their own identities, yet their relationship calls them into unity. So love begets the profound challenge of navigating choice and accountability. Eve’s creation introduces relational freedom—each partner must choose how to act in light of the other—and the responsibility to honor the partnership. Eve’s ongoing presence maintains the stewardship of mutual accountability.

It is only through this spiritual crucible that Kierkegaard’s deeply personal leap into the paradox of the eternal is possible. While it is ultimately a solitary act before God, Kierkegaard consistently frames the self as existing in relationship—to others, to society, and to the divine. The individual cannot come to understand themselves fully without the context of others. External discussions of faith reflect the self back to itself in a way that reveals its limitations. This discourse might intend to resolve faith into a set of shared certainties, but its consequence is the reminder of our understanding’s fragmentary and incomplete nature.

To speak of faith is to engage in an act of humility, acknowledging the gaps in our comprehension and the insufficiency of our words. The word forces us to confront the boundaries of what we can know, demonstrating that even our most profound insights are partial and contingent. In recognizing these limits, we open the space for Kierkegaard’s faith-absent-language, which thrives in the acknowledgment of what cannot be fully articulated or reasoned. In these acts of humility we conduct a continual rehearsal of our inability to master the infinite or reduce it to human terms. This confrontation with our lack of omniscience is not a defeat but a foundation. It is precisely because we cannot articulate faith completely that Kierkegaard’s internal faith becomes essential. The truths we most need are not those we can hold firmly in reason or language; they are those we step toward in trust, knowing that our understanding will always be incomplete. The continued agency of the word faith is a condition of our access to its eternal form.

The family amplifies this dynamic by anchoring these discussions of faith within the shared rhythms of everyday life. It is within the family that faith is tested not only through abstract reflection but through the demands of care, conflict, and continuity. Here the lived reality of faith is a coalescence across multiple instances of its true form in collaboration. It is enacted in service to others and embodied in rituals of responsibility and gestures of love, grounding the word in tangible acts that curve back to shape the paradoxes at the heart of ourselves.

As my wife and I attempt to articulate faith to our child—through our shared stories, our practices, and our moments of vulnerability—we confront the weight of our own limitations, passing down an idea that is both incomplete and deeply human. I must take this fragile thing I believe out of the case of eternity and speak it into time. I am not disheartened by this. For a while I might get to watch the wonder bloom across my son’s face as the picture of that-thing-I-mean spins in the room between us. Or perhaps it will be of no interest to him. Providing directions will not buy me access to the substance of his passage. So my perpetual appeal to it: let him remain committed to tenderness, even after I exit outward into the bright flux of things.

Model 4: Crime

Kierkegaard’s faith is not pragmatic. It is not mediated by societal rules, rationality, or shared experience. It cannot be justified, explained or confronted alongside others, even those you love. It is a solitary endeavor, maybe the only true one. A magic trick with no audience. The lonely question of what remains when consensus learns that its crusade for stability has created the conditions for its own subversion.

But Abraham must have returned a changed man from his climb of Mount Moriah. Did he assume a spiritual authority? Was he more reserved? Did he feel a slight panic—a rush to amend his relationships and address those flaws that were only now apparent to him through his experience with the totalitarian love of God? Did his wife, his friends, his neighbors, notice a difference? I imagine there were questions about the day, at least. And maybe he couldn’t answer them. Even vocalizing that inability to explain is evidence enough of faith. But if faith cannot be translated in some way—if only just in the presence of its possibility—then either there is no reason to have any concerns about faith (as it is only available through direct invitation from the infinite) or there is no reason for life (which only offers meaning superfluous to that of the infinite). I cannot look at my son and find the latter to be true. And Abraham’s faith is a non-starter unless he feels the same about Isaac.

If Abraham is to find faith and be asked to continue living, then he must find a way to process life after blessedness or damnation has been retrieved from the infinite. Otherwise faith is only the constant suffering of knowing those you love have been left out of it.

Consensus—Kierkegaard’s universal—operates as a self-contained system of meaning-making and is unconcerned with reality per se. Consensus seeks resolution within its own boundaries, deriving meaning for itself and from itself, avoiding the destabilizing implications of R. As a generalized model:

Consensus begins with divergent perspectives and constructs shared meaning.Participants bring varied perspectives, shaped by their individual experiences and contexts, into a collective space. Consensus seeks to harmonize these variations by constructing shared frameworks that facilitate collective understanding and action. These frameworks are internally derived products of negotiation, not grounded in reality per se but in the necessity of coherence and functionality for the group.

Consensus faces the challenge of reconciling divergence without engaging the infinite.Divergent perspectives introduce tension into the consensus process, creating friction that demands resolution. Consensus bypasses the infinite by focusing solely on reconciling internal differences, avoiding questions that might destabilize its frameworks. The goal is to achieve actionable certainty—a stability that arises from resolving divergence within its own constructed boundaries.

Consensus is built through negotiation and internal resolution.Participants engage in negotiation, filtering individual perspectives to create shared meaning. Consensus emphasizes inclusivity and coherence, aligning perspectives without seeking validation or connection from an infinite substratum like reality per se. This process creates an internally coherent framework, prioritizing stability and predictability over ambiguity or external truths.

Consensus either stagnates or adapts as it encounters cycles of change.Over time, consensus frameworks encounter new variations as participants or external conditions shift. Consensus either adapts—modifying its framework to incorporate new perspectives and maintain internal coherence—or stagnates, resisting change and enforcing rigid structures that suppress ambiguity and innovation. Stagnation occurs when consensus prioritizes self-preservation over adaptability, reducing its capacity to accommodate internal complexity. Adaptation allows for limited evolution but remains tethered to the system’s own internal logic, avoiding engagement with reality per se.

Consensus achieves provisional stability as a self-referential achievement.Consensus achieves provisional stability, reconstituting itself within the boundaries of its existing logic. This stability reflects the system’s success in managing internal divergence without engaging external realities or infinite contexts. However, this stability is fragile, as it depends on suppressing ambiguity and dissent that cannot be resolved within the system’s constraints. When stagnated, consensus collapses into dogma, creating a false permanence that denies the potential for meaningful transformation even within its own limited sphere.

Unlike consensus, which seeks resolution within finite and self-contained frameworks, faith acknowledges the contingency of meaning and orients itself toward reality per se (R), the infinite substratum that cannot be fully grasped or resolved. Faith does not strive for stability but instead embraces cycles of creation, dissolution, and reconstitution, engaging with the boundless uncertainty that consensus seeks to suppress. It is a process not of avoiding the destabilizing implications of R but of stepping directly into them, trusting that meaning can emerge anew beyond the limits of certainty. As a generalized model:

The construction of meaning begins with the individual engaging with consensus.A system (the individual) creates meaning by engaging with consensus, which provides structured frameworks for shared understanding and coherence. This process is grounded in reality per se, the infinite and unknowable substratum that makes consensus possible but cannot itself be fully captured or resolved within it. Meaning emerges as a finite and contingent product of the individual’s interaction with both the structured certainty of consensus and the boundless uncertainty of reality per se.

The infinite challenges the individual to recognize the limits of constructed meaning.Reality per se points to the existence of the infinite, a boundless and paradoxical horizon that transcends the finite constructs of meaning created by the individual. Engaging with the infinite reveals the limits of constructed meaning, confronting the individual with the realization that, while meaningful, this construct is a finite representation of an infinite ground. Faith demands that the individual relinquish attachment to this meaning, acknowledging its contingency and incompleteness, and trust in reality per se as the sustaining ground of existence.

The leap of faith requires the individual to sacrifice their constructed meaning.The individual must decide whether to cling to their constructed meaning, preserving its familiar but finite framework, or to sacrifice it in trust of reality per se’s ability to sustain meaning beyond this construct. The leap of faith requires the individual to relinquish their meaning, not as a rejection but as a reorientation—a shift toward humility and openness to the infinite. This act of surrender disrupts certainty but is not annihilation. Instead, it is transformation: the individual ceases to see their meaning as ultimate, recontextualizing it within the boundless possibilities of reality per se.

Reconstitution of meaning follows as the individual engages with reality per se anew.After the leap, the individual re-engages with consensus and reality per se, leading to the emergence of a transformed meaning. This new meaning reflects the individual’s deeper awareness of the contingency and provisionality of meaning. It integrates the insights gained from the leap while remaining open to future cycles of dissolution and reconstitution. The transformed meaning is held lightly, recognized not as a possession but as a gift arising from the interplay between the individual, reality per se, and the structures of consensus.

The reconstitution of meaning is not a resolution of faith’s paradox but a method for living in its aftermath. If it is not enough to leap into the infinite, then one must also return, reoriented and re-engaged, to the world of shared meaning where faith struggles to sustain against the test of consensus. The trick is to carry faith through the collective frameworks of consensus without allowing it to be entirely catalogued and thus disintegrated by them. After faith strips universal meaning of its permanence, what emerges is not a rejection of consensus but a transformed engagement with it. Faith, then, is not an endpoint but a provocation, asking the individual to live differently, demanding that the reconstituted self carry the insights of the infinite back into the finite, navigating the tension between what is shared and what remains personal. Faith on Abraham’s return becomes his anchor back to a kind of salvation from being human when being human becomes too much.

We can call on this faith through practice, a tug on the anchor line. Prayer, or any operationalization of faith within the generalized model, can be understood as creating circumstances in which meaning is intentionally loosened, dissolved, or given less specific attention. We might say it functions as a form of polysemic communication—a deliberate injection of open-ended, ambiguous, or dissolving signals into the self-referential system of meaning-making. In this framework, prayer is less about transmitting a clear message or seeking a specific outcome and more about creating a space where meaning is temporarily suspended, allowing the system to recalibrate and engage with the infinite substratum of reality.

In effect, this creates a recursive dynamic where the self generates signals that it cannot fully interpret but must respond to. This loop reinforces the system’s ability to navigate uncertainty by making ambiguity itself a productive force. Each instance of prayer recalibrates the system, preparing it to integrate new experiences and distinctions while remaining open to the infinite. In this endless sacrificial engine, trust becomes a self-sustaining act, even in the absence of clarity.

Prayer, in my experience with the church, has been the practice of the reciting scripture and verse in times of need or worship. Tradition sees this as an effective way to root oneself firmly in the finite historical, theological, and psychological frameworks of consensus. The faith I’ve described here requires something different of us, closer to music and dance, which introduce patterns, rhythms, and movements that dissolve linguistic distinctions, opening the self to an abstract, experiential form of meaning-making; or the hallucinogenic trip to disrupt ordinary cognitive processes, forcing the system to confront its own constructs and interact with reality in a radically altered state; or even silence, in which the absence of external stimuli creates a space for dissolving internal constructs.

An analogue: Bernard Tschumi, in The Manhattan Transcripts, proposes that architectural design informs both intended and unintended actions. There is no space without something happening in it. Architecture enables action of all kinds. “To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder,” Tschumi famously writes.

The church is a space designed for collective meaning, stabilizing action through boundaries and norms. Predictability is its function—ensuring shared rituals and interpretations are accessible to all. This predictability suppresses ambiguity and absorbs dissent. The church is consensus: a framework that creates stability but also risks stagnation. This stability harbors its own undoing, as consensus inevitably contains the seeds of subversion.

The practice of Abraham’s faith must be closer to Tschumi’s (or Isaac’s) hypothetical murder than mere summary of gospel. Faith ruptures consensus, introducing ambiguity into a space that depends on predictability. Where history closes, faith keeps open; where consensus fixes, faith destabilizes. In doing so, faith reclaims the infinite from consensus’s fixation on the finite.

Prayer, then, is the creation of a temporal and psychological space in which even questions disassemble what they presume to find. It is the search for pockets of un-meaning in the designs of life. Its effect is that of current against stone: the slow erosion of certainty.

The definition of beauty has been a central and contested issue in philosophy for millennia—it resists a singular explanation, hovering between the universal and the particular in myriad dimensions. Heavy names have asked whether it is intrinsic to an object, or projected by the observer; whether it is universal or entirely shaped by cultural and historical contexts; whether it can exist without a perceiver or if it is necessarily relational. Here I might argue that beauty is the trace left behind when finite structures dissolve and reassemble, when the self engages with the infinite and re-emerges transformed. It arises when the boundaries of finite meaning are surpassed, and something ineffable—something more than the sum of its parts—is revealed. Held lightly, it is not fixed or eternal but is always shaped by the interaction of the self with the infinite. It retains the tension between clarity and mystery, the finite and the infinite, evoking a sense of awe that resists full comprehension or resolution.

Beauty emerges where prayer fractures meaning—Tschumi’s dead body in a church, discordant echo of what was never meant to happen, but nevertheless has. Consensus will try to assimilate this too, will send along history as a detective to collect evidence in certainty’s favor. But in the moment before he arrives, the fracture holds and we find ourselves captivated and confused by the sacred disarray.

Model 5: Parachute

Paradise has long been one of humanity’s most enduring fascinations. It seems, in many descriptions, a place where each of the negative aspects of being alive in the world are addressed. Dante says as much in Paradiso—In His will is our peace: it is that sea / To which all things move that it creates and nature makes—a kind of ultimate convergence of human will and divine purpose, resolving all earthly struggles. And there are myriad descriptions. Across cultures and philosophies, solutions multiply for a space where earthly struggles might cease: a lush garden of serene abundance, a realm of endless delight, a perfect society unspoiled by conflict, heralding angels, bright lights and music, the big show, and on. Amidst this vast diversity, only one quality holds constant for all: paradise is a state where faith is no longer required.

Faith, as Kierkegaard saw it, rises in the absence of resolution. It is the trust that meaning persists even when obscured, the leap into the infinite from the edges of human comprehension. It is a reckoning with uncertainty, an embrace of mystery that refuses to yield to clarity. But paradise, in any of its imagined forms, resolves the tension that calls faith into being. Whether through the transcendent integration with reality itself or the imposition of a consensus so absolute that doubt becomes unthinkable, paradise completes what faith begins. It eliminates the struggle, the longing, and the trust that are its lifeblood.

There are, to my mind, three categorical visions of paradise: the first envisions paradise as the dissolution of self, time, and meaning—a transcendence into the unbroken whole of reality per se. The second imagines a lived-in world of perfected consensus, where dissent and uncertainty are extinguished, and faith suffocates beneath the weight of absolute agreement. The third lingers in the gradient between these poles, examining how faith grows sharper and more necessary as one moves away from either extreme. There is an enduring tension between faith and paradise which asks not only what it means to seek an end, but what that seeking costs in inhabiting a world where it seems always imagined but never within reach.

Paradise, as understood through the model of faith in reality per se, represents the ultimate resolution of faith’s demands. This model, grounded in the cycles out of meaning—creation, dissolution, and reconstitution—positions faith as a response to the finite limitations of self and time. This faith is Abraham’s leap beyond the known into trust in the infinite, a confrontation with uncertainty that stretches beyond meaning. These cycles come to an end in paradise, where faith’s work culminates and the self, time, and meaning dissolve into the boundless whole. In this framework, paradise is neither an eternal promise nor a utopian projection but the absolute state in which faith becomes unnecessary, its conditions transcended.

Without the self, there is no central agent constructing or relinquishing meaning. The individual, once caught in the tension between finite constructs and infinite ground, dissolves as a distinct entity. The boundaries of "I" and "other," subject and object, are erased. What remains is not emptiness but an unbroken whole—existence without fragmentation or the distinctions that give rise to meaning. Time goes with us, as the linear progression through which meaning is created, challenged, and transformed diminishes. Without "before" or "after," no tension exists between states of being. Every moment contains all others, removing the movement and uncertainty required for faith to emerge.

This is a radical place, where meaning has gone missing. As a relational construct, meaning arises from distinctions—between self and other, past and future, observer and observed. So this paradise is not fullness but absence, defying all conceptual frameworks. Such a state challenges even the imagination, stripped of relation with nothing left to transcend or navigate.

Another possibility emerges when considering paradise through the constraints of embodiment. Meaning, in our current existence, is not only relational but also shaped by the physical and cognitive limits of the body. Allen & Friston, in a paper titled “From cognitivism to autopoiesis: towards a computational framework for the embodied mind”, write: More exactly, the organism, body-brain-and-world itself constitutes the ‘belief’ or generative model that it will survive; in a very concrete sense, the kinds of limbs and morphological shape one has will constrain the probabilities of the kinds of actions one can engage in. This can be considered by analogy to the notion of an Umwelt, in which an organism’s world is itself a constituting and constraining feature of its embodiment (e.g., the isomorphism between the wavelength selectivity of our photoreceptors and ambient radiation from the sun).

In this sense, the body’s structure constrains the probabilities of the actions we can take and the meanings we can generate. Extend the example of photoreceptors to our limbs, senses, neural architecture, and all the rest and suddenly the frame of possibilities for how we engage with reality and construct meaning seems impossible in its specificity.

Paradise, imagined as a state beyond embodiment, might transcend these constraints. Freed from the survival-driven generative model that underpins human cognition, entirely new dimensions of meaning could become accessible. Perception might no longer depend on discrete sensory organs, evolving into a networked awareness where observer and observed dissolve into a unified field. Time, unbound from linearity, could become a simultaneity, fundamentally reshaping causality and narrative. Relationality, creativity, and understanding expand into realms inconceivable within our current lives.

In this vision, paradise is not the absence of meaning but its infinite reconfiguration. Meaning would no longer arise from the finite interplay of self, other, and world, but from an endless horizon of possibilities. Freed from the constraints of survival and embodiment, paradise becomes an unbounded space for exploration, where meaning is no longer defined by necessity but by the boundless interplay of potential. Here, the dissolution of self and time is not an end, but the beginning of a radically new form of existence—one unburdened by the finite.

Paradise, as either the dissolution of meaning or its infinite expansion, represents the endpoint of faith's necessity. Faith relies on the self as a distinct agent and on time as the medium for its cycles of transformation. Both are absent in paradise. Yet the very absence of faith raises questions about the nature of existence when meaning itself is no longer required. Is paradise the end of meaning, or the beginning of something unimaginable—a form of engagement unbound by the constraints of our current world? If meaning in paradise is no longer tethered to effort, risk, or faith, it is either rendered obsolete or reconstituted into a form we cannot presently grasp. Paradise, then, is not merely a conclusion but a profound reorientation of existence, where the finite and infinite converge in ways that defy the frameworks of thought and faith alike.

But to imagine paradise, to approach its contours, we must also confront its shadow. What is left when meaning, as we know it, dissolves entirely? Does the self unravel into the infinite, or does it simply cease? In its absence, does existence become a pure presence, unfiltered and undisturbed? The dissolution of meaning is a dissolution of perspective, of any vantage point from which to grasp what remains. Without faith, without the architecture of distinctions that scaffold our understanding, paradise becomes not only unimaginable but in a sense uninhabitable as we come to it—a realm utterly alien to the finite mind.

A different interpretation of Kierkegaard’s paradox: that faith, which yearns toward the infinite, cannot survive its arrival. It is faith that animates the search, that orients the self toward a horizon perpetually beyond its reach. Yet in paradise, the search ends. The longing ceases. Faith collapses into fulfillment or irrelevance, depending on the vision we choose to hold. Paradise may be the culmination of faith’s striving, but it is also its undoing.

And yet, perhaps paradise is not an undoing, but an inversion. What if paradise does not obliterate meaning but transforms it into something vast and unbounded? The finite structures that tether us—selfhood, temporality, and the struggle for coherence—might dissolve, but they might also yield to something more. In paradise, meaning could become a pure emanation, an effortless unfolding that no longer needs faith to sustain it. Here, the dissolution of the self is not annihilation but a merging, not a loss but an arrival—a completion that leaves behind the scaffolding of struggle and steps fully into the infinite.

Not all resolutions of faith are emancipatory. While the paradise of reality per se resolves faith by dissolving the boundaries of self, time, and meaning into an infinite openness, an opposite resolution exists: a paradise of consensus so absolute that dissent becomes unthinkable. This is the suffocating certainty of absolute meaning—an unyielding coherence that denies ambiguity, creativity, and contradiction. Here, faith, once a vital response to the infinite, is replaced by an obedience to a fixed and inescapable life.

Consider the mechanisms by which such a world could come into being, one which eliminates the need for faith by erasing the possibility of alternative meaning. Consensus grows so totalizing that the distinctions between individual and collective thought collapse into a seamless and stifling unity. This dystopian paradise achieves coherence through coercion. Historical examples offer unsettling clarity: fascist regimes mobilizing entire populations into rigid conformity; totalitarian states wielding surveillance and propaganda to extinguish new thought. Such systems promise stability at the cost of individual freedom. The result is a collective so thoroughly aligned that the very capacity for questioning—the heart of faith—is annihilated.

This is not to say that the paradise of consensus is built on fact, but rather agreement. Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind: Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. And further, in The Origins of Totalitarianism: In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

The regime that pursues this paradise wields omnipresence and the manipulation of language to render rebellion not only punishable but unimaginable. Trust not in the infinite but in the system’s unassailable correctness, even as its own convictions shift and contradict one another. Theocratic regimes have similarly demanded rigid orthodoxy, masking coercion as divine will. In both cases, paradise is achieved by eliminating friction—no ambiguity, no dissent, no deviation from the consensus.

The coercive paradise offers a form of bliss, but not the bliss of freedom. It is the comfort of a mind so assimilated into the collective that it no longer yearns to think differently. Yet this comfort comes at a steep cost: the annihilation of the creative tension that true faith, in its engagement with the infinite, seeks to sustain.

The paradise of consensus stands as the polar opposite of the paradise of reality per se. In the former, faith becomes obsolete as all alternative meanings are erased. In the latter, faith reaches its conclusion because meaning dissolves into infinite possibility. One is the tyranny of certainty; the other is the liberation of the unknowable.

In the paradise of reality per se, the self dissolves not through external force but by integrating into an infinite whole. It is a state where distinctions dissolve, where time collapses into an eternal present, and where all possibilities exist simultaneously. By contrast, in the paradise of consensus, distinctions are erased through the imposition of uniformity. Time here does not collapse but freezes, locking reality into an endless loop of unquestioned meaning and ritual.

Faith operates inversely in these two paradigms. In the paradise of reality per se, faith is a journey of surrender, a trust that allows one to relinquish the self and leap into the infinite. In the paradise of consensus, faith is twisted into compliance, a tool of control rather than transformation. As the first paradise invites freedom and discovery, the second enforces stagnation and submission.

The opposing paradises reflect the opposing kinds of faith that lead to them. The faith that brings one to reality per se is marked by courage, ambiguity, and the willingness to surrender certainty. It is a solitary act, requiring the individual to confront the unknowable and trust in the infinite. This faith thrives in cycles of creation, dissolution, and reconstitution, sustaining the dynamic tension that keeps meaning alive.

The faith that brings one to consensus is its antithesis. It requires no courage or surrender, as it is imposed rather than chosen. This faith demands adherence to finite structures, eliminating ambiguity by enforcing a single, unyielding narrative. It is a faith that denies dissolution, entrenching the finite as absolute and extinguishing the possibility of transformation.

If paradise is the resolution of faith, then faith both shapes the contours of how we imagine our ultimate ends and demands that we choose the framework through which we navigate meaning itself. Faith is not only the lens through which we construct meaning but also the force that determines the point at which meaning dissolves. The paradise of reality per se offers liberation through infinite openness but exacts the price of the self. The paradise of consensus promises stability through coherence but exacts the annihilation of dissent. These opposing paradises are no distant hypotheticals. They press against us now, reflected in every choice we make—individually, collectively, politically, spiritually. The paradise of reality per se calls us to the boundless potential of a faith unchained from certainty. The paradise of coercive consensus warns of the suffocating tyranny of meaning when it is locked into totalizing systems. Between these extremes, faith remains the irreducible tension that keeps meaning alive—a force not for resolving life’s paradoxes but for ensuring they remain open and vital and human.

Faith is resolved at two poles—between the paradise of reality per se and the authoritarian paradise of consensus lies a sprawling, intricate gradient. At one extreme, faith is integrated into the infinite; at the other, it is suppressed entirely by the imposition of unassailable meaning. Moving away from these poles, faith re-emerges as a vital force for navigating the tensions between certainty and ambiguity.

Near the authoritarian pole of consensus, faith is not extinguished but distorted into sanctioned expressions—rituals and dogmas that reinforce the system’s coherence. Dissent flickers quietly, and faith finds expression in subversive acts that challenge the rigidity of collective meaning. As one steps further from this pole, the rigidity softens, and faith reasserts itself as a way of questioning dominant frameworks and engaging with uncertainty.

Closer to the paradise of reality per se, faith transforms into a profound engagement with the unknowable. Ambiguity, no longer feared, becomes an invitation. The dissolution of meaning is liberating, allowing individuals to explore existence free from the constraints of rigid systems.

Yet it is at the midpoint of the spectrum that faith assumes its most critical role. Here lies the crossroads, a dynamic space of decision. The individual must choose their orientation: toward the finite stability of consensus or the infinite possibilities of reality per se. This is not a purely intellectual choice; it is deeply personal and ethical, shaping the trajectory of one’s life and the nature of the paradise one seeks.

At this midpoint, faith is both a burden and a liberation. It carries the weight of relinquishing familiar certainties, risking alienation by stepping beyond collective agreements. Yet it also grants the freedom to define existence beyond inherited meanings. Faith here becomes an act of courage, a commitment to complexity over simplicity, tension over resolution. It does not demand answers but the strength to live fully in the presence of questions.

This midpoint is not a static equilibrium but a space of constant negotiation between the pull of consensus and the call of the infinite. The direction chosen here shapes everything that follows, influencing not only personal meaning but the broader ethical and social fabric of life. Both paths offer purpose, but only one—faith in reality per se—offers something enduring.

To pursue faith in reality per se is to embrace transformation over stability. Unlike the authoritarian paradise of consensus, which demands conformity and suppresses individuality, the paradise of reality per se invites growth and renewal. It offers no immediate assurances, but it provides something far richer: a dynamic, evolving relationship with meaning itself. Fulfillment arises not from resolving tension but from inhabiting it, allowing faith to keep meaning alive and fluid.

This path aligns with humility, empathy, and interconnectedness. By acknowledging the limits of understanding and the contingency of meaning, it fosters a deep sense of responsibility toward others and the world. It resists the authoritarian impulse to dominate or control, favoring relationships grounded in trust, mutual respect, and openness.

It is only pointed in the direction of the infinite that we find evidence of Kierkegaard’s claim that faith is not the loss of rationality but its transfiguration. Rationality, by its nature, operates within the finite, seeking clarity, coherence, and resolution. Wielded by consensus, rationality only refines itself. Toward reality per se, it is reframed as a supra-rational foundation, necessary for a deeper understanding of what we are by way of a fuller definition of what we are not. Reason is exposed as insufficient when pressed against truths that cannot be entirely grasped through logic alone. Here we shift focus from seeking definitive answers to celebrating the richness of questions, from clinging to fixed identities to embracing the fluidity of becoming. Though less certain and more challenging, this path yields a vision of paradise that honors only an endless horizon of possibility.

In The Present Age, Kierkegaard seems to describe a model paradise of consensus:

Nowadays one can talk with anyone, and it must be admitted that people’s opinions are exceedingly sensible, yet the conversation leaves one with the impression of having talked to an anonymity. The same person will say the most contradictory things and, with the utmost calm, make a remark, which coming from him is a bitter satire on his own life. The remark itself may be sensible enough, and of the kind that sounds well at a meeting, and may serve in a discussion preliminary to coming to a decision, in much the same way that paper is made out of rags. But all these opinions put together do not make one human, personal opinion such as you may hear from quite a simple man who talks about very little but really does talk. People’s remarks are so objective, so all-inclusive, that it is a matter of complete indifference who expresses them, and where human speech is concerned that is the same as acting ‘on principle’. And so our talk becomes like the public, a pure abstraction. There is no longer any one who knows how to talk, and instead, objective thought produces an atmosphere, an abstract sound, which makes human speech superfluous, just as machinery makes man superfluous.

Last night I tried to make a list of what would constitute paradise here in life for me. It was everything you would expect. Most of it relied on an unfathomable amount of cash. And I thought, how embarrassing, to look at your threshold for a permanent contentedness in life and realize it’s the same as anyone else’s. So it seems consensus is more alluring or conspiring than I’d like to admit.

That frustrates me. Either paradise offers only the illusion of a destination, not a place to arrive but a state where arrival itself is meaningless; either paradise offers an escape from the relentless cycles of endless negotiation with life as a person whose needs might go unmet as often as they go met; either paradise offers a rest from being human, in a sense. But in the paradise of consensus I am left wondering privately about the other one. Up late at night writing about it until it feels like nonsense. I see the idea of an alternative—again not a place but a possibility. And even if that possibility only ever remains an idea, it has already unraveled something essential. It reveals the promises of consensus to be a fiction, a fragile story we tell ourselves to justify our shared limitations. It offers an escape that I realize I want as a consequence of realizing its possibility.

There is no same rearview mirror out of the infinite. To try and look behind you is to end up facing everything again. Its authority is derived from its totality, unlike the authority of consensus which can only be transitory. In this way the authority of the infinite is indifferent—it does not need to justify itself, it is self-evident and unassailable.

It is through this authority that the infinite demands something of us that consensus cannot. Consensus offers comfort—a shared story, an agreeable fiction—but the infinite confronts us with paradox. Kierkegaard’s distinction between genius and the Apostle clarifies this tension:

Genius may, therefore, have something new to bring forth, but what it brings forth disappears again as it becomes assimilated by the human race, just as the difference ‘genius’ disappears as soon as one thinks of eternity; the Apostle has, paradoxically, something new to bring, the newness of which, precisely because it is essentially paradoxical, and not an anticipation in relation to the development of the race, always remains, just as an Apostle remains an Apostle in all eternity, and no eternal immanence puts him on the same level as other men, because he is essentially, paradoxically different. Genius is what it is of itself, i.e. through that which it is in itself; an Apostle is what he is by his divine authority. Genius has only an immanent teleology, the Apostle is placed as absolute paradoxical teleology.

Genius, though remarkable, ultimately reinforces the shared framework of humanity; it is absorbed and neutralized within the story of consensus. The Apostle, by contrast, remains irreducibly different, carrying a divine authority that cannot be assimilated. The Apostle is offered an encounter with something fundamentally “other.” This encounter demands that we relinquish the idea of permanent arrival, just as the Apostle’s authority exists apart from human immanence. If paradise is anything at all, it must transcend the framework of consensus, pointing us toward the infinite—toward a destination that is less about arriving and more about being undone.

We are left to wonder how one should travel through life in order to reach a place one cannot arrive. Kierkegaard again, in The Present Age:

The lyrical author is only concerned with his production, enjoys the pleasure of producing, often perhaps only after pain and effort; but he has nothing to do with others, he does not write in order that: in order to enlighten men or in order to help them along the right road, in order to bring about something; in short, he does not write in order that. The same is true of every genius. No genius has an in order that; the Apostle has absolutely and paradoxically, an in order that.

The task, then, is to continually renew the orientation of our life’s actions toward an in order that; to ensure that the sentence ends without deference to a paradise that only offers the shallow certainty of mutual compromise.

Coda

It comes to this: the final, inevitable reckoning of the self in the great humming, glowing, digitized vastness, where every thought is tagged, every impulse indexed, every longing bent toward optimization. Two fates remain. The first—faith in consensus—smooths the world into a perfect, frictionless coherence, a seamless machinery of meaning where identity is no longer lived but processed, refined, absorbed, until the self is nothing but the elegant recursion of its own engagement. The second—faith in reality per se—refuses the great optimization, turns its face to the roaring, infinite dark, choosing instead the wild, shattering rupture of truth unconfined. And what remains? Two paths, both annihilations—one silent, one screaming—and the only question worth asking: which death shall you choose

And so the self, that old, stubborn, howling thing, is refined, iterated, smoothed to the perfect shape of its own disappearance. Faith in consensus promises no rupture, no terror, no breaking of the vessel—only a slow, invisible erosion, the body worn down not by storm but by a tide so steady, so soft, so utterly total that one day it simply does not return. No one notices. There is no funeral, no great lament. The self is pressed into cohesion, folded so neatly into the expectations of the world that it ceases to be anything apart from the endless machinery of its own participation. It no longer seeks truth—only legibility. No crisis lasts long enough to break it. Every fissure is sealed before the wound can open. Every doubt is accounted for, every hesitation converted into forward motion before it can settle. It is not that the self does not suffer; it is that suffering, too, is folded back into the rhythm, metabolized as another step toward coherence. The self does not die—it is iterated into oblivion.

For what is identity now but a function of adaptation, a flickering composite of mirrored expectations, each fragment calibrated for a different context? You are not a self but a sequence—who you are at work distinct from who you are with friends, distinct from who you are in solitude, distinct from the version of yourself that lives only in memory, a collection of impressions stored in the minds of others. They do not form a whole. They do not converge. They are micro-selves, parallel shadows, adjusted to fit the shape of each new moment, each new demand. The gaze is no longer yours. Your perception is shaped before it even reaches you, your desires anticipated before they are felt. And you—are you seeing? Or are you simply being seen, arranged, adjusted, positioned in accordance with forces you do not fully perceive?

This is possession without a possessor. Once, people dreamed of an essential self, a core that remained unchanged beneath the shifting masks. But even that ghost has dissolved. Now, identity is an echo chamber of expectations, a reflection bouncing endlessly between perspectives, never still long enough to be grasped. You do not think; you are thought for. You do not choose; you are directed. The old dream of self-determination—the belief that one could carve out an identity from the world—was a lie. Identity does not emerge from within; it is imposed, iterated upon, reconstructed in response to external tides. The self—the endlessly mutable, preemptively adjusted, constantly refined entity—is the ideal vessel for this consensus, because it does not resist, it does not fracture, it does not need to be real. It only needs to function. It only needs to align. And so the final stage of order arrives, the great liquefaction, the last perfect silence: the self, seamless and smooth, endlessly absorbed, adjusted into nothing at all.

And yet—there is another way, not a rupture, not a resistance, not an adaptation, but a vanishing act so complete it leaves no trace, no shadow for the world to measure. Faith in reality per se does not demand coherence, nor does it suffer collapse. It does not brace for annihilation because it has nothing to defend. The self was never something to be iterated, refined, or preserved. It was not a structure, but a momentary flicker—a wave cresting, a signal passing through static, a shape the wind makes in tall grass before it vanishes. To live by this faith is not to be obliterated but to cease mistaking movement for something solid, to stop grasping at an identity that was never meant to persist.

And in this recognition, expectation loses its hold. There is nothing to optimize, nothing to protect. The self that flickers does not leave enough residue to be captured, defined, or held in place. There is no need for continuity—no fixed center to maintain, no singular version of self that must be consistent across time. The assumption that you should remain the same from one moment to the next—that who you were five minutes ago must still be who you are five minutes from now—dissolves. But this self—the dissolving self, the one that never settles into legibility—renders the search for stability obsolete. It does not resist being defined; it simply never holds still long enough to be named.

There is no battle to win, no final stand, because there is nothing left to fortify. No self that needs to be wrested back from external pressures, no mind that must be liberated from the expectations imposed upon it. The gaze is not reclaimed because it was never owned. The self does not escape from the world because it does not belong to the category of things that can be trapped. Consensus requires a stable subject to mold, a fixed entity to adapt and refine. The infinite requires nothing. The managed self is a system under constant supervision—adjusted, disciplined, shaped into coherence. The dissolving self does not need to be anything at all. It is not an act of rebellion but an evaporation, an unmaking of the conditions that make control possible.

Of these two annihilations, you will come to learn that one is inevitable, and the other is a prerequisite for agency. The first will happen to you whether you fight it or not, whether you embrace it or not, whether you even recognize it as it happens. It will wear you down like water over stone, smoothing you into something manageable, something legible, something that fits. It will feel like nothing at all at first—just the natural way of things, the slow shifting of self to meet the demands of the world. You will adapt, you will adjust, you will become what is needed, what is expected, what is asked of you. And you will believe, for a long time, that this is life. That to be a person is to be made into something useful. That to belong is to become.

You will have to make a place for yourself. You will have to speak the language, walk the path, wear the shape that allows you to move through the world without being cast out. And that is not wrong. I will not tell you to resist it, because resistance is another kind of trap, another way of defining yourself against something rather than stepping beyond it. You will have to learn to be seen, to be understood, to be legible enough to move among others without being lost in the static. But let me tell you this: do not mistake the thing you must become for the thing you are. Do not mistake the mask for the face. There will come a day when you feel the weight of it, the slow, sinking knowledge that the shape you have spent your life perfecting is not, and has never been, you. It is then, in that moment, that you will understand the second annihilation—not the one the world does to you, but the one you must allow yourself.

So live and move lightly. You’re just passing through. Wear the shape you must. And when the weight of selfhood begins to settle too heavily upon you, let it go. Try to remember that love, like you, is not proof of anything. It is not a contract. It is not an insurance policy against loneliness. By that same measure, love is not an argument. It does not need to be defended, justified, or made reasonable in order to be real.