Is There a Father in the House?

Bob, you can't talk that way and expect to have any readers.

What -- Father reality, Mother intellect, and all that? I can back that up, you know.

No doubt, but must you?

To repeat what was said at the end of yesterday's post, the mind and reality are female and male respectively, in a union that gives birth to the concept or "word." Continuing with the same book, The Universe as Journey, Clarke writes that

It is because of my belief in this "nuptial relationship" between the mind and reality that I feel such antipathy toward the epistemology of Immanuel Kant.

Not only was Kant a confirmed old bachelor, but he very much wants the restavus to live as infertile eggheads:

Rather than allowing reality to reveal itself to the human mind by actively informing it, the Kantian mind is more like an aggressive all-male activist, actively imposing its own prefabricated a priori forms on the disordered raw material of the sense manifold coming in.

A Kantsplainer, that's what he is, forcing reality to conform to his own preconceptions about it. Ideology as such -- e.g., feminism -- is always a very bad man. 

[I]t seems to me that the feminine model of the mind as mother enshrines a much deeper and more accurate insight into the fundamental relationship between the mind and reality than the Kantian masculine model.

Agreed, but I'll bet we could deduce this on purely metaphysical grounds, since Male and Female are (or symbolize) a primordial metacosmic complementarity that will inevitably pop & mom up in some form or fashion, nor can we have one without the other. We can't have two fathers, nor one allone, the Son being the "passive other" in relation to the Father. 

There are also levels and angles, such that, looked at another way, the world can be feminine, i.e., Maya or Prakriti, the Purusha being the detached observer of the eternal Dance of Appearances.

If we're in the mood to deepak the chopra, we could also say that wave is feminine and particle masculine, and here again the one is always implicit in, and irreducible to, the other. Even Jesus had a mother, and this mother is now the Church, but that's a different rabbit hole.  

Let's move on to another book by Norris Clarke, The Philosophical Approach to God. Clarke is one of the top five Theologians Who Speak to Me, such that reading him is like hearing myself think. 

Example.

As we reflect on the activities of our intellectual knowing power, we come to recognize it as an inexhaustible dynamism of inquiry, ever searching to lay hold more deeply and widely on the universe of reality.

This drive is infinite, bearing in mind that infinitude as such is the feminine pole of the Absolute-Infinite complementarity alluded to above. In other words, Absolute and Infinite are the first and last words of the Male-Female complementarity.

It is impossible to restrict [the Intellect's] horizon of inquiry to any limited area of reality, to any goal short of all that there is to know about all that there is.

Any finite resting place always reveals more beyond: "This process continues indefinitely in ever-expanding and ever deepening circles," and I say that the ontological goround of this epistemological circle is located in the Trinity, precisely, in which the Son eternally knows the Father, and is the Father's eternal knowledge-Word.

From our end of the metacosmic dance, "the mind must have a dynamic a priori orientation, an aptitude or affinity, for all that is, for the totality of being." Indeed, nothing could be as experience-near as the experience of this infinite horizon of Being. The question is the nature of this Being at the other end of our experience. 

Is it only we who pursue It? Or does It pursue us, so to speak? This goes to what I call the Divine Attractor, which always and everywhere exerts a kind of vertical-gravitational -- or teleological -- pull on us: It "naturally attracts or draws it to [I]tself," such that we always have

a dim, obscure, implicit, but nonetheless real awareness of this goal as drawing it [the intellect].... the mind has, from its first conscious movement from emptiness toward fulfillment, a kind of implicit, pre-conceptual, anticipatory grasp or foretaste of being as the encompassing horizon and goal of all its inquiries.

So, Kant is correct about our pre-conceptual awareness of reality. It's just that he needs a bigger pre-concept, this being nothing less than O. Here is another example of Bob's thoughts in Clarke's words:

The entire mental life of man consists in gradually filling in this at first conceptually empty and indeterminate but limitless horizon of being with increasingly determinate conceptual comprehension, as we step by step come to know one part of this totality after another.

My life in a notshall: every shall of truth revealing the next not over the infinite horizon of being. Any attempt to limit or enclose the latter is, well, a very anti-Gödelian thing to do. We really have only two choices: either 

the mind is doomed to endless rebounding from one finite to another, with no final satisfactory or unqualified fulfillment ever attainable, or even possible. Our restless, unquenchable search has no actually existing final goal.

A "living absurdity," like two empty mirrors reflecting one one another and enclosing us in a vain tautolontology -- or like two hysterical sisters with no man in the house. 

OR, 

somewhere hidden within this unlimited horizon of being there exists an actually infinite Plenitude of Being [O], in which all other beings participate yet of which they are but imperfect images.

This Being -- O -- is

the adequate, totally fulfilling goal of the dynamism of our minds, matching superabundantly the inexhaustible abyss of our own capacity and desire to know: one abyss, a negative ["female"] one, calling out to another, a positive ["male"] one.

Now we still have two mirrors, only like the eternal reflection of the Father in the Son. A few posts back we suggested that the very notion of adequation or conformity to the Real is anchored in the principle of the Trinity, which, you might say, is the eternal conformity of Son to Father. And we in turn are images of of the Father's image.  

Maybe a good place to pause and reflect.