If the essay is the meterology of poiesis--attendant and ethically constructive reason without ration-- the poem is its daychart navigation and logged course.

 

Grounding Language: Nominalism through Kairesis, Post-Secular Modernity, and the Poiesis of Iconoclasm as Radical Immanence

Douglas Blake Olds, May 28, 2025

Modernity reframed the relationship between language and reality, replacing tradition-bound metaphysics with individual accountability and nominalist correctives to Platonic abstraction. From apophatic theology through Protestant iconoclasm, enlightenment investigators of thought have wrestled whether language mirrors transcendental truths or emerges through historical, situated use. The biblical narrative—especially Adam’s naming function and the Pre-Pentecostal legacy of Babel--suggests that postlapsarian humanity cannot access absolute meanings apart from God’s bestowal like sunshine and rain, as temporal vectors of grace rather than a frozen moment of awe ensuring.

Figures like Herder rejected Kant’s universalizing a priori, instead affirming that meaning arises inductively from lived, historical conditions— extending even to Montesquieu’s climatic determinations of culture. This tradition of rejecting absolutes resurfaced in Wittgenstein’s “language games” and Derrida’s deconstruction, which, despite advancing the study of motive and form, ultimately fell short by privileging suspicion and abstraction over embodied wisdom. Their methods exposed the problem of representation but enclosed language in epistemic loops, detached from ethical transformation in the heart’s conation.

Against this backdrop, nominalism re-emerges as a pragmatic theology of language: an immanent, craft-based engagement with meaning grounded in context, experience, and relationality. Like earlier apophatic traditions, it eschews the illusion of linguistic finality and analogical claims to instead point toward Pentecost’s humility and earth-grounded service in extremis—what Christ embodied in the Shema’s heart-led anthropology.

This theology challenges the modern tendency to equate truth with systemic abstraction and validation with institutional approval. Nominalism resists consequentialist ethics and prosperity-gospel moralities that commodify goodness. Instead, it affirms techne as immediate participation in unfolding creation from system—a post-liturgical, peripatetic calling grounded in responsibility and attention, not in conquest or control or claim or chain.

In Herderian terms, meaning arises in situ et tempore—from a tabernacling life, moving outward through variegated contexts, cultures, and “canvases” of encounter. Just as the Tabernacle was built from diverse hides—ram, goat, lamb—our ethical task is not to direct by universal forms, but to carry wisdom in movement: to live, speak, and listen with others in an obliging spirit of humility, curiosity, and reconciliatory grace.

Which leads to the proposal of Peripatetic Accountability: Life is a test unmapped. None of us enter and exit through the same stormy channel, the same mother of ideas of each rooted but not shaped by our tribes and cradle. Wandering from these through what contexts we engage by leaving our tent to go out through the tabernacle of various measures—ram, goat, lamb-- to take our role in the heavenly Temple’s variegated canvas of need and dance floor of joy. Where we go matters less than how we go--and what we notice, study, align with and expressly attribute--than any aggrandizing purpose or appropriative totem we hail.

Peripatetic accountability reconciles elitism and nihilism by refusing a post-Nietzschean description of nihilism as both system and theory: an “institutionally grounded moral order that may not command our respect” and the abutting view that nihilism stems from the absence of any metaphysically grounded moral order worthy of respect. Instead of studying and aligning with elite ordering of hierarchy, the pilgrim encounters situational extremity, where meaning has collapsed, to instead relieve the outcome of its nihilistic potential in loss of life. By this registration of metaphysics of sustaining creation, the enlightenment project of modernity is not completed by Nietzsche’s tragedy or the radical challenge of time that suspends its course to seek fascistic primordia. But the Enlightenment is fulfilled by metaphysical realism, the Golden Imperative to sustain the created that his followers venture to usurp in name of appetitive will--where justice is given its priority in accountable humanity—the individual heart first, then collectives and their exclusionary systems replaced by inclusive shalom.

Ernst Jünger identified the Titanic and the Dreyfus Affair as events that first gave contour--not genesis--to the twentieth century, a century shaped by technocratic hubris and juridical fracture. But perhaps the deeper contour was drawn a generation earlier, when the arch-pietist Bruckner’s haunted heir, Mahler, séanced with the orphaned and orphaning cause of Schelling’s metaphysical outrage: to peer behind the veil of origin—not to find order, but Dasein. The cultural groundwork for the 20th century’s death-centered consciousness and cosmological mourning was already being laid in music and metaphysical interiority decades earlier:  a poetics of metaphysical prelude—not reactive, but anticipatory; not nostalgic, but purgative. A genealogy of dread that dares to hope.

Beneath all appearance lies the struggle with death, a psychic core of obsession that leaks into culture, validated as intellectation’s merit. Bildung is swallowed by diremptions, only to be regurgitated as a strange gospel hope—pre-critical, non-representational, and fecund with possibility. So while Jünger marks the historical shock events, Mahler composes a psycho-spiritual anticipation of death as kairesis [1].  Where the soul itself is a continuous a posteriori synthesis, an intellectual intuition that death is defeated only so long as breath is taken.

In this way, correction of an metaphysically bereft epoch is not merely temporal but ontological: the century does not begin in event, but in a leak of metaphysical dread into the artistic heart. Just as Mahler mourned a Europe not yet destroyed but already spiritually unraveling, middle modernity mourns a humanity not yet extinguished but already spiritually severed by simulation and seduction. In this sense, poiesis is the Mahlerian prelude to the Jüngerian century of AI—a metaphysical composition of dread, attuned not to final judgment but to the tragic drift from covenantal alignment that leads to it. And like Mahler, poiesis is not pessimistic but purgative: diagnosing collapse so that something truer might rise in the key of providence and mercy.

Postludic

If a journey in Christ comes
via the philosopher’s snifter and cushion—
not by jowl-moistening repentance—
it arrives by endorsement of another sublime,
the inner ring magnet of escape from awe,
from accountability to justice flying by
the false flag of freedom—
self-determined,
self-tethered—
and thus to sink against coups,
grasping at whatever is held as solid,
so then lapsing, freighted by conceits
of icons, of the past buoying come
to knuckle being under determined futures
whereever again security
leans by
with neither ecstasy
nor experiment gestured
nor stooping
nor becoming.

Iconoclasm punctuates
dead skins of bumptious primations (Heb. 6.6),
humbly forthing
habituations of virtue,
so the Trinitarian heart
comes to history’s helm,

And by liturgies of double helix—
its aureole a clue by the zippering acrostic of
human potential
and divine logos—
that cohere, concurrently,
coursing by archive's coffer
and shared will.

By the creature’s bearings
eternity’s shed seed,
by sense made dendritic,
a waterbug poised to
the riverine surface
of embodied generations—
hosting new possibles
of sailing grace,
rather than self-sheeting

to evolve new triangulates
of jawbone and canvas
against the masted horizon—
a hierarchophaging spinnaking—
(b)luffing and breeching
toward statue’d heavens
as haven
from history’s broaching.

--

Institutionalizers conscript and rescript truth, thereby weaponizing it for inner circles—elite priesthoods--instead of walking virtuously with it. They do not let truth fruit freely, attributing it to its source for the sake of its fountaining light, but bind it to system and hierarchy, turning revelation into ration.

NOTE:

[1] Mahler, composing in the 1880s–1910s, anticipates key existential themes that would surface explicitly with Heidegger. His orchestral works (especially Kindertotenlieder, Das Lied von der Erde, Symphony No. 9) are saturated with finitude, the search for transcendent meaning, and a metaphysical grief that outpaces political crises. These works presage the shift in Lebensgefühl that the 20th century will crystallize.