Does it antimatter?

Leaning the ladders against the correct wall, an important precept, the west wall now, as mornings offer cool and quiet access to movement clockwise around the house. Timing matters. Consequences of substance.  Painting project begun last year progresses towards Fall 2019 completion of the circumnavigation of a paintbrush over the skin of the house. Scraped, sanded, primed, caulked, re-primed and top-coated.

Matter is from mater "origin, source, mother".
"In the Standard Model of particle physics, matter is not a fundamental concept because the elementary constituents of atoms are quantum entities which do not have an inherent "size" or "volume" in any everyday sense of the word."
I'm pretty sure it's a fundamental, though. It's just the concept lacks fundamentality. Concepts aren't matter.
Then there's antimatter.
"at this time the apparent asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the visible universe is one of the great unsolved problems in physics." Antimatter is antivisible, problem solved.
So if matter is our mother, who is our antimatter?

Voegelin #4

part 1 is here:

§4. The Beginning of Genesis 1

In Genesis 1:1, we read: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." We can hardly come closer to the real beginning of anything than in an original act of creating everything. But what is creation? and how does God proceed when he creates? Genesis 1:3 gives this information: "And God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light" or, in the more literal Buber-Rosenzweig translation, "God spoke: Light be! Light became." The reality light appears in this verse when the divine command calls it forth, into its existential luminosity, by calling it by its name. The spoken word, it appears, is more than a mere sign signifying something; it is a power in reality that evokes structures in reality by naming them. This magic power of the word can be discerned even more clearly in Genesis 1:5 (Buber-Rosenzweig translation): "God called to light: Day! and to the darkness he called: Night! And there became evening and morning: A Day."
Still, the power of the creative word is not yet the true beginning we are pursuing; for the account of the creative process is inherently incomplete. It forcefully raises such questions as: To whom are the divine commands addressed? and who is the God who addresses them? or what is that kind of reality where the spoken word evokes the structures of which it speaks? In the situation created by these questions, a recourse to theological conceptions of "revelation" would be of little help, for even a revelation must make sense as a spoken or written word, a word heard or seen, if the message the word reveals is to be intelligible. The authors of Genesis 1, we prefer to assume, were human beings of the same kind as we are; they had to face the same kind of reality, with the same kind of consciousness, as we do; and when, in their pursuit of truth, they put down their words on whatever material, they had to raise, and to cope with, the same questions we confront when we put down our words.
In the situation created by the question What is that kind of reality where the spoken word evokes the structures of which it speaks? they had to find the language symbols that would adequately express the experience and structure of what I have called the It-reality. How did they do it? The answer is given by Genesis 1:2: "The earth was waste and void; darkness was on the face of the deep; and the spirit [breath] of God was moving over the face of the water." Over an emptiness, over a formless waste of something there moves, perhaps like a storm, the breath or spirit, the ruach, of God, or rather of a plural divinity, elohim. The It-reality, thus, is symbolized as the strong movement of a spiritual consciousness, imposing form on a formless and nonforming countermovement, as the tension between a pneumatic, formative force ( ruach ; in later Greek translation, pneuma ) and an at least passively resistant counterforce.
Moreover, the tension in the It is definitely not the tension of a human consciousness in its struggle with reality for its truth; it is recognized as a nonhuman process, to be symbolized as divine; and yet it has to convey an aura of analogy with the human process because man experiences his own acts, such as the quest for truth, as acts of participation in the process of the It. When the authors of Genesis 1 put down the first words of their text they were conscious of beginning an act of participation in the mysterious Beginning of the It.

In Search of Order , CW Vol 18
Ch 1, The Beginning of the Beginning,
§4. The Beginning of Genesis 1,
pp 33-34.

Voegelin excerpt #3

Part 1 is here:

 

§3. The Complex of Consciousness-Reality-Language

There is indeed no beginning to be found in this or that part of the complex; the beginning will reveal itself only if the paradox is taken seriously as the something that constitutes the complex as a whole. This complex, however, as the expansion of equivocations shows, includes language and truth, together with consciousness and reality. There is no autonomous, nonparadoxic language, ready to be used by man as a system of signs when he wants to refer to the paradoxic structures of reality and consciousness. Words and their meanings are just as much a part of the reality to which they refer as the being things are partners in the comprehending reality; language participates in the paradox of a quest that lets reality become luminous for its truth by pursuing truth as a thing tended. This paradoxic structure of language has caused certain questions, controversies, and terminological difficulties to become constants in the philosophers' discourse since antiquity without approaching satisfactory conclusions.
One such constant is the great question whether language is "conventional" or "natural." The conventionalist opinion, today the more fashionable one, is moved by the intentionality of consciousness and the corresponding thing-reality to regard words as phonic signs, more or less arbitrarily chosen to refer to things. The naturalists are moved by a sense that signs must have some sort of reality in common with the things to which they refer, or they would not be intelligible as signs with certain meanings. Both of the opinions are precariously founded because their adherents were not present when language originated, while the men who were present left no record of the event but language itself.
As I understand the issue, both groups are right in their motivations, as well as in their attempts to explore the conditions incidental to the origin of language and its meaning; and yet both are wrong inasmuch as they disregard the fact that the epiphany of structures in reality—be they atoms, molecules, genes, biological species, races, human consciousness, or language—is a mystery inaccessible to explanation.
Another such constant is the distinction between "concept" and "symbol," with the difficulty of assigning precise meanings to the terms. This problem has plagued the philosophers' discourse ever since Plato recognized it and, in the practice of his own philosophizing, coped with it by using both conceptual analysis and mythic symbolization as complementary modes of thought in the quest for truth. In the so-called modern centuries, since the Renaissance, these difficulties have become further aggravated by the parallel growth of the natural and the historical sciences.
On the one hand, the advance of the natural sciences concentrated attention intensely on the particular problems of conceptualization they posed, so intensely indeed that the concentration has become the motivating force of a socially still-expanding movement of sectarians who want to monopolize the meaning of the terms "truth" and "science" for the results and methods of the mathematizing sciences.
On the other hand, the equally astounding advance of the historical sciences has concentrated attention on the problems of symbolization posed by the discoveries in the ancient civilizations and their mythologies, as well as by the exploration of the modes of thought to be found in contemporary tribal societies. Again the two concentrations are transparent for the experiences of intentionality and luminosity, of thing-reality and It-reality, behind them; again the representatives of both concentrations are right in their pursuit of truth as long as they confine themselves to areas of reality in which the structures of their preference predominate; and again both are wrong when they engage in magic dreams of a truth that can be reached by concentrating exclusively on either the intentionality of conceptualizing science or the luminosity of mythic and revelatory symbols.
From the analysis there emerges the complex of consciousness-reality-language as a something that receives its character as a unit through the pervasive presence of another something, called the paradox of intentionality and luminosity, of thing-ness and It-ness. In what sense, however, is this complex the beginning we, the reader and I, are pursuing without having found it yet? And what are such terms and phrases as "complex," "paradox," and "pervasive presence"? Are they concepts intending a thing-reality or are they symbols expressing the It-reality? or are they both? or are they perhaps no more than pieces of empty talk? Do all these things really exist anywhere as a meaningful complex except in the phantasy of the present analysis?
What is needed to calm down this class of questions is a literary document, a concrete case, which intelligibly demonstrates the co-existence of the structures in the unit of the complex, as well as the meaning of this complex as a "beginning." For this purpose I shall present one of the classic cases where the Beginning makes its beginning with precisely the complex of structures under analysis, the case of Genesis 1.

In Search of Order , CW Vol 18
Ch 1, The Beginning of the Beginning,
§3. The Complex of Consciousness-Reality-Language,
pp 31-33.

Voegelin excerpt #2:

 Part 1 is here:


Voegelin excerpt #2:

§2. The Paradox of Consciousness

By now the Beginning has wandered from the opening of the chapter to its end, from the end of the chapter to its whole, from the whole to the English language as the means of communication between reader and writer, and from the process of communication in English to a philosophers' language that communicates among the participants in the millennial process of the quest for truth. And still the way of the beginning has not reached the end that would be intelligible as its true beginning; for the appearance of a "philosophers' language" raises new questions concerning a problem that begins to look rather like a complex of problems.
There is something peculiar about the "philosophers' language": In order to be intelligible, it had to be spoken in one of the several ethnic, imperial, and national languages that have developed ever since antiquity, although it does not seem to be identical with any one of them; and yet, while it is not identical with any one of the considerable number of ancient and modern languages in which it has been spoken, they all have left, and are leaving, their specific traces of meaning in the language used, and expected to be understood, in the present chapter; but then again, in its millennial course the quest for truth has developed, and is still developing, a language of its own. What is the structure in reality that will induce, when experienced, this equivocal use of the term "language"?
The equivocation is induced by the paradoxical structure of consciousness and its relation to reality. On the one hand, we speak of consciousness as a something located in human beings in their bodily existence. In relation to this concretely embodied consciousness, reality assumes the position of an object intended. Moreover, by its position as an object intended by a consciousness that is bodily located, reality itself acquires a metaphorical touch of external thingness. We use this metaphor in such phrases as "being conscious of something," "remembering or imagining something," "thinking about something," "studying or exploring something." I shall, therefore, call this structure of consciousness its intentionality, and the corresponding structure of reality its thingness.
On the other hand, we know the bodily located consciousness to be also real; and this concretely located consciousness does not belong to another genus of reality, but is part of the same reality that has moved, in its relation to man's consciousness, into the position of a thing-reality. In this second sense, then, reality is not an object of consciousness but the something in which consciousness occurs as an event of participation between partners in the community of being.
In the complex experience, presently in process of articulation, reality moves from the position of an intended object to that of a subject, while the consciousness of the human subject intending objects moves to the position of a predicative event in the subject "reality" as it becomes luminous for its truth. Consciousness, thus, has the structural aspect not only of intentionality but also of luminosity. Moreover, when consciousness is experienced as an event of participatory illumination in the reality that comprehends the partners to the event, it has to be located, not in one of the partners, but in the comprehending reality; consciousness has a structural dimension by which it belongs, not to man in his bodily existence, but to the reality in which man, the other partners to the community of being, and the participatory relations among them occur. If the spatial metaphor be still permitted, the luminosity of consciousness is located somewhere "between" human consciousness in bodily existence and reality intended in its mode of thingness.
Contemporary philosophical discourse has no conventionally accepted language for the structures just analyzed. Hence, to denote the between-status of consciousness I shall use the Greek work metaxy, developed by Plato as the technical term in his analysis of the structure. To denote the reality that comprehends the partners in being, i.e., God and the world, man and society, no technical term has been developed, as far as I know, by anybody. However, I notice that philosophers, when they run into this structure incidentally in their exploration of other subject matters, have a habit of referring to it by a neutral "it." The It referred to is the mysterious "it" that also occurs in everyday language in such phrases as "it rains." I shall call it therefore the It-reality, as distinguished from the thing-reality.
The equivocal use of the word "language" pointed toward an experience of reality that would have to express itself by this usage; and the quest proceeded to the structure of consciousness as the experience engendering the equivocation. But is this answer a step closer to the Beginning? At first sight it rather looks like an expansion of equivocations. There is a consciousness with two structural meanings, to be distinguished as intentionality and luminosity. There is a reality with two structural meanings, to be distinguished as the thing-reality and the It-reality. Consciousness, then, is a subject intending reality as its object, but at the same time a something in a comprehending reality; and reality is the object of consciousness, but at the same time the subject of which consciousness is to be predicated. Where in this complex of equivocations do we find a beginning?

In Search of Order , CW Vol 18
Ch 1, The Beginning of the Beginning,
§2. The Paradox of Consciousness,
pp 28-31.

Voegelin on Beginnings

A series of excerpts from Eric Voegelin, one of my favorite philosophers will be the topic of the next few posts. This is where they begin.

§1. Where does the Beginning Begin

As I am putting down these words on an empty page, I have begun to write a sentence that, when it is finished, will be the beginning of a chapter on certain problems of Beginning.
The sentence is finished. But is it true?
The reader does not know whether it is true before he has finished reading the chapter and can judge whether it is indeed a sermon on the sentence as its text. Nor do I know at this time, for the chapter is yet unwritten; and although I have a general idea of its construction, I know from experience that new ideas have a habit of emerging while the writing is going on, compelling changes in the construction and making the beginning unsuitable. Unless we want to enjoy the delights of a Sternean stream of consciousness, the story has no beginning before it has come to its end. What then comes first: the beginning or the end?
Neither the beginning nor the end comes first. The question rather points to whole, a thing called "chapter," with a variety of dimensions. This whole has an extension in space as a body of letters written or printed as pages. It then has a temporal dimension in the process of being written or being read. And finally it has a dimension of meaning, neither spatial nor temporal, in the existential process of the quest for truth in which both the reader and the writer are engaged. Is then the whole, with its spatio-temporal and existential dimensions, the answer to the question: What comes first?
The whole as a literary unit called "chapter" is not the answer either. By its character of a chapter in a book, the whole points beyond itself to the intricate problems of communication between reader and writer. The book is meant to be read; it is an event in a vast social field of thought and language, of writing and read¬ing about matters that the members of the field believe to be of concern for their existence in truth. The whole is no beginning in an absolute sense; it is no beginning of anything at all unless it has a function in a communion of existential concern; and the communion of concern as a social field depends for its existence on the communicability of the concern through language. Back we are referred, the reader and I, to the words, for they have begun before I have begun to put them down. Was the word in the beginning after all?
Well, in order to convey its meaning, the chapter must be intelligible; it must be written in a language common to reader and writer, in this case English; and this language must be written according to contemporary standards of word usage, grammar, sen¬tence building, punctuation, paragraphing, so that the reader will not encounter improper obstacles to his effort of understanding the chapter's meaning. But that is not enough. For the chapter is not a piece of information about familiar objects of the external world; rather, it seeks to communicate an act of participation in the quest for truth. Besides satisfying standards of intelligibility in the everyday sense of reference to objects, the language must be common in the sense of communicating the meanings in the area of the existential quest; it must be able to convey the meanings of a philosopher's experience, meditation, and exegetic analysis.
This philosopher's language, however, does not begin with the present chapter either, but has been structured by a millennial history of the philosophers' quest for truth, a history that has not stopped at some point in the past but is continuing in the present effort between reader and writer. The social field constituted by the philosophers' language, thus, is not limited to communication through the spoken and written word among contemporaries, but extends historically from a distant past, through the present, into the future.

In Search of Order , CW Vol 18
Ch 1, The Beginning of the Beginning,
§1. Where Does the Beginning Begin?,
pp 27-28.