I can identify the self with the body, in all its subtle and gross forms – although it is always an essence-pointing intention that defines it, and the addiction is to this essence-pointing nature. This, in fact, brings us closer to the actuality of the addiction, since it points to the nature of Unity. Form is inherently addictive precisely because it is the simulacrum for the self. Form is the correlated creation of mind and world out of the solipsistic amalgam of pre-reflective awareness. Contrary to western philosophy, perception is active and not passive. No object inheres in any sense datum. Awareness assembles objects by a reflective act – the simultaneous generation of mind or self-awareness – and does it by pivoting on the felt nature of the body – the sensory instrument – as a Unity, thus simultaneously assigning the unity to object and ‘essence’ body or ‘self’.

            And this is addictive for two reasons : because it forms the basis by which we accept socialization in the historical interpretation which is our structural framework for ‘conscious’ (i.e., reflective) perception of the world, and because it apparently completely replaces the solipsistic immediacy of infant or pre-reflective consciousness.

            All of which is well and good, but does not explain why we have arrived at postmodernism. What is the history that brings the self to the fore in such a way that we are now entirely immersed in a pan-cultural addiction to self such that the denial of the self addiction eliminates culture – entirely blanking out culture itself?

            To answer this, we must begin by understanding that our sense of self, as we have it now, is an historical phenomenon. It is the epitome moment, historically, of this definition of self that now brings us to the point that we entirely define culture explicitly in terms of the self – a fact which the denial of the self addiction now entirely obscures, leaving us, paradoxically, with neither self nor culture.

            We are so immersed in this idea of self that, while the historical development of this understanding of self has allowed us to open anthropology – the study of the diversity of human cultures and hence, by corollary, the diversity of human self-understanding – we are not prepared to recognized the comprehensive uniqueness of our sense of self or of its historical emergence during the last two or three centuries.

            Much of my work in this blog has been to recover this history, to trace this modern sense of self directly back to German Idealism and the peculiar movements it spawned, such as the English Romanticism of both the Byronic hero and the subjectivist ideologies and intimacies of Shelley and Keats. Scholars are still lifting and carrying the ideological attempt to pair romantic and classical as somehow an ongoing alternation, but nothing like Romanticism had ever preceded the Romantic movement. It involves the unique emergence of the modern self involvement that has now displaced culture by denial.

            And, of course, I trace its sources further back, to the melding of the traditions of Israel and Greece, of prophecy and the historically and culturally unique emergence of explicitly causal analysis, whose synthesis in the Middle Ages determined the actual root history of the modern west.

            But these are meaningless asides until we recognize that what we are confronting is a universal addiction prompting a universal denial.

            What complicates the problem is the other side of the self. What we have spoken of thus far, whether witness, form, concept, body, essence body or the nature of Unity, is necessarily the essentially ‘passive’ nature of the self. The force of the addiction and the denial rests in the fact that the dominating focus of the addiction also includes a simulacrum for the active side of the persona – an equivalent for volition – namely cause itself.

            Cause is pervasive because perception is active. Since, within the reflective construct, perception is the perception of an ‘object’, whether substantive or ideational, the fact that the object is assembled by consciousness means that the object automatically has a causal history. And this is true of all forms for the self, as well as forms in the world.

            This means that both act and form – whether objective or subjective – now fall under the rubric of the addiction.

            It is this which has blotted out the cultural basis of our world. No matter which way we turn, form and act, perception and cause, all fall under the frame of the addiction and disappear into the horizonless black hole of denial.

            Paradoxically, the only way out is through the core of the self. What reflection teaches us, as essentially an exclusive first principle, is that every moment is necessarily a value. If this were not so, reflection would not be possible. We can only witness self through a specific value, the reflective pivot that produces ‘perception’. ‘Every moment’ can only signify through the experience moment of an individual experiencer. Therefore the only escape from the solipsism of the moment, as well as the addiction to self and its denial, is through this living value which in fact ‘is’ the moment.

            But awakening to this living value is not different from creativity, the essential expression of the value as simultaneously the intimately personal expression of the moment and the direct universal nature of the value. But, of course, such a creative act not only expresses the whole history contained in the specific value of the moment, in some sense it requires a consciousness of the whole history of the moment necessary for the value. All creativity is wholly spontaneous and entirely embraced in tradition.

            This, and not the artifices of the real / ideal dichotomy, is the true paradox of creativity.