What in the World is the World?

We believe in many things we do not believe we believe. --Dávila 

Yesterday I read a couple chapters of Voegelin that were simultaneously -- as usual -- provocative and mystifying, often both at the same time. Does he write this way on purpose? Or is it just because he's German?

In any event, it set off a lot of secondary explosions. It's difficult to reverse engineer a bomb blast, but we'll try. 

Sometimes I think he's trying to provoke in real time what he's writing about; for example, in writing about the Ground of Being, he's trying to provoke in the reader a concrete experience of it. 

Experience. We'll come back to this, nor will we ever leave it, strictly speaking. As if that's even possible. 

Recursive. That's the word I'm looking for: a repeating process whose output at each stage is applied as input in the succeeding stage. In other words, he tosses the bomb into your head, and then you're reading the next bomb from the perspective of your bombed out head, etc.

To be honest, I try to do this a little, in that in a good post, the reader will be a slightly different person at the end than he was at the beginning, at which point he can return to the beginning a new man and reread it. I just try not to be so German about it.

Otherwise, what's the point? The world is drowning in information, so the last thing I want to do is cram more of it into your overstretched head. 

Now that I'm thinking about this unusual subject, Jesus must have been the last word in this sort of thing, no? In other words, with most everything he said, he must have been simultaneously evoking what he was talking about. And He who has ears, let him hear.  

I guess the problem is -- insofar as communication is concerned -- if we're going to dive into the Ground of Being, it is, among other things, the very place from which language emanates. 

Which reminds me of what C.S. Lewis said about his longing "to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from -- my country, the place where I ought to have been born." 

Must be the same place all the truth comes from, or at least a mansion on the same street. And both must look like explosions from the outside. 

Just as, I suppose, the big bang must have looked like an explosion from the outside, even though, from the inside -- or so I am told -- it was an exquisitely fine-tuned exercise in higher physics. [Extra credut: Ixnay on the reatio ex nihilo cay, it's a scientific blastferme & you, agape in their beloved theory.] 

I'm a little busy. Will there be a post this morning, or just more of the above?

As if there could even be an above without a below! 

Perhaps it's best to begin with a concrete example, so you can be as mystified as I am. We begin at the beginning -- or at least with one of two possible ends of this thing -- with 

the meaning of the term world. It presents extraordinary difficulties to philosophical analysis. 

Therefore, if I ask you what the world is, and you give me some quick and readymade answer, that is already proof -- scientific proof, I might add -- that you are quite wrong, since the man just told us that the question presents extraordinary difficulties.

Like I said: recursive. But we are not alone. Good morning, Nicolás! Whaddya got for us?

As long as we can respond without hesitating we do not know the subject.

Whoever is curious to measure his stupidity should count the number of things that seem obvious to him. 

Only the fool knows clearly why he believes or why he doubts. 

The honest philosophy does not pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery.

There are types of ignorance that enrich the mind and types of knowledge that impoverish it. 

I repeat: what is the world?

I know! I don't know?

Correct, You have no idea. Yet. In fact, you've never really thought about it, have you? I mean literally: what in the world is the world?

Good question. Is there an answer? Yes, but this may be one of those cases in which a good question is superior to any answer we could provide. At least a wideawake & cutandry one. To paraphrase Schuon, there is more Light in a good question than in some rote answer we can give.

The modern man only admits the evidence that the vulgar perceive.

In order to abolish all mystery, it is enough to view the world with the eyes of a pig.

Mmm, bacon... 

So, let's look into this question and try not to be foolish and vulgar pigs about it.

First of all, the word is equivocal, in that it has several meanings, but certain ones presuppose other meanings. Curse your cursed recursiveness!

We won't review all the dictionary definitions, nor even add them all up, because that still won't = The World -- at least the World we're talking about -- obviously.

There seems to be alive in [these definitions] a desire to express linguistically a substantive order pervading all levels of being as well as being as a whole.... The difference can be more easily sensed than described.

Please try anyway. But do try not to be so damn German.

In the ancient [conception], the accent lies more on the visible and external, on the cosmic order in a preeminent sense; in the Christian [conception], it lies on the internal order of man. 

So, "two orders," cosmic-exterior and human-interior? Something like that? These "differences in meaning" appear to

reflect the actual historical process in which the experience of human existence under a world-transcendent God has differentiated from the primary, more compact experience of existence in a cosmos that includes both gods and men.

Here we need to pull back and reconsider and reflect upon the nature of science itself, because it goes to a much larger area of intelligibility than the restricted scope of mere scientism (which is retrograde to the core, a porcine devolution from Judeo-Christian world-historical insight into the World).

Looked at this way, Christianity involves strictly scientific discoveries about the nature of The World, something, come to think of it, that Chesterton discusses in The Everlasting Man.

But we're waaaay up here (pant pant), and I don't have time to climb back down and fetch the book. In general, we're talking about a scientific and/or more than scientific

advance toward the differentiated experience of transcendent Being in order to establish explicitly the insight that the order of the world is not of "this world" alone but also of the "world beyond."

So, any definition of this world must include the world beyond that is its ground? Or something? 

Good question. We'll try to scale it again in the next post.   

When the authentic mystery is eclipsed, humanity becomes drunk on imbecilic mysteries.