Philosophy takes place at the fluid boundary between what is known with certitude and what can never be known exhaustively, like standing on the earth and looking into the sky.
Anyone can see the ground on which he stands, but no one has ever seen the end of the sky. And even if we do perceive the edge of the big bang, the sky is just a symbol of Infinitude, so don't be so literal!
This line in the ampersand between earth & sky is necessarily ambiguous -- i.e., imprecise -- but nevertheless clear.
Think of a cloud, which has distinct edges from a distance but which become increasingly vague as one approaches. Doesn't mean clouds don't exist, nor that a man can't have his head in one. Don't be so literal!
It's the same with words, which is how the left creates so much mischief with them. Just because no word is exactly what it signifies, it doesn't mean words have no relationship to reality, nor that they mean whatever the left wants them to mean.
But this necessary ambiguity is like catnip to the anti-intellectual (mind-destroying) left; it is how they can define anything they want into existence, and undefine out what they don't like. As we know, abracadabra means I will create as I speak, and this is the very basis of the politico-media-academic black magic of the left.
I could get sidetracked into this two-volume biography of Hitler I'm reading, but it's rather early to invoke Godwin's Law.
Still, I've mentioned before that my time as an intern at Camarillo State Mental Hospital dealing with extreme loonies helped prepare me for dealing with everyday loonies, because in the former we see the same pathological mechanisms at work, only in a hypertrophically vivid manner -- things like projection, denial, splitting, repression, fantasy, and transference, painted over the sky with bold, primary colors.
Analogously, someone like Hitler is just an extreme version of everyday politics. Viewed through this lens, nothing he said was out of the ordinary per se, rather, just the usual lies and distortions on steroids. This is not to compare anyone to Hitler, rather, to recognize the continuity of the deep structure beneath the BS.
Thus, when Brandon points to the imaginary threat of MAGA REPUBLICANS!, it has an obvious resemblance to Nazi blather about Jews, or Slavs, or life unworthy of life. But forget about the grave danger posed by MAGA or Jew, for the underlying constant is scapegoating, which in turn is related to the omnipresence of projection, aggression, and psychic purification.
That's as far as I want to go down that Jojo rabbit hole, but the book to read is Gil Bailie's Violence Unveiled. You could say that concealed within the news of the day is the scapegoat of the day: identity the scapegoat and you've seen through their primitive magic. The content always changes (kulaks, blacks, Catholics, deplorables, Tea Party, the bourgeoisie, MAGA), but the mechanism endures. https://www.amazon.com/Violence-Unveiled-Humanity-at-Crossroads/dp/0824516451/ref=sr_1_2?crid=27ALYM5IW6XNC&keywords=Gil+Bailie&qid=1662574108&s=books&sprefix=gil+bailie%2Cstripbooks%2C124&sr=1-2
About the two sides of the epistemological line in the clouds referenced above, Pieper writes that it is perfectly appropriate to pronounce on the one hand that Science has determined...
It is meaningless, on the other hand, to declare that "philosophy" has discovered or explained this or that.... No philosopher can in any way use the "results" of Plato's philosophy, except if he repeats, by and for himself, Plato's thinking.
We have aphoristic confirmation of this breaking story:
Comprehending a philosopher is being momentarily swayed by him.
Confirmation too for the ground we're standing on:
Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest.
And for the abiding continuity beneath the Current Thing:
It is not so much that men change their ideas, as that the ideas change their disguises. In the discourse of the centuries, the same voices are in dialogue.
To be continued...
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