Facts Care About Your Feelings

We mentioned yesterday that Ben Shapiro is wrong, and that facts actually do care about our feelings. We reached out to the Aphorist for a comment, and he said

Things do not have feeling, but there are feelings in many things.

Nor are they "mute," rather,   

They merely select their listeners. 

Congratulations! You are selected, elected, and about to be subjected to this valuable post.

If we heard correctly, it's not just a question of what knowledge is and how we can know it -- i.e., of garden variety epistemology -- rather, of the multitude of ways we can know it. 

For if we can know reality in diverse ways and modalities, it means that the world... What did Shakespeare say?

That there are tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones.  

Exactly. From babbling brooks to kibbitzing canyons to gossiping gr--

We get it. The wind that speaks to the leaves, telling stories that no one believes, to redeem a snippet of Jobim.

What I want to say is that "intelligibility" has many modes, which is more or less where we left off yesterday with the idea that mother nature gives us too much information. What say you, Nicolás?

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

Yes, like seeing an invisible Bigfoot or a vertical UFO. 

Transcendent objects are invisible by nature. 

True enough, but the Light shines through them, no? Metaphysical transparency, to purcoin a phrase.

Or translucency. 

Precisely. The exact formula for this translucency is transcendence-in-immanence. It's why reality is never boring. For

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

And if you really want to get a little woowoo, this must be the very formula of the Incarnation, quite literally so vis-a-vis the Transfiguration. Let those with ears see!

Thaaaat's right Petey, because the seeing is predicated on the hearing, AKA faith. 

To put it conversely, no one sees except through the eyes of faith. Peering through the lens of scientism -- a "lesser faith," so to speak -- one sees only solid surfaces, cold quantities, and dry--

We get it.

A tapestry woven of geometry and music, always and everywhere. Come to think of it, it is in this modality that nominalism becomes valid, if you catch my meaning. If you don't, allow Nicolás to explain:

The plethora of objects in the midst of which we live has made us insensible to the quality, to the texture, and to the individuality of the object.

So, there is a sense in which everything is unique, or at least was before faceless factories and fast food, the facile and frozen--

We get it.

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.

It can by no means 

give recipes, because there are no methods for making miracles. 

Secular grace and everyday miracles, such that

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.

Which brings us back to faith, which is, properly speaking,

not an irrational assent to a proposition; it is a perception of a special order of realities.

"Perception." What a concept! For it can no more be defined than can "experience" or "consciousness." In a way, these are all but adjectives for the undefinable Presence pervading everything.

I'm having one of those unnamable feelings alluded to in yesterday's post.

The intelligent idea produces sensual pleasure.

That's the one. What a pleasurable aphorism! 

Appearance is not the veil, but the vehicle, of reality.

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance. 

 I wish I'd said that. 

In order to speak of the eternal, it is sufficient to speak with talent of the things of the day.

One tries one's best.