Just a brief post that will continue until the school bell rings, i.e., until the student wakes up.
By way of context, the fact that we are living through such radically crazy times has prompted me to reexamine the Ultimate Ground of things.
On the one hand, O is the apophatic godhead beyond-being, and there's nothing we can say about it without having to immediately unsay it on pain of misleading the public. In other words, O is beyond time, language, specification, and understanding, since these latter would place limits on the Limitless. Like quantum physics, if you can understand it, it's not God.
This is why genuine theo-logy entails the mastery of unglish obliterature.
That said, from our perspective -- i.e., the perspective of the maninfestation -- O manifests an implicit nonlocal order, or vertical hierarchy. You could say that this is the "first fruit" engendeered by and from O.
At the top of this more "visible" goround plan is the Outward Face of God -- the great "AM," so to speak -- if anyone asks -- above and beyond which is the mysterious "I" of pure subjectivity hiding in or above that Cloud of Unknowing.
This is why we can look up and see the cloud, but even the bestavus can see no further: "Moses went up into the mountain, and a cloud covered the mountain."
Later, the same meteorological language is used when "a bright cloud overshadowed them, and suddenly a voice came out of the cloud." One may fish many similar examples, and not only from the Judeo-Christian stream.
Looked at one way, a cloud is just something that blocks the sun. But looked at from both sides now, and you realize it's but the end product of a nonlinear process involving everything from Hayward breezes to butterfly sneezes, Climbing to tranquility / Far above the cloud / Conceiving the heavens / Clear of misty shroud. So don't be so quick to dismiss our eyewitless foggus!
As mentioned in the previous post, when things get crazy -- whether in individuals or groups -- it allows us a clearer understanding of sanity. Indeed, we needn't even think about sanity until there is insanity. Likewise, we don't think about virtue until there are criminals, nor truth until there are liars, journalists, and tenure. Nor I suppose do we think about paradise in the afternoon until it's lost by eve.
So, you may have noticed from the sidebar that I've been reading a lot of radical literature, since it makes more sense in the context of these radically insane times.
For example, I recently reread the biography of Father Seraphim Rose. I want to say that he was a "radical" Christian, but this overlooks the fact that nothing by definition can ever be more radical than Christianity -- of Infinitude clothed in finitude for our convenience. There's nothing beyond that, except for finitude to return to infinitude and complete the circle.
I've also been reading radical libertarian economists such as Rothbard, von Mises, and Hoppe. In normal times, such thinkers appear a tad extreme. But in crazy times, they start to make more sense.
Oops! That was the school bell. Let me conclude with one last thought, which goes to a surprising coonfluence of economics and theology.
I'm not going to have time enough to flesh it out, but one of the most appealing aspects of Austrian economics is its epistemological humility and its appreciation not just of the known Unknown, but of the unknowable Unknown.
Then I read the following passage by a very libertarian and Hayekian-sounding theologian named Ratzinger:
But if the logos of all being, the being that upholds and encompasses everything, is consciousness, freedom, and love, then it follows automatically that the supreme factor in the world is not cosmic necessity but freedom.
That's the libertarian part. Here's the explicitly Hayekian part:
this leads to the conclusion that freedom is [orthoparadoxically!] the necessary structure of the world, as it were, and this again means that one can only comprehend the world as incomprehensible, that it must be incomprehensibility....
[T]ogether with freedom the incalculability implicit in it is an essential part of the world. Incalculability is an implication of freedom; the world can never -- if this is the position -- be completely reduced to mathematical logic
Halt, who Gödels there!
23 comments:
...the world can never -- if this is the position -- be completely reduced to mathematical logic
Sadly, some people never stop trying.
It's good to try, so long as one understands it is impossible, i.e., that understanding is prior to, and deeper than, math.
Granted; and in its way, at least the person searching for mathematical truth is looking for truth of some kind.
Apropos, at Gerard's
Speaking of truth, I’ve known Iranians.
The one I knew back in 1977 high school was an exchange student who was the last to arrive to architecture class because his previous class was at the very far extreme of our large city school campus. Every day when he arrived the teacher would say something like “Here comes the Shah”, thinking himself clever. I remember seeing the grimace on the Iranians face. Teach apparently didn’t know much about recent Iranian history.
The one I knew in my 1992 office, I asked about that self-flagellation-with-chains thing their men did during religious parades. He told me it was mostly for the ladies, plus virtue signaling to the watchful Imams who held power after the Shah was deposed. You’d self-flagellate hard when the girls and Imams were watching, soft when they weren’t.
Iranian truths. Sometimes very different from American truths. I was unsure about how to approach them about Christianity.
There is really one question we all need to ask: "What should I do right now?"
Happy is she who knows the answer at any given time.
Iranians have a long and at times glorious history; I've known a few and they were all utterly normal people who wanted all the usual things.
Iranian woman are said to be animals in the bedroom when they are approached respectfully.
Another interesting looking book: Modernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos.
I met an Iranian woman who had designed and engineered her beautiful home, and the amazing gardens surrounding. The brunch she served for our club was unusually varied and delicious. She was also very attractive with a personality to match. I asked her husband what it was like to have a wife like that, and he replied simply with a big grin: “It’s great.”
When I met the single worst boss I ever had, she sat in front of me at the intro office meeting for her project. While the PM spoke she placed her elbow on the table and wiggled her fingers repeatedly. I noticed a huge wedding ring. She withdrew her hand for a second.
Then she returned it to that position and again wiggled her fingers. This time her fingers had no ring. She was also very attractive but I was also married, and faithful. I was there to do a good job and nothing else. In the subsequent month, working for her would be a living hell where nothing made sense. For example, she’d say idiotic things in direct contrast to her “summa cum lauda” plaques on her office wall. I finally went to my own, real boss (I’d been a gig economy gigger on loan), and he made a few calls and had me replaced. During one of the calls he’d referred to the woman as “dragon lady”.
So there you have it, a full spectrum of Iranians. The exchange student who’d calmly taught me about international “rule of law”, the comical self-flagellator, the perfect wife, and the psychopathic con artist philanderer. Whenever I’ve told the typical American about them, most want to come to judgment and so pick just one of my stories with which to categorize all Iraninans everywhere. This is where I learned about projection. Most people who judge, are actually confessing. And most Americans can be pretty damned ignorant about "others".
anon @10/06/2021 03:08:00 PM,
I'll be spending the entire day finishing a deck I'm building for a divorcee. Tomorrow I'll be starting on a MIL apartment for a recent divorcee and her newly divorced son.
What I really need to quit posting so much angst around here, is a string of clients who are just normal regular folks living in a normal regular city where temperatures never exceed record levels on a regular basis and non-english speakers are more of a novelty than a norm and tent cities full of freeway rock throwers aren't so commonplace.
I know it wouldn't be for everyone's cup of tea, but what with the need to cut back on the global dairy herd due to it's contribution to global warming combined with the polarization on abortion, might not a compromise be found whereby the milk produced for the aborted babies be commercialized on a grand scale. After all there is no great outcry when calves are slaughtered so that the milk meant for them can be consumed by humans. The humans who insist it's their right to behave like animals can't complain when they're treated as such.
An empty vessel makes much noise, and an empty head spews many words.
Clearly, Anon's mind is so open its brain has fallen out.
Jesus said "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven" (Luke 10:18)
Truth triumphs.
Out of his element
I am the walrus.
“And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light”. - 2 Corinthians 11:14
Except, what if everybody is calling everybody else Satan, disguised as an angel of light? How do we know who's Satan, in league with Satan, or just playing the devils advocate?
Lotta ins, lotta outs.
I am the Donny.
"This is why genuine theo-logy entails the mastery of unglish obliterature."
Nice.
"I've also been reading radical libertarian economists such as Rothbard, von Mises, and Hoppe. In normal times, such thinkers appear a tad extreme. But in crazy times, they start to make more sense."
One of these econs is not like the others, one of these ecoons just doesn't belong, one of these econs denies intellectual property, ensuring that liberty would be lost in anarchy....
Cough *rothbard* cough. Excuse me.
Definitely a crank and a polemicist, but his loathing of the state is refreshing.
I'm also intrigued by the idea of economics being rooted in a priori principles, since math is hard.
What disturbs me most about modern economics, is that it attempts to replace philosophy as the starting point for thinking and acting in the world, behaving as if metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and economics' parent, the ethics of politics, are subservient to it, rather than the very things which what it purportedly studies, results from.
In it's original form of Political Economy, with Jean Baptiste Say and Fredrick Bastiat, it was more oriented towards discovering and reporting upon what was actually true and most effective in light of that, but with the switch to modern 'Economics' under the sway of Positivism & Marxism, it's become more concerned with devising what should be believed to be true, and efficient.
von Mises & Hayek are amongst the best of the moderns, but they too tend to take their own thoughts as starting points, and for similar utilitarian purposes. Rothbard, like Kant, says many fine sounding things, but when you put them all together, they end up inverting and destroying the thing they claimed to be furthering.
Um... IMHO. Ahem.
Post a Comment