Waiting & Wondering

While I wait for the next thing to arrive in my head, let's exhumine some deeply buried aphorisms, i.e., listen to some deep cuts instead of the usual greatest hits. Who knows, perhaps the next thing will emerge as we meditate on them. 

First up:    

Intelligence is a little thing if the entire soul does not weigh upon it as if on a point.

The idea is for everything we are to be compressed down upon everything that is -- like a diamond stylus into the groove of a record.

It reminds me of something Schuon says about how "in space, the absolute is the point," and "in time, the absolute is the moment," and here we are. It's all here now, or it's nowhere at any time.

And let's be clear:

A clear writer is one who does not catechize, but whose sole ambition is that his sentence be the immortal huntress of the instant.

Moreover,

In order to advance it is necessary to turn around on a point. 

Somewhere Dávila says that religious thought does not move forward, but rather, deeper, and I'm spinning as fast as I can, trying to hunt down this instant!   

Sometimes even my own ideas seem dreadfully inadequate to the task. Okay, always:

Any explanation soon seems naïve.

Any explanation seems inadequate when we hear it repeatedly.

Any idea is always too simple.

The Idea, whatever it is, isn't one, for -- contrary to Hegel -- 

What is real is not rational and what is rational is not real. 

Man is rational, but not only rational, otherwise there would be no escape from our own assumptions and premises, and besides, Gödel. 

Since to be a rationalist is to ignore that logic is formal, there are as many rationalisms possible as possible unconscious assumptions.

Show me your assumptions and I'll show you your philosophy, your matrix, and your prison. 

Consciousness tends, like a spider, the lexical web, in order to capture the ideas that fly into the interior spaces like drunken insects.

In a web constructed of reason, the most interesting and tasty insects fly right through.

The children are our future past, and the childish adults are our present:

The young are not so much the future as they are the tedious reiteration of the past.

Each new generation does not add one new truth. Not even one new falsehood.

Except maybe that people can be born into the wrong body and switch sexes. That's a new one. I was going to say the idea that we can change the weather, but that's an oldie, what with rain dances and such.

This latter idea implies that the world is not the way it is supposed to be. Which is true:

The universe seems less dark when we suspect that it is de facto, when we begin to suspect that it is not de jure.

This next one is important:

The important book of philosophy is that which discovers a new irreducible term.

Of course, you have to be careful that your irreducible term isn't just one of those assumptions or drunken insects referenced above. 

It reminds me of something Garrigou-Lagrange says, that we want to identify those principles for which error is impossible, that entail no principle or prior truth, that presuppose any investigation of reality, and denial of which engenders absurdity.

Okay, like what? Oh, that the world is intelligible to our intelligence, or the principle of identity (or non-contradiction). Just try denying those and see how far you get.

I don't see how my writing could ever be popular. Modesty, or humble brag?

Among unpopular writers there are many who do not deserve the homage of unpopularity.

Although we write about religion, 

We say nothing of God in a sickly-sweet voice.

Never have and never will. What kind of voice, then?

Even our favorite ideas soon bore us if we do not hear them expressed with irony, with grace and with beauty.

The first comes naturally, but I'm always working on the latter two.

In order to be appealing it is not necessary that the writer have something to say, but rather that he be someone.

That one also comes easy, since I am who I am, and one is more than enough for me and perhaps too much for most.

Intelligence would be invincible if it did not make the intelligent conceited.

Except a conceited intelligence is no longer intelligent. Reminds me of Schuon again:

partisans of "faith" reduce intelligence to reason alone, and then they accuse intelligence of "intellectual pride" -- a contradiction in terms -- the moment it follows the demands of its own nature.

But 

Intelligence does not fit within the limits of a doctrine.

Since it turns out the Doctrine is made of Intelligence, more on which tomorrow.