All There Is To Know About All There Is

I just reread W. Norris Clarke's The Philosophical Approach to God, and he comes very close to disclosing the whole darn secret of the Way of the Raccoon. Which is plain irresponsible. But since it's now out there, I suppose no further harm can come from my usual vulgarization.

Here's the bottom line:

As we reflect on the activities of our intellectual knowing power, we come to recognize it as an exhaustible dynamism of inquiry, ever searching to lay hold more deeply and widely on the universe of reality. It is impossible to restrict its horizon of inquiry to any limited area of reality, to any goal short of all there is to know about all that there is (emphasis mine).

Thomas Aquinas famously -- and correctly -- says that Every knower knows God implicitly in anything it knows. Some people don't know this, which imperils what little knowledge they might otherwise possess, since this knowledge will have no ground, no deeper context, no principle to establish and justify even its own possibility.

Nothing in this world -- no conceivable finite fact -- satisfies the inexhaustible dynamism of the intellect. Go ahead and try. Yes, you can always arbitrarily stop with this fact or that theory, but you're only fooling yoursoph:

For our experience of knowing reveals to us that each time we come to know some new object or aspect of reality we rest in it at first, savoring its intelligibility as far as we can (Clarke).

Mmm, intelligibility.

But as soon as we run up against its limits and discover that it is finite, the mind at once rebounds farther, reaching beyond it to wherever else it leads, to whatever else there is to be known beyond it.

D'oh!

No, it's okay. You just have to be content with the permanent and ineradicable structure of human knowing: we can only know anything because we can't know everything; or in other words, science is necessarily sponsored by omni-science:

"This process [of knowing] continues indefinitely in ever-expanding and ever-deepening circles" (otherwise known as a spiral). And as we reflect upon this inspiraling process of be-coming and of coming-into-being, "we realize that the only adequate goal of our dynamism of knowing is the totality of being."

Exactly. The "totality of being" is what we call O: it is the ground and telos of all knowing; it is our horizon of being -- or better, it is always just over the horizon.

But there's more, because our dynamic space of knowing isn't just "nothing," but ordered by ascending and descending energies and currents. How do we know this? This is like asking a sailor how he knows about wind. You don't have to know that wind is a side effect of high and low pressure areas seeking equilibrium to float your boat.

Likewise, you don't have to know about the eternal plenitude of the Divine Object to know stuff. An atheist blowhard can nevertheless get somewhere -- to tenure, and beyond! -- with science, just as a sailor who believes wind is caused by God sneezing can still get blown somewhere.

In any event, the Divine Object "naturally attracts or draws" the dynamic intellect toward itself. Which means that

the mind has, from its first conscious movement from emptiness toward fulfillment, a kind of implicit, pre-conceptual, anticipatory grasp or foretaste of being as the encompassing horizon and goal of all its inquiries.... This is to live mentally within the horizon of being.

Again, it's where we're always living anyway. Might as well be aware of it.