Absolutely excellent observation, the_conscience!
But at the same time, to “reduce” the partners into separate entities fatally detracts from the universal, synergistic cooperation and coherence of the partners, which is what the symbol “great hierarchy of being” intends to convey. Any “reduction into entities” tends to falsify its comprehensive meaning.
As with just about everything, there is a danger of “doctrinalization” of what is fundamentally ineffable. Language is the only carrier of human meaning. It is the articulation of self-reflected human experience. And experience is the key word here. Any doctrine tends to separate the “articulation in language” from the actual experience that gave rise to the language symbols. Further, to the extent that any doctrine holds itself out as authoritative, we are invited to accept its tenets as a sort of substitution for direct experience. Both ways we lose the idea that human experience, self-reflection, and articulation are the very foundations of everything we know or think we know, whether in science or philosophy.
And so I stay constantly aware of the Great Hierarchy of Being, not as any kind of “system” or “doctrine,” but as the most universal description of reality of which I can conceive, which illuminates my own direct existential experience and the articulation thereof. To me, it is the universal context in which human existence is conducted. I say that, not because I’ve been “told” that (by means of some doctrine), but because I have actually “seen” that, based on my own direct experience and my self-understanding of it.
Thank you so very much for your most perceptive criticism. I don’t know whether my reply answers it to your satisfaction, so take it FWIW.
It certainly sheds light on my own personal war between spirit and flesh.
For the conversation, I'd like to put the emphasis on the word hierarchy in the Great Hierarchy of Being and offer an example.
Namely that There is only One Great Commandment.
This is the first and great commandment.
And the second [is] like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. – Matthew 22:37-40
But when we invert those two commandments, the result is "Liberation Theology" which of course is Obama's spiritual Christian roots.
In that theology, the true believers put loving neighbor and self ahead of loving God and defiantly declare that if God does not meet their standard of loving their neighbors and self as they think they do, then they reject God.
The consequence of such inverted true belief is socialism.
Historical knowledge is a substitute for direct experience but nevertheless a distinct part of reality. Mere existentialism must always flatten out history and assume all past events are cotemporaneous. History loses its revelational content, God becomes unknowable, the Christ event is mystery, humanness is all contingency with no relation to the universal.
Of course the existential is a necessary component of knowledge but to yank the historical revelational content expressed doctrinally out of the knowledge equation leaves the subject swaying the seas of experience without the firm foundation of actual historical events.
The historical event is not merely a language game but actually provides concrete meaning to our experiences.
Happy Providence!