This post started off with a Point, but eventually devolved into a possibly pointless free-association. However, I suspect the associations were implicitly ordered to a far off point that may or may not be vaguely illuminated by the end...
Regarding the basis of esoterism, Schuon writes that
Where there is a truth of Revelation, hence of formal and theological truth, there must also be a truth of intellection, hence of non-formal and metaphysical truth.
This statement encapsulates much of what motivates this blogger, and strikes him as necessarily, self-evidently, and undeniably true. So, what's the catch?
As we know, a philosopher is just like anyone else, except with regard to the question Why? To back up a bit, the human station may almost be reduced to this question of questioning. Beings below us do not inquire into the causes of things, nor do those above. But as you know, you never really know, so there's no logical end or limit to the questioning.
Having said this, it is understandable that most people will simply stop asking Why? after settling on a good-enough metaphysic. The average person can get through life just fine with Newtonian physics. It doesn't take an Einstein to get out of the way of the bus. There is no added value -- practically speaking -- to tweaking our everyday worldview so as to accommodate dark matter, black holes, or multiple universes.
Indeed, the added complexity might just make survival more difficult, for we evolved in this world, -- the one available to our senses -- not in some abstract world of mathematical concepts. Likewise, for a farmer, it scarcely matters whether the sun circles the earth or vice versa. The sun will still rise in the morning and he'll still have to plant in the spring.
What does it matter if the world was created on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC (as Archbishop Usher calculated) or banged into existence 13.7 billion years ago? For all practical purposes nothing important changes; babies will still need mothers, life will still be short, and the Dodgers will still be 2.5 games behind the Giants.
To be clear, we're not talking about the scientific implications, only the fact that science determines neither metaphysics above nor practical considerations below. When it's time to pay your taxes you can't tell the IRS that modern physics proves time doesn't exist. You can't dissolve your marriage by arguing it was an invalid contract because God doesn't exist.
In any event, the Average Person is content to live his life in a soph-limiting cognitive matrix, which is essentially a simulation of reality. Nor do we necessarily blame them. Asking Why? is a fooltime job fit mostly for misfits, gadflies, noodges, and crank bloggers with too much timelessness on their hands.
So let's zoom out to the widest possible angle and ask ourselves: What's going on? In other words, let's do what we always do, and check things out from a tricosmic metaperspective.
Everyone, without exception needs a metaphysic, that is, an overarching explanation or paradigm to satisfy this intrinsic need. As we've said many times, man is the epistemophelic creature, meaning that he is born wanting to know.
But it goes beyond this, because this Unlimited Seeking on our end is In Fact ordered to an Unlimited Object on the other. To enter the human station is to live in the dynamic tension between these poles, between the intellect here and its proper object up or over there.
Nor can we ever arrive at the far side, for the journey is literally endless -- orthoparadoxically because there is an End, an End people call God, or which my people sometimes call O to avoid pretending we can know what we can only properly unKnow.
This endless epistemophila goes to our very essence: man essentially loves truth, because like is attracted to like. We love truth, for which reason its highest pursuit is rightly called philo-sophy.
This post is beginning to lose focus, so let's return to the opening quote: if there is formal and theological truth -- which there Is -- it is ultimately because it is ordered to non-formal and metaphysical truth.
We can reduce this to a single word: Truth. It reminds me of the "intelligent design" folks who go to all the trouble of trying to prove to us that the gene or the cell or the eye is so complex that it must have been designed.
The truth is at once more banal than we suppose and more liberating than we can imagine, for we can again reduce it to a single word: Intelligence. It is enough to say that the cosmos is pervaded by an immanent intelligence which thereby transcends it -- a transcendent intelligence that until very recent times was spontaneously understood to be God.
Only an intelligent creature asks why; and only an intelligible cosmos furnishes answers.
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