Let's Get Lost

Continuing with our freewheeling epistemic cogitations, traditional philosophy begins with the senses, but there is no knowledge per se at the level of the senses, since the senses themselves don't know what they know, and they certainly don't know what they don't know. 

For example, the eyes don't know about music, and all the senses combined don't know about their common object in the absence of a mental operation that effortlessly synthesizes them. 

Obviously, this immaterial synthesis of the senses is not itself a material sense, but without it, the senses would be like the five blind men describing the elephant in the room. Well, one of them could see, but you get the point. 

But I was mainly thinking about how the senses have no way of knowing that they are ordered only to the periphery, surface, or epidermis of the total cosmos. Conversely, the intellect is the faculty ordered to this total cosmos, precisely, most of which is invisible to the senses. 

Now, modern man is a man who has forgotten everything I just said, even though it is what defines the human station.

I want to say that the intellect goes all the way to the top floor of the cosmic telovator, because it is ordered to the Absolute. If it isn't, then to hell with it. Then life reduces to an endless battle of Just Your Opinion, Man, waged by cowards who are unable to achieve on a level field of play.

But this aggression will not stand, and the bums will always lose.

Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one here who gives a shit about the rules of the cosmos?!  

Schuon also cared, although, like me, he didn't care whether a bunch of amateurs, nihilists, and perverts knew it. Suffice it to say that

Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence, the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be.

Yes, inconceivable, and literally so. That is, if you care about little things like coherence, to say nothing of totality. 

For example, the most complete knowledge of physics is blind to biology, let alone psychology. Rather, -- and this is just common sense -- physics assumes the physicists who discover and develop it, just as biology assumes the existence of living organisms and the lonely biologists who spend their lives studying them. 

But what is life? And what is a physicist? Postmodern philosophy doesn't even know what a woman is; it only knows there aren't enough of them in the physics department. And it certainly doesn't know what life is, only that a fetus doesn't have it.

Incidentally, not to focus on myself, but this morning while preparing the coffee and wondering what I might post about, the thought occurred to me: I'm just like Keith Jarrett. 

No, not that I'm an artiste, only in the analogous sense that he is the only musician of whom I am aware who gave solo concerts of pure improvisation. He'd sit before the piano with no preconceptions and just play whatever popped into his fingers, and yet, somehow made it compelling and even (relatively) popular.  

Of course, doing this requires tremendous preparation, and no doubt he possessed a vast storehouse of musical thingys to draw upon. But they were spontaneously combined and elaborated while animated by the mysterious x-factor of aesthetic grace. 

Probably his most popular one was released back in 1975. Here are some excerpts from the All Music Guide review, with certain words highlighted just because:

this disc has, along with its revelatory music, some attendant cultural baggage that is unfair in one sense: Every pot-smoking and dazed and confused college kid -- and a few of the more sophisticated ones in high school -- owned this as one of the truly classic jazz records....

It also gets unfairly blamed for creating George Winston, but that's another story. What Keith Jarrett had begun a year before on the Solo Concerts album and brought to such gorgeous flowering here was nothing short of a miracle....

Nothing on this program was considered before he sat down to play. All of the gestures, intricate droning harmonies, skittering and shimmering melodic lines, and whoops and sighs from the man are spontaneous....

Jarrett's intimate meditation on the inner workings of not only his pianism, but also the instrument itself and the nature of sound and how it stacks up against silence, involved listeners in its search for beauty, truth, and meaning. 

So, I don't compare myself to him in terms of achievement, but I do think the comparison is valid in terms of intent. He has his keyboard and I have mine, and off we go. 

One big difference is that he only puts out his successes every year or two, whereas I publish my successes and my failures. Maybe it's not done well, but you have to admit, it's a little surprising it's done at all, and with so little encouragement and no alibi at all!

That's all I'm going to say about that. On with the show!

Above we alluded to that most precious prerogative of the human station -- the intellect -- and how we essentially dissipate our humanness when it atrophies to the point of virtuality, like the stump at the end of our spine that used to be a tail before we cashed in our chimps.

Schuon relates this rupture between nonlocal intellect and local ego to the fall, but you can't really know anything about this unless and until you begin to recover or reawaken the former. 

To put it in a slightly obnoxious way, the ego has no right to an opinion about the intellect, any more than the eyes have a right to an opinion about music.

Now, you don't have to believe in a literal fall to understand the following, unless you have a better idea:

The rational faculty detached from its supernatural context is necessarily opposed to man and is bound to give rise in the end to a way of thought and a form of life both of which are opposed to man...

So, there are two sequential movements, a fall away from the Principle and then a rising up against it, analogous to rebellion and revolution, respectively. 

We see this quite literally in the contemporary transexual anti-sanity, which began with a rebellion against traditional gender roles and has ended in a violent revolution against biology in particular and reality more generally by a cohort of spiteful mutants.  

The problem with improvisation is that you don't really know when to stop. So I will.