Even a Rockhead is Infinitely Higher than a Rock

We live in a cosmos of relations. While this sounds like a banality, it is among the most consequential facts of existence, for it is a necessary condition of everything else, certainly including the possibility of philosophy -- or of any other kind of knowing, for that matter.

Imagine, for example, a pile of rocks. We can see that this rock is related to that one, that the pile is related to the landscape, etc. But not really. For as Pieper says, a stone isn't really "in" a pile, "with" its fellow rocks, or "next to" anything at all.

Rather, "Relations in the genuine sense are formed from the inside-out; relations are only possible where there is an interior."

So in reality, to say "relation" is to say "interior," and this is the revolutionary part, for we live in a cosmos of interior relations, and no one has ever explained -- or will ever explain -- how an exterior cosmos can suddenly become interior to itself, how organisms are possiible, or how existence becomes experience.

This isn't to say there is no explanation. It's just that there is no material explanation, because it inevitably and arbitrarily eliminates what it needs to explain, thus leaving us with no explanation and no one to explain it.

This is one of those principles that... Put it this way: we all know the allegory of Plato's cave, whereby exiting the cave is a movement from shadows to light, i.e., from appearances to reality. But there's another allegory about the owl at midday, who is blinded by the sun. Rather, the owl can take only so much light; he sees much better under conditions of darkness. His vision is adapted to a certain environment.

Just so, human beings are adapted to certain conditions. We are by nature oriented to the Light, but too much of it can blind us. I would categorize the interiority of the cosmos as Blindingly Obvious, and therefore not seen by most people.

The first modern thinker to understand this and to draw the implications was Alfred North Whitehead. Yes, poets have always seen it, as have mystics. But Whitehead approached it from a purely scientific angle; for example, in Adventures in Ideas he writes that

the foundation of metaphysics should be sought in the understanding of the subject-object structure of experience, and in the respective roles of the physical and mental functionings.

Instead of a vicious and insoluble mind-matter dualism, we see a dynamic and fruitful complementarity. Once you grasp this principle, then the door is open for further metaphysical differentiations, including intersubjectivity, personhood, and ultimately Trinity -- that's me taking, not Whitehead; while he often spoke of religion, I think he tried to reconcile it to his philosophy as opposed to reconciling his philosophy with the data of revelation.

That's an important point, one that Pieper touches on later in the essay: Christianity doesn't make things easier for the philosopher, rather, more difficult; it's not a copout or escape from thinking, but a tension that forces us to think at a higher level: the Christian philosopher has

a more difficult time of it intellectually than someone who does not consider himself bound to the norm of traditional articles of faith.... Philosophical thinking does not become easier when it ties itself to the norm of Christian revelation, but -- and this claim is simply self-evident to the Christian -- it is more genuine and more in keeping with reality!

It is a creative, a productive resistance that revealed truth sets in opposition to philosophical thought. It is a more rigorous type of prerequisite to which Christian philosophizing is subject. Christian philosophizing is uniquely characterized by the fact that it sees itself obliged to endure a tension that goes beyond the realm of purely conceptual problems.

Christian philosophizing is more complicated because it forbids itself from arriving at "obvious" formulations by overlooking realities, by choosing that and omitting this.... it is forced to think in broader terms and, above all, not to rest content with the blandness of rationalist generalizations.

This is why, for example, Thomas Aquinas, is so much deeper and more complex than, say, existentialism or scientism. For it's easy to explain everything by explaining everything away. Which is what ideology does, every time.

What exactly does Christianity reveal that must be regarded as axiomatic to the meta-thinking man? Perhaps the most important is the Trinity, which entails person as ultimate category and the intersubjectivity of persons; another big one is the doctrine of creation. To attempt to think about ultimate reality without these and other ultimate categories will obviously lead nowhere. God desperately wants to help us think. For which reason the Aphorist says many insolent and provocative things, but I'll try to limit it to a top ten:

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

9) God does not ask for the submission of the intelligence, but rather an intelligent submission.

8) Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. The religious man lives among realities that the secular man ignores.

7) To believe that science is enough is the most naïve of superstitions.

6) The modern aberration consists in believing that the only thing that is real is what the vulgar soul can perceive.

5) There is no stupid idea which modern man is not capable of believing, as long as he avoids believing in Christ.

4) By unmasking a truth, one encounters a Christian face.

3) There was never any conflict between reason and faith, but between two faiths.

2) The believer knows how to doubt; the unbeliever does not know how to believe.

And this day's #1 aphorism: When their religious depth disappears, things are reduced to a surface without thickness, where nothing shows through.

Now back to where we were: a cosmos -- any cosmos, AKA ordered totality -- is a field of relations, and this field is always interior or it simply cannot be. This then leads to the principle that

The higher the status of the being with with an interior, that is, the more expansive and comprehensive its power to enter into relations is, the broader and more multidimensioned is the field of relations associated with it; alternatively expressed, the higher the being stands in the hierarchy of reality, the larger its world and the greater its status.

The human person is objectively higher than a rock because his interior is more expansive, comprehensive, multidimensional, and densely related. I know what you're thinking, but Joe Biden is the exception that proves the rule: we're talking about man as such, not such-and-such a rockheaded man.

This whole line of inquiry is dense with further implications, but that's enough for today.