Might as well continue where we left off. Speaking of which -- continuity -- man always lives amidst both, i.e., continuity-and-discontinuity. Which seems contradictory, -- indeed, to violate the law of non-contraction: for how can something be continuous and discontinuous at the same time and in the same respect?
On the one hand, we don't know. Then again, we do, for hints and clues and even fingerprints are everywhere: for example, the quantum realm cannot be reduced further than to the seemingly contradictory descriptions of "wave" and "particle."
In other words, the particle isn't a function of the wave, nor vice versa. Call it "exact inexactitude." It's not something we can picture in the head. But it nevertheless is.
As we all know, I'm not one of those new age bunk peddlers who like to pretend that a woo-woo interpretation of quantum physics is THE KEY to ABUNDANCE and IMMORTALITY or something. We leave the deepakery to those counterfeit mystery mongers and grotesque chopresque slack merchants.
We'll just rewordgitate a line we swallowed long ago: that quantum physics is the way it is because it is a mirror of the Real. It is not reality itself, obviously. And importantly, this is a two-way mirror, AKA the mirror of intelligence-and-intelligibility.
Consider the latter: are these two (world and knowledge) discontinuous? Yes. Are they continuous? Yes. If they weren't both, then neither would be possible.
Perhaps you don't know exactly what I mean. Let me try to spell it out briefly, because it's only peripheral to the subject of this post, but nevertheless foundational: what I mean is what St. Thomas means when he says that the knower is, in a certain manner, able to become other things.
This latter goes to what knowledge is, precisely: something of the object inside the subject, but without damaging or destroying the former, as in chewing and digesting (or, on a lower level, how leftist historians destroy the object of history, or leftist psychologists the psyche).
The process does, however, share the form of digestion, in the sense that, just as the pizza you eat mysteriously transforms into your material body, so too does the world mysteriously transform into knowledge of itself in the knower -- without destroying the world (leftism and other destructive ideological deformities notwithstanding).
Let's not pretend we understand either mystery. But let's also not pretend a mystery is just an indigestible absurdity or impregnable wall of stupid. Let's put it this way: mystery is present at the hinge points within the cosmos, and also at its edges.
For example, we know that the cosmos is neither self-explanatory nor self-sufficient; rather, it is ontologically dependent upon another principle. We can deploy physics to map our universe all the way to its beginning in time -- or even (so they say) to the beginning of time -- but then... mystery.
And where does the cosmos end?
Same. Same mystery? Yes -- or so we have heard from the wise: we exist between Alpha and Omega, which are discontinuous here but continuous hereafter.
Not so fast. For what does it mean to say that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand? Does it not mean that the Kingdom of Continuity reveals its presence here and now in our vexatious Prison of Discontinuity?
Or I am the Alpha and Omega. Logic -- or bi-logic -- would seem to entail the converse: that Alpha and Omega are I AM. Which makes perfect nonsense to me.
We're rapidly losing track of the main point, which is this: that we are necessarily immersed in mystery, which is to say that mystery is for man absolutely necessary -- again, not mystery-as-ignorance, but rather, mystery as presence. Man himself is a mystery -- to both himself and others -- and thus always more (not less!) than we can specify.
Let me throw out some of these complementary and/or transitional mysteries off the top of my head: intelligible being and intelligence, being and non-being, sense and intellect, matter and life, life and mind, freedom and necessity, appearance and reality, one and many, origin and end, prehistory and history, being and beyond-being.
In each case the two terms are related in an obscure way. Which is absolutely the clearest way to delineate such absolutely necessary mysteries.
The end. And beginning.
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