On the Disenchantment and Re-enchantment of the World

To review, yesterday we examined the soundness of concluding I am from I think, and found it wanting. This is because a deeper principle is required, absent which there is no link between intellect and being (or I and am).

This link is pretty darn important. If it doesn't exist, then we can never escape our heads and know anything certain about extra-mental reality: there is no basis for the ergo sum 

without surreptitiously presupposing the ancient axiom: "The object of the intellect is being."

Absent the link to being, one could only say I think therefore I am thinking. And even this wouldn't be certain absent the principle of identity (non-contradiction), for "if reality can, at bottom, be contradictory," then is and is not would be indistinguishable, as in, I am therefore I am not. But commonsense realism affirms that

it is not only INCONCEIVABLE for us, but is indeed REALLY IMPOSSIBLE IN ITSELF that any given reality would simultaneously exist and not exist.

This is not simply a "logical law of the mind," but a necessary law of reality. Bottom line: "The point of departure for knowledge is not the cogito," rather

It is being, as well as the first principle which it implies: the principle of identity / non-contradiction.

Such a small point, but what massive consequences, for it points to the convergence of the laws of thought and the laws of being. It is not just in our heads that "reality cannot at once be reality and non-reality." No: the principle of identity applies to both thought and being. 

Nevertheless, "the whole of modern subjectivism" is founded on the denial of this first certitude. And here we are.

But even Kant would never say "perception is reality." Rather, that perception is perception (of appearances), and reality is unknowable. 

But even God obeys the the law of non-contradiction, in that he can't create "that which is manifestly absurd (like a square circle)." Such a thing is "obviously UNREALIZABLE outside the mind, whatever God's power may be." 

Having said all this, is there anything redeemable in subjectivism, relativism, postmodernism, et al? For as they say, philosophies are generally true in what they affirm but false in what they deny. Therefore -- if I'm following myself -- an integral philosophy will make room for both; it will not be a strictly either/or affair, but rather, both/and.

Again, Garrigou-Lagrange highlights "the real extra-mental impossibility of something which would exist and not exist at one and the same time from one and the same perspective," and of the need to resolve "our intellectual evidence into sensible evidence," or in other words, to be able to cash our concepts into real being.

Something in me rebels against such an unambiguous, cutandry, and wideawake worldview, for where's the magic, the poetry, the mystery? Certainly we need reality -- today more than ever -- but darn it, we also need mystery, enchantment, imagination, etc. 

Now, supposing we need these airy fairy things, what is their ontological status? If the object of the intellect is being, what is the object of the sense of mystery? Perhaps  

Mysticism is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge.

Historically speaking, we have evolved from enchantment -- the "enchanted world" -- to the disenchantment of scientism, positivism, and naturalism, and I've been thinking about this for a long time. 

For example, way back when I was trying to come up with an idea for my dissertation, I considered The Re-enchantment of the World -- not in an unhealthy, delusional way, but as the marker and synthesis of a kind of "higher health" -- you know, THE RELIGION THE ALMIGHTY & ME WORKS OUT BETWIXT US.

We're veering into a whole 'nuther post but the Aphorist has some preluminary ideas for where it seems to be headed:

Without aesthetic transfiguration all of reality is pedestrian.

When religion and aesthetics are divorced from each other, we do not know which is corrupted sooner.

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what is says.

The laws of biology in themselves do not have sufficiently delicate fingers to fashion the beauty of a face.

Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition; it is perception of a special order of realities.

And speaking of non-contradiction,

Two contradictory philosophical theses complete each other, but only God knows how.

Perhaps we could say that there are good and bad -- or higher and lower -- forms of disenchantment and of re-enchantment (the New Age movement, for example, being an unhealthy perversion of a genuine human need). In any event, more to follow.