Continuing with the theme of metaphysical happiness, there is something definitively irritating about any theory or vision -- whether secular or religious -- that fails to "go all the way," or that arbitrarily stops before tracing out all its entailments and implications.
I suppose I first ran into this notion in reading Schopenhauer, who made a big deal out of it, and with good reason:
What, indeed, is an explanation, any explanation? An attempt to answer that question is the natural starting-point of [Schopenhauer's] enquiry, and as such the subject of his first book (Magee).
So, before you proffer an explanation, you need to explain how you know your explanation is sufficient.
Some readers will say, "ah, now I remember why I hate philosophy." But this isn't just some pedantic question like how many pinheads can dance on the heart of an angel, but rather, goes to the question of how we can know anything about anything.
It is possible to for us to pose some sort of Why? question with regard to anything.
Yes, but Why?
Stop reminding me why I hate philosophy! Can't be helped. For
we simply cannot imagine anything objectively of which no "why" could be further demanded (Schopenhauer).
To put it logically, anything that can be formulated can be questioned. To put it psychologically, the status of anything that can be perceived, or thought, or understood, can be queried (Magee).
Except, of course, the 2020 election.
Besides that, is it possible to have an explanation to which we don't respond with another annoying b-b-but Why?
Such an explanation must simply be. Or, it simply Is. It must be the Being of being, such that our response to it must essentially be Oh. Okay. That settles that. Let's eat!
I'm going to jump ahead of myself and just blurt out what I think must be the Sufficient Reason of Everything and Anything: Beyond-Being. This would constitute not even the first principle, rather, the ultimate reality that engenders principles.
I don't yet know if this is correct, but then again I do, because thought itself can go no further than this, the question now being whether the limits of our epistemology actually correspond to ontology per se, and I'm gonna say Shit yeah!, because to say No would ultimately mean that we can't really know anything about anything.
What I mean is that if we can know anything -- which we can -- then there is a principial reason for this, and it is the metacosmic descent from Beyond-Being --> Intelligible Being --> Intellect. Beyond-Being is not an un- or anti-Christian principle, and indeed, I was just reading about it yesterday in a couple of books about Maximus Confessor (born 580) and Eckhart (born 1260).
The latter, for example, "insists that God is above being," and that there is a corresponding "uncreated something in the soul," a "little spark" where "the Godhead becomes God in the flowing out of creation."
These are somewhat dangerous waters for those who do not know how to swim or to ask annoying questions, so proceed with caution, for this is an "endless ocean" and "bottomless abyss" about which Eckhart -- like someone else we know -- fools around with "word games that are meant to be both playful and serious," including "paradoxes, contradictions, oxymora, and other forms of wordplay in speaking of the ground."
As for Maximus, he characterizes the "Trinitarian movement" as "the perfection of a living circle, the dynamics of a divine Being who makes himself personal."
I prefer to think of the Three and the One as the ultimate complementarity as opposed to one reducing to the other. Maximus seems to agree, in that "God is Monad according to the principle of His essence" and "Triad according to his mode of existence."
But as we all know, God's essence and existence are not-two, and there is no questioning beyond a being who's essence is to exist. Or, in the words of the Aphorist -- and this is most definitely not a childish tautology, much less a full-groan tauntology --
The sole proof of the existence of God is His existence.
"Ah, now I remember why I hate this blog."
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