Dad,
Among the many times we’ve shared cigars, one recent conversation stands out in my memory with particular urgency. Your essay yesterday brought me back to that conversation, and I think we’ve reached a point now where we can resume it with our friends here.
The crux of the matter was this: the tradition of Western philosophy springs forth from the exchanges between Plato and his most fiercely brilliant student, Aristotle. On the subject of language, Plato laid some basic groundwork: there’s the world around us, and there’s the words we use to talk about the world. When I say “hand me that lighter,” we both know what object I’m talking about. Words describe the world.
But that’s not quite all. What Aristotle noticed is that in between the words and the world, there’s a little space that opens up. That space is where you and I live. When I say “what a lovely sunset that was,” or “remember how the birds flocked outside the window as we planned to launch this site?” I’m not just using sounds to stand in for objects. I’m using language to convey my experience of things, which I trust you can share in some essential way.
There’s the world outside, and there’s the world within. Words stand in between. The essential realities you wrote about in your essay, the heart truths that we capture with concepts like “mother” and “friend”—turns out, those realities come in three parts. They are the third thing that emerges when a human mind encounters the universe. The soul meets the world, and the word forms a bridge between them: they are never apart, but always distinct. They are three, and yet they are one.
This drives everyone insane. And I mean everyone. It drives the technologists and the materialists insane because they want to boil the world down into objects, get those squishy human “feelings” out of the picture, and measure it all up at last in grams and lightyears: hard, dead, data. It drives the politicians and the utopians insane because they want to bundle everything up into systems and programs, some spending package or ballot initiative they can control. But standing in the way of all that is this pesky middle space, this world of human thoughts and feelings that can neither be tallied up nor boiled down.
And yet that third thing—that space between, that relationship—is everything. It’s why philosophy is neither Plato nor Aristotle but the living exchange between them and their heirs. It’s why the most beautiful ideas are the ones that take shape in the cigar smoke between us. And all, I suspect, because not one thing was ever made without the inexhaustible love that flows among the persons of the triune God: creator, spirit, and living word. It makes me think that everything we’re fighting for is the space between.
Love always,
Spencer
Yes! In the "space between" is life abundant. The "tallied up and boiled down" are just the details, just excuses to get together and build the kingdom. Thanks for letting us dwell in your cigar smoke...
Your letter instantly made me see the Trinity. God, the word, Christ the world, the Holy Spirit the space in between. How we echo God on a daily basis.