Part One
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The contours of Things are contours only in a reigning consensus about how Things are (. . . ); the human-independent forces being pursued are found with human hands and felt in human hearts."
David R. Gruber,
"The brain is a blinding light".
In Edward Butler’s “The Way of Being”, he tries to articulate what “it was possible to think, and not necessarily with what was permissible or popular to think.”1 He uses this heuristic to articulate the thought-field of the socio-cultural milieu he is focusing on, describing culture as “metaphysics by diverse means.”2 Of course, culture is more than this, but it is an interesting heuristic for articulating the metaphysics of collectivities.
It’s permissible these days to spite the “masses” for not being metaphysically ept. My interactions on twitter make it very clear to me that most people aren’t even amateurs in philosophy, and its diverse jargon. Heck, even I am still an amateur and I do not know enough. However, this does not mean that sufficiently motivated people don’t think, or that the common cultural production of peoples do not produce a good enough (and even brilliant) metaphysics. They just do it by “diverse means”, using the languages and methods they do know and specialize in. Some special people have the ability to tap into this stream to weave works of art beautiful enough to harmonize some of it. Some people are on the same aggregated wavelength, you could say, as the “thought field” they live in.
This is what I see going on with the DC universe (at least, at its best) and with authors like Grant Morrison, in his Final Crisis story. One might say this is the story of Darkseid’s suicide, but fittingly for a God, his death is cosmogonic: Worlds are formed, deformed, reformed, and transformed by his death, and the process of this death. You can try to read the story yourself first – for those who don’t like spoilers – but you don’t need to read it to follow my reasoning. What you will need is an open mind, and a love of music.
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