Down-to-Earth: The Dialectical Analysis of an Ideal
Down-to-Earth immediately gives subjectivity a scope and a direction.
The direction is down and the scope is planetary. When we seek to be Down-to-Earth, we are immediately high, but we lower ourselves. In this way, to be Down-to-Earth is to make one’s self a high-born to kneel to the commonness of the world, which is lower than us. In an egoistic ethical sense, this is not entirely wrong, as to calculate how we should live in the world immediately puts us ahead of the world, and only reverses the position of putting the world ahead of ourselves in the name of an Ideal.
If an Ideal can put us in the grave for the sake of it, we should not take lightly the power of the Ideal.
Down-to-Earthness followed Caesar to his Dictatorship as he kept the senate functioning, and it followed the Dictatorship to its own Christian negation and synthesis in Constantine, a simultaneous embodiment of the greatest alleged crime (the killing of Christ) and the greatest power of Rome (being the Emperor).
For those that are truly high within a society, Down-to-Earth has a limit in their own security, whether it is an Author being attacked on stage or a President and their Secret Service, Down-to-Earthness is clearly limited by another Ideal: Safety.
In the Geometric sense, Safety is the negative Ideal which posits the triumph of Down-to-Earthness in the first place. To play a game with safety which inspires a sort of Moral or Heroic Awe. For the Emperor, Lord, or in today’s world, a celebrity, the Ideal comes up with contact with us plebians, us unwashed masses. What do us plebians do in order to become in-touch with Down-to-Earthness? It is not so easily apparent, as we already are of the Earth…or are we? Didn’t we solve this earlier? To be Down-to-Earth we must first raise ourselves in some Ideal manner. This can be via our professional subjectivity within society, or more personally (and possibly less or more meaningfully, depending on the circumstance) within our own minds. Our profession can allow us to deliver to the other something with a high degree of skill, while our own minds may fancy ourselves a great expert on something which we have no real adept and nimble skill for.
We add another Geometric component to Down-to-Earthness: A High subjectivity for ourselves. This contradiction within the abstract, of humbleness and Highness, is Absolutely and Geometrically necessary to create the Down-to-Earth, as much as exactly three sides are needed to create a triangle. I interact with the outside of myself as subject, not as the void beyond the subject, but as somone who is One with the Ideal via subject, I am in this sense, an Ideal embodied prior to embodying Down-to-Earth.
Being Down-to-Earth can never be the original Ideal, as I must be enhabiting a High subjectivity. As a Therapist, I embody Mental Health, and thus I can be Down-to-Earth by speaking about Mental Health for free. The value of me doing this is not the same as a Civil Rights activist speaking publically at risk of their own safety, but it is of the same Ideal of Down-to-Earthness, if at a much different level of Force in the world to affect others.
In Conclusion, to be Down-to-Earth, you must first be somewhat boastful, or better yet, let society boast of you, and let you inhabit your High subjectivity. You can then enter into a direction of velocity, which is downwards, and look for how you can intereact with the world beneath you in ways which are meaningful for that world and yourself. Ideally, go towards a limit of safety, and play with the idea of your own Highness, you are one of the people. The clownish aspect is, of course you are one of the people, but this clownish contradiction which asserts the reality of the Ideal of your Highness, your Safety (as limit), and an aesthetic which effectively and aethetically plays with the High-Ideal qua its own non-reality aspect of your subjectivity, you can ex-sist in the world as a good, universal, cosmopolitain citizen!