How good a writer was he? The early novels have a fantastic charm but lack profundity. The Father Brown stories are entertaining and clever and an impressive forerunner to what, between the wars, would become the golden age of detective fiction. 

While dropping the Telegraph to go and read almost anything else is always good advice, I’m not sure this will quite persuade anyone to abandon it. He goes on to say that his criticism of Dickens is rather good (it is some of the best you will read) but that he also left us some “dense theological works” (they aren’t my favorite either, but finding them dense says rather more about S.J Heffer than G.K Chesterton). ​​The summit of Chesterton’s achievements will be a footnote to Agatha Christie.  

While her virtues might be indisputable for a certain class and age group of Englishmen, I must dissent. The English detective story refined the Father Brown stories, even before its supposed Golden Age. By making his leading man a priest, G.K. Chesterton could write crime fiction that investigated crime in its totality. An intelligent detective might “get to the center of things” by penetrating the psychology of his criminal, but the intelligent priest goes one step further; Father Brown’s singular talent is his ability to investigate the metaphysics of a crime. 

​​​While his metaphysical criminology doesn’t entirely ignore psychology, it does suggest that one’s psychology is not the fundamental thing about oneself.  For Chesterton, the core of any act is the final attitude toward the universe it represents. Normally, Father Brown summarises this attitude after he solves the mystery; its great advantage is that this gong-note of sublimity introduces the necessary revelatory scene that usually ends a detective story. When these endings come from writers unequipped with a similar gong, I am too often unsatisfied, revealing the criminal’s method is too much like un-weaving the rainbow. Admittedly, when reading a mystery, there is a kind of satisfaction in finally knowing how this was stolen, how he was murdered, etc. Still, compared to the wonder excited by the mystery itself, even the most ingenuous act of detection falls short. In short, detective stories tend to end flaccidly.  

The Father Brown stories obviate this by increasing our wonder rather than diminishing it. While he performs the same curtain-rending reveal as fiction’s other bloodhounds, the same methodical breakdown of the magic trick in the better stories, this is accompanied by an observation that points to the revealed action’s greater significance. Thus, Chesterton spares himself that weak final note.  

He even manages this with plots that amount to pedestrianly natural explanations for events that seem supernatural. In ‘The Honour of Israel Gow,’ the circumstances surrounding the death of a Scottish Earl and the postmortem treatment of his estate look like black magic but turn out to be the consequence of the innocent (if twisted) actions of the Earl’s servant. We understand the servant’s twisted innocence as a product of his Calvinism. At first, the murder in ‘The Wrong Shape’ looks like it has something to do with the mystical influence of the Hindu Fakir the victim had staying at his home. It transpires to have been committed by the victim’s doctor, whose written confession to Father Brown points to the significance of his action. 

​​​Dr Harris kills the dissipated poet Quinton because he is in love with Mrs Quinton; we can call this the psychological content of the crime. The metaphysical element is suggested in the written confession Father Brown persuades the atheist physician to write. As far as Dr Harris is concerned, “According to my own creed, I was quite free to kill Quinton.” This creed is encapsulated in Harris’s wish to be a “good animal.” In this confession, he refers to himself as an “animal” twice more. This creed appears to amount to the belief that man should model himself on the lion; self-interest is made the sole criterion of behavior, and the value of other lives is put at the level of a gazelle in the eye of the same lion. The very concept of humanity is denied, and with it, the notion that our species enjoys special rights. We recognize that ontology plays its part in the killing just as much as cold steel. 

Our understanding of the crime can remain at the psychological level, and the facts of the story stay the same: Quinton’s death is a murder of passion. But without that which we learn from Dr Harris’s confession, this psychological explanation of the crime would feel too much like a crash to earth. Instead, Chesterton takes our attention away from the supernatural to demonstrate the murder’s profundity and how far its origin stretches into the depth of the murderer’s soul. 

​​​The word “soul” chimes us back to the fact that these are stories by a Roman Catholic about a Roman Catholic priest. And saving souls, not solving crimes, is Father Brown’s real profession. ​​Obviously, there is a moralizing element to this act; Brown isn’t coercive. Simon Heffer rightly points out that the advantage of making your detective a priest is his understanding of human nature; the other advantage is it frees the detective from playing a part in his society’s judicial machinery. The effect this has in the stories is of relegating in importance the ensuing arrest and imprisonment behind that of the deep dive into the crime’s meaning.  

When he asks for Dr Harris’s confession, Father Brown reminds him that confidentiality is a must in his trade as much as a doctor’s. The story ends with the gloomy image of the “wet waterproofs of several policemen” gleaming in the streetlights, but we know that the written statement in Father Brown’s hand won’t end up tucked into one of their pockets. His duty in solving and understanding the murder isn’t towards the law; his intentions are more spiritual. Likewise, Chesterton’s stories do not constitute fantasies of nefarious Protestants and atheists being cuffed and hauled to the police station. His illustrations of error are more contemplative than this. If his interest in crime is more fundamental than the psychologist’s, then it is certainly more so than that of the mere moralist.  

Inevitably, there are duds here. ‘The Eye of Apollo’ is abysmal to the point of reading like an apprentice’s work. But at his most felicitous and pace, Heffer, I think Chesterton manages a kind of philosophic storytelling that matches Dante’s. If this seems like a claim too far, it is easily proved or refuted by consulting Chesterton’s own Dantesque infernal peregrination, ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword.’ The story’s plot unfolds as Father Brown walks with his friend, the criminal-turned-detective Flambeau, through an English selva oscura. They talk about hellish things until finally reaching the paradise of a well-furnished pub. Chesterton names Dante twice in this story. 

​​​It is necessary to know its plot for the story’s power to be made clear. It begins with Father Brown taking Flambeau to see the tomb of General St Clare, a fictional English general who died on a campaign in Brazil. St Clare has become a national hero, and the circumstances of his death are a mystery. Father Brown already knows its secret; it is slowly revealed to Flambeau. The mystery is this: Olivier, St Clare’s Brazilian adversary, is famous for his chivalrous conduct, but St Clare was hanged after his final battle with his broken sword hanging, in turn, from his corpse. Further to this, St Clare was a tactical genius, so why does his last military command appear to have been a futile suicide charge that cost hundreds of British lives? What happened? 

Flambeau offers three attempts at an explanation; all are wrong. His companion tells him that the real story is even more horrid than he can imagine. “There are worse things,” he says as they tramp past the dark trees. Father Brown, as he always does, has learned the secret thanks to the privileges of his role as priest. Through his acquaintance and knowledge of three persons present at the time of the battle, one a Brazilian, and the other two an Irish colonel and an Ulster Protestant Major serving in the British Army, he learns that St Clare was not only in debt but the victim of blackmail. To make money, he had been betraying his country by selling secrets to a Brazilian spy. Major Murray, the Ulsterman, discovers this and demands he resign or be court-martialled. St Clare kills Murray with his sword (which breaks) to prevent the necessity of either option, but he now confronts a problem: what to do with the body of the dead Ulsterman? 

As a means of avoiding an accusation of murder, St Clare has his men form ranks and marches most of them to their deaths. Murray’s body is now one among many, and all assume he died in the battle. Olivier is astounded at the foe’s foolhardiness, but recognizing their bravery, he spares St Clare and the surviving men. He departs, but as he does, the surviving British soldiers recognize what St Clare has done, and they lynch their general. The officer who puts the rope on his neck is his son-in-law-to-be, Captain Keith. St Clare’s calculating intelligence remained undiminished unto the last, and Olivier’s conduct is in fact unblemished.  

As well as learning the facts surrounding his death, Father Brown also makes the discovery that the reality of St Clare’s life is even further from the truth of his heroic legacy. He tells Flambeau that “In each of the hot and secret countries to which that man went, he kept a harem, he tortured witnesses, he amassed shameful gold…” and there were “tales of monstrous and prehistoric things in Park Lane.” Read one way: the evil represented by this figure makes him a caricature of a certain kind of Englishness and greed—even a satire on militarism. But, as ever, it’s the reference that Father Brown makes to religion that expands our sense of his evil, indicating that this story might be about things deeper than satire usually allows. St Clare was an “Anglo-Indian” who read his Bible. But Father Brown has this to say about that: 

When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else’s Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads him and finds we have no arms and legs…Of course, he read the Old Testament rather than the New. Of course, he found in the Old Testament anything that he wanted- lust, tyranny, treason. 

With his reference to General St Clare’s reading of the Old Testament, Chesterton brings to mind the whole bloody narrative of divine wrath and peoples put to the sword. For an honest Christian, all the killing in the story of Exodus and the Deuteronomistic history might well merit the epithet “evil” according to human conventions, but evil according to God’s laws certainly is not; killing in these instances was no sin. There is evil, and there is Evil. There is violence consubstantial with Hell and violence flowing from the will of God. 

‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’ is, in part, about this theology of violence. Read this way: General St Clare becomes a swaggering Canaanite, sunk in sin, and Captain Keith, a conquering Joshua, cuts down the Lord’s enemies. The story’s climax, the scene of the English survivors turning their faces on their general in silence, and the hand of the general’s son-in-law-to-be placing the rope on his neck, is a horror show. But we aren’t totally displeased with the event. It is the climax not only because the story’s horrors crest at this point but because the reader finds himself willing to commit the mutinous murder like no other act in the story. Chesterton thus evokes an intuition of Old Testament divine justice through carefully ratcheting up a moment of poetic justice. He has us rejoice at the justice manifested in this revenge in the same way as the author of Leviticus wants us to recognize the good in massacring the Amorite women and children. Like a Canto of the Inferno, with its depiction of unquestionable divine judgment alongside Dante’s empathy for the sinner, ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’ is a tale of the prismatic nature of both evil and God’s will. 

It is no wonder that the paradoxical moral logic of the Old Testament appealed to Chesterton. Even less surprising is that the concise invocation of its paradoxes in ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’ should appeal to that other metaphysical romancer, Jorge Luis Borges. That Borges was an admirer of Chesterton is well known. Less well known is the influence that this story, in particular, seems to have had on the Argentine. By my reckoning, no fewer than three stories in Borges’s Labyrinths appear to have their origin in musing on its theme. 

‘The Shape of the Sword’ shows some superficial signs of influence in its title and its Englishman (who turns out to be Irish) in Brazil, but the important link is its concern, not only with treachery but with the synonymity of treachery and heroism. Suppose General St Clare is both a traitor and a hero because of a conflict between appearance and reality. In that case, Borges builds on the idea of that contradiction by making his John Vincent Moon two characters at once: one a hero of the fight for Irish independence, the other an informer in Britain’s pay. Then, as if he chose to write a story as a commentary on the story that precedes it (even keeping Ireland as the setting for the examples of his heroism and treachery), Borges follows with the ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’. Like Father Brown, Ryan learns that a historical figure played both the best and the worst characters in the drama in which he found himself; again, like Father Brown, Ryan chooses to stay silent about his discovery. It is suggested that the treachery was necessary for the Irish rebels to succeed, therefore making the traitor the hero because of his treachery.  

Finally, Borges then takes his master’s theme into an area of scriptural debate he is unlikely to have condoned. With ‘Three Versions of Judas,’ we have the suggestion that either the meaning of Judas’ treachery was self-abnegation to match the sacrifice of the Word becoming flesh and suffering death, with his eternal punishment in Hell, therefore, being understood as the perfection of the ascetic means of glorying God; or, the terrible significance of Judas is that he is himself the Word become flesh and that the abasement inherent in his treachery is a more committed form of status-lowering than merely getting yourself executed.  

These elaborations on the theme of ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’ are a Mount Nebo affording a fuller look into Chesterton’s original treatment. Each one suggests the possibility of the paradox of an act of treachery, the worst of things, being simultaneously the greatest of things. Although ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’ doesn’t quite make these metaphysical sallies, what it offers the reader of Chesterton is the opportunity for a playful re-reading. After Borges, we might understand General St Clare as not only a caricature of evil incarnate but a caricature of the average human being, as the universality of his own protagonists suggests; the paradox of good and evil existing in the same soul is one we all experience. With his near-saintly legacy and bestial life story, he is a nightmare image of the concept of man as half-divine, half-animal.  

More interesting, perhaps, is the way this reading points to a paradox in the nature of sin itself. In this story, as he also does in ‘The Flying Stars’, Father Brown points out that the tendency of crime and sin is to make the perpetrator meaner; the more we rebel against the laws of the universe, the smaller we become. This is a paradox. While the significance of our evil acts grows, expanding to a heroic stature as they mount a challenge to the divine order, our natures become less than human. The immensity of divine wrath that a traitor triggers is in inverse relationship to the attention he merits from God. 

We needn’t worry about being accused of Hefferism by saying that to have made Borges Borges is enormous to Chesterton’s credit. He did not have to write for us to recognize Chesterton’s value. And yet, it remains true that without the metaphysical puzzling of his diminutive priest, it is unlikely we would have that disturbing reinterpretation of Judas Iscariot. I suspect that crediting him with the inspiration of this story would displease him, so I am sorry to have done so on his birthday. Nonetheless, he could not have been so without being one of the greatest artists in the last 150 years.  

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Videogames, video clips, anime, and Tarantino movies could be considered the four horsemen of the apocalypse: those ready to extirpate the world and psychological understanding of all its substance, to reduce neuronal connections to their minimum expression, to turn us into easily conditioned Pavlovian creatures. However, in more than one respect, such prophecies seem not to have been fulfilled but to have unfolded as the exact opposite of what they preached in the first place. Yes, it is true that, to a large extent, we resemble a bunch of overstimulated beings with less attention span than a mosquito. But couldn’t the overstimulation be a greater energetic capacity? A return to Dionysian sacredness?

As for lack of concentration (and that obscure stigmatization that turned out to be the 90s epidemic of ADHD), in most cases, it is a matter of “being everywhere and nowhere at once,” a role that may quietly grant us some reminiscence of the altered states of consciousness acquired through meditation. Overstimulation has made us immune to it, in the same way a snake becomes immune to the venom it carries within its body every day. We are all city dwellers with the brains of hyped squirrels.

We surpass the speed of light, we travel through time, and images become substance. After all, why should we fall into this arbitrariness in which only in written words is substance found? Few remember that Plato himself was worried about the propagation of books, for they would mean the undermining of oral tradition. This meant a warning to the young to only use books moderately as a secondary helping tool, perhaps. The old becoming scandalized by youngster´s behavior: a tale as old as time.

Our substance, our existential stimulus, is different from our parents’: now it is pure image. It is more colourful: We generate neon gods almost daily. We have as many gods as musicians, publicists, graphic designers, filmmakers, photographers, and so on. All of these constitute a creative act, which requires a certain potential: whatever this potential capacity is, it has been exponentiated.

Television parodies, dank memes, acid humor, and ecstatic nights in the desert allow us to lighten our inherited karmic weight. A lot of weight has been thrown at us. Still, the culture of massive information and accelerated images has given us the necessary tools to drain it, to cut with a millenary chain that has been the yoke of the human being. This has happened spontaneously; we could call it the natural course of events. What for older generations is vanity, stupidity, superficiality, and lack of “metaphysical depth” (keeping in mind that wars waged during the 20th century by the heirs of the Enlightenment, it would be necessary to analyze whether the metaphysics they used were not, at their root, corrupt), for us represents a certain redemption.

If the entire millennial and centennial population chilled with the expectations of a world not built for us but that, nonetheless, we shall inherit sooner or later, existential dread levels would decrease. The deflation of all promised to be so much more than it is would bring us a new world that is fresh, relaxed, and immune to false messiahs. Spontaneous, childlike sensitivity and intuition would break through as the new values.

If we are accused of being a childlike generation, then praise be, for this translates as VIP passes into heaven. However, heaven, understood as a separation from our natural organic life cycle, poses more dangers than blessings.

This leads me to the second part of the argument: the upcoming globalized world for the benefit of the common youth. I believe the extinguishing of any civilization has arisen from separating our lives from our deaths or expecting death as a distant event to redeem us from all the accumulating miasma. We are dying, the emptiness lies beneath us, and such an event gives us space to continue generating wild gods capable of promising only what they are at that moment. The blank space of the canvas emerges as the promise of a great work. The purge of all the tortuous elements that have been tormenting us could be considered our priority, no longer as a matter of intellectual pride but of pure survival instinct.

I will elaborate next. Human power has exponentiated to titanic levels, a third great war would end each and every one of us, or leave us in a cavernous age followed by a nuclear winter. As I mentioned, our surrender to the seemingly superfluous and childish is a metaphysical deflation. This deflation is not casual: it arises from the deepest and most visceral survival instinct. It is a “relax or die” taken to the extreme; our early exposure to images of violence has brought us to a heightened awareness of all that we can become if we are not careful. Romance is not dead, but it has entered a certain repose. This repose is waiting to end once the conditions for its resurgence are propitious. We will not poke our heads in until the last tyrant has faded away from old age and his son enjoys the radical simplicity of an afternoon eating Lays and playing Xbox with his friends.

Perhaps then our closeness will increase, our lust for destruction will be tamed, and perhaps in that peace, we will gain the confidence to, with great enterprise, bring greater life to a neon polytheism, to greater and more complex nights of euphoria, to more evident poetry in the mundane, and cold beers on a summer sunset.

The post Millennial Manifesto for an Upcoming World appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Every time you make yourself a cup of coffee, maybe while standing nearly lifeless (or half dead) in front of that coffee pot on a particularly dismal Monday morning, it is not difficult to take it for granted that the coffee is there. It’s so obviously there, so how could it be otherwise? But in its thereness, the metaphysical question of being applies. Being is. But how come? However, maybe that coffee is not so very obvious after all. All effects obscure their causes, although, yes, sometimes causes obscure their effects. The truth is, we get used to things, and when we do, it gets easier to take them for granted without gratitude.

I don’t need to tell you, but I will anyway, that coffee is a popular drink. Every year, nearly two and a half billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide, and at least half of those are by my brother-in-law. But this wasn’t always the case, especially before my brother-in-law turned five. If history had worked out a little differently, maybe we’d all be obsessed with something else entirely, like, say, mint tea. At one point in history, coffee was thought of as a “bitter invention of Satan.” It was shunned in the West because no one wants to end up demonically possessed by a beverage.

Legend has it that coffee was discovered around the year 850 A. D. by a poetically inclined Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi. Kaldi saw that his goats would all gravitate towards a kind of cherry tree and that, after eating its berries, the goats would be noticeably more energetic. Kaldi tried the cherries himself, and he felt just heck-gosh-darn-it marvelous. Poetry flowed out of him, and his eyes widened to a world of wonders in a new way. He began waxing Heideggerian about how man is not the lord of being, but the shepherd of being, and that was long before Heidegger showed up to confuse philosophy undergraduates.

Kaldi brought the cherries to an Islamic monastery where its devout dwellers experimented until the first form of coffee came into existence. As you would expect, when such a miracle is discovered, it spreads quickly. Not everyone was a fan, but, in general, coffee began to trend. When the West caught a whiff of the stuff, this ambivalent stance towards it continued. A mix of fascination and terror. The criticism seemed to outweigh praise until Pope Clement the 8th tried coffee and said these great words: “This Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”

Well, thank Clement for that. But all of this brings me to the horrible realization I had today that my coffee had cooled down while I was reflecting on the history of coffee. I realized as that cold coffee touched my lips and as I shuddered at the brutality of that experience that we are often so busy getting caught in the vortex of the twenty-four-hour news cycle or the details of the history of some or other beverage that we forget that just by contemplating coffee long enough, we might end up proving the existence of God and better understanding something of modern politics. It’s easier to do so, in fact, when you notice how your coffee changes. So, let’s contemplate change for a moment, shall we? We’ll get to the theology and politics of it in a moment.

Everything changes, you know. Things that are once were not, and will one day not be again. You and I are included in this, I’m afraid. And change can happen in different ways. Filling my cup: a quantitative change. Spilling my coffee: a location change. Coffee cooling down: qualitative change. Digesting the coffee: substantial change to the coffee and, although debatable, to me. Change would occur even if we lived in a simulation, and for that reason, it would need to be explained.

If I were drinking my coffee with Aristotle or St. Thomas, they would remind me that change involves the actualization of a potential. It involves making real what could be real. Coffee has the potential to get cold. I can heat it up again, too, but I’m too busy writing this thing to do that. All created beings are a mixture of actuality and potentiality, and these facets of being interact with each other. They interactualise. For a potential to be made real, something that possesses a certain actualizing power has to impart that actuality to what doesn’t have it, as when the room’s temperature cools the coffee down. Everything needs a real changer for change to happen.

Now, to make this very straightforward fact more interesting, let’s think of an isolated moment in the life of some coffee. The coffee is on my desk, next to me. It is approximately three feet off the ground because of the desk. The desk is approximately three meters from the ground because my house is on the first floor of a block of flats, and the block of flats is supported by a foundation, which is supported by the ground, under which is the turbulence and tormenting heat of lava, and so on. I’m thinking vertically here about the fact that the coffee is where it is in space and not just in time because it is dependent on other things, which are dependent on other things, which are dependent on yet other things. And so on. The coffee has no power on its own to be where it is. The coffee can only be where it is because it depends on the desk, and the desk can only be where it is because it depends on the floor.

I mention this more vertical way of thinking, from cup to table to floor to building to foundation to ground, and so on, because I don’t want you to make the mistake of thinking that we require something like an initial starting point, like a big bang, for all of this to exist as it does. Aristotle, for instance, believed in the Carl-Saganancity of a universe that always ways and will always be, as if time itself is not a creature, although I think it is.

An atemporal or vertical way of thinking about coffee helps us consider how various actualities depend on other actualities, which depend on other actualities in turn. Change cannot happen apart from this atemporal dependence. Moreover, each thing, which depends on other things at any given moment, clearly is not self-sustaining and self-supporting and so requires something else, which in turn is not self-sustaining or self-supporting. This is true at the microscopic and subatomic levels, too, as we dive into the coffee, its water and caffeine, molecules and atoms and quarks and gluons, and so on.

The obvious contingency of the thing—the fact that it is not self-supporting—doesn’t disappear but becomes increasingly glaringly apparent the more you look at things. Not only does nothing fully account for itself, but nothing self-actualizes itself, including the subjects of Maslowian psychology. All potentials are actualized by things that are not the thing itself, even quite apart from some historical-temporal explanation. The potential of my coffee cup to be there, feet off the ground, is actualized, for instance, by the table it is on.

Now think, as much as you are able to, about everything. Think about the sum total of everything that exists. Metaphysically, we are asking about all of that, all of us included. If I am walking in a forest and I happen to come across a giant cup of coffee floating inexplicably in the middle of a beautiful clearing without apparent reason or support, I would be likely to ask the question of how it got there. Well, while that is no doubt disturbingly inexplicable, it is no less strange that there is anything at all here rather than nothing. It would be weird for a giant, unsupported coffee cup to be in the middle of a clearing in the forest, but it is far weirder that there is a giant, unsupported universe right in the middle of—well, in the middle of what exactly?

Here we are, and here everything is, and when you really think about it, rather than just taking it for granted, you discover that it is rather strange that anything exists at all, especially since everything in the system of the entire universe is clearly not a self-supporting thing. And it isn’t good enough to merely state the fact of everything’s self-evident presence, as scientistic atheists do, because the description in itself is not an explanation. If someone dies drinking poisoned coffee, as someone does in Keigo Higashino’s thoroughly enjoyable novel Salvation of a Saint, merely describing the crime scene is not sufficient to solve the question of who poisoned the victim and why. In other words, answering any question at one level is hard to answer on the required levels for the answer to be sufficient.

Nothing we know of in the universe is self-supporting, so why would the universe itself be self-supporting? It will also not do to constantly point to causes of change that are themselves open to change because then you have to simply point to another cause for change, which is itself also changing and changeable because, in that case, we are dealing not just with infinite regress but with the silly idea that just because you add yet another level to your hierarchy of being that you have in fact solved the problem—because you really haven’t. All you have done is defer it. This is why mechanical explanations don’t ultimately destroy mystery. Just because you know how a machine works doesn’t mean you have properly understood the mystical presence of the machine itself.

My point is this. We’re not just interested in what changes our coffee from warm to cold coffee. We are interested in why coffee exists in this very moment, as isolated from all other moments. We’re also not just asking about the chemical composition of coffee because that doesn’t answer the question; it merely rephrases it. We’re not thinking about history because that’s just another way to defer the question of being. We are asking the metaphysical question: Why is there coffee instead of nothing?

What actualizes the potential of the sum total of everything in the coffee as well as everything that is the universe? We’re interested in what actualizes the universe itself (and the coffee): what actualizes anything’s potential to be, given that everything is so obviously loaded with potential? We don’t really need to ask about the whole universe at all and how it came to be, of course. We need only ask about any simple, everyday thing, like a cup of coffee. Its thereness is astonishing, isn’t it?

To avoid infinite regress, we can now posit that there must be an Unactualised Actualiser, or what Aristotle calls the Unmoved Mover. We need something that is so actual that it does not have any potential at all. As soon as something has a potential, after all, it would require something else to actualize that potential, and that would merely put us on the cosmic infinite regress path all over again. Thus, the Unactualised Actualiser would have to be absolutely unchangeable. It would need to have no parts because if it had parts, it would be dependent upon those parts for its existence, and we’d end up with yet more regress. It must be so real that it does not require anything else to explain its own reality.

If we’re taking the natural order of things as seriously as I’m trying to, then this is the only logical explanation available to any of us regarding why there is something rather than nothing, at least insofar as change is our main consideration. If you decide to contest this logic, your own logic would need to be on the basis of a more logical possibility.

We can, of course, simply settle for the fact that everything just is. We, at least most of us, can believe our senses and accept that they are not lying to us. But if we want an explanation and if we trust the basic inferential logic of how things depend on other things and that the sum total of all dependent things must require something singular and independent upon which everything can rest, it is not just possible but necessary to trust that an Unmoved Mover is the only possible answer. It is a logical necessity.

There are myriad ways to fine-tune the above argument, which is really the shortest version of it I could give without risking boring you. But I have another reason for bringing this up. And that reason is political. Because politics always rests on some or other metaphysics. This metaphysical division of being into actuality, the technical name being act, and potentiality, the technical name being potency, suggests a fantastic array of powers of actualization and potentiality.

Even in our most basic understanding of the world, we know that there are harmonious and inharmonious ways that act and potency can interact. Here’s a harmonious interactualisation: I drink the coffee, which ignites a little spark in me, and I move on to enjoy my day. Here’s an inharmonious version of this: I drink several cups of coffee in a row, and soon enough, I feel insanely anxious, become restless, get a headache, get dizzy, and my heart rate goes nuts. The political dimension of this simple interaction with coffee would be that my interactions with others, as now affected by my interaction with coffee, could be better or worse, depending on the proportion between actuality and potentiality in this specific interaction. Harmony, which is what we should be aiming for and which the ancients described in terms of the life of virtue, involves difficulties in our interactions, too, such as the difficulty of getting out of bed and making coffee. Why does it not make itself? Ah, yes, I’ve already implied an explanation for that.

Well, politics is much more complicated than this, of course. But you get the idea. It’s a matter not just of what interacts but also of a certain proportion between the things that interact. In some places and times, there has been harmony. As suggested in the Genesis story in the bible, harmony is achievable in terms of how certain aspects of creation allow for and limit each other. In her marvelous book, The Need for Roots, Simone Weil uses this principle to discuss certain needs for the soul, noting that “needs are arranged in antithetical pairs and have to combine together to form a balance. Man requires food but also an interval between his meals; he requires warmth and coolness, rest, and exercise. Likewise, in the case of the soul’s needs.” She notes our soul needs a political order that balances liberty and responsibility, equality and hierarchism, honor and punishment, truth and freedom of opinion, security, and risk, as well as private property and collective property.

Arguably, there are reasonable ways to consider all such things. But, in our time, something glaringly bothersome makes even reasonable consideration close to impossible.

It’s worth noting that there are also things that have a certain kind of existence that are completely imaginary. Let’s imagine, say, coffee that tastes exactly like tea. I can throw these antithetical ideas together quite easily to create a pure logical possibility. This is not a real potential, of course, because it is not grounded in the nature of real things. It is fiction, which, even to be a fiction, must exist somewhere—that is, in my mind—even if it isn’t truly realizable. If my coffee really tasted like tea, it would actually be tea and not coffee. Just because it is thinkable does not mean it is actualisable.

Technically, then, we are dealing here with something that has so little actuality that it is nearly completely all potentiality. If a person were to believe that one can really actualize something that has no being, he would essentially be equating himself with the ultimate actuality. He would quite literally be thinking of himself as equal to God, who is not a mere logical potential but a logical necessity. While I grant that you may not accept the existence of God on the basis of anything like what I have said, even so, the vast majority of people would agree, given the degrees of actualizing power readily and even obviously perceptible in the world, that to assume the ability to call a new nature into existence by what amounts to sheer will is a rather astonishing sort of hubris.

But it is this very hubris that is at the heart of the entire liberal political project.  To look at our current political moment both metaphysically and historically, we start to see that alarmingly far back, even before Sartre inverted essence and existence, the modern project was already obsessively concerned with falsification. The idea that we can only determine what is true after antagonizing being, which is what modern science does, is already to place actuality at the service of potentiality. But this idea leaked into everything, including theology, philosophy, and culture.

Way back, the conception of personhood in the heads of nominalists, even before Descartes, was already tending to think of logical possibility—meaning a pure object of thought without any material being—as superior in a way to potency proper. The conception of personhood at play was one of pure thought imaginatively but not actually cut off from reality. It was a blank slate before Locke and Rousseau. It was, in short, a fiction. Its reality was rooted not in being and its natural division of act and potency but in the mind, which can easily invert that division without even noticing that it is an inversion.

Politics, for a long time now, has been de-ontologized. It’s why it’s so easy to get caught up in political discussions that have almost nothing to do with actual political concerns; that is, with what it means to live well in the world, given that we interact with and intellectualize each other, and given that we even have the potential to denigrate each other if we cannot perceive harmonious interactions wisely. Theoretical relations are now more commonly entertained than real relations.

Sure, you could look at this lengthy meditation and accuse me of doing the same. But, part of why I have traversed the whole universe, from my coffee cup to God to the realm of the political, is because I ultimately have a very simple point to make. The political has to be, in the richest sense, universal. But the truly universal is not a false universal absolutely ripped from context. It is intimate as well. It pertains to various actualities and how they play off each other and give of themselves to each other. It pertains to the lives we really live. And the truth is that where the so-called political yanks us away from concrete particulars, it is no longer really political. It destroys the tensions between those antithetical pairs that Weil mentions without even considering what they mean, we cannot figure out what it means to live together, and we cannot possibly encounter wholeness. Right now, what is being sacrificed for the sake of so many fictions, the absolute fiction of money included, is everything from families to nations to harmonious geopolitical solutions, all in the name of reconceptualizing the world as a realm of pure artificiality.

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