This book is a collection of Foldenyi’s essays on the common themes of transcendence, godliness, metaphysics, and myth. He introduces his own writings by quoting Heinrich von Kleist, “We would have to eat once more of the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence…. That is the final chapter in the history of the world.” Then Heidegger, “Ever since being got interpreted as Idea, thinking about the being of beings has been metaphysical, and metaphysics has been theological.” Foldenyi, himself, continues, “Traditional metaphysics is underpinned by a belief in a supposedly final and positive meaning, which meaning, by virtue of its very nature, also differentiates itself from everything that it invests with meaning. This traditional understanding of meaning, the abyss between Being and Be-ing, entices us with the prospect of a new world that, although available to all, can only be accessed if one renounces everything there is, and abandons what appears to be without meaning…. In lieu of an earthly, and hence fractured, Self-image, metaphysical thinking is fascinated by a solid and definitive, hence divine, Self-image…. Individuality is the endless reflection of mirrors reflecting one another, while, above all, actually reflecting the divine…. Human beings are doomed to metaphysics owing to their awareness of their own mortality.”
Foldenyi’s first essay is titled “Divine Experience and Divine Faith (Where the Bars of the Cross Intersect).” It begins with an epigraph from Nietzsche, “You go your own way of greatness; here no one shall sneak along after you! Your foot itself erased the path behind you, and above it stands written: impossibility.” Foldenyi begins by explaining mysticism, “The ‘personal encounter with God,’ known as the key characteristic of mysticism, is the seemingly moderate expression to convey the experience of mystics who have simultaneously lived a given moment (the moment of ‘conversion’) as deprivation and excessive fulfillment.” Heidegger asks, “Why are there beings at all, and why not nothing?” Foldenyi continues, “In the course of divine experience, what cannot be experienced becomes the subject of experience—excess appears within the parameters of moderation—while divine faith separates knowledge and experience, and differentiates moderation from excess…. Divine experience is intense, heated, momentary, and it makes no allowance for past or future, since it makes no allowance for time either…. Divine experience is incompatible with moderation…. In moments such as divine experience, when the individual breaks away from community and is all alone facing the incomprehensible, on the one hand, there are countless things to say, and, on the other, the mouth can barely utter anything.”
Many of Foldenyi’s other essays discuss juxtaposition and paradox. He is interested in the moment and the supremely personal. Foldenyi propounds, “Every live face conceals a mask—the mask of the impossible—into which existence as a whole is compressed, so that one can confront something that does not exist and yet is capable of subverting everything.” In another essay, he, again, discusses the concept of moderation, “The human being, by virtue of its sheer existence, is at the mercy of moderation, the limit and the world of order…. In moments of disruption, it becomes apparent that moderation is a prison, and, as its tenant, one is the prisoner of those who surpass existence altogether: Dike and Ananke; in other words, limitlessness and excess. Thus, one has to become limitless and immoderate in order to assess the totality of one’s own existence.” He quotes Heraclitus, “You could not in your going find the ends of the soul, though you travelled the whole way; so deep is its Law (Logos).”
In another essay, titled “The Impossible,” Foldenyi begins by quoting Plato’s uncle, Critias, “Nothing is certain, except that having been born we die, and that in life one cannot avoid disaster.” Foldenyi expands, “One experiences oneself as a banished God and, as a result, finds oneself bedazzled and tends to perceive life as a giant wound…. In unsettling moments, when one is touched by chaos and, having transcended everything, perceives oneself as the divine centre, it rightly feels that one has also become a victim of discord.” This is related to the concepts of Otherness and alienation. “In sacred moments, one gets to one’s inner self via the roundabout way of Otherness, initially moving away from oneself. Hence the expression ‘losing oneself’, since in such situations one is alienated from everything, including oneself…. Every historical period has encountered this alienation of the world from itself…. Relevant in this respect are the Gnostics, who interpreted alienation as a synonym for the so-called trans- or hypercosmic, and experienced an unsurmountable abyss between earthly existence and the alien and unknowable God in charge of this existence.” Getting back to Otherness, “The ‘Other’ is the expression of the impossibility that everything there is, mankind included, owes its origin to something that is not identical with itself. Every existence is charged with its own absence; in everything that there is, something Other is also inherently nestled…. Through existence, one is the depository of a ‘Being’ that guarantees all existence; at the same time, as an individual condemned to decay, one also has to endure the impossibility of this ‘Being’. The impossible, therefore, is not a noun, and is no equivalent to God, as proposed by theologians, or to Being, as perceived by ontologists…. The very usage of the word is misleading, since we are dealing with something that should not in fact be called impossible; a hyphen (-), free-standing brackets ( ) or three dots (…) would better illustrate this concept than words.” Foldenyi concludes by relating this explicitly back to the impossible, “One of the main aims of the European tradition starting with Plato and culminating with Christianity was to equip the individual to handle the temptation of the impossible…. Ideology teaches about the idea, or, to put it differently, about the sensorially visible…. By seeking an explanation for everything, ideologists find themselves attempting to leave aside the impossible, this defining characteristic of existence.” Friedrich Schleiermacher posits, “The more you fade from yourself, the clearer will the universe stand forth before you, the more splendidly will you be recompensed for the horror of self-annihilation through the feeling of the infinite in you.”
Foldenyi concludes, in his essay “The Power of Now,” by riffing, once again, on the essence of life and its momentariness. “What could human life entail if not a unique moment in which the impossible ruptures and something becomes possible? This moment between birth and death is like lightning; a luminous source that suddenly shoots off into the body of darkness. It surpasses everything while it lasts, appears indestructible and timeless, and is destroyer and creator of time. And then it disappears, just as suddenly as it came about, annihilated by the same immeasurability that led to its birth…. While endowed with the gift of life, the individual also feels short-changed, a feeling for which mortality is the most eloquent proof.” We are all out there in this world, but all on our own for this ever-brief moment of time. “In extraordinary moments, it becomes obvious that there is no society to alleviate the burden of the fleetingness of human existence, and that one cannot rely on other in the end.”
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