This post is all over the place, the reason being that yesterday's post made me a little over-excited, spurring me to consult half a dozen disparate books that failed to congeal -- like Jello that is still half liquid. Nevertheless, here it is:
Just when no one else I suspect is in my tree, I pull out a volume of Errol Harris and see that it has a blurb by one of my favorite Catholic theologians, W. Norris Clark (the book is called The Reality of Time, and like most of his books, has 0 reviews on amazon; I first read it a couple decades ago, when I had never heard of Norris Clarke):
It is a beautiful piece of deep philosophical thinking, expressed with outstanding clarity and elegance. I like especially the rare combination of rich immersion in the facts of science with profound creative reflection and synthesis. This is truly a distinguished, even great work.
That Clarke found the book blurbworthy is enough to warrant a serious Second Look, even though I don't agree with everything Harris says -- for example, I recall him being partial to Hegel, and he seems to have been an idealistic one-world government type of guy.
I suspect that he made it to the cusp of O, while remaining enclosed in rationalism. It's a capacious rationalism, but fails to abide in the place from which Reason emanates.
What would we do without time? It's very nature
compels us to posit something other than continuous change, in contrast to which alone that change is possible, something other than time, on which time itself is dependent, or of which it is a necessary aspect, yet which is not and cannot be in process (Harris).
Which I think means that time must be a serial entailment of the timeless, or of something trans-temporal. Although when he claims it cannot be in process, a voice in my head says perichoresis, which is something like an "eternal process," unless I'm way off base. Whatever it is, it isn't static, nor is it closed, a subject we will take up when we eventually return theoretical biologist Robert Rosen's call.
"The central metaphysical problem seems to me to be how we identify the present moment," and Harris confesses that he is stumped. Indeed, in physics it doesn't exist, last I checked. For example, Einstein said
The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
I see that he also said that "Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live," which makes him a Kantian, one of our many philosophical non-starters.
Back to the now: as far as I'm concerned, it's *just* the bisection of the horizontal by the vertical; to even know of time indicates that we must be partly outside or above it (just as we are partly free and partly determined). Which makes sense, being that we are a composite of spirit and matter.
As usual, I agree with the Aphorist:
Creation is the nexus between eternity and history.
I think I've discovered the source of Harris' difficulty: he is trying to get from Here to There via philosophy, when no philosophy can do this, precisely. While he is admirably open to religiosity, he nowhere alludes to having made the Plunge (or rather, being fully open to God's plunge).
The philosopher is, as it were, an angel caught in time. Philosophy as such must fail, because one has to speak of the whole in terms of the parts, and now Rosen is calling again.
First of all, I don't understand everything he says, but I do understand the 10% that is expressed in plain English, like
In hierarchical systems, the upper level gives meaning to the level of focus, the lower level.
Or that our pal Gödel "effectively demolished the formalist program," which is to say that "no matter how one tries to formalize a particular part of mathematics," it cannot coincide with "the set of truths about numbers." Which is another way of saying that semantics -- meaning -- cannot be reduced to syntax -- order.
The meaning is in the Whole, but again, in this cosmos the Whole is in the parts. In short, don't panic, it's organic. Just don't conflate organicism with (mere) biology, because the source of life is at the top. God is not only alive, he is indeed Life Itself. And abundantly, from what we have heard from the Wise. At any rate,
There is always a purely semantic residue, that cannot be accommodated by [any] syntactical scheme.
What is Life?
Any question becomes unanswerable if we do not permit ourselves a universe large enough to deal with the question.
So, in order to deal with certain mysteries that science cannot elucidate without hitting an infra-metaphysical wall, we're gonna need a bigger universe. Simple as. Reduction is fine as a method, but it betrays us if elevated to an ontology, i.e., to the extent that it looks "only downward toward subsystems, and never upward and outward."
Which is a bit ironic, because nor did Rosen, as far as I know, take the vertical plunge upward and inward. Suffice it to say that if he knew what we were doing with his ideas, he'd probably file a restraining order.
Rosen is absolutely correct about open systems. It's just that he fails to take the concept all the way up, to an open cosmos, open to what we call O, which is the ultimate answer to otherwise insoluble questions such as What is life?, What is thought?, What is beauty?, and What is existence?
The doctrines that explain the higher by the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book.
Again, the scientistic rule book is formal and quantitative, such that meaning is expressed through it but but not from it. The meaning of mathematics cannot be deduced from mathematics.
Then again, -- well, math is hard, but it seems to me that math can be reduced to one and multiples thereof. But Oneness itself is at the top, otherwise we have multiplicity without Unity, which is another one of those philosophical nonstarters.
Which is where metaphysical irony comes in, for we know we are obligated to express true ideas, even though no idea can express the Truth, Truth being a Person and a Relationship. Nor can one ever point to a relationship, because the pointing is itself a relationship between pointer and pointed.
Presence.
Excuse me?
You heard me.
Apparently, I need to work this into the discussion. While I'm thinking about it, let me hand the wheel over to Dávila:
Proofs for the existence of God are the ideology of the feeling of His presence in the soul.
A voluptuous presence communicates its sensual splendor to everything.
The momentary beauty of the instant is the only thing in the universe that concurs with the eagerness of our souls.
Let's allow these ideas to congeal for another 24 hours, and then try again to nail them to the wall.
5 comments:
That gif - so many implications...
Suffice it to say that if he knew what we were doing with his ideas, he'd probably file a restraining order.
There's an amusing thought; I can see philosophers putting their works out with a warning label along the lines of "do not think beyond the scope of these words."
Re. presence, a tidbit taken out of context courtesy of HvB:
"...God really wishes to be seen and heard and touched in his incarnate Word of life so that we, responding to his approach, may enter an entirely new fellowship with him. We are not meant to linger on the fringes, fascinated by fragmentary prismatic colors, but to advance from all directions toward the heart of the central light that has come near to us."
From the prismhouse of color to the pure and unlimited white light. Like it. "Light takes on the color of its container," to paraphrase Schuon.
I read Mathew, now underway on Mark. I had never realized before these gospels, and possibly others, are loosely repetitive. The gospels read like interviews with witnesses who well saw the same crime and describe it largely the same. In them Jesus said, ask and you will be answered, knock and the door will open, request and you will be given, to paraphrase.
From this and other posts, Bob mentioned there are few persons "up his same tree." I gave this some thought.
From this post Bob mentioned persons who approach a relationship with O but don't "take the plunge." I gave this some thought.
From this post we also read that Einstein was a failure at philosophy, his ideas on space and time being Kantian. I gave this some thought as well.
These items are all in relation, to whit:
We have all asked asked, and we have all been answered, but the answer isn't always revealing or even useful. It often comes across as "Thank you for asking, I'll get back to you, now move along." The same with opening the door, and requests for favors. We get the open door and various stuff, but often the door leads to baffling little rooms, and the stuff doesn't hit the spot. Why is that? Or is it just me?
Philosophers are not common. That's the sense I get. I know for certain I cannot be one. There literally seems to be a massive iron door with a huge lock on it, and over the upper lintel a sign reads "Philosophy:Enter Here." I have no key. I can crack other subjects, this one, I cannot. I suspect it is the same way for many.
For people who can't quite take the plunge: these are often the most God-fearing people you've ever met, virtuous and good. What is the hang-up? What is so difficult about the plunge? What? There must be some difficulty I am not aware of. What is it?
Why do Kantians think everything is in our heads? Is it because they cannot reduce thought down beyond a synapse with a crude molecule in it? How much poverty of the imagination does it take to get stuck there? It is a mystery.
Well I was going to tie all of this up in a bundle, like the newspapers I used to deliver long ago. But I am out of space. And time. Perhaps the eternal instant will allow me to circle back around, perhaps knot.
As Gödel told his mama,
"Assuming that the world is rationally organized, human life -- as embedded in the world -- ought to possess the same rational structure. We have grounds for assuming that the world is rationally organized. Yet human life is irrationally structured. It is constituted by a great potential but it never fully expresses this potential in a lifetime. Hence, each of us must realize our full potential in a future world. Reason demands it."
To follow along with Bob's comment, which quotes that which Godel told his mama, which I don't know if Bob endorses or not, to whit:
I suspect each human life is indeed organized, and if fact highly regimented, on the individual level. This suspicion, if true, would explain a lot about what is observed.
A loose analogy about philosophy and religion. One can study philosophy and learn all disparate theories and writings of renowned philosophers. And, one can likewise study all the religions in depth and detail. All is well and good, as bounding around in great meadows of information gathering the flowers is great fun, and time well spent.
However, the instant one COMMITS to a certain philosophy or religion, there is instantly a great separation into categories of what must be true and what must therefore be untrue. When this happens, the indiscriminate study of all paths ends, as it is a waste of one's time to learn more about untrue things. So life get simple. You focus on what is real.
Unfortunately you must also see that people who have not chosen wisely are in for big trouble.
Therefore, to bring my long-winded analogy to a close, I suspect that a large amount of life planning is made prenatally to save time, because life is short. OK, that will lose some of you right there.
I propose to say people are born with a life-plan out the gate, and deviations from the plan are not a good use of one's time. Therefore, when one deviates from the life plan, one will meet resistance. Because the plan is not obvious, it is easy to make errors. The plan is encoded and hard to read, located in some veiled inner precincts of the soul. Therefore the need for introspection and intuition.
Consequences:
Therefore when I ask God questions for which the answers would not facilitate my life plan, I'm going to get politely brushed off. Questions which are germane, on the other hand, will get useful responses. The same goes for any other requests made directly to God.
Likewise, therefore I cannot study philosophy, as apparently that would be an unwise and wasteful side trip, FOR ME. So I get the iron door barring my way.
For people who somehow cannot take the plunge and accept a friendship with O, this must pertain to what their life plan must be; perhaps to later redound to an even more astonishing level of faith by dint of having it withheld briefly. IDK.
And for Kantians, they will be blown completely away when they are relieved of this impediment, and it may have been put there precisely to compress and accentuate the staggering relief they will feel when unity with God is perceived.
All of this is conjecture of course. My apologies.
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