Wednesday, June 19, 2013

The world, always an imbroglio, is no different now than it is has ever been [sic].  It is the urge to reduce and purify that desacralizes the world, not the world's own ontological promiscuity.  We cannot be guilty of mixing up this world with another or of cutting the string that once tied us to a higher plane because this world (i.e. these transcendences) is all there is.  If the gods exist, they live and move and have their being in the same motley pluriverse as every other object. 

The good news is that, "as soon as there is no other world, perfection resides in this one" (PF 233).  Every object is simply and perfectly whatever that object is.  "There is no rear-world behind to be used as a judge of this one" (RS 118).  This does not mean that legitimate judgements cannot be made, but it does mean that non-messy, non-provisional, non-concatenated judgments cannot be made.  It means that the messiness of these judgments does not stem from our poor access to what is real, but from the messiness of the real itself.  And it means that, with nowhere else to go, "God has come down from Heaven to Earth" and he too must go "to work to discuss, through experimentation with possible worlds, the best of deals, the optimum that no one is allowed to calculate in others' stead" (PN 177).

..if we can manage to renounce our dreams of revolution and reduction, then "the most ordinary common sense suffices for us to take hold, without am inute of apprenticeship, of all the tools that are right here at hand" (PN 163).  This work of acknowledging both the modesty and adequacy of the tools an dinstruments at hand--of confessing both the "perfection" and sufficiency of the grace of this disheveled world--is the work of an experimental metaphysics.  and, if there were to be such a thing, it would be the work of an experimental religion as well.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 47-48.

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