Herr Martin,

Your point about the real value of beauty and the subsequent real disparity in goods from one human being to the next was not lost on me. It has a substantial biblical resonance to it; one that I think may helpfully temper the incipient moral panic furtively and anxiously wringing its hands behind my last letter.

I confess I may have jumped to the extreme I did because of an accidental, though no less unfair, apprehension of an imagined motive. You may recall from an earlier article of mine that I addressed a particular online variety of feigned traditionalism which suggests without a hint of self-awareness that “pretty girls’ lives are worth more than old ladies’ because pretty girls are pretty,” especially regarding prettiness as it is imagined to correlate with a set of ethnically-connected traits so cartoonishly predictable that they don’t bear mentioning. Your appreciation for this concern, of which I’m adequately assured, will suffice even in place of sharing it.

On the other hand, the opportunity you presented me to clarify my meaning by “participation” is too ripe to pass up. But perhaps it is appropriate to arrive there by firstly tugging on the biblical thread you’ve aptly invoked. My mind turns immediately to the Apostle Paul’s preferred image of the Church as having a diversity analogous to that among the many and varied parts of a single human body. Naturally, then, I’m particularly reminded of a puzzling facet of this motif which the Apostle pursues in 1 Corinthians 12, namely, that “those parts of the body which we think less honorable we invest with the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require.” He elaborates that this fact is orchestrated by God in order to prevent disunity among the members of the body.

This seems to indicate that, to Paul’s divinely-inspired mind, there is a kind of equality among members in the body engendered by God’s gift of indispensability which compensates for the wants and insufficiencies of the less presentable parts. That is, it seems his meaning is that the parts which are deprived of one gift are endowed with another, through which fact every part becomes equal in its total participation in the body. I was perhaps remiss not to have previously noted this relationship.

This serves as an excellent point of contact with the Platonic notion of participation. Take, for instance, your point about the beauty of the lilies of the field. I should like to explain that by participation I do not refer strictly to some form of activity on the part of humanity, but to an ontological reality. Indeed, we cannot know if the beauty of the lilies depends on their being seen or not, for there is no world in which they are not in every moment seen by their Creator. The sort of participation I am referring to is not that in which human beings actively engage in perception of lilies, but rather the participation in which lilies engage whereby their beauty, as concomitant with the fact of their existence, is derived from the Divine. Put simply, lilies are beautiful because they subsist as an idea in the mind of God. Because God is beautiful, He is the source of their beauty, and therefore no lily is beautiful intrinsically any more than a given lily could be self-existent. They exist by His whim, and their beauty is a glimmer of His own.

I can see how this idea, or more so my explanation, might simply validate your prior evaluation of the effect of our personalities on the trajectory of our conversation. I am willing to hazard a little navel-gazing — a certain dose of which would perhaps be no great sin — to say I think the dynamic you identified in these letters is worth interrogating further, certainly as it might help us to realize the full potential of whatever project it is in which we find ourselves presently engaged. And, besides, a little extra self-awareness never hurt anybody.

It seems fitting, then, to reexamine in this light the idea that the fact of the conversation matters at least as much as the subject of the conversation. If it is not fitting, it is at least a sufficient pretense to inject some thoughts I had recently on the topic of communication and meaning. See, there is one sense, which we might call the “conventional,” in which meaning is simply a “thing” possessed by one mind and communication is the endeavor to convey that “thing” to another, analogous to transporting an object. But there is another sense of communication, or art, that we might call the “dialectic,” in which the meaning is not an object but a phenomenon, like the sound of a plucked string, generated by the actual process of conveyance itself. On this dialectical view, meaning emerges between the two parties or is created by their inter-action rather than existing as a static possession.

Perhaps you will appreciate a nod to your pragmatism — the practical import of this distinction is evident in that the word-in-the-mind and word-in-the-mouth are not identical. That is, that our notions can be dramatically altered by their becoming spoken, especially when they are thereby forced to contend with actual rather than potential responses. Take, for example, how a fella interested in a lady may have a vastly different script in his mind than what ultimately staggers out of his mouth when he approaches her. Or how one might keep a thought to oneself out of confidence in the expected response only to find upon actually speaking that the response in its unpredictability shatters whatever notions and feelings were predicated on that thought. This could be considered, then, in terms of thought in abstract and thought in action, word as embodied or disembodied.

Allow me to offer a little more than a nod, then, in a manner I’m hopeful will enrich our discussion. By committing our thoughts to writing, and especially by sharing them with one another, we are decidedly engaged in the dialectic kind of communication. I mention this because I hope you will not be discouraged if at times it seems the content of the conversation may tend toward circularity because, if paradoxically, I do not think the circularity of contents can defeat the inevitability of synthesis. What I am saying is that the fact we may repeat ourselves must not be discouraging, since it is inevitable, and it matters far less than the fact that we are repeating at all. “No man steps in the same river twice.” We never really say the same thing more than once since the context is always gradually shifting and the conversation developing.

In a funny way, then, I find that the apparent opposition in our dispositions, no matter the friction it may generate emotionally or intellectually, is actually a necessity not unlike that of diversity in the body. The human body itself is bisected along an axis of symmetry. It is symmetry that differentiates animal life and allows it to navigate the world in its distinct and powerful way. Two identical halves would be useless and dead, just as the products of two identical interlocutors would be lifeless and unproductive as talking in a mirror. At the risk of sounding pretentious — a risk that should never be taken too seriously — I’d submit that there is a purpose of our conversation above mere persuasion to one point-of-view or another, and that is simply the exercise of synthesis. And, if I may augment the aforementioned risk, this goal is impossible to fail in unless the conversation, the process, the phenomenon, ceases.

As long as the thesis is introduced to its antithesis, the synthesis will naturally occur. Even if I cannot change your mind and you cannot change mine, our minds are changing nonetheless by the act of conversing. Should the one goal fizzle out, the other simply refuses.

It is with the force of this invincible hope in the inevitable triumph of conversation that I dare steer us toward the doldrums of navel-gazing. If we never escape them from this letter on, then maybe we only got what we deserved. But, as a gesture of my fathomless good-will, I shall deign to offer you the escape of further discussing Platonism.

As if that condescension is not adequately demonstrative of my peerless sanctimony, I must say I am rather bemused and a bit puzzled by your casual rejection of Plato, and I think it an ill that I am desirous to graciously remedy. If you want something practical to start with, I would begin by way of apologetic with this allegory: When a baby is born, how do you know if it is deformed? The answer is that, beyond knowing what it looks like, you know what it ought to look like. You have a concept of its proper form. A Platonic view would simply be that that concept, not as it exists in your mind but certainly as it exists as a thing referred to by your mind, is more real than the thing itself. That is to say, the most real thing about a thing is what it is meant to be. Its essence is a participation in its telos.

I submit that this idea is important because it guards the fundamentality of purpose to the nature of reality. Without this notion, I find it difficult to imagine how the ‘why’ of a given thing can ultimately have a literally substantial bearing on the ‘what.’ Without the world of Forms or some comparable notion, things are not necessarily supposed to be one way or another, they simply are. Perhaps Aristotle’s causes can fill in here, but I am unpersuaded as of yet that they can do so as elegantly.

I invite you to attack or accept or avoid these ideas as seems good to you, as in any event we are successful — but if in no event we fail, then indeed in the case of no event, we do fail.

Die Wahrheit ist untödlich.

Ton frère,
Garrett L. White