The Endless Post

Why does the passage at the top of yesterday's post make Bob happy? Let's break it down point-by-point and try to figure out why.

But before doing so, let's consider another passage that hits the spot, also from a previously unpublished letter:

The human state is a central state, and consequently man's intelligence, his will, and his soul have a central character, in other words a character of totality, hence also of objectivity (emphases mine).

Which is precisely why the passage from yesterday is able to describe meta-reality in an objective and total manner via the human subject. Not to brag, but human intelligence isn't just anything. It is not just another animal "point of view," even -- or especially -- if one is, say, a metaphysical Darwinian or scientistic reductionist more generally. 

The point is, reality is a sum of things, but prior to this it is the whole of things, the former being more peripheral, the latter central. For example, where is the "center" of your body? Somehow it is in every part, and you are certainly more than the sum of your parts. "Wholeness" is something we can't do without, even if it has an unavoidable penumbra of mystery. 

The reductive biologist or physicist can only pretend to ignore Schuon's description while making a special exemption for themselves. For there is certainly no principle in Darwinism or subatomic physics that permits human beings to know objective and disinterested truths about the totality of biology or of the natural world.

Why this urge to insult and marginalize man's intelligence? 

I think I get it, for it is at once on target and also perverse. 

It is on target for the same reason Genesis 3 is on target: man is a Piece of Work, and we have every right, if not obligation, to be skeptical of his projects and pronouncements. It's a big reason we are not progressives.

But the key is to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, not innocent as rattlesnakes and wise as birdbrains.   

Continuing with the letter,

Human intelligence is total, for it can conceive of the Transcendent, the Absolute, or the Substance; and it is objective, for it can conceive the relativity, or accidentality, of the subject, hence that of its own empirical envelope. The intelligence is made for total Truth: both absolute truth and relative truth; metaphysics and cosmology, objective as well as subjective, including degrees of absoluteness -- or of relativity -- in the one and in the other.

That covers much the same ground as yesterday's letter, going to ultimate realities and our ability to know them. For either man can or cannot know reality; and if he can't, then we're done here, for there's nothing left but the will to power, AKA hammer & anvil, Dems & deplorables, boots & faces, Who & Whom.

About man's centrality, I read something similar in Thomistic Psychology -- that 

Man is a person. When we have said this much about him, we have paid him the highest possible tribute that can be given to a cosmic creature. He is, so to speak, the top rung on the ladder of corporeal substances.

This hierarchy is so obvious that one must be highly educated in order to not see it. At the same time, not only is there no hierarchy without a top, the hierarchy is conditioned from the top down via the vertical causation consequent to its wholeness. So,

Everything that is good and excellent in the visible cosmos points to the person of man as the crown of corporeal perfection, since everything is integrated in his person.

You'd think that this would provoke a little curiosity as to the nonlocal Principle of personhood, but no. I don't recall it ever being mentioned during my eight years of grad school. While one occasionally ran into a thinker who took a slightly more cosmic view of things, not one followed the evidence all the way up to its origin and destiny.

As a being who can think and will, [man] is a person, the only person in the material universe.

You can say with the Magisterium that  man is a "special creation" and stop right there. You won't be wrong.

Or, you can meditate on the question of what type of cosmos this must be in order for persons to exist in it. For necessities imply possibilities: if man exists, it first must be possible for him to exist, and how are we possible?

We've all heard the cliche about mankind supposedly being "traumatized" as a result of being displaced from the center of the cosmos because of heliocentrism and Darwinism. 

But guess what: only a "central" intelligence could even know of such realities. The fact remains -- and will always remain -- that "the person of man is the very center of the cosmos" (Brennan). No, not analogous to the center of a circle or even sphere; rather, more like the tip of an upward facing cone.

Another key is our immateriality, or our share in it:

because the mind of man is able to understand the determinate nature of all corporeal substances, it cannot, itself, be a corporeal substance (ibid.).

If you believe a body is a mind and vice versa, what won't you believe? In reality, 

the human mind knows corporeal substance precisely by abstracting from accidents that make them concrete and individual, removing them out of the dimensions of space and time, considering them according to their forms, absolutely and universally (ibid.).

This is not an opinion, rather, a description. And you'll just have to deal with the implications, no matter how pleasant.  

Instead of thinking of this as an "incomplete post," think of it as an endless post divided up in 24 hour increments. Like your life.