Picking up right where we left off, a big question is whether our distinction between the Absolute Absolute (AA) and Relative Absolute (RA) is ontological or merely epistemological -- i.e., really real or really just our opinion, man.
In other words, there is one sense in which the RA cannot be the AA, otherwise we'd be God: our knowledge of God is not and cannot be the same as God’s knowledge of himself. Or just say that finitude is not infinitude. Forever.
Having screed that, if I’m not totally out of my element here, then nor is finitude not infinitude, full stop, end of story. By way of analogy, we don’t live inside the sun, but then again, who can draw an ontological distinction between the sun and the rays streaming in through my window? Somewhat like the Trinity, there is distinction but no substantial difference, because light is light and heat is heat.
So, we’re simultaneously inside the sun but not inside the sun. So much for Aristotelian logic. Big rabbit hole here, but suffice it to say that Aristotelian logic is still valid -- duh -- but either situated within, or complementary to, another logic.
Come to think of it, there is ultimately a kind of “tri-logic” that involves a complementarity between symmetrical and asymmetrical logics on the horizontal plane, situated vertically within the logos as such.
Not only is this an even bigger hole, off in the distance I see a hookah-smoking caterpillar more than willing to sell us some pot and other edibles. No thanks. Caffeine is enough for now.
Think of other distinctions we routinely make, say, between heart and brain, or mind and body, or intellect and truth, or human and animal, etc. Who can draw a literal line between these? No, I’m serious: name me one. NAME ME ONE!
If you follow this line of thought -- or have another toke -- you not only begin to wonder where the line is, but whether we’ve crossed it. Isn’t this what heresy is? (One toke) over the line, Smokey! Excuse me! MARK IT ZERO! Next paragraph.
It just now occurred to me that the deeper I get into retirement, the more I am surrounded by these rabbit holes. For “retirement” isn't merely an absence of toil, it is -- for me at any rate -- a nonstop vertical plunge into the source or ground or something.
This may sound off-the-Walter, but I’ve always envied the seemingly Dude-like life of Bob Dylan. No, not the money or fame or any worldly perks, rather precisely the opposite: that he seems to float along in the otherworldly world from which creativity arises.
Perhaps someday I’ll write a post on this subject, but at any rate, if I have a bucket list, the only thing in the bucket is a desire to penetrate this annoying worldly world and dwell inside the real one. Back when I owed my allegiance to what 99% of human call the “real world,” I had to render myself unreal in order to live there.
Granted, most people aren't built this way, and thank God, because if they were, we’d be in big trouble. But a few of us are, and I like to think that we pneumatics provide the vertical innertainment. Yes, we are here to amuse you, accent on the muse -- even if no one else seems to find it amusing except for me, Dupree, Julie, Ted, and occasionally the late Vanderleun, Slack be upon him, there where poetic champions compose!
Matter of fact, yesterday at the library sale I picked up a biography of one of my literary heroes, P.G. Wodehouse, who most definitely lived in the Dylanworld mentioned above.
Like anyone else, he was at times forced "to take account of the rest of the world. But he never cared for it.” He was “remarkably unresponsive to many aspects of the world around him,” but here again, this was not fundamentally an avoidance but a total plunge into that place from which creativity arises.
Example. I was thinking about taking weekends off in order to give readers a break. But guess what? My mother-in-law is visiting, which will require much more attention to that other world than Bob is comfortable with. Therefore, I need to come back to this world for a little oxygen, or what the voice in Brandon’s head calls a little breathing room.
And here’s a coincidence: the Wodehouse bio is my nighttome read, while in broad daylight I’m reading a book on the implicit theology of Tolkien, who is very much in the same boat as Dylan and Wodehouse. He hardly ever left his "legendarium," just as I am ill at ease outside my jestarium (https://www.amazon.com/Tolkien-Dogmatics-Theology-Mythology-Middle-earth/dp/1683596676/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3P1QM5VK5MEFQ&keywords=austin+freeman&qid=1676221198&s=books&sprefix=austin+freeman%2Cstripbooks%2C163&sr=1-1.)
I guess the bottom line is: STFU, I’m not avoiding anything, least of all reality. Rather, I'm nondoing whatever I feel like I want to, gosh!
There's a dream where the contents are visible / Where the poetic champions compose
25 comments:
Big rabbit hole here, but suffice it to say that Aristotelian logic is still valid -- duh -- but either situated within, or complementary to, another logic.
Oh, there's a thought. How many scientists have spent their lives looking for the TOE, when they should have been looking for the third element of a material trinity (something along the lines of Newtonian physics, quantum physics, and ... ?). We know that both Newtonian and quantum are true in their respective elements, and are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps there is another, as-yet-undiscovered field of physics which would really tie the room together.
You can't get rid of transcendence by pretending to have transcended it.
The logics of Aristotle + Gödel + Matte Blanco + Schuon come close to the metalogical Big Picture.
Also "trinitarian logic."
I guess the bottom line is: STFU, I’m not avoiding anything, least of all reality. Rather, I'm nondoing whatever I feel like I want to, gosh!
:D
Right now, one of my biggest challenges as a parent is looking my daughter in the eye and trying to gently explain that not going anywhere or doing much in particular IS the plan for the day, and more than enough to keep us occupied. Most days, she remains unconvinced.
"Renouncing the world" ceases to be an achievement and becomes a temptation as Progress progresses.
I don't know about you Bob, but it took a lot of effort for me to be nondoing. And I still can't stop myself from an occasional do... If I do say so thyself.
Bob – can you tell me more about Matte Blanco and his significance? Thanks.
Some interesting observations about Wodehouse:
“He is a man singularly ill-fitted to live in a time of ideological conflict, having no feelings of hatred about anyone, and no very strong views about anything. ... I never heard him speak bitterly about anyone—not even about old friends who turned against him in distress. Such temperament does not make for good citizenship in the second half of the Twentieth Century”. (Malcolm Muggeridge)
“For Mr Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man; no 'aboriginal calamity'. His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled. ... Mr Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in”. (Evelyn Waugh)
And about himself:
“I never was interested in politics. I'm quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent feeling. Just as I'm about to feel belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings.”
“When in due course Charon ferries me across the Styx and everyone is telling everyone else what a rotten writer I was, I hope at least one voice will be heard piping up, 'But he did take trouble’.”
Matte Blanco only wrote one book called The Unconscious as Infinite Sets, which is like 500 pages and aimed at psychoanalysts.
However, a theologian or vicar of some kind named Rodney Bomford wrote a much shorter book called The Symmetry of God, which shows how Matte Blanco's symmetrical logic (in contrast to the asymmetrical logic of Aristotle) can be applied to God and theology. I don't agree with everything in the book, but it was a start, and no one else is doing it.
To a certain sense this is the logic of dreams, and it is pervasive in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, even though Joyce was way before Matte Blanco. But think of how in dreams a fellow's wife may suddenly turn into his mother. This is not illogical, it just obeys a different kind of logic. Likewise, in Finnegans Wake, Napoleon might turn into Caesar who turns into Wellington, etc., all with no warning. But again, it's just that a different kind of logic is at play.
At any rate, with symmetrical dream logic it is rather easy to see how God could be man and vice versa!
And now that I'm thinking about it, with the slack of retirement, it seems that one slips more easily into this alt logic. Also, Schuon made frequent reference to how old age circles back to childhood, leading to a re-enchantment of the world. This is a little trickier in my case, since I never left adolescence. There are Aphorisms for this, but I can't get at them because I'm hiding from my mother-in-law.
Also, this logic can explain how, for example, we are all Adam and Eve -- or Christ, for that matter. What is impossible for Aristotle is easy peasy for Matte Blanco.
Or, "the Kingdom of God is at hand." Right here right now, coexisting with that other world.
A fulfilled life is one that after long years delivers to the grave an adolescent whom life did not corrupt.
Without a certain religious childishness, a certain intellectual profundity is unattainable.
Some of Matte Blanco's ideas may be more elegantly expressed in Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary".
That might well be the case -- the main point is that we have these two complementary modes of knowing, which is why we have left and right cerebral hemispheres, each attuned or conformed to different dimensions. However, these two must be synthesized in the higher third.
I suspect it's one of the reasons politics is downstream from culture. Conservatives win every argument, but this is not as persuasive to barbarians as RIHANNA GRABBED HER CROTCH!
And why is McGilchrist's latest $125.00? At that price, it had better be the best book ever written.
Schuon often makes the distinction between mere intelligence, which easily descends into rationalism, intellectualism, ideology, and other cognitive pathologies, and intellection.
The latter is easily recognized once seen and understood, but since no one talks about it, even the people capable of exercising it don't know about it. For Schuon, it is "at once mirror of the supra-sensible and itself a supernatural ray of light" (a characterization which itself leads to fruitful thinking about the very nature of reality).
Intellection is "precisely what makes evident to us the absoluteness of the Self and the relativity of 'objectivations.'" It is "essentially a contemplativity which in no way enters into the [merely] rational capacity, the latter being logical rather than contemplative."
Petey would say we live in an age of hyper-intellectualism with scarcely any proper intellection, even among many friendlies.
To post or not to post... MIL lurking outside the Coon cave... A post it shall be.
:D
Good luck!
Also, Petey is not wrong.
"God is the guest of silence," says the Aphorist. My MIL is the guest that can't stop babbling. It is literally as if she narrates her life as it is happening. Even Larry David couldn't invent her.
I wonder if she's one of those people who has no internal narrator? For some people like that, they literally don't know what they think until they say it.
On the other hand, we have a lot of relatives with the chatterbox gene; they have an internal dialog but just never run out of things to say.
I'll have to think about it. But not too much, because I don't think there's any there there to think about. Despite the fact that she is obviously of above average intelligence.
"Like anyone else, he was at times forced "to take account of the rest of the world. But he never cared for it.” He was “remarkably unresponsive to many aspects of the world around him,” but here again, this was not fundamentally an avoidance but a total plunge into that place from which creativity arises."
Not to inflate my nullity, but here in the commentary past, I find a certain sense of peaceful free fall, there no need to engage with the flow, I can just nod, wonder, enjoy, and occasionally pitch some text into the great HTMLiverse, linger a bit more, relax and float downstream... it's not dreaming, but it ain't bad.
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