Who Cut the Light?!

If, as Derrida says, there is nothing beyond the text, then language is a closed system that can never get beyond itself to the reality it is supposed to map: "language is hereby made into a closed, immanent totality, a 'prison-house' from which there is no escape" (Betz). Worse yet, such an approach denies

any point of contact with the substances we could call "real" or any "things" that would "match up" with our words for them....

 This means that

language has no outside, no beginning or end, no ultimate significance, and nothing is ultimately communicated through it. It is, in a word, pointless -- pointless dissemination without the possibility of any real communion or redeeming communication...

There is no "living presence" to speech, rather, "It must in a sense be dead." If this is true, then we are in quite a fix. Is there any way out of the darkness? 

Schuon writes that "man is not a closed system, although he can try to be so." In the Foreword to his last book, The Transfiguration of Man, he affirms that 

In reality, man is as if suspended between animality and divinity; now modern thought -- be it philosophical or scientific -- admits only animality, practically speaking.

Concur. Such a partial and fragmented image of man fails "to take account of his true nature, which transcends the earthly, and lacking which he would have no reason for being."  

As Hamann predicted vis-a-vis the Enlightenment,

Quite paradoxically, the cult of reason ended in that sub-rationalism -- or "esoterism of stupidity" -- that is existentialism in all its forms (Schuon).

Nevertheless, here we are: "On the whole, modern philosophy is the codification of an acquired infirmity; the intellectual atrophy of man marked by the 'fall,'" into "a hypertrophy of practical intelligence" and "the psychosis of 'civilization' and of 'progress.'" 

A reminder that leftism in all its ghastly forms is the institutionalization of man's fall.

Hmm. How do we put the Light back into the Enlightenment? I suppose by first acknowledging the ontological darkness in which it enclosed us. It tried to replace the divine Light with the human, but this is to sever the manifestation from the principle, the effect from its cause.

Just as our eyes are conformed to physical light, the Intellect not only has access to the higher Light, but is of the same substance as that Light. It is "At once mirror of the supra-sensible and itself a supernatural ray of light" (Schuon). Here it is

necessary to distinguish between a "created Intellect" and an "uncreated Intellect," the latter being the divine Light and the former the reflection of this Light at the center of Existence.

Whatever the case, it seems to me that Light is another irreducible, in that it is always here, and cannot be reduced to something less. In Genesis 1 the Creator's first act is the creation of light, and its division from darkness. 

This is paralleled in John, what with the light shining in the darkness, and the reference to John the Baptist bearing witness to the light, to "the true Light which gives light to every man who comes into the world."  In contrast to what was said above about the deadness of language enclosed in itself, John says that in the Word is "the life, and the life was the light of men." 

According to Bina & Ziarani, "Mental faculties are reflections of a deep-seated, limitless source -- but on a limited plane." However, "because it takes its light from that limitless source, it is able to point to its own limitation, and also to its limitless source." In short, we are able to use the light of reason to reason about the limits of reason: it is

precisely because man's mental faculties take their light from a limitless source within him that he cannot be confined to mechanistic systematizations.

In short, to say "that reason is the sole criterion of truth... is not rationally provable." As we know from our Gödel, "no sufficiently logical system can prove itself true from within itself, that is, by logical argument" (ibid.).

This reminds me of the question asked by Stephen Hawking: granting a lawful universe, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" Which in turn reminds me of an Aphorism:

The world is a system of equations that stir winds of poetry.

The Enlightenment essentially confined us to Plato's cave, to a world of appearances with no access to the Light. But for Thomas, "The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing else than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light," and "the interior light of the mind is the principal cause of knowledge."

But we have to be open to the Light: "The highest perfection of human life consists in the mind of man being open to God" -- who is the Light and the Life, as per what John says above.