Cosmos and Cosmopathology: Getting Off the Crazy Train

There is an infinite gap between knowledge of ignorance and ignorance of ignorance. The gap is infinite because Infinitude per se is inexhaustible, being the extension of the Absolute into space, time, matter, relativity, diversity, multiplicity, etc. 

To reduce Infinitude to the finite is to implicitly affirm an absoluteness that man can mirror but never "contain." I could drone on about Gödel, but you know the drill: admit your map is incomplete and move on. And up.

And yet, it seems that human beings are addicted to this grandiose usurpation. Ever since the first couple decided to be as gods, man has been getting high on his own epistemological supply, from the Tower of Babel to Prometheus to the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Man is not just stupid, but infinitely so. Unlike animals, who don't pretend to know it all, it seems that man can't help doing so. At least modern man, since to say "post-Christian" is to say either naive rationalism (scientism) or naive irrationalism (postmodernism); the former are too clever to know their limitations, the latter too stupid.

Both campfs "know it all," but

Nothing is more superficial than intelligences that comprehend everything.

In reality,

That which is incomprehensible increases with the growth of the intelligence.

But you will have no doubt noticed that 

Intelligence is a train from which few do not deboard, one after the other, in successive stations (Dávila x 3).

Only the mystic or saint take the train all the way to the highest station. The rest of these congenitally incurious yahoos end their journey at some provincial stop and pretend they're in Shangri-La. 

Hayek calls it the "synoptic delusion," but it's the same as Voegelin's "closed existence," which is

the mode of existence in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and the pull of the transcendental (Webb). 

Which results in what Voegelin calls "deformation," i.e.,

the destruction of the order of the soul, which should be "formed" by the love of transcendental perfection inherent in the fundamental tension of existence (ibid.).

As you can see, this goes beyond a mere psychopathology, or even existential pathology, as it is more onto- and cosmological. Cosmopathology? Is that a thing?

Yes it's a thing, and I am quite sure it's the same thing that is expressed mythopoetically in Genesis 3. 

Let's start with the Cosmos: what is it? Well, if you reduce it to its material qualities, you have already placed -- plunged -- yourself outside it, into a false reality. In terms of Genesis 3, you have fallen.  

The real Cosmos is "the whole of ordered reality including animate and inmate nature" -- or in other words, conscious and "nonconscious," transcendent and immanent, vertical and horizontal. How hard is this to keep in mind? Very hard for the tenured. This real -- or at least not-unreal -- world encompasses

the full range of the tension between of existence toward the transcendental. Noetic and pneumatic differentiations of consciousness separate this cosmos into the immanent "world" and the transcendent "divine ground."

Now, you can call this fundamental tension and its poles by other names, but you can't deny their existence -- or presence -- without denying yourself and everything else. This tension is where we live, have always lived, and must live. It can never be "escaped," only denied, and this denial results in one's model being conflated with the reality it can only symbolically represent. 

Voegelin also uses the term "Gnosticism" for this disordered movement, which is "A type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality," and which "may take [either] transcendentalizing or immanentizing forms" (e.g., idealism or rationalism at one end, Marxism or scientism at the other).

Well, "who cares?," you might asking. "So what if man thinks he knows more than he can know?"

Hayek writes that all totalitarian doctrines -- of which socialism is but a sssofter and more ssseductvie version -- 

are false, not because of the values on which they are based, but because of a misconception of the forces which have made the Great Society and civilization possible.

These differences are the differences between an open and closed world, and "ultimately rest on purely intellectual issues capable of scientific resolution" -- at least so long as science isn't reduced to scientism.

To be continued...