Yesterday's post alluded to principles and anti-principles without ever getting to the point, but this is because I only find out what a post is about after it's finished, at which point a title pops into my head and says "we're done here." Count no man happy until he is dead, and count no post finished until it is named, even if the name makes no sense and requires a new post.
Now, it would be unscientific to contemplate the very things that would be unphilosophical not to contemplate. Why? Because the two approaches operate by very different principles. To elevate any science to the ultimate principle immediately renders it an anti-principle. Why?
Because the object of philosophy is being as being -- everything -- while the object of science is this or that delimited aspect of being -- various something(s), e.g., matter, life, earth, celestial objects, etc. Philosophy is all of these and more, because it isn't the sum of them but the totality or whole of them.
The intellect is conformed to the Transcendent Everything, which is always on the surface but never of the surface.
In an insultaining asnide, Schuon notes that "most philosophies start from a sort of axiomatic blindness," which is to say, an anti-principle, which in turn explains why "modern man collects keys without ever knowing how to open a door."
For any form of mere rationalism encloses itself in its own premises and thereby "seeks the culminating point of the cognitive process on its own level."
This is like searching "for a word that is entirely what it designates," or a title that is equivalent to its post. Modernity is -- was -- a forgetting or systematic undiscovery of principles, whereas postmodernity is their inversion.
Back to Pieper: "To philosophize means nothing else but to reflect on the whole of all reality."
Like anyone could even know that!
We never said know: rather, we said reflect -- like a mirror, not a container. When I gaze into a mirror I see my reflection, but the mirror does not and cannot contain me (said I AM; indeed, the same I AM can see Abraham's reflection, because before Abraham was, I AM).
(It is possible that that last paragraph made a point beyond my ability to make it.)
Now, supposing truth exists, then it is necessary for us to know it. But ever since Genesis 3,
Man is an obligation that man often violates (Dávila).
Here we see that IS actually does entail its own OUGHT, at least vis-a-vis philosophy. In other words, we know that we cannot derive the "ought" of morality from the "is" of nature. And yet, due to the very principle of our capacity to know being, we are thereby obligated to know it truthfully.
Man qua man is obligated to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but only because he is conformed to the truth, the whole, truth, and nothing but the truth. So, help me, God!
No prayer is ever in vain, especially that one. For what is a question but a prayer for its answer?
Put conversely, strike at God, kill the man -- or his mind, anyway. Which is precisely why we are living through this zombie apocalypse, which is nothing other than dead men thinking. Other bloggers have sought merely to understand the left, when the point is to destroy the left. Or rather, to point out how and why they have already self-destructed.
This post is rapidly becoming an exercise in why a post can't be named until it is written. But let's refocus and try one more time to begin it.
I remember after the 2016 election, when the anti-democratic left called itself the resistance. This is actually a fine name, because the left always and everywhere resists reality -- what is -- precisely.
Conversely, we may define reality as that which resists us, precisely: it is that which resists us even when we stop believing in it. You might think that the greatest resistance is in the material world, and you would have a point: gravity, time, and entropy are all formidable aspects of The Cosmic Resistance.
However, in our opinion the most consequential forms of the resistance are in the vertical, for these are the principles from which everything else flows -- for example, the principles of identity (or non-contradiction), or of sufficient reason, or of causation.
I want to say that God poses the ultimate resistance for man, and there are many aphorisms that prove my point once and for all. But before getting to them, I would say that the crucifixion is the unsurpassable example, in that it is the permanent reminder that God is in the way and has to go -- at which point we can get down to the important business of creating heaven on earth without all the resistance from this vertical nuisance.
God is the impediment of modern man.
Today the individual rebels against inalterable human nature in order to refrain from amending his own correctable nature.
If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.
Hell is the place where man finds all his projects realized.
Like a Democrat run city.
No comments:
Post a Comment