Freedom and Creation, Truth and Unfathomability

I'd like to get back to the subject of freedom. Again, we're trying to approach it from different angles, from the economic, political, and psychological (Hayek) to the metaphysical (Schuon). Also, I was just flipping through Stanley Jaki's Means to Message, which has a whole chapter devoted to the subject. (Jaki was a physicist, philosopher of science, and Catholic priest.)

Jaki highlights an important relationship between freedom and creation -- i.e., the doctrine of creation, whereby the cosmos is not self-explanatory, but must be rooted in a higher source.

Please note that there are two and only two possible choices -- createdness and self-sufficiency -- and that one's initial choice determines everything.

Note as well that most people who choose the latter (a vertically closed universe) want to have it both ways. That is, they pretend the cosmos isn't created, while enjoying numerous benefits that could only exist in a vertically open universe -- beginning with freedom itself, for example, the freedom to choose a self-sufficient universe while pretending free will doesn't exist.

Free will cannot be explained on any philosophical, psychological, or neurological basis. To be perfectly accurate, each of these disciplines can argue the question both ways, with no way to arbitrate between the two positions. Rather, the only way to objectively answer the question is to exit the system entirely, i.e., via a transcendence that is only possible if the universe is created.

Jaki discusses the psychologist William James, who "took the doctrine of creation out of nothing for the worst aberration of the human mind." But "little did he suspect that this idea alone" can resolve the Problem of all Problems -- or, one might say, the problem of the beginning and the beginning of all problems. For once creation is discarded, then "nothing can be seen as transcending matter, although this is what every free act does." Conversely, any materialistic paradigm reduces free will to sheer willfulness. Or to power.

I don't want to get all political right away, but you can see at once how this plays out in the Red vs. Blue sweepstakes. Yes, it is a question of truth vs. power, but also of freedom vs. control, of creativity vs. the machine, of religion vs. the religion of no religion, and in Hayekian terms, cosmos vs. taxis, the former a spontaneous order, the latter a manmade one. All because of one little error at the root of all subsequent thinking!

Democracy, of course, has no necessary relationship to truth. Rather, it is only about power -- the power of the demos. Therefore, the value of democracy depends entirely upon the quality of the demos, in particular, its access to, and assimilation of, truth. Yes, "the will of the people may express truth," and "yet this is increasingly less the case when he people are exposed to daily brainwashing" by the media, by academia, and by our culture itself.

Notice how socialism is enjoying a resurgence in popularity among the demos, especially the young and extensively indocucated such as our Miss Occluded Cortex. Again, the "truth" of socialism is power. Should it appeal to truth as such, then it is no longer socialism. Thus, it is quite natural that academia should have devolved into a left-wing oasis of totalitarianism in a desert of freedom. Even the acknowledgment of truth and freedom undermine leftism at the root.

Instead of appealing to truth, the left not only appeals to power, but more cleverly, to "the oppressed," AKA victims (as in the Central American Caravan of Invaders). There's demographic gold in them thar shills!

One of the most persistent strategies of the left is the appropriation and abuse of Christian ethics in service to the destruction of Christendom. It's really the timeless psychological fallacy of the appeal to pity, addressed to a religiously untutored demos still living in the shadow of Christian compassion. It wouldn't work in, say, China or Saudi Arabia, where victims are just pathetic victims and not would-be godlings.

Thus is the God of love covertly transformed into the god of power. It's how the Evil One rolls, at least in America. Elsewhere he needn't conceal himself, and can operate more openly.

The same principle that accounts for our freedom accounts for our paradoxical access to truth without ever being capable of knowing the full truth of the least imaginable thing. In other words, it is only because of a certain irremediable ignorance that we can know anything at all. And this irremediable ignorance is another consequence of the doctrine of creation.

Pieper explains it most clearly and concisely: "the natural world around us can be empirically known precisely because it has first been 'thought' by the Creator." That is to say, things -- real things, to the extent that they are indeed real -- literally ex-ist in the space between the divine intellect and the human mind; or between Creator and ensouled creature.

Which is why we can affirm that "all things are true." Reality is true, and truth is reality. Sounds uncontroversial, but trying saying it in a liberal looniversity! Safe spaces exist in order to shield their benefactors from the truth of reality and reality of truth.

"All things are true," would therefore mean, on the one hand, that all things are known by God in the act of creation and, on the other hand, that all things are by their nature accessible and comprehensible to the human mind.... All things are intelligible, translucent, clear and open because they are essentially spirit related.... In short, things can be known because they are created.

But! Orthoparadoxically, "being true and being unfathomable go together" because "the comprehensibility of a thing can never be fully exhausted by any finite mind." So, things are simultaneously knowable and unfathomable, and our freedom is located in the interstices between these. Which Hayek says, but from a totally different perspective.

To be continued...