Diabolical Division and Satan's Blender

It's desk clearing time. I've got books and notes everywhere, and I need to reduce the chaos to some kind of mere disorder. At the very least, the notes will be in one convenient place. And who knows, they may even cohere into a post. In any event, I wouldn't expect much.

The notes aren't always very helpful. Rather, they are often ideas for ideas that I am presumably supposed to enflesh at a later now. This one is typical: it says "Diabolos -- lies & division & truths at wrong level & blending of hierarchy."

Thanks for the tip! But what could it mean? Obviously it has something to do with the etymology of diabolical, and etymology is useful because it can highlight the experience-near reason for why we have a word to begin with. Obviously, ongoing use of the word can take us rather far afield from the original meaning.

Let's consult the dictionary. Not the little one, but the doorstop. From the Greek, diabolos, among other linguistic variations, connoting slanderer, discredit, throw across. Dia is related to dis, which connotes apart, to pieces, and division. Dis then sends us to dys, with connotations including doubt, bad, and difficult.

Where does this leave us? Correct: to Dems. Consider the the left's strategy, which is always founded upon five types of speech: slander, libel, incitement, sedition, and treason. This is what they throw at Trump every day, all day. Racism didn't stick. Anti-Semitism looks pretty stupid in light of the UN smackdown. So now we're back to Russia and treason. It will never end.

The lies of the left are obvious, as is the division, AKA multiculturalism and identity politics. What about truths at the wrong level and the blending of hierarchy? These two go together, because one way to wreck a hierarchy is to apply the truth of one level to a level where it isn't appropriate -- for example, conflating scientific and metaphysical truth.

The left never stops engaging in the latter, which is why they can accuse us of being unscientific when we are being metaphysical, or metaphysical (or better, "politicized" or ideological) when we are being scientific.

For example, when we say that a baby human being is a human being, we are not being political but scientific. No, that's an insult to science. We're just being logical and common freaking sensical, or even prescientific: what you have to be in order to even begin science.

Or, it turns out that different human groups have different average IQs. That's just the way it is. Likewise, it turns out that none of the models cobbled together by global warming activists has proved able to accurately predict the future (and more embarrassingly, the past). There's a name for that in science: wrong. They are the ones who elevate global warming to a metaphysic (AKA religion), in that it is literally unfalsifiable.

To back up a bit, that is precisely what metaphysics involves: the most general concepts about reality (or being) that by definition cannot not be true (for example, the principle of noncontradiction). As such, all events, experiences, and knowledge will be in conformity with it. If they aren't, then your metaphysic is wrong, and you need to go back to the drawing board, probably for the first time. It's the difference between things that cannot not be and things that just can't be.

Now, truth is hierarchical, or better, symphonic (throwing time into the mix). Reality is a concordance (or harmolodic, to borrow a term from Ornette Coleman) of chordal structure and melodic elaboration and variation, or verticality and horizontality: archetype and exemplar; form and substance; essence and existence -- the ultimate pattern of which is found in Father/Son, Creator/Creation, Beyond Being/Being, Being/Existence, etc. (IMO).

What about the diabolical blending of the left? Let us count the ways! Man and woman, legal and illegal, immigration and invasion, their right and our obligation, law and whim, truth and power, journalism and propaganda, education and indoctrination, college and infant daycare, art and excrement... They relativize the Absolute and absolutize their particular relativism.

In fact, here's another note: nature abhors a metaphysical vacuum. Which is itself a metaphysical truth! Deny it and you will inevitably end up with an unexamined and probably stupid metaphysic. Or more likely, a... what is the opposite of meta-?

Says here there isn't really one, but he recommends mesa-. So, mesapneumic, or something. I'm not going to read the paper, but it seems to me that it is analogous to the distinction between transcendent and immanent (speaking of necessary truths of being, which is "bilocal," so to speak; or local and nonlocal).

But fascism -- AKA the left -- involves, as the old gag goes, the violent rejection of transcendence. It reduces transcendence to immanence, or spirit to matter, which is precisely what Marx claimed to be doing. (Unlike contemporary leftists, he was at least honest about what he was up to.)

Damn, only two notes down, and we're out of time. We'll leave off with a third: paradise is enclosed in a wall of complementarities. Hell is their conflation.

Mathworld and Mythworld

We've finished the book on Thomas, and I'm pretty much left with nothing to say this morning, and no compulsion to say it. The end of a blogging cycle? Could be. In any event, what we have here is a rambling exploration of whatever pops up

Note to myself: the future never arrives. It was never there.

Something arrives. Just not the future. Rather, all we can really know is the new present. The present is always here, and we are always in it.

Pro-tip right there.

Still, we can't help thinking about the future. We are situated in this dimension called time, which has three distinct and extraordinarily different modalities: past, present, future. These three are so different in character that it's difficult to see how they could be the same thing; or, three views of the same thing. And yet, there it is: was, is, and will be.

I'm out of the loop. Has anyone cracked the enigma of time? Or have we still made no progress since Augustine's remark that if no one asks us, we know what time is. But if we wish to explain it, then we have no idea.

It seems to me that science just putters around the edges of such mysteries. It can only assume time, not explain it. Likewise little things like causality, law, consciousness, subject, origin, event, etc. These are all prerequisites for science and therefore unexplainable by science -- just as the eye cannot see itself or the Antifa support himself.

You might say that science is one way to metabolize the mystery of existence. But just because you have metabolized it in a certain way, it hardly means you have done so exhaustively, or that nothing remains to be digested. Indeed, no explanation, no matter how complete, ever extinguishes the mystery, and may even deepen it.

As Feser explains, "there is simply no reason to suppose that physics gives us anything close to an exhaustive description of reality in the first place," and "ample reason to think that it does not." It "focuses its attention on those aspects of nature which can be described in the language of mathematics," but by definition leaves out everything that is not subject to mathematization. Thus, "if there are features" of the world "that cannot be captured by this method, physics is guaranteed to not find them."

Mathematics is an abstraction, indeed, the most abstract language available to man. But it is only possible because there is something concrete prior to it. We cannot live in mathworld. There must be something of an "intrinsic character" that simply is what it is, and can never be reduced to an abstraction.

It seems to me that this is Gödel's bottom line take, and yet, so few really take it to the bottom: that all of our intellectual systems are ultimately projections on the mystery of existence.

However, according to my sources, Gödel never intended this to consign us to a Kantian shadow-world of phenomenal appearances only, with no possibility of knowing reality. Rather, the opposite: that of course we have access to truths we cannot prove with our reason, the latter of which is always self-enclosed and tautological.

In short, we can exit the cave and see the sun. But we can never contain the sun in our own little abstract systems. To think otherwise is... G3AOA -- Genesis 3 All Over Again.

So, one must maintain a complementary balance reality and idea, or between concrete and abstract. Again, no matter how sophisticated your idea, reality nevertheless is what it is. Indeed, the more sophisticated the idea, the more one may be tempted to imagine that it is adequate.

This is precisely where idea transmogrifies into ideology, where education devolves to indoctrination, and where math is fallaciously reified into a misplaced concreteness.

It is the difference between mathworld and mythworld. No civilization can be founded upon mathworld, let alone maintained on it. Infertile eggheads who imagine otherwise are just leaves leafing in denial of the trunk and roots of the cosmic tree that nourishes them.

From a psychological standpoint there are two forms of independence, the real kind and a pseudo version. Real independence is always rooted in what we call "mature dependence." Conversely, to imagine we are literally independent -- an I without a We -- is the worst kind of narcissism. I think many libertarians fall into the latter error. Conversely, leftists champion a version of immature dependence in elevating the We to the detriment of the I.

Come to think of it, this is precisely the subject of Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity. The questions 'Who Are We?' and 'Who Am I?' are absolutely intertwined and complementary: one cannot ask one without asking the other, either explicitly or implicitly.

And at the basis of our civil war are two completely irreconcilable version of the I and We. In other words, the We of the left has absolutely nothing in common with the We to which I belong. That may sound polemical, but it is quite accurate, and cuts right to the heart of the dispute.

I've highlighted so many passages in the book that I scarcely know where to begin. I'm almost out of time anyway, but let's just say that Trump not only speaks for the forgotten We of America, but for a We that the multicultural and transnational left effectively wishes to eradicate.

And I mean that literally. Ultimately what the left wishes to eliminate is Americans, that is, people who identify with our founding, our traditions, our history, our myths, our spiritual vision, and our exceptional mission. Even our statues. And certainly our constitution.

Let's put it this way: you can deconstruct the shorthand myth of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree. Fine. But if you are not mythopoetically awed by the greatness of the man, and deny his national fatherhood, then we are not only no longer brothers but members of different and hostile tribes.

Let the Dead Bury the Tenured

"All beings naturally strive towards God -- not explicitly but implicitly" (Thomas). Since atheists are beings too, this goes for them as much as anyone else. But how can someone who rejects God be simultaneously striving for God? Let's think.

Well, most atheists of my acquaintance reject God on the basis of their intellect. But what is the intellect, and why can it be trusted, especially regarding a subject so vastly transcending its scope, its reason for being (which is biological reproduction)? Well, you have to put your faith in something. An atheist presumably puts faith in himself and leaves it at that.

But if you don't stop arbitrarily with your own mind -- if you refrain from the cosmic onanism for a moment -- then you are soon enough led into one of the classical proofs of God, to something certain, unmoved, eternal, etc. In short, your own thinking must have the backing of an eternal sponsor, or it is nothing.

We know and judge all things in the light of the first truth, for the light of our intellect, which is either natural or a gift of grace, is nothing other than an imprint of the first truth. This interior light of the mind is the principal cause of knowledge.

This was obviously the approach of our founders. They did not say, "in our opinion, people should be free to pursue their own interests & stuff." In this regard they foresaw the future fascist snowflakes who would say, "in our opinion, you are not free, especially Ben Shapiro. He triggers us, therefore he is violent, so we have the right to violently shut him down."

You see from where leftist principles always come and to where they inevitably lead: quite literally, they come from nothing and lead nowhere. These people are anarchists. Nihilists, Donny. Cosmocrats of the Dark Aion. Who cannot see it? And why not?

I'm old enough to remember when conservatives were free to speak in our Temples of Truth without $600,000 in police protection. Churchill once cracked that "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." In our current civil war, truth needs a bodyguard, period. An army of them if it ventures near a liberal campus.

It's not only that truth requires police protection. The reason it needs the protection is that it is under violent attack. Now, there is nothing more sick than attacking truth. Rejecting it is one thing. That's amenable to correction. But preemptively assaulting it is another matter entirely. For it is the negation of the very purpose of the intellect, which is to know truth in an objective and disinterested way.

Therefore, it is an attempt to violently sunder man from his very ground -- from his reason for being. It is the end of humanness, the end of all meaning except that which is violently superimposed by the requirements of leftist ideology.

The science is never settled. But nor is the religion, and for the same reason: "The reason we are called wayfarers is because we are striving toward God, who is our end and beatitude."

Likewise, science strives toward a truth it can never attain, on pain of Gödel coming to your house and slapping you around. And truth is the beatitude of the intellect.

For "The love of God has the power of uniting things." Indeed, God is the principle of unity, without whom there would be none. Here again, science is the reduction of multiplicity to unity. Therefore, it is always implicitly seeking God, at least when rightly practiced.

Conversely, "Love of self... divides up human affections and diversifies them." Those with ears, let them hear! Those with graduate degrees, remove those ideological truth-cancelling headphones!

There are only two vertical directions, up and down, toward God and unity or toward a futile cosmic dispersion and fragmentary selfhood shouting nonsense into the void, AKA the liberal media.

Truly, "The last end is the first principle of being." AlphOmega. We are wayfarers on an inspiraling journey, not from nowhere to nothing, but from ground to nonlocal destiny. And "when the first cause in which all else can be known is reached, the quest of the spirit comes to an end."

Note that the first cause of the left is matter, or nothing, or ideology, which amount to the same thing. It is why their journey is over before it begins -- a zombie-like quest for the impossible. Let the dead bury the tenured.

Does this mean everyone is the same? The precise opposite! For it is the very basis of our individuality:

"God is one in reality but is multiple according to our minds; we know him in as many ways as created things represent him." But if we do not know God, then it is as if everyone knows nothing, which truly renders them as unique and valuable as an ant.