Bowne’s Rational Universe Given in Experience, Otherwise Known as Rational Empiricism and the Theism it Entails (Part 1)

Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910) is so hauntingly honest. Hauntingly honest is being transparent with how many assumptions are informing your argumentation. It’s bringing the assumed into view for all to see like he does here in his Philosophy of Theism (1887) in the very first chapter,

These postulates (interaction, law, and system) command universal assent as the basis of objective cognition. They are not doubted like the assumption of design, but are implied in the structure of knowledge. The specific nature of the laws and the system is, indeed a problem for solution; but the existence of rational law and system is implicitly assumed (Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 1887, p. 49).

Borrowing a Kantian strategy, Bowne is making a transcendental argument about the elements of all objective cognition. All knowledge of objects requires that members of a group interact and determine some part of another member. In assessing those interactions, I come to understand some principle of regularity. The unity expresses itself as harmony of law or laws. The fact that there are laws and a unity expressed by a series of proposition about members gives rise to a system. Since any knowledge functions in exactly this way in experience with interacting members, regulative law-like principles, and that systematization of these laws expressed an underlying intelligible unity, a rational nature to the universe is assumed implicitly in its expression of those laws as a system. That’s why theism is intimated in experience of any intelligibility for Bowne and yet Bowne proceeds slower than coming immediately to theism. Instead, he only wishes to establish the existence of some intelligence in the experience of the world. The merger of intelligence in experience of and with the world is what Bowne calls the world-ground and its unfolding in experience is one of intelligence. It’s very Taoistic.

A couple pages later, Bowne applies this argument to show the practical necessity of positing a One by exposing two ways that one may take relations of members that interact with each other.

By hypothesis these members, A, B, C, etc., are the only ontological realities; and the system is only our conception of their relations. But we cannot rest in them, for A refers us to B, and B to C, and we reach no resting place. We cannot rest in members taken singly, for each refers us to all the others. We cannot rest in the sum of the members, for a sum, as such, is only a mental product; and we get no hint of what it is in reality which is able to add a series of dependent units. in so potent a fashion as to bring out an independent sum. For the same reason, we cannot rest in the system; for the system is only a conception. To rest in the system we must make it the ontological reality, and regard the members of only as its implications or phases. Instead of constructing the system from members as ontological units, we must construct the members from the system (Bowne, PoT, p. 55).

Notice that Bowne is working backwards ontologically; he is moving from the highest level of organization in experience to the other constitutive elements of objective cognition. We experience all levels of system, law, and interaction. The highest level of organization, however, is system, and in constructing ontologically what we take to be the synthesis of unity that makes systematic knowledge possible Bowne is taking system as ontologically primitively given rather than assuming the ontological reality of members. Members are first only encountered in the relations that make them up. A member’s existence “is involved in its relations and would vanish without them” (Bowne, PoT, p. 53). From this effort, I ask the question: What types of system might we construct to interpret the members of a sequence of interaction as its implication or phases? While that’s not the question Bowne asks next in the text from the passage above, I think we are asking the same question when he writes, “How must we think about the fundamental reality?” (55). In answering this question, he answers mine. In doing so, he introduced what I will call the Practical Dilemma for Basal Monism.

[Either] [w]e may think of A, B, C, etc. as dependent on some one being, M, distinct from them which co-ordinates them and mediates their interaction. Or we may think of them…but [dependent] on some one being in them which their reality, and of which they are in some sense but phases or modifications. Thing, in the common usage of the term, would have but derived or phenomenal reality, and would have even this existence only in and through the one fundamental reality. The decision between the two views must be left for future study (Bowne, PoT, p. 56)

Bowne does not resolve this dilemma yet. He only points out that the unity reflected in experienced elements must posit One as the basis of experiencing an intelligible and systematically ordered universe in both disjuncts. This One of speculation, he hopes, may be considered “the God of Religion” (58). For now, it’s only a cognitive ideal, and cognitive ideals are a bit more acceptable than religious one to the point that the metaphysician, while not calling it God yet, has two options with this One. Let me explain.

First, the metaphysician can think of the One as a creator, architect, or artisan. In this way, the One made the world and its members, but their interaction necessitates the division between Creator and created as distinct. The One co-ordinates the members into their relational interactions. Such a conception is compatible with traditional orthodoxy of God as sustainer of the oneness of things. The One is the cause of the parts and the reason for their interaction. In that conception, the One transcends the members but causes and sustains the members in their interaction. Second, the metaphysician can think of the One as an immanent principle that animates and determines that order. In this way, the One may have made the world and its members, but is more present immanently. Such a conception is compatible with a type of panentheism where God or the Divine is actively present in the members.

In both views, Bowne thinks we are compelled to deny “the self-sufficiency of things” and affirm “a unitary world-ground” (56). This world-ground is infinite and absolute. Bowne is not implying that this unitary world-ground is “the all.” Instead, Bowne is only thinking that the unitary world-ground is independent of the finite. This independence does not mean that it is out of all relations, but that “out of all restrictive relations to anything beyond itself and is the independent source of the finite and all its relations” (56). As a consequence, there is no pluralism, and Bowne admits there’s no knockdown argument to go the way of pluralism or a basal monism. Instead, our shared practical interest in basal monism speaks to “giving expression to the mind’s demand for ultimate unity and in removing the contradiction which lies in the assumption of interaction between independent things” (57). In other words, with these two demands of the mind present and given the transcendental argument for the postulates of interaction, law and system, reality is fundamentally One, not pluralistic. A basal monism is implied in the practical necessity of the One to make sense of how experience arrives at systematic knowledge and the mind’s need for such unity.

In the end, we know only a few things. First, we know that the One is infinite in that it differs significantly from finite being. Second, metaphysics compels that we regard the One as active. This activity may be described as either the co-ordinate mediator that transcends the created or that the One is immanent in all things. Third, we also know that the Many cannot be One, although the One gives rise to the many. Bowne writes,

The One cannot be conceived as the sum of the many, nor as the stuff out which the many are made, neither does it depend on it. In this sense, the One is transcendent. Again, the many are not spatially outside the One, nor a pendulous appendage of the One; but the One is the ever-present power in and through which the many exist. In this sense the One is immanent. In any other sense the terms [transcendent and immanent] are words without meaning (59).

In this passage, the cognitive ideal is still only the God of the philosophers, more Plotinus than Abraham. The One cannot be the sum of the many as it is ontologically distinct, even if related. If the One were emergent out of the sum, a type of pantheism would equate the Creator and the created. The Divine transcends the finitude it makes. Next, the metaphysical reality of the Divine unfolds in immanent time with the members of its creation, so it may well be the animating principle that expresses the overall unity of everything. We are not there yet in this book, but only such activity of relations is necessitated.

Barbie is a Philosophical Movie

Barbie is a philosophical movie. I will review the movie below. I do warn you that there are spoilers below. Several from my department and I saw it today, and so here are my thoughts.

I turned to my chair and said, “This movie has so many references to existentialism that I bet Greta Gerwig has a BA in philosophy.” It’s true—English and philosophy. I looked it up afterwards. I simply wanted to point this out as well as I have a witness, and as I said, the existentialism is everywhere. Let me explain.

One can see how the metaphor of being a doll starts to breakdown. In the beginning of the movie, the characters are moving and acting with the laws of the universe determined by being an object. Barbie takes a shower with no water, drinks empty glasses, and has arched feet like the doll. As she is an object at this point, there is nothing unique about Margot Robbie’s Barbie anymore than the countless others one meets. Then, Margot Robbie’s Barbie starts to awaken.

Barbie’s awakening to consciousness as a subject is due to the fact that she faces her own being-towards-death. In this encounter, she experiences a dreadful angst that doesn’t take an object as existentialists describe dread and angst when one reflects on dreadful angst. In this way, dreadful angst is different than simply an experience of fear. Fear always takes an object. I fear spiders. I fear becoming obsolete. Unlike fear, dreadful angst appears everywhere and nowhere as a primordial and pervasive affective orientation to one’s own existence. Such dread starts to saturate all points of how I feel toward the world and experience of it as a whole. Heidegger called this a fundamental mood, and it is fundamental for Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beauvoir. For both Sartre and Beauvoir, this dreadful angst is produced in us when we feel the fundamental contingency that hinges upon human freedom. Existence is not ordered, and any such belief in order emanates from our affirmation. Choice and freedom are the realities that may engender this dread in us.

In this encounter with her own mortality is a philosophical possibility and then slowly stops being an object but becomes a subject. An authentic self is one that takes responsibility for all one does as one’s being is unconditioned and free to create novelty and meaning. By contrast, the beginning encounter with death also means that everyone else is largely inauthentic. Inauthenticity becomes metaphorically likened to being an object and a toy, a thing that is merely reactive to the world. This double entendre works perfectly well since if one never takes responsibility for the undetermined nothingness at the heart of existential freedom to create meaning that nobody could chose, then one is effectively equal ontologically to being like an object.

The feminist critique is mostly Simone de Beauvoir. There are elements of authenticity, autonomy and agency that takes on the ambiguity of being a subject and an object. There’s a play on when the created object, Barbie, becomes more human and like so many sci-fi stories, there’s a play on her encountering her creator. Such moments occur in Ex Machina, when Data in Star Trek creates his daughter, Lal, and classics like Frankenstein. Here however, the feeling is a bit more like City of Angels (1998) when Nicolas Cage, as an angel, falls in love with Meg Ryan. His decision to fall to Earth and become human is what happens at the end, and the ghost of the creator of Barbie played by Rhea Perlman. Somehow, Rhea Perlman wants Barbie to make an informed choice about whether or not she should become human and the divine gift shares images and a montage of women from all walks of life. The idea here is that to affirm and take responsibility for this choice is to choose it for all women. Barbie becomes a Sartrean and Beauvoirian agent of realizing freedom with the aid of this “ghost.” For this reason, the texts for the movie are The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex.

As Gerwig was raised Universal Unitarian, the dialogue at the end with Perlman’s character and the maker of Barbie, Ruth Handler, appears loosely divine. One cannot tell if there is a divine component to this movie–though it resembles something like Paul Tillich’s Courage to Be. One could say that the disembodied voice of Helen Mirren that breaks the fourth wall on several occasions may be a loosely divine voice that may be the same spirit as Ruth offered at the end. This dialogue may also be a Kierkegaardian leap of the absurd as the playfulness of this movie is an intentional strategy by the director to show the contingency of our social reality can be mended through Beauvoirian and Sartrean freedom that relies on that very playfulness to overturn patriarchy. Sartre and Beauvoir are reacting in many ways to the essentialism propagated by the Catholic Church’s stranglehold over feminine and masculine natures in natural law theology in France, so if Gerwig wanted to challenge such thinking, especially if I am right that the thought of her movie is mediated by a Beauvoirian angle than anything else, then portraying Handler as a spirit who stops the plot of the movie and reveals the concrete realities of a mortal embodied womanly existence is nothing more than the sacred feminine. Gerwig is depicting a different conception of God at the end.

There is a moment when Barbie encounters the daughter of the mom central to the story. The daughter lays into Barbie about being a fascist model that generates oppressive norms and impossible body image problems since her inception. Gerwig purposefully leaves this critique open and unresolved, but soon the fact that Barbie can be any girl in any profession returns the movie to feel good feminism that cooperates within neoliberal capitalism. In this way, the tension is exposed and never leaves the film. The tension lingers for those of us philosophically inclined. The fascism critique is simply ignored for a feminism that assists capitalist economies, but does not actually go into depth about the structural features of social reality engender more oppression. In this way, Gerwig’s version of patriarchy is only a surface engagement and in only engaging the surface of patriarchy, the film is undermined by never exposing the many possible ways the social structures of the world oppress women through the mechanisms at work in capitalism. Nothing Gerwig can do will make this critique go away, and it’s the most perplexing flaw of the entire movie. The Mattel corporation would never license its intellectual property to a feel good movie that women can be anything they want so long as they manage the desires of their own agential freedom within the boundaries of capitalist economy. Mattel still needs to sell Barbies. Warner Brothers still needs to make money off of its $150 million dollar marketing cost. Whatever feminism might be in this film, it still must sell as both a movie and as an idea. The idea cannot undercut the method of its own delivery.

There is an attempt to say that patriarchy harms men in it and the message, while there, never goes anywhere. It gets bogged down in execution. At one point in the film, Ryan Gosling’s Ken sees the the aspects of patriarchy that would benefit him in the real world. He brings patriarchy back to Barbieland. In the real world, he sees how a world that is welcoming to him is one that respects him, but he does not ever have to reckon with the harm such responsibility would truly generate for him and the women in Barbieland. Patriarchy is never discussed as a concrete problem with effects on real people’s lives, and it’s here that I am critical of both the movie and medium. The medium of patriarchy is, of course, a fantasy movie. When using fantasy to embody a real world issue, the analogy must be suitably concrete to capture aspects of the real world issue the analogy speaks to. The patriarchy brought back to Barbieland should be suitably concrete and in doing so, there should be a clear indication of harm done to women. And yet, can one harm dolls? If the dolls are wholly actualized toys that are also objects, which way should one go with the harm? Gerwig is silent on this question.

Like the other Kens, Gosling’s Ken has never really debated or encountered his own freedom through the contingency of life and it is later revealed he was wrong to become obsessed with it. For this reason, Gosling’s Ken has always been an object, a point I do admit that Gosling’s acting drives home. Everything about Ken might be said to be how women are often depicted in men-driven stories. Take for instance a Bond movie where women react to Bond, but Bond is the driving agency through which the plot unfolds. The women in a Bond movie are overtly objectified, satisfying criteria of the male gaze while leaving alone any question of their own agency. What’s more, Goslin’s Ken later confesses that he got really bored with patriarchy when he found out it had nothing to do with horses. Goslin brings back patriarchy to seize power. He became enamored with it because he had never been the author of his own actions. He got carried away with it although the allure and majesty of this make-believe patriarchy could seduce women away from being the doctors and lawyers they were prior to the arrival of patriarchy. So the cost was forever depriving women of their own agency.

That’s never really made clear, and the two people from the real world brought back to Barbieland somehow disappear. Their only function is to empower Barbieland because they have experience dealing with men in the cunning way that resolves their desire for recognition and power in a land where they have none. Barbieland cannot be an analogy for all things, but it’s not an interdependent ethics of care that might have had a greater philosophical impact on the themes in the movie. In turning Barbieland into a Kendom, none of the Kens incur the existential cost of harming others even though the price seemed to be brainwashing women. Of course, we in the audience know that patriarchy comes at a cost to actual lives. Gerwig should have made it more clear to the audience what such an existential cost is. The answer to that cost is equally dissatisfying. All is well because of Sartrean-Beauvoirian freedom to outsmart others. That existential freedom breaks the bad faith patriarchy caused in women, and while I get that as a philosophy professor, how that worked in the movie is less clear.

Conservatives have reacted to the essentialism they assume prior to watching the movie. In doing so, they see the women of Barbieland ruling over men, and men must remain as eye candy support to the fully actualized lives of the various Barbies. In thinking this way, they see the men and women at perpetual odds with permanent human natures as the projection of ideological dogma of leftism and yet the movie is calling attention to that fact on the political right. Conservatives interpret the film wrongly that for the world to be a fine place for women, men must always lose. In thinking this way, the absurdity of the reversal is played out as part of the political message. Patriarchy does the same thing; it trades in essentialism and so Gerwig’s film uses a type of subversive irony that such permanent human natures, such essentialisms, are the trappings of the patriarchy that people like Ben Shapiro cannot suspend when they critique the movie. If Barbie traded in essentialism, then A) it wouldn’t adopt the existential motif critical of essentialisms about race and gender in its opening and B) Barbie’s ending conversation would have never mentioned that he’s never been an authentic self. He doesn’t know who he is, and so before he could love another, he must answer that question.

Of course, there are some plot holes. Why is it necessary to chase Barbie back in Barbieland when she returns there herself? Why was it necessary to bring the real world others back to Barbieland? What purpose did the Mattel CEO add to the movie?

All in all, I can see the movie opening up conversations despite some of its plotting flaws. The objectification of toys as inauthentic characters and what young ladies apsire to be through their play using objects employs existential freedom and authenticity denied to objects. The analogy and a metaphor of a toy are perfect for this storytelling and tension in being both a subject and an object. There are also unmentioned themes. As Barbie’s first thoughts are of death, there’s a Plato connection that philosophy is preparation for death. In this way, both existentialism and ancient philosophy assume that philosophical reflection has a therapeutic role to answer both how one might comport oneself but also live a life of suffering and strife. For this reason, young people should see the movie. It can open a world of philosophy to them.

Some of the references in the movie are also philosophical. The very beginning is a parody of 2001 Space Odyssey directed by Stanley Kubrick through a feminist lens that’s very well done and witty. In Kubrick’s beginning, he shows our primate ancestors invent a weapon by picking up a large bone and using it to murder another. In big letters, Kubrick writes across the screen “the origin of man.” Gerwig shows the origin of young ladies beating down their baby dolls for Barbie dolls that portray that women can be more than just mothers. Gerwig has young girls murdering the possibility of being only mothers and babymakers and like Kubrick, a young lady tosses up a doll as the murdering hominid tosses up the improvised weapon. Both the tossed doll and the weapon are instrumental tools, and so the first philosophical moment occurs two minutes in that such baby dolls are tools to oppress women. Women are more than their procreating bodies and the social roles attendant to that fact.

I enjoyed the film. I can see this movie becoming a cult classic much like Rocky Horror Picture Show or Rent. It can be a way to start conversations with young women, but it by no means goes beyond the failings of 1970s feminism that addresses the concrete problems experienced by BIPOC women nor does it ever resolves the tension of the fascist question. It possesses an unbelievable commitment to existential feminism, and there’s something especially problematic about that engagement when it eschews an analysis of the social conditions where such existential freedom finds itself situated. I also want to emphasize it’s not Beauvoir who is ignorant of this fact as she says, “It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting” (Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 9). Gerwig is silent on this point, and so her movie is ignorant on this point. In this way, Gerwig wrongly thinks that patriarchy can be challenged along those lines with the assertion of that existential freedom. In doing so, Gerwig does not question the institutionalized habits that operate a tergo with that freedom. She does not question the existence of these institutions as if they are failing institutions. Instead again, the Barbies are running a world with these same institutions and the belief is they work in principle. Such a belief is too optimistic and too uncritical. Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) is performatively liberal. That’s why Barbie can only start conversations with young people. Gerwig cannot finish them and maybe that’s not a problem of the movie as much as it is an American public unwilling to have this conversation publicly such that it takes a fantasy-driven movie to even get them started.

Hypothetical Syllogism and Being on Rapport with Reality

P1: If S accepts some version of naturalism, then S’s philosophical framework is compatible with the natural sciences.

P2: If S’s philosophical framework is compatible with the natural sciences, then S is on rapport with reality.

C: If S accepts some version of naturalism, then S is on rapport with reality.

Logical substitutions

A. philosophical framework = Jamesian pragmatism.

B. Some version of naturalism = processive naturalism.

By processive naturalism, I mean the following:

1. The universe consists of relations, both those that hold relatively stable while they endure and others of varying degrees of temporal duration that are unfolding independently of me and some that are in relation in and through human beings.

2. Any object or essence, as it is given phenomenologically, is so woven with other relations that any phenomenological description is bound up to describe these relations.

3. Part of being bound up with relations is that an object, essence, concept, or idea are bound up within time’s flux, so no rigidity and timelessness should be presupposed in any description, understanding, or treatment of them, but instead description, understanding and treatment are understood as interpretations of an object, essence, concept, or idea.

4. An interpretation is found to be pragmatically true insofar as the interpretation terminates in the object, essence, concept, or idea.

So,

P1: If S accepts processive naturalism, then S’s Jamesian pragmatism is compatible with the natural sciences.

P2: If S’s Jamesian pragmatism is compatible with the natural sciences then, S is on rapport with reality.

C: If S accepts processive naturalism, then S is on rapport with reality.

Emerson, Parmenides, and the Metaphyiscal Language of Poetry

I am captivated by certain poetic verses, and the metaphysical meanings they convey. The problem or advantage of my philosophical training is that I look at Emerson as I did when Freydberg taught us History of Western Philosophy 1 with the same Kirk and Raven collection I am now flipping through. So I am reading Emerson’s poem “Brahma” and “Boston Hymn” as if they are like Parmenides. Consider Parmenides fragment 343, “It is all one to me where I begin; for I shall come back there again in time.” (K&R, p. 268). The language here is permanently disclosive. In many ways, we look at it like a metaphysical proposition, not a metaphysical proposition that was united with poetry in its very disclosure.

In his Way of Truth poem, language is conveying metaphor and imagery to entice the imagination to apprehend the unseen. In this way, poetic language functions like James’s fringe that catches glimpses of the unseen. Language can only disclose these parts in small shuddering breaths of imagination or so it seems. In this way, language discloses the unsayable by giving us a trace of that which may prompt us to imagine and feel the truth of an utterance; it frames the experience so if we experience it, we might have an inclination of that experience. Language captures the activity of how reality becomes.

Disclosure might be read along two fault lines of traditional metaphysics: 1) those metaphysical systems of a finished, beautiful and harmonious universe that starts with the Parmenidean Pythagoreanism where there is some immutable unchanging and maybe unconditioned unity that expresses itself and imbues every poetic fragment we have of him and those that use poetry this way and 2) those metaphysical systems of an unfinished universe that forever exceeds our idea of it where novelty and meaning are generative in us and beyond us all at the same time. By 1), language discloses determinative being. Consider these words from the Way of Truth,

Meet it is that thou shouldst learn all things, as well as the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth, as the opinions of mortals in which is no true belief at all. Yet none the less shall learn these things also–how the things seem, as they all pass through everything, must gain the semblance of being (K&R, p. 267).

In 2) I am reminded of Arendt’s discussion in the Life of the Mind about how we can only talk about the unseen realities with metaphoric imagery rather than directly using concepts and ideas. From 2) such language is generatively disclosive of a trace. Such language always seems fleeting as if the understanding of what is being disclosed escapes forever like when one feels sand enclosed in a hand and it flows forever between the hands. It is moving like a stream with only a few remnants of the trace contained in the hand. A generative disclosure of language preserves the dynamism of both the framing such imagery anticipates within us and the heralding of its value, but also provides us with a sense of movement within the boundaries of space and time where such disclosure manifests and continues to do so. The unsayable and trace are felt rather than seen, the consequences emergent in practice. In that language, the transcendence of meaning is immanently constructed in our experiences contained in this world, but also generative of new possibilities never so contained in this world. So, Emerson’s poetry contains elements of both 1 and 2, a sense of permanence that is continually challenged, synthesized or negated by generative language of disclosure. Emerson discloses meaning along an eternality when seeking and appropriating ancients (like Plato), but Emerson ultimately destabilizes the disclosure in poetry in 1 to culminate in 2. This movement from 1 and 2 and back again is also the transition as to how metaphysical language might function in the radical empiricism of James and Dewey, both preserving the stable and the precarious, the enduring and the temporal as forever conjoined.

Take Emerson’s “Boston Hymn”(1863), it is a beautiful abolitionist poem, written from God’s perspective. Consider,

I break your bonds and masterships,
And I unchain the slave:
Free be his heart and hand henceforth,
As wind and wandering wave.

In this verse, God’s judgment about slavery is eternal and should prompt within one that this eternality shall forever reign within the space and time of our shared concrete experiences. The unchained slave is as permanent a law “as wind and wandering wave.” The moral law is equated to the laws of nature. No other experience of moral sentiment will ever contradict this eternality even though the practices of humankind forever deviate from 1. At the same time, the poem disrupts the possibility of its own time period; it challenges the conventional wisdom of slavery. In this way, the disclosure of poetic language is generative of new possibility–the abolition of slavery. The language pulls and pushes us from both the stable and precarious all at the same time.

The permanence of the Divine’s moral law and how the Divine shines through all parts is also evident in Emerson’s “Brahma.” In fact, in this poem, like the “Boston Hymn” Emerson’s voice stands in for Brahma and in the first stanza, 1) and 2) are present. Consider,

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

According to a 1960 paper, “Emerson’s Brahma: An Indian Interpretation,” K. R. Chandrasekharan informs us that this verse is more than likely inspired by a similar passage to it from the Katha Upanishads, “If the slayer think that he slays, if the slain think that he is slain, neither of them knows the truth. The Self slays not, nor is he slain.” In this verse, Emerson may be stating that there is a divine principle of the soul that does not suffer the contingency of ego and its divine nature is immanently given in time, tending toward 2) as Brahmin moves in and throughout the cycles of time. The Atman discloses itself as a possibility in 1) but again 1) falls to the realization of this truth in practice of 2).

I refrain from conceiving 1) and 2) as a form of phenomenological disclosure per se, but I come very close to, if not entirely embracing, that phenomenological interpretation of language. Disclosure, although a feature of language, occurs in experience of it and through it simultaneously. It is a mediating aspect of language. It is the “house of being” as Gadamer claimed, and I cannot conceive of philosophy without poetry just as much as I cannot conceive without imagination.