THE MYSTERY OF THINGS

“The Mystery Of Things.”
When Winston Churchill famously called Russia “a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma,” he thus showed an uncommon perspicacity and political discernment. I have accordingly lavished great praises on Churchill’s wisdom with regard to Russia in several places already, and my position on this issue has been made perfectly clear.
But, curiously, he could have said precisely the same thing about practically anything, and thus would have shown an uncommon perspicacity and philosophical discernment. For, anything and everything we perceive could be perceived as a riddle, as a mystery, as an enigma, if only we look at it the right way. Shakespeare’s King Lear looked at it the right way, when he talked about “the mystery of things.”
Everything, in heaven and on earth, is a mystery to the human mind. But seeing that mystery, recognizing it as a mystery and appreciating it as such depends on the beholder. One only sees what he or she wants to see, and only gets out of it what one wants. There is no mystery in the expected, these two words are antipodes. The mystery as such is always, and exclusively, hidden in the awareness of the presence of the unexpected. No two persons see the same object in the same way. Every single object of our perception, both physical and abstract, is charged with an infinite number of properties, and what we can see is only a tiny selection of them. We can expect the expansion of the selection, thus, our ability to expand that selection alone does not necessarily guarantee the unpredictableness to reveal itself to our eye. It is only the very special ability of a keen and open mind to look for the unexpected, to “expect the unexpected” (for the record, this phrase does not originate with some modern new-age guru; it was first said by Heraclitus, and then twenty-four hundred years later it was repeated by Oscar Wilde, becoming wildly popular yet another hundred years later), which makes the revelation of the mystery possible.
But there is more to it than the revelation of a single mystery. Everything around us is a multiple mystery, and the multiplicity of mysteries within the same object is not even “triple,” like in Churchill’s Russia, but actually, infinite. We can return to the same object over and over again, each time uncovering yet another mystery, and we shall never run out of these mysteries. Our object of attention will never disappoint us in our curiosity; it will always remain inexhaustibly pregnant with great mysteries, awaiting for us to simply say Ali Baba’s “Open Sesame!” And Sesame will always open to us, provided that we meet one condition only: that as we are saying these magic words “Open Sesame!” we have absolutely no idea as to what we have come to “Sesame” for.

From Point A To Point Z.
How do you get from point A to point Z?
There are actually two ways. The first one is the long way. You first get to point B, then to point C, then D, E, F, etc., until you finally reach your destination. However, the road is tricky and tiring, and by the end of the journey, chances are that you will be too worn out to savor your accomplishment.
The second way, the shortest and the surest, is to stay where you are. Because point A is point Z.

Seven Days Of God.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth… And God saw every thing that he had made and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day… Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them… And on the seventh day God ended his work, which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work, which he had made.” (Genesis 1:1--2:2)
And here is my question for the story of Creation: What did God do on the eighth day?
This question is quite intriguing, and philosophically rewarding, but taken in a straightforward sense, it is nonsensical, for, as we know, God exists outside time. Time is his creation exclusively for the purpose of his Creation. We, his creatures, have our tens of thousands of days; the earth, his Creation, has its hundreds of billions of days… But God, the Creator of all, does He have an… “eighth day”?
The “seven days of God” are not even days, in our time-related sense. They are separate stages of Creation, thus represented not objectively, but subjectively, to fit the parameters of our understanding. Apparently, it has not been necessary for the Holy Scriptures to include more than seven days in the story of Creation, not for the reason that we might not understand the significance of the eighth, ninth, or tenth day, but because the eighth, and all subsequent days of Creation do not exist.
The seventh day, on which God ended his work, and rested, has never ended. A billion years ago, just as it is today, and will be a billion years from today, all God’s Creation has been living through the never-ending seventh day, and an “eighth day” is not to be.

Faith And Philosophy.
How does one’s personal faith correlate with one’s philosophy?
Faith is an extremely potent mind-affecting substance, which must not be allowed to dominate philosophical thinking. But by the same token as it ought not to dictate philosophy, as had been the rather unfortunate case with Pascal, nor must it be thrown under the philosopher’s “bus” in an artificial attempt at objectivity.
The long history of the so-called “theism” has shown us that the greatest temptation of a religiously-minded philosopher has always been the scientific proof of the existence of God, leading him into a mind-darkening confusion between the two basic substances of faith and philosophy which must at all times be kept separate because whenever they are allowed to mix, one completely overwhelms the other.
But Nietzsche’s irreverent answer is the opposite extreme of Pascal’s inordinate reverence. Nietzsche would not allow any reverent feeling to stand in the way of philosophical inquiry; therefore since his early years he had dismissed all things supernatural from his consideration, thus throwing the baby out with the bath water (as he explains, obviously, in much smoother terms, in his autobiographical Ecce Homo).
His absolute idealism saves him, however, from the silliness of practicing what he preaches, referring to his aversion to religion spilling into an aversion to spirituality, of which aversion he of course has none.
Talking about myself, I have already noticed, and commented on, the fact that in my writings, I often come across as religiously irreverent, but such is the only proper mix of faith and philosophy. In fact, what I have been thus exhibiting is an absence of piety, where piety is not due. Piety belongs to faith, and philosophy is not faith!
However, my general ethical disposition does not undergo a substantial transformation when it moves from faith to philosophy. Ethics is the bridge between the two, and there can be only one such bridge in a single person. In this sense, faith and philosophy are closely linked, and should a divorce happen between them, such divorce explodes the connective bridge, leaving the person pitifully devoid of ethics.

Why God Is Not A Philosopher.
(The politically aware reader may correctly notice that this entry was triggered by George W. Bush’s proudly made statement, during a 1999 Republican Presidential Campaign Debate, that Jesus Christ was his favorite political philosopher or thinker “because he changed my heart.” It has since been argued that he may have misunderstood the moderator’s question, but whether he did or not is irrelevant, because that incident to me was just a spark that set off the fireworks, illuminating my mind to this entry.)
The title of this entry may at first sight appear extremely irreverent, and even offensive, to the pious reader, but only at first sight. On careful examination, he must see that, on the contrary, calling God a ‘philosopher’ would be just as inappropriate and even offensive as for some wacky university out of sheer fancy to bestow upon God the honorary title of PhD.
Why raise the subject at all is, of course, another question, but the reason may already be obvious to anyone who has been following the American political scene for the past eight years with some minimal attention. I am referring to the well-known episode when the then President George W. Bush, in a television interview, named Jesus Christ as his “favorite philosopher.” It is true that this kind of answer may be very tempting for a religious person to come up with and to be proud of, however beneath the thin surface it is philosophically unsustainable. Its simplistic, unphilosophical approach reflects a deep philosophical confusion as to who is God, and who can be called a “philosopher.” Incidentally and ironically, only a non-Christian, who, by his faith or a lack thereof, rejects the notion of Christ’s divinity can call Jesus Christ “a philosopher,” which, to him, would then denote anyone of those men searching for the truth, whose answers to important questions are always subject to immediate doubt and intense critical scrutiny, and then, only in case we choose to take them seriously and with respect, exactly because none of them can be accepted as revelations of the truth or as commands on the authority of God.
Not surprisingly, the Scriptures give the word “philosopher” a very negative connotation (as someone who dares to challenge the authority of the Apostle Paul, in Acts 17:18), and who does it in a rather rude manner: “Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say?”…(etc.) Honestly, I see nothing wrong in the philosophers’ expression of doubt. After all, they are not questioning the authority of God in this instance!
But the key to the reason why God is not a philosopher lies in Plato’s definition of philosopher in Politeia: “A philosopher is one who desires to discern the truth.”
A philosopher is a person necessarily deficient in knowledge (as all human beings are!), who sets upon the noble path of increasing his knowledge, usually by asking himself (for the purpose of learning) and others (for the purpose of teaching, and also for dialectic learning, like Socrates, and other Greeks) a host of very pertinent and illuminating questions, not so much in the hope of discovering the truth, as of being able to get closer to it.
In God, however, there can be no deficiency in anything, deficiency of knowledge included. Therefore, the philosophical spirit of inquiry cannot be posited as an attribute of God, therefore, God is not a philosopher, for that very reason!
While Philosophy is the search for the right Question, God is the definitive Answer, and the only one there is. The philosopher does not reveal the truth to us, he only pushes our mind toward the path of searching for it. On the other hand, God is the Truth Itself, being the highest point of esse, altius non. That is why it is not appropriate for a Christian, or anyone who believes that Jesus is God, to call Jesus Christ “a philosopher.”
…I feel inclined to add a personal recollection here from times long past. I was born and raised as a Russian Orthodox Christian, and you just cannot be more Christian than that, if we are talking about Soviet Russia, where the vibrant spirit of early Christianity was very much revived and amazingly well… If you doubt this, just ask Kierkegaard! Yet, I have always been kind of philosophically unhappy, accepting the Bible not as a magnificent book of philosophy, but only as the definitive and non-arguable Word of God, because such an acceptance, if we one is sincere and consistent in his faith, which is by no means the case in most cases, but was in mine, should immediately strip this great book of its immense philosophical value, by denying to the philosopher-reader of the Bible his primary tool of inquiry: doubt. If only we, Christian believers, had been allowed to regard the Bible not as the imperative word of God, but as a terrific human effort, our intellectual rewards would undoubtedly have been even greater!…

God And Death.
(The following is a rational philosophical discussion, which deliberately shuns all theological arguments, but cannot be mistaken for an anti-theological stand, on that account.)
The denial of the existence of God, associated with atheism, has two sides: physical and psychological, both having to do with the concept of death. I disagree with those who say that physically speaking theism makes more sense than atheism. I believe that it is reasonable to propose that a human being’s life goes through the same life cycles as are found everywhere around us in nature, and that, like in everything else, death means the end of the individual existence. On the other hand, our belief in a supernatural force beyond our control and comprehension, and the existence of life after death, is also quite reasonable and cannot be dismissed in a rational debate.
In other words, physically speaking, the argument splits 50/50 along the pro and contra lines. The situation is different when human psychology enters the picture.
As long as the human brain can easily grasp the concept of eternity, it is extremely hard to accept the notion that the same brain just dies off with the physical death of the flesh which has been its home throughout the life journey. Thus it is psychologically optimistic to subscribe to the notion of God, while it is pessimistic to expect man with his vastly superior brain to be no better than the animals inhabiting the earth with us, as we all go to waste. What a waste!
There is only one sensible type of atheist who is psychologically more at home with the notion of total death than with the notion of eternal life after death. This is the man who has a guilty conscience and who is afraid of some kind of retribution for his sins in the afterlife much more than he is afraid of post-life nothingness.
For those who have no fear of retribution and who count on God’s loving forgiveness, it is natural to believe in God and in some kind of continuing life after death, whether by transcendence, or by reincarnation of the same soul which has been ours since the beginning of time, in the continuing mystery of eternal recurrence.
Their worst and the most terrifying fear in life must therefore be that God does not exist, and that only death is the inevitable certainty.

On This Side Of Good And Evil.
(The title is a transpositional play on Nietzsche’s title Jenseits von Gut und Bose, which, literally translated, will be On the Other Side of Good and Evil. Here we are talking about this side.)
I believe that evil has no part of infinity and immortality, but is imbedded in the finite and limited nature of time and space. If we still insist that anything infinite or created outside time may possess the quality of evil, we are thereby committing the philosophical fallacy of the Manicheans, and thus the whole noble purpose of philosophy, which is always morality-centered, is utterly defeated, because, in my belief, the very idea of immortality of evil makes the concept of Evil co-legitimate with the concept of God and Goodness, thus, not an undesirable temporal blot on man’s quest for acceptance into the realm of the Infinite, but a kind of alternative existence within the Nature of Things. Therefore I believe that, insofar as Satan is concerned, he, as well as the host of all the other angels (thus to be consistent with the definition of angelic creatures where Satan is only one among many) have either been created within time, or that his original creation, therefore, his nature, does not include the propensity for evil, and thus the fact of his being the source of evil, rather than evil itself, contains some outright esoteric significance, which we with our limited intellectual capacity have been unable to grasp. An alternative approach to Satan and the angels would be surprisingly along the lines of Hobbes’ insistence that all angels are metaphorical creatures, blown up into phantasmal forms and shapes by popular superstitions. In such a case, Satan also appears as a metaphor, and the whole question of evil boils down to the bad-effect alternative to the good effect of the same cause: human action; while the reason that such an alternative is possible at all is the freedom of choice. Without the cause called freedom of choice there can be no alternative behavior or action, and the notion of choice presupposes the reality of such alternatives. Consequently, evil is an unfortunate effect of a good cause, namely the freedom of choice. God has not even created evil as such, but he created a very good thing that contains the potential of a bad thing, as its logical consequence. This last sentence sounds a bit casuistic, but it is in fact philosophically sound, logically irrefutable, and above all, crucial to the ethics of human existence.

Immortality Of Good Versus Mortality Of Evil.
“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” (Genesis 1:31)
Searching for the cause of the presence of Evil in God’s Very Good Creation, every diligent philosopher of ethics always attempts to look, with varying degrees of consistency, at the continuum of the causal chain. If God is good and so is the design of His creation, then how and where does evil enter the picture?
It is obvious to me that evil was first introduced into the causal chain not from the very beginning, where the only First Cause was God, but somewhere later along the line, thus making it contained in time, rather than infinite, unlike what Mani and the Manicheans have wanted us to believe; and also that evil had entered the chain as a bad effect of a good cause, as otherwise the chain would lose its logic and consistency. Now, how did that happen?
To solve this daunting intellectual puzzle, we must necessarily examine the complex question of Freedom of Choice. If we agree that Freedom of Choice was an integral part of God’s original Creation, with the caveat, of course, that we are talking about Creation-in-Time, with Time being included in its design, then what this means is that Freedom of Choice must be a good-in-itself, while on the contrary the lack of such a Freedom would have not been good, and, therefore, inconsistent with God’s Design. But the very fact of the presence of Free Choice, or Free Will for that matter, in the ongoing continuum of the causal chain, unless, of course, this whole thing is rendered totally meaningless, interferes with the ever-continuing sequence of causes and effects, in the course of nature. The Goodness of the First Cause cannot promise the goodness of subsequent occurrences of effects, which themselves become causes in time.
Now, Free Will cannot be explained away as if it were some kind of choice between two goods: this would not make sense, because philosophically, there is just one good, and if the practical choices we make are not between good and evil, they must be only between some morally-neutral trivialities, and, of course, such choices have nothing to do with either free will or freedom of choice which are definitely of a fundamentally ethical nature.
Thus we can trust the Bible, telling us that “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good,” but we cannot make from this the absurd inference that all is good within God’s Creation because, as I have just reasoned, good causes can produce bad effects. But to be fair and consistent in our affirmation of the goodness of God, we must never take this for granted and fail to recognize and reaffirm the timelessness of Goodness, as opposed to the temporariness of evil. All causes in time, as opposed to one timeless Cause, which is God, are of a different, corrupt nature, like the nature of man. Because it is in the nature of time to produce the corruptive effect. Generation and regeneration are impossible in the absence of a degeneration. And of course, degeneration and death have nothing to do with evil, both being the so-called natural causes, as distinguished by philosophers from man’s willful actions, cited by them as the one and only cause of evil in existence. Personally, I do not like the latter argument, because all natural disasters, such as catastrophic hurricane, for instance, are considered by most people as evil; and although for me this distinction between “God’s evil,” which is not philosophically, but popularly evil, and man’s evil, which is philosophically evil, but among men is disputed as such (as they say, for instance, one man’s terrorism is another man’s fight for freedom, etc.), does have some sense to argue about, on principle, yet such an argument is totally avoidable, and even superfluous, in the context of the bigger picture.
I believe that it is along these lines that we must approach the question of Evil, and thus, we will be able to prove its temporal separation-in-principle from the timelessness of God’s Goodness.

Creator Of Evil.
This short entry, continuing our long discussion of the eternity of goodness and temporality of evil, is built around the following verse in Isaiah 45:7---
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”
It must be noted that some prudish "improvers" of the Bible, always wary of any rough verbal edges, on their smug journey to the harbors of comfort, have taken the liberty of changing Create Evil to Create All in their sacred texts. Apparently, their merely superficial, in this and other similar cases, sensibilities outweigh any allegiance to the authenticity of the sacred writings, which might otherwise have moved them toward an accommodation a little more respectful toward the Bible’s great prophets. But apparently nothing to it…
With regard to the phrase “Creator of Evil,” I find it remarkably in tune with my overall insistence, within the ‘Good and Evil’ subsection, on the temporality, and therefore subordinate, position of evil in the general order of things. Evil, in my analysis, is originally an effect within time, and, therefore, it cannot a participant in eternity. But as I said before, the stark meaning of Isaiah 45:7 points to the fact that by allowing freedom of choice to his ultimate creation, man, God created the logical conditions for the appearance of evil within the temporal and spatial boundaries of His creation, and thus his attribution to himself of the creation of evil starts making the only possible sense in the otherwise inexplicable paradox of “God seeing every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” (Genesis 1:31)

Arguments And Facts.
There are different patterns of arguments, in which people are engaged, both in philosophical debates and in everyday life. One of such patterns is particularly curious. One person would be insisting on something that, according to him, is gospel truth, whereas the other cannot accept such an authoritative premise.
One way of dealing with this conflict is to characterize the positions of the arguers as incompatible, and stop arguing right there. It may be possible, however, for the arguers to reach a one-sided reconciliation if such a reconciliation is not only desirable, but absolutely necessary.
A reconciliation of our two incompatible positions becomes possible only both sides agree to consider each other’s gospel truths as mere working hypotheses, thereby allowing the hypothetical conclusions from them to become admissible, regardless of the fact that our promoters of the gospel truth see their own premise not as a hypothetical construct or simply a whim, but as the only one to be allowed. In these delicate situations, our arguers will then find it possible to focus their argument exclusively on the admissibility of each other’s conclusions, but not on the validity of the starting premises, and in this case, a mutually acceptable common denominator can be found. This is of course only possible when the arguers are only discussing the validity of their conclusions, and not the validity of the “facts” behind their premises.
Bringing the latter into the discussion, would be the most pointless argument and a sorry waste of time, as in all theoretical constructs, and in an overwhelming majority of practical ones, the premises are, of necessity, hypothetical, and “facts” grounded in gospel truth are hard to find outside the realm of religious revelation.

Language And Philosophy.
The choicest playground of philosophy is language. As we know, not every language happily submits itself to the role of playground, which does not speak well for such languages. In fact, any language ought to see it as an honor, to become a playground for philosophy, and it is a palpable deficiency, if it falls short of the task.
They say that the German language is among the fittest. No wonder, then, that German philosophy has been known as the most sophisticated of all Western philosophies with Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, as well as many others, plus Karl Marx, of course, serving as witnesses to the truth of this proposition.
On the other hand, the English language is not known to be as philosophy-friendly as the German language is. This is also a generally known fact (except in the English-speaking countries), and it probably somewhat explains Nietzsche’s dismissive attitude toward English philosophy.
The secret of heightened language adaptability to the needs of philosophy is not that it already contains the necessary philosophical terms and concepts within itself but rather that it allows its vocabulary to be used as building blocks, for philosophers to create a wide array of previously non-existent terms and phrases. It was in this capacity that Nietzsche, in particular, has distinguished himself. Many of the previously non-existent philosophical terms have been invented by him, thanks in equal part to his genius and to such propensity of the German language to be used in this manner.
I have said it several times before, and here is a fitting opportunity to say it again, that the word Jenseits, as an example, used by Nietzsche in his title Jenseits von Gut und Böse, allows us two legitimate translations: as beyond, in the English translation, and as on the other side, in the Russian translation. One may argue as to which translation is better, but the fact remains that the German word Jenseits does provide the subtlety, which makes both translations possible.
This entry is quite obviously not intended to glorify the German language, philosophically speaking, but its main thrust is to raise the awareness of the peculiar connection between language and philosophy, which I intend to keep discussing at length later on, when I finally have some leisure for it.

Truth As An Unlikely Cinderella.
A very long time ago, when I was still young and idealistic, I remember becoming very interested in writing an altogether new, “philosophical” version of the Cinderella story, in which Cinderella was ugly, and prone to saying some terribly unpleasant things, whereas her wicked sisters were exceptionally beautiful, pleasant, and full of the happiness of life. It is all too easy for an aesthetically-minded rich prince to fall in love with a stunningly beautiful girl, regardless of whether she is good or evil, but it takes an accomplished philosopher prince to discern the sublime qualities of our utterly unattractive Cinderella, who, in my story, happened to be the ugly truth, as opposed to her sisters being two beautiful lies to die for, let alone to fall in love with!
I wish I had jotted down my weird Cinderella story then and there, but instead I had chosen to relish it in my mind for decades, rather than commit myself to a project as conspicuously unaesthetic as this one. Because the good, the true and the beautiful rhyme all too perfectly, and harmonize together into a heavenly chord, while the true and the ugly create a cacophony, upsetting the balance of our senses. It is painfully clear from this picture how easily a pack of pleasantly sounding lies can creep into our eagerly awaiting consciousness and take it over, by offering us nine out of ten qualities aesthetically associated with goodness, cleverly leaving a blank, where we expect to find goodness, which we are mindlessly eager to fill in ourselves, by the power of strong association.
On the other hand, an ugly Cinderella does not fit the fairytale pattern and easily falls victim to our aesthetic prejudice.

Ten Thousand Hieroglyphs.
Arguably, the most important philosophical book of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (published in 1921) ends with these memorable and somewhat pessimistic lines:
6.522. There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself, it is the Mystische.
6.23. The right method of philosophy would be this: to say nothing except what can be said…
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
...Is there a way of saying this more optimistically? I think there is.
I would interpret this as: Our thoughts are limited by words which are known to us. When we feel limited by our vocabulary, we must either seek ways to expand it (the optimistic approach), or convincingly prove that it cannot be expanded. And only then when we realize that we want to speak of cannot be spoken of and not for the failure to find the words, can we say with good conscience: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
…I am having these thoughts as I am thinking about the fact which I made a note of before in this book, that the Chinese culture possesses some ten thousand hieroglyphs, an overwhelming majority of which is totally unknown to the ordinary Chinese population to say nothing of the foreigners. Those esoteric hieroglyphs are safely hidden behind the walls of old monastic schools of wisdom, some here, some there, some elsewhere, and even the chances of “crosspollination” among these repositories of ancient Chinese culture are not very frequent, to say the least.
So here, in China, are contained, like deep in the bowels of the earth or in the depths of the oceans, the very “words” which allow the humans to voice the unspeakable. Unlike us, heirs of the Western civilization, who have shared the mysteries of our language among ourselves, and who can say to the world: “what you see is what we have,” the Chinese are keeping their linguistic secrets to themselves, while keeping the rest of us, who are aware that they have these secrets, guessing how much wiser should this be making them. Frankly, after the experiences of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it seems strange how the treasures of their language can still be with them, and not lie buried somewhere under the debris of their former re-educational facilities…
Seriously, dear reader, this is a deeply philosophical and mystical question, if we choose to trust linguistic philosophers, and the genius of Wittgenstein first and foremost among them.

Philosophy And Ethics.
It is generally assumed that ethics is a component of philosophy. I do not argue with this premise, as long as it is not turned into a general truth, but knows its place in limited applications. What I am going to do here, however, is to posit the opposite as my opening premise. I am saying that philosophy is a part of ethics, and not the other way around. Again, as in the previous case, I am not claiming this as a general truth, but just as a limited-range proposition. I am further suggesting that ethics consists of two components: theoretical and practical, where philosophy covers theoretical ethics and social sciences cover practical ethics.
The central question of theoretical ethics is that of good and bad. The central question of practical ethics is that of rich and poor. At the main intersection of theory and practice lies the question: is the practice of rich and poor good or bad? I further propose that this is can well be the most important questions “ever asked on behalf of philosophy.”
Attempts to answer it my way have been consistently made throughout virtually every section of this book.