The Age of Hunter's Laptop

We've been f... fooling around with Schuon's essay the Prerogatives of the Human State, but let's try to be a little more serious. 

Again, he starts with "Total intelligence, free will, and sentiment capable of disinterestedness," which correspond to Plato's Big Three transcendentals, the true, good, and beautiful. 

Of course, Plato tosses in a fourth, Unity, which almost goes without saying, since nothing could be said in its absence.

Ever thus to nihilists.

Correct. The implications of unity -- and its inverted shadow, nothingness, are as Light and dark, respectively.

As to the latter, one might well ask, how much more black could this be? None more black. 

Let me briefly hand the wheel of the bus over to Prof. Wiki while I take a couple of restorative gulps. He can be pretty unreliable on a good day, but surely he can't f... foul up something so basic:

The transcendentals are "properties of being," nowadays commonly considered to be truth, unity, being, and goodness. Viewed ontologically, the transcendentals are understood to be what is common to all beings. From a cognitive point of view, they are the "first" concepts, since they cannot be logically traced back to something preceding them.

From the time of the High Middle Ages, the transcendentals have been the subject of metaphysics. Although there was disagreement about their number, there was consensus that, in addition to the basic concept of being itself, unity, truth, and goodness were part of the transcendental family. Since then, essence, otherness, and, more recently, beauty, have been added. Today, they are found in theology, particularly in Catholic thought, as unity, truth, goodness and beauty.

So, Schuon is coming out of this great philosophical tradition of Being. All lesser philosophies -- which is to say all modern and postmodern pseudo-philosophies -- start and end in non-Being, which is why they generate such absurdity. 

I won't even bother to explain why, because if you read and understand this blog, you already know why. Existentialism, for example, begins with existence, as if it were self-explanatory and not a consequence of Being.  

Disgusting.

Indeed, Petey, a reminder that disgust might as well be another transcendental, for 

God is the transcendental condition of our disgust.

But dis-gust is a primordial, gustatory recognition of bullshit, founded in a deeper realization that 

God is the substance of what we love.

This being because the substance of God is love, or so we have heard from the thrice-wise. I'm not presumptuous enough to put myself in their company, but I do love truth, so it's a start. 

I also think that in our Dark Age -- the evil Age of Progressive Malice and Stupidity -- we have to fight back with the tools of intellect, never forgetting, of course, the tools of the second amendment without which the most self-evident truth and airtight logic are subject to the truncheon and worse, to the Manhattan jury of Nancy Pelosi's peers.

You will have noticed that this evil age not only rejects Being and its transcendentals, but covertly sneaks in pseudo-transcendentals of its own such as Race, Gender, and Sexual Perversion, AKA identity politics. 

Now, identity is a Judeo-Christian concept and applies to the individual, not some abstract class of sacred victims.

"Yes, but what about the Jews," you might ask. "Doesn't your whole fairy tale religion begin with your imaginary sky god singling out this group for some special status?"

Absolutely, but as usual you mis- and disunderstand, for they are chosen precisely for a universal mission, which is to bring the transcendentals into history -- for example, universal morality. 

It would be a rookie mistake to suggest that the Jews were selected because they somehow embodied these universals before being chosen to follow and embody them for the restavus. It's kind of the whole f... freaking point of the OT.

In the final analysis, God may work with nations and peoples, but 

For God there are only individuals.

God is, of course, the very principle of persons, since He is them.

Here is a rare occasion that I have to disagree with the Aphorist, or at least would have to if taken literally:

If one does not believe in God, the only honest alternative is vulgar utilitarianism. The rest is rhetoric.

For there is vulgar leftism, vulgar scientism, vulgar postmodernism, and just plain vulgarity. 

The list isn't endless, because it ends in the vulgar nihilism that is currently in the saddle. And how appropriate that the man in the saddle has no mind at all. Who said the left is devoid of poetic irony? Who could be more vulgar? None more vulgar.

Are you forgetting Hunter?

Don't be so literal. We include him in the unholy trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Bottomless Vulgarity.

God does not die, but unfortunatey for man, the lesser gods, like modesty, honor, dignity, and decency, have perished.

The Age of Hunter's Laptop, my Empurpled Friend.

Indeed, back in film school we called it the "objective correlative": A physical representation or manifestation of an abstract concept; especially, a symbolic artistic representation of a particular emotion, feeling etc.

At the same time, and correlative to the objective correlative, is the utter shamelessness that accompanies the vulgarity. Which can be summarized in Nancy Pelosi's awesome tweet the other day, in which, for once, she was brutally honest:

No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove their innocence. 

Before a Manhattan jury of her peers, of course, in order to determine if Trump floats. The mailed fist of the Dark Ages has nothing on the femaled fist of our darker age.

You know the old saying, No facts, just Bragg.

Busy Doin' Nothin'

So, various admixtures of intelligence, will, and sentiment go to the capability, character, and scope of this or that individual. 

I numinate Thomas Aquinas for scoring a 10/10 in all six dimensions. After all, the scope of the Summa(s) is no less than everything, and only the distraction of mystical union and the nuisance of death prevented him from eying every cross and teeing up every last dot and tiddle. 

This guy -- this is my kind of guy. Why settle for anything less? Way back when I was confirmed last year I took his as my saint name, so technically you can call me St. Thomas, am I wrong?

No, you're just an assoul.  

I wish you would get out of my life and shut up!

We kid. It's just that The Big Lebowski is Petey's favorite movie, and I can match him reference for reference with Napoleon Dynamite. The question is, how much do you want to bet I can throw this post over them mountains of intelligibility? 

Say, Petey... you know a lot about cyberspace. You ever come across anything... like time travel?

Easy. I've already looked into it for myself. Up here, different times are adjacent in vertical space. There's something analogous for you temporal folks, and the Happy Acres guy alluded to it the other day:

If you’re not in conversation with the great minds of the past, you’re not a thinker. For who else is there to talk to? (https://twitter.com/HappyHectares/status/1640894028588945408)

Reminds me of something the Aphorist says:

A cultured soul is one in which the din of the living does not drown out the music of the dead.

Agreed. Lately I've been conversing with my namesake via several books, the current one called Catholic Dogmatic Theology: A Synthesis, by Jean-Herve Nicolas (https://www.amazon.com/Catholic-Dogmatic-Theology-Trinitarian-Ressourcement/dp/0813234395/ref=sr_1_4?crid=1HCT2QIUCBRC9&keywords=catholic+dogmatic+theology+a+synthesis&qid=1680284174&s=books&sprefix=catholic+dogmatic+theology+a+synthesis%2Cstripbooks%2C160&sr=1-4).

Catholic dogma. Sounds scintillating!

Shut-up, Petey. You're just jealous 'cause I've been chatting online with Thomas all day.

Now, it's no secret that I've been working these last 17+ years on my own Summa Cosmologica, the question being whether I have the intelligence and capability. Put it this way: I have the sensibility down, and the scope isn't far behind. Sure, it requires a heroic will, but what's a hero? 

And so what if you're the laziest man in Los Angeles County?

I'm flattered, but you've touched precisely on a factor that is required but which cuts both ways if not more. The Aphorist gets it:

God is the guest of silence.

But it's not just a passive exercise -- or verticalisthenic rather -- because

Resignation must not be an exercise in stoicism but a surrender into divine hands.

Point is, you can't schedule these things, but then again, you can't not schedule them either. 

Which is why, every afternoon from approximately 4:25 until Tucker Time, I turn off my mind, relax, and float upstream, i.e., or lay down all thought and surrender to the void. Listen to the color of my dreams. Play the game existence to the end.

Of the beginning, of the beginning, of the beginning....

Thaaat's right Petey. Heeere's jnani. I wait at the great gate in an altered state, contemplate and wait for the Advocate. Does it help? Who knows? It's like physical exercise, which I do every day from 3:30 to 4:00. The Aphorist gets it:

We all have a key to the door that opens onto the luminous and noble peace of the desert.

And 

In man's extreme solitude he perceives anew the touch of immortal wings.

Well, one does one's best at any rate.

We only dig the channels for flash floods.

But

Thirst runs out before the water does.

So, it may look like I'm busy doing nothing, but

The mystic is the only one who is seriously ambitious.

I too get a lot of thoughts in the morning… I write them all down, but even so forget 'em after awhile.

A Short Treatise on Intelligence, Will, and Sensibility

Our discussion of the various modes of contact with reality reminded of an old post. However, I searched with various words and phrases for this so-called post, and nothing came up. Therefore, your luck has run out, and we'll have to redo it from scratch. 

By way of compromise, we'll just summarize it rather than going full ad nauseam. In any event, it's worth a revisit, since you and I are different people than we were back then (trolls excepted).

Recall that the three essential prerogatives constituting the human state are intelligence, sentiment, and will; or truth, virtue, and beauty. 

Each of these in turn has its own formal object, but as with the immanent Trinity, these are distinctions within a single substance, which is simply to say that the True, Good, and Beautiful converge at the toppermost of the poppermost, where, you might say, there is only O and the beatific vision of it. 

One hopes, anyway.

In the essay Prerogatives of the Human State, Schuon traces all the ins, outs, and what-have-yous of this human trinity -- entailments, prolongations, and Sphinx-like antinomies -- and comes up with this nifty formulation:

Intelligence and will when taken together constitute what we might call the "capability" of the individual, whatever his moral and aesthetic sensibility might be.

That's pretty abstract, so perhaps we should pause right there and think of a concrete example. On a scale of one to ten, can we think of someone whose intelligence and will are... we won't say ten, for reasons alluded to above -- that since the modes converge at the top, it isn't actually possible to have a great intelligence and no taste whatsoever. 

So, let's say a fellow has an above average intelligence and a will of iron. The first examples that spring to mind are all those 20th century dictators such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. None were stupid, but they sure had poor taste. 

I'm reminded of the The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy (https://www.amazon.com/Infernal-Library-Dictators-Catastrophes-Literacy/dp/1250181607/ref=sr_1_1?crid=OP9R73F5RIGG&keywords=Infernal+library&qid=1680196653&s=books&sprefix=infernal%2520library%2Cstripbooks%2C156&sr=1-1):

With all this power and unique knowledge, the dictator of even a small and geopolitically insignificant country should be in a position to write at least a moderately interesting book, even if by accident. And yet to a man, they almost always produce mind-numbing drivel.

Lookin' at you, Barry.

Or how about tech-tyrant doofusi such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg? From my experience, a lot of successful businessmen are like this: smart and persistent, but vulgar to the core -- the sort of person who boasts of spending thousands of dollars for front row seats to a Billy Joel concert. No amount of material wealth compensates for such aesthetic poverty.

Next up,

sensibility and will when taken together constitute the "character" of the individual, whatever his intelligence might be.

A great warrior comes to mind. But also ridiculous ones such as Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin, who are willful but stupid and tasteless. How else to explain this:

Third,

intelligence and sensibility when taken together constitute the "scope" of the individual, whatever the strength of will may be.

So, good taste and high intelligence but lacking in the will department. This reminds me of the Aphorist, whose intelligence is ten and sensibility eleven, but gave zero fucks as to whether anyone knew it.

The short morning strikes again. To be continued...

Facts Care About Your Feelings

We mentioned yesterday that Ben Shapiro is wrong, and that facts actually do care about our feelings. We reached out to the Aphorist for a comment, and he said

Things do not have feeling, but there are feelings in many things.

Nor are they "mute," rather,   

They merely select their listeners. 

Congratulations! You are selected, elected, and about to be subjected to this valuable post.

If we heard correctly, it's not just a question of what knowledge is and how we can know it -- i.e., of garden variety epistemology -- rather, of the multitude of ways we can know it. 

For if we can know reality in diverse ways and modalities, it means that the world... What did Shakespeare say?

That there are tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones.  

Exactly. From babbling brooks to kibbitzing canyons to gossiping gr--

We get it. The wind that speaks to the leaves, telling stories that no one believes, to redeem a snippet of Jobim.

What I want to say is that "intelligibility" has many modes, which is more or less where we left off yesterday with the idea that mother nature gives us too much information. What say you, Nicolás?

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

Yes, like seeing an invisible Bigfoot or a vertical UFO. 

Transcendent objects are invisible by nature. 

True enough, but the Light shines through them, no? Metaphysical transparency, to purcoin a phrase.

Or translucency. 

Precisely. The exact formula for this translucency is transcendence-in-immanence. It's why reality is never boring. For

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

And if you really want to get a little woowoo, this must be the very formula of the Incarnation, quite literally so vis-a-vis the Transfiguration. Let those with ears see!

Thaaaat's right Petey, because the seeing is predicated on the hearing, AKA faith. 

To put it conversely, no one sees except through the eyes of faith. Peering through the lens of scientism -- a "lesser faith," so to speak -- one sees only solid surfaces, cold quantities, and dry--

We get it.

A tapestry woven of geometry and music, always and everywhere. Come to think of it, it is in this modality that nominalism becomes valid, if you catch my meaning. If you don't, allow Nicolás to explain:

The plethora of objects in the midst of which we live has made us insensible to the quality, to the texture, and to the individuality of the object.

So, there is a sense in which everything is unique, or at least was before faceless factories and fast food, the facile and frozen--

We get it.

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.

It can by no means 

give recipes, because there are no methods for making miracles. 

Secular grace and everyday miracles, such that

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

Which brings us back to faith, which is, properly speaking,

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

"Perception." What a concept! For it can no more be defined than can "experience" or "consciousness." In a way, these are all but adjectives for the undefinable Presence pervading everything.

I'm having one of those unnamable feelings alluded to in yesterday's post.

The intelligent idea produces sensual pleasure.

That's the one. What a pleasurable aphorism! 

Appearance is not the veil, but the vehicle, of reality.

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance. 

 I wish I'd said that. 

In order to speak of the eternal, it is sufficient to speak with talent of the things of the day.

One tries one's best.

The Satellite Dish in My Mansion Has Many Stations

"Total intelligence, free will, sentiment capable of disinterestedness: these are the prerogatives that place man at the summit of terrestrial creatures," writes Schuon.

Now, "prerogative" is not a word found or even conceptualizable in science. Animals don't have them, let alone planets, forces, quantities, etc. 

From a purely scientific standpoint a prerogative would have to be just a social arrangement, purely contingent upon more real things (post-rogatives?). Nevertheless.

PREROGATIVE: preference, privilege; a right attached to an office or rank to exercise a special privilege or function; a special right or privilege belonging to a person, group, or class of individuals; a special quality that gives one superiority.

The bottom line is that mother was right: I am special.

Pretty perceptive of her to recognize that you're a person. How long did it take?

I see your point. The specialness attaches to the species, or better, to persons. And an office or rank only exist in a hierarchy. 

And you're only at the top of the terrestrial hierarchy. Above that are nonlocal vertical powers, principalities, and immaterial beings with privileges of their own. 

For example it is my awesome privilege to advise and protect you -- mostly from yourself. At least until such a time that I earn my wings and get kicked upstairs. 

Right. The Petey Principle. 

Very funny. But it doesn't work like that. Within terrestrial hierarchies, it is true that people tend to rise to the level of their own incompetence.

And much higher if Brandon and K-Har are any indication. 

In the angelic hierarchy it's different. Here an angel descends to the level of his own malice. Thus, if Joe Biden were an angel he'd already be in hell. 

No doubt with the rest of the Biden clan. 

Yes, there's always plenty of company. Up here we have a saying: truly truly, depravity loves company. It's why they keep adding letters to LGBTQ ad nauseam.

I'm a little surprised they have a Democrat party up there. 

Down there. It can only recognized from above. From within the party it looks like it's "above."

I get it. That would explain the obnoxious superiority and condescension of the left -- the nauseating spectacle of being ruled by our intellectual and moral inferiors.

That's a bingo.   

A corrupt and stupid man who showers with his daughter and raises an utterly depraved crackhead son lecturing us about the "soul of the nation." 

There's no nausea up here, otherwise we'd never stop throwing up.

Eternal nausea -- like The View on an endless loop.

You're talking about hell. The Buddhists say it is populated by beings with ravenous hunger but pinhole mouths. But it's also a place of unending nausea with no ability to vomit. 

That happened to me in February of 2005. I remember it because it was a couple months before my son was born. I was nauseous all day from food poisoning, but suppressed the urge to throw up. Eventually I did and felt much better. I now have a 17 year streak with no vomiting.

Up here we have another saying, Too much information. Think about it.   

Oh c'mon. Where were you when someone should have warned me about the Kung Pao chicken?

Let's get back on track: intelligence, will, and sentiment, and all the interesting relationships between them. For starters we could express it schematically with the following:

Intelligence <---> Knowledge and Truth

Will <---> Freedom and Virtue

Sentiment <---> Love and Beauty

This seems to cover all the important privileges, as well as the corresponding (and anterior) responsibilities. 

For example, if we have the right to knowledge -- to think -- we have the responsibility to know truth; if we have freedom to act, it is in order to choose the good (and avoid the evil); if we have the right to creativity, we have a responsibility to beauty.  

Another way of looking at it is to say that each of our privileges has a telos. Which makes sense, because the whole hierarchy in which we are situated has its telos in the Absolute Principle-Person.

You know the new saying: facts don't care about your feelings. Actually, they do. Very much so. 

We are not advocating for a Spock-like detachment, if only because so much of reality is only accessible to emotion and sentiment, or better, to "sensibility." Progressives have only their crude and unformed oceanic feelings. We have sensibility. Taste. Discretion. Good breeding, as mother used to say.

Like last night, my son was channel surfing and landed on a hellish spectacle called the I Heart Music Awards or something. For a sensitive soul like me who truly hearts music, it was vulgar beyond belief. A soundtrack to hell, or worse, to The View. 

Now that I think about it, it caused a kind of very real pain, a pain that I suppose has no name, but is nevertheless distinct and familiar. 

The young siegneur then flipped over to another program where the host was speaking with such truth and lucidity that it provoked the "opposite" sensation of intense "pleasure," but that's not the right adjective. You know what I'm talking about. If there's existential nausea, there's also existential something-or-other.

For example, the tone of Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar is at once impossible to describe and yet pretty obvious to these ears, especially in contrast to, say, Lennie Kravitz's tone, which nearly drove me from the room. I was about to get up and leave before my son flipped over to the other channel.

My house has many channels.

Damn. Every once in a while you do say something useful. But you should have said it at the start, because that's the subject of a whole post that will have to be written tomorrow. 

What Is Mind that We Should Be Mindful of It?

In keeping with our theme that everything is stupid, we could substitute "political party" for religion in the following observation by Schuon vis-a-vis big box (or exoteric) religion:

[Politics] addresses itself a priori to what is capable of "stirring" to action the will of the average man; it could not address the intelligence in an immediate manner, for, precisely, it is not the intelligence that gives impetus... to the average or ordinary man, thus to the majority.

Credit where it is due: making college accessible to every "intelligence" has not only nullified intelligence but elevated unintelligence to the point that the state recognizes stupidity is an officially protected class. And stupid people may be stupid, but they are smart enough to realize they need the state -- Big Mother -- to take care of them.

Z Man has the receipts, does the math, and shows his work:  

The main reason there is no solution at the ballot box is demographics. The people in charge are quickly replacing the old white population with a new, vibrant and diverse population that naturally prefers managerialism. The tens of millions of new Americans love their managers more than they love life itself. In elections, they look for the candidates and the party that promises to take care of them. This institutional lock on the system will be clear in the coming election (https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=29590).

Above Schuon alludes to what it is that stirs a person to action, i.e., tickles the will. Again, to say that for the majority it is not "intellect" is.... 

Well, it's obvious to you and me, but here again, thanks to Satan's effective ground game in the media-academia complex, we are ruled by a managerial class that is utterly convinced of its intellectual superiority, and that lives under the mass delusion that the fashionable nonsense of the hivemind is somehow "knowledge."

In reality it is not merely false, since it is anti-knowledge, i.e., not just contrary but contradictory. As we said a few posts back about negative IQ, to affirm that a man can be a woman, or that climate change is an "existential crisis," or that children should be exposed to perverts, or that Brandon is in possession of his marbles, is not just "un-" but  "anti-" reality.

Now, what is man and what is knowledge, anyway? Man, of course, is the doublewise trailer trash, the Being Who Knows (Homo sapiens sapiens), but that's not only circular but more than a bit self-flattering, no? And presumptuous, because who said this glorified primate knows the first thing about reality?

I believe I can say without fear of contradiction that man's essence may be reduced to three modalities, and that these three may be situated on the vertical axis, meaning that each is capable of transcendence, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. First the three modes, which are 1) intelligence, 2) will, and 3) sentiment.

Each of these corresponds to its own proper object, which is to say, the true, good, and beautiful, respectively, and the three taken together constitute the Real. Therefore, for example, a good intellect and a bad will can't really go together -- in other words "intellectual dishonesty" is intellectual sin, properly speaking.  

Ah, but there are loopholes. For in order to be guilty, one must have full knowledge and deliberate consent of the will, in other words, the matter must involve a voluntary choice (not compelled or coerced in any way) and not be a consequence of bad information or invincible ignorance. 

Must we really forgive them for they know not what they do? Or is there a loophole in the loophole? Remind me to answer that tomorrow, because the clock is running out.

As we said, each of our three modes may be situated vertically, hence our transcendence and objectivity. For example, an intelligence incapable of objectivity would no longer be intelligent, likewise a morality incapable of seeing the other fellow's point of view. Therefore, knowledge and morality are either adequations or they are nothing. Same with beauty.

"So how," you might ask, "does the left get away with it?" In other words, how do they manage to combine the absurdity of an absolute relativism with the tyranny of absolute conformity and compliance? I guess because the velvet glove of relativism always evokes and hides the iron fist of totalitarianism.

Shmendriks to the Left of Me, Golems to the Far Left

There are quite a few words for "fool" in Yiddish, but I guess shmendrik is my favorite. If Dávila had been Jewish, perhaps he would have said

The shmendrik is not impressed except by what is recent. For the intelligent man, nothing depends on its date.

 Or

The doctrines that explain the higher by the means of the lower are so much bupkis.

Men are divided into two camps: those who believe in original sin and those who are schmucks.

The yutz, to be perfect, needs to be somewhat educated.

If the yutz is very educated, then he's a shmendrik. Or maybe vice versa. It depends on the amount of dreck they've published. 

Speaking of insults, Schuon gets off some good ones in an essay I read yesterday called Orthodoxy and Intellectuality. In a footnote he characterizes modern shmendriks as "pseudo-intellectual mollusks." (A backward mollusk -- a mollusk, let us say, which had been dropped on its head when baby?)

"In fact,"

it requires a prodigious lack of spiritual sensibility and of a sense of proportion to take any contemporary thinking, even the best possible, for one of the great providential "crystallizations" of the philosophia perennis (Schuon).

I rate that statement 100% true. If Catholicism didn't exist, I'd be Orthodox. If that didn't exist, then Vedantin or Buddhist or Taoist. Or Sufi or Kabbalistic Jew. Any of these surpass the best possible modern mishegoss, let alone postmodern intersectional kvetching.   

Logic? You speak of logic?! It

can either operate in accordance with an intellection or on the contrary put itself at the disposal of error, so that philosophy can become the vehicle of just about anything.

Literally, for it is written: garbage in, tenure out -- existentialism, for example, 

in which logic is no more than a blind, unreal activity, and which can rightly be described as an "esoterism of stupidity."

Why stupid? Because it places human experience at the center and top of the cosmos, which, in the absence of the Absolute, degenerates to the periphery and bottom. 

Only in such an inside-out and upside-down cosmos can bottom-dwellers such as Sartre or Foucault be regarded as philosophers instead of commie putz and sado-masochistic faygeleh, respectively. 

When unintelligence -- and what we mean by this is in no way incompatible with "worldly" intelligence -- joins with passion to prostitute logic, it is impossible to escape a mental satanism which destroys the very bases of intelligence and truth (ibid.).

Strong words, but are they strong enough? Perhaps you didn't know it, but "golem" is a Yiddish word for a manmade monster, and therein lies a whole post, for Karl Marx is a real Dr. Frankenstein, and then some, for his monsters are still very much with us.

Speaking of which, I wonder if it's a coincidence that great-great aunt Mary Godwin not only wrote Frankenstein -- AKA The Modern Prometheus -- at the very same time socialism was all the ragicide among avant-garde intellectual nudniks, but that she was the daughter of radical progressive bull goose loony William Godwin?  

"Frankenstein" apparently wasn't a reference to the Franks or their monstrous revolution or anything.  

And speaking of great-great-great uncle William, 

Avant-garde philosophy is properly an acephalous ["headless"] 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 (ibid.).

True story: I first encountered William Godwin via my Uncle Jerry, who was a man of the left. He foisted on me a copy of Godwin's political novel Caleb Williams. This must have been in the early '80s, when I was but a progressive boychik. I might have read a page or two and then flipped through the rest. Let's see if I can find it in the closet of doom.

According to the introduction, he "disbelieved in the freedom of man's will," rather, that "environment was all-compelling." At the same time, he "believed in progress toward some sort of extra-religious millennium." 

What else is new with me... Let's see, yesterday evening while deidreaming during a schmaltzy homily by the substitute priest, a thought floated in: that if the Father is absolute-absolute, then the Son is relative absolute and the Spirit is absolute relative. I think it adds up, but if it does, it will have to be in another post. This one's kaput.