Clearing the Air

Let’s get back to the question of whether it is possible to gain insight into insight as such, irrespective of the discipline; in short, whether insight is universal. To say universal is to say necessity, and only God is Necessary Being, the restavus being contingent.

Nevertheless -- leaving theology out of it for the moment -- man is uniquely capable of conceiving and knowing necessity, or what Lonergan calls the “virtually unconditioned” (which is another way of saying conditioned necessity). 

Absolute Being, AKA God, is unconditioned, full stop, whereas our knowledge of necessity has certain conditions attached: for example, if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then we know with certitude that Socrates is mortal.

More generally, our knowledge of necessity takes the form of if conditions are met —> then certitude; not absolutely necessary but conditionally so.

As we mentioned a few posts back, we are clearly contingent. We didn’t have to be here. Nevertheless, once here, we are necessarily here: contingent necessity. 

I'm definitely here. You can try to talk me out of it, but to whom are you talking?

Lonergan goes on to say that human insight may be vulnerable or invulnerable; if it’s the former, then the insight is conditional and susceptible to further questions, whereas the latter represents an end to all questioning: certitude, full stop.

However, other factors besides invulnerability may come into play. For example, we often hear it said that the Science of Climate Change is Settled, implying there are no more questions. What they really mean is that our questions are not allowed because they don’t know how to answer them. 

That’s the opposite of invulnerable, i.e., weak, brittle, flimsy, fragile, etc. Catastrophic Climate Change is obviously conditional, only its votaries pretend the conditions have been fulfilled. 

Which is no different in form to the belief that the signs of the times have been fulfilled, so the return of the 12th Mahdi is right around the corner. Which is good news, because it certainly means Climate Change is the least of our worries.

Hmm. I’m a little conflicted about this whole Insight business. Or maybe I’m just bored or something, which probably means you are also getting bored, which is against the one rule at One Cosmos. 

Why not just say Intelligence and be done with it? Either we are intelligent or we aren’t. If we’re intelligent then we can know truth, all the way up to necessary truth, which is to say, the truth of necessary Being, AKA God. 

Schuon is so much more clear and concise, for which reason, whenever I’m feeling drowned in verbiage, I return to him like — to invert the analogy — an oasis in the desert.

Example.

Intelligence gives rise not only to discernment, but also -- ipso facto — to the awareness of our superiority in relation to those who do not know how to discern; contrary to what many moralists think, this awareness is not in itself a fault, for we cannot help being aware of something that exists and is perceptible to us thanks to our intelligence, precisely. 

It is not for nothing that objectivity is one of man’s privileges. But the same intelligence that makes us aware of a superiority, also makes us aware of the relativity of this superiority and, more than this, it makes us aware of all our limitations. 

This means that an essential function of intelligence is self-knowledge: hence the knowledge -- positive or negative according to the aspects in view -- of our own nature. 

To know God, the Real in itself, the supremely Intelligible, and then to know things in the light of this knowledge, and in consequence also to know ourselves: these are the dimensions of intrinsic and integral intelligence, the only one worthy of the name, strictly speaking, since it alone is properly human. 

[I]ntelligence produces, by its very essence, self-knowledge, with the virtues of humility and charity; but it may also produce, outside its essence or nature and as a consequence of a luciferian perversion, that vice of vices which is pride.

Sorry about the overlong quotes. I guess I was extra thirsty. 

I suppose the bottom line is that intelligence is no longer intelligent to the extent that it partakes of pride and thereby rejects the humility proper to a proper man. Always and everywhere, the proud not only reveal themselves to be stupid, but in so doing, the diabolical is just around corner or behind the bushes (AKA Genesis 3 All Over Again). Thus, 

It is only too evident that mental effort does not automatically give rise to the perception of the real; the most capable mind may be the vehicle of the grossest error. The paradoxical phenomenon of even a “brilliant” intelligence being the vehicle of error is explained first of all by the possibility of a mental operation that is exclusively “horizontal,” hence lacking all awareness of “vertical” relationships….

A decisive factor in the phenomenon of “intelligent error” is plainly the intervention of an extra-intellectual element, such as sentimentality or passion; the exclusivism of “horizontality” creates a void that the irrational necessarily comes to fill.

An oasis in the desert, a piece of driftwood in the ocean, a cooling breeze on a stifling day.... or, with any luck, One Cosmos on a Sunday morning.