In the Beginning is the Wordplay

These provisions of which you speak, Gagdad — what on earth are you even talking about?

It’s like the old joke about how a math department needs only pencils and wastebaskets. But running a philosophy department is even cheaper, because they don’t even need wastebaskets. So, what do we need except for a word processor, a dollop of insolence, and a heapin' helpin' of grandiosity?

A reader?

Shut up, Petey. It's not easy to conjure the readers needed to understand what I'm talking about. There exists no demand for More Bob, so I have to create it myself.  

As to the provisions, looks like we'll also be taking along this book I just started called The Irreducibility of the Human Person. Oddly, I don’t think I could find a book on our subject if I tried, and yet, this one just fell into my hands (https://www.amazon.com/Irreducibility-Human-Person-Catholic-Synthesis/dp/0813235200/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2R9MJABTZL9F5&keywords=mark+k+spencer&qid=1673989300&s=books&sprefix=mark%2520k%2520spencer%2Cstripbooks%2C139&sr=1-1).

Whenever this happens -- and it happens in some way on a daily basis -- I assume it means something or at least means something, and that I am to pay attention to it.  

However, notice what this implicitly means: that we are not alone, and that we are apparently surrounded by nonlocal operators standing by and ready to assist us. This is at once a rash conclusion, but what’s the alternative? Just ignoring synchronicities and positing a universe in which such things are impossible? That involves as much of a leap of faith as does ours. 

Besides, it’s not as if I’m building a whole cosmos out of this principle. Rather, I’m just acknowledging its possibility and going with it. All we are saying is give synchronicity a chance. What have we to lose? I like what the Rabbi says:

The physical world in which we live, the objectively observed universe around us, is only a part of an inconceivably vast system of worlds. Most of these worlds are spiritual in their essence; they are of a different order than the known world. Which does not necessarily mean that they exist somewhere else, but means rather that they exist in different dimensions of being (Seinsaltz).

I might add that it’s just a hypthothesis, not a conclusion, and that we are always ready to accept evidence to the contrary. Every believer knows how to doubt. It is scientistic and submaterial infidels who don’t know how to believe. 

I don’t want to assume too much about the ins & outs of the cosmic network, but certainly one of its most important features is that it is a network. In other words, it isn’t just human persons, but rather, everything that is a member of everything else.  

It reminds me of what race realists say about natural selection: why would we ever imagine it stops above the neck? Likewise, if nonlocality exists, why should we believe it is limited to subatomic particles? The Aphorist, as always, speaks for me:

Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others

But for this very reason -- since metaphor is pervasive -- man is susceptible to finding himself trapped within his own metaphor (or ideological matrix). Whitehead called this the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, while Schuon adverts to it in a variety of ways, for example, "The wisdom of Christ is 'folly' because it does not flatter the exteriorizing perversion" of a fallen intelligence that both hardens and scatters. 

Also, I don’t always agree with Alan Watts, but when he’s right, he’s funny. To paraphrase, he said something to the effect that if two visions of reality are otherwise equal, pick the one that’s more fun. 

So, we’ll acknowledge at the outset that we are inclined to a metaphysic that is both ultimately true and endlessly amusing. (Leaving aside another important point, that a creation without humor would be a huge mistake, nor would it adequately reflect its witty Creator. Come to think of it, what is a synchronicity but God punning?) 

Why so serious? What ever happened to Divine comedy? It is not synonymous with frivolousness, rather, closer to the phenomenology of discovery, AKA the eureka! experience.

I don’t mean to sound defensive, rather, offensive, but it should also be noted that even commencing this journey presupposes a great deal, even (or perhaps especially) a purely “scientific” journey. The latter is motivated by the same unrestricted drive to know ultimate reality, only with no explanation of how it is that our intellect just happens to proportioned to the Absolute:

the decisive error of materialism and of agnosticism is to be blind to the fact that the material things and the common experiences of our life are immensely beneath the scope of our intelligence…. The truth of the Absolute coincides with the very substance of our spirit (Schuon).

That last observation turns out to be particularly important, and goes to the fact that our intelligence should not be conflated with, or reduced to its, content alone. 

Rather, it is a substance -- the substance of intelligence -- and therefore not limited. For how can intelligence limit itself? Who is the limiter? This may sound arcane or abstract, but as we proceed we shall see how it provides the key to many enigmas and conundrums. 

Now, yesterpost we alluded to those archetypal truths that "are contained as potentialities or virtualities in the pure Intellect.” This is consistent with the “discovery” that we aren’t blank slates after all, but that we come factory equipped with all sorts of interesting features. 

Indeed, the only reason anyone pretends to believe in the old tabula rasa is that without it, the whole progressive DEI agenda collapses. You could say that our primary metaphysical competitors are just greasy politicians, not thinkers, let alone adventures or divine comedians. They're funny, but never intentionally.

We’re running up against the new Noon Limit, but I suppose we’ll end with an extremely important aphorism that we'll definitely be bringing along in our slackpack:  

The life of intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.