Saturday, February 04, 2023

Mythoverestimating the Divine Nature

I have this idea that is seemingly unpopular on all sides, but since I am who I am, I can’t can’t help having it, nor do I imagine I could be talked out of it, although I’m always open to a better idea. 

We’ve discussed it in the past -- the conception of God’s limited or qualified omnipotence, but it came up again the other day. It is fully optional, so I don't expect readers to agree with me. No one will be denied burial in Bismarck for thinking Bob has gone off the tracks in his own private railcar.   

Think of it as a vertical exercise in Pick Two:
Pick two, sometimes expressed as pick any two, is the principle that in many sets of three desirable qualities, those qualities will be somewhat mutually exclusive.
In this case the three qualities are Goodness, Intelligibility, and Omnipotence. You might say that if push comes to shove, I prefer a God who is intelligible and unqualifiedly good over one who is all-powerful. 

Moreover, we’re not talking about a total downgrade here, an insult to the divine majesty. Rather, God is still the most powerful being conceivable (and technically beyond-being and therefore beyond conception), limited only by unintelligibility or absurdity (i.e., self-contradiction).

Let me also say that the limitation on omnipotence actually implies the presence of quite positive qualities that could not otherwise exist. 

In particular, I am thinking of God’s ability to relate to us. I’ve heard all the arguments for the simultaneous existence of an unchangeable God and a God who is intimately related to us -- for example who suffers with us and responds to prayer -- but I find them to be tendentious and sophistical. Special pleading, all to preserve what amounts to a platonic conception of God, not necessarily a biblical one.

With my approach, you also avoid the silliness of imagining a God who intervenes, say, to save the life of a professional football player while looking the other way as thousands of less fortunate people are gunned down in Democrat run cities. If God is In Control and God has a Plan and all that, then the plan is not only totally unintelligible, but makes the person trying to sell it come off sounding like an idiot. Not to mention insensitive to the widespread suffering of others.

By the way, this is in no way to deny the existence of the category of the “miraculous,” but this will require a separate discussion that reframes it in the context of the Nature of Things. 

The short answer is the existence is a web of vertical and horizontal influences that is not so much unintelligible as excessively so. As such, we have to accept the fact that it’s complicated, instead of making the complexity go away by suggesting that every child who dies of cancer is just part of God’s plan.

No offense, but some plan. Again, my intention is to preserve Gods goodness while not totally sacrificing intelligibility.

Along these lines, I mentioned that a reader alerted me to an essay by Hans Jonas called The Concept of God after Auschwitz. I read a fair amount about the Holocaust, and every time I do, it is as if I am plunged into a world that is so evil that it is beyond comprehension. There is a limit to what one can truly imagine, such that I can read the words and understand their meaning, and yet, not wrap my mind around how a person could be so sadisically evil, let alone millions of them. 

The Holocaust is far from the only human atrocity that strains to the breaking point the conception of a God who is all-powerful and all-good. The briefest encounter with history reveals horrors that again defy imagination. All part of The Plan? It’s just impossible for me to believe this. But also impossible for me to believe that God doesn't exist, so here we are. 

Nor is this to say there is no plan. Far from it. There is indeed a plan, and the single factor that most interferes with the execution of this plan is called man -- especially me, not to mention you. 

But man is also the being who should act in accord with the plan and actualize it on earth, which places us in an awkward and ambiguous situation, since it is as if the disease is part of the cure, so to speak, or at least has to consent to and participate in it.

Consider a little vertical gedankenexperiment. Suppose the creator of the universe breaks the fourth wall of the historical drama and joins the cast herebelow. This is a mission of mercy that essentially involves saving man from both himself and his closest advisor, a diabolical presence of some sort. But instead of being warmly accepted by all and sundry, he is tortured and executed inside his own creation by his own creatures.

Wo. If this isn’t the strangest story ever told, then surely there could be no stranger. But we need to bear in mind that not only is reality stranger than we suppose, it is stranger than we can suppose, so the strangeness of this narrative is a point in its favor, not to mention other weird elements of the drama that we don’t have time to get into this morning.

Just getting started, so to be continued...

Mythoverestimating the Divine Nature

I have this idea that is seemingly unpopular on all sides, but since I am who I am, I can’t can’t help having it, nor do I imagine I could be talked out of it, although I’m always open to a better idea. 

We’ve discussed it in the past -- the conception of God’s limited or qualified omnipotence, but it came up again the other day. It is fully optional, so I don't expect readers to agree with me. No one will be denied burial in Bismarck for thinking Bob has gone off the tracks in his own private railcar.   

Think of it as a vertical exercise in Pick Two:
Pick two, sometimes expressed as pick any two, is the principle that in many sets of three desirable qualities, those qualities will be somewhat mutually exclusive.
In this case the three qualities are Goodness, Intelligibility, and Omnipotence. You might say that if push comes to shove, I prefer a God who is intelligible and unqualifiedly good over one who is all-powerful. 

Moreover, we’re not talking about a total downgrade here, an insult to the divine majesty. Rather, God is still the most powerful being conceivable (and technically beyond-being and therefore beyond conception), limited only by unintelligibility or absurdity (i.e., self-contradiction).

Let me also say that the limitation on omnipotence actually implies the presence of quite positive qualities that could not otherwise exist. 

In particular, I am thinking of God’s ability to relate to us. I’ve heard all the arguments for the simultaneous existence of an unchangeable God and a God who is intimately related to us -- for example who suffers with us and responds to prayer -- but I find them to be tendentious and sophistical. Special pleading, all to preserve what amounts to a platonic conception of God, not necessarily a biblical one.

With my approach, you also avoid the silliness of imagining a God who intervenes, say, to save the life of a professional football player while looking the other way as thousands of less fortunate people are gunned down in Democrat run cities. If God is In Control and God has a Plan and all that, then the plan is not only totally unintelligible, but makes the person trying to sell it come off sounding like an idiot. Not to mention insensitive to the widespread suffering of others.

By the way, this is in no way to deny the existence of the category of the “miraculous,” but this will require a separate discussion that reframes it in the context of the Nature of Things. 

The short answer is the existence is a web of vertical and horizontal influences that is not so much unintelligible as excessively so. As such, we have to accept the fact that it’s complicated, instead of making the complexity go away by suggesting that every child who dies of cancer is just part of God’s plan.

No offense, but some plan. Again, my intention is to preserve Gods goodness while not totally sacrificing intelligibility.

Along these lines, I mentioned that a reader alerted me to an essay by Hans Jonas called The Concept of God after Auschwitz. I read a fair amount about the Holocaust, and every time I do, it is as if I am plunged into a world that is so evil that it is beyond comprehension. There is a limit to what one can truly imagine, such that I can read the words and understand their meaning, and yet, not wrap my mind around how a person could be so sadisically evil, let alone millions of them. 

The Holocaust is far from the only human atrocity that strains to the breaking point the conception of a God who is all-powerful and all-good. The briefest encounter with history reveals horrors that again defy imagination. All part of The Plan? It’s just impossible for me to believe this. But also impossible for me to believe that God doesn't exist, so here we are. 

Nor is this to say there is no plan. Far from it. There is indeed a plan, and the single factor that most interferes with the execution of this plan is called man -- especially me, not to mention you. 

But man is also the being who should act in accord with the plan and actualize it on earth, which places us in an awkward and ambiguous situation, since it is as if the disease is part of the cure, so to speak, or at least has to consent to and participate in it.

Consider a little vertical gedankenexperiment. Suppose the creator of the universe breaks the fourth wall of the historical drama and joins the cast herebelow. This is a mission of mercy that essentially involves saving man from both himself and his closest advisor, a diabolical presence of some sort. But instead of being warmly accepted by all and sundry, he is tortured and executed inside his own creation by his own creatures.

Wo. If this isn’t the strangest story ever told, then surely there could be no stranger. But we need to bear in mind that not only is reality stranger than we suppose, it is stranger than we can suppose, so the strangeness of this narrative is a point in its favor, not to mention other weird elements of the drama that we don’t have time to get into this morning.

Just getting started, so to be continued...

Friday, February 03, 2023

The Presence of Truth and Truth of Presence

I read an essay this morning about an unrelated subject, but that doesn’t mean we can’t twist it to our ends and put it to good use. The author notes that human beings

are rational animals. And if rational, then logical. And if logical, then it follows that if we accept a certain premise or set of premises, we are logically bound to accept all the conclusions that follow.
This gives rise to a kind of paradox, in that we ought to be rational, unless we begin with an irrational or absurd premise, in which case we ought not be. Rather, spare us. Go back and start over. 

Angels, of course, since they don't have bodies mediating reality, apprehend essences directly and don’t need to reason about them. Nor are they vulnerable to rationalization, even the naughty angels. Rather, these latter are as bold and shameless in their twisted assertions as any gaslighting Democrat politician or journalist (but I repeat myself).

Now, irrespective of whether or not you acknowledge the existence of angels, you will have noticed that some intellects are markedly more angelic than others. Importantly, it doesn’t necessarily make them correct, rather, just angelic. For "Some of us bear a resemblance to the angels,"
but very, very few, a minute fraction of the human race. These few become either great mathematicians (e.g., Isaac Newton), or makers of scientific revolutions (Newton or Einstein), or grandmasters at chess, or (less happily) paranoid schizophrenics who draw logical conclusions from absurd premises (ibid.).
Logical conclusions from absurd premises, AKA Garbage In, Tenure Out.  

An additional layer of paradox or something is introduced by the need to begin with correct premises that cannot be justified by logic per se (see Gödel for details). Which implies that we must possess some power analogous to angels in order to “see” and know where to begin. Am I missing something? Sincere question. Or “sincere” at any rate.

Now, to tie this into the current subject, -- and only subject, come to think of it -- which is the nature of Ultimate Reality, i.e., what is Really Real and how we can know it.

In other words, we want to know the most important and consequential stuff, but we also want to know how it is that we are capable of knowing it. These are distinct but related questions, ultimately going to ontology and epistemology, respectively.

If I go back and forth between using O and God to signify the same reality, it is partly because God is a problematic word to use in thinking about these things. 

For example, if we begin with “God,” this is loaded with conclusions about reality that -- from the perspective of logic -- need to be justified. Otherwise we can be as easily dismissed as one of those "paranoid schizophrenics who draw logical conclusions from absurd premises."

Okay, but what about those angelic intelligences referenced above? For clearly, there are some people who just see or know or feel God directly, with no need for some egghead to explain it to them -- or worse, for some condescending assoul to assure them that God cannot exist and that that they're delusional.

But note the trick: to say that God doesn’t exist is literally an angelic inversion, or the opposite of what an angelic intelligence does. For it pretends to peer into the core of reality and declares with omniscient stupidity, Nothing to see here, move along. 

At any rate, as Señor D. says, Proofs for the existence of God abound for those who do not need them. For these intelligences, proving the existence of God is analogous to proving the existence of sight to one who sees. After all, if we couldn't see, we couldn't even conceive of sight. 

This also reminds me of something Schuon says to the effect that God appears as Truth and/or Presence. These words would seem to imply objective and subjective, respectively. But since these two are not bifurcated in the Godhead, we might say that Truth has its own Presence, and vice versa. For when God is present, we know it is True. And when we truly understand truth -- not such and such a truth but Truth as such -- then we’re in the presence of God. 

About this mysterious presence, the good Señor has a few other juicy ones, for example,
The sole proof of the existence of God is his existence.
bOOm. I’ve written before of how the existence of proof itself proves the existence of God, just as any truth is a testimony of Truth itself. 
God is not an invention, but a finding.
Look what I found!

Especially for the more angelic among us, 
The existence of God is indemonstrable, because with a person the only thing we can do is bump into him.
Put conversely, no one would go around trying to prove the existence of other people if he hadn’t met or seen one -- as if we come into the world as sealed in solipsistic narcissism as an Obama. 

This goes back to the question of where to begin our reasoning. It is perfectly acceptable to begin with Presence. Which is, in the end, true of any and all reasoning about anything. No one begins by proving the existence of logic. It can of course, be perfected, but it’s just part of the standard package installed at the slacktory.  
If God were the conclusion of a rational argument I would feel no need to worship him.
Of course, this doesn't mean we should worship the irrational, as do our hissin’ cousins to the leftavus.

One last zinger:
In certain moments of abundance, God overflows into the world like a spring gushing into the peace of the midday.
Which comes very close to what we were saying the other day about Ekhart, the flow, and the bubbling-over of the divine Ground. I do intend to return to this subject, just as I intend to return to the dozen or so other books sitting here open on my desk. It's just that, uh, 

The Presence of Truth and Truth of Presence

I read an essay this morning about an unrelated subject, but that doesn’t mean we can’t twist it to our ends and put it to good use. The author notes that human beings

are rational animals. And if rational, then logical. And if logical, then it follows that if we accept a certain premise or set of premises, we are logically bound to accept all the conclusions that follow.
This gives rise to a kind of paradox, in that we ought to be rational, unless we begin with an irrational or absurd premise, in which case we ought not be. Rather, spare us. Go back and start over. 

Angels, of course, since they don't have bodies mediating reality, apprehend essences directly and don’t need to reason about them. Nor are they vulnerable to rationalization, even the naughty angels. Rather, these latter are as bold and shameless in their twisted assertions as any gaslighting Democrat politician or journalist (but I repeat myself).

Now, irrespective of whether or not you acknowledge the existence of angels, you will have noticed that some intellects are markedly more angelic than others. Importantly, it doesn’t necessarily make them correct, rather, just angelic. For "Some of us bear a resemblance to the angels,"
but very, very few, a minute fraction of the human race. These few become either great mathematicians (e.g., Isaac Newton), or makers of scientific revolutions (Newton or Einstein), or grandmasters at chess, or (less happily) paranoid schizophrenics who draw logical conclusions from absurd premises (ibid.).
Logical conclusions from absurd premises, AKA Garbage In, Tenure Out.  

An additional layer of paradox or something is introduced by the need to begin with correct premises that cannot be justified by logic per se (see Gödel for details). Which implies that we must possess some power analogous to angels in order to “see” and know where to begin. Am I missing something? Sincere question. Or “sincere” at any rate.

Now, to tie this into the current subject, -- and only subject, come to think of it -- which is the nature of Ultimate Reality, i.e., what is Really Real and how we can know it.

In other words, we want to know the most important and consequential stuff, but we also want to know how it is that we are capable of knowing it. These are distinct but related questions, ultimately going to ontology and epistemology, respectively.

If I go back and forth between using O and God to signify the same reality, it is partly because God is a problematic word to use in thinking about these things. 

For example, if we begin with “God,” this is loaded with conclusions about reality that -- from the perspective of logic -- need to be justified. Otherwise we can be as easily dismissed as one of those "paranoid schizophrenics who draw logical conclusions from absurd premises."

Okay, but what about those angelic intelligences referenced above? For clearly, there are some people who just see or know or feel God directly, with no need for some egghead to explain it to them -- or worse, for some condescending assoul to assure them that God cannot exist and that that they're delusional.

But note the trick: to say that God doesn’t exist is literally an angelic inversion, or the opposite of what an angelic intelligence does. For it pretends to peer into the core of reality and declares with omniscient stupidity, Nothing to see here, move along. 

At any rate, as Señor D. says, Proofs for the existence of God abound for those who do not need them. For these intelligences, proving the existence of God is analogous to proving the existence of sight to one who sees. After all, if we couldn't see, we couldn't even conceive of sight. 

This also reminds me of something Schuon says to the effect that God appears as Truth and/or Presence. These words would seem to imply objective and subjective, respectively. But since these two are not bifurcated in the Godhead, we might say that Truth has its own Presence, and vice versa. For when God is present, we know it is True. And when we truly understand truth -- not such and such a truth but Truth as such -- then we’re in the presence of God. 

About this mysterious presence, the good Señor has a few other juicy ones, for example,
The sole proof of the existence of God is his existence.
bOOm. I’ve written before of how the existence of proof itself proves the existence of God, just as any truth is a testimony of Truth itself. 
God is not an invention, but a finding.
Look what I found!

Especially for the more angelic among us, 
The existence of God is indemonstrable, because with a person the only thing we can do is bump into him.
Put conversely, no one would go around trying to prove the existence of other people if he hadn’t met or seen one -- as if we come into the world as sealed in solipsistic narcissism as an Obama. 

This goes back to the question of where to begin our reasoning. It is perfectly acceptable to begin with Presence. Which is, in the end, true of any and all reasoning about anything. No one begins by proving the existence of logic. It can of course, be perfected, but it’s just part of the standard package installed at the slacktory.  
If God were the conclusion of a rational argument I would feel no need to worship him.
Of course, this doesn't mean we should worship the irrational, as do our hissin’ cousins to the leftavus.

One last zinger:
In certain moments of abundance, God overflows into the world like a spring gushing into the peace of the midday.
Which comes very close to what we were saying the other day about Ekhart, the flow, and the bubbling-over of the divine Ground. I do intend to return to this subject, just as I intend to return to the dozen or so other books sitting here open on my desk. It's just that, uh, 

Thursday, February 02, 2023

The View from Nowhere by Someone

A reader alerted me to an essay by our old friend Hans Jonas called The Concept of God after Auschwitz. Turns out I've read it before, as it is contained in a book called Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good After Auschwitz

Although we’ve often mentioned Jonas's The Phenomenon of Life, we’ve never discussed this one. I must have read it in the dark ages before blogging. Back then if you read something interesting, there was no place to talk about it except in the margins of the book. 

The essay in question actually dovetails with yesterday’s subject of what amounts to relativity in God. We’ve discussed this question in the past, but it’s one of those things I keep coming back to, for it is as if all roads lead there. All the roads on which I travel, anyway. 

The question is, is this a true Divine Attractor to which the roads are leading, or just, like, my own opinion? If so, it’s not worth much, because what we’re really looking for is the central View From Nowhere, not the marginal view from Bob’s head.

The modern world couldn’t be more schizophrenic or bipolar on this question of the View From Nowhere, for which reason the seams are beginning to tear in their cheap fabric of non-being. 

What I mean is that we are presented with two irreconcilable positions, first the I LOVE ME SOME SCIENCE crowd that pretends science really is an exhaustive view from nowhere, untainted by subjectivity. 

But this coexists with the widespread delusion that perception is reality and that any and all knowledge is not only “perspectival” but rooted in Power and Oppression, or Racism and Sexism. 

How to reconcile these two unintelligibilities? In the low-IQ consensus that science, math, physics, and even objectivity itself are the cis-hetero white man’s power play. For the most part, Big Science is ether too cowardly to fight back, or actually defends these imbeciles, perverts, and ideologues. 

For example, all of biology is organized around sexual reproduction, and yet, it fails to do its part by crushing the perverse agenda of the QWERTY+ people. 

Now, there is obviously a view from nowhere, and only God can see it. However, at the same time, we can obviously know of its existence, but it turns out that this isn't fundamentally different from any knowledge of any kind, for only God can know essences directly and exhaustively, whereas we can apprehend them, but never completely. We can know a great deal about anything, but can never know everything about a single thing.  

Why? A lot of reasons, but perhaps the main one -- or the one they all reduce to -- is that we are finite while God (or O) is infinite. Note that we can easily use that word — “infinite” -- even while having no idea what it means. Indeed, we can only even define it negatively, as in “not finite.” We know all about finitude. It is the shadow or prolongation or creation of what is not finitude. 

Does this satisfy your intellect? Perhaps it does, and there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this, because at least you don’t believe the impossible and absurd, as do the votaries of scientism and relativism.  

Speaking of the latter, to say we are finite is also to say we are relative. Relative to what? For the postmodern cretin, relative to other words. We live in a linguistic hall of mirrors, such that every word reflects and refers to another word, not to something called “reality.” 

But… they just now described reality as a network of language. How did they slip through the linguistic net and attain the view from nowhere? 

Even more fundamentally, how did they evade Gödel? Because he would agree that there is no escape from any nontrivial manmade system via that system. Nevertheless, so what, because escape we do. In other words, man qua man is the very being who transcends any system imposed upon him.

That’s a rather miraculous trick, but how do we manage it? Probably the same way God does, only in reverse. 

Let’s go back to what was said at the end of yesterday’s post, that ultimate reality, the view from nowhere, must somehow be an irreducible dialectic of O <—> ( ). If this is so, then it implies something to the effect that the Creator is always creating, or that the Absolute is always tossing out relativity, or Infinitude is always becoming finite. 

Now turn this around and look at it from our perspective, AKA the view from somewhere, indeed, someone: a human person. Forget for a moment about the two-way arrow, which is controversial. However, no believer would disagree with a one-way flow of O —> (•), from Creator to creature (the dot in the middle symbolizing the human person). 

Likewise, certainly no Christian would dispute the description of our lives as a vertical adventure of  (•) —> O, which is indeed the whole point: that God becomes man that man might become God.

Still, there’s a little catch in there if we want to insist upon an intelligible concept of God. But this is my short morning, so we’ll have to pick up the thread tomorrow. 

The View from Nowhere by Someone

A reader alerted me to an essay by our old friend Hans Jonas called The Concept of God after Auschwitz. Turns out I've read it before, as it is contained in a book called Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good After Auschwitz

Although we’ve often mentioned Jonas's The Phenomenon of Life, we’ve never discussed this one. I must have read it in the dark ages before blogging. Back then if you read something interesting, there was no place to talk about it except in the margins of the book. 

The essay in question actually dovetails with yesterday’s subject of what amounts to relativity in God. We’ve discussed this question in the past, but it’s one of those things I keep coming back to, for it is as if all roads lead there. All the roads on which I travel, anyway. 

The question is, is this a true Divine Attractor to which the roads are leading, or just, like, my own opinion? If so, it’s not worth much, because what we’re really looking for is the central View From Nowhere, not the marginal view from Bob’s head.

The modern world couldn’t be more schizophrenic or bipolar on this question of the View From Nowhere, for which reason the seams are beginning to tear in their cheap fabric of non-being. 

What I mean is that we are presented with two irreconcilable positions, first the I LOVE ME SOME SCIENCE crowd that pretends science really is an exhaustive view from nowhere, untainted by subjectivity. 

But this coexists with the widespread delusion that perception is reality and that any and all knowledge is not only “perspectival” but rooted in Power and Oppression, or Racism and Sexism. 

How to reconcile these two unintelligibilities? In the low-IQ consensus that science, math, physics, and even objectivity itself are the cis-hetero white man’s power play. For the most part, Big Science is ether too cowardly to fight back, or actually defends these imbeciles, perverts, and ideologues. 

For example, all of biology is organized around sexual reproduction, and yet, it fails to do its part by crushing the perverse agenda of the QWERTY+ people. 

Now, there is obviously a view from nowhere, and only God can see it. However, at the same time, we can obviously know of its existence, but it turns out that this isn't fundamentally different from any knowledge of any kind, for only God can know essences directly and exhaustively, whereas we can apprehend them, but never completely. We can know a great deal about anything, but can never know everything about a single thing.  

Why? A lot of reasons, but perhaps the main one -- or the one they all reduce to -- is that we are finite while God (or O) is infinite. Note that we can easily use that word — “infinite” -- even while having no idea what it means. Indeed, we can only even define it negatively, as in “not finite.” We know all about finitude. It is the shadow or prolongation or creation of what is not finitude. 

Does this satisfy your intellect? Perhaps it does, and there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this, because at least you don’t believe the impossible and absurd, as do the votaries of scientism and relativism.  

Speaking of the latter, to say we are finite is also to say we are relative. Relative to what? For the postmodern cretin, relative to other words. We live in a linguistic hall of mirrors, such that every word reflects and refers to another word, not to something called “reality.” 

But… they just now described reality as a network of language. How did they slip through the linguistic net and attain the view from nowhere? 

Even more fundamentally, how did they evade Gödel? Because he would agree that there is no escape from any nontrivial manmade system via that system. Nevertheless, so what, because escape we do. In other words, man qua man is the very being who transcends any system imposed upon him.

That’s a rather miraculous trick, but how do we manage it? Probably the same way God does, only in reverse. 

Let’s go back to what was said at the end of yesterday’s post, that ultimate reality, the view from nowhere, must somehow be an irreducible dialectic of O <—> ( ). If this is so, then it implies something to the effect that the Creator is always creating, or that the Absolute is always tossing out relativity, or Infinitude is always becoming finite. 

Now turn this around and look at it from our perspective, AKA the view from somewhere, indeed, someone: a human person. Forget for a moment about the two-way arrow, which is controversial. However, no believer would disagree with a one-way flow of O —> (•), from Creator to creature (the dot in the middle symbolizing the human person). 

Likewise, certainly no Christian would dispute the description of our lives as a vertical adventure of  (•) —> O, which is indeed the whole point: that God becomes man that man might become God.

Still, there’s a little catch in there if we want to insist upon an intelligible concept of God. But this is my short morning, so we’ll have to pick up the thread tomorrow. 

Wednesday, February 01, 2023

Thinking About Thinking About God

Where were we? Yes, passive and active in the intellect. The senses, for example, are mostly passive, at least until worked over by the mind and transformed into something thinkable, a concept. 

But concepts are quite alluring, so much so that they can become detached from the empirical reality from which they are derived and take on a death of their own: the fall into ideology and ideolatry is complete, and we are sealed in tenure.

As a commenter commented yesterday, there are "7 billion minds out there that create their own worlds at the speed of thought. Actually, faster than that, because properly speaking no thinking is involved. Rather, all they see is what their idea permits them to see. This idea is active, but in a dysfunctional way, in that it is actively superimposed on phenomena, reducing the world to some stupid idea about it. This culminates in a "Ph.D.," as in "Dr. Jill Biden." 

Happens all the time, and can’t not happen if we aren’t vigilant about what we let into our heads. Rather, we must always remain open-minded except insofar as we have arrived at a principle that cannot not be. Then it's not only okay to be close-minded, it’s mandatory, for this is the rock on which we shall built our perch, AKA the transcendent view from nOwhere.

Science has the right approach, in that its every idea about the world is tentative and falsifiable, except principle ideas such as falsifiability, the intelligibility of the world, and the mind’s adequation to a reality independent of it, without which there can be no science. 

In addition to the active/passive complementarity there is one of analysis/synthesis. Analysis is essentially active, except it may operate on concepts that have been passively assimilated, for example, “critical race theory,” which is critical about everything except the initial delusion which has been passively internalized by the "Ph.D." 

The same is true of any discipline ending in Studies, for what is studied and scrutinized is some gratifying projection, even if it’s hard for normal folks to understand why it’s gratifying. 

For example, it is somehow gratifying for them to believe the world is so racist that even black police officers in a black-run department are white racists. Likewise, here in California Larry Elder is our black face of white supremacy. We scarcely know whether to laugh or laugh harder.  

Active and passive, analysis and synthesis. Anything else? Yes, there are the distinctions between Absolute and Relative, Infinite and Finite, Reality and Appearance, Eternity and Time, and Principle and Manifestation. However, I suspect these are all just different ways of looking at and thinking about the same thing, which comes down to “Creator and Creation” or “God and World.

But if we really want to remain openminded about this, we should use empty and unsaturated symbols such as O and (  ) for God and world, respectively.  

Everything, it turns out, partakes of this “empty dialectic,” so to speak, even God himself. (For reasons I no longer recall, I thought it was a better idea to symbolize the world as )( in the book, probably because I thought it conveyed an inversion or something. That’s too cute by half.)

Now, the only other guy who comes close to thinking about this subject as I do is Schuon, although he still sticks with words and not symbols. Perhaps Guenon went there, but it will take too much time to check.

My point is that this O <—> ( ) dialectic is irreducible, even in God, or in divinas, as they say when they want to sound more serious. But I think you’ll find that thinking about God this way resolves a lot of problems, paradoxes, existential absurdities, and ontological nul-de-slacks that occur if we try to think about God in the usual way. Tune in tomorrow to find out why.

Thinking About Thinking About God

Where were we? Yes, passive and active in the intellect. The senses, for example, are mostly passive, at least until worked over by the mind and transformed into something thinkable, a concept. 

But concepts are quite alluring, so much so that they can become detached from the empirical reality from which they are derived and take on a death of their own: the fall into ideology and ideolatry is complete, and we are sealed in tenure.

As a commenter commented yesterday, there are "7 billion minds out there that create their own worlds at the speed of thought. Actually, faster than that, because properly speaking no thinking is involved. Rather, all they see is what their idea permits them to see. This idea is active, but in a dysfunctional way, in that it is actively superimposed on phenomena, reducing the world to some stupid idea about it. This culminates in a "Ph.D.," as in "Dr. Jill Biden." 

Happens all the time, and can’t not happen if we aren’t vigilant about what we let into our heads. Rather, we must always remain open-minded except insofar as we have arrived at a principle that cannot not be. Then it's not only okay to be close-minded, it’s mandatory, for this is the rock on which we shall built our perch, AKA the transcendent view from nOwhere.

Science has the right approach, in that its every idea about the world is tentative and falsifiable, except principle ideas such as falsifiability, the intelligibility of the world, and the mind’s adequation to a reality independent of it, without which there can be no science. 

In addition to the active/passive complementarity there is one of analysis/synthesis. Analysis is essentially active, except it may operate on concepts that have been passively assimilated, for example, “critical race theory,” which is critical about everything except the initial delusion which has been passively internalized by the "Ph.D." 

The same is true of any discipline ending in Studies, for what is studied and scrutinized is some gratifying projection, even if it’s hard for normal folks to understand why it’s gratifying. 

For example, it is somehow gratifying for them to believe the world is so racist that even black police officers in a black-run department are white racists. Likewise, here in California Larry Elder is our black face of white supremacy. We scarcely know whether to laugh or laugh harder.  

Active and passive, analysis and synthesis. Anything else? Yes, there are the distinctions between Absolute and Relative, Infinite and Finite, Reality and Appearance, Eternity and Time, and Principle and Manifestation. However, I suspect these are all just different ways of looking at and thinking about the same thing, which comes down to “Creator and Creation” or “God and World.

But if we really want to remain openminded about this, we should use empty and unsaturated symbols such as O and (  ) for God and world, respectively.  

Everything, it turns out, partakes of this “empty dialectic,” so to speak, even God himself. (For reasons I no longer recall, I thought it was a better idea to symbolize the world as )( in the book, probably because I thought it conveyed an inversion or something. That’s too cute by half.)

Now, the only other guy who comes close to thinking about this subject as I do is Schuon, although he still sticks with words and not symbols. Perhaps Guenon went there, but it will take too much time to check.

My point is that this O <—> ( ) dialectic is irreducible, even in God, or in divinas, as they say when they want to sound more serious. But I think you’ll find that thinking about God this way resolves a lot of problems, paradoxes, existential absurdities, and ontological nul-de-slacks that occur if we try to think about God in the usual way. Tune in tomorrow to find out why.

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

The Real Fundamentalism

Let's try to fundamentally describe what's really going on and what's really real: AKA reality2. I realize we've been down this hole recently, but it's a new day and therefore a new new.

I woke up this morning thinking about experience, which is at once so fundamental as to defy definition, but so central as to be the rabbit hole of rabbit holes. For it is literally the cosmic hole without which there are no holes. Am I wrong?! 

No, just a hole

Excuse me while I check out Big Oxford for an exact definition. But whatever it turns out to be, I’m sure it will be out of its element and unable to keep itself from assuming what it needs to explain. In other words, tautological. 

At any rate, this shouldn’t take long. There’s a lot here, but here's one: the sum total of the conscious events that make up an individual life.

Okay, now define conscious, event, individual, and life, which are almost equally fundamental. You need to be alive to have experiences, but what is life but experiences?

This one is still problematic but a bit more elemental and closer to what we’re looking for: something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through. There’s also a list of helpful synonyms such as undergo, sustain, and suffer, each of which, come to think of it, is first hand and first person. Remind me to come back to this, because it's important.

This also reminds me of the “passion” of Christ, which doesn't imply passion in the usual sense, but rather, something passively endured or submitted to -- being acted upon rather than acting. 

That’s enough of that. My point is that bestwecando with regard to getting at the essence of experience is to say that it is at once an “opening” and an “openness.” And like any opening, it has two sides, in this case, an exterior and an interior. 

Now, to say interiority is very nearly to say experience, or at least it’s impossible to conceive of one without the other. For to have an experience is to have it on the inside, in this world of subjectivity. 

Which is another word that is very difficult-if-not-impossible to dig beneath. It is at once a hole -- or the hole -- but also a kind of wall, in that we can never get at it without assuming it. It’s just there (or here, rather), a given. 

But check out all the stuff in here! I mean, literally everything and more. For it is a spring that never runs dry, or a burning bush that is never consumed, or a light that is shines in the darkness and is never turned off. Except at death, but what can death be in the deeper context of what even a single experience of I AM is?  

As it so happens, my son is taking a class on Western Civilization, or even, one might say, EXTREME CIVILIZATION, which naturally leads to questions of what it even is. 

Today they’re going on about the centrality of BEAUTY, and here we go again with the so-fundamental-as-to-defy-definition. 

Nevertheless, Thomas took a stab at it, characterizing it as our perception -- or better, apprehension, since any animal can perceive but not see it -- of wholeness (i.e., unity and oneness), harmony (proportion or part-whole relations), and radiance (i.e, the extra-perceptual perception of some x-factor that jumps out of the object, up to and including the blinding glory or divine light discussed at the end of yesterday's post).

So clearly, beauty is something experienced, undergone, and personally encountered. And if no one is there to experience it, then it goes ungnosissed.

Not so fast! Because a big part of beauty -- the experience of beauty -- involves bearing witness to all of the natural beauty that was here for billions of years before we ever got here. Which, the moment you try to think about it, is exceedingly and surpassingly strange, because someone has pretty damn good taste in throw rugs.

For it is strange enough that an inexplicable hole should appear in the center of creation, stranger still that into it should flow all this beauty, from stars above to forests, oceans, storms, animals, and whatnot. What’s going on here? 

There is no principle down here that can account for the elemental mysteries discussed above, so stop looking here. Okay. Where else to look?

Insufficient time to do justice to the subject, but this principle of “passive witness to all the glorious beauty” must be situated above: there is an “eternal outpouring,” so to speak, and an "eternal reception,” but that’s only half the story. Or two thirds, rather.  

The Real Fundamentalism

Let's try to fundamentally describe what's really going on and what's really real: AKA reality2. I realize we've been down this hole recently, but it's a new day and therefore a new new.

I woke up this morning thinking about experience, which is at once so fundamental as to defy definition, but so central as to be the rabbit hole of rabbit holes. For it is literally the cosmic hole without which there are no holes. Am I wrong?! 

No, just a hole

Excuse me while I check out Big Oxford for an exact definition. But whatever it turns out to be, I’m sure it will be out of its element and unable to keep itself from assuming what it needs to explain. In other words, tautological. 

At any rate, this shouldn’t take long. There’s a lot here, but here's one: the sum total of the conscious events that make up an individual life.

Okay, now define conscious, event, individual, and life, which are almost equally fundamental. You need to be alive to have experiences, but what is life but experiences?

This one is still problematic but a bit more elemental and closer to what we’re looking for: something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through. There’s also a list of helpful synonyms such as undergo, sustain, and suffer, each of which, come to think of it, is first hand and first person. Remind me to come back to this, because it's important.

This also reminds me of the “passion” of Christ, which doesn't imply passion in the usual sense, but rather, something passively endured or submitted to -- being acted upon rather than acting. 

That’s enough of that. My point is that bestwecando with regard to getting at the essence of experience is to say that it is at once an “opening” and an “openness.” And like any opening, it has two sides, in this case, an exterior and an interior. 

Now, to say interiority is very nearly to say experience, or at least it’s impossible to conceive of one without the other. For to have an experience is to have it on the inside, in this world of subjectivity. 

Which is another word that is very difficult-if-not-impossible to dig beneath. It is at once a hole -- or the hole -- but also a kind of wall, in that we can never get at it without assuming it. It’s just there (or here, rather), a given. 

But check out all the stuff in here! I mean, literally everything and more. For it is a spring that never runs dry, or a burning bush that is never consumed, or a light that is shines in the darkness and is never turned off. Except at death, but what can death be in the deeper context of what even a single experience of I AM is?  

As it so happens, my son is taking a class on Western Civilization, or even, one might say, EXTREME CIVILIZATION, which naturally leads to questions of what it even is. 

Today they’re going on about the centrality of BEAUTY, and here we go again with the so-fundamental-as-to-defy-definition. 

Nevertheless, Thomas took a stab at it, characterizing it as our perception -- or better, apprehension, since any animal can perceive but not see it -- of wholeness (i.e., unity and oneness), harmony (proportion or part-whole relations), and radiance (i.e, the extra-perceptual perception of some x-factor that jumps out of the object, up to and including the blinding glory or divine light discussed at the end of yesterday's post).

So clearly, beauty is something experienced, undergone, and personally encountered. And if no one is there to experience it, then it goes ungnosissed.

Not so fast! Because a big part of beauty -- the experience of beauty -- involves bearing witness to all of the natural beauty that was here for billions of years before we ever got here. Which, the moment you try to think about it, is exceedingly and surpassingly strange, because someone has pretty damn good taste in throw rugs.

For it is strange enough that an inexplicable hole should appear in the center of creation, stranger still that into it should flow all this beauty, from stars above to forests, oceans, storms, animals, and whatnot. What’s going on here? 

There is no principle down here that can account for the elemental mysteries discussed above, so stop looking here. Okay. Where else to look?

Insufficient time to do justice to the subject, but this principle of “passive witness to all the glorious beauty” must be situated above: there is an “eternal outpouring,” so to speak, and an "eternal reception,” but that’s only half the story. Or two thirds, rather.  

Monday, January 30, 2023

Burning Questions and Shining Answers

The darkness alluded to in yesterday’s post is like the silence needed in order to speak and be heard. There is message, there is noise, and there is silence. 

As it pertains to us, there is the light and the mirror that reflects it (AKA intellect) and various accidents that interfere with the clarity of the latter, ranging from our fallenness at one end to our own peculiarities, passions, and mind parasites at the other. 

Now, our mirror also reflects the world, here again, more or less adequately. The point is, we are situated at the crossroads of vertical and horizontal, with one mirror pointing up, the other out. But there is only one mirror, or rather, One Cosmos transluminously mirrored in us. At least potentially, depending on the purity of the mirror.  

In the past I’ve used the analogy of a lampshade with any number of pinprick holes. Viewed from outside it will look like that many independent points of light, when there is actually only the one source of light at the center. Now, technically there are three bulbs and one light, but don’t worry about that for now.

The lampshade is not the actual “perimeter” of reality; rather, man is a two-faced bastard, meaning again that one side faces O, the other “the world.” We are always in between these two extremes.

Another way of thinking about this structure is to imagine pure colorless light passing through a prism and producing the spectrum of color. None of the individual colors are the pure light, but nor are they not-light. And every man is his own color.

Now, there’s a persistent voice in my head that tells me “revelation is the poetry of metaphysics.” I can’t say with certainty that this is true, but it’s too good to check. If it is true, then we can take the most metaphysical of the gospels -- this being John -- which should be fungible into metaphysics per se, or be a pretty clear reflection of what goes on up there (bearing in mind the analogy of light and mirror, or central bulb and holey lampshade).

If man isn’t a mirror of truth, then to hell with it. The mirror is like the inverse image of God: it is purely passive and receptive, whereas God is said to be  pure act. The mirror is at once image of God, but of everything and anything else, high or low.

But first of all, a hermeneutic skeleton key: for our Jewish friends the OT is itself a sufficient reflection of G-d, which is true enough and more than true enough. 

For the Christian it is also a reflection, except a more specific reflection of God as revealed in the NT -- ultimately of the Trinity. Thus, we read the OT in the light of the NT, the latter being the “telos” of the former, so to speak.  

For our purposes this morning, all I’m trying to say is that the prologue of John is an obvious reflection or parallel commentary on the prologue of Genesis. Both begin with In the beginning; in truth In the beginning is the beginning which is always now

And this now is at once temporal and spatial, which goes to origin and center, respectively.  

In Genesis the beginning focuses more on God’s end and with his creative activity, and the first thing he does is separate darkness from light; if John is a reflection of this, then this same light that is created in the beginning -- and without which nothing is created -- becomes flesh and dwells among us.  

It is as if the central bulb becomes one of the holes. But let’s deconstruct this analogy into something more purely metaphysical. I mean, if we can. Without language disintegrating again, for that bulb is bright but also hot. A metaphor is like an oven mitt that allows us to reach toward the bulb without getting burned. I hope.

Caution: objects in mirror are closer and hotter than they appear.

I’m reaching around in the dark looking for a little help, and Steinsaltz’s Thirteen Petalled Rose falls into my hands, so let's go with it:
The use of plastic imagery and symbols is so characteristic of language that it is hard to find a sentence in the Scriptures that is not the basis of metaphorical description rather than that of abstract conceptualization. Imagery-bound concepts are to be found everywhere, in almost every paragraph…
Do we dare attempt to grasp the naked concept? Maybe, but I’m wearing these metaphorical mitts just in case.
Precisely because of this prevalence of metaphorical statement, and the widespread use of figures of speech drawn from the human image, it becomes all the more necessary to emphasize that they are allegorical truths and not actual descriptions of reality.
Hmm. Looks like there is danger in either direction: on the one mitt, of falling into “a crude material apprehension of the divine essence and of the higher reality,” but on the other mitt, of the need to maintain a healthy respect for the infinite distance between man and God. Apparently we can see his face, but this is the last thing we'll see.  

Unless, of course, the Incarnation takes care of this problem for us, or in other words, spans that infinite distance like God’s own oven mitt.  

Let’s climb out of that rabbi hole and return to where we left off yesterday, to The Roots of Christian Mysticism, and we can take that word -- “root” -- in a number of ways, beginning with a Christological sense. For the horizontal roots extend back to the desert fathers, and then up vertically to Christ, who rains back down on our own personal desert. 

Let me first repeat the passage from yesterday: the divine darkness
is the symbol and the experience of a presence that cannot be grasped, a night in which the Inaccessible presents himself and eludes us at the same time. It is the nocturnal communion of the hidden God with the person who is hidden in God.
Continuing from there, Clement says that
This darkness does not deny the glory that flows from it. It is not the absence of light: rather, it is “more than luminous.
Again, it is also hot to the touch, so let’s proceed cautiously so our words don't melt like they did on Saturday. 

The word “glory” has a specific meaning, going to the overwhelming beauty of the divine light, for example, vis-a-vis the transfiguration. 

Note that in this event, Christ’s clothes become “as white as light” -- “shining, exceedingly white, like snow, such as no launderer on earth can whiten them” -- which goes back to what was said above about the pure light before it passes through the prism: yes, the apostles are looking directly at the bulb and witnessing a theophany. They fall to the ground and are “greatly afraid," for they have neither mitts nor visors.

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