On the Achievement of Perfect Subjectivity

Just a brief bit of spontaneous mind jazz.

I heard that. 

Of course it is self-indulgent, the question being whether it is sufficiently so.

That subjectivity exists is an objective statement, and already adequate proof that we cannot be plunged into a radical subjectivism, or into a cosmic Just Your Opinion, Man, as the bums never tire of saying. 

Now, I've always had a sense that objective truth exists and that I personally know it. Problem is, I had this sense even -- or especially -- when I was a lunatic and an idiot, so it turns out my feelings aren't dispositive after all. 

Nowadays I'm much more circumspect in my circumnavelgazing, AKA, my  cosmic narcissism. It's more a way of life than a determinative content. Did someone say Voegelin?

The quest, thus, has no external "object," but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable.

Did someone say... circum?

The honest philosophy does to pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery. 

Did someone say political philosophy?

In the current political landscape no party is closer than others to the truth. There are just some that are further away.

Now, why are they further away? Because of the Ray of Creation, more on which.

It seems to me that the most obvious thing in the world is simultaneously the most mysterious and even miraculous, i.e., the human subject, or even just subjectivity itself. 

This (this!) is pretty much the most inconceivable thing you'd expect to pop up (boo!) in a heretofore purely objective universe with no interior at all -- unless it was (is!) there in potential all along, in which case it's still a mystery but at least nested in a Big Mystery, or Mystery Central.

Now, revelation implies -- threepeatedly -- that Mystery Central is not just "subjective" but intersubjective, i.e., tripersonal. 

Importantly, the Persons are not at all analogous to three objects in space, but rather, like a... like a family that is metaspiritually prior to its members; it is one even though "diverse." 

Not only does this principle explain how human beings are both subjective and intersubjective, it also explains how the latter always exists both horizontally and vertically. 

And truly truly, it makes perfect sense of what otherwise sounds crazy or nonsensical, that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. 

And while tracking down the exact words, I saw many other passages in John that are unlocked with the same hermeneutickey to the kingdom.

As if the human subject weren't miraculous enough, along comes objectivity, which is equally miraculous, because it means simultaneously being the subject we cannot not be, but somehow standing above or outside ourselves, as if partaking the old "view from nowhere."

Now, most philosophers say this view from nowhere is impossible, but most philosophers are asses. Of course there's a view from nowhere, even if only God enjoys it.   

I want to say that even if we can never have this perspective in the literal sense, God does indeed furnish us with points of reference that are more than sufficient to guide us through this vale of veils.

What's under the veil? 

Wouldn't you like to know!

Yes, I would like to know. Are there only more veils? 

Yes. And no. Which gets into the whole business of just where to situate relativity, and also to the Ray of Creation alluded to above. Obviously it exists. But how and why? Maybe the pneumagraph to our right is a harbinger of the self-indulgent mind jazz of tomorrow -- a fancy way of saying to be continued.

Workin' on a Building

Modern architecture knows how to erect industrial sheds but cannot manage to construct a palace or a temple.

Well, I don't know if we can construct the latter, but hopefully we can do better than the former. Maybe we can manage something in between, like a primordial mancave with an airy geist room.  

Let's pick up right where we left off, with the truly self-evident principle that 

unless one accepts that there is indeed such a thing as truth, nothing holds: remove truth and everything collapses. Nothing can get around this: "there is no truth" cannot be taken as true since it would ipso facto refute itself.

This is like the keystone in the arch, the one without which the building collapses. Now, the question is whether this keystone is also the cornerstone the contractors rejected. If so, this would explain the shoddiness of their postmodern craftsmanship. 

I'm a little fuzzy in the head this morning -- too many carbs last night -- so I'm going to jump right to my bottom line, and then try to clean it up afterwards. 

I suppose we could begin with something Schuon often says, that there is no privilege higher than truth, and then combine this with what must be the shortest and bluntest of aphorisms, that 

Truth is a person. 

Do the math: if truth is the highest privilege, and it is as person, then... personhood is the highest truth and privilege?

Possibly, but let's toss in one more aphorism, just for fun:

The truth is objective but not impersonal.

Now, how can this be? Aren't "objective" and "personal" kind of antonymous? Yes and no. Actually, only a person can be objective and/or subjective, and on every level. Another one:

That which is not a person is not finally anything. 

This, even though 

The Antichrist is probably man.

How can this be? Easy: a human being divorced from God is no longer strictly human, since God and human coarise in the personal space referenced above. 

Which is not to say man literally creates God -- the Tripersonal Absolute -- but then again, look at the motley crew of sacrificial gods he does create and seemingly can't help creating, from Moloch to Quetzalcoatl to Climate Change. But I repeat myself.

At any rate, if that which is not a person isn't anything, then it isn't even nothing, since nothing is at least parasitic on someone. Think about it, while I think about this:

Modern man treats the universe like a lunatic treats an idiot.

Now, let's be literal: just how does a lunatic treat an idiot? I should know this because I used to be a psychologist. More importantly, I used to be a lunatic and an idiot, so this ought to be easy. 

A lunatic is crazy, while an idiot is just stupid. Put them together and what do we have? I mean, besides tenure? I suppose you have someone who insists on believing impossible things about nothing, from Hume to Kant to Nietzsche to Derrida to the Democratic platform.

If we are correct -- and we cannot not be -- then the category of person not only proceeds all the way up (and down), it is why there is an up and down. 

Put conversely, remove the archetypal person from the arch and we find ourselves in a totally unintelligible flatland. But in reality, there is only a floor in this building because there is a roof. And moreover, 

We cannot escape the triviality of existence through the doors, but rather through the roofs.

Another big one:

The permanent possibility of initiating a causal series is what we call a person.

Thus, the "first cause" is the "first person," and both are Necessary Being. 

Granted, this post never got off the ground. But that's okay. At least it's a solid foundation, something to build on.

To the Heart of Ultimate Reality, and Beyond

We've been discussing epistemological assumptions, about which the Aphorist has this to say:

The scientific encyclopedia will grow indefinitely, but about the very nature of the universe it will never teach anything different from what its epistemological assumptions teach.

It may be coherent, but it will never be complete:

In the coherence of certain systems, a vision is articulated; others systems result from the mere inertia of an idea.

So, science will keep rollin' on forever, but it confers a false vision upon itself if it conflates this with "eternity," much less "eternal progress." This is because science takes place, and can only take place, within the horizons of a transcendence it can never reach. Or in other words,

Creation is the nexus between eternity and history.

Thus, science can never explain creation, because creation -- the verb and principle -- is the very link between vertical and horizontal. A reminder that

There are a thousand truths and only one error. 

Not literally. Rather, there are infinite truths, and the one error takes diverse forms. What is this one error? The answer may surprise you! Because it's sure going to surprise me, being that I'm waiting for Petey to whisper the answer.

And the answer is...

Hmm. Late again. Looks like we're on our own.

The One Error is like a... like a multifaceted disco ball. It has no light of its own, but if we shine our light this way or that, a different facet is illuminated. Here are some of the facets I see: relativism, nominalism, empiricism, existentialism, materialism, scientism... What is the substance?

Properly speaking they have no substance, for they are the substance of nothing, so to speak: nada. Nihilism. Bupkis. The Shadow of O.

The Big. Mistake., however, must be relativism, with nihilism as its first and last entailment. The phrase just popped into my head, The Dark Trinity. What could that be? Relativism-Becoming-Nominalism.

Which is at antipodes to, and parasitic on, our true cosmic situation, which is something like Absolute-Being-Transcendence (these also being interrelated). Or Absolute-Infinite-Perfect. Or perhaps Beyond Being-Infinitude-Existence. Or Transcendence-Immanence-Consciousness. This side of the veil, there's more than one way of skinning the catechism.

If all this seems a bit abstract, let's bring it down a notch or two. In fact, let's make it so concrete that any person of average intelligence and good will can grasp it and agree that Bob is correct.

This is my short morning, so I hope my eyes haven't bitten off more than I can stomach.

Philosophy is one endless argument. Can I really end it in the 30 minutes remaining?

Eh, I think so. I suppose it comes down to an initial bifurcation:

Truth --> consequences.

Or how about Intelligence <--> Intelligibility. You could say that this complementarity forms the space in which we live, move, and have our being, everywhere and always. And if you disagree, and you wish to be both scrupulously honest and rigorously consistent, you must STFU! at once.

Still too abstract?

Philosophy begins in wonder, the wonder of the eternal WTF?! In this the Aphorist agrees, more or less:

Any civilization flourishes in the hands of an astonished man.

Are we not civilized? Conversely, all anti-philosophy -- or misosophy, or philodoxy, or just Ø -- begins in blunder, the blunder of "absolute relativism" in all its many forms. 

Still too abstract.

There he is! Little help?

Yes, pull out that little book you referenced yesterday, Philosophy of Science in the Light of the Perennial Philosophy. Open to p. 1.

You mean where it asks, "How do we know if anything is true?" 

Correct. Keep reading.

[B]efore we can begin to look for the criterion of truth, we have to ascertain that there is such a thing as truth. Now, unless one accepts that there is indeed such a thing as truth, nothing holds: remove truth and everything collapses. Nothing can get around this: "there is no truth" cannot be taken as true since it would ipso facto refute itself.

That's about all the time we have this morning, but I will pour some more concrete tomorrow. 

Meanwhile, this post is dedicated to my son on his 18th birthday, an occasion so utterly surreal that there are no words. Here my meager skills come up against a wall of babbling inarticulacy. Compared to Ultimate Reality, trying to describe him or my feelings for him is beyond my capacity. 

Which, of course, I can't help thinking is another Big Hint about Ultimate Reality. Help us out here, Nicolas!

To love is to understand the reason God had for creating what we love. 

Sweeping Causality Under the Rug

Funny how Hume keeps popping into my awareness like a bad case of Baader-Meinhof. 

Of course, he would say it's just a coincidence, like everything else. The sun came up and it's light outside, but who knows why, and tomorrow may be different. The relationship between, say, heat and light, "is not causal, it is merely an association of ideas in our minds." But 

The fallacy of Hume's argument is obvious: in explaining what produced the notion of causality in our mind, he is effectively trying to ascertain the cause of causality. In other words, he must have taken causality for granted to have been prompted to explain its cause in our mind (Bina & Ziarani).

And if that passage caused us to understand it, poof, no Hume, and my Baader-Meinhof has been cured. But what is the cause of causality? There's a footnote:

We find the notion of causality in us because it is a universal reality that is necessarily present in our deepest being.

That's true. To say "human" is to say "a being who looks for causes in things." Causality

is a more fundamental reality than logic: the latter is merely the reflection of the former on the plane of the human mind. To accept an effect without a cause, then, is as absurd as to accept an inconsistent thesis. He who does not accept causality should best remain silent, for he would find himself in refutation of himself as soon as he expresses an opinion. 

Granted, sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence. And unless we flip the rug and look at the other side, we can't see the connections between this and that. 

On our (phenomenal) side of the rug things might appear spatially separated, but look underneath and you see the connecting threads. Just as an effect without a cause is absurd, so too is a rug with a top and no bottom.

More generally, on our side of the rug things are more or less discontinuous. It's pretty much the first thing noticed by consciousness:

When we look around us, what do we see? Firstly, existence; secondly, differences; thirdly, movements, modifications, transformations; fourthly, disappearances (Schuon).

I think you could boil this down to forms, changes, and adiós, outta here. Now, adiós literally means "go with God," but that's just a coincidence. 

It seems to me that discontinuity is a left-brain specialty. In a way, it superimposes a discontinuity on the underlying continuity, because obviously, looked at another way, there are no literal boundaries between things, for All is One and Can I Buy Some Pot From You? 

This is an argument that goes all the way back to the pre-Socratics: many or one? Change or permanence? Beatles or Stones?

You could bring the debate right up to the present, as in "wave or particle?" Turns out it's always both, like a wavicle or something. But it dovetails nicely with our own Ultimate Category, which is to say, personal substance-in-relation. which is like particles-in-waves. Or perhaps ice cubes in water: different but the same.

It makes me think this is a debate between right and left hemispheres, but I'm still waiting for The Matter with Things in the mail, so we'll see. 

I want to say that science describes one side of the rug, but there are two sides to every story, not to mention multiple storeys in a vertical cosmos, and each storey with multiple mansions. 

Let's sober up for a moment and let Schuon explain what we're talking about. When we get into these deep waters, he's our designated diver:

Modern science, which is rationalist as to its subject and material as to its object, can describe our situation physically and approximately, but it can tell us nothing about our extra-spatial situation in the total and real Universe. 

Yes, literally NOTHING, unless you flip the rug and examine the other side, or better, consider both sides at once, as complementarities that necessitate or at least imply one another. In other words, there is a bit more slack on the underside, whereas necessity rules the topside. Only in God are freedom and necessity one, but God knows how.

Every truth is a tension between contradictory evidences that claim our simultaneous allegiance. 

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

This reminds me of a little tweet by Eve Keneinan that got stuck in my head, something to the effect that many distinctions that are intuitively obvious may be difficult explain -- for example, what I just said: it is intuitively obvious that many if not most of the really important things are more seen than proved. There are so many aphorisms that touch on this, that I'll limit myself to three:

Proofs for the existence of God abound for those who do not need them.

God is not an invention, but a finding.

There is evidence that disappears along with those who deserve to perceive it.

Now, I see a rug, and again, the rug has two sides, which reminds me of this: 

The natural and supernatural are not overlapping planes, but intertwined threads. 

Which is why denial of the wonderside always ends in catastrophe, for 

Any straight line leads straight to hell.

Unless you're a Humean being who think progressivism has no effects.

Reductio ad Oozlumity

A reader has alerted me to an essay he published a few years back called The Perils of Philosophy, which touches on the all-too-Humean. Since he's obviously aware of this blog, I'm going to have to give him attribution instead of stealing it outright:

(https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/12/the-perils-of-philosophy/) 

He cites a passage from a novel by C.S. Lewis describing a character who had sailed right through Hume and fallen all the way to the bottom of the cosmos:

He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through Logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void.... He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth...

Does the cosmos literally have a bottom? Of course it has a bottom, and speaking of which, does this not remind you of the legendary Oozlum bird -- the one that flies in ever-diminishing circles until it disappears up its bottom? 

But Lewis's character (named Wither) only hit the epistemic bottom. There is also a moral bottom and an aesthetic bottom, but interestingly, Hume in his personal life apparently avoided the latter two. He wasn't an assoul at all, rather,  

Hume was better than his philosophy, and not like Wither at all. He was brilliant and charming, liked and admired by Reid and loved by his good friend Adam Smith.

Go figure. If he had had a rigorously consistent philosophy he would have been an antinomian sociopath. 

Anyway, Curry cites philosopher Thomas Reid's description of Hume's metaphysic, which features

No cause or effects; no substances, material or spiritual; no evidence, even in mathematical demonstration; no liberty or active power; nothing existing in nature, but impressions and ideas following each other, without time, place, or subject.  

Why is this called rational instead of psychotic? Because it is both -- reminiscent of Chesterton's gag that the madman has lost everything but his reason. Instead of a reductio ad absurdum it's an.... expandio there, such that all of reality is rendered absurd. Whatever philosophy is, this must be the very opposite.

Epandio ad absurdum. I want to say that every bad philosophy ends there if only you pursue all its entailments to the end of the line. You may have noticed that they always begin with some principle or axiom that may seem self-evident to the philosopher in question, but is by no means obvious to the restavus. 

Again, such assertions tell us about the fellow asserting them, not about the reality purportedly being asserted. 

If someone tells me that all of reality is exhaustively described by the scientific method, that is not a scientific statement, rather, an autobiographical one, and I even feel a little sorry for him.

Well, not really. It also reminds me of a fruitless debate I had with another guy in the insane asylum. No, we weren't patients, rather, fellow interns from very different programs. He was a behaviorist while my training was in psychoanalysis, thus we were as different as Hume is from Aquinas, except we were both wrong. 

But a strictly consistent behaviorist believes only behavior is real, so the only way to win the debate would have been to hit him over the head with a baseball bat. No bat was handy, so my words just bounced off. 

Naturally, in his "mind," the failure of my words to penetrate his ideological carapace was sufficient proof of the doctrine in question. Which reminds me of how, when my dog barks at the UPS man as he drives away, she must believe she once again saved us from being murdered.

Time out for a passage by Schuon, because it goes to Thomas Reid's characterization of Hume above:

Spirit is Substance, matter is accident: that is to say that matter is but a contingent and transitory modality of the radiation that projects the worlds.... 

If this sounds like a non-Christian emanationism it is, except that Schuon would qualify it to say that God is constrained by his nature -- as Creator, duh -- to create. In other words, he may create this or he may create that, but he just can't help creating. 

You may say Like anyone could know that!, but it makes perfect nonsense to me. It certainly isn't absurd, a point to which we shall return, since it may provide a clue to deeper things. Meanwhile, let's allow the man to finish his thought: the radiation just mentioned

produces the polarization into subject and object: matter is the final point of the descent of the objective pole, sensorial consciousness being the corresponding subjective phenomenon. 

Again, you may find Schuon's description queer, but it is by no means absurd, and the question of course is whether it is queer enough:

For the senses, the object is matter, or let us say the perceptible physical domain; for the Intellect, objective reality is the Spirit in all its forms.

Now, this is just obvious, not esoteric, especially the first part: for what do the senses register? Various modes of physical reality. 

But do the senses know anything about the nonsense world? To ask the question is to answer it. Which is not to go to the other extreme and say that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." It is, but it is also an adequation to the beautiful. 

Note that Schuon says the Intellect is ordered to an objective reality; we are not arguing for subjectivism, God forbid, for that is a gateway rug to absurdity -- a rug absolutely incapable of tying the cosmos together.

Seems like a good place to pause.

Pride Goeth Before a FAIL

If there's not an Absolute Subject, then gosh, "relative subjectivity would be neither possible nor conceivable," for it would be "like an effect without a cause" (Schuon).

Well, who said effects must have causes? Asked no sane person ever, until David Hume came along and said we can only know correlations between phenomena, not causality. 

But one frankly has to be in an advance state of tenure to imagine that such a view is possible or even conceivable. For one of the first certitudes of Cosmic Normality is that effects have causes and causes have effects. If they don't, then truly truly, We Are Done Here. No philosophy for you!

There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures.

Thaaaat's right, Nicolas. If effects can be uncaused, then unintelligibility is absolute, because intelligibility is knowledge of causes, precisely. 

And if contingency isn't contingent, then this violates another certitude of normality, the principle of non-contradiction. And if the latter isn't the case, then all philosophy is 'Nam, and the only rule is that there are no rules.

torrents of intelligence are wasted for the sake of conjuring away the essential and proving the absurd brilliantly (Schuon).

A reminder that

Great stupidities do not come from the people. They have seduced intelligent men first.  

Everything Humean is alien to me.

If a first principle of contemporary tenure is that boys can be girls and girls can be boys, then it is perfectly understandable that they'd want to chuck the the principles of causality and non-contradiction. 

This gratuitous limitation on what we can know has become an urgent necessity of contemporary intelligence, which means that its epistemology is anchored in the extra-intellectual passion known as pride:

Intelligence separated from its supra-individual source is accompanied by that lack of sense of proportions which one calls pride; conversely pride prevents intelligence, when it has become rationalism, from rising to its source; it can only deny Spirit and replace it with matter....

Rather than bow to the evidence of the Spirit, proud reason will deny its own nature which, nonetheless, enables it to think....

This is hardly the first time in history that thinking has had to bow to the necessities of the mob, -- to fashion, to the state, or in a word, to power. This is essentially a form of backward reasoning that searches for the principle to justify itself.

For example, if  "a black man has no rights which the white man is bound to respect," then rights are a function of the contingency of race and not in the nature of things. 

Likewise, if women have a natural right to abortion, then girls have a right to be murdered. It's all just nominalism by another name, which is in turn another name for absolute stupidity. But

Humility is the only secure refuge against stupidity. 

And

Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles

Now, our fallenness is presented to us as an "event," but I think this event is actually a principle in the form of a narrative. 

Which is why

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

 Conversely, 

In order to corrupt the individual it is enough to teach him to call his personal desires rights and the rights of others abuses.

Which again goes to the "principle of nominalism" which confers not only a right to "transexualism," but the right to abuse those of us who are humble enough to believe in natural rights, because these rights are anchored in the fact that 1) the Absolute exists, and 2) we are not it. 

But of course, Genesis 3 didn't happen once upon a time, it happens every time: 

The radical error -- the deification of man -- does not have its origin in history. Fallen man is the permanent possibility of commiting the error.

Let's Get Lost

Continuing with our freewheeling epistemic cogitations, traditional philosophy begins with the senses, but there is no knowledge per se at the level of the senses, since the senses themselves don't know what they know, and they certainly don't know what they don't know. 

For example, the eyes don't know about music, and all the senses combined don't know about their common object in the absence of a mental operation that effortlessly synthesizes them. 

Obviously, this immaterial synthesis of the senses is not itself a material sense, but without it, the senses would be like the five blind men describing the elephant in the room. Well, one of them could see, but you get the point. 

But I was mainly thinking about how the senses have no way of knowing that they are ordered only to the periphery, surface, or epidermis of the total cosmos. Conversely, the intellect is the faculty ordered to this total cosmos, precisely, most of which is invisible to the senses. 

Now, modern man is a man who has forgotten everything I just said, even though it is what defines the human station.

I want to say that the intellect goes all the way to the top floor of the cosmic telovator, because it is ordered to the Absolute. If it isn't, then to hell with it. Then life reduces to an endless battle of Just Your Opinion, Man, waged by cowards who are unable to achieve on a level field of play.

But this aggression will not stand, and the bums will always lose.

Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one here who gives a shit about the rules of the cosmos?!  

Schuon also cared, although, like me, he didn't care whether a bunch of amateurs, nihilists, and perverts knew it. Suffice it to say that

Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence, the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be.

Yes, inconceivable, and literally so. That is, if you care about little things like coherence, to say nothing of totality. 

For example, the most complete knowledge of physics is blind to biology, let alone psychology. Rather, -- and this is just common sense -- physics assumes the physicists who discover and develop it, just as biology assumes the existence of living organisms and the lonely biologists who spend their lives studying them. 

But what is life? And what is a physicist? Postmodern philosophy doesn't even know what a woman is; it only knows there aren't enough of them in the physics department. And it certainly doesn't know what life is, only that a fetus doesn't have it.

Incidentally, not to focus on myself, but this morning while preparing the coffee and wondering what I might post about, the thought occurred to me: I'm just like Keith Jarrett. 

No, not that I'm an artiste, only in the analogous sense that he is the only musician of whom I am aware who gave solo concerts of pure improvisation. He'd sit before the piano with no preconceptions and just play whatever popped into his fingers, and yet, somehow made it compelling and even (relatively) popular.  

Of course, doing this requires tremendous preparation, and no doubt he possessed a vast storehouse of musical thingys to draw upon. But they were spontaneously combined and elaborated while animated by the mysterious x-factor of aesthetic grace. 

Probably his most popular one was released back in 1975. Here are some excerpts from the All Music Guide review, with certain words highlighted just because:

this disc has, along with its revelatory music, some attendant cultural baggage that is unfair in one sense: Every pot-smoking and dazed and confused college kid -- and a few of the more sophisticated ones in high school -- owned this as one of the truly classic jazz records....

It also gets unfairly blamed for creating George Winston, but that's another story. What Keith Jarrett had begun a year before on the Solo Concerts album and brought to such gorgeous flowering here was nothing short of a miracle....

Nothing on this program was considered before he sat down to play. All of the gestures, intricate droning harmonies, skittering and shimmering melodic lines, and whoops and sighs from the man are spontaneous....

Jarrett's intimate meditation on the inner workings of not only his pianism, but also the instrument itself and the nature of sound and how it stacks up against silence, involved listeners in its search for beauty, truth, and meaning. 

So, I don't compare myself to him in terms of achievement, but I do think the comparison is valid in terms of intent. He has his keyboard and I have mine, and off we go. 

One big difference is that he only puts out his successes every year or two, whereas I publish my successes and my failures. Maybe it's not done well, but you have to admit, it's a little surprising it's done at all, and with so little encouragement and no alibi at all!

That's all I'm going to say about that. On with the show!

Above we alluded to that most precious prerogative of the human station -- the intellect -- and how we essentially dissipate our humanness when it atrophies to the point of virtuality, like the stump at the end of our spine that used to be a tail before we cashed in our chimps.

Schuon relates this rupture between nonlocal intellect and local ego to the fall, but you can't really know anything about this unless and until you begin to recover or reawaken the former. 

To put it in a slightly obnoxious way, the ego has no right to an opinion about the intellect, any more than the eyes have a right to an opinion about music.

Now, you don't have to believe in a literal fall to understand the following, unless you have a better idea:

The rational faculty detached from its supernatural context is necessarily opposed to man and is bound to give rise in the end to a way of thought and a form of life both of which are opposed to man...

So, there are two sequential movements, a fall away from the Principle and then a rising up against it, analogous to rebellion and revolution, respectively. 

We see this quite literally in the contemporary transexual anti-sanity, which began with a rebellion against traditional gender roles and has ended in a violent revolution against biology in particular and reality more generally by a cohort of spiteful mutants.  

The problem with improvisation is that you don't really know when to stop. So I will.