Kainurgesic transcendence, with special reference to Gnosis

‘the Dasein in human being' is nothing human ¹

All things are deconstrained.²

The physiologist Walter Cannon titled his autobiography The Way of an Investigator.   He devotes chapter 5 to ‘The Role of Hunches.'   Hunches are “sudden revelations—really, unearned grants of insight.” (Was ist das, daß Einfall gewährt?) Cannon observes that among the conditions favorable for “the appearance of hunches” are “a great interest in the problem to be solved, a clear definition of this problem, and an eager desire for its solution.”  He goes on to note that “A large store of related information already acquired is another prerequisite.  The greater the number of facts which are pertinent to the urgent problem and which can be combined in novel ways for explaining the puzzle it presents, the more likely is the puzzle to be solved.” ³

April DeConick's preferred term for ‘a large store of related information' is ‘buffer,' a word she adopts from computer technology. Gnostic spirituality first emerges, she writes, “within the ‘religious buffer' that had formed in Egypt by the turn of the first century CE.”  She explains that the religious buffer “is a collective assortment of information about a variety of religions, revelations, spiritual sensibilities, religious experiences, and metaphysical speculations.” ⁴  

DeConick's religious buffer plays the same role as Cannon's large store of related information:—the inventory of materials available for combination in novel ways to solve an urgent problem.  For, DeConick says, “Innovative structures that emerge from the religious buffer, such as Gnostic spirituality, are about the creation of a conceptual blend that is totally unique yet entirely contingent upon the matrix of the religious buffer.  In this case, the whole is not the sum of its parts but something altogether new.”  This something altogether new is “an emergent structure, an innovative concept that some ancient people began to use to describe a new way to be religious.” ⁵   A new ‘how.'

For example, under the rubric ‘The Gnostic Cure' DeConick writes,

“With the emergence of Gnostic spirituality came a reorientation of religious ritual drama to the human spirit and its God nature.  The central focus of Gnostic initiations became the purging, recovery, and integration of the fallen spirit.  Because of this shift in focus, the initiations were novel in their therapeutic orientation, an orientation unknown in the initiation ceremonies of the other ancient mystery religions. This reorientation of mystery initiation likely emerged from a religious buffer that blended what Gnostics knew about Greek shamanism and temple healing practices with what they knew about mystery religion rites.” ⁶

David Litwa explicitly attributes religious innovation to entrepreneurs, writing that “If the human brain naturally blends things, it's no surprise that religious entrepreneurs mix religious ideas from different religious domains, along with different organizational structures, rites, and so on.” ⁷  That is, religious development (Entwicklung), like economic development, originates with entrepreneurs, just as Schumpeter said.  The function of the entrepreneur, in Schumpeter's view, is the carrying out of new combinations.  As he writes,

“To produce [produzieren] means to combine materials and forces within our reach [vorhandenen Dinge und Kräfte].  To produce other things [anderes], or the same things by a different method, means to combine these materials and forces differently.  In so far as the ‘new combination' [die neue Kombination] may in time grow out of the old by continuous adjustment [kontinuierlich anpassend] in small steps, there is certainly change [Veränderung], possibly growth [Wachstum], but neither a new phenomenon nor development [Entwicklung] in our sense.  In so far as this is not the case, and the new combinations appear discontinuously [diskontinuierlich auftreten], then the phenomenon characterising development emerges.  . . . Development in our sense is then determined by the carrying out of new combinations [ Durchsetzung neuer Kombinationen; sc. of materials and forces at hand; that is, of beings, Seiende].”⁸

In Milsom's work on the history of common law the same theme appears as the proposition “the law is a free-enterprise business.” ⁹   That is to say,  

“The life of the common law has been in the abuse of its elementary ideas.  If the rules of property give what now seems an unjust answer [i.e., adverse to an interest, client's or King's], try obligation; and equity has proved that from the materials of obligation you can counterfeit the phenomena of property.  If the rules of contract give what now seems an unjust answer, try tort.  Your counterfeit will look odd to one brought up on categories of Roman origin; but it will work.  If the rules of one tort, say deceit, give what now seems an unjust answer, try another, try negligence. And so the legal world goes round.” ¹⁰  

So again: a store or buffer or archive of elements (ideas, materials, rules) from which enterprising persons select and combine (counterfeit) to solve an urgent problem.  And for the same reason—its novelty—Gnosis looks odd to those brought up on other categories, the “traditional forms of servant, covenant, and ecstatic spirituality.” ¹¹  

In the course of introducing her text DeConick tells us “It is the transgressive power of the Gnostic to innovate and revolutionize religion that I expose in The Gnostic New Age and explore as a distinctive feature of Gnostic spirituality.” ¹²   As the texts from Cannon, Schumpeter, and Milsom suggest, we can read DeConick's work as analyzing a particular instance of the general phenomenon:—the transcending power of Existenz  to innovate and thereby revolutionize its way of life.  In other words, DeConick presents yet more evidence that ontodelic generation of das Neue is our superpower,  καινούργησις our specific ἀρετή:—that human being is the dreamwork of nature, its most deconstrained plasmatist. ¹³   (That we are also thereby das wahnwitzige Thier  is the correlative ἁμαρτία; our superpower its own kryptonite.) In Heidegger's formulation, Sein ist das transcendens schlechthin. ¹⁴  Human being ex-sists as Transzendenz überschwingend in Möglichkeiten.¹⁵

Litwa emphasizes the combinatory moment, the mixing and blending:

“People mix things.  When toddlers fingerpaint, they mix the colors to test out combinations.  Marketers mix and match email campaigns.  Chemists combine chemicals. ¹⁶   To mix is human.  Our very brains are natural blenders.  Mental combination is the mother of creativity—and the key to human flourishing [ adaeque withering] on this planet.  The brain naturally blends different things, framing and reframing ideas without our conscious intention.  Thousands of new ideas are the results of blending different concepts from different domains.” ¹⁷  

The disclosive moment is to have things for mixing; to have colors, emails, chemicals, ideas, concepts, Dinge und Kräfte, show up in reach, vorhandenen,  ‘in the there,' and in the buffer, the reservoir, das Erbe.   As Heidegger puts it,

“the beings that surround us are uniformly manifest [gleichmäßig offenbar] as simply something present at hand in the broadest sense [Vorhandene im weitesten Sinne] . . . We board the tram, talk to other people, call the dog, look up at the stars, all in the same way [in einem Stil]—humans, vehicles, human beings, animals, heavenly bodies, everything in the same uniformity of what is present at hand [alles in einer Gleichmäßigkeit des eben Vorhandenen].”¹⁸

Present because of—to borrow Gerty MacDowell's phrase—‘the wondrous revealment':

“With the existence of human beings there occurs an irruption [Einbruch] into the totality of beings [ in das Ganze des Seienden ], so that now the being in itself first [jetzt erst] becomes manifest, i.e., as being [das Seiende an ihm selbst, d.h. als Seiendes offenbar wird], in varying degrees, according to various levels of clarity, in various degrees of certainty.” ¹⁹

And these now-manifest Seienden are henceforth variously accessible for dicing and splicing to make anderes, neuer Kombinationen. ²⁰   As Aristotle says, we make use (χρώμεθα) of der Bestand  (πάντων ὑπαρχόντων) as if it's there for our sake (ὡς ἡμῶν ἕνεκα). ²¹   Which use-making is ontologically obligate: “Dasein is in itself excessive, i.e., defined by a primary insatiability for beings.” ²²   The recipe for world-building is therefore simple: “you need only add beings,” man braucht nur Seiendes hinzuzubringen. ²³    

DeConick observes that “much of the Gnostic message has become mainstream spirituality” ²⁴  and consequently shows up in artefacts of popular culture.  To illuminate Gnostic spirituality for us DeConick draws on the buffer of motion pictures.  She shows that a certain set of films are the dual of the Gnostic vision, or aspects of it. Thus her examples confirm the adage, ‘If you want a myth of deliverance, go see a Hollywood movie.' ²⁵   E.g.,

“In the Gnostic world, there is only one way to deal with the monsters, the dark lords [bad archons] who rule us.  A divine emissary or savior descends to earth from the great realm of power in order to guide and save humanity.  The Christian versions of Gnostic stories feature the emissary Jesus, not just as the revelator of the truth but also as the power who takes on the monsters and defeats them in a cosmic struggle.  . . . So, in scene after scene, Superman takes on Zod and his militia, and one by one they are eliminated. . . . Superman saves the world.” ²⁶  

Again:

“The dark city in Proyas's film, where alien demons control a world of darkness in which humans are bound, and where an extraordinary human, John Murdoch, wields alien powers to conquer the demons, is not unlike the dark cosmos portrayed in the Gospel of John.  In the fourth Gospel, the world is depicted as a realm of falsehood and darkness . . . Jesus and the demons duke it out throughout the Gospel, as Jesus wields his superhuman power, overcoming the darkness with his light and, in the end, casting out the demonic world ruler.” ²⁷

Okay, but these motifemes descend from the dragon-slayer myth: ‘Indra smashes Vrtra with his vajra and frees up the waters of life' sort of thing.  Sadly, “It is a basic feature of the [Indo-European] hero that he is a killer.” ²⁸   Happily, this is not a basic feature of the gnostic, whose distinctive feature is transcendence.  In gnostic myth the serpent is not the blocker (Vrtra means ‘Obstructor' ²⁹ ) but the helper.

In The Truman Show the serpent-helper takes erotic form in the actress Sylvia (Natascha McElhone) playing the role of ‘Lauren,' who catalyzes Truman's quest to know.  When Truman's search uncovers the truth of his life, that it's a TV show, he does not smash and kill—instead he travels to the edge of the sound-stage and simply steps outside.  He transcends the deception that was his former life.  DeConick comments, “How did the Gnostics think we go about finding the holy wholly Other and escaping chaos?  In the same way that Truman Burbank figures he can.  You have to journey out of the world.” ³⁰        

DeConick's 380 pages of text contain 102 tokens of transcend- , a keyword of her exposition. (A second keyword, transgress-,  appears in 84 tokens.)   Likewise Litwa, after recounting the standard meaning of ‘gnosis' as “a special kind of knowledge or insight that brings salvation,” emphasizes that transcendence is the condition of the possibility of gnosis: “Without experience of the transcendent at least on some level, there is no gnosis.” ³¹   Jeffrey Kripal explains that “The gnostic authors consistently saw something essentially divine and immortal deep within human nature, a hidden spark or lost pearl, that could manifest its true nature and glory only through a return back into the primordial Pleroma, the Fullness of the Godhead that constituted for so many of these systems the ultimate origin and goal of all creation.” ³²  

The gnostic version is another instance of ontic  transcendence.  As Heidegger describes that structure, “the quite common sense [vulgär verstanden] of a being (Dasein) rising over to [steigt hinüber zu] another being [Seienden] (Dasein or something on hand [Vorhandenes]), crossing over in such a way that, in transcending, that to which Dasein transcends is disclosed for it [für es enthüllt ist] in a rather broad sense.” ³³  And that's also the structure of epistemological transcendence, as Heidegger sets it out:

“Hence the subject is thought of as a sort of box with an interior, with the walls of a box, and with an exterior.  . . . and what belongs to the very conception of the transcendent is that a barrier between inner and outer must be crossed. . . . Transcendence, then, is taken to be the relationship that somehow or other maintains a passageway between the interior and exterior of the box by leaping over or passing through the wall of the box. So the problem arises of how to explain the possibility of such a passage.” ³⁴        

Heidegger distinguishes this epistemological conception of transcendence from the theological one ‘in the widest sense'.  For transcendence can be considered as

“the opposite of contingency.  The contingent is what touches us, what pertains to us, that with which we are on the same footing, that which belongs to our kind and sort.  The transcendent, on the contrary, is what is beyond all this as that which conditions it, as the unconditioned, but at the same time as the really unattainable, what exceeds us [das Überschwängliche].  Transcendence is stepping-over in the sense of lying beyond conditioned beings. . . . Being-beyond, in this case, expresses at the same time a difference in degree of being, or better, the infinite difference of the created from the creator . . .  Insofar as the transcendent, in this second concept, always means the unconditioned, the Absolute in some form or other, and the latter means predominantly the divine, we can speak here of a theological conception of transcendence.” ³⁵  

Heidegger remarks that both these conceptions of transcendence, the epistemological and the theological, “can be conjoined—something that has always happened and always recurs.” ³⁶   Exhibit A for this proposition is Gnosis.  Gnostics not only believe in the transcendent holy wholly Other, the Pleroma, the divine Absolute, etc., they also believe the divine spark trapped in the human body must transcend its corporal prison-cell and cross yet further cosmic barriers in order to reunite with the aforementioned divinity.  In DeConick's words,

“Conventional religions, they thought, mask the true God of worship, a transcendent God who is the ultimate reality and the primal source of all existence.  This God of goodness and love transcends all gods and all religions. . . .  According to the Gnostics, the essential human self, our authentic being, is nothing less than God's very own life essence, his own spirit captured deep within the human soul, where it lies dormant, unexpressed, and forgotten. It lies there pained, waiting to be awakened, cultivated, and reunited with the divine source of all.  For the Gnostics, religion is not about obeying the conventional gods but about transcending them in order to find spiritual union with the ultimate God, the supreme source of all existence.” ³⁷        

Yet even Hokuspokus—the mythical means of divuncular transit into or out of a body ³⁸ —is only conceivable because of what Heidegger calls ‘primal transcendence,' ‘neutral Dasein,' “the primordial positivity and potency of the essence.” ³⁹   “Neutral Dasein is never what exists; Dasein exists in each case only in its factical concretion.”  E.g., neutral Dasein “is neither of the two sexes.”  Rather, it's more of an ontological stem cell: “neutral Dasein is indeed the primal source of intrinsic possibility that springs up in every existence and makes it intrinsically possible. . . . As such, Dasein harbors the intrinsic possibility for being factically dispersed into [birgt die innere Möglichkeit für die faktische Zerstreuung in] bodiliness and thus into sexuality.”  “The metaphysical neutrality of the human being, inmost isolated as Dasein . . . is the authentic concreteness of the origin, the not-yet of factical dispersion [das Noch-nicht der faktischen Zerstreutheit].” ⁴⁰

Heidegger denies this is Pleromatoid gnosticism: “We are not dealing with the notion of a large primal being in its simplicity becoming ontically split into many individuals.” ⁴¹   We are dealing instead with primal transcendence:

“what Dasein surpasses in its transcendence is not a gap or barrier ‘between' itself and objects. But beings, among which Dasein also factically is, get surpassed [überschritten] by Dasein.  Objects are surpassed in advance; more exactly, beings are surpassed and can subsequently become objects. Dasein is thrown, factical, thoroughly amidst nature through its bodiliness, and transcendence lies in the fact that these beings, among which Dasein is and to which Dasein belongs, are surpassed by Dasein.  In other words, as transcending, Dasein is beyond nature [über die Natur], although, as factical, it remains environed [umschlungen] by nature.  As transcending, i.e., as free, Dasein is something alien [etwas Fremdes] to nature.” ⁴²     

Das Evangelium vom fremden Freiheit  kind of thing:—the message that in their real, true being—neutral Dasein, the ontunculus—humans cannot be in nature; otherwise they would not be transcending, free.  So the problem arises of how to explain the possibility of such a freedom.

Well, evolution has proved that from the materials of nature it can counterfeit the phenomenon of überNatur, of metaphysical freedom. ( Auch ein Kunststück des Lebens. )  What materials?

In a perspective article titled “Evolvability,” Kirschner and Gerhart contend that “The [physiological] properties of versatile protein elements, weak linkage, compartmentation, redundancy, and exploratory behavior . . . confer evolvability on the organism by reducing constraints on change and allowing the accumulation of nonlethal variation.” These core features have been conserved over evolutionary time because “they deconstrain phenotypic variation in other processes, and hence facilitate evolutionary change.”  Exploratory systems include angiogenesis, nerve outgrowth, neural crest cells, microtubulin-based morphogenesis, “and even behaviors such as ant foraging.” ⁴³          

Twenty-five years after “Evolvability” Wong et al . conjecture a “hitherto-unarticulated law” “to characterize familiar macroscopic phenomena of our complex, evolving universe;” a law to account for “the evolution of varied systems, including stars, minerals, atmospheres, and life.”  They point out that these systems “appear to be conceptually equivalent in that they display three notable attributes: 1) They form from numerous components that have the potential to adopt combinatorily vast numbers of different configurations; 2) processes exist that generate numerous different configurations [of those components]; and 3) configurations are preferentially selected based on function.” ⁴⁴  

Long ages of descent with modification have selected a process pre-eminently überschwingend in Möglichkeiten  which thereby generates vast numbers of different configurations of combinatorily protean elements, Dinge und Kräfte.   The core process of exploratory behavior is conserved in the form of self-interpretation and self-articulation; foraging for meaning, for das Neue. ⁴⁵   ‘Exploratory' in that beings—versatile elements and components—are disclosed to us as such, and we have an open-ended capacity and drive to recombine them to make others.

What's the point of a pan-metabolizer?  Only with a certain reservation can I assent to Michael Russell's thesis that the purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide. ⁴⁶   The claim is Earth-chauvinistic.  If life exists elsewhere, why would it necessarily be carbon-based?  It would, however, just as does our planet's form of life, “serve to augment the rate of entropy production over what it would be in the absence of biota.” ⁴⁷   Rather than ‘anthropology' or ‘biology' we should speak of ‘entropology.' ⁴⁸  In Bradley Layton's word, living things entropicize their environments, and none more effectively than human beings.  He explains that “One hundred percent of our 500+ exajoule-per-year technological diet becomes thermal.”  (exa = 10 18 ) Using this figure Layton puts the contemporary rate of entropy generation by humanity into its cosmic context:

“The average temperature of the atmosphere, where our technologies convert chemical, and nuclear energy into thermal energy takes place, is 15°C (288 K). Thus the entropy generation rate of the technosphere is Ṡearth = 5.53 · 1010 W K-1. Normalizing both the universal and the terrestrial rates of entropy generation by their respective volumes results in Ṡuniverse, V = 2.14 · 10 -32 W K-1 m-3  and Ṡearth, V = 4.33 · 10 -9 W K-1 m-3. In other words, on a volumetric basis, humans entropicize their environment at a rate 1.80 · 10 23  times greater than the ‘background' entropy generation rate of the universe.” ⁴⁹  

As an example of our contemporary power to entropicize, Layton estimates that we are consuming the earth's chemical energy stores, fossil fuels, at a rate ten million times greater than their rate of deposition. ⁵⁰  

Layton's estimates put a metric to Heidegger's trope that technology “rages about in the ‘world' today like an unshackled [entfesselte] beast.” ⁵¹   Aber die jeweilige faktische Entdecktheit ist gleichsam immer eine Entfesselung, so to speak. And insofar as Entfesselung, deconstraint,  serves to increase the local rate of entropy production it is, in that sense, the point.    To rejigger another Heideggerism, ⁵²   der Stoffwechsel die Transzendenz des Daseins ausmacht.  Our transcendence is metabolism.  We change—in the widest sense—beings into other beings, ever faster burning the world to build our Welt.  Bis die wahnwitzigen Thiere  mussten sterben. ⁵³

DCW 10/06/2025

Doug C. Wise's Papers

Ereignis