Unfundamentalist Fundamentalism

Let’s get back to our subject, which is to say, the fundamental categories of thought and, if we’re lucky, of reality as well. Ever since Kant the fundamental idea has been that our ideas don’t reveal anything about the world, or at least we have no way of knowing whether they do. In short, the Noumenon is closed for isness. Ours, anyway. 

On the one hand, Kant’s idealism is so wrong on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. On the other hand, it's apparently difficult to prove wrong, I suppose for the same reason we can’t prove the existence of free will, or even that solipsism is false. If this is a simulation, how would we know? 

Another factor is that people don’t want to believe X if X inevitably leads to a completely unacceptable Y. We see this everywhere, and it essentially defines the left. Almost everything normal people are forbidden to notice or talk about is because (x) will lead to a (y) that destroys the premises of the left. 

This is why free speech has suddenly become problematic after having been settled for over two centuries. That our right to it is self-evident is somehow no longer evident. Human nature didn’t change, so what did? 

I suppose that’s easy, in the sense that human beings have always opposed free speech. The U.S. was a brief exception to this enduring rule of human nature, and now we’re back to the rule -- which, not surprisingly, has co-arisen with the denial of human nature. 

In a certain sense, postmodernity may be defined as a systematic amnesia of what man knows about Man. To be sure, it is still known, but only by a persecuted remnant of authoritarian fascist insurrectionist transphobic election deniers.  

Free speech doesn’t only pose a threat to those in power, but it does so because of the X—>Y schematic referenced above. 

But it isn’t just freedom of speech that is under attack, but -- of course -- freedom itself: freedom of thought, freedom of association, and freedom to hate (AKA “hate speech”) those who would deny our freedom. This amounts to a class of hateful authoritarians presuming to tell us we aren't permitted to despise them out loud.

Fundamentals. Unfortunately, this word connotes fundamentalism, as authority connotes authoritarian. It reminds me of how Schuon once referred to himself as an “absolutist,” perhaps not knowing what this connotes, when all he meant is that his metaphysic begins with the Absolute from which various entailments follow. For example, 

If we were to be asked what the Absolute is, we would reply first of all that it is necessary and not merely possible Reality; absolute Reality, hence infinite and perfect, precisely; and we would add -- in conformity with the level of the question asked – that the Absolute is that which, in the world, is reflected as the existence of things. Without the Absolute, there is no existence; the aspect of absoluteness of a thing is what distinguishes it from inexistence, if one may so put it. Compared to empty space, each grain of sand is a miracle. 

It is literally impossible to express it more clearly than that, but nevertheless, I suspect that our tenured class would have no idea what he’s saying, proving once again that the Secret protects itself. It no more wishes to be sullied by their grubby hands than a 13 year old girl wants to shower (again) with President Biden.  

The passage reminds us of our recent examination of Necessity and Possibility, which won’t necessarily amount to much without the third term alluded to by Schuon, which is to say, Perfection. 

In the absence of this ladder, there is no vertical scale and therefore no progress, development, telos, etc. Rather, our existence (supposing it could even exist) would be more like a fluctuating hallucinatory dreamscape with no axis or center — pure change regarded from within an endless flux of  subjectivity, the very recipe for unremitting psychosis: nihilism as ontological fact, not merely as faculty lounge pretension.

Reminds me of the “anarchism” of ANTIFA, which is only conceivable in the nurturing context of grown-up arch-ism. Which in turn reminds me of Voegelin’s gag about the order of History being the history of Order. It is this very Order we speak of when speaking of the Fundamentals.

This Fundamental Order is at once permanent and… I don’t want to say “changing,” but rather, it is not only “alive,” but the living organism is its analogue, precisely. To put it rightside up, this Order is the principle of both Life and Person — in case you were wondering how these two miracles could be present in an inanimate physics experiment. 

This Order is also “relational,” which probably implies more than you suspect, because if relationship is irreducible to anything less, it not only changes everything, but is the principle of the very intersubjectivity that permits humanness, especially our creativity. Intersubjective relationality is the framework of creativity, and even of scientific progress, since it facilitates an endlessly inspiraling advance between intelligence and intelligibility.

Words fail at the horizon of the wordless Word, and I gotta run anyway, but let Schuon take a crack at it:

The Absolute, or the Essence, intrinsically comprises Infinitude; it is as the Infinite that it radiates. Divine Radiation projects the Essence into the “void,” but without there being any “going out” whatsoever, for the Principle is immutable and indivisible, nothing can be taken away from it; by this projection on the surface of a nothingness that in itself is inexistent, the Essence is reflected in the mode of “forms” or “accidents.” 

But the “life” of the Infinite is not only centrifugal, it is also centripetal; it is alternately or simultaneously -- depending on the relationships envisaged -- Radiation and Reintegration; the latter is the apocatastatic* “return” of forms and accidents into the Essence, without nevertheless there being anything added to the latter, for it is absolute Plenitude. Moreover, and even above all, Infinitude – like Perfection – is an intrinsic characteristic of the Absolute: it is as it were its inward life, or its love which by overflowing, so to speak prolongs itself and creates the world.

*Word of the day, apocatastasis: (Greek): restitution, restoration among certain Christian theologians.