Apologies for that sprawling post yesterday. Must be concise. It's our adversaries who conceal their vacuity under all that verbiage: The deluded are prolix.
About that philosophical wrong turn western civilization took with Kant, which separated us from contact with reality and confined us to phenomena:
the objects of experience are mere "appearances." The nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us (Prof Wiki).
Like anyone could even know that. I wonder: did Kant have any real idea what he was rejecting with his "critical" philosophy? How much actual acquaintance with Thomas did he or anyone else have at the time? Did he know what he was criticizing? What if, in pursuing a perfect philosophy, he rejected the damn good enough?
Again, there can be no perfect philosophy, because the map can never be the territory:
Nevertheless, there are good and bad maps -- of extra-mental reality, otherwise they're not even maps, just the doodles of tenured children.
Note that Kant begins with the map -- with our own a priori categories. Whether, or to what extent, they map the extra-mental world is unknowable to us.
Of course, no one actually lives as if this were true, barring psychosis, which is precisely living as if one's interior world were real, with no ability to distinguish between hallucinations and reality. It doesn't help such a person to tell him that "you're just living in your own subjective categories projected onto the noumena, like anyone else."
Recall Garrigou-Lagrange's concise formula, absent which you are entering a world of pain:
That which is, is; that which is not, is not.
Since I am one of those pre-critical trailer Thomists, I have no difficulty recognizing that the hallucinating patient just mentioned is affirming that which is not, and failing to conform to that which is. Put another way, I am sorry to inform you that a gulf exists between your truth and the truth. If this makes me a fascist, then so be it.
It is for similar reasons that we can affirm that the progressive left is not living on Planet Is, but let's lay some additional groundwork before getting to the insultainment portion of our program.
For a naive "pre-critical" philosopher, Thomas sure makes some subtle points about the possibility of our contact with reality.
For example nowhere does he say that our minds provide a simple and direct reflection of the world. Yes, truth is the conformity of our judgment with extra-mental being; BUT our mental representations are not precisely what is known, rather, "that by which something extra-mental is known," and that's a subtle distinction.
Our mental representation is only "material preparation for the act of knowing," not yet knowledge itself. Nor can there be "right judgment unless it can be traced back to the sense," this latter being what we meant when we said that our ideas must be fungible to the extra-mental world, i.e., backed by the full faith and credit of the First Bank of Reality: from the coin of the senses, to abstract ideas, back to the senses, only now informed by that abstract knowledge.
I say, those post-critical sophisticates are the naive ones, for "the purely imaginary vision terminates at an object within." Again: Kantian philosophy begins and ends with our map of the world, whereas common sense realism begins with our sense impressions of the world and abstracts from them, while never severing the abstractions from the extra-mental world.
Otherwise, truly truly, to hell with it. I mean, if we're not arguing about reality, then what are we arguing about? My hallucination is better than your hallucination?
Lately we've seen the progressive blob attacking speaker Mike Johnson for his "biblical worldview." Well, his metaphysic is not my metaphysic, but on what metaphysical basis can progressives say that they are in contact with reality, while Johnson isn't? Because that philosophical horse left the barn a few hundred years ago. You can't appeal to an extra-mental reality unknown and unknowable by man.
Conversely, Thomas insists that any proper vision of the world terminates with the world, not with our vision of the world:
for St. Thomas bodily vision is distinguished from imaginary vision insofar as it terminates at the very thing that is being sensed, or at least at its real influx into a sense organ.
Is this too much to ask? For
it is exactly this question that is at stake: Is it possible or contradictory properly to see that which really is not, for example, properly to see a non-existent ray of a star and properly hear a non-existent sound?
Can we really see or know "that which is not"?
Of course we can. Otherwise the Democrat party would be out of business. They say Jefferson was their founder, but it would be more accurate to say it was Kant. Or before him, the ancient sophists and skeptics. And before them, the serpent who promises Ye shall be as Gods.
I suppose the new speaker understands that literally. But at least he understands it.
14 comments:
For example, in the postmodern world, "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."
No: a terrorist IS a terrorist, and "The root cause of the violence we have seen in Israel and Gaza over the past month is the sick culture that prevails in Gaza. Jew-hatred is the only value in that culture, and terror its only product."
Hamas and their western enablers have long escaped Planet Is.
Otherwise, truly truly, to hell with it. I mean, if we're not arguing about reality, then what are we arguing about? My hallucination is better than your hallucination?
It's like a people staggering through the world wearing VR headsets. Whatever they're seeing blinds them from reality while projecting a private truth into the eyes and ears. All well and good, until reality asserts itself in the form of walls, furniture, random live obstacles on the floor, or an unexpected stairwell. A sane person would either remove the headset or at least find a safer space to pretend to be a hero, but as we see daily, sane people are few and far between.
How was it not clear that Kant's epistemology was incoherent? Is there something about the German thought process that couldn't grasp such a fundamental problem?
That's a good question. Schuon -- whose native tongue was German -- wrote his works in French, because he couldn't way what he wanted to say, or how he wanted to say it, in German.
Schuon:
“(A) further remark, this time of a more or less personal order: we grew up at a time when one could still say, without blushing on account of its naivety, that two and two make four; when words still had a meaning and said what they meant to say; when one could conform to the laws of elementary logic or of common sense, without having to pass through psychology or biology, or so-called sociology, and so forth; in short, when there were still points of reference in the intellectual arsenal of men. By this we wish to point out that our way of thinking and our dialectic are deliberately out-of-date; and we know in advance, for it is only too evident, that the reader to whom we address ourselves will thank us for it.”
"What is crucial in Kantianism is not its pro domo logic and its few very limited lucidities, but the altogether 'irrational' desire to limit intelligence; this results in a dehumanization of the intelligence and opens the door to all the inhuman aberrations of our century. In short, if to be man means the possibility of transcending oneself intellectually, Kantianism is the negation of all that is essentially and integrally human."
"Avant-garde philosophy is properly an acephalous logic: it labels what is intellectually evident as 'prejudice'; seeking to free itself from the servitudes of the mind, it falls into infra-logic; closing itself, above, to the light of the intellect, it opens itself, below, to the darkness of the subconscious."
"According to [Kant], every cognition which is not rational in the narrowest sense, is mere pretentiousness and fanciful enthusiasm; now, if there is anything pretentious it is this very opinion. Fantasy, arbitrariness and irrationality are not features of the Scholastics, but they certainly are of the rationalists who persist in violently contesting, with ridiculous and often pathetic arguments, everything which eludes their grasp."
"With Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant, bourgeois unintelligence is put forward as a 'doctrine' and definitively installed in European 'thought,' giving birth, by way of the French Revolution, to scientism, industry and to quantitative 'culture.' Mental hypertrophy in the 'cultured' man henceforth compensates the absence of intellectual penetration; the sense of the absolute and the principial is drowned in a mediocre empiricism, coupled with a pseudo-mysticism posing as 'positive' or 'human.' Some people may reproach us with a lack of due consideration, but we would ask what due consideration is shown by philosophers who shamelessly slash down the wisdom of countless centuries."
"Kantians will ask us to prove the existence of this way of knowing (intellection of archetypes); and herein is the first error, namely that only what can be proved de facto is knowledge; the second error, which immediately follows the first, is that a reality that one cannot prove -- that is to say which one cannot make accessible to some artificial and ignorant mental demand -- by reason of this apparent lack of proof, does not and cannot exist. Integral rationalism lacks intellectual objectivity as much as moral impartiality."
"For an intellectual limit is a wall of which one has no awareness. One cannot therefore have it both ways: either the intelligence by definition comprises a principle of illimitability or liberty, whatever be the degree of its actualization, in which case there is no call to attribute limits to it with an arbitrariness that is all the more inexcusable in that the power of a particular individual intelligence (or mode of intelligence) is not necessarily a criterion for the appraisal of intelligence as such; or else, on the contrary, the intelligence comprises, likewise by definition, a principle of limitation or constraint, in which case it no longer admits of any certitude and cannot function any differently from the intelligence of animals, with the result that all pretension to a 'critical philosophy' is vain."
"we are asked to believe that knowledge, thus reduced to a combination of sensory experiences and the innate categories, shows us things such as they appear to be and not such as they are; as if the inherent nature of things did not pierce through their appearances, given that the whole point of knowledge is the perception of a thing-in-itself, failing which the very notion of perception would not exist."
"To speak of a knowledge that is incapable of adequation is a contradiction in terms, disproved moreover by experience at every level of the knowable; in short, it is absurd to deduce from the obvious fact that our knowledge cannot become totally identified with its objects -- at least when these objects are relative -- that all speculations on the aseity of things are 'empty and vain.'”
The quotes help a lot, as I am preoccupied with thinkers who could best articulate the damage wrought by Kant.
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