Reality is Not What it Used to Be

Where do we go from there? -- in reference to the previous post, which took the telovator to the top floor and concluded that

In everything that is true -- that exists -- there "has to be at least a vestige of the Son's correspondence to the Father."

This explains why we are at once swimming in an ocean of truth and drowning in a sea of lies. 

At any rate, supposing we have pierced the veil of the toppermost -- or it us, rather -- there's nowhere to go but back down into the world. 

Indeed, we are always between immanence and transcendence, bearing in mind that Betweenness as such is a primordial category -- that something is always and forever going on Between the Father and Son, AKA conformity to the True. This between -- what Voegelin calls the metaxy -- represents

human existence as "between" lower and upper poles; man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on. Equivalent to the symbol of "participation of being" (Webb).

This latter -- participation of being -- "Refers to sharing the qualities of the supreme exemplar," or "a condition between higher and lower degrees of reality." In the Judeo-Christian tradition it is reflected in the principle of our theomorphism, and can be symbolized as follows:

O

(⇅)

Ø

That's us in the middle. To dwell at the bottom equates to empiricism, to flee to the top idealism. But neither approach on its own is justifiable. It reminds us of a book called The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization, which describes the seesaw argument that has been going on for over two millennia. 

The two men disagreed on the fundamental purpose of the philosophy. For Plato, the image of the cave summed up man’s destined path, emerging from the darkness of material existence to the light of a higher and more spiritual truth [↑]. Aristotle thought otherwise. Instead of rising above mundane reality, he insisted, the philosopher’s job is to explain how the real world works, and how we can find our place in it [↓]. 

But an integral view of the cosmos requires both, since they are not dualistic but complementary. Perhaps I should reread it, but at the moment I'm reading a book called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.

And here we are. But how did we get here? That is the question the book attempts to answer. The short answer is through really, really bad philosophy, involving a great deal of amnesia, in particular, a systematic forgetting of what man knows about man. But I'm only up to p. 64.

At any rate, the book does bring us back down from the beautiful clouds of metaphysics to the cloudy muck of history.

So, how did we get here -- to a place that sees and raises Descartes, and says I think I am a woman, therefore I am a woman. What must the world be like in order for such a nonsensical statement to make sense? It actually requires centuries of work. Termites can't destroy a house in a day. 

Long story short,

Because men have forgotten God, they have also forgotten man; that's why all this has has happened.... Yet any proposed Christian solution to the crisis of modernity will fail if it does not address the core issues of the Great Forgetting (Trueman).

Long story shorter,

The modern man is the man who forgets what man knows about man.

Each day modern man knows the world better and knows man less.

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

"Human" is the adjective used to excuse any infamy.

The human has the insignificance of a swarm of insects when it is merely human.

The cause of the modern sickness is the conviction that man can cure himself.

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

Nor is there a "Christian solution" per se, since ours is a chronic but treatable condition.

We only know how to solve problems that do not matter.

Christianity does not solve "problems"; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level.

Little problems like death, loss, evil, human nature, and the nature of reality. 

Trueman actually begins with the problem of I am a woman trapped in a man's body, a sentence which "carries with it a world of metaphysical assumptions."

Now, every mentally ill person has a problem. As does every healthy person. What is life but problems?

The problem of the fellow somehow unhappiting the wrong body

cannot be understood until it is set in the context of a much broader transformation in how society understands the nature of human selfhood.

Get your anthropology wrong and everything else follows. Am I wrong?

No, but Nietzsche, Marx, and other fiending fathers of postmodernity are: they argue

that the history of society is a history of power and oppression and that even notions such as human nature are constructs designed to reinforce and perpetuate this subjugation.

In other words, forgetting human nature isn't a bug, it's a featured mind parasite. It's like saying There's no such thing as a woman, and I am one. But if everything is an oppressive social construct, so too is the construct of transgenderism. Indeed, often enough to only escape from this oppressive construct is suicide.

The product of power and oppression is the Sacred Victim, who are collectively "the real heroes of the narrative." You get more of what you reward, hence all the victim-heroes. At the same time the real heroes, from Washington to Churchill, are the oppressors.

Tell us something we don't know.

Okay, Trueman discusses the terms mimesis and poiesis, which "refer to two different ways of thinking about the world." The former is much like a realist philosophy in which truth is the conformity of intellect to being: it

regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it.

Such a commonsense view of the world is precisely what makes you an oppressive and power-mad White European Heteronormative Christian Nationalist tyrant. Conversely, poiesis   

sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.

Genesis 3 All Over Again? 

Sure sounds like it. Back in the real world,

the authority of the created order was obvious and unavoidable. The world was what it was, and the individual needed to conform to it.

Now, I'm all for questioning authority. But the authority of reality? And its author? That seems more than a bit soph-defeating. Nevertheless, "Today's world is not the objectively authoritative place" it used to be. Nowadays, 

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

That's enough for today.