We're nearing the end of Person and Being, which, as I mentioned at the outset, is one of my favorite little books. Indeed, I wish all books were simultaneously this compact and substantive. The world would be a much better and more coherent place without so much writing.
Fake News is only a symptom of a much deeper pneumopathology. Toss higher indoctrination into the mix, and we have millions of credentialed retards who think their low-watt words matter to anyone outside their immediate family.
If you really have something important to say, it shouldn't take that long to say it. So, what's the motivation? I suppose the same instinct that moves dogs to pee on fire hydrants, only worse, since animals have no free will; linguistic narcissism is a choice.
For it is written -- and even then just barely --
Writing is many times unavoidable; publishing is almost always indecent.
Wordiness is not an excess of words, but a dearth of ideas.
The deluded are prolix.
The fewer adjectives we waste, the more difficult it is to lie.
Clarity eliminates rhetoric.
Write concisely, so as to finish before making the reader sick.
Simple talent is to literature what good intentions are to conduct.
Matter of fact, in the very next section Clarke describes what can go wrong if our movement toward self-transcendence is stymied or derailed: such individuals stagnate while wondering
what is wrong with them now that the old ways of self-fulfillment no longer seem to work as effectively as before; they become restless, wander on the horizontal level looking for new challenges, new stimuli that will fill the mysterious void they feel developing, but avoiding the shift to a new self-transcending level of consciousness....
"Others more or less consciously and deliberately cling tenaciously to their self-centered ego," and thus
positively block the flow of the Transcendent Center in them and through them, with the final consequence of stagnation or perhaps even disintegration...
Schuon describes in similar terms how our subjectivity may become hardened and frozen -- as if under a thick sheet of ice -- or dispersed and dissipated in outwardness.
But in reality, we are endowed with
a radical innate drive toward the whole of being, the unlimited horizon of being as intelligible.
Therefore,
since the Source and fullness of all being is Infinite Being, there is in every spiritual intellect a natural drive to know God as Source, fullness of being, and final goal of knowing... a natural drive in us as images of God to transcend our own limited point of view...
Let's stipulate that this drive is either present in us or it's not; and that it either has a proper telos or it is utterly inexplicable and devoid of meaning.
I'm just now reading another book called A Catholic Scientist Harmonizes Science and Faith, and the author makes the same point:
Our universal drive for self-transcendence does not seem to come from our genes.... As St. Bonaventure put it, "We cannot rise above ourselves unless a higher power lifts us up."
To say that we are images of God is to acknowledge a key principle, for it explains how it is possible to "de-center and transcend our finite selves," and thus "take on the Infinite Center, the authentic Center of all being, as our own center and perspective." Only in so doing are we able to fulfill "the potentialities of personal being as such."
This is at once "a losing or letting go of oneself that is simultaneously and by that very fact a new finding of oneself at a deeper level."
Only by reaching beyond the human can we succeed in becoming fully human. To refuse to do so condemns us to fall short of the human itself. To be a human person fully means to self-transcend toward the Infinite.
Like Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it or something.
25 comments:
Wordiness is not an excess of words, but a dearth of ideas.
The truth of the above statement is more encompassing than many realize. I would only add that most whom fall prey to wordiness do so because they confuse a plethora of words for actual ideas.
HappyAcres
@HappyHectares
·
May 31
From earliest times we've known to distrust people who deal in words and not things. But we always forget again.
“If we regard sin as a spiritual disease, as corruption in the will, blindness and disorder in the understanding, derangement and perversion of man’s moral nature, then the forgiveness of sin consists in curing him of his spiritual diseases. It is the purification of his affections, it is the restoration of the understanding to its original order and normal condition, it is curing his spiritual blindness, giving him ears to hear the words of the Lord, and eyes to perceive the delicate and exquisite harmonies of the Divine order; it is putting all his faculties into right relations to each other and to the source of life. When this is done, and so far as it is done, the penalty also is remitted, for the penalty goes with the disease. When a musical instrument is out of tune the penalty is discord. Tune it and the penalty disappears. The Lord came into the world to restore our disorderly faculties to their normal condition, to bring them into harmony with the order of His own nature, to conjoin them to Him, as the branch to the vine, that the life-giving forces of His own nature might flow into them, cleanse them of their impurities, vivify them with His love, and cause them to bear fruit abundantly. When, therefore, we pray to the Lord to forgive us our debts, we must think of our own sinful natures, our diseased and dying condition, and the burden and purpose of our prayer must be that the Lord will heal our diseases, save us from the death they threaten, and conjoin us to Himself.“ Rev. Chauncey Giles (1813-1893)
I wouldn't put it that way.
Wordiness is not an excess of words, but a dearth of ideas.
Indeed.
Just watched Matt Walsh's What is a Woman? Highly recommended -- the most simultaneously humorous and horrifying film you'll ever see.
A few words about the benefits of wordiness.
All one has to do is search out the comments section of practically any opinion piece (where the clientele hasn’t yet been fully tribalized with all contrarians canceled) to find know-it-alls who have all the answers that everybody else needs to know. These are typically people of few words.
I’d go along with it if all their pithy little know-it-all answers didn’t stand in direct conflict with each other. Confusing. It’s far more effective (and lucrative) to be prolific word salad generators. Note the success of Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump, for examples.
And then there are those who’ve given up on words and choose armor piercing instead. Wouldn’t we all rather they be shooting random words at our children instead?
Men disagree not so much because they think differently but because they do not think.
Thinking or leftism: pick one.
The essence of leftist ideology:
"While he professed a worldview set radically against metaphysics and Kantian idealism, Stalin was an idealist in the sense that he believed completely in the primacy of ideas.
"Stalin was a man of ideas, to the point where he thought that by changing the ideas to which people are exposed he could redesign human nature itself."
Leftist non-thinking in two easy steps:
"Postmodernism solved two major problems for the Left. First, it set forth the idea that even if there was an objective reality, we had no way of knowing about it outside of our senses, so any arguments founded on the assumption of an objective reality could be dismissed as meaningless.
"Second, it asserted that reason itself was flawed and useless for understanding reality. Indeed, reality could only be defined by each individual’s own thoughts, feelings and experiences, and was therefore a subjective product unique to each individual.
"In one fell swoop, the entire foundation of millennia of progress was wiped away and humans were returned to a primitive state, reliant on the pronouncements of authority figures who would compete on the basis of the plausibility of their assertions without any need to subject themselves to agreement with problematic facts."
Only if you're a white supremacist who believes in freedom of speech.
I'm a white supremacist who believes in freedom of my speech, Karen. And I'll bet your real name is Shaniqua. Which means no speech for you.
For God there are only individuals.
Dupree, that perfectly describes every Leftist I've ever known, as described by blue state conservatives.
But then there's RINOs. You almost got me started. Never get me started when it comes to RINOs.
So I'll switch over to the 20+ more senseless mass shootings of complete strangers we've had in America since Uvalde. More than in every other developed nation in the world combined.
The USA, where more kids are killed than either cops or soldiers.
Damn postmodernism. And all their so-called "good guys with a gun" loitering about waiting for the donuts to arrive.
Now, a rational person of few words might want to compare all the possible variables in order to come up with a few rational reasons in the fewest words possible. So what’s different between our Great Nation and their obviously sucky ones?
Well… The video games are the same. The number of doors is the same. The number of mentally ill is the same. The number of Muslims, trannies and Marxists is the same, give or take. What seems notably different, is that we got more Christians. Plus we got more guns. Plus more gun and Christian freedom laws, in spite of all the persecution from you know who.
Which brings us right back to postmodernism. Postmodernism is to blame. Because all postmodernism is, is a buncha fake news anyways.
If we could only keep guns out of the hands of Democrats we'd have the crime rate of Sweden. Before the Muslims got there.
We had a shooting a couple blocks away a couple of weeks ago. One dead, but 14 wounded; Sailer's Law applied, which is why it was relegated to "local news" and quickly smothered. Everyone involved were almost certainly Democrat voters.
But muh narrative: Hispanic shooter murders Hispanic children while Hispanic cops do nothing until white border patrol agent intervenes.
Yep. So many things sickeningly wrong there, one hardly knows where to begin.
Puts a whole new spin on the concept of "white knight."
Literally thousands of blacks have been murdered by other blacks because of BLM and its goodwhite enablers.
When you see it graphed out, it's truly horrific. But heaven forbid anybody say anything or hold anyone accountable, that would be racist.
BLM WN: Buy Large Mansions in White Neighborhoods
Everything you say is trying to spin away the cold hard fact that shooters of all races are mass murdering indiscriminately in our once far more peaceful Christian nation. It's just rationalization. Or maybe just postmodernist thinking.
The world is watching and I'd think that if this thing cannot be controlled, civilized nations won't want any part of it: Guns, lockdown freedom, or Christianity.
Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give opinions.
The liberal politician passes the second part of his life trying to heal the wounds he inflicted on society in the first.
I will ABSOLUTELY give up my guns if Obama, Pelosi, and Biden do so first.
Post a Comment