In other words, the fact that we perceive objects and form ideas is a ‘given’ that cannot be explained, whether from sense data, substance or cause. Every act of awareness is essentially teleological, the function of a ‘final cause’ that no prior cause can explain. This is why George Berkeley, at the beginning of ‘empirical philosophy’, assumed that the divine is immanent in consciousness. And while, of course, this provoked all kinds of ‘empirical’ criticisms, the unexplained reality remains. The real problem with Berkeley’s relatively casual assertion is that, if it is true, not only must the divine be immanent, we must also be God. That is, our awareness is obviously the teleological instrument.

            George Berkeley is an interesting figure, perhaps the last fully religious man who is considered a serious philosopher in the lineage of western philosophy. The primary reason is because Berkeley first formally defined the problem of solipsism, a problem that had been hovering on the periphery as well as undermining from the center all philosophy hitherto. Everything is our experience. Ignorance is not just an idea, it is empirically tangible, however that is possible. Before we orbited the moon, the dark side of the moon was still a tangible idea, something we held in consciousness. Our idea of the objectivity and independence of scientific knowledge is nevertheless wholly within the frame of our experience and therefore also entirely subjective.

            Perhaps only someone who could have a simplistic idea of the immanence of God in consciousness could have consciously formulated and articulated the concept of solipsism. Any serious meditation on solipsism, and we fall into the eye of the vortex.

            But this is what we have done.

            The problem I have with postmodernism is that the postmodernist is lost in the pit of this solipsistic morass while he or she is shouting about what a lovely place this black hole is and how wonderful it is, and surely there must be something positive around here somewhere.

            This is what I call ‘epitome denial’.

            But denial, as the recovering addicts say, is not a river in Egypt.

            And what I say is that where there is denial, there must be addiction.

            For the ‘outsider’ not blessed with a stint in the star’s refuge, namely rehab, ‘denial’ as thus used must seem like a technical term. But addiction is not a technical term, but a behavioral reality. It resides in the same ambivalence of the will or volition that allows us to become aware of ourselves. The nature of awareness is intimate with focus and volition. Kant got lost in contortions because he understood that logically it is impossible for us to become self-aware. Logically, it is absurd that the witness witnesses the witness. But if we did not have this logical absurdity as fact, we would not have ‘conscious’ awareness, the awareness of awareness that allows us to see the world as we do, a field of time and space subdivided by objects and apparently behaving according to pervasive causal sequences. This is all something we awakened to and learned since infancy.

            When we trace this fact to its source, we find that it resides in the ambivalence of volition. That ‘the will’ is what can ‘look both ways’ from within ‘awareness’. The separation correlated with this ambivalence necessarily ‘opens up’ in the act of self-awareness. But this allows volition itself to get caught in self-feeding loops that are essentially prior to self-awareness. In fact, self-awareness is one of these self-feeding loops. Hence, the addiction to self is universal.

            What has happened now is that historically we have entirely fallen into the solipsism / addiction as the core of our culture.

            Culture is philosophy.

            The fact that culture finally falls back into the solipsism which is formalized and articulated through our philosophical study of the nature and process of experience should be sufficient evidence. The ambivalence in volition is not only indigenous in the tacit statement about the nature of the observer in Einstein’s Special Theory, it is also the formal corollary and the immediate expression of the actual ‘location’ of philosophy. Contrary to Kant and the logicians, philosophy is precisely psychology. The structures of reflection produce cause and the One, the conditioning principles of logic itself. The fact that these are grounded in ambivalence therefore places philosophy on a par with the Special Theory. This is the ‘subjective’ condition that finds its corollary expression in the ‘objective’ nature of Relativity Theory.

            But, consonant with this is the fact that philosophy has entirely fallen into the formal ranges of the solipsistic self. Until we resolve the issue of self in terms of the self, our culture is little more than the denial expression of the addiction to self.

            The first paradox we encounter with respect to the addiction to self is the fact that self is all and nothing. These are actual positions, and both are radical expressions of the disease.

            The self is all. In the addiction to self, I lose all boundaries. Everything you do is about me. In other words, pure paranoia. But this boundaryless condition imbues my ‘positive’ reactions as well as my negative. Your positive emotions must also be about me, like the child molester saying the child seduced him.

            The self is nothing. I am just the observer, and I am wholly objective. I am not present here except as a valueless I. I have no influence over the situation.

            Do we recognize these archetypes?

            But the self is ‘pure’ addiction. Hence, pure addiction, pure denial – epitome addiction, epitome denial. The addiction has swallowed all. The denial has swallowed all. No tradition. No history. No nature. Self and no self. Now you see it. Now you don’t. The final disaster of the Humean shell game.