The Concept of Fate

Is wisdom forever foundational to philosophy? And if so, then what basic wisdom suffices to be called foundational to philosophy? Basic wisdom in turn depends on what we make of foundational facts. In what way might basic wisdom be called profound? Certainly it is profound if it merits singular attention as fundamental to philosophy.

Do the fates of all concepts lie with the Concept of Fate? Or else, does the fate of all concepts? But these are different questions, one aimed at the respective fates of concepts by themselves, the other at the Fate of Concepts as a whole. In one scenario, the Concepts as a whole survive sempiternally. In another, some concepts die off, others survive for the foreseeable future. In yet another, all concepts perish while life itself survives. But in this vein of thought, we are foremost concerned with two concepts in particular, both subject to this broader inquiry: God and Time.

The facticity or know-ability of the world, conventional wisdom holds, is founded upon basic truths. A truth, given or received as a basis, as a foundation, as a founding basis for knowledge—however such an abstraction of materiality might hold up to a critique of the concept of truth—facticity itself is abstractive as "a power for being known", this prominence of givenness from within a world-enclosure. This "givenness" and "power-for-such" are both semantically denoted datively, as "for-ness" or "being-for-such". It is as such that a confusion between the singular and the plural occurs, in the question of a God-given-world, versus the multiple sempeternities and/or mortalities of the individuals; the Sacred and the secular.

Yet as internality, the concepts of Time, Eternity, Fate all belong to a species of horologic-derived notions; the gods being the divinities, the heavenly beings, stars, astra and colonies of astra, heuristically conceived through narrative conventions, myths. Such abstractions of Time were necessary, in order to first think the heavenly order of being—the first incarnation of this being an early historical foundation of metaphysics and supernaturalism in Indo-European astrologies, as well as later astronomies, through which myths based upon constellations preserved their heuristic value. And thinking from afar, the astral or abstract body became narratively associated with the stars and the great ape, homo sapiens, did first conceive the horological.

This archeophilosophical inquiry into the founding concepts of mind sees in it a latent, nascent historical truth, one that turns on the earliest narrative interwovenness of temporality and eternity. Time and God both reside at the mental site of judging fates. Time appears like God, as a force that cannot be defeated from within life from within the world-disclosure which it avails, because as-such, as world-giving-Time, it is the power that drives birth and death, existence and fate, the universal event of life, though it is entirely possible that the fate of the afterlife and the eternal lie too, in its historical and hermeneutical operations.

If the universal event of life is a fact, if it is knowable-as-a-fact, then it is already a fact to be reckoned with. God-given-ness as an explanation for its facticity, for its knowability, does offer the appearance of an immediate buck-stops-here-styled premise, and for that, it recommends itself in a certain light as unquestionable, beyond criticism.

But if we think of the God who gives as one who gives in-and-through a medium, a prominent finitude or life who reveals as the prominence of the virtues in the thinking of the world as God-given-ness—then the question naturally arises as to how God gives the world to homo sapiens. 

Internality and Dimension

Time and Eternity have in common that they both are constituted mentally as a kind of conceptual internality; yet as internalities, they differ, not just from spatial externality, but one as a concept pertaining to the external and limited,  to science and cause and effect, over and against a concept pertaining to the internal and unlimited or infinite. Yet in this self-reflexivity, in this apperception which is itself a reflection on the self as time, as being-historical, as enduring—there is a kind of inference which takes the temporal and the eternal as erzats options to be opined upon and judged between, as if the facts did not intrude here, in this remote place, so as to prevent some external, objective determination; to wit, a deathless soul enfleshed in time.

Yet it is just in this history of Time and Eternity that we are to locate the emergence of this peculiar, absurdly paradoxical species of religious consciousness, a consciousness that determines deathlessness for itself in the face of death!

To preserve the concept of the Eternal in the face of the Temporal concept of Death is to insist upon the superiority, ontologically speaking, of an internality which cannot be violated or diminished in any ways by the external; a pure internality which affords a pure reasoning. Kant attempted to unfold this situation, and yet we could never say that he was successful in establishing an immortal soul as a fact, insofar as this would arrogate itself to behave like some external determination on this unreachable place, placing the cart before the horse, so to speak.

What is essential and deathless in the conceptualizing framework which is this mental dimension of internality, must be the way in which the self as Time intrudes upon the world for a while and in a particular place. This insistence of the superiority of self over matter, of the I Myself over the whole of the World, of the narrative of self over the facts of life and death, leads to a retreat into the self as a place of repose and continuity in the face of rampant scheduling and never ending worries about yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The world draws us out from our repose and throws us into the fray of everlasting strife, the struggle for existence, the struggle for recognition, the struggle for freedom, the struggle for the good life.

Life gifts goodness in its own time, and we struggle to find safe haven in the ports between sea-going journeys between life-events, between anniversaries and holidays, between celebrations and parties, festivals; sacred moments, cherished and commemorated. Work that is akin to play makes this journey the more endurable; a life at sea, in pilgrimage, as journeymen and travellers, make and map our ways, seek sense in the larger picture, to join the small things in one harmonious and meaningful trip.

The sense of the Eternal endures, perhaps not least because it is endurance as such! Existence washes over us historically, until at last we relinquish our bodies to the grave. Will we then see ourselves in a new light? In any light at all? Yet endurance beyond life is already something external as historical. And as historical it is not immediately the eternal, but only the temporal.