Nihilist Commandment 5A: You Shall Honor Your Children by Being One, You Smart Alec

Murder.

I am sure that if nihilistic liberals really comprehended the horror of this term, they wouldn't be nihilistic liberals. To put it another way, the contemporary liberal specifically devalues life and liberty while carrying out a frontal assault on truth, beauty, and any transcendent moral order. And they do these things because their Ten Commandments compel them to do so.

Before getting into more vague and sweeping generalities, let's focus on a particular case, Alec Baldwin, who, unless his recent display of rage toward his daughter was a pure aberration, is an abuser and "rage-aholic." This weekend he released a statement explaining what caused him to threaten, berate, and insult his daughter -- all forms of soul murder. First of all, since he is a liberal, it is not his fault. Rather, he is the victim here, and other victims understand this:

Thank you to everyone who has posted messages of support and understanding.

There are people who support and understand his grotesque behavior? Of course. As we learned the other day at dailykos, there are leftists who support and understand the mass murderer Cho, so supporting Baldwin is nothing.

Naturally, it is not best for a parent to lose their temper with their child.

Interesting way to put it. Bellowing at your child that she is a selfish pig isn't "bad." Rather, it's just "not best." You know, like "murder is not best," or "stealing is not best."

For one thing, losing your temper with your child is neither here nor there. Not only is it inevitable, but children need to know that certain behaviors on their part will elicit anger from others. Anger is a form of valuable feedback.

But there is anger, a passing emotion, and there is rage which is in an entirely different category. It is not just quantitatively different from anger, but it is qualitatively different -- very much like the difference between anxiety and panic. If you've ever been around a rage-prone individual, you know exactly what I mean. They are quite frightening, because they don't have the "thermostat" of a normal person which prevents their anger from exceeding certain boundaries. In other words, there is a sort of "ceiling" which a normal person's anger does not surpass, but for the rage-prone individual, they crash through that ceiling and become a different person. They are not a person who has anger, but rage which possesses a human.

All "borderline" personalities have boundary disturbances that prevent them from regulating their emotions. The boundary disturbance affects their relations with the interpersonal world -- i.e., with people who are meaningful to them -- but more subtly, in their own minds. They have psychic structural deficits that lead to a situation in which their mind parasites become entirely detached from the main personality.

Look at it this way. The most normal person has all kinds of conflicts, but he is generally able to keep them from profoundly affecting him through repression, which you might think of as a sort of horizontal boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind.

But the mind of the borderline individual is subject to vertical splitting. Instead of drawing a horizontal line between your conscious and unconscious mind, with the mind parasites kept "below deck," not too far from Ben's kitchen, imagine a series of vertical lines in the psyche, so that each mind parasite has its own agenda, which is "swtiched on," based upon various signals or patterns coming either from the external world or from the internal world.

In Baldwin's case, he tells us in his diatribe exactly which mind parasite took over: shame -- more specifically dysreglated shame. The narcissistic personality is structured around the inability to tolerate shame, so that if it is provoked, it immediately converts to rage at the object who triggered it. The rage is a measure of the shame, and is equally dysregulated. Thus,

Once again I made an ASS of myself trying to get to a phone! ....I'm leaving this message to tell you you have INSULTED me for the last time! ....You have HUMILIATED me for the last time with this phone! ....You made me feel like SHIT, and you made me feel like a FOOL, over and over and over again!

For the narcissistic, rage-prone individual, once the intolerable shame is provoked, a subpersonality takes over and expresses rage at its maximum intensity. It is no longer the central self speaking, but an omnipotently angry mind parasite. This is to an 11 year-old girl, mind you:

You don't have the BRAINS or the DECENCY as a human being.... I'm going to straighten your ass out! I'm gonna get on a plane to let you know just how I feel about what a ROTTEN PIG you really are! You are a RUDE, thoughtless little PIG, okay?

But liberals always turn perpetrators into victims, the reason being that this is how you overturn the moral order of the cosmos. For once you find a way to see the perpetrator as victim, then anything he does, no matter how heinous, is justified. In other words, the liberal appeals to our innate sense of justice, only in an entirely fraudulent and manipulative way.

That is, being seeped in a Judeo-Christian worldview, we all long for justice. But liberals do not share the Judeo-Christian worldview, to say the least. Rather, they want to eliminate it altogether. Therefore, their strategy involves using it against itself by detaching the moral category of "victim," and using it to appeal to the Christianized conscience.

Please bear in mind that no cultures in the world particularly cared about the plight of victims before the emergence of the Judeo-Christian worldview. This is a critical point, and all Coons are encouraged to read Gil Bailie's wonderful Violence Unveiled for the full explication of the anthropological implications of the Christianized mind.

Remember, on a purely historical and anthropological basis, Christianity is the religion of the ultimate innocent victim, and thanks to its influence, the Western world produced the most humane and decent civilization in human history. But it has now produced a split-off, shadow version of itself, that is, the leftist culture of victimology, which creates victims for the purposes of undermining the Judeo-Christian worldview.

Therefore, being that he is on the far left, it is not surprising that Baldwin immediately depicted himself as the victim. First, he is the victim of his daughter, who has made him feel ashamed, humiliated, and "like shit."

(Which, by the way, should be understood quite literally; so-called "dirty words" retain their potency because they have deep roots in the unconscious mind. To the extent that these words ever become common linguistic currency, then they lose their connection to deep unconscious springs of meaning which are otherwise beyond the reach of language. In a way, they are "sacred," but in a reverse sense of the term, in that they evoke unconscious power instead of supraconscious power. If used in a mindlessly casual way, these words become "impotent." This is why decent people refrain from using such language in public, because they understand the magic potency of these "four-letter incantations." By no means am I opposed to cursing. However, it should be reserved for various "special occasions," otherwise it no longer performs its function. No one can call someone a bastard like John Cleese. But if the word ever comes into common usage, then we will actually no longer have a word for those bloody bastards. Naturally, liberals are oblivious to this linguistic reality as well, for we have no desire to "repress" language, but to preserve it. Otherwise, we'll have to invent a whole new lexicon to replace our current slate of outstanding dirty words.)

Perhaps I should emphasize that I hardly exclude myself from the "cycle of mind parasites." Parenting is difficult, one reason being that children will inevitably evoke your own mind parasites. However, it is up to you how you react to them.

For example, my son was pretty colicky for several months during his first year, when it was at times difficult to sooth him. There were occasions that a voice popped into my head -- something like, "Damm, will you just suck it up and shut up for five f***ing minutes?" Now needless to say, I did not verbalize this, much less act out on it. I did not call my son a selfish pig, nor did I blame him for making me feel so helpless. Rather, I used it as an occasion for introspection as to the origins of that voice. It would be the height of immaturity to blame the baby -- even though, from the standpoint of the mind parasite, it's all his fault. And if you do act out toward your child, you are just ensuring that they will internalize your own mind parasites.

But for Baldwin, nothing is his fault. Whatever he says or does, someone else made him do it. Here we see another key feature of contemporary liberalism: the attenuation of free will, so that people are just machines who cannot help reacting in this or that way (except for conservatives, who somehow freely choose evil and who are never given a pass). This was one of the most critical contributions to the spike in violent crime that began in the 1960s, for that is precisely when leftists began implementing their new ideas that the perpetrator is the victim, and an era of leniency toward criminals was ushered in. A system of incentives was put in place which actually encouraged criminal activity, and even now, leftists argue for going back to the good old days of rampant crime that ruined so many lives (and a disproportionate number of black lives, I might add -- as if they care about the plight of blacks).

So it's not Baldwin's fault. Rather, Everyone who knows me privately knows that I have endured a great deal over the last several years in my custody litigation.

That could be perfectly true, but why would you take it out on your daughter?

Everyone who knows me privately knows that certain people will go to any lengths to embarass me and to disrupt my relationship with my daughter.

I see. It's all about the humiliation again. But is your own behavior contributing anything to disrupt your relationship with your daughter? How could it not? Who would want to be around such a frightening person unless there is already something wrong with them -- a perverse attraction to the dark side?

Children learn by imitating you. Whatever "lesson" Baldwin thinks he is conveying to his daugter, she will generally learn one of two things: men are out of control beasts whom a woman can easily manipulate or seduce; or they will confuse this kind of parenting with "love," and be attracted to the wrong kind of man: perhaps a man just like Baldwin. I've only seen the dynamic play out hundreds of times. (And by the way, I'm not absolving Kim Basinger, who fell in love with this man. What mind parasite in her made him attractive after she endured the first rage storm?)

Although I have been told by numerous people not to worry too much, as all parents lose their patience with their kids, I am most saddened that this was released to the media because of what it does to a child.

If his friends are telling him not to worry, they are probably not actually friends, for a friend doesn't lie to you. I can't help wondering if Baldwin is the type of person who doesn't want to hear the truth about himself, and would simply "hate the messenger" even more than the Basinger.

I'm sorry, as everyone who knows me is aware, for losing my temper with my child. I have been driven to the edge by parental alienation for many years now.

Okay, you're a victim. You suffer from "parental alienation." But why do you live in New York, 3,000 miles away from her? You're wealthy. You can live wherever you want. Under no circumstances would I ever live 3,000 miles away from my child, for if I did, I would cause a case of "child alienation" in my son. If I had your kind of money, I'd purchase a house in the same neighborhood, and be an active presence in my child's life. This is just "common decency." I'm not congratulating myself, for any normal man would do the same.

Here's what I wouldn't do: move 3,000 miles away in order to get involved in feckless liberal causes as a way to convince myself that I am a good person. According to his website, Baldwin is an "outspoken supporter" of various causes such as:

--the government's support of the arts (i.e., forcing citizens to pay for "art" that Baldwin and other elites approve of)
--campaign finance reform (i.e., limiting political speech that he doesn't like)
--animal rights (i.e, PETA, which is not about "animal rights," but about the deeply immoral conflation of humans and animals; and by the way, would you treat a baby seal the way you treat your daughter? I didn't think so.)
--gun control (i.e., preventing citizens from protecting themselves from crazy, rage-filled perpetrators, such as....)

If I were wasting my time and resources on any of these activities to the exclusion of my primary role as a parent, I would consider myself a failed human being. But the whole point about being a liberal -- the whole attraction, as it were -- is that you needn't give a thought to mastering and transcending yourself, because nothing is your fault. You are never a failure. It's everyone else's fault, and can you make yourself "good" merely by sanctimoniously being on the "correct" side of this or that issue, whether it is affirming Al Gore's junk science or advocating the redefinition of marriage.

But you can only change the world one a-hole at a time, beginning with yourself, followed by your children.

The Word Became Flesh and the Noun Became Verb

I remember an interview with the great Ted Williams in which he expressed his disdain for pitchers, calling them "baseballically" stupid. With one neat trick -- appending the -ally -- he converted a noun into an adverb. 

The question is, do nouns actually exist in reality, or are they essentially a linguistic convention that makes thinking and communication possible? If we're going to be literal, everything is in motion, certainly at the subatomic level that science presumes to be most real. If we consider that buzzing hive of energy, it's a wonder that nouns exist at all. 

How do they exist? In the past I've used the analogy of a cloud in the sky, which looks like a "thing" but is actually the end result of an infinitely complex global system of weather. Moreover, if you were to try to examine the cloud more closely, its borders would gradually dissolve before disappearing entirely, and you'd be inside a fog.

Stanley Jaki says all words are like this: from a distance they have sharp outlines, but  examine them closely and they too become blurry. What is anything in the absence of its relation to everything else? For example, a single word soon enough implies the whole dictionary. In other words, look up the meaning of a word, and then you have to look up the meaning of those words, ad nauseam.

Anything is everything? That sounds like relativistic madness.

No, that would be the other way around: everything is anything, e.g., a man is a woman. Conversely, to say anything is everything is to advert to the whole, e.g., one man stands for all men. Come to think of it, this would be the basis of universal human rights, because the whole inheres in the part.

But what we're really wondering about is whether God can be reduced to a noun, or whether this too is a convention of speech. Perhaps God is always godding, not to mention godly. Certainly it's difficult to examine the word without it blurring and spilling over into everything. 

This comes up in Jenson's Systematic Theology, especially with regard to the Trinity, because if that's what God is, it's a very peculiar sort of noun, perhaps even unique. For example, we still treat it as if it were a noun, but examine it closely and it contains other nouns, e.g., persons, not to mention activities (which is to say, verbs), such as begetting, speaking, proceeding, creating, redeeming, etc. 

This seems very far from the simple atemporal noun-god of Greek philosophy. But the problem actually begins with the Jews. Ask a Jew who God is, and the first answer is "Whoever rescued us from Egypt." The Christian agrees with this assessment, but adds "Whoever raised Jesus from the dead." 

Now, both of these are very much activities, which make it difficult to say that God is atemporal, or has nothing to do with time: this God "is truly identified by the temporal events of Exodus and Resurrection," whereas the usual gods "are not personally invested in time," and "indeed, their deity consists in their immunity to time, from which devotees hope they may rescue us also."

Note the difference: rescue us from time vs. rescuing us in and even with time -- ultimately to redeem time itself.  

Jenson notes that "It is above all birth and death that establish temporality," and whaddya know: this peculiar God also subjects himself to these conditions. From the Greek perspective of the atemporal noun-god, this would have to be regarded as scandalous. First of all God can't do that, but why on earth would he want to do that, when the whole point is to be above and beyond all this temporal nonsense, i.e., the suffering, loss, and general decrodement?

But again, even prior to the Incarnation, the Bible "is a record of the Lord's struggle to create and sustain Israel's exclusive faithfulness to him against other claimants to godhead." This is not very nounlike, and again, why does God even want to mess with temporality? It reminds me of the song, I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water:

I washed my hands in muddy water / washed my hands, but they didn't come clean / Tried to do like my daddy told me / but I must have washed my hands in a muddy stream.

The question is, when God washes his hands in the muddy stream of time, do his hands get dirty, or is this how he decontaminates the river?

Judaism, it seems, is all about decontamination, in that a substantial portion of the law involves maintaining ritual purity.

Yes, washing one's hands in time without getting them dirty. But wasn't it Paul who said the ultimate purpose of the Law is to demonstrate humanity's inability to keep it? 

Paul argued that the law reveals the extent of human sinfulness. He believed that by showing how impossible it is to perfectly adhere to the law, it highlights humanity's need for divine grace.

So, we can try to wash our hands in the pure stream of the law, but they still won't come clean. A more dramatic intervention is required, one that uses the polluted stream to cleanse itself?

So, God doesn't so much wash his hands in the muddy river as wash the muddy river via his clean hands?

Weird. But in any event, very far from that atemporal noun-like god of the Greeks, for this is a God willing to get his hands dirty. But they just don't get dirty, for example, in the forty days in the desert. Satan tries to show that Jesus is just as dirty as the restavus, but he comes out smelling like a rose.

The rosy cross.  

Good point. What exactly is the significance of the rosy cross? I'll bet Tomberg would know, but let's first google myself and see what comes up. Interesting, from way back in 2006:

Reader Dilys made an excellent point a couple of days ago, noting that, "My working hypothesis is that repeated close encounters with age-ripened liturgies access a far-reaching psycho-spiritual genius that drains the subconscious swamp." 

In other words, by immersing ourselves in certain time-tested vertical modalities, something very real and measurable happens to us. One thing grows. Another thing shrinks, or at least begins to lose its grip on us.

The post goes on to suggest that

In order to have a comprehensive view of the world, one must appreciate the vertical and the horizontal, the interior and the exterior. In fact, reality is a cross ( + ) where the vertical and horizontal energies converge. Each moment -- the eternal now -- is a sort of “whirlpool” that is created out of these dialectically related streams. Your body is actually the “rosy cross” that blooms around the area of the heart -- if given the proper vertamins and heartilizer.

Pretty woo woo.

Yes, let's keep googling ourselves. Here's another weird one from 2008, consisting of a freewheeling parody of Star Trek that took place in the comment section. The rosy cross is only mentioned at the very end, appended to a passage from the end of the book:

uhuru said...
Captain! I'm getting a transmission... but I can't decipher it!

captain said...
Spock, can you...?

spock said...
Fascinating. It doesn't show up on my monitor...

captain said...
Magnify... the viewer... to maximum!

bones said...
What in tarnation?

spock said...
Fascinating.

captain said...
What... is it... Spock?

spock said...
It appears, however unlikely that may be, to be a garden gnome of some sort. It still doesn't register on any of our scanners.

red shirt ray said...
Huh? I don't see anything. Hey, did you guys read that evolution book I was...

captain said...
Security! Escort mister Ray to sick bay. Bones... do what you can.

sulu said...
I'll escort him, Captain!

captain said...
Spock, Uhura... the gnome... he is saying something... what?

spock said...
I checked the highest frequency, and I took the filters off... I...

captain said...
Spock! Spock! Snap out of it! What... did... he... say? Spock?

Bones! Spock, he's... smiling.

spock said...
Captain... he calls himself... Petey. He did a gnome mind meld, Jim... ha ha ha!

scotty said...
Try saying gnome mind meld ten times really fast!

bones said...
Spock is fine, Jim. Must be his human side laughing.

captain said...
Spock! Spock! What... did he... say?

spock said...
Ha ha! He said... Ho! he said "pardon our Bob, hallowed be his gnome!" Ha ha ha!

captain said...
Wait a minnute! Wait! A minute... that book I was reading, you know the one, Bones... you gave it to me.

bones said...
Yeah, but it was meant as a joke, Jim...

captain said...
One Cosmos... One Cosmos Under... God! That's the one, Bones!
In... the book... there was a hand drawn likeness of this Petey!

But how...can this be?!

bones said...
Down the foggy ruins of time... far past the frozen leaves...

captain said...
Mister.... Tambourine.... Man!

spock said...
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow?

bones said...
Jim, Petey is saying something else!

captain said...
To dance... beneath... the diamond sky... with one hand waving free!

bones said...
With... all memory and fate... driven deep beneath the waves....

spock said...
He said... one indulgence to you, Sulu, for your cosmic reacharound to the lost tribe of Raccoons. Ho!

red shirt ray said...
Did you know that Raccoons evolved?
I'm serious!

petey said...
Raccoons did not evolve. Evolution Raccooned. Big difference.

red shirt ray said...
Gorn!!!

petey said...
Woe to the gaseous brood of Darwinist vapors!

[...]

petey said...
I am not come for the hole in your head but for a whole new head!

Ho!

petey said...
For we have come to wage battle with the Nobel savages!

petey said...
For I say unto you: the Darwinist is the sound of one bland yapping!

petey said...
O, my little masked pandits, know that I speak to you with vague certainty and crystal clear ambiguity!

Ho!

petey said...
The HE IS is eternally reflected in the clear and peaceful waters of the I AM.

Or is it the other way around?

petey said...
Only with two eyes may you see the third of which they are a property!

uss ben usn (ret) said...
The third Aye...

petey said...
For in these latter days, your heart shall be a rosy cross, a kali flower!

petey said...
For bonehead Darwinism is a trojan hearse to sneak the culture of Death into our public schools!

petey said...
In our two front battle, our superstitious foreign enemies are lost in the circle, while our substitious domestic ones are lost in the line. We must show them the innerstices of the open spiral!

petey said...
Knowledge minus wisdom = materialism.

petey said...
Darwinism explains the Darwinist, for their minds are simply an adaptation to the transient fashions of the day. A Raccoon is adapted to the Eternal Verities. A word to the unwise: "Survival of the Fittest" applies to eternity no less than time, AKA supernatural election!

petey said...
To the small mind of the Darwinist, tiny things appear large. But their entire ideology fits into my capacious hip pocket, with room left over for my Walmart coupons!

Ho!

scatter said...
If Truth is higher than a banana, then Darwinism has been falsified. [FYI, Scatter, a recurring character in the early days of the blog, was the name of Elvis' pet chimp]

uss ben usn (ret) said...
Even Scatter gets it!

petey said...
Scatter does indeed get it, for science is a world of horizontal quantities, while religion discloses a world of vertical qualities. Being that scientism would reduce the vertical to the horizontal, it cannot help but end in a culture of death if followed to its logical extreme. To reduce wisdom to knowledge is to cease to be human.

The blog does indeed seem to have been weirder in those days. Here's another strange one written on Easter Sunday 2007, the last time we mentioned anything about a rosy cross. 

As you might recoil, yesternow we were in the mist of discussing the secret religionship between trauma and spiritual opening, and here it is, the religious unday of them all, the sonny dei that commemorates the undoing of what was did way back when, on that dark and sinny day in the park. Remama? You know the one. Around Eve, it was. We wouldn't have needed the resurrection if it hadn't a' been for that insurrection in paradise, now would we?

Or, as I shouted out last year at about this time, "Hooray! Surrection!" In the bread and the brew of life, it's a Hoppy Yeaster to you ale! That ought to get a rise out of you, since he is accompliced by all his adoptees and other sacrificial blood relativities.

No need to embarrass myself by republishing the whole thing, but it ends with this: 

Ascent you a son, amen for a child's job. Telos when it's over. Now. It is accomplished. The circle unbroken, by and by. A godsend for a new beginning, a touch of infanity, a bloomin' yes on a rosy cross.

Well, I think we're pretty far from the point of this post, if it ever had one. I challenge Gemini to make any sense of it:

1. The Nature of Nouns and Language:

Relativity of Language:

• The text starts with Ted Williams' playful use of "baseballically" and then dives into the question of whether nouns are real or simply linguistic constructs.
• It argues that, at a fundamental level, everything is in flux, challenging the idea of fixed "things" that nouns represent.
• Stanley Jaki's observation that words blur upon closer examination reinforces this idea, highlighting the inherent ambiguity of language.
• The concept that "anything is everything" and "everything is anything" plays with the fluidity of meaning and the interconnectedness of concepts.

• Language and Reality:
  • The text questions whether language accurately reflects reality or if it imposes a structure on it.
  • It suggests that language is a tool that allows us to navigate the world, but it may also distort our perception of it.

2. Theology and the Nature of God:

• God as Verb vs. Noun:
  • The text challenges the traditional Greek concept of God as an atemporal, unchanging noun.
  • It emphasizes the biblical portrayal of God as active and involved in history, particularly in the Exodus and the resurrection of Jesus.
  • The idea of "God godding" suggests that God's essence is action and process, not static being.
• God and Time:
  • The text contrasts the Greek idea of God's immunity to time with the Judeo-Christian concept of God's engagement with time.
  • The Incarnation, in which God enters human time and experiences birth and death, is seen as a radical departure from the Greek perspective.
  • The "muddy river" analogy is very powerful, it poses the question of how God can interact with our tainted reality, without becoming tainted.
• The Rosy Cross:
  • The "rosy cross" is presented as a symbol of the intersection of the vertical (spiritual) and horizontal (material) dimensions of reality.
  • The text explores the idea that the human body, particularly the heart, can be a "rosy cross" where these energies converge.
  • The Star Trek parody, and the Easter Sunday section, both add to the concept of the Rosy Cross, by adding a very strange and almost psychedelic feel.

3. Themes and Style:

• Playful and Philosophical:
  • The text blends serious philosophical and theological inquiry with humor and wordplay.
  • The Star Trek parody and the use of colloquialisms contribute to a lighthearted tone, even as it tackles complex ideas.
• Intertextuality:
  • The text draws on a wide range of sources, including Ted Williams, Stanley Jaki, Jenson's "Systematic Theology," the Bible, and even Star Trek.
  • This intertextuality creates a rich tapestry of ideas and perspectives.
• Metaphor and Analogy:
  • The text relies heavily on metaphors and analogies, such as the cloud, the muddy river, and the rosy cross, to convey its ideas.
  • These figures of speech add depth and nuance to the discussion.
• The Problem of Language:
  • The text is very aware of its own limitations, and the limitations of language in general. It frequently draws attention to the problems that arise when trying to describe the indescribable.

In summary:

The text is a challenging and thought-provoking exploration of language, theology, and the nature of reality. It questions conventional assumptions about nouns, God, and time, and it invites the reader to consider the interconnectedness of all things. The text's playful style and intertextual approach make it a unique and engaging read.

Dirty Harvey and the Image of God

We are in the midst of a discussion of the human telos, which, if I am not mistaken, has something to do with Harvey Weinstein.

Why Dirty Harvey? Because even liberals seem to understand that he is a poor example of humanness. That being the case, something must have gone wrong in his development; something must have prevented him from being the Harvey God intended him to be.

Again, the two operative words are integration and actualization. And as usual, as soon as I start thinking about a subject, books fall into my hands that relate to the same subject. I wonder about that: is it just because my preoccupations are so vague and universal that everything speaks to them? In that case, what looks like synchronicity is just inevitability in disguise.

I don't know. We can never see beneath the veil on this side of the rug. But I just started reading a seemingly unrelated book that has an awful lot about integration -- specifically, the metacosmic integration made possible by Christ. Indeed, if Christ is who believers say he is, then he is in principle the last word in both integration and actualization. Or first and last, which is to say, archetype and fulfillment.

Now, man must love and will the good; indeed, willing the good is a function of loving it, which "completes or perfects the human being teleologically." We must also love truth, such that real knowledge is another form of teleological completion or perfection.

In any event, we can see that what we "must do" -- i.e., what is necessary for man -- is very much a function of our purpose. Because there are things that we cannot not be, there are things we should not fail to know and do.

The "Catholic intellectual vocation," says White, calls its practitioners "to be people of a holistic integrity." Off the top of my head, this may be what most distinguishes us from the animals: they too should be integrated, but they can never attain a holistic integration.

A dog, for example, may achieve a perfect integration with its archetype, and thus be honored by the Westminster Kennel Club. But a dog is nevertheless enclosed in its archetype. There is nothing holistic about it, in the sense of being ordered to, and integrated with, the Whole.

Not so with man. Why? Because our archetype is ultimately the Godman, being that we were created in the Image and Likeness of the Absolute.

In this context, "microcosmos" is too confining a word. "Micro-theos" is more like it, so long as we don't misunderstand the implications. Dirty Harvey, for example, certainly pretended to be a "micro-god." Big difference. Still, we need to know why it is so different, and why his approach is intrinsically deviant, i.e., what one mustn't do.

"Every facet of our life needs to come progressively into the light of Christ," so that "we may live in a more truly human and divine way," the one being a reflection of the other:

When human beings are integrated morally, intellectually, and spiritually, their intellectual concerns and their moral patterns of life cohere. Their artistic sense and their capacity for self-giving are united. Their forms of recreation and rest are in harmony with their sense of worship and commitment. Their relationships of human love are deeply related to their aspiration to divine love (emphases mine).

What this really amounts to is an integration that is both vertical and horizontal; or better, horizontality integrated with verticality. Horizontality inevitably involves an element of contingency. Indeed, if there were no verticality then man would be condemned to either a pure horizontal contingency or an unyielding determinism. Only our verticality lifts us from these twin hells. Transcendence is always there amidst our immanence.

But it is not enough for man to merely be free; rather, freedom in the absence of a telos is just nihilism by another name. Dirty Harvey's worldly power made him "free" to engage in all sorts of intrinsic transgressions. And don't think for one moment that thousands of other reptilian Hollywood denizens don't want to be just like Harvey! They just don't want to get caught, that's all.

For example, in this morning's jolt, Jim Geraghty writes that

For decades, the stars and powerful players of Hollywood instructed us about which political candidates deserved election. They told us which causes were worthy of support and which ones needed to be opposed. In their works and in their speeches, they told us how to be a better person.

(!)

That's the key: our moral superiors in Hollywood don't just tell us whom to vote for and what policies to support, but how to be better human beings. And you cannot presume to know what is better without an implicit standard of what is best, i.e., without a telos. What -- or who -- is their telos? They don't really ever say, but it's usually someone who is Really Brave, by which they mean someone who Stands Up to Republicans and all they represent. In short, someone like Dirty Harvey, who is a bully for the left, which absolves the rest of his bullying. Or did, until a week ago.

But real integration -- and therefore integrity -- is "rare in the world today, where we are constantly confronted with stories about morally divided lives.... De-Christianization leads to re-paganization. We begin to serve multiple gods and suffer the division [read: dis-integration] of our selves. Without the grace of Christ, the integration of the human person is made more difficult, and even on many levels impossible" (emphasis mine).

I think you can look at this in two ways: yes, without the grace of Christ, integration on many levels is impossible. But you can turn it around, such that "integration of many levels" is the grace of Christ, precisely. That such integration is even possible, let alone actualized, is nothing less than the Trinity in action, call it what you will.

For In the Beginning are the uncreated Persons of the Trinity. It is that ultimate harmony of which we are the image and likeness.

I don't mean to leave you hanging, but that's as far as I've gotten in the book. However, I'm also rereading Schuon's Roots of the Human Condition, which not only complements the above, but provides an even deeper... integration.

The title provides a hint, doesn't it? Roots of the human condition. You might say that our task herebelow is to trace the latter up into the former, i.e., to scamper up that venerable Tree with Roots Aloft and Branches Down Below.

Example. Okay,

To know, to will, to love: this is man's whole nature and consequently it is his whole vocation and duty. To know totally, to will freely, to love nobly; or in other words: to know the Absolute..., to will what is demanded of us by virtue of this knowledge; and to love both the true and the good, and that which maintains them here below; thus to love the beautiful which leads to them.

That's a tall order, but is it really? Eh, I don't think so. Seems like the bare minimum. Indeed, it should "come naturally" (or supernaturally naturally, to be precise) to us, just as eating grass comes naturally to an herbivore. In order for it to not come naturally, something must get in the way. What could that be? Who or what is trying to prevent us from being ourselves, i.e., from actualization of our archetype and integration with our telos? More on that later. Because we're outta time.

Let's just say that Reality -- ultimate Reality -- is not actually that complicated. Rather, we are. Also the world, what with its crosscurrents of turbulence, contingency, karma, fluctuation, relativity, finitude, and other people. The Conspiracy.

Nevertheless.

"Intelligence is the perception of a reality," which is ultimately rooted in "the perception of the Real as such" (emphasis mine). Because we can know, Reality Is; but this still doesn't go far enough. For Being Is, and Being is a communion of Persons characterized by love, truth, and beauty. And we are not other than That.

Conservatism and the Implications of Human Nature

Let's try to get to the essence of the nub of the gist of our political differences. For me, conservatism is simply the cultural and political implications (in that order) of human nature, both good and bad. Given the constraints of human nature, only so much "hope" is rationally warranted and only so much "change" can be reasonably expected, man being what he is.

Which is why leftism in all its forms starts with the denial of human nature. Once that particular obstacle is removed, then anything is possible. For example, the left talks about "greed" as if it is something invented by conservatives instead of an intrinsic defect in man, like some kind of original sin or something.

And once it is projected into conservatives, it is possible to imagine that the state isn't susceptible to the same greedy impulses. Then one lives in a fantasy world in which corporations are driven to increase profits but the state isn't driven to increase revenue. This naive mindset can only be maintained if one has already engaged in primitive psychological splitting, projecting the bad into the private sector and the good into the public sector.

Me? No, I do not imagine that huge corporations are magically good or altruistic, nor do I believe that the state is intrinsically evil. Rather, both institutions are shaped and limited by three things: human nature, a system of incentives, and negative feedback. The first cannot change, but the second two can limit or exacerbate the damage.

In an ideal world of market forces, businesses are subject to a continuous flow of corrective feedback known as profits and losses. A business owner can be as greedy as you like, but this greed is impotent if it doesn't translate to providing a product or service that people want, and for which they are willing to part with their cash. The leftist will no doubt argue that people want the wrong things!, but that's a different argument, one that again touches on human nature.

For example, it is natural for human beings to seek and enjoy sugary substances. The conservative argues that this is no doubt true, for which reason the essence of psychological maturity involves mastery of one's impulses, whether they are directed toward food, sex, drugs, or any other pleasurable activity.

No one can call himself a proper human if he hasn't even mastered himself. Temptations are everywhere, and that's just the way it is. In the Islamic world they don't like sexual temptation, so they put women in black bags. Good idea? Or should they apply a more Bloombergian rule, and just bag women with C-cups and larger?

The leftist instinctively rejects the strategy of self-mastery because of a paradoxical affirmation and denial of human nature. One also sees this in their hatred of "abstinence," as if sexual impulses are beyond anyone's control, unless, of course, you use dirty words in front of a fragile female coworker, in which case you should be sued and fired. I mean, isn't the whole point of political correctness that people can be bullied and cowed into unnatural thought and behavior?

The best part of human nature is actually supernatural and cannot be reduced to nature. Quintessentially this applies to free will. The leftist denies this higher human nature, but accepts the lower nature. And since we have no power of free will to exert control over our lower nature, we need the state to intercede and do this for us. As a result, the state treats us all like impulsive babies, even those of us who have attained control of our bladders and mouths.

Dennis Prager makes this point in a recent essay, Science Demands Big Government. Specifically, with regard to Mayor Bloomberg's proposed ban on beverages he doesn't like, a Harvard professor of evolutionary biology helpfully points out that human beings "have evolved to need coercion." There is a contradiction here, because science proves that there is no such thing as human nature, and that the state can control it.

Note first of all that this is an ironic conclusion for a "progressive," since it denies any human capacity for progressing beyond our most primitive impulses without assistance from the state. And those of us who believe we can control those impulses on our own, thank you, are not only wrong but ANTI-SCIENCE!

Such an attitude, if permitted to stand, leads to devastating -- and profoundly anti-human -- consequences. For example, if we use natural selection "to guide social policy, little that is truly decent will survive. Is there anything less prescribed by evolution than, let us say, hospices?" Likewise, "if evolution demands the survival of the species, wouldn’t evolution call for other 'coercion' -- against abortion, for example?"

Left unanswered because the left won't answer is the question of how private human beings cannot know -- or at least exert control over -- what is bad for them, but a public human being -- a state bureaucrat -- somehow magically acquires both the knowledge and the wisdom to coerce others. Or in other words, government employees are better than us. But you knew that already. In fact, too good for us, really. We are not worthy of his demonization!

Thomas Sowell makes a similar point in a piece called Barack Obama: Dictator of the Left (Sowell is an obvious racist, so forgive the hyperbolic title). In it, he essentially shows how politicians such as Obama are shielded from the rigors of negative feedback, very much unlike the market.

For example, "the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the 'greed' of the insurance companies."

The identical dynamic played out in the collapse of the real estate bubble in 2008, in that instance, the state forcing lenders to make bad loans to unqualified borrowers.

In both cases, note that the state is subject to feedback, but not market feedback. Rather, the state responds to political feedback, so it will implement destructive policies in exchange for positive political feedback and refrain from helpful ones if they generate negative political feedback.

Back to the reality of human nature. Human nature isn't, of course, "unitary." Rather, there are things like sex and temperament through which that nature is inflected. Now, it is clear that political differences are rooted in these deeper distinctions, for which reason the quackademic left, for the past 60 years or so, has been attempting to pathologize half the spectrum: the male half, precisely.

Scruton discusses these contrasting "political temperaments" in his How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism. I think you'll agree that it is just common sense.

For example, there are "individualists, who look for opportunities and freedoms, and who are disposed to hold people responsible for their acts." On the other hand, there are "egalitarians, who seek a solution that will not make distinctions between people, and who are apt to to entrust problems to the state, as the impartial provider and distributor of goods."

Scruton has just defined the characterological distinction between (classical) liberals and leftists, and no amount of tenured nonsense is going to eliminate the former, at least not here in the United States, which is founded on those very principles.

Does this mean there is no place for the egalitarian impulse? Of course not. It's not going anywhere either, at least so long as there are, for example, single women, feminized men, and various victim groups anointed by the left.

My problem is that I see no need to embody the egalitarian impulse in a massive and intrusive state, just as I see no need to displace self-control into the government, a la Bloomberg.

A fully functioning -- which is to say, integrated -- human being harbors a complementarity of mercy and severity, compassion and justice, violence and magnanimity, self-interest and charity, male and female, individual and social, etc. I think to embody just one or the other is to be in a state of imbalance, and that a big part of maturity involves realizing -- and tolerating -- their unresolvable complementarity.

And that is a state no state can force upon you.

Outer and Inner Limits

I suppose these two amount to the same thing. This is not to equate our idea of the world with the world per se, only to say that the world will expand or contract, depending upon our metaphysical vision. 

I might add that people don't generally live in the limited world they claim to live in -- in other words, there is a great deal of ontological hypocrisy going on. No materialist actually lives as one, nor do climate hysterics avoid private jets or flee from expensive beach houses. 

Perhaps a pre-linguistic Helen Keller would have claimed to be a materialist if only she had had access to the symbolic world that transcends materality. Speech is precisely what set her free from the bonds of matter.

This represents one kind of ontological movement. Another kind occurs when we conflate our limits with the limitless. In the words of Charles Upton, 

Lucifer's intellectual error -- which in terms of his free will, was also an act of rebellion -- was to identify his now limited selfhood with the Absolute Reality he saw within him, rather than submitting to It and worshiping It...

Sometimes limitations only limit, while other times they liberate. For example, being limited by the rules of music allows us to create something more than noise. The same principle distinguishes speech from mere animal sounds or mindless journalism.

Perhaps we can say that limits will only limit if we're not careful. Being that we are conformed to the Absolute, we can't help trying to reach beyond whatever limits us. This is a constant motif in artistic movements, which start as creative breakthroughs and end as rackets of stale convention and vacuous artifice. 

Thomas Kuhn described something similar in the The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and we also see it in religious movements, which are often motivated by a desire for a more intensely experiential theology beyond the strictures of words and dogma. Memorizing a creed is not the same as understanding it, much less undergoing it.

For Christianity per say, exodus is a primordial category, such that we cannot not be in it.

Which is to say in between. Between what? Vertically speaking, between immanence and transcendence: these two categories are directional pointers, at once limits and limitless. Again, Helen Keller was truly in an immanent world until she entered the linguistic world that pointed to its transcendent pole. 

Well, big deal: so now we're stuck in this unending bewilderness adventure of exodus, with no hope of arriving at the promised land. How is this different from the existential myth of Sisyphus? 

I would say that we are only liberated from this myth by the Messiah principle, whether in potential (Judaism) or actual (Christianity). 

But absent this principle, I don't see how we escape being condemned to mindlessly pushing this massive rock up the hill until we die. There is nothing at the top of the hill, nor anything at the bottom, but life nevertheless consists of a struggle to push the crock up the hill until death relieves us of the burden. 

Who will redeem the time! The time otherwise spent in this utterly meaningless exodus-from with no exodus-to? 

Now, some people say that Creation as such is a kind of exodus of God from himself, so to speak. In the past we've called it the exodeus, but who actually believes this except for Bob? Can you cite any actual authorities, or can we at least buy some pot from you?

Well, it seems undeniable that if God is to create, it must somehow be "separate" from God, even though, strictly speaking, this is ontologically impossible. 

Analogously, when humans create something, it is distinct from a natural bodily function that occurs inevitably (postmodern coprophilic art notwithstanding); it is what distinguishes the Pieta from a spider's web or beaver's dam. The creation is "outside us," even though we have somehow placed ourselves in it. In other words, cut this post and it bleeds me!

So, it seems we're in this ambiguous space of exodus, simultaneously in and out of God, or connected but alienated, still the image but reflected in a dirty mirror. We try to clean the mirror, but like the song says,

I washed my hands in muddy water / Washed my hands, but they didn't come clean / Tried to do what my daddy told me, / But I must have washed my hands in a muddy stream

Enough with all this preluminary hemming and hawing. Let's get to the point. I recently read a book on the subject of divinization called Christ Alive in Me: Living as a Member of the Mystical Body. 

Flipping to p. 52, there's a section called The Great Exchange, which says "we can share in God's nature only because he first shares in ours." Moreover, "he is not simply pouring grace extrinsically upon us, but he is transforming us from within" (emphasis mine).

Therefore, it seems he is transforming our inner limits, such that his unlimited emptying becomes our limitless filling:

our theosis is the Son's kenosis -- in his emptying is our divine fulfillment....

Because of the Son's descent into the human condition, all of humanity has been changed forever. The God-made-human is now able to dwell personally in any other human soul humble enough to allow him entry.

His exodus into us is the end of our exodus from him. That's a pretty attractive offer, but it is for a limited time only. 

Outer and Inner Limits

I suppose these two amount to the same thing. This is not to equate our idea of the world with the world per se, only to say that the world will expand or contract, depending upon our metaphysical vision. 

I might add that people don't generally live in the limited world they claim to live in -- in other words, there is a great deal of ontological hypocrisy going on. No materialist actually lives as one, nor do climate hysterics avoid private jets or flee from expensive beach houses. 

Perhaps a pre-linguistic Helen Keller would have claimed to be a materialist if only she had had access to the symbolic world that transcends materality. Speech is precisely what set her free from the bonds of matter.

This represents one kind of ontological movement. Another kind occurs when we conflate our limits with the limitless. In the words of Charles Upton, 

Lucifer's intellectual error -- which in terms of his free will, was also an act of rebellion -- was to identify his now limited selfhood with the Absolute Reality he saw within him, rather than submitting to It and worshiping It...

Sometimes limitations only limit, while other times they liberate. For example, being limited by the rules of music allows us to create something more than noise. The same principle distinguishes speech from mere animal sounds or mindless journalism.

Perhaps we can say that limits will only limit if we're not careful. Being that we are conformed to the Absolute, we can't help trying to reach beyond whatever limits us. This is a constant motif in artistic movements, which start as creative breakthroughs and end as rackets of stale convention and vacuous artifice. 

Thomas Kuhn described something similar in the The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and we also see it in religious movements, which are often motivated by a desire for a more intensely experiential theology beyond the strictures of words and dogma. Memorizing a creed is not the same as understanding it, much less undergoing it.

For Christianity per say, exodus is a primordial category, such that we cannot not be in it.

Which is to say in between. Between what? Vertically speaking, between immanence and transcendence: these two categories are directional pointers, at once limits and limitless. Again, Helen Keller was truly in an immanent world until she entered the linguistic world that pointed to its transcendent pole. 

Well, big deal: so now we're stuck in this unending bewilderness adventure of exodus, with no hope of arriving at the promised land. How is this different from the existential myth of Sisyphus? 

I would say that we are only liberated from this myth by the Messiah principle, whether in potential (Judaism) or actual (Christianity). 

But absent this principle, I don't see how we escape being condemned to mindlessly pushing this massive rock up the hill until we die. There is nothing at the top of the hill, nor anything at the bottom, but life nevertheless consists of a struggle to push the crock up the hill until death relieves us of the burden. 

Who will redeem the time! The time otherwise spent in this utterly meaningless exodus-from with no exodus-to? 

Now, some people say that Creation as such is a kind of exodus of God from himself, so to speak. In the past we've called it the exodeus, but who actually believes this except for Bob? Can you cite any actual authorities, or can we at least buy some pot from you?

Well, it seems undeniable that if God is to create, it must somehow be "separate" from God, even though, strictly speaking, this is ontologically impossible. 

Analogously, when humans create something, it is distinct from a natural bodily function that occurs inevitably (postmodern coprophilic art notwithstanding); it is what distinguishes the Pieta from a spider's web or beaver's dam. The creation is "outside us," even though we have somehow placed ourselves in it. In other words, cut this post and it bleeds me!

So, it seems we're in this ambiguous space of exodus, simultaneously in and out of God, or connected but alienated, still the image but reflected in a dirty mirror. We try to clean the mirror, but like the song says,

I washed my hands in muddy water / Washed my hands, but they didn't come clean / Tried to do what my daddy told me, / But I must have washed my hands in a muddy stream

Enough with all this preluminary hemming and hawing. Let's get to the point. I recently read a book on the subject of divinization called Christ Alive in Me: Living as a Member of the Mystical Body. 

Flipping to p. 52, there's a section called The Great Exchange, which says "we can share in God's nature only because he first shares in ours." Moreover, "he is not simply pouring grace extrinsically upon us, but he is transforming us from within" (emphasis mine).

Therefore, it seems he is transforming our inner limits, such that his unlimited emptying becomes our limitless filling:

our theosis is the Son's kenosis -- in his emptying is our divine fulfillment....

Because of the Son's descent into the human condition, all of humanity has been changed forever. The God-made-human is now able to dwell personally in any other human soul humble enough to allow him entry.

His exodus into us is the end of our exodus from him. That's a pretty attractive offer, but it is for a limited time only. 

I Created the Cosmos! (3.02.10)

DeKoninck -- who obviously knew what it meant to inhabit a right side-up cosmos -- wrote that "It is only in human understanding that the cosmos becomes a universe in the full sense." In other words, the "end" of the causal chain cannot be found in the endless horizontal iterations of abstract matter, but in our concrete vertical understanding. Which is another way of saying in truth, specifically, the truth of being.

In this regard, it is critical to bear in mind that "God does not act" -- or only act -- "on things, but from within" them. Thus, it is as if God comes to his own fruition, so to speak, in the uncreated light of our interior understanding (or in love or virtue, but that is a subject for a slightly different post). Therefore, "Creation is essentially a communication," a communication of being.

In fact, to turn it around, it would not be possible for God -- since it would contradict the divine nature -- to "create a cosmos which was not essentially ordered to an intra-cosmic intelligence." In other words, God could no more create an unintelligible universe than an evil or ugly one.

So when we see that being itself is overflowing with truth and beauty, we should not be surprised. Awed, but not surprised. The really strange thing, as Aquinas observed, is that "the perfection of the entire universe can exist in one of its parts." That would be us. "For this reason, philosophers have held that the ultimate perfection to which the soul can attain consists in embracing the whole order of the universe and its causes."

In my book, for reasons that should be apparent, I use the pneumaticon ʘ to symbolize this state of the soul in its relation to the totality of O, or of human part to divine whole.

O is not just source but end; ontologically speaking, it is both alpha and omega. But this is to be expected, since the "ultimate cause" must also be the "ultimate end." Thus, the Poet is not really being poetical but quite literal when he talks about the end preceding the beginning, and how both are "always there," for these are things that must be. It is the Law. Some poets are indeed the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Meaning, interior, wholeness, unity -- these are all interconnected aspects of the same prior reality. It should be a banality to point out that the cosmos can have no meaning unless there is an interior where it can be apprehended. Nor can there be meaning in the absence of unity and wholeness, for meaning essentially consists of the reduction of multiplicity to unity -- or the apprehension of the hidden unity behind or above the veil of appearances.

Now, if there is an "ultimate meaning," there must be an "ultimate interior," so to speak. Or, to turn it around, to say that the ultimate meaning could be found in empiricism or profane reason -- i.e., matter or mechanical thought -- is not only to say that there is no meaning, but to abolish the very ground and possibility of meaning. Here is how DeKoninck describes it:

"In order for the world to have a raison d'être, in order for it to be profoundly one and a universe, it is not enough that it be composed of parts and that these parts physically constitute a whole; it is also necessary that all the individual parts be oriented toward that one in which all together can exist, that each of the principal parts of the universe should be the entire whole, that each of these universes be in some fashion all the others."

In other words, the universe must be both interobjective and intersubjective, with both properties emanating from the a priori wholeness and interior unity of O, the origin, the one, the OMega. In short, the cosmos must fundamentally be a place in which everything preserves its "partness," even while each part participates in (not just with) all the others.

In otherother words, the universe, since it is one, is an internally related totality -- which is why we all intuitively apprehend the unity of being, from which the truth (not to mention, goodness and beauty) of being radiates, both from subjects and from objects.

For the truth "flows" from objects into subjects, even while the object completes itself in the knowing subject. Without objects there is nothing to be known, and without subjects there is no way to know it. But in the end, both flow from the same prior unity, i.e, Truth as such.

It is not so much that "being is transcendentally accessible to intelligence" (DeKoninck). Rather, that is only half the story, for if that is the case -- which it is -- then it must mean that being and truth are one -- or at least not two. After their little game of hide and seek, or bride and seeker, they return to themselves and embrace in the one fleshlight of the divine-human subject.

Being is "good," for, among other reasons, it is open to intelligence, to which it gives of itself without reserve. There is indeed a kind of divine marriage, or sacred bond, between being and intellect, as the two become united in one flesh. As this marriage matures, we can see in the cosmos "a tendency toward the thought in which all its parts are united and lived; the cosmos thus tends to compenetrate itself, to touch itself in the intelligence of man, in which it can realize this explicit return to its First Principle."

Why yes,

The molten infinite pours forth a blazen torrent of incandescent finitude, as light plunges an undying fire into its own shadow (oops! a dirty world) and f-aa-lll-lllllll-ssssssssssss like 1-2-3-7-12 in love with the productions of time, hurtling higgledy-piggledy into jivass godlings & samskara monsters all the way down.

You might say that the emancipating journey from cosmic infancy to metacosmic maturity begins in an inside-out universe of "pure exteriority. The world was so to say entirely outside, separated from itself, imprisoned in itself and its own obscurity" (DeKoninck).

You know -- for it is written in the New Testavus -- pure emptiness, a formless void without mind or life, a shadow spinning before the beginning over a silent static sea, unlit altar of eternity, fathomless vortex of the Infinite Zero.

In this murky state of affairs, the world "is dead, empty, an abyss of division." And yet, here we are, like mushrooms that have sprouted in the darkness of cosmic night. For "intelligence must appear. This demand is written in it from the beginning.... it is necessary that the universe fall back in a certain way on itself, and that it close in on itself, that it interiorize, and it is just this interiorization that will permit it to open onto itself."

In other words, it is only our understanding of the cosmos that makes it possible. For if we couldn't understand it, surely we wouldn't be here. The ultimate cause of the cosmos is its truth, a truth we may know and renew in the timeless ground of the intellect. So when I say that "I caused the universe," I am not really making any special claim for myself. Now and again I do it all the timeless.

On the Subject of Objects

Another quick and dirty post. Pressed for time this morning....

Continuing with our discussion of the bifurcation of reality into subject and object, the reason why the subject may know -- and the object may be known -- is that they descend from a Oneness that is anterior to them. If this were not the case, then there would be no possibility of real knowledge, or truth, or cosmic intercourse.

A critical point is that we begin with the idea that the world is true because created, and that it in-forms the subject for the very reason that it is an ex-form of the Cosmic Subject who bears the objects within. This is very much in contrast to Eastern religions that regard the world as maya, or something from which we must escape (which in itself is a misunderstanding of the maya principle, since maya is real and even necessary on its own plane, just not the "ultimate Real").

Nevertheless, the human subject is not nothing -- as if its only function is to be a mirror of the object world. Rather, as Schuon points out, "it bears the element object within itself, in the sense that pure subjectivity potentially contains the metaphysical essence of the knowable."

This is reminiscent of the idea that God is not in the cosmos, but vice versa. Being that we are mirrorcles of the Absolute, we can equally say that we are not in the cosmos, but vice versa, hence, the possibility of the actualization of real knowledge. In other words, the soul is not in the cosmos, but vice versa.

Furthermore, no object is merely an object, or it couldn't properly exist (for it would be like an outside with no inside). Rather, every object -- if it is an object -- has the potential to be known by a subject. In other words, to say that there could be objects that cannot be known is an absurdity. An object is by definition "on the way to" knowledge, like an arrow shot toward the subject who "completes" it in slackful contemplation.

Now, subjectivity comes to us in two modes, one unconscious, the other conscious, which is to say Life and Mind, respectively. Life itself tends toward conscious mind, while the conscious mind obviously has deep roots in unconscious life. One can draw no fundamental line between life and mind, at least for embodied humans (angelic beings are another matter).

This is another dialectic, or complementarity, that prevents consciousness from coagulating into the dead letter of rationalism. Rather, consciousness is always nourished by waters from above and below, which is why man is "condemned to transcendence." Thank God reality is what it is, on the one hand, but always more, on the other!

Schuon points out that the word "objectivity" has moral connotations, which is entirely appropriate, since it is really another way of saying "truth." To know truth we must be objective, impartial, and dispassionate, and overcome petty self-interest.

But at the same time, "subjectivity" has wrongly taken on negative connotations, as if it is a "defect" -- you know, "pay no attention to Bob's ranting, it's all subjective nonsense."

It is obviously possible for subjectivity to become imbalanced and disproportionate, but Schuon says that this ought to be called "subjectivism," just as the scientistic rationalist who pretends that reality can be stripped of the human subject ought to be called an "objectivist" (he wasn't referring to Randians).

Schuon says that ideally, "objectivity" ought to imply "conformity with the nature of things," which comes very close to the cardinal virtue of prudence, pieperly understood (more on which later). And "subjectivity" ought to convey on the one hand the idea that "the kingdom of God is within you," but also that in encountering the object world, we ought to do so with a view to interiorization and a return to our Self.

In other words, the object world is not like a flat, two-dimensional surface; rather, it has a degree of metaphysical transparency that can only be known by a human subject. It radiates not just truth, but beauty and other spiritual essences, from Subject to subject, or O --> (¶).

I am reminded of a commenter at American Digest -- I think that's where it was -- who asked why all of those Hubble photos of stars, planets, and galaxies are are so beautiful. I mean, that's the first thing you notice, isn't it? It's such a strange property to be present in a cosmos, and yet, almost a mundane observation. "Another beautiful galaxy. Whatever."

The Beauty of Woman is quite easy for the Darwinian to explain, since he can assure us that the attraction is just an illusion created by our genes in order to compel us to drag her into the nearest bush and dispatch our genes into the next generation. But this is to put the immanent ass before the transcendent horse, as if the horse's ass is the first and last word of this marvelous cosmos. Which is of course the quintessence of a backassward metaphysic.