And Several Billion Watts of Ultraviolet Radiation Shine in the Darkness

Yesterday’s post was derailed after the initial observation about specialists and general practitioners, the point being that “metaphysics underlies all other departments, because all other departments are specializations of the total basic inquiry” (Lonergan). 

I’ll bite: what’s the Total Basic Inquiry?

Thinking back on it, I don’t recall any of my teachers beginning with this question. But certainly through my entire elementary education the question echoed in my head: "why are we learning this? Why is it important? What’s the point? And how does it fit together? It all seems so random and disjointed.” 

The smart kids mastered it all without bothering to ask why, while the stupid ones either couldn’t master it or rebelled against the idea of trying because it would reveal their stupidity. Then there were a few people like me, AKA my friends, who grudgingly did the minimum needed to get by and promptly forgot it.  

But I never forgot the question: what the heck is the Total Basic Inquiry? Of course, I didn’t put it in those words, but it revolved around an implicit sense that there is more to reality than its appearances. 

Which turns out to be the essential function of intelligence as such: “discernment between the Real and the illusory, or between the Permanent and the impermanent" (Schuon).

We all know the patristic gag to the effect that God becomes man that man might become God. Schuon makes the more general (or particular, depending on how you view it) point that “the Real entered into the illusory so that the illusory might be able to return to the Real.” 

Speaking for myself, this certainly helps me understand the metaphysics (or “meta-theology” or something) of the Incarnation. I say this because as a lad, Christianity was explained to me no better than anything else, leaving me with so many unanswered -- and seemingly unanswerable -- questions that I jettisoned the whole thing. 

For if one truly understands something, one should be able to explain it to a ten year old. Which is different from treating the student like a ten year old. Such patronizing explanations do more harm than good, in large measure because they aren’t explanations at all, just assertions. And assertions without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.

Now, it’s one thing to step outside Plato’s cave and squint at the sun, another thing altogether when the sun ventures into the cave and becomes one of the dwellers. Nevertheless, that’s the point of December 25 -- that the sun that lights our world from afar descends right down into it.

“After a fashion” and “so to speak.” Not to place human limits on what transpired, but there were human limits, in the sense that human nature was the lens or prism through which the Light shone. 

I’m probably not explaining it well, but I’m thinking of something Schuon wrote, that if God had fully entered our world full stop and without qualification, “the effect of His birth would have been the instantaneous reduction of the universe to ashes.”

First of all, like anybody could know that. Then again, it reminds me of what Fr. Spitzer says about the traces of the Resurrection left in the Shroud of Turin (there is a whole chapter devoted to this subject at https://www.crediblecatholic.com/big-book/):

The image was not formed by dyes, chemicals, vapors, or scorching. The only known explanation for the formation of the image is an intense burst of vacuum ultraviolet radiation (equivalent to the output of 14,000 excimer lasers) emitted from every three-dimensional point of the body in the Shroud.

The ultraviolet light necessary to form the image exceeds the maximum power released by all ultraviolet light sources available today.... It would require “pulses having durations shorter than one forty-billionth of a second, and intensities on the order of several billion watts.”

Now, no one’s faith should stand or fall based on scientific speculation, but such a finding is consistent with what was said above about what happens when this inconceivably intense Light is let loose in our little cave. So have a safe Christmas. 

And Several Billion Watts of Ultraviolet Radiation Shine in the Darkness

Yesterday’s post was derailed after the initial observation about specialists and general practitioners, the point being that “metaphysics underlies all other departments, because all other departments are specializations of the total basic inquiry” (Lonergan). 

I’ll bite: what’s the Total Basic Inquiry?

Thinking back on it, I don’t recall any of my teachers beginning with this question. But certainly through my entire elementary education the question echoed in my head: "why are we learning this? Why is it important? What’s the point? And how does it fit together? It all seems so random and disjointed.” 

The smart kids mastered it all without bothering to ask why, while the stupid ones either couldn’t master it or rebelled against the idea of trying because it would reveal their stupidity. Then there were a few people like me, AKA my friends, who grudgingly did the minimum needed to get by and promptly forgot it.  

But I never forgot the question: what the heck is the Total Basic Inquiry? Of course, I didn’t put it in those words, but it revolved around an implicit sense that there is more to reality than its appearances. 

Which turns out to be the essential function of intelligence as such: “discernment between the Real and the illusory, or between the Permanent and the impermanent" (Schuon).

We all know the patristic gag to the effect that God becomes man that man might become God. Schuon makes the more general (or particular, depending on how you view it) point that “the Real entered into the illusory so that the illusory might be able to return to the Real.” 

Speaking for myself, this certainly helps me understand the metaphysics (or “meta-theology” or something) of the Incarnation. I say this because as a lad, Christianity was explained to me no better than anything else, leaving me with so many unanswered -- and seemingly unanswerable -- questions that I jettisoned the whole thing. 

For if one truly understands something, one should be able to explain it to a ten year old. Which is different from treating the student like a ten year old. Such patronizing explanations do more harm than good, in large measure because they aren’t explanations at all, just assertions. And assertions without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.

Now, it’s one thing to step outside Plato’s cave and squint at the sun, another thing altogether when the sun ventures into the cave and becomes one of the dwellers. Nevertheless, that’s the point of December 25 -- that the sun that lights our world from afar descends right down into it.

“After a fashion” and “so to speak.” Not to place human limits on what transpired, but there were human limits, in the sense that human nature was the lens or prism through which the Light shone. 

I’m probably not explaining it well, but I’m thinking of something Schuon wrote, that if God had fully entered our world full stop and without qualification, “the effect of His birth would have been the instantaneous reduction of the universe to ashes.”

First of all, like anybody could know that. Then again, it reminds me of what Fr. Spitzer says about the traces of the Resurrection left in the Shroud of Turin (there is a whole chapter devoted to this subject at https://www.crediblecatholic.com/big-book/):

The image was not formed by dyes, chemicals, vapors, or scorching. The only known explanation for the formation of the image is an intense burst of vacuum ultraviolet radiation (equivalent to the output of 14,000 excimer lasers) emitted from every three-dimensional point of the body in the Shroud.

The ultraviolet light necessary to form the image exceeds the maximum power released by all ultraviolet light sources available today.... It would require “pulses having durations shorter than one forty-billionth of a second, and intensities on the order of several billion watts.”

Now, no one’s faith should stand or fall based on scientific speculation, but such a finding is consistent with what was said above about what happens when this inconceivably intense Light is let loose in our little cave. So have a safe Christmas. 

Metaphysician Heal Thysoph

Just as there are medical specialists and the general physician, there are diverse academic specialties and the general metaphysician. Except we are suffering a severe shortage of the latter, at least qualified ones.

As we know, everyone is a metaphysician, nor can man not be one short of a literal psychosis that results in no order to anything, both inside and out. 

The qualified metaphysician is simply someone who reflects on this implicit order, not just of this or that aspect of reality, but of the totality. Metaphysics "aims in the first place at the comprehension of the whole Universe” from top to bottom, i.e., "from the Divine Order to the terrestrial contingencies” (Schuon).

Not so fast, Gagdad: isn’t that a bit presumptuous? Who said anything about a Divine Order?

Fair enough. We may or may not call it this at the end of our discussion, but for now it’s enough to call it the “vertical dimension,” or just “verticality.” But so long as you are truly open and minded, you will realize that this verticality is neither self-explanatory nor reducible to something else. 

Indeed, the very first thing we know is actually two things that necessarily coarise: objects and our knowledge of them. 

This is in contrast to animals, who perceive a world of objects which they cannot penetrate. They see only surfaces where we perceive essences. A man who sees only unintelligible surfaces would be a severely autistic nominalist. 

Man as such turns walls into windows. But only because there is a skylight, more on which as we proceed.

So, it’s not possible to say or know anything about anything without presupposing this verticality. To say “there is no verticality” would be as nonsensical as saying “I am not speaking.” 

Whence the desire of our class of pseudo-intellectual imbeciles -- or worse, intellectual imbeciles -- to bury the vertical, and metaphysics along with it, over the past few centuries? Why? What’s the motivation? And what’s the payoff?

I don’t recall ever posting about this question, but I suppose I have only to interrogate my former Bob to find out. 

For example, if you had asked me back in the ‘90s what the conscience is, I would have assured you that it’s just a colloquial way of talking about the superego, which is a kind of internalized voice that punishes us for not going along with the more or less random rules of this or that culture, and rewards us when we do.

Morality itself is relative, but the superego makes it feel absolute, almost like “the voice of God,” if such a thing existed. Indeed, the existence of the superego is a big reason why people believe in God to begin with, since it is as if we are under the judging eye of an interior Other.  

And if you had asked me about the ultimate source of the superego, I would have said something about the introjection of the father. Come to think of it, this is why people refer to God as “father,” since he’s mostly the projection of a big superego in the sky

It wasn’t until I started listening to Dennis Prayer in the 1990s that I realized how ridiculous this was. Take an obvious example: is murder wrong, or do we just imagine it’s wrong because our superego says so? 

As obvious as that is, it couldn’t penetrate my stupidity at first, because there were other, equally important factors at play — all the usual leftist ones such as social status, moral and intellectual superiority, secular gnosis, class conformity, etc.  

It’s almost Christmas, so I’m giving you a break: a short post.

Metaphysician Heal Thysoph

Just as there are medical specialists and the general physician, there are diverse academic specialties and the general metaphysician. Except we are suffering a severe shortage of the latter, at least qualified ones.

As we know, everyone is a metaphysician, nor can man not be one short of a literal psychosis that results in no order to anything, both inside and out. 

The qualified metaphysician is simply someone who reflects on this implicit order, not just of this or that aspect of reality, but of the totality. Metaphysics "aims in the first place at the comprehension of the whole Universe” from top to bottom, i.e., "from the Divine Order to the terrestrial contingencies” (Schuon).

Not so fast, Gagdad: isn’t that a bit presumptuous? Who said anything about a Divine Order?

Fair enough. We may or may not call it this at the end of our discussion, but for now it’s enough to call it the “vertical dimension,” or just “verticality.” But so long as you are truly open and minded, you will realize that this verticality is neither self-explanatory nor reducible to something else. 

Indeed, the very first thing we know is actually two things that necessarily coarise: objects and our knowledge of them. 

This is in contrast to animals, who perceive a world of objects which they cannot penetrate. They see only surfaces where we perceive essences. A man who sees only unintelligible surfaces would be a severely autistic nominalist. 

Man as such turns walls into windows. But only because there is a skylight, more on which as we proceed.

So, it’s not possible to say or know anything about anything without presupposing this verticality. To say “there is no verticality” would be as nonsensical as saying “I am not speaking.” 

Whence the desire of our class of pseudo-intellectual imbeciles -- or worse, intellectual imbeciles -- to bury the vertical, and metaphysics along with it, over the past few centuries? Why? What’s the motivation? And what’s the payoff?

I don’t recall ever posting about this question, but I suppose I have only to interrogate my former Bob to find out. 

For example, if you had asked me back in the ‘90s what the conscience is, I would have assured you that it’s just a colloquial way of talking about the superego, which is a kind of internalized voice that punishes us for not going along with the more or less random rules of this or that culture, and rewards us when we do.

Morality itself is relative, but the superego makes it feel absolute, almost like “the voice of God,” if such a thing existed. Indeed, the existence of the superego is a big reason why people believe in God to begin with, since it is as if we are under the judging eye of an interior Other.  

And if you had asked me about the ultimate source of the superego, I would have said something about the introjection of the father. Come to think of it, this is why people refer to God as “father,” since he’s mostly the projection of a big superego in the sky

It wasn’t until I started listening to Dennis Prayer in the 1990s that I realized how ridiculous this was. Take an obvious example: is murder wrong, or do we just imagine it’s wrong because our superego says so? 

As obvious as that is, it couldn’t penetrate my stupidity at first, because there were other, equally important factors at play — all the usual leftist ones such as social status, moral and intellectual superiority, secular gnosis, class conformity, etc.  

It’s almost Christmas, so I’m giving you a break: a short post.

Victims All the Way Down

In one of his unintended aphorisms, Whitehead observed that intellectual antagonists of a particular era will generally share some unconscious or implicit presuppositions about how the world functions:

Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

I’m old enough to remember when left and right in America shared some underlying assumptions, e.g., the Constitution, freedom of speech, equality under the law, Judeo-Christian values, etc. Now what do we share? I can’t think of a single principle we can all rally around, nor a single person we can all revere as a Superior Specimen. 

For one thing, to even recognize such a specimen is to acknowledge hierarchy and telos, which is precisely what their ontology denies at the outset. 

For us Washington is the greatest American, and worthy of our eternal gratitude; for them, a self-interested slaveholder. No need to review the list of similar heroes felled by the axe of cultural Marxism. You need only one grievous example to get the point:

Those who profess that nobility is vile end up preaching that vileness is noble.

For example, groomers, trannies, criminals, really, all the special pets of the left, who are special not by any merit or achievement, but only because of some immutable trait or correctable defect.         

Not only do we have different political philosophies, there is no longer a shared ontology. We literally live in different realities, but the first thing to know about reality is that there’s only one. Of course, there are different views of this single reality, but the left elevates the view to the viewed, AKA My Truth. 

Which for us translates to no truth and no possibility of truth. Nor can there be any compromise between what reality is and what I want it to be. At least after age ten or eleven.

Why can’t they understand this? It’s not necessarily stupidity, which leads to the corollary that not only is intelligence not enough, nothing good comes of it when it is unhinged from reality:

Compared to so many dull intellectuals, to so many artists without talent, to so many stereotyped revolutionaries, a bourgeois without pretensions looks like a Greek statue.

Second look at my entirely ordinary and unpretentious parents? Perhaps, but that’s another post. Besides, I was looking for a different aphorism. Here’s one that reminds me of the state-media-big tech gaslighting that has become so perversive in recent years:

Propaganda in Russia and in China selected such intentionally crude arguments and obvious falsifications that we must attribute the triumph of communism to the disdain with which it treats the intelligence of the masses.

There’s a subtle point in there, because the citizen who participates in the gaslighting at least gets to share in the disdain for the restavus, both the normal and superior. Is there a matrix-media journalist out there who doesn’t ooze this disdain from every pore? And not just disdain, but genuine hatred, contempt, dehumanization, etc. 

We’ve mentioned before that the people who are subject to these feelings may deceive themselves into believing they are “unpleasant,” when the opposite is the case: not only is self-righteous disdain pleasant, it’s addictive. Ultimately it's a form of "downward transcendence," or elevation from below. 

And now we have an anthropological context to understand such upper vertical counsels as forgiving, turning the other cheek, loving one’s enemies, etc. Obviously these have to be given from a supernatural source precisely because they do not come naturally. What comes naturally is tribalism, envy, scapegoating, human sacrifice.

In other words, what comes naturally is the left. The world of the modern left is an invention of Queen Karen for the benefit of their stupid, perverse, and criminal kings such as George Floyd. 

It's really an inversion of Christ's inversion alluded to above. But just because the ultimate victim of human depravity was God himself, this does not mean that any old Democrat-approved victim is the ultimate god.

Victims All the Way Down

In one of his unintended aphorisms, Whitehead observed that intellectual antagonists of a particular era will generally share some unconscious or implicit presuppositions about how the world functions:

Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

I’m old enough to remember when left and right in America shared some underlying assumptions, e.g., the Constitution, freedom of speech, equality under the law, Judeo-Christian values, etc. Now what do we share? I can’t think of a single principle we can all rally around, nor a single person we can all revere as a Superior Specimen. 

For one thing, to even recognize such a specimen is to acknowledge hierarchy and telos, which is precisely what their ontology denies at the outset. 

For us Washington is the greatest American, and worthy of our eternal gratitude; for them, a self-interested slaveholder. No need to review the list of similar heroes felled by the axe of cultural Marxism. You need only one grievous example to get the point:

Those who profess that nobility is vile end up preaching that vileness is noble.

For example, groomers, trannies, criminals, really, all the special pets of the left, who are special not by any merit or achievement, but only because of some immutable trait or correctable defect.         

Not only do we have different political philosophies, there is no longer a shared ontology. We literally live in different realities, but the first thing to know about reality is that there’s only one. Of course, there are different views of this single reality, but the left elevates the view to the viewed, AKA My Truth. 

Which for us translates to no truth and no possibility of truth. Nor can there be any compromise between what reality is and what I want it to be. At least after age ten or eleven.

Why can’t they understand this? It’s not necessarily stupidity, which leads to the corollary that not only is intelligence not enough, nothing good comes of it when it is unhinged from reality:

Compared to so many dull intellectuals, to so many artists without talent, to so many stereotyped revolutionaries, a bourgeois without pretensions looks like a Greek statue.

Second look at my entirely ordinary and unpretentious parents? Perhaps, but that’s another post. Besides, I was looking for a different aphorism. Here’s one that reminds me of the state-media-big tech gaslighting that has become so perversive in recent years:

Propaganda in Russia and in China selected such intentionally crude arguments and obvious falsifications that we must attribute the triumph of communism to the disdain with which it treats the intelligence of the masses.

There’s a subtle point in there, because the citizen who participates in the gaslighting at least gets to share in the disdain for the restavus, both the normal and superior. Is there a matrix-media journalist out there who doesn’t ooze this disdain from every pore? And not just disdain, but genuine hatred, contempt, dehumanization, etc. 

We’ve mentioned before that the people who are subject to these feelings may deceive themselves into believing they are “unpleasant,” when the opposite is the case: not only is self-righteous disdain pleasant, it’s addictive. Ultimately it's a form of "downward transcendence," or elevation from below. 

And now we have an anthropological context to understand such upper vertical counsels as forgiving, turning the other cheek, loving one’s enemies, etc. Obviously these have to be given from a supernatural source precisely because they do not come naturally. What comes naturally is tribalism, envy, scapegoating, human sacrifice.

In other words, what comes naturally is the left. The world of the modern left is an invention of Queen Karen for the benefit of their stupid, perverse, and criminal kings such as George Floyd. 

It's really an inversion of Christ's inversion alluded to above. But just because the ultimate victim of human depravity was God himself, this does not mean that any old Democrat-approved victim is the ultimate god.

Concrete Principle and Abstract Entailments

Lonergan characterizes metaphysics as 

the department of human knowledge that underlies, penetrates, transforms and unifies all other departments.

In short, it involves the integration of “the totality of the objects of knowing” with “the totality of knowing”; ultimately, the diversity of objects is reconciled in the one Subject, irrespective of whether or not we are consciously aware of it, for every act of knowing is a participation in this Principle. Change my mind. On second thought, don't bother:

The foundation of metaphysical certitude is the coincidence between truth and our being; a coincidence that no ratiocination could invalidate (Schuon). 

We’ve written before of this primordial distinction of Subject <--> Object, and of how it must be the first meta-cosmic bifurcation. Different religions handle this bifurcation in different ways, but we may have to put them all together in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding. 

This is because Big Box religion tends to operate on a “need to know” basis, with this need being different, or at least a different aspect of the One Thing Needful being emphasized. 

For example, in Christianity it is salvation, but this hardly excludes growth in charity or all-around saintliness. Judaism emphasizes holiness, freedom (AKA exodus), and moral actions, while Vedanta hammers home the distinction between reality and appearances.

Those are simplifications, and one could go on, but this question of the One Thing Needful is rather large. Come to think of it, it’s got to be the largest thing conceivable, since, you might say, it is the very actualization of God in man, and nothing is bigger than God.

Think about the Incarnation, both as concrete fact and in terms of its many entailments. Of note, these entailments proceed both “up” and “down,” so to speak. For example, let’s say the Absolute Principle assumes human nature. So what? What's it to me?

Obviously a lot, only it’s not necessarily self-evident, hence the role of a teaching institution to draw out the implications, which are more or less endless. 

At the same time, proceeding upward, what does the bare fact of the Incarnation say about God? In other words, supposing the Incarnation occurs, it must be possible for it to occur, and by virtue of what principle?  

Long post short, I want to say Trinity. As we know, this word is nowhere found in scripture, and yet, it is the simplest way of talking about the up & down entailments of the Incarnation, if you’re following me. For what else can it imply when Christ says something like, for example, I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you? Moreover, he frames this not in terms of belief but knowledge.

What kind of strange knowledge is this, and how is it possible, because it doesn’t seem to follow Aristotelian logic or the usual scientific categories. Anything is a thing precisely insofar is it is this thing and not that thing. But here Jesus implies a world in which it is possible for one thing to be in another while not losing itself. Indeed, this is the ultimate context in which one finds oneself.

Slept late. To be continued... 

Concrete Principle and Abstract Entailments

Lonergan characterizes metaphysics as 

the department of human knowledge that underlies, penetrates, transforms and unifies all other departments.

In short, it involves the integration of “the totality of the objects of knowing” with “the totality of knowing”; ultimately, the diversity of objects is reconciled in the one Subject, irrespective of whether or not we are consciously aware of it, for every act of knowing is a participation in this Principle. Change my mind. On second thought, don't bother:

The foundation of metaphysical certitude is the coincidence between truth and our being; a coincidence that no ratiocination could invalidate (Schuon). 

We’ve written before of this primordial distinction of Subject <--> Object, and of how it must be the first meta-cosmic bifurcation. Different religions handle this bifurcation in different ways, but we may have to put them all together in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding. 

This is because Big Box religion tends to operate on a “need to know” basis, with this need being different, or at least a different aspect of the One Thing Needful being emphasized. 

For example, in Christianity it is salvation, but this hardly excludes growth in charity or all-around saintliness. Judaism emphasizes holiness, freedom (AKA exodus), and moral actions, while Vedanta hammers home the distinction between reality and appearances.

Those are simplifications, and one could go on, but this question of the One Thing Needful is rather large. Come to think of it, it’s got to be the largest thing conceivable, since, you might say, it is the very actualization of God in man, and nothing is bigger than God.

Think about the Incarnation, both as concrete fact and in terms of its many entailments. Of note, these entailments proceed both “up” and “down,” so to speak. For example, let’s say the Absolute Principle assumes human nature. So what? What's it to me?

Obviously a lot, only it’s not necessarily self-evident, hence the role of a teaching institution to draw out the implications, which are more or less endless. 

At the same time, proceeding upward, what does the bare fact of the Incarnation say about God? In other words, supposing the Incarnation occurs, it must be possible for it to occur, and by virtue of what principle?  

Long post short, I want to say Trinity. As we know, this word is nowhere found in scripture, and yet, it is the simplest way of talking about the up & down entailments of the Incarnation, if you’re following me. For what else can it imply when Christ says something like, for example, I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you? Moreover, he frames this not in terms of belief but knowledge.

What kind of strange knowledge is this, and how is it possible, because it doesn’t seem to follow Aristotelian logic or the usual scientific categories. Anything is a thing precisely insofar is it is this thing and not that thing. But here Jesus implies a world in which it is possible for one thing to be in another while not losing itself. Indeed, this is the ultimate context in which one finds oneself.

Slept late. To be continued... 

The Light Shines in the Darkness, But Give Us a Break

It’s Christmas week, and we should be blogging about happier subjects. Yes, we’re still in a civilizational nosedive, but we can always return to that catastrophe in a week or two, assuming we don’t hit the ground first. And despite the left's best efforts, destroying civilization isn’t as easy as it looks.  

Moreover, even the leftist doesn’t really want to live in the violent, repressive, and, worst of all, humorless world his theories and policies bring about, right? Right? RIGHT?!

I heard somewhere that old John Cleese is finally waking up to wokeness, after 83 years of making a nuisance of himself (he actually offered to be a speechwriter for Obama, and not because he saw that Obama himself is capable only of cliches, smears, and straw man arguments).  A reminder that

The leaden prose of the Marxist offers an irresistible attraction to leaden minds (Davila).

Unfair, or too fair? Cleese recently described the Republican Party as the "most disgracefully immoral people I've ever come across in a Western civilization.” 

On second thought, the perfect speechwriter for Obama! I mean, I can’t stand Republican leaders either, but Cleese will be surprised to discover that Western civilization has actually seen worse.  

"The progressive," writes Sr. D., "travels among literary works as the Puritan did among cathedrals: with hammer in hand.” Until the hammer is turned on him. Then it's not so fun being the Nail of the Day.

Nevertheless, it’s not a virtue to defend yourself from being clubbed to death. Then again, discovery of the survival instinct is a very good place to begin one’s meditation on politics and human nature.

In any event, I predict Cleese will not live long enough to undergo a full-monty Alec Guinness:

But again, tomorrow it will be the eve of Christmas Eve Eve Eve, so let’s keep it light despite the darkness. 

And for once, no pun intended: let's cerebrate this idea of the Light shining in the darkness, because if it’s true, it’s not just good news for sinners and even the IRS, but equally for thinkers, given all the bad and destructive ideas to which man is inclined (see above).  

Oh, by the way, if we don’t get more than the occasional comment, I’m going to be forced to turn off comments. Too humiliating! I recall a deal we made several years ago, when far-flung members of the vertical diaspora promised to check in once a year. Perhaps they no longer exist, or have passed on to Bismarck. If you're dead, then never mind.

Our subject today is metaphysics. But really, we’re just going back to the previous discussion of Lonergan’s Understanding and Being, which took us through Lecture 7. How convenient that Lecture 8 is called A Definition of Metaphysics. It probably won’t be my definition, but that’s okay. Iron sharpens irony.

Maybe the posts are too long? I’m not aware of any other blogger who burdens the reader with such endless circumnavelgazing on a near daily basis. 

As always, my excuse is that I do it for no one’s benefit but my own, because how can you help anyone else if you can’t help yourself? Supposing we are in a nosedive, it’s the only sensible thing to do: secure your flask first, and then assist the other person with a taste. 

Let me back up a moment, and ask the question of whether Christianity has anything to do with metaphysics? I, of course, believe it does, but this places me in an apparently small and shrinking minority. 

But if Christianity is true, and the truth sets you free, surely this can’t be just a helpful tip, another piece of the puzzle, a "department" like any other, only revolving around the Great Unprovable? Rather, it must be the epistemological key to the whole existentialada, no? 

Is it all the made up words? 

Or, do reverence and irreverence just not go together? Besides, you’re not as funny as you think you are, Gagdad. Keep your day job. Or rather, beg them to give it back. 

We have so many departments of learning, is it really possible that a single idea or principle or being could unify them all? For this is the promise of any metaphysic, and not just the Christian kind.

I know -- maybe I should leave readers in suspense, so they have to tune in tomorrow for the next installment. 

The Light Shines in the Darkness, But Give Us a Break

It’s Christmas week, and we should be blogging about happier subjects. Yes, we’re still in a civilizational nosedive, but we can always return to that catastrophe in a week or two, assuming we don’t hit the ground first. And despite the left's best efforts, destroying civilization isn’t as easy as it looks.  

Moreover, even the leftist doesn’t really want to live in the violent, repressive, and, worst of all, humorless world his theories and policies bring about, right? Right? RIGHT?!

I heard somewhere that old John Cleese is finally waking up to wokeness, after 83 years of making a nuisance of himself (he actually offered to be a speechwriter for Obama, and not because he saw that Obama himself is capable only of cliches, smears, and straw man arguments).  A reminder that

The leaden prose of the Marxist offers an irresistible attraction to leaden minds (Davila).

Unfair, or too fair? Cleese recently described the Republican Party as the "most disgracefully immoral people I've ever come across in a Western civilization.” 

On second thought, the perfect speechwriter for Obama! I mean, I can’t stand Republican leaders either, but Cleese will be surprised to discover that Western civilization has actually seen worse.  

"The progressive," writes Sr. D., "travels among literary works as the Puritan did among cathedrals: with hammer in hand.” Until the hammer is turned on him. Then it's not so fun being the Nail of the Day.

Nevertheless, it’s not a virtue to defend yourself from being clubbed to death. Then again, discovery of the survival instinct is a very good place to begin one’s meditation on politics and human nature.

In any event, I predict Cleese will not live long enough to undergo a full-monty Alec Guinness:

But again, tomorrow it will be the eve of Christmas Eve Eve Eve, so let’s keep it light despite the darkness. 

And for once, no pun intended: let's cerebrate this idea of the Light shining in the darkness, because if it’s true, it’s not just good news for sinners and even the IRS, but equally for thinkers, given all the bad and destructive ideas to which man is inclined (see above).  

Oh, by the way, if we don’t get more than the occasional comment, I’m going to be forced to turn off comments. Too humiliating! I recall a deal we made several years ago, when far-flung members of the vertical diaspora promised to check in once a year. Perhaps they no longer exist, or have passed on to Bismarck. If you're dead, then never mind.

Our subject today is metaphysics. But really, we’re just going back to the previous discussion of Lonergan’s Understanding and Being, which took us through Lecture 7. How convenient that Lecture 8 is called A Definition of Metaphysics. It probably won’t be my definition, but that’s okay. Iron sharpens irony.

Maybe the posts are too long? I’m not aware of any other blogger who burdens the reader with such endless circumnavelgazing on a near daily basis. 

As always, my excuse is that I do it for no one’s benefit but my own, because how can you help anyone else if you can’t help yourself? Supposing we are in a nosedive, it’s the only sensible thing to do: secure your flask first, and then assist the other person with a taste. 

Let me back up a moment, and ask the question of whether Christianity has anything to do with metaphysics? I, of course, believe it does, but this places me in an apparently small and shrinking minority. 

But if Christianity is true, and the truth sets you free, surely this can’t be just a helpful tip, another piece of the puzzle, a "department" like any other, only revolving around the Great Unprovable? Rather, it must be the epistemological key to the whole existentialada, no? 

Is it all the made up words? 

Or, do reverence and irreverence just not go together? Besides, you’re not as funny as you think you are, Gagdad. Keep your day job. Or rather, beg them to give it back. 

We have so many departments of learning, is it really possible that a single idea or principle or being could unify them all? For this is the promise of any metaphysic, and not just the Christian kind.

I know -- maybe I should leave readers in suspense, so they have to tune in tomorrow for the next installment. 

Crystalized Stupidity

So, the plane is going down and the dials on our console have become useless, either spinning like Adam Schiff in a tornado or stopped altogether. Progressives have succeeded in dismantling all our standards, measures, and landmarks, leaving us literally dis-oriented. 

Violence is not enough to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference to the particular values that founded it. --Dávila

So, there is a kind of speech that equates to violence. It’s called deconstruction, or any academic discipline ending in "Theory" or "Studies." It never stops destroying, but the tenured ape "cannot lament the disappearance of what he is ignorant of."

It wasn’t that long ago that the West oriented itself to little things such as God, truth, liberty, family, equality under the law, freedom of speech & assembly, etc. Meantime -- sing with me -- The blizzard of the world / Has crossed the threshold / And it’s overturned / The order of the soul (Cohen).

Yes, there are always countercultural pockets of resistance, islands of sanity, and bunkers of Slack, but we’re talking about the culture at large, both where it is and where it is headed. And it doesn’t take a prophet to read the signs of these times, because even if the progressive flight panel is useless, ours is working just fine.  

For the Lie is parasitic on Truth, in that the most consequential liars do so because they are clever enough to know the truth. 

However, the more stupid among them simply embrace the Lie with no reflection whatsoever. What is a progressive NPC but a sponge that sops up random drops of ideology? Or maybe you have no extended family.

It’s the difference between, say, Hillary Clinton and Sandy Cortez. Both never stop disseminating the Lie, but only one has some murky sense of the truth in her gutsies. Speech was given to one type of leftist in order to deceive, the other type in order to be deceived, and together they make an extremely effective team. At least until they reach the finals: 

Cynical skill progresses from victory to victory until the final victory, which annihilates it.  

Obviously, in order to maintain our flight, we must have a sense of up and down, just as every culture must have it in order to function, even if its standards are not our standards, to put it mildly. No, we are not relativists -- up is up and down is down. Rather, we’re thinking of something Dávila says about even a bad order being preferable to no order at all.

Elsewhere he says There are a thousand truths and one error. I’ll bite: what’s the one error? 

He’s too respectful of the reader’s intelligence to come out and say it, but it must be the same as Chesterton’s one thought that ought to be stopped, the thought that stops thought: the ultimate stupidity of absolute relativism.

Progressives who complain about the present forget that it is the very crystallization of their dreams come true:

Two hundred years ago it was legitimate to have confidence in the future without being totally stupid. But who can believe in today’s predictions since we are yesterday’s splendid future?

Identity politics is about more than identity, it’s about joyfully participating in one’s own exploitation: 

In order to exploit a man peacefully it is convenient to reduce him beforehand to sociological abstractions. 

But EQUITY! Precisely, for  

Homogeneity drives out God.

At the same time, godlessness drives out hierarchy, so it's a win-win for the left. 

Crystalized Stupidity

So, the plane is going down and the dials on our console have become useless, either spinning like Adam Schiff in a tornado or stopped altogether. Progressives have succeeded in dismantling all our standards, measures, and landmarks, leaving us literally dis-oriented. 

Violence is not enough to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference to the particular values that founded it. --Dávila

So, there is a kind of speech that equates to violence. It’s called deconstruction, or any academic discipline ending in "Theory" or "Studies." It never stops destroying, but the tenured ape "cannot lament the disappearance of what he is ignorant of."

It wasn’t that long ago that the West oriented itself to little things such as God, truth, liberty, family, equality under the law, freedom of speech & assembly, etc. Meantime -- sing with me -- The blizzard of the world / Has crossed the threshold / And it’s overturned / The order of the soul (Cohen).

Yes, there are always countercultural pockets of resistance, islands of sanity, and bunkers of Slack, but we’re talking about the culture at large, both where it is and where it is headed. And it doesn’t take a prophet to read the signs of these times, because even if the progressive flight panel is useless, ours is working just fine.  

For the Lie is parasitic on Truth, in that the most consequential liars do so because they are clever enough to know the truth. 

However, the more stupid among them simply embrace the Lie with no reflection whatsoever. What is a progressive NPC but a sponge that sops up random drops of ideology? Or maybe you have no extended family.

It’s the difference between, say, Hillary Clinton and Sandy Cortez. Both never stop disseminating the Lie, but only one has some murky sense of the truth in her gutsies. Speech was given to one type of leftist in order to deceive, the other type in order to be deceived, and together they make an extremely effective team. At least until they reach the finals: 

Cynical skill progresses from victory to victory until the final victory, which annihilates it.  

Obviously, in order to maintain our flight, we must have a sense of up and down, just as every culture must have it in order to function, even if its standards are not our standards, to put it mildly. No, we are not relativists -- up is up and down is down. Rather, we’re thinking of something Dávila says about even a bad order being preferable to no order at all.

Elsewhere he says There are a thousand truths and one error. I’ll bite: what’s the one error? 

He’s too respectful of the reader’s intelligence to come out and say it, but it must be the same as Chesterton’s one thought that ought to be stopped, the thought that stops thought: the ultimate stupidity of absolute relativism.

Progressives who complain about the present forget that it is the very crystallization of their dreams come true:

Two hundred years ago it was legitimate to have confidence in the future without being totally stupid. But who can believe in today’s predictions since we are yesterday’s splendid future?

Identity politics is about more than identity, it’s about joyfully participating in one’s own exploitation: 

In order to exploit a man peacefully it is convenient to reduce him beforehand to sociological abstractions. 

But EQUITY! Precisely, for  

Homogeneity drives out God.

At the same time, godlessness drives out hierarchy, so it's a win-win for the left. 

Transcendental Flight and Vertical Orientation

Wait, I think the metaphor is still moving -- better club it again!

Yesterday we spoke of the various instruments arrayed on our flight panel, and of which one might be the most important. We decided to go with man’s knowledge of himself, in both its horizontal and vertical dimensions, AKA science and wisdom. 

However, although the two can't actually be separated -- man by definition partaking of both -- a purely horizontal view of man inevitably leads to the slaughterhouse, which is why the 20th was by orders of magnitude the bloodiest in man’s long and lamentable catalogue of crimes against his own kind.

God is probably not the first and certainly not the last to wonder if the creation of man might have been a bit overly optimistic. Man is such a reliable underachiever, and each generation falls for the same old errors painted a new color. No wonder the left wants to lower the voting age, so they can bake in the cosmic stupidity: in the Kingdom of the Retarded, AOC is queen. 

My point is this, and if you don’t believe me, believe Davila: 

Without philosophy the sciences do not know what they know.

As a corollary, with a bad or implicit philosophy, scientism knows a great deal that cannot be true, and knows nothing at all about things that must be true -- including ones that make the practice of science possible. So perhaps you've noticed that

Nothing is more alarming than science in the ignorant.

Like, say, the Incarnation of Science itself, Dr. Fauci.

This systematic amnesia or ideological repression of what man knows about man is a major part of Lonergan’s whole... thing. “Our century [referring to the 20th],” he writes, 

is merely the most recent moment in a cycle of decline in which our self-understanding [read: knowledge of human nature] and our understanding of our common situation have become ever less comprehensible, and our capacity to respond to the challenges posed by this situation has become more and more restricted [not just forgotten but censored and exiled beyond the virtual pale, a la Twitter].

As alluded to a couple of posts back, since we are always situated in the vertical, we can fall into an ever-tightening graveyard spiral, or be drawn upward into the ever-widening gyre of the Divine Attractor.

To be perfectly accurate, the latter is at once both ever-widening but focused around God, which seems paradoxical but not at all, since God is analogous to a dimensionless point, which is therefore Infinitude itself. At any rate, very roomy. 

Since we’re all sailing through the nonlocal ether, how do we know whether we’re pointed up or down? Recall JFK Jr., who wasn't instrument trained and was therefore among the last three to find out the hard way he was probably flying upside down when the flight came to a sudden end. By then he had probably lost all spatial and visual orientation, so flying wasn’t the problem, rather, avoiding obstacles such as, oh, the earth.

Analogously, supposing we’re up in the air of transcendence, how to we maintain our vertical orientation? What are the cues and landmarks we can use to gauge our direction and our progress?

Well, for starters, there is capital-T Tradition, which consists of a body of wisdom resulting from hundreds of generations who have confronted the same situations. You could say that much of it is “unexamined” or “precritical,” but then again, Death, Misery, and Dysfunction are pretty effective means of finding out you probably shouldn't have done that. In the words of Amy Winehouse, I Told You I was Trouble, but she didn't listen.

Anyway, let’s continue with Lonergan’s description of the ins & outs of our death spiral:  

In this cycle of decline our horizons contract, our language is devalued, our questions are brushed aside, and our experiences become a flow of alienating absurdity.

Gosh. That sounds… familiar.  

Moreover, these “facts” about ourselves descend like an iron curtain and cut us off from the realization of our potentialities; they provide ready-made justifications for the views of those who would see us as little more than animals in a [horizontal] habitat…

Lonergan saw very clearly where the plane was headed, since he was instrument trained: "At the root of this crisis is a crisis in our knowledge of ourselves.” 

Which reminds me of what Dennis Prager says about feminism, that the average postmodern toxic female knows far less about human sexuality than did her great-grandmothers. These spiteful mutants are the very image of naivety posing as sophistication.

Having said that, Lonergan is not a reactionary. He knows that the only way out is forward, and that airplanes cannot fly in reverse.

I suppose that’s a good place to pause. 

Transcendental Flight and Vertical Orientation

Wait, I think the metaphor is still moving -- better club it again!

Yesterday we spoke of the various instruments arrayed on our flight panel, and of which one might be the most important. We decided to go with man’s knowledge of himself, in both its horizontal and vertical dimensions, AKA science and wisdom. 

However, although the two can't actually be separated -- man by definition partaking of both -- a purely horizontal view of man inevitably leads to the slaughterhouse, which is why the 20th was by orders of magnitude the bloodiest in man’s long and lamentable catalogue of crimes against his own kind.

God is probably not the first and certainly not the last to wonder if the creation of man might have been a bit overly optimistic. Man is such a reliable underachiever, and each generation falls for the same old errors painted a new color. No wonder the left wants to lower the voting age, so they can bake in the cosmic stupidity: in the Kingdom of the Retarded, AOC is queen. 

My point is this, and if you don’t believe me, believe Davila: 

Without philosophy the sciences do not know what they know.

As a corollary, with a bad or implicit philosophy, scientism knows a great deal that cannot be true, and knows nothing at all about things that must be true -- including ones that make the practice of science possible. So perhaps you've noticed that

Nothing is more alarming than science in the ignorant.

Like, say, the Incarnation of Science itself, Dr. Fauci.

This systematic amnesia or ideological repression of what man knows about man is a major part of Lonergan’s whole... thing. “Our century [referring to the 20th],” he writes, 

is merely the most recent moment in a cycle of decline in which our self-understanding [read: knowledge of human nature] and our understanding of our common situation have become ever less comprehensible, and our capacity to respond to the challenges posed by this situation has become more and more restricted [not just forgotten but censored and exiled beyond the virtual pale, a la Twitter].

As alluded to a couple of posts back, since we are always situated in the vertical, we can fall into an ever-tightening graveyard spiral, or be drawn upward into the ever-widening gyre of the Divine Attractor.

To be perfectly accurate, the latter is at once both ever-widening but focused around God, which seems paradoxical but not at all, since God is analogous to a dimensionless point, which is therefore Infinitude itself. At any rate, very roomy. 

Since we’re all sailing through the nonlocal ether, how do we know whether we’re pointed up or down? Recall JFK Jr., who wasn't instrument trained and was therefore among the last three to find out the hard way he was probably flying upside down when the flight came to a sudden end. By then he had probably lost all spatial and visual orientation, so flying wasn’t the problem, rather, avoiding obstacles such as, oh, the earth.

Analogously, supposing we’re up in the air of transcendence, how to we maintain our vertical orientation? What are the cues and landmarks we can use to gauge our direction and our progress?

Well, for starters, there is capital-T Tradition, which consists of a body of wisdom resulting from hundreds of generations who have confronted the same situations. You could say that much of it is “unexamined” or “precritical,” but then again, Death, Misery, and Dysfunction are pretty effective means of finding out you probably shouldn't have done that. In the words of Amy Winehouse, I Told You I was Trouble, but she didn't listen.

Anyway, let’s continue with Lonergan’s description of the ins & outs of our death spiral:  

In this cycle of decline our horizons contract, our language is devalued, our questions are brushed aside, and our experiences become a flow of alienating absurdity.

Gosh. That sounds… familiar.  

Moreover, these “facts” about ourselves descend like an iron curtain and cut us off from the realization of our potentialities; they provide ready-made justifications for the views of those who would see us as little more than animals in a [horizontal] habitat…

Lonergan saw very clearly where the plane was headed, since he was instrument trained: "At the root of this crisis is a crisis in our knowledge of ourselves.” 

Which reminds me of what Dennis Prager says about feminism, that the average postmodern toxic female knows far less about human sexuality than did her great-grandmothers. These spiteful mutants are the very image of naivety posing as sophistication.

Having said that, Lonergan is not a reactionary. He knows that the only way out is forward, and that airplanes cannot fly in reverse.

I suppose that’s a good place to pause.