How to Tell Your Friends from the Barbarians

One of our fundamental ideas is that man is an open system, not just horizontally but vertically. No one else to my knowledge puts it in exactly those blunt terms, but whenever I encounter a thinker who says something similar, the sparks fly in the manner described by the Aphorist:

Collision with an intelligent book makes us see a thousand stars.

As happened while reading the final chapter of Theological Anthropology, which is about Josef Pieper's own metacosmic anthropology.

What exactly is an intelligent book and a brilliant writer? It's an important question, and the answer comes down to the exigencies of Dunning-Kruger. For what we get out of a book depends upon what we bring to it, which again implies a kind of dynamic open system between text and reader.

Thus, most so-called intellectuals have no right to pass judgment on books that they can't even penetrate, much less understand. Instead, they elevate what they are capable of understanding to that which can be understood, which essentially seals them in their own ignorance and tenure. 

Believing that he says what he wants to, the writer only says what he can.

When conversing with such a flat and narrow-souled individual I don't always say what I'm thinking, which is You only believe that nonsense because that is what you are capable of believing. 

This limitation is as obvious in children as it is in adults -- especially those intellectual vulgarians who have passed through the educational system only to internalize an intrinsically pathological ideology, which is both a cause and effect of the deformation of the soul. 

The modern aberration consists in believing that the only thing that is real is what the vulgar soul can perceive. 

Moreover, 

Nothing seems easier to understand than what we have not understood. 

For example, back when I was an atheist, I totally understood Christianity. Indeed, what could be easier?

D'oh!

Anthropology. Where would we be without it? It is the key to everything, for if you get it wrong, then everything else follows: as we know, even a small error at the foundation results in massive errors in the left. And any purely immanent philosophy starts with the negation of man as vertically open system: 

If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born of that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.

Thus, man is either the reflection of something transcending him, or he is the inane reflection of something less, ultimately reducing to himself. Supposing one is trapped in this closed system, then

Man is the animal that imagines itself to be Man.

Quite literally, as in, say, a metaphysical Darwinism which encloses man in his "selfish genes," as one tenured ape puts it. We could say a lot more about this, but you get the point, even if they never will, and are darn proud of it. 

For it is beyond self-evident that man comprehends natural selection, not the other way around. Not to say that evolution tells us nothing about ourselves. 

To the contrary, it tells us a great deal, but it is necessarily silent about the nature of the being who transcends his genes and whose mind is free to conform to the truth of reality. Of course they have their theories of how we have transcended natural selection, which all fall under the heading of Performative Contradictions.  

Man is not educated through knowledge of things but through knowledge of man.

Which is why knowledge of every possible material thing doesn't add up to knowledge of the immaterial knower who knows those things. But

Man speaks of the relativity of truth because he calls his innumerable errors truths. 

We often wonder or chuckle at the differences between left and right, but what is the source, the deep structure of these differences -- the principle in light of which all the surface differences are revealed? 

It essentially turns on the question of whether man is open to transcendence or enclosed in immanence. In the case of the former, we are conformed to an objective intellectual and moral order. Which is why the latter never stop yelling fire! in the low-rent theater of their dreams. 

That was an unexpectedly long prologue. Let's get to the essay. 

Pieper's attention was riveted first on the real and then on making the truth of reality transparent through language. 

Same. "He developed three fundamental anthropological insights which form a unifying vision of the human person," one of which is "the receptivity inherent in our status as created beings." This receptivity is what we call vertical openness, symbolically represented by the pneumaticon (o). 

In our crudely secular world, people have become closed to transcendence; in contrast, "Our forbears were open, or porous, to the supernatural," perhaps even too open -- or not sufficiently open to the horizontal world mapped by science. 

Which goes to the necessary complementarity between vertical and horizontal, for any truth from either domain is ultimately reconciled in O -- or in other words, testifies to God. For if we are the truth-bearing creature, no immanent metaphysic can account for this Great Mystery. And Big Responsibility.  

Or, one can attempt to enclose the Mystery in our own ideas and categories, but "meaning exists outside of us, it is ours to receive." In other words, to the extent that we invent meaning, this is not meaning, rather, an existential dream or a Kantian prison, AKA intracosmic and infrahuman ønanism. 

"Once the human subject became solely responsible for the constitution of meaning and value," then "each individual eventually felt free to advance a cultural synthesis of [his] own, ransacking the tradition for spare parts."

Good times. I think we'll stop here and resume the discussion tomorrow.