Suspended Between Uncertain Truth and Certain Untruth

While rummaging around for some metaphysical back-up for our vertical peregrinotions, I pulled out Schuon's From the Divine to the Human which, for me, expresses what Voegelin is trying to say about our ontological pickle -- the human predicament -- in a far more concise, essential, and experiential way. 

Schuon is an excellent sherpa for the vertical ascent because he never wastes your timelessness with half-baked speculation but gets straight to the point. He doesn't "think out loud" in wild and wooly way, like some attention-starved blogger. Rather, everything has already been thought through and therefore "edited" in the head before being reduced to writing.

It reminds me of how the Beatles recorded before and after 1967. Before, their producer George Martin would make them sit down and play actual compositions, which they could then tweak and sprinkle with a little Beatle fairy dust on top. 

But after '67 they would noodle around for hours hoping a serviceable composition would emerge, but then it might require literally hundreds of takes to perfect. I just read a book by their engineer who says the new way was tedious beyond belief.

Like reading a German philosopher.

First, let's give a big hand to this little footnote to an essay called Consequences Flowing from the Mystery of Subjectivity: "to know the nature of subjectivity is to know the structure of the world." 

Obviously he doesn't mean this in any Kantian sense, in which case to to know the nature of subjectivity is to know the nature of the subjectivity. The world -- whatever that is -- is unknown and unknowable outside our categories of knowing it. Being an idealist means you can truly know everything. Except reality.  

But if the purpose of intelligence isn't to know intelligible being, then to hell with it: knowledge is ignorance and ignorance is power. Schuon speaks of "the monstrous disproportion between the cleverness of reason"

and the falseness of its results; tons of intelligence are wasted to circumvent the essential while brilliantly proving the absurd, namely to prove that the spirit sprung in the end from a clod of earth...  

This manner of (non)thinking

seeks to explain everything from below; to erect no matter what hypothesis, provided it excludes real causes, which are transcendent and not material... 

There's much here that goes to the ambiguous "in between" status unique to man, but Schuon formulates it differently (and more succinctly) than Voegelin:

man is by definition situated between an Intellection which connects him to God and a world that has the power to separate him from God... 

Therefore, man "possesses the paradoxical freedom to wish in his turn to make himself God." The possibility of such a rupture -- or fall, to coin a term -- "is present from the start owing to the very ambiguity of the human condition," suspended as we are "between the Infinite and the finite."

Any form of reductionism collapses the former into the latter, and "Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser." Such a rookie mistake "is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be." Inconceivable, because to conceive it is to have transcended it. 

In the next essay, Aspects of the Theophanic Phenomenon of Consciousness, Schuon gets into how man qua man is always open to what transcends him: "What is proper to man alone is the Intellect open to the Absolute." But

There are two tendencies in the human spirit, either to reduce God to the world, or the Absolute to the relative, or to reduce [I would say expand] the world to God or the relative to the Absolute. 

Idealism at one end, materialism at the other. Both necessarily collapse the between-space in which human beings are privileged to abide. Which is to say, they demote man and fire reality. But in reality, 

starting from the recognition of the immediately tangible mystery that is subjectivity or intelligence, it is easy to understand that the origin of the Universe is, not inert and unconscious matter, but a spiritual Substance...

Which is not to say it isn't a mystery, but it's the fun kind, for we are each a little mystery that is a prolongation of the big mystery of Myster Big:

all that exists is inscribed a priori in the theomorphic substance of our intelligence -- there is no integral consciousness that does not prolong absolute Consciousness...

That's the good nous. The bad news is that

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.

You know -- all the isms and olatries referenced in yesterday's post. One word: pride.

Intelligence separated from its supra-individual source is accompanied by that lack of sense of proportions which one calls pride; conversely, pride prevents intelligence, when it has become rationalism, from rising to its source.

Yeah, it's human, but "nothing is more fundamentally inhuman than the 'purely human'" -- this being a kind of freak or monster that denies "its own nature which nonetheless enables it to think" and allows it to "feel at ease in a world" that "exempts man from the effort of transcending things and of transcending himself." Congratulations: you've bypassed the human vocation!  

intelligence is dehumanized and gives rise to materialism, even existentialism, hence to a "thinking" which is human only by its mode and of which the content is properly sub-human. 

But what is a bad man but a good man's teacher? "The very excess of their inanity" bears witness "to the reality of the spirit and consequently to its primacy." 

And circling back for a moment to Voegelin, he speaks of the "pneumopathology" of ideologues who deform and distort the order of being in order to make their magical visions appear attainable; and of "the temptation to fall from [the] uncertain truth" of the in-between (i.e., of a faith-full openness to transcendent being) to the "certain untruth" of existential closure in the fanciful constructs of their ideological matrices.