Living Between the Must Be and the Can't Be

 I want to make a u-turn back to a drive-by passage from a couple of weeks ago:

Without the intelligence there can be no continuity and no fluidity in the universe.... Discard the intelligence and you create a gap in the universe that no instinct or imaginal can fill.... Recognize the intelligence and you have a harmonious progression of perfections reaching even to God himself. Posit intelligence, and evolution becomes intelligible; deny it, and it becomes absurd (Sheen).  

Which brings to mind an aphorism, a truism, and an insult, which walk into a blog:

Agreement is eventually possible between intelligent men because intelligence is a conviction they share.

Men disagree not so much because they think differently but because they do not think.

The intelligent man quickly reaches conservative conclusions.

All of which begs the question: exactly what is intelligence and what is thinking? And what is the relationship between them?

Me? I've been thinking about thinking ever since I learned how, or thought I had, anyway. This is partly due to how unexpected it was: I wasn't used to it, so I didn't take it for granted.  "What's happening to me?," I asked.  "Why this annoying gap between impulse and action?"  

Which brings to mind a riddle: what is the biggest space in the world? 

Hmm, let's think. Yes, it must be this one: the space between intelligence and intelligibility!  After all, everything we can possibly conceive of is situated here, either in actuality or potential. If there's anything bigger than that, God's keeping it for himself.

Alternatively, perhaps it's the space between the necessary and the possible -- or between the Things that Must Be and those that can Never Be, AKA possibility.  All of evolution, for example, occurs in the space of the possible. Obviously evolutionary change isn't impossible, nor is it necessary, like a mathematical procedure or logical entailment.

If we could draw a map of our place in the cosmos, it might look like this:

MUST BE   {you are here}   CAN'T BE

Obviously, what we call thinking occurs in the middle area, between the brackets. Now, all thinking is an adequation, but bad thinking must be an adequation to things that can't be, which makes it an inadequation; these types of pseudo-thinkers tend to be inadequate to the task of realizing their own inadequacy.  Mr. Dunning meet Mr. Kruger. Mr. Biden meet Mrs. Harris. Again.

As we've discussed on numerous occasions, God is precisely that (or who) must be and cannot not be; for if God isn't, then nor is the cosmos (i.e., the cosmos as integrated totality of intelligible reality knowable by intelligence).  Instead, the cosmos reduces to a body without a head, such that it isn't even a body (i.e., organism) anymore. 

In reality, man inhabits -- or is in contact with --  two very different and yet intimately related worlds:

the first world without the second merely means the knowing of the letters of a language without being able to put them together into words and propositions. The second kind of world without the first means attempting to carry water in a bucket without a bottom to it (in Sheen).

In reality, we always begin by sensing a material object, but knowledge doesn't end there. Indeed, sensation isn't really knowledge at all. Rather, knowledge is an abstraction from sensation: it is immaterial and conceptual. And again, we always live in both worlds -- indeed, our world is always an integration of the two.

So long as we are aren't abstracting about things that can never be. Or, alternatively, prevented from abstracting about things that are.  

Jumping ahead a bit, what is, for example, political correctness, but a mechanism that forbids us to reason about what is, and forces us to conform our minds to what isn't? For example, it forces us to pretend men and women are identical and interchangeable, or that there are no cognitive or behavioral differences between ethnic groups.  

Progress. Yes, we all believe in. Except some of us posit a metaphysic that renders it incoherent and impossible, "for nothing is more unintelligible than an eternal becoming without a thing that becomes" (Sheen).  

In other words, change must occur to something enduring that is changed; if  things have no nature, no essence, then there is no subject of the change, no ontological continuity. Every moment, you'd be a brand new person in a terrifyingly novel world.

There's a name for that: psychosis. 

The collapse of our two worlds into one has disastrous consequences:

First, if the intelligence is destined merely for matter and for the practical, is organic and not spiritual, why are things intelligible? Why can things be known? Why are things known? 

Because reality is an IQ test? 

Second, if God is not the Principle of things..., then what ultimate explanation is there for the intelligibility in things?

Again, man exists between the Must Be -- beginning with God -- and the Can't Be -- which encompasses the countless ideologies from empiricism to scientism to Marxism to feminism and all the rest. Or perhaps we can just say that history is a constant struggle between God and ideology, or between O and Ø.  

If there is a world, it is infinitely incomprehensible without God. But there is a world. Ergo.

Blah blah yada yada, the rest is commentary. 

On the one hand God must be, and although we can know this as postulate -- as O -- he is like the bucket alluded to above, one with a secure bottom, and a top that goes on forever:

There is no doubt that we do not comprehend Him in Himself, but we comprehend Him as an inevitable postulate..., and we reach the height of comprehension in declaring Him, properly speaking, beyond our comprehension (Sheen). 

We are faced with a binary choice: infinite incomprehensibility, AKA incurable stupidity, at the one end; or endless comprehension of the infinite at the other.  But

When a society has two souls, there is -- and ought to be -- civil war.... for anything which has dual personality is certainly mad; and probably possessed by devils. --Chesterton