Along the vertical spectrum there are three principle degrees of abstraction to which we have access; from the bottom up, they are 1) the positive sciences, which still have one foot in matter, 2) mathematics, and 3) the metaphysical, this latter being completely immaterial and going to the sort of cosmos in which math and intelligible matter can even exist.
The vertical spectrum can be further subdivided in any number of ways, for example, between physics and biology, psychology and neurology, theology and metaphysics. Nevertheless, despite these divisions, it's all still -- somehow -- One Cosmos.
In the previous post we added "indivisible," but that's only half the story, for in reality, it is always both divisible and indivisible, continuous and discontinuous, radial (the Cosmic Ray from the center out) and circumferential (semiautonomous circles around Celestial Central).
This goes to one of those primordial complementarities we've heard so little about. However, as with all such complementarities, one pole must be prior, and in this case it's indivisibility, for the alternative is both inconceivable and impossible: no amount of parts adds up to the whole if the whole isn't already fractally present in the parts.
In the absence of this prior unity, the best we can accomplish is an aggregation, agglomeration, or agglutination; a blob, glob, or mob.
G-L agrees that "A being's quantitative unity in space is not the criterion for its substantial unity. This quantitative unity presumes only an accidental union (an aggregation of molecules)." In short, there is the accidental unity of the blob, and the substantial unity of the whole: substance and accident, another one of those primordial complementarities.
This calls to mind a mundane but insultaining political thought: you will have noticed that the left always makes transparently fraudulent appeals to "unity," even while its primitive identity politics assures that real (substantial) unity is impossible. They invent fake unities such as the LGBTQ community, the black community, or Latin-x community, etc.
First of all, these aren't real communities, since a "black community" of Sharptons, Obamas, and Waterses has no commonality with a "black community" of Elders, Sowells, and Thomases. Second, there is no substantial unity among the primitive tribes to which the left never stops pandering. The only unity is accidental, revolving around force, cash prizes, and demonization of those of us who don't belong to a tribe of DNC certified victims.
Rather, we are members of a community with a higher unity revolving around civilization, natural law, the Constitution, etc. Our movement rests upon a substantial unity, not an accidental one of skin tone, genitalia, or sexual deviance.
Which, come to think of it, mirrors the substantial unity of the Vertical Church of the Friends of Reality, the body of Christ, in which it doesn't matter whether you are Jew or Greek, man or woman, slave or free, for all are one in this Christ person-principle.
Or, if you prefer to keep things metaphysical and not theological, the Logos-Christos is the very principle whereby this real substantial unity is possible. In the absence of this principle there could be no substantial unity-in-diversity on the human plane. Rather, we'd just be radically individualistic monads, which redounds to Marxism at one end or libertarianism at the other, for extremists meet.
Even so, humans can't help possessing implicit knowledge of the whole, even if they explicitly deny it:
Indeed, the most influential form of atheism, namely Marxism, asserts in the strictest form this unity of being in all that is, by declaring all being to be matter (Ratzinger).
This absolute denial conceals an affirmation of the Absolute. Conversely, we say Yes! to a rational cosmos right up front:
Logos signifies reason, meaning, or even "word" -- a meaning, therefore, that is Word, that is relationship, that is creative. The God who is logos guarantees the intelligibility of the world, the intelligibility of our existence, the aptitude of reason to know God and the reasonableness of God.... The world comes from reason, and this reason is a Person, is Love (ibid.).
With regard to the substance/accident complementarity, the alternative view is that substances do not actually exist, but rather, are only verbal entities. This modern baton was handed off to the postmodern crowd, which promptly hurtled into the abyss, with the view that words only point to other words, sealing us into an ever-shrinking circle of non-being.
For us, being is happily the object of the intellect, and the two -- intellect and intelligible being -- are a diversity-in-unity. We reject the notion that the sciences are just "well-constructed languages" with no anchor in being.
I've gone on too long; we'll conclude with this: "What makes a man is not freedom, morality, religion, sociability, or speech. It is reason, for all the other notes are deduced from reason" (G-L).
I suppose we could say that Reason-Logos provides both the horizontal melody and the vertical harmony for the Song Supreme. Without a rationality rooted in being there can be no freedom, morality, or knowledge. In other words, our freedom is ordered to the good because our intellect is ordered to the true.
9 comments:
I agree with Francis Schaeffer when he posits that as individuals we have two choices we can make about reality. The choices determine your worldview, but only one of the choices encompasses reason, the other falls into mere rationality. He refers to the two choices as an individual's presuppositions.
If your presupposition for the beginning of all things in the material world is an impersonal beginning, well, then you fall into mere rationality, which often descends into irrationality, and the world (culture, politics, economics, etc.) suffers as we are left with no permanent standards due to the impersonalness of it all.
The other presuppositional choice is a personal beginning, a Creator God, creating not only the material world, but man, and man created in His image and with knowledge of His mind, which includes reason, though, granted, it is not (man's mind) always used in a reasonable manner.
You cannot have reason without a personal beginning.
Well said, John.
I started reading the intro to Intro; it's a testament to the clarity of Ratzinger's thought that what was said about Marxism in the 90s still holds true today.
Apropos, in the sense that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, AOC calls for the right kind of unity.
Of course, if she ever realizes the meaning and implications of what she said, the comment will get memory-holed right quick...
It's interesting that he locates two world-historical inflection points in the revolutionary hope of 1968 and its collapse in 1989. This mirrors those ever-present dualities a-la Finnegans Wake: rise and fall, illusion and disillusion, dream and reality, etc. Same as it ever was: the delusional Hope of Obama followed by the pedestrian reality of Obama.
Indeed. I was privy to a discussion the other day between a Catholic and an Evangelical about Revelation. The Evangelical is firmly convinced that we are in the end times right now, the Rapture will be happening soon, etc. I stayed out of it, mainly because what God has planned is far above my praygrade. However, the fact that world history so often repeats the same spiraling cycle has me thinking that while this is certainly an end, it probably isn't the End. The past couple of years have been Apocalyptic in the sense that evil has become increasingly unveiled, but I can't help thinking that Europeans during the plague years were probably pretty sure that was the End - which it was, but not in the way they thought.
Revelation is typological: it's always the End Times. And Beginning Times. The question is where you're situated in the spiral.
The End Times began with the Ascension. We've been in the End Times for 2,000 years (blink of an eye).
"I suppose we could say that Reason-Logos provides both the horizontal melody and the vertical harmony for the Song Supreme. Without a rationality rooted in being there can be no freedom, morality, or knowledge. In other words, our freedom is ordered to the good because our intellect is ordered to the true."
I like that Melody crossed with Harmony. Allot.
There is a model of the cosmos which deserves consideration, and this is drawn from water.
Water can be a solid, liquid, or gas, as we know.
So let us suppose the cosmos is composed of one thing we shall call consciousness. This is the mind of God in the most literal sense.
We partake of the pure stuff when we think. That is the gaseous basic consciousness.
Compressed and dense consciousness becomes time and energy, the liquid form.
Further condensed, matter precipitates out particles which along with energy form the table of the elements. Time is a component of energy (including gravity), probably they are variants of the same thing.
So this forms a chain of creation directly from God to what we can observe. It fits the facts. And it fits Genesis to a T.
The next frontier is the study of consciousness, which has to be done by turning inward.
The take away of this is not to down-play time, energy, and matter. These are indeed the very body of God and in fact can be converted directly to pure consciousness under the right conditions.
Another take away is to put primacy on consciousness, as it is the purest, most basic form of the cosmos.
Dark matter and energy are probably variants of which the differences are just a polarity.
There we have it, I can take questions now.
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