Love is the Answer!!! Unless it's the Problem

A small but important point: "no sensitive power can reflect upon itself" (Brennan.) In other words, our five senses don't know they're sensing; they cannot reflect upon themselves. Rather, their knowledge is limited to that which they sense, which is always something material.

Nor can one sense know what any other sense is up to. Eyes know nothing about sound, as ears know nothing about light. To understand that the bluebird is chirping is an immaterial synthesis of sensory information, not reducible to mere sense.

I remember back in high school, a rumor made the rounds that it was possible to do homework in one's sleep. Apparently, all that mattered was that the soundwaves of the lecture enter one's ears. Being that I detested school from the depths of my being, this was an attractive proposition. Why doesn't it work? Mainly because learning can only take place in the depths of one's b. It doesn't take place on the surface of the senses.

Analogously, I always listen to music when going to sleep. Upon awakening I can remember the last song I heard before falling asleep, often even the point in the middle of a song. Obviously the music continued playing and entered my ears. Or did it? Music is only synthesized in a human mind. It isn't merely sensed, although the sense of hearing is obviously required in order to apprehend the music. So the senses are involved, but converting the sensory vibrations into music is pure nonsense. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

Along these lines, Brennan writes that

The basic reason why sense is unable to make a complete return upon itself is the material texture of its being. A faculty that is able to reflect upon itself is necessarily devoid of all matter; and so its object is not limited like that of the senses.

That's a bold claim in these tenured times: that the most quintessential human power is devoid of ALL matter. After all, we live in a dark and materialist age in which nothing can be devoid of all matter except, of course, the doctrine of materialism. But in order to be a proper materialist, one must believe both that everything is reducible to matter and that nothing outside or beyond matter can have any real existence.

However, as we already said (in the previous post) A universe of matter alone would be simply unintelligible, period, full stop, end of story. Matter devoid of form is the "essence" of unintelligibility, if there could be such a thing. But there can be no such thing, except conceptually, for we never encounter uninformed matter. You could say that "matter" (or what Thomists call prime matter) is analogous to the placeholder 0 in math. In order for 0 to be something, it requires another digit. Otherwise nothing is nothing.

Now, to be human is to know that we sense and to understand that we know, and both of these powers are immaterial. How can this be? By virtue of what principle can an immaterial entity exist in a material cosmos? Well, math surely exists, and it is obviously immaterial. No one ever saw pi, or the square root of two, or Obama's college GPA. Yes, but math is objective. We're talking about the human subject. What's that about?

Not to run ahead of ourselves, but there is no such thing as an object in the absence of a subject. These two categories aren't just existential complementarities but ontologically irreducible to anything else, all the way down to the goround of being. Thanks to important advances in theology, man was able to move beyond the wild or tame speculations of pre-Christian metaphysicians, even while maintaining our sizable lead over post-Christian cranks and malcontents.

That probably sounds like a gag, but theology advances no less than does science. This obviously doesn't imply that the object of theology evolves, which would be absurd. Rather, our understanding deepens; to be precise, it can proceed forward, toward the Godhead, or back, in the direction of soul dead materialism or braindead atheism.

Philosophy, theology, and science are different activities, and let no Raccoon suggest it isn't helpful to distinguish them. However, we don't leave it at that. Rather, we distinguish in order to unite, in part because the distinctions are in the subject, not the object; and even the practice of science is always in the direction of deeper principles that unite disparate facts.

Put another way, realty is one, while our approaches to it are diverse. If one forgets this, then one will inevitably "evolve backward" and elevate something less than God to God, in order to make the unsettling diversity go away.

Put it this way: ether one acknowledges God or one conflates and confuses the non- or anti-God with God. Which is why idolatry is such an intrinsic error. Intellectual sin is probably worse than the other kind, because it can injure so many more people. You could say that a single crime of passion may be a tragedy, while the crimes of ideology are a statistic.

Speaking of which, Brennan notes that

When we sift the matter down, it will be found that love is at the root of every passion. It is, in a sense, the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, of all the movements of our appetites.

Another bold statement, but the first thing one must understand is that love itself is neither here nor there. Rather, there is disordered love and rightly ordered love.

A quintessential example of the former is the left's cliché that we shouldn't discriminate against others based on WHO THEY LOVE!!! (sic). Taken on its own terms, it means that love has no proper object or order. Which is precisely analogous to insisting that knowledge has no object or order. Which is to say that truth not only doesn't exist, but is an impossibility.

Which is to say: anarchy, chaos, and nihilism.

Or maybe you haven't noticed.