Life is but a dream, but what if it weren't? There'd be no glorious nonsense, for example, Day dong a da ding-dong / A-lang-da-lang-da-lang / Ah, woah, woah, bip / Ah bi-ba-do-da-dip, woah:
The question is, is it true? Of course it's true, unlike the watered-down version by the Crew Cuts:
Art is an adequation, and in this case the Crew Cut's pale imitation is just inadequate. And this we can know objectively.
But art and knowledge cannot be a pure adequation full stop, because otherwise our minds would be like cameras or Xerox machines cranking out identical copies of reality.
At the same time, finitude can never be adequate to infinitude, which is why we will never run out of art, and why science will forever approach but never reach its object. Besides, Gödel: every logical system includes statements that cannot be justified by the system.
So, there's a gap, and we live and move and have our being in this gap. It's where (and why) the freedom is, and how it is that we can become detached from reality, unlike other animals, for whom this gap is enclosed in instinct. Man alone has the space to know truth and falsehood, to do good or evil, and to create beauty or ugliness.
There's also the matter of right brain / left brain, which assures a kind of unending synthesis resulting from our neuropsychological stereoscopy.
If our first premise is that Being is intelligible, our second must be that it is endlessly and infinitely so -- that it is generative. Some people conclude from this that there is only becoming, but they are asses.
A philosophy of pure becoming quickly leads to the reductio absurdum of absolute relativism and nihilism, and to a complete phenomenalism that makes the intelligible being of sensible things disappear; and once you've jettisoned intelligible being, there's no getting it back. Sure, night follows day, but you can never know if this is correlation or causation, because causation is reduced to a mere succession of phenomena:
Finally, the thinking subject, my very substance, disappears. The only thing left standing are phenomena that are accessible either to the external senses or to the internal senses (Garrigou-Lagrange).
Thus, imagination survives, but that is all that survives. Man is enclosed in his own dreams, and cannot advance a step outside them, nor ascend a step above.
Which is quite different from the functional imagination that abides in the gap referenced above, for there is no longer any distinction between imagination -- the could be -- with being, AKA the is: "the verb to be, the soul of our judgments... disappears, since judgment is now nothing more than an empirical association."
Interestingly, although such absolute relativism is the warped ontology of progressive wokesters and social justice warriors, it also renders justice itself impossible, for
The murderer could say to his judges, "I was not really the cause of this murder. It is a fact which followed upon my own actions, just as the day follows the night without being caused by it."
Which they come close to saying, except never consistently, thus our two-tier judicial system which mandates strict realism for enemies of the regime, but a squishy and forgiving relativism for its friends; a dream for pro-genocide rioters, a nightmare for J6 protesters.
4 comments:
But art and knowledge cannot be a pure adequation full stop, because otherwise our minds would be like cameras or Xerox machines cranking out identical copies of reality.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that most people don't have eidetic memories In a weird way, if everyone had perfect recall reality as we understand it might be a lot more boring.
Some people conclude from this that there is only becoming, but they are asses.
Ultimately, doesn't that simply result in nihilism, since everything living eventually is going to become dead?
Yes: pure becoming with no being redounds to nihilism. It's why I say commonsense realism is the worst philosophy, except for all the others. Or in other words, it's the best we can do, so we should leave well enough alone. Rejecting it only leads to malicious mischief.
"A philosophy of pure becoming quickly leads to the reductio absurdum of absolute relativism and nihilism, and to a complete phenomenalism that makes the intelligible being of sensible things disappear; and once you've jettisoned intelligible being, there's no getting it back. Sure, night follows day, but you can never know if this is correlation or causation, because causation is reduced to a mere succession of phenomena:
Finally, the thinking subject, my very substance, disappears. The only thing left standing are phenomena that are accessible either to the external senses or to the internal senses (Garrigou-Lagrange)."
Yes!!!
Post a Comment