One Cosmos, Indivisible

Yes, indivisible, which is the principle and prerequisite for a host of overlapping entailments, among which are interiority, unity-in-diversity, intersubjectivity, personhood, intelligence, intelligibility, understanding, and more. 

Each of these realkategories (a German-sounding term I just made up) is only possible because this is One Cosmos, indivisible; we could even add "with liberty and justice," and if time permits we'll explain why. Suffice it to say that only a very specific -- not to mention unlikely -- type of cosmos allows for the existence of free will.  

Okay, a hint: it must be a rational cosmos: if things are fundamentally irrational, then obviously the possibility of rational choice is eliminated at the root. Is this why, everywhere and everywhere, Job One of the left is to efface primordial distinctions and to thereby sow chaos? 

Yes, and because of this they never stop gaslighting us. They can scarcely yell one thing without dementedly screaming its opposite, e.g., "Our Afghan mission was an unprecedented success, and besides, it's all Trump's fault!," or "Black lives matter, and defund the police!," or "follow the science, and men can give birth!" 

It is precisely this cosmic indivisibility that is a necessary condition for the writing of this post -- indeed, for saying anything about anything, AKA discovering the truth of things: in a word, affirming their isness. As mentioned a post or two back, to say something is true may be reduced to the statement that something either Is or Is Not.  

But how are such statements possible unless there is a real underlying unity between knower and known?  We cannot know a thing that is fundamentally unconnected to us. From our perspective such things don't exist, because we can't know what we can't know. This isn't just the inevitable domain of unknown unknowns, but of unknowable unknowns. 

As G-L reminds us, "the first operation of the intellect" -- the operation we always do and can't help doing -- is "simple intellectual apprehension." This spontaneous apprehension is anterior to both reason and judgment:

The gaze of our intellect is fixed first upon the natures of sensible things.... To understand is a kind reading into the interior.... For sense knowledge is occupied with sensible, exterior qualities, whereas intellective knowledge penetrates all the way to the essence of the thing (Thomas, quoted by G-L, emphases mine).

This goes to what I meant in the first paragraph with regard to interiority, intelligence, intelligibility, and understanding being entailments of cosmic indivisibility. For ultimately -- in the first & last analysis and every one in between -- "the object of the intellect is that which is," AKA being.  

I know what you're thinking: this is all a bit abstract and eggheady, Bob. You're making dryasdust medieval scholasticism sound like a party at Foucault's place. But to say that being is, and is intelligible, is probably the most profound -- and surprising -- thing one could say about the world (for the implications are literally endless).

Do things make sense? Or does sense make things? That may sound like a Sphinx-worthy antithesis, but it really comes down to that: for modern Kantians, what we call things are just consequences of our own psychic categories. But for realists such as ourselves, it is the things themselves that truly make sense, i.e., disclose their real natures to the intellect.

After all, if they don't, then to hell with it. If the world is but a projection of our own neuropsychology, that's just a step away from saying that perception is reality. But if perception is reality, then there is no reality. To even say reality is to affirm the existence of something distinct from our own perceptions, and will still be there when we look away -- for example, Americans stranded in Afghanistan. The Matrix Media will of course expend every effort to make them go away. We'll see.

In truth, to say reality is to say appearances; but this is a complementarity, not a duality, for appearances are of reality. Isn't this the point? It takes the form of, "I thought it was this, but it turned out to be that." 

For example, "it sure looked like the sun circles the earth, but it turns out the earth circles the sun." Then, "it looked like the sun is stationary, but it turns out it's just one of a hundred billion stars spiraling around a galactic center many lightyears away." Etc. 

However, we don't just go from one appearance to another equally unfounded one, but to a deeper understanding of the reality behind them. Just because there's no end to this fun-filled interior journey, it hardly means reality doesn't exist, or that it's just a winding road from nowhere to nothing.  

I thought this post would get more deeply into the chapter, but it didn't. Oh well. More fun for future Bob!