n-Financial Theology - St. Augustine's Confessions -> Secrities Disclosures and The Tensions of Time

1. Who is the most modern ancient philosopher? Probably St. Augustine.

http://www.stoa.org/hippo/comm.html

He is certainly the West's first psychologist who used his training in Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and rhetoric to conceive of the act of writing as a serious matter converging with the truth. Simple Latin with a meandering heart in every direction. This is not just the impulse of eloquence, but revelation in terms of transforming whatever event was in memory to a form of abstraction where solutions could be freely found under an infinity of un-utterable possibilities. This movement of thought from concrete to abstract and then to abstract flights to freedom was always stimulated and contextualised by quotidian events. The angst of the particular ("Darling, show me the cash flow") is so St. Augustian, that I recommend him to financial regulators and wannabe traders. More than any philosopher since Heraclitus, St. Augustine the 93 volume universal scholar was a lead administrator and bureaucrat who struggled to find the perfect rule that would unleash the personal good. His lesson for all is that the spiritual journey is intensely personal, and that it is not taken alone.

2. I believe, I believe, I believe that the concept of disclosures as specified only for particular times as per a prospectus under US Securities shows fundamental errors about the nature of psychological truth and even more pointedly misses the point that the truth may be at first a personal revelation but unless tested and proved amongst the larger community is only partially true and partially false. Consider St. Augustine's questioning in the first book of his Confessions:


"But when thou dost fill all things, dost thou fill er us together. But when thou dost fill all things, dost thou fill them with thy whole being? Or, since not even all things together could contain thee altogether, does any one thing contain a single part, and do all things contain that same part at the same time? Do singulars contain thee singly? Do greater things contain more of thee, and smaller things less? Or, is it not rather that thou art wholly present everywhere, yet in such a way that nothing contains thee wholly? with thy whole being? Or, since not even all things together could contain thee altogether, does any one thing contain a single part, and do all things contain that same part at the same time? Do singulars contain thee singly? Do greater things contain more of thee, and smaller things less? Or, is it not rather that thou art wholly present everywhere, yet in such a way that nothing contains thee wholly?". See:

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confessions.iv.html

Funny how the "many versus the one" problem never really leaves us. Aristotle uttered an intimation to a synthetic reduction that the "primary quality is quantity." The urge to find a universal solution may be a simple grammatical misconception, as if there is substantive correspondence between plurality and singularity. Most recent intellectual history shows this controversy in the foundations of set theory and in the sociology of law. In both disciplines, we have a type of Manicheanism where there is an absolute division between plurality and singularity. In set theory, the controversy was caste in terms of intensionality (ie, "universal properties") versus extensionality (ie lists of elements). For legal theorists, the contronsy has always centred on the definition of law versus laws.


3. These controversies are largely resolved by a phenomenology of the quantum spirit writ in categorical terms which explicitly incorporates, if not makes incarnate, the purely human DNA at birth (thus, giving us an updated physical metaphor for physical purity) to the many (90% of the entire human colony of cells being non-human DNA at human maturity). The many-to-the-one human structure over time is n-categorical, specifically, an operad. In category theory terms, f:[H-DNA]->[non-H-DNA], g:[non-H-DNA]->[H-DNA], where f is a forgetful functor and g is a free functor. An adjunction of these functors would raise the structure to any and all games of life as self-reproducing automata. Given these structures, it's quite evident that Plotinus and St. Augustine thought can be quickly sketched as self-similarities towards one great overall and all-encompassing super-structure. Note here that Lawvere, one the great category theorists, early on used Hegelian thought by analogy. Given what we've just sown, this is entirely consistent to the philosophical operad.

4. Finally, how does St. Augustine's personalized schema re the Confessions relate to modern securities regulations? One may argue that St. Augustine had a more accurate psychological vision of how truth should be disclosed to society. So much of securities law is about disclosures. But aside from an almost mirror neuronal view of disclosures where the issuer is suppose to somehow guess exactly what is in the mind of the investor, St. Augustine would not make such a grammatical ontological error. He clearly declares his own concerns and shares them with others. He is free to do so because he believes that God who sees all allows one to be completely transparent so much so that it is useless to hide. Without these metaphysical premises, modern securities laws which preach truth and transparency are utterly futile, and worst, perpetrating moral and ethical contradictions. Without a proper metaphysical foundation, it is better that we return to the unenlightened view of caveat emptor so that the buyer-investor will have the incentive to protect herself. But the world implied by caveat emptor is not leading us anywhere special, and barely keeps insatiable greed in check.