If Reality is an Onion, How Do We Peel It?

As mentioned in the previous post, I'm currently rereading Josef Pieper's For the Love of Wisdom, and I'm obviously getting much more out of it than I did the first time in 2007. This is easy enough to establish, because I'm highlighting many more passages. So, what changed?

This is an intriguing phenomenon, being that in 2007 I would have considered myself intellectually... adequate, anyway. Not so! Little did I know that "PhD" simply means Pompous Half-baked Doctrine.

I've used the analogy before of a hybrid/SACD, in which there are two layers of digital encoding. If you have an SACD player, it can reach down into the deeper layer and decode the super audio.

Such multi-level encoding is quintessentially true of the deeper layers of scripture, but also of any author who is worthy of the honor of being reread. In a way, the only authors worth reading in the first place are those one can reread forever. They are worth your time because they are worthy of eternity. Aphorisms, while I await the vertical link-up:

Collision with an intelligent book makes us see a thousand stars.

One can only reread what suggests more than what it expresses.

It is not the ideas that I look for in the intelligent book, but rather the air that one breathes there.

Our opinion of a great book is the verdict with which the book judges us.

This last one is key, for imagine the arrogance and stupidity of one (probably you) who presumes to judge this type of book, because he is oblivious to the fact that it even is this type of book. It's not so much that he "misses" the point. Rather, he can't even reach it; and because he can't reach it, can't know of its existence.

It reminds me of a child who roughhouses with his father and thinks he really knocked him out. But enough about our trolls.

Think of our contemporary leftists, who presume to judge and even condemn the founders. This is very much like Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, who knows better than Jesus what human beings want and need. Who needs the Declaration and Constitution when Joe Biden understands me and my real needs better than I do?

There are two principle ways of knowing. Let's call them "reason" (ratio) and "intellect" (intellectus). This is a crucial distinction, and it should be self-evident to anyone who takes the time to think about thinking.

Indeed, it isn't even possible to think without both modalities, since reason reduces to tautology without the transcendent perspective of the intellect. To put it another way, without the intellect, reason can't know what it knows. Nor can science, obviously, although scientism pretends to: fake nous!

To extend the analogy of the hybrid/SACD, the standard CD is accessible to reason, the super CD to intellect; thus, if your laser light can only access the standard layer, you're missing a whole world of intelligibility. But you can't know of this deeper world unless you train your laser to detect it. Or at least don't "untrain" it, which is what a modern education does. Use it or lose it.

Certainly this was true in my case. I don't want to say that "I didn't know anything about it," because it is impossible to not know about it. In reality, the intellect is part of our standard equipment, and it is there because it is an adequation to its proper object -- as eyes exist because there is light, or ears because there are air vibrations.

Goethe made the orthoparadoxical remark that "experience is only half of experience." The larger half -- so to speak -- is the transcendental experience of experience, or thinking about perception, as intellect is to reason. We need both, obviously: reason needs something to chew on, and intellection needs something to digest. Necessary + Sufficient. Vertical metabolism.

We might also say that ratio is work, while intellect is play. If this weren't the case, this blog would have dried up years ago. The first is active, the second more passive and receptive; it is open to the totality. You might even say it is feminine -- not that there's anything wrong with that.

Well, it is wrong if it isn't betrothed to reason, just as reason goes off the rails if it isn't domesticated by intellect. All those bad religions, especially the political ones? Correct: intellectual visions untethered by fact, experience, and logic.

Which leads directly to the question: what does it even mean to philosophize? You already know the answer, but we will answer it anyway in the next post, because it's always good to consciously understand what you're unconsciously doing anyway.