WHO Cut the Light

Yesterday's post asked Who cut the light?! Today we shall identify WHO took the light out of the Enlightenment, and it wasn't just Enlightenment thinkers. 

Rather, the roots extend back to certain medieval philosophical trends, especially nominalism. The whole catastrophe is described in the book Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times, which we will be plagiarizing with this morning.

In many ways it mirrors the thesis of Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences -- nominalism being one of the most consequential ideas ever, since it drives a wedge between reality and our ideas of reality, the latter reduced to mere names, such that reality is no longer intelligible. You can trace a straight line from this to postmodern nihilism.

In a certain sense, Platonism is simply what philosophy is, i.e., the effort to apprehend the enduring reality beneath, behind, or above the flux of contingency and change. As Schuon puts it, "all the speculations of Plato or Socrates converge upon a vision which transcends the perception of appearances and which opens on to the Essence of things." 

For Plato, "philosophy is the knowledge of the Immutable and of the Ideas" (ibid.), and what's the Big Idea? The Good, which diffuses its light into the world of appearances. If not, then to hell with it, because philosophy is doomed from the start. Truly truly, it reduces to anti-philosophy -- to misosophy or philodoxy (love of opinion) -- masquerading as philosophy:

This stance does not think that Meaning and Reason are there in Reality; rather, it holds that all meaning and reasoning and all reality beliefs are human constructions..., rather than defensible claims concerning how things ultimately are (Tyson).

In contrast, the Christian Platonist "holds that the unseen God really is the present source and ongoing ground of all created reality," and that "the qualities of beauty, goodness, and truth, wherever they are in some measure discovered, are divine revelations of real meaning that give the world in which we live its value and purpose."

To this outlook intangible qualities are more basic than any temporal expression of truth, and true meaning... is reflected partially in the human mind rather then generated there. To this outlook there is more to reality than simply what meets the eye. Here reality exceeds that which can be discretely quantified, mathematically modeled, or logically demonstrated. 

And why not? Gödel himself was a "committed Platonist," and

According to Gödel's own Platonist understanding of his proof, it shows us that our minds, in knowing mathematics, are escaping the limitations of man-made systems, grasping the independent truths of abstract reality (Goldstein). 

You know what? I'm feeling a bit scattered this morning, plus we've been down this path so many times before that there's no need to do so again. Rather, I'll just pull some excerpts from past posts that pretty much summarize the argument:

Exactly what was this "nominalist revolution"? To make a long story short, it simply has to do with the question of the reality of transcendentals, or universals. For realists such as Aquinas, universals were ultimately real, while for the nominalist insurgency, they were considered mere names (immediately you see the seeds of deconstruction, which attacks universals -- and therefore Truth -- with a neo-barbaric vengeance).

Seems like a mundane enough academic squabble, doesn't it? Well, no. This is the wedge that plunges right down the center of Christendom, and cleaves Western man to this day.

Now, the God of the scholastics could be approached with reason. This being the case, the divine realm was ordered, hierarchical, and subject to man's comprehension (up to a point). But the nominalists swept this entire order aside, which had the perhaps unintended consequence of radically changing the character of God.

For one of the implications of nominalism is that God cannot be approached rationally, since this is to compromise his divine omnipotence. God can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to such an extent that he actually becomes far more distant and fearsome -- an object of pure awe instead of understanding.

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Secular humanists follow in the wake of the late medieval nominalists who convinced themselves that the principial realm of transcendental truth was words only, and that only concrete material things were ultimately real. This ousted them from the transcendent and created the split that continues to this day between realists and materialists. 

In turn, this split is very much at the basis of mundane politics, as conservatism may be defined as that philosophy which sees the world as the instantiation of "permanent things," or archetypal ideas that are not subject to change. We do not judge or measure them, because they judge and take the measure of us. We are either evolving toward, or away, from what we are in our deepest nature.

But because the left has exiled itself from human reality, it can never understand the simple truth that the world is disordered because souls are. And then in its ontic backasswardness, it tries to order souls by changing the world, and is always surprised when disordered souls re-exert themselves and spoil their beautiful plans. To paraphrase Eliot, they are always dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, which is to say, a rightly ordered soul (since souls don't exist for them anyway).

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As to when it all started, Richard Weaver, in his consequential Ideas Have Consequences, blames the triumph of nominalism over realism, or Occam over Thomas, way back in the 14th century. According to Prof. Wiki, Occam is considered "the father of modern epistemology" by many modern idiots

because of his strongly argued position that only individuals exist, rather than supra-individual universals, essences, or forms, and that universals are the products of abstraction from individuals by the human mind and have no extra-mental existence.

So lacking in self-awareness was this Occam fellow that he didn't even realize that the philosophy of nominalism is itself an abstraction.

Imagine a fish who denies the existence of water becoming the most important thinker among fish. That's what happened to man: despite being founded on an overt denial of reality, this denial became the new foundation of western thought (or anti-thought, if you want to be literal).

Occam was also "a theological voluntarist who believed that if God had wanted to, he could have become incarnate as a donkey or an ox, or even as both a donkey and a man at the same time."

He is closer to Islamic than Christian metaphysics, because he is one of those folks who would say that God doesn't command certain things because they are right and good, but that they are right and good because God commands them. If God commanded abortion, or theft, or Gender Affirming Care, then these would be good instead of immoral. There is no natural law written on our hearts, because abstract universals can't exist, and besides, we're so wrecked by original sin that we can't think straight anyway.

Oddly enough, just two days ago I ran across the same analysis in Barron's The Priority of Christ, except he's much more polite about it. He writes of how Occam's kooky voluntarism renders both God and man "self-contained, capricious, absolute, and finally irrational."

 Barron writes of how the turn away from realism redounds to

a not very convincing form of Christianity and the opponent to whom it naturally gave rise. Modernity and decadent Christianity are enemies in one sense, but in another sense, they are deeply connected to one another and mirror one another. In most of the disputes between Christianity and modernity, we have advocates of the prerogative of the voluntarist God facing down advocates of the voluntarist self (emphasis mine).

In short, the human world is reduced to will vs. will, and may the most ruthless win. The infinitely wider, deeper, and richer world of human intelligence and divine intelligibility is reduced to will and to the power to enforce it.