Simple and Deep, Complex and Shallow

We are on the subject of depth: what is it, and how do we know it? There are degrees of depth in thought, prose, poetry, science, religion, music, painting, or in other words, knowledge and beauty.

But again, depth isn't necessarily covariant with truth. I suppose Heidegger is deep, but that doesn't make him any less wrong. And in a certain sense, truth is actually quite simple, simplicity being not at all synonymous with superficiality. "God's essence is to exist." Doesn't get more simple or true than that.

Nevertheless, Often the simpler a truth is the more difficult it is to understand (NGD).

Some people are drawn to depth, while it appears that most people are indifferent to it at best, but often repelled by it. In the past, I've written about the psychological reasons for this, in that -- in my opinion -- just as people have psychological defense mechanisms that repress, deny, project and otherwise transform the lower vertical, they also have "pneumatic" defense mechanisms that allow them to do the same with the upper vertical. Which is how leftism becomes a religion.

To say lower is to say higher, and it makes no sense to affirm that the human ego is the highest entity in all of creation. Rather, it is always situated on a vertical spectrum between... best to leave this undefined -- or unsaturated with preconceptions -- since the unKnown is at both ends; let's just say that man is suspended between O and Ø.

With this in mind, we now have a way to conceptualize depth: the deeply true is in the direction of O, while the deeply false is in the direction of Ø. Looked at in this way, reductionistic Darwinism is deeply false, as is Marxism, or feminism, or positivism (giving adherents the benefit of the doubt that these isms are deep to begin with).

Now, what can it mean to be "in the direction of O"? How can we tell? Let's leave aside aesthetics and focus on thought. One critical point is that while Ø necessarily excludes O, O must encompass and account for Ø -- which is precisely what makes it the more deep. For depth implies comprehensiveness, and a system that accounts for the cosmic Subject is obviously more comprehensive than one that pretends to deny it at the outset (and it can only pretend to do so, on pain of saying nothing with no one to say it).

Conversely, O doesn't deny Ø, least of all in the Christian tradition. Indeed, we could even think of Incarnation as O becoming Ø; or, to tweak the old patristic gag, "O became Ø that Ø might become O."

In contrast, think of Eastern traditions for which Ø is pure illusion. Their goal is to attain O, but it must be a less comprehensive O, since it excludes Ø. A western representative of the same approach is Plotinus, whom St. Augustine rejected for precisely this reason. With neoplatonism you can experience the One, only you can't be there to experience it. D'O!

Backing up a bit, it was the work of millennia to first discover that God is one: "A religious-minded Greek felt himself the passive battlefield of overpowering and too often mutually conflicting divine influences. His will was at their mercy" (Gilson, God and Philosophy).

This testifies to a fragmented psyche that is both the cause and consequence of inability to know the One. This was a world "where everything came to men from without, including their feelings and passions, their virtues and their vices..." (ibid.).

And guess what? That world most assuredly still exists. As a clinical psychologist, I see it all the time -- not just in patients but (especially!) in politics, which is the widest field for externalizing various psychic fragments.

For example, the existence of people who cannot tolerate free speech isn't really a political problem but a psychological crisis. To even discuss it on the plane of politics is to obscure and displace its location and depth. In other words, there can be no deep political reason to eliminate free speech. However, there are certainly deep psychological reasons to do so! But that's between you and your psychologist.

Back to the gradual discovery of the One: "What makes Aristotle's metaphysics an epoch-making event in the history of natural theology is that in it the long delayed conjunction of the first philosophical principle with the notion of god became at last an accomplished fact" (ibid). In short, God is no longer the fragmented and un-integrated experience described above, but its synthesis: "At the summit of the Aristotelian universe is not an Idea, but a self-subsisting and eternal Act of thinking": an eternally one-ing one, so to speak.

Coming at it from a different angle -- revelation as opposed to natural theology -- "any follower of the Jewish God would know at once that, whatever the nature of reality itself may be said to be, its religious principle must of necessity coincide with its philosophical principle" -- each is one, but unified in an even higher Oneness: I AM and IT IS are not two, so to speak.

Gilson mentions in passing a key principle in understanding depth, that "Whereas Thomas Aquinas distinguished in order to unite, Descartes divided in order to separate." In the case of the latter, there is no way to put the cosmic egg back together after the initial division of thought and being -- thus, there can be no recovery of the depth of reality.

But what makes a thing deep is precisely the complementary oneness in the many and manyness of the One. "A world," writes Schuon, "is not a simple and inert block, but an infinitely variegated play of antinomies and combinations" which nevertheless possess a "homogeneous character," otherwise they would be different worlds. "Existence crystallizes, divides, and disperses; Intelligence on the contrary brings back to unity." The two are complementary:

we must distinguish between a perspective that is intellectual and unitive and another that is existential and separative; the first envisions everything in relation to unity, even Existence..., whereas the second sees everything in relation to separativity, even Intelligence...

Theology and science, respectively. Which are not two. Anything short of this is in the shallow end of the gene pool. For "there is no true synthesis without discernment." And vice versa.

Aphorisms, which is to say, maximum depth with minimum words:

All truths converge upon one truth, but the routes have been barricaded.

Thought can avoid the idea of God as long as it limits itself to meditating on minor problems.

In order for a multitude of diverse terms to coexist, it is necessary to place them on different levels. A hierarchical ordering is the only one that neither expels nor suppresses them. --Dávila