Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Memo to Credentialed Imbeciles: What You Know Is Who You Are

Or in other words, knowledge is constrained -- or liberated -- by being. This runs counter to the implicit cartesian metaphysic of the conspiracy, which starts by severing knowledge from being, and then superimposing the former on the latter, thus reducing our hyperspatial cosmic pneumagraph to a simplistic two-dimensional map they call a "college degree."

Then, What Is is conflated with what can unambiguously be said about it, such that quantity is elevated over quality and the interior horizon is squeezed out of the equation entirely.

The result is the sprawling but tedious ignorantia of the conspiracy -- the Kognitive Kansas of the left -- which permits any movement except up. Importantly, it not only permits downward flight, but truly requires it, as anyone who has attended college can verify: the only way out is down.

Indeed, being that tenured excrement obeys the law of gravity, coprophagia was hardly invented by Michelle Obama, but has long been on the menu at any public school. I even see it in my son's private Catholic school, but that shouldn't be surprising either, exhibit A being the pontiff himself.

According to Cheetham, Corbin "begins with a sweeping claim," but Corbin and I own the same broom. The claim is that -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- the "mode of presence" of the person defines and limits of what is potentially present to the person.

This means that in order to know something -- say, about God -- you first have to show up. Sounds reasonable, but we all know people who deny the existence of God but refuse to consult the map.

Corbin expresses it in a needlessly convoluted manner, for if you can't formulate Truth in such a way that a bright middle schooler can grasp it, the fault is yours: "being-there is essentially to be enacting a presence, enactment of that presence by which and for which meaning is revealed in the present. The modality of this human presence is thus to be revelatory, but in such a way that, in revealing the meaning, it reveals itself, and that which is revealed."

Sigh. What he really means to say is that meaning arises in the space between two presences, ours and God's. Meaning also arises in the horizontal, but only because it is a prolongation of the prior vertical relation. Deny the vertical and no meaning of any kind is possible.

It is a matter of cosmic orthodoxy that the cosmos itself is the "first revelation" of its Creator. However, this revelation is always in a complementary relation to our human presence. Thus -- and you could insert Polanyi's whole corpus here -- our world (including the scientific world) is always on the way to a deeper iteration of itself.

Have you gnosissed that the literal factsimians who stare vacantly at the world in a scientistic manner do the same thing -- and can't help doing the same thing -- with scripture? Scientism can't even touch the world, let alone its creator.

The wholeness of reality -- or of being -- is an antecedent and generally implicit experience. It cannot be deduced, nor can one add up the parts and call it a cosmos. Rather, our logocentric cosmos is prior to anything we can say about it, otherwise we couldn't say anything about anything, for words come from Word (as life from Life, mind from Mind, slack from Slack, etc.).

As Schindler describes it, this primordial experience "must be seen as open from the roots to the whole of reality, in terms not merely of the sum of things..., but also of the integrated relation among things that establishes them as an ordered whole and hence as a cosmos."

A key point is that "any essential aspect of experience that is ignored or left unaccounted for at the outset cannot simply be added later without risk of diminishing reality" (emphasis mine).

This is quintessentially true of the cartesianism that pushed modernity out of the starting gate. You can't bloody well begin by severing knowing from being and then hope to get them back together at the end. That's... imbecilic.

Looked at from our privileged vertical perch in Upper Tonga, we can see that postmodernity is an inevitable complication of modernity. Take the first step down that fork and you can stick it into yourself, because you're done.

Or in other words, if you do that, then you are an imbecile. Indeed, according to Georges Bernanos -- whom Dupree doesn't know but wants to have a playdate with -- "the intellectual is so frequently an imbecile that we should always take him to be such until he has proved to us the contrary."

This all-too-common type of tenured dweeb or hired pundit is "particularly at home in the modern world of technology and numbers," because "in such a world he can climb to a very high position without giving away his half-culture." He is "informed about everything and hence condemned to understand nothing."

You could say that these imbeciles are the very incarnation of discarnation, which is to say, abstract and desiccated (k) without the real presence of (n).

17 comments:

Van Harvey said...

[Insert first three paragraphs here]

YES, YES, YES... YES, YES, YES... YES, YES, YES...

Did I mention " Yes! " ?

Van Harvey said...

"This is quintessentially true of the cartesianism that pushed modernity out of the starting gate. You can't bloody well begin by severing knowing from being and then hope to get them back together at the end. That's... imbecilic.

Looked at from our privileged vertical perch in Upper Tonga, we can see that postmodernity is an inevitable complication of modernity. Take the first step down that fork and you can stick it into yourself, because you're done."

Yes!... but I rePetey myself.

julie said...

I even see it in my son's private Catholic school, but that shouldn't be surprising either, exhibit A being the pontiff himself.

Luckily, the public school here is pretty good, but we briefly considered Catholic or generally Christian private school. Ruled it out for now because it seems the Catholic schools peddle much of the same old BS, but since they're part of the Church there's a level of Authority which makes it more difficult. A secular teacher is just a person. So, of course, is a Christian teacher, but she may genuinely believe she's serving God when she serves the State, and there's the rub...

julie said...

I like that Georges Bernanos quote. Almost Don Colacho-esque.

Gagdad Bob said...

The other day in class the daughter of a famous conservative-hating actress informed the teacher that my son doesn't believe in global warming. As Prager always says, people who don't recognize real evil just end up identifying other things as evil.

julie said...

Poor T. He'll never have a future as an actor if he's already been outed as a climate denier.

The real question, though, is how did his teacher react? Live and let live, or try to nudge him to agree that humans are destroying the planet?

Gagdad Bob said...

She just let it go. It's not as if he was pointing his finger in the shape of a gun, or eating junk food.

mushroom said...

Van has summed it up nicely.

After JPII and Benedict, Francis is like trying to run on E-85. That we have gone from Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul to Obama, Cameron, and Francis, pretty much convinces me all the world is a stooge.

Gagdad Bob said...

Meanwhile, it will soon be a crime to try to help a child with unwanted homosexual impulses.

Gagdad Bob said...

The good news: the left has no problem with homosexual priests so long as their adolescent victims consent to it.

julie said...

"...efforts to change one’s sexual orientation are wrong and harmful."

Oh? So it would be "wrong and harmful," for instance, for women's studies professors to tell their female students they should all become lesbians? Do tell...

Tony said...

My son A is like T in being a calm voice of reason in his classes.

Yes, maybe there may be a slight warming trend, but it's extremely difficult to determine this accurately, and there has been no warming for at least 18 years, which IPCC models have failed to predict. Yes, changes in weather patterns around the globe affect different countries differently. People deal.

No, any warming is not due to human causes but to the Sun, the operation of which Leftists have not yet managed to infiltrate. No, there is no cause for panic, no need for World Government, no good reason for diverting cash away from more pressing and solvable projects to boondoggles of Gore & Co.

He's gaining some converts. His Leftist peers look at him, he says, and seethe.

Proud pappy here.

Gagdad Bob said...

Yes, if they don't cave into the hivemind, being in an adverse environment can actually teach one to think. In fact, it is precisely because of their cultural and educational domination that leftists are unable to reason, think, or argue, Obama being a quintessential case. His intellectual dishonesty and/or weakness is breathtaking.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"You could say that these imbeciles are the very incarnation of discarnation, which is to say, abstract and desiccated (k) without the real presence of (n)."

Franken (k).

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Seems like almost every day I see another report about scientists lying to make the globull warming computer models somehow come true.
Unfortunately for them, the climate isn't cooperating.

Climate of corruption. There's some real evidence for that.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

One thing I noticed about the truth is that it doesn't need people lying about it to make it true.
Quite the opposite really.

Joan of Argghh! said...

He is "informed about everything and hence condemned to understand nothing."

Definition of a Redditor.

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