Mrs. G. is out of town again, so it's all on me. No time to come up with a new post. Therefore, I've dug up one of the previous 1,383 posts from the arkive for a fresh re-exhumination...
Who can hope to obtain proper concepts of the present, without knowing the future? --Johann Georg Hamann
If we consider the historical form of Jesus, we see that he cannot be understood in isolation, unlike, say, Buddha or Shankara, who divulge a message of purely vertical metaphysics which stands outside time. In fact, the same could be said of the Koran, and we can see how this leads to certain inevitable problems, i.e., either the devaluation of the temporal realm (as in Buddhism), or else the attempt to cease it altogether, so that we might all live shabbily ever after in a 9th century caliphate worse than death.
But Jesus appears within a dense network of earlier truths, of which he is said to be the "fulfillment." Ultimately, as we shall see, his form is very much temporal as opposed to spatial.
As such, as I mentioned in the new testavus, apprehending his form is much more analogous to hearing a symphony, which must be listened to in its entirety before we can know what it was about. You might say that the "future" of the symphony illuminates its past, and reveals the necessity of various passages which can only be tied together and "resolved" within time. (cf. The Tristan Chord for the most extreme case.)
This is quite unique among the world's revelations, because it is so entangled with history, which means that it somehow renders history -- which would otherwise be purely horizontal -- an extension, or expression, of the vertical. You might say that at the center of Jesus' mission, as it were, is the verticalizing of the horizontal, whereas for Buddha or Shankara, it would be simply escape from the horizontal. Whereas Christianity is like a symphony in which there is a serial articulation of the whole, eastern approaches would be more like a great painting which one leaps through and follows the celestial radiation directly back to its source.
(This is not necessarily to criticize the latter, just to highlight the differences; also, the later Bodhisattva principle involves a certain horizontalizing impulse, in the sense that the liberated person forgoes the vertical for the horizontal in order to devote his life to saving the damned, those deluded souls who are marooned in the purely horizontal. Thus, the Bodhisattva is in the world, no longer of it.)
As Balthasar explains, Christ's form is embedded "within a context of events which partly condition Jesus' historical person and which are partly conditioned and prompted by it." This is a rather interesting observation, because it means that, in the Incarnation, there is a certain "random" element. In other words, if God is going to submit himself to man and cast his pearls before swine, it means going the whole hog and also submitting himself to time, to history, and even to the random element that inevitably intrudes in the herebelow.
Indeed, without submitting to this random element, one would not be truly submitting to the real conditions of mankind. As Balthasar writes in A Theology of History, "In order to become manifest, the absolute uniqueness of God, uniting itself with the humanity of Jesus, makes use of the relative uniqueness of a particular historical personality..."
This then leads to the interesting question of how one conveys intrinsic and unchanging Truth within the context of historical change? Think about it. It would be analogous to incarnating as a metaphysics professor in a liberal university, where the only truth is that truth does not exist. But that would be the one place that would be most aching for the appearance of Truth, would it not, even if it meant being crucified by the inquisitors of political correctness? Indeed, how else to teach these devils that the crucifixion of Truth is the central truth -- and therefore, lie -- of the left?
It gets even more complicated, because if we are to accept the totality of revelation, then Jesus is the Total Truth who appears in the historical context of his own "partial truths" that had to first lay the groundwork for his own reception. I see that Balthasar is on the same page with me thus far:
"A statue can be placed anywhere; a symphony can be performed in any concert hall; a poem of Goethe's can be understood and enjoyed without any knowledge of its biographical context." But the form of Jesus "cannot be detached from the place in space and time in which it stands. He is what he is only by fulfilling, on the one hand, all the promises that point to him, and, on the other, by himself making promises which he will at some time fulfill."
Again, this is a fascinating thing to contemplate. It reminds me of how you can trace your family tree back so that it looks as if you are the final cause, the meaning, the fulfillment, the "end point" of all of those previous generations.
At the same time, you could reverse the image, so that a family tree grows into the future from your single point of departure. Thus we have the image of a point in the present, with two trees growing from it, one into the past, the other into the future. Therefore, you are the cause of both your ancestors and descendants.
It is as if Jesus does the same thing, except with all of history and all of mankind. In other words, all of history leads to his "point," and then flows into the future from that point. But where is the point? Is it his birth? His life? His teachings? His resurrection? His return?
It is somehow all of these things, not to mention the fact that, once he enters history, his causal power is far from exhausted, as he continues to exert a profound effect on people and events. The "whole line of development in the history of salvation is ordered toward himself as its climax and subjected to himself as the meaning which fulfills it..."
In this regard, Jesus doesn't just give meaning to history, but somehow "is himself history," or "the living center of history itself." Again, think of how different this is from situating the center in a particular point in space, such as Mecca, or the Scientology Celebrity Centre International in Hollywood.
As I have mentioned before, Jesus is more like a vertical depth charge dropped from on high into history, which then causes a kind of temporal lao tsunami, so that the waves from the original impact continue to lap upon the shore of the present. And the waves will bear the "imprint" of the original event, just as we can trace the present background radiation to the "big bang" at the origin of the horizontal cosmos.
This is again only fitting, if "the Word becoming flesh" implies the timeless vertical becoming horizontal. For, as Balthasar explains, "To the horizontal power with which he encompasses all time and rules all space 'even to the ends of the earth,' centering world history on himself, there corresponds the vertical power with which he makes the Father visible and with which he makes present, in his witness concerning the Father, the Father's witness to him."
What a marvelous paradox! Just yesterday I was thinking how different Christianity would be if, instead of truly submitting to the world, Jesus tried to "conquer" the world, à llah Mohammed. Obviously it would no longer be Christianity, for central to it is this idea that the Word becomes flesh not to overpower the world in the horizontal sense, but to redeem it.
Mariani refers to "Christ's Great Sacrifice, the ramifications of his radical self-emptying and humility, not grasping after what was his by right, but returning everything to the Father in an act of total self-emptying, even unto a criminal's death on the cross." What a strange God! Who would ever invent such a counter-intuitive story?
For the man who is spiritually existent, who is directed upon the whole of reality, in other words, for the man who philosophizes, this question of the end of history is, quite naturally, more pressing than the question of "what actually happened." --Josef Pieper, The End of Time
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
All Science is Cosmology, All Cosmology is Theology
For the benefit of those benighted trolls who imagine that the B'ob is somehow anti-science, let me remind them that, as always, they need to stop projecting and get a life.
The fact is, any of the 31 flavors of philosophical materialism is not just an attack on religion, but on real science as well. And it is anti-science because it simply isn't true. If science is more than just an impersonal method for putting nature on the rack and getting her to talk, then this sort of naive reductionism must be abandoned.
As Jaki expresses it, "the understanding of science is in a sense the grasp of man's ability to reach beyond his own materiality, nay beyond matter" (emphasis mine). I mean, if we can't agree on this, then there is nothing we can agree on. For what kind of insane philosophy transcends matter in order to affirm that transcendence is impossible?
Lets talk about the cosmos, which no scientist will ever see, but is founded on his tacit faith in the unity of all being: "Man transcends all matter when he forms for himself a notion of the universe, or the totality of consistently interacting things, and he is assured by what is best in twentieth-century science that when he does so he is not the victim of a transcendental illusion."
Jaki's point is both subtle and yet obvious. No animal but man forms the idea of a cosmos -- which is not just everything, but a harmonious and internally related whole which is consistently lawful across all space and time. If that weren't the case, then we couldn't, for example, trace the background radiation back 13 billion years to the horizontal origin of the cosmos. Thus, "for the first time in history science has become a cosmology, a consistent discourse about the universe.... What makes scientific cosmology possible is the coherent singularity of the cosmos..." (Jaki).
In short, today, all science is cosmology, with cosmic implications. Please note how different this is from a merely logical construction of a cosmos, which is a kind of external model that is really more about man than the cosmos.
The whole point about a quantum/relativistic cosmos is that it is deeply entangled with itself in a way that defies scientistic fantasies of linearity and logical atomism. It is shot through with wholeness at every level -- which is why, by the way, there can be "whole" organisms for natural selection to operate upon, or why the billions of neuronal interactions in your head resolve into the simple whole of a stable identity. The wholeness is antecedent; it could never be a result of evolution, for evolution presupposes it.
And please bear in mind that "Since all science is cosmology, failure to make progress in cosmology meant failure to make vital advances in science" (Jaki). Again, this is why science was stillborn in every other culture: they did not posit a cosmology that could support science -- a science that then goes on to confirm its own assumptions about a transcendentally lawful and singular cosmos. (In other words, astrophysicists where quite shocked to discover that the universe really did come into being in a moment of time.)
For example, cosmology stalled in the 19th century due to its overly mechanistic and materialistic assumptions. It posited an infinite and eternal universe which it endeavored to map with a grid of Newtonian physics. The revolution in physics initiated by Einstein in 1903 was also a breakthrough in cosmology, in that it soon led to the conclusion that the cosmos was not infinite but created in time (indeed, that time came into existence with it), and not fundamentally divisible but whole -- again, a true cosmos.
The cosmos forms a whole in both space and time, vertically and horizontally. But this wholeness can only be known by a being who intrinsically mirrors this wholeness, or who carries it within:
"Just as no man can live by bread alone, no cosmologist (a term which includes all genuine scientists) can live without a [transcendental] realist notion of the universe as the totality of interacting things." And equally important, "this very same science cannot be understood without recognizing the existence of a mind able to hold within its reach the wholeness of nature and be thereby superior to it..." (Jaki).
Do you see the critical point? Schuon put it well when he said that "All knowledge is by definition knowledge of absolute Reality; which is to say that Reality is the necessary, unique and essential object of all possible knowledge. While it is true that there are kinds of knowledge which seem to have other objects, this is not insofar as they are Knowledge but insofar as they are modalities or limitations of it; and if these objects seem not to be Reality, this is so not insofar as they are objects of Knowledge, but insofar as they are modalities or limitations of the One Object, which is God seen by God."
Which is why there is no intrinsic limit to what a man may know. Please note that when science attempts to place shackles on man's intellect, it transgresses its own proper bounds, and makes an absolute statement of how absolute truth is denied man. Yes, science has limits; but that doesn't mean that the human subject does. Ironically, one of the great dangers of a "limitless science" is the limits it arbitrarily sets on what a man may know. In so doing, it does violence to man, to the cosmos, and to God. It becomes "omnisciently ignorant," as it were.
The singularity of the universe is a gigantic springboard which can propel upward anyone ready to exploit its metaphysical resilience and catch thereby a glimpse of the Ultimate and Absolute... . --Stanley Jaki
The fact is, any of the 31 flavors of philosophical materialism is not just an attack on religion, but on real science as well. And it is anti-science because it simply isn't true. If science is more than just an impersonal method for putting nature on the rack and getting her to talk, then this sort of naive reductionism must be abandoned.
As Jaki expresses it, "the understanding of science is in a sense the grasp of man's ability to reach beyond his own materiality, nay beyond matter" (emphasis mine). I mean, if we can't agree on this, then there is nothing we can agree on. For what kind of insane philosophy transcends matter in order to affirm that transcendence is impossible?
Lets talk about the cosmos, which no scientist will ever see, but is founded on his tacit faith in the unity of all being: "Man transcends all matter when he forms for himself a notion of the universe, or the totality of consistently interacting things, and he is assured by what is best in twentieth-century science that when he does so he is not the victim of a transcendental illusion."
Jaki's point is both subtle and yet obvious. No animal but man forms the idea of a cosmos -- which is not just everything, but a harmonious and internally related whole which is consistently lawful across all space and time. If that weren't the case, then we couldn't, for example, trace the background radiation back 13 billion years to the horizontal origin of the cosmos. Thus, "for the first time in history science has become a cosmology, a consistent discourse about the universe.... What makes scientific cosmology possible is the coherent singularity of the cosmos..." (Jaki).
In short, today, all science is cosmology, with cosmic implications. Please note how different this is from a merely logical construction of a cosmos, which is a kind of external model that is really more about man than the cosmos.
The whole point about a quantum/relativistic cosmos is that it is deeply entangled with itself in a way that defies scientistic fantasies of linearity and logical atomism. It is shot through with wholeness at every level -- which is why, by the way, there can be "whole" organisms for natural selection to operate upon, or why the billions of neuronal interactions in your head resolve into the simple whole of a stable identity. The wholeness is antecedent; it could never be a result of evolution, for evolution presupposes it.
And please bear in mind that "Since all science is cosmology, failure to make progress in cosmology meant failure to make vital advances in science" (Jaki). Again, this is why science was stillborn in every other culture: they did not posit a cosmology that could support science -- a science that then goes on to confirm its own assumptions about a transcendentally lawful and singular cosmos. (In other words, astrophysicists where quite shocked to discover that the universe really did come into being in a moment of time.)
For example, cosmology stalled in the 19th century due to its overly mechanistic and materialistic assumptions. It posited an infinite and eternal universe which it endeavored to map with a grid of Newtonian physics. The revolution in physics initiated by Einstein in 1903 was also a breakthrough in cosmology, in that it soon led to the conclusion that the cosmos was not infinite but created in time (indeed, that time came into existence with it), and not fundamentally divisible but whole -- again, a true cosmos.
The cosmos forms a whole in both space and time, vertically and horizontally. But this wholeness can only be known by a being who intrinsically mirrors this wholeness, or who carries it within:
"Just as no man can live by bread alone, no cosmologist (a term which includes all genuine scientists) can live without a [transcendental] realist notion of the universe as the totality of interacting things." And equally important, "this very same science cannot be understood without recognizing the existence of a mind able to hold within its reach the wholeness of nature and be thereby superior to it..." (Jaki).
Do you see the critical point? Schuon put it well when he said that "All knowledge is by definition knowledge of absolute Reality; which is to say that Reality is the necessary, unique and essential object of all possible knowledge. While it is true that there are kinds of knowledge which seem to have other objects, this is not insofar as they are Knowledge but insofar as they are modalities or limitations of it; and if these objects seem not to be Reality, this is so not insofar as they are objects of Knowledge, but insofar as they are modalities or limitations of the One Object, which is God seen by God."
Which is why there is no intrinsic limit to what a man may know. Please note that when science attempts to place shackles on man's intellect, it transgresses its own proper bounds, and makes an absolute statement of how absolute truth is denied man. Yes, science has limits; but that doesn't mean that the human subject does. Ironically, one of the great dangers of a "limitless science" is the limits it arbitrarily sets on what a man may know. In so doing, it does violence to man, to the cosmos, and to God. It becomes "omnisciently ignorant," as it were.
The singularity of the universe is a gigantic springboard which can propel upward anyone ready to exploit its metaphysical resilience and catch thereby a glimpse of the Ultimate and Absolute... . --Stanley Jaki
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
What Must the World Be Like In Order that Man May Know It?
We begin with two questions; or really, one question put two ways: "What must nature, including man, be like in order that science be possible at all?" (Kuhn). More simply, "What must the world be like in order that man may know it?" (Jaki).
There are two kinds of people: the great majority of those who don't find these to be interesting questions; and a vanishingly small number of orthodox Raccoons who suspect that they hold the key to everything. As I've mentioned on a number of occasions, I am much more fascinated by how scientific knowledge is possible at all, rather than this or that scientific finding. And I am interested in two ways, one horizontal, the other vertical.
The horizontal has to do with how all of our diverse scientific knowledge fits together, say physics with biology, or neurobiology with developmental psychoanalysis.
As I mentioned in the Coonifesto, the cosmos doesn't brood over the mystery of how it is possible for matter to suddenly come alive, or how an erstwhile (mere) animal is able to begin hosting truth, beauty, and virtue. These things happen quite spontaneously, even if science not only cannot account for them, but has no idea how any strictly scientific theory ever could account for them (that is, without violently reducing them to something they are not). They don't even yet have a decent paradigm for a preliminary theory for a tentative hypothesis.
In other words, materialists don't even know how it would be possible to know these things, because knowing of any kind reverts back to question #2 above: what must the cosmos itself be like in order that man may know it? And their kneejerk strategy of reductionism or materialism results in a cosmos that cannot be known, period.
Yes, such a world can be perceived, but there would be no reason to believe that these perceptions correspond to the thing called "reality." In this approach, Kant would be absolutely correct: that there are the phenomena available to our species-bound ways of perceiving the world; and there is the noumenon, about which we can say precisely nothing.
In the Kantian view -- and I don't see how it is possible for the profane thinker to extricate himself from Kant's bifurcation -- there is reality and there is human thought, and never the twain shall meet; or, if they do occasionally meet, we would have no way of confirming it. How did Whitehead put it, Jeeves? "The present is all that you have; and unless in this present you can find general principles which interpret the present as including a representation of the whole community of existents, you cannot move a step beyond your little patch of immediacy."
No, not that one.
"No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which it tacitly presupposes.... We habitually speak of stones, and planets, and animals, as though each individual thing could exist, even for a passing moment, in separation from the environment which is in truth a necessary factor in its own nature."
No, the other one -- you know, that crack about how the naive and unexamined metaphysics of science ends up with conjecture on one side and a dream on the other. So science ends in a kind of absurcular and tautologous dream interpretation -- for example, who survives? The fittest! Who are the fittest? Those that survive! Or, what is man? An animal! What is an animal? A concatenation of random accidents adapted to its environment! And just what can a random accident know of reality? Nothing! How do you know that? Shut up, creationist!
Speaking of which, I just don't believe that such a beautiful girl could result from random copying errors:
Can I prove this? Yes, certainly to my satisfaction. If Darwin is correct, animals are selected only for their adaptive fitness. If they possess this thing we call "beauty," it would only be a kind of optical illusion designed to get us to copulate. Now, I love my dog, but...
Sure, I can understand why the bee would convince itself that flowers are beautiful. But damned if I can understand why people think they are. And it's not just flowers. Rather, why is there so much beauty everywhere? Not just visual beauty, but aural beauty, poetic beauty, moral beauty, mathematical beauty. And why can beauty sometimes move a man to tears? What's that all about?
What must the world be like that man may weep tears of joy and gratitude over its celestial truth radiant beauty?
Here is the Christian answer, as expressed by Jaki: "the world [is] an objective and orderly entity investigable by the mind because the mind too [is] an orderly and objective product of the same rational, that is, perfectly consistent, Creator." This is why the Raccoon not only has no problem with science, but with art or religion either.
Note, for example, that the consistent Darwinian must reduce art to something less than it is -- as just another meaningless trick of the nervous system, with no bearing on transcendental or objective beauty, much less truth. Such an impoverished philosophy is not even interesting, let alone true. Like the epicycles of the pre-Copernican solar system, it saves the appearances of the theory, but at the cost of absurdity.
Or, like "climate science," no one could believe it except for someone who already believes it. Such science doesn't really "evolve"; rather, it merely comes up with more elaborate and tendentious schemes to patch up its holes and prop it up. Call it "Weekend at Bernie's" science. Just ignore that bloated and stinking corpseman over there at the IPCC.
The irony is that the same people who fundamentally eroded our trust in the mind's ability to know reality, are the ones who arrogantly insist that they are not only right, but cannot possibly be wrong. Again, from whence comes this misplaced faith in sham absolutes such as ideological Darwinism? For if Darwinism is the last word on man, it would call for the most abject humility about making absolute pronouncements of any kind whatsoever.
The humble theist knows that he is not worthy of the sublime truth that uniquely elevates him to cosmic worthiness. But the grandiose ideological Darwinian somehow believes that he is uniquely worthy of a universal truth that renders man unworthy of any truth at all. Strange.
There are two kinds of people: the great majority of those who don't find these to be interesting questions; and a vanishingly small number of orthodox Raccoons who suspect that they hold the key to everything. As I've mentioned on a number of occasions, I am much more fascinated by how scientific knowledge is possible at all, rather than this or that scientific finding. And I am interested in two ways, one horizontal, the other vertical.
The horizontal has to do with how all of our diverse scientific knowledge fits together, say physics with biology, or neurobiology with developmental psychoanalysis.
As I mentioned in the Coonifesto, the cosmos doesn't brood over the mystery of how it is possible for matter to suddenly come alive, or how an erstwhile (mere) animal is able to begin hosting truth, beauty, and virtue. These things happen quite spontaneously, even if science not only cannot account for them, but has no idea how any strictly scientific theory ever could account for them (that is, without violently reducing them to something they are not). They don't even yet have a decent paradigm for a preliminary theory for a tentative hypothesis.
In other words, materialists don't even know how it would be possible to know these things, because knowing of any kind reverts back to question #2 above: what must the cosmos itself be like in order that man may know it? And their kneejerk strategy of reductionism or materialism results in a cosmos that cannot be known, period.
Yes, such a world can be perceived, but there would be no reason to believe that these perceptions correspond to the thing called "reality." In this approach, Kant would be absolutely correct: that there are the phenomena available to our species-bound ways of perceiving the world; and there is the noumenon, about which we can say precisely nothing.
In the Kantian view -- and I don't see how it is possible for the profane thinker to extricate himself from Kant's bifurcation -- there is reality and there is human thought, and never the twain shall meet; or, if they do occasionally meet, we would have no way of confirming it. How did Whitehead put it, Jeeves? "The present is all that you have; and unless in this present you can find general principles which interpret the present as including a representation of the whole community of existents, you cannot move a step beyond your little patch of immediacy."
No, not that one.
"No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which it tacitly presupposes.... We habitually speak of stones, and planets, and animals, as though each individual thing could exist, even for a passing moment, in separation from the environment which is in truth a necessary factor in its own nature."
No, the other one -- you know, that crack about how the naive and unexamined metaphysics of science ends up with conjecture on one side and a dream on the other. So science ends in a kind of absurcular and tautologous dream interpretation -- for example, who survives? The fittest! Who are the fittest? Those that survive! Or, what is man? An animal! What is an animal? A concatenation of random accidents adapted to its environment! And just what can a random accident know of reality? Nothing! How do you know that? Shut up, creationist!
Speaking of which, I just don't believe that such a beautiful girl could result from random copying errors:
Can I prove this? Yes, certainly to my satisfaction. If Darwin is correct, animals are selected only for their adaptive fitness. If they possess this thing we call "beauty," it would only be a kind of optical illusion designed to get us to copulate. Now, I love my dog, but...
Sure, I can understand why the bee would convince itself that flowers are beautiful. But damned if I can understand why people think they are. And it's not just flowers. Rather, why is there so much beauty everywhere? Not just visual beauty, but aural beauty, poetic beauty, moral beauty, mathematical beauty. And why can beauty sometimes move a man to tears? What's that all about?
What must the world be like that man may weep tears of joy and gratitude over its celestial truth radiant beauty?
Here is the Christian answer, as expressed by Jaki: "the world [is] an objective and orderly entity investigable by the mind because the mind too [is] an orderly and objective product of the same rational, that is, perfectly consistent, Creator." This is why the Raccoon not only has no problem with science, but with art or religion either.
Note, for example, that the consistent Darwinian must reduce art to something less than it is -- as just another meaningless trick of the nervous system, with no bearing on transcendental or objective beauty, much less truth. Such an impoverished philosophy is not even interesting, let alone true. Like the epicycles of the pre-Copernican solar system, it saves the appearances of the theory, but at the cost of absurdity.
Or, like "climate science," no one could believe it except for someone who already believes it. Such science doesn't really "evolve"; rather, it merely comes up with more elaborate and tendentious schemes to patch up its holes and prop it up. Call it "Weekend at Bernie's" science. Just ignore that bloated and stinking corpseman over there at the IPCC.
The irony is that the same people who fundamentally eroded our trust in the mind's ability to know reality, are the ones who arrogantly insist that they are not only right, but cannot possibly be wrong. Again, from whence comes this misplaced faith in sham absolutes such as ideological Darwinism? For if Darwinism is the last word on man, it would call for the most abject humility about making absolute pronouncements of any kind whatsoever.
The humble theist knows that he is not worthy of the sublime truth that uniquely elevates him to cosmic worthiness. But the grandiose ideological Darwinian somehow believes that he is uniquely worthy of a universal truth that renders man unworthy of any truth at all. Strange.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Secular Subhumanists and the Ravages of Reductionism
Ravage: to wreak havoc on; visit destructively and often violently; to commit destructive actions
I suppose one of my main themes is the violence done to man as a result of any ideology that regards him as less than Man. Ideological Darwinism, for example (the strict science notwithstanding), is a philosophical non-starter, since it reduces man to an animal pure and simple. There isn't, nor can there be, anything "special" about man, except perhaps his delusional ability to convince himself that he is something other than an ape with a few additional tricks for survival.
But these traits can have no intrinsic "value," being that value is one of the primary delusions of this human ape. Nor can there be any fixed "human nature" or essence, since man, like everything else in the biosphere, is just a temporary resting spot for genes that are relentlessly changing. Obviously, nothing can be "permanent" in such a view, since every species is by definition "transitional." Which is why the Darwinian worldview is so seriously fluxed up.
Likewise, scientism wreaks havoc on the human qua human, since it goes even further, reducing his animality to mere matter. Marxism too -- and all ideologies that flow from Marxism -- reduces man to a passive subject of forces that both control and define him, whether race, class, gender, or sexual preference.
But to define a man in terms of one of these categories is to rob him of his manhood, which is to say, his individuality (or uniqueness) and his nobility and dignity (or his intrinsic worth). For example, instead of defining Obama as "the first black president," it's actually less of an insult to regard him as the most recent idiot president, since one can at least be a unique idiot. But to insist that his race is important is to limit him by a category that is irrelevant to human essence. Or, to put it another way, Obama's race is not a statement about him, only about how most Americans couldn't care less what race their president is.
Each person is unique -- or at least potentially so -- which makes any reductionistic theory of man a kind of metaphysical straitjacket. Now, can man be described in the abstract? Of course. This is why, for example, modern medicine works. But even then, there are many people who, for reasons unknown, react quite differently to the identical medication. This is especially true in psychiatry, where for one person a medication can be a magic bullet, while it just makes another person feel sick.
And man is surely a social animal, but his social-ism must always be understood in the greater context of his individual-ism. In other words, the purpose of the collective is to facilitate human development. Conversely, the purpose of individualism cannot to be to subordinate it to the collective, as happens in primitive groups (in both their premodern and postmodern varieties, or untenured and tenured, respectively).
A truly human science describes man as he is, on his own level, as opposed to eliminating that level through reduction. The irony is that people who call themselves "humanists" are generally the worst offenders, since their philosophy rejects the transcendent categories that define our humanness. These categories are located "above" (vertically speaking), not below. Which is why there can be no true humanism in the absence of religion, otherwise humanism quickly reduces to animalism or worse (eg., quantity). In other words, if the human is not constrained from above, he will be defined from below. He is a person, not (only) an animal and not a number.
This is the reason, by the way, that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." No, they don't cause the sun to rise or the seasons to change. But the poet does cast science in human terms. Or as commenter Frank P. says, "It was not science that described this delightful example of Universal structure and its implications; it was the poet and his art. The scientist merely exposed it, with the aid of the mechanic and the technician. We can trust the poet. The question that you perhaps pose, though, is which employs the most guile to enlighten (or deceive) the innocent and ignorant? The answer -- I suppose -- depends on which scientist and which poet."
Precisely. Which is why some poems are magic bullets, while others can be deceptive or even toxic: all those lousy little poets coming round tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson or Al Gore. (Apologies to Leonard Cohen.)
As Schuon -- in my view a quintessential humanist in the proper sense of the word -- expressed it, "There is a great deal of talk these days about 'humanism,' talk which forgets that once man abandons his prerogatives to matter, to machines, to quantitative knowledge, he ceases to be truly 'human.'"
Schuon always treats the human as human. But in our day, the word humanism "constitutes a curious abuse of language in view of the fact that it expresses a notion that is contrary to the integrally human, hence to the human properly so called: indeed, nothing is more fundamentally inhuman than the 'purely human,' the illusion of constructing a perfect man starting from the individual and terrestrial; whereas the human in the ideal sense draws its reason for existence and its entire content from that which transcends the individual and the earthly."
Again, our essence defines us from above, not below. Likewise, genuine freedom can only find its source above -- which is why the libertarian who vaunts freedom in the absence of transcendence simply falls into a kind of license that, because it has no constraints, cannot be free in any meaningful sense. Yes, if you were lost somewhere in the wilderness, you would be "free." But this is like saying that a baby is a genius because he is completely free of untruths.
And as we were saying yesterday, since man cannot live without the Absolute, secular humanism ends up being "the reign of horizontality, either naïve or perfidious; and since it is also -- and by that very fact -- the negation of the Absolute, it is a door open to a multitude of sham absolutes, which in addition are often negative, subversive, and destructive."
So, just as the leftist dreams of a system so perfect that no one would need to be good, the reductionist -- the Darwinian, the materialist, the logical positivist -- dreams of one in which no one would need to be intelligent or creative. In short, he dreams of a system that eliminates man.
I suppose one of my main themes is the violence done to man as a result of any ideology that regards him as less than Man. Ideological Darwinism, for example (the strict science notwithstanding), is a philosophical non-starter, since it reduces man to an animal pure and simple. There isn't, nor can there be, anything "special" about man, except perhaps his delusional ability to convince himself that he is something other than an ape with a few additional tricks for survival.
But these traits can have no intrinsic "value," being that value is one of the primary delusions of this human ape. Nor can there be any fixed "human nature" or essence, since man, like everything else in the biosphere, is just a temporary resting spot for genes that are relentlessly changing. Obviously, nothing can be "permanent" in such a view, since every species is by definition "transitional." Which is why the Darwinian worldview is so seriously fluxed up.
Likewise, scientism wreaks havoc on the human qua human, since it goes even further, reducing his animality to mere matter. Marxism too -- and all ideologies that flow from Marxism -- reduces man to a passive subject of forces that both control and define him, whether race, class, gender, or sexual preference.
But to define a man in terms of one of these categories is to rob him of his manhood, which is to say, his individuality (or uniqueness) and his nobility and dignity (or his intrinsic worth). For example, instead of defining Obama as "the first black president," it's actually less of an insult to regard him as the most recent idiot president, since one can at least be a unique idiot. But to insist that his race is important is to limit him by a category that is irrelevant to human essence. Or, to put it another way, Obama's race is not a statement about him, only about how most Americans couldn't care less what race their president is.
Each person is unique -- or at least potentially so -- which makes any reductionistic theory of man a kind of metaphysical straitjacket. Now, can man be described in the abstract? Of course. This is why, for example, modern medicine works. But even then, there are many people who, for reasons unknown, react quite differently to the identical medication. This is especially true in psychiatry, where for one person a medication can be a magic bullet, while it just makes another person feel sick.
And man is surely a social animal, but his social-ism must always be understood in the greater context of his individual-ism. In other words, the purpose of the collective is to facilitate human development. Conversely, the purpose of individualism cannot to be to subordinate it to the collective, as happens in primitive groups (in both their premodern and postmodern varieties, or untenured and tenured, respectively).
A truly human science describes man as he is, on his own level, as opposed to eliminating that level through reduction. The irony is that people who call themselves "humanists" are generally the worst offenders, since their philosophy rejects the transcendent categories that define our humanness. These categories are located "above" (vertically speaking), not below. Which is why there can be no true humanism in the absence of religion, otherwise humanism quickly reduces to animalism or worse (eg., quantity). In other words, if the human is not constrained from above, he will be defined from below. He is a person, not (only) an animal and not a number.
This is the reason, by the way, that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." No, they don't cause the sun to rise or the seasons to change. But the poet does cast science in human terms. Or as commenter Frank P. says, "It was not science that described this delightful example of Universal structure and its implications; it was the poet and his art. The scientist merely exposed it, with the aid of the mechanic and the technician. We can trust the poet. The question that you perhaps pose, though, is which employs the most guile to enlighten (or deceive) the innocent and ignorant? The answer -- I suppose -- depends on which scientist and which poet."
Precisely. Which is why some poems are magic bullets, while others can be deceptive or even toxic: all those lousy little poets coming round tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson or Al Gore. (Apologies to Leonard Cohen.)
As Schuon -- in my view a quintessential humanist in the proper sense of the word -- expressed it, "There is a great deal of talk these days about 'humanism,' talk which forgets that once man abandons his prerogatives to matter, to machines, to quantitative knowledge, he ceases to be truly 'human.'"
Schuon always treats the human as human. But in our day, the word humanism "constitutes a curious abuse of language in view of the fact that it expresses a notion that is contrary to the integrally human, hence to the human properly so called: indeed, nothing is more fundamentally inhuman than the 'purely human,' the illusion of constructing a perfect man starting from the individual and terrestrial; whereas the human in the ideal sense draws its reason for existence and its entire content from that which transcends the individual and the earthly."
Again, our essence defines us from above, not below. Likewise, genuine freedom can only find its source above -- which is why the libertarian who vaunts freedom in the absence of transcendence simply falls into a kind of license that, because it has no constraints, cannot be free in any meaningful sense. Yes, if you were lost somewhere in the wilderness, you would be "free." But this is like saying that a baby is a genius because he is completely free of untruths.
And as we were saying yesterday, since man cannot live without the Absolute, secular humanism ends up being "the reign of horizontality, either naïve or perfidious; and since it is also -- and by that very fact -- the negation of the Absolute, it is a door open to a multitude of sham absolutes, which in addition are often negative, subversive, and destructive."
So, just as the leftist dreams of a system so perfect that no one would need to be good, the reductionist -- the Darwinian, the materialist, the logical positivist -- dreams of one in which no one would need to be intelligent or creative. In short, he dreams of a system that eliminates man.
Monday, February 15, 2010
The New Science of Quantum Booty!
Back to The Road of Science and the Ways to God, which, happily for us, just so happen to converge. In fact, "converge" isn't quite right, being that they can never really diverge to begin with. Again, truth is Truth and man uniquely knows it -- but only in a logoistic and theocentric cosmos. Only in a cosmos that is one because under God.
Jaki next gets into some of the epistemological problems that arose as a result of modern physics, which in turn created a gaping hole for anti-science, anti-Christian, and anti-Western a-holes such as Deepak to jump in. In short, inexact measurement was taken for inexact causation, so that epistemology was conflated with ontology.
We are speaking of course of quantum indeterminacy, which Jaki is at pains to emphasize does not mean what the Deepaks of the world think it means: that we create reality by observing it, i.e., that observation causes the collapse of the wave function. But don't tell that to all those new-age publishers and their shelves of Quantum Whatever books!
Think I'm exaggerating? I'll just put the word "quantum" into the amazon search engine and see what comes up: Quantum Leadership, Quantum Wellness, Quantum Wellness Cleanse, Quantum Success, Quantum Prophecy, 5 Steps to a Quantum Life: How to Use the Astounding Secrets of Quantum Physics to Create the Life You Want, The Quantum Doctor: A Physicist's Guide to Health and Healing, Supercharging Quantum Touch, The Quantum Book of Living, Dying, Reincarnation and Immortality, etc.
Anybody care to wager that if I search for Quantum Sex right now -- in a manner of speaking -- I won't find it? Hmm?
Here it is: chapter 4.6, Cosmic Energy & Quantum Sex, right there among Love My Yoni, Love Myself, Eve's Secrets and Vagina 101, and -- of course -- The Post-Menopausal Challenge of the New Millennium.
So, how did we get to this point, where cutting edge science is misunderstood and reinterpreted as a new religion in exchange for cash and other valuable prizes, whether it is the misosophy of ideological Darwinism, the tautology of Climate Change, or the endless Quest for Quantum Booty? Yes, yes, Chesterton's Law is binding -- that those who spurn religion don't believe in nothing but in anything. But why is that? Why does the law apply with such rigid necessity?
Well, first of all, since man is in the image of the Creator, he cannot live or think without the Absolute. He might fool himself into believing he can, but the only people who really do so are the severely mentally ill. If you want to see what human life would be like with no absolutes, just visit an insane asylum such as Camarillo Mental Hospital, where I did my doctoral internship. Yes, I realize that it has since then been converted into a California State University college campus. That's my point.
For the whole idea of the "uni-versity" was founded upon the implicit idea of universal and integral knowledge -- which is a bit of a tautology, for any genuine knowledge, if it isn't just opinion, should share in the characteristics of universality, timelessness, objectivity, and absoluteness. If it doesn't share -- or at least aspire to -- these traits, then it can't be knowledge. Seriously, why would you spend upwards of $100,000 to get the opinions of a bunch of people who have never even seen the real world? If that's what you want, you can read the New York Times editorial page for free.
For if the above referenced traits -- timelessness, objectivity, et al -- are not "real," then no knowledge is possible. Which is just the way the left likes it, for if there is no truth then there is only muscle. And if there is only muscle, then there is just the one truth imposed by the left. And instead of a cerebral leader, we end up with a medullard like Obama.
Now, in order to convert bad science (or good science misconstrued) into a religion, two things are necessary. First, instead of pointing toward the Absolute, it must be the Absolute. And then the science of the day must be imagined to be the last word, the ultimate phase, or last chapter of its development. We laugh at people who did this in the past. Why don't we laugh at people who do it today?
Oh wait. We do. Charles Johnson.
The irony is that the same people who, say, criticize the Church for opposing Galileo are the new secular churchmen who are threatened by opposition to their sacred ideology. Thus, if you question the dogma of global warming, you are in league with satan, i.e. Big Oil, who is paying you to say those evil things. Or, if you point out the undeniable holes in radical Darwinism, you are secretly in league with medieval Creationists. No need to actually engage the arguments. Just break out the kindling and matches.
For when radical secularists horizontalize the vertical, nature becomes their new absolute. The real Absolute is, of course Infinite. So what happens to the soul who convinces himself that he has reached the end of his absolute -- who really believes, for example, that Darwinism presents the last word on human existence? A spiritual crisis, really, for one gains a false absolute at the cost of one's very soul.
As Jaki puts it, "To be in sight of the end can easily provoke a peculiar feeling, especially in moderns who [have] replaced God, the infinite, with an endless search in an allegedly infinite universe, and who had grown accustomed to setting a higher value on the search for truth than on the possession of truth itself."
For to finally possess the "absolute truth" of reductionistic Darwinism is to possess something that is quite worthless (that is if Darwinism is true). In other words, the central truth of Darwinism is that everything in the biosphere, from the single cell to the human neocortex, is just a result of random copying errors. You end up holding an opinion that crumbles in your hands into a bunch of selfish genes that can never know their own truth.
I say, if you can believe that, then truly, you can believe anything. Yes, there is a real quantum -- several actually -- and they can never, ever be bridged from the bottom up. These are the infinite ontological discontinuities between matter and life, life and mind, mind and spirit, and spirit and God. To reverse the vector flow of this timeless emanation and involution is to dig oneself an ontological hole which can only end on the other side of reality.
But that's okay. As Chief Wiggum said when the Simpsons fell into that giant sinkhole, "they're China's problem now."
***
More on Deepak's Quantum Bullshit.
Jaki next gets into some of the epistemological problems that arose as a result of modern physics, which in turn created a gaping hole for anti-science, anti-Christian, and anti-Western a-holes such as Deepak to jump in. In short, inexact measurement was taken for inexact causation, so that epistemology was conflated with ontology.
We are speaking of course of quantum indeterminacy, which Jaki is at pains to emphasize does not mean what the Deepaks of the world think it means: that we create reality by observing it, i.e., that observation causes the collapse of the wave function. But don't tell that to all those new-age publishers and their shelves of Quantum Whatever books!
Think I'm exaggerating? I'll just put the word "quantum" into the amazon search engine and see what comes up: Quantum Leadership, Quantum Wellness, Quantum Wellness Cleanse, Quantum Success, Quantum Prophecy, 5 Steps to a Quantum Life: How to Use the Astounding Secrets of Quantum Physics to Create the Life You Want, The Quantum Doctor: A Physicist's Guide to Health and Healing, Supercharging Quantum Touch, The Quantum Book of Living, Dying, Reincarnation and Immortality, etc.
Anybody care to wager that if I search for Quantum Sex right now -- in a manner of speaking -- I won't find it? Hmm?
Here it is: chapter 4.6, Cosmic Energy & Quantum Sex, right there among Love My Yoni, Love Myself, Eve's Secrets and Vagina 101, and -- of course -- The Post-Menopausal Challenge of the New Millennium.
So, how did we get to this point, where cutting edge science is misunderstood and reinterpreted as a new religion in exchange for cash and other valuable prizes, whether it is the misosophy of ideological Darwinism, the tautology of Climate Change, or the endless Quest for Quantum Booty? Yes, yes, Chesterton's Law is binding -- that those who spurn religion don't believe in nothing but in anything. But why is that? Why does the law apply with such rigid necessity?
Well, first of all, since man is in the image of the Creator, he cannot live or think without the Absolute. He might fool himself into believing he can, but the only people who really do so are the severely mentally ill. If you want to see what human life would be like with no absolutes, just visit an insane asylum such as Camarillo Mental Hospital, where I did my doctoral internship. Yes, I realize that it has since then been converted into a California State University college campus. That's my point.
For the whole idea of the "uni-versity" was founded upon the implicit idea of universal and integral knowledge -- which is a bit of a tautology, for any genuine knowledge, if it isn't just opinion, should share in the characteristics of universality, timelessness, objectivity, and absoluteness. If it doesn't share -- or at least aspire to -- these traits, then it can't be knowledge. Seriously, why would you spend upwards of $100,000 to get the opinions of a bunch of people who have never even seen the real world? If that's what you want, you can read the New York Times editorial page for free.
For if the above referenced traits -- timelessness, objectivity, et al -- are not "real," then no knowledge is possible. Which is just the way the left likes it, for if there is no truth then there is only muscle. And if there is only muscle, then there is just the one truth imposed by the left. And instead of a cerebral leader, we end up with a medullard like Obama.
Now, in order to convert bad science (or good science misconstrued) into a religion, two things are necessary. First, instead of pointing toward the Absolute, it must be the Absolute. And then the science of the day must be imagined to be the last word, the ultimate phase, or last chapter of its development. We laugh at people who did this in the past. Why don't we laugh at people who do it today?
Oh wait. We do. Charles Johnson.
The irony is that the same people who, say, criticize the Church for opposing Galileo are the new secular churchmen who are threatened by opposition to their sacred ideology. Thus, if you question the dogma of global warming, you are in league with satan, i.e. Big Oil, who is paying you to say those evil things. Or, if you point out the undeniable holes in radical Darwinism, you are secretly in league with medieval Creationists. No need to actually engage the arguments. Just break out the kindling and matches.
For when radical secularists horizontalize the vertical, nature becomes their new absolute. The real Absolute is, of course Infinite. So what happens to the soul who convinces himself that he has reached the end of his absolute -- who really believes, for example, that Darwinism presents the last word on human existence? A spiritual crisis, really, for one gains a false absolute at the cost of one's very soul.
As Jaki puts it, "To be in sight of the end can easily provoke a peculiar feeling, especially in moderns who [have] replaced God, the infinite, with an endless search in an allegedly infinite universe, and who had grown accustomed to setting a higher value on the search for truth than on the possession of truth itself."
For to finally possess the "absolute truth" of reductionistic Darwinism is to possess something that is quite worthless (that is if Darwinism is true). In other words, the central truth of Darwinism is that everything in the biosphere, from the single cell to the human neocortex, is just a result of random copying errors. You end up holding an opinion that crumbles in your hands into a bunch of selfish genes that can never know their own truth.
I say, if you can believe that, then truly, you can believe anything. Yes, there is a real quantum -- several actually -- and they can never, ever be bridged from the bottom up. These are the infinite ontological discontinuities between matter and life, life and mind, mind and spirit, and spirit and God. To reverse the vector flow of this timeless emanation and involution is to dig oneself an ontological hole which can only end on the other side of reality.
But that's okay. As Chief Wiggum said when the Simpsons fell into that giant sinkhole, "they're China's problem now."
***
More on Deepak's Quantum Bullshit.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Theme Song
