That's what it comes down to: a binary choice, except in choosing the latter, it immediately fragments into 8.1 billion opinionated dreamers competing for top dogma.
I'm just flipping through a book by Josef Pieper called Living the Truth, which is -- in my opinion -- about nothing less than waking from the modern dream and the postmodern nightmare:
With the expression, "All that exists is true," Western philosophy for almost two millennia intended to make a statement not only about reality as such but no less about the nature of man.
The statement is this: that being is intelligible to the intellect, and that truth is the conformity of the latter to the former. This is the "principle of the truth of all things."
It was once uncontroversial to affirm that "all that is real, is true." It meant that we started with the reality of being rather than with the content of the mind.
But Enlightenment thinkers "despised and eliminated the principle of ontological truth, together with metaphysical ontology as such," making them "among the first to reject the principle of the truth of all things" and to "even deny that it expresses anything meaningful at all."
Which means that there is no truth in things, and that supposing there were, we could never know it. Rather, we are sealed off from the thing itself, and therefore enclosed in our opinions and dreams about what's going on with them, i.e., with reality.
Pieper quotes Spinoza to the effect that "Altogether in the wrong are those who consider truth to be a property of being," but here again, to say that truth is not a property of being is to say that there is no truth.
Likewise, "Kant explicitly denies truth to be a property of reality as such." He sought to "discredit once and for all the basic concepts of traditional ontology," and boy did he succeed.
Except to say that there's no failure like success, in that it has successfully redounded to an "abyss separating the intellectual giants of the High Middle Ages from the pedantic philosophical systematists of the Enlightenment," and here we are.
With the jettisoning of ontology came the rejection of the very principles of thought, among which are non-contradiction, sufficient reason, and of rationality itself: "The opposite of transcendental truth would be a dream mistaken for reality. A string of dreams would be a fairy tale world."
And what is the contemporary multiversity but a fairy tale world of academic division, fragmentation, and disunity, detached in principle from the one thing that could integrate them, AKA being? Pieper quotes the philosopher Christian Wolff, who speaks for me:
The truth that is called "transcendental" and is conceived as inherent in reality as such... is the ordered structure governing existing things.... a dream, in contrast, means inconsistency in the transformation of things. The truth implies order, the dream disorder.
Reject the truth of being, and the world dissolves "into a fairy tale, the equivalent of a dream." Now, I have nothing against dreams, I just don't want to be ruled by them, which is to say, enclosed in the dream of dreamers with more power than I have, i.e., people with the power to impose their kooky dreams on the restavus.
We've mentioned before that one of the primordial divisions between contemporary leftism and conservative liberalism is this question of contact with reality -- the transcendental reality of Permanent Things.
Russell Kirk, for example, writes that "conservatives generally believe that there exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society." But this presupposes a nonlocal order -- the order of being -- in which the good, true, and beautiful converge.
It's never too late to admit that we took the wrong fork in the road, and to make a u-turn back to the reality from which we diverged, as articulated by Thomas:
All existing things, namely, all real objects outside the soul, possess something intrinsic that allows us to call them true.
I personally made the u-turn a couple of decades ago, and I highly commend it, because it gives us the best of both worlds:
In created things there is truth on two levels: in the things themselves, and in the perceiving mind.
In other words, we get to save reality, with the salvation of our minds tossed in for free: again, an infinitely intelligible world of being, intelligible to an equally infinite intellect, and how convenient is that!
"'All things are true' means that they are oriented toward a knowing self." Thus "every being, as being, stands in relation to a knowing mind." This is fundamentally a relational cosmos, such that
"To be," therefore, means the same as "to be oriented toward a knowing mind."
"No existing being is without such relational orientation," and "this relationship is actualized in the process of mental perception or intellection." Otherwise you're just dreaming a dream detached from being, and you can't argue with a dreamer, rather, you can only try to wake them up.
4 comments:
Reject the truth of being, and the world dissolves "into a fairy tale, the equivalent of a dream."
Ultimately, it can't help but to become the stuff of nightmares.
Otherwise you're just dreaming a dream detached from being, and you can't argue with a dreamer, rather, you can only try to wake them up.
With most people, it's easier said than done unless they are mugged by reality at some point.
Good evening, Dr. Godwin, Julie, others. Let's all take a deep breath. Hold.....now let it out. Good. We are all in this together.
From the post: "Now, I have nothing against dreams, I just don't want to be ruled by them, which is to say, enclosed in the dream of dreamers with more power than I have, i.e., people with the power to impose their kooky dreams on the restavus."
Let's unpack this statement. Is it possible for decent and sane persons to be lorded over by persons bearing a fantastic, dreamlike, distorted impression of reality? And consequently impose harmful restrictions, laws, and regulations on the general population?
Absolutely. Panel, I present to you...Heinrich Himmler. Now a corpse, but once a very live person with what we would think of as a fantasy view of the world and how it should be governed. He thought there were groups of people who shouldn't exist.
Now we have protesting college students who some would say shouldn't exist, but we won't go that far, now would we? Because of still being in contact of reality. But for those of us who do not like what these college students are doing and saying can appreciate how eaaaaaaaasy it is to slide out of reality and into la-la land.
Losing contact with reality is cinchy. It really is. All you have to do is be judgmental about things, and decide you like certain things and events, and dislike others. That is where it all starts.
The God believer loves God, and consequently, loves all, because God is all, and all is God, so the sincere religious person has a certain holdfast on reality. We could get real simple and say "It's all good" and this would quite literally be reality, in truth.
But its so eaaaaaaaaaasy to decide certain things are no good, out of whack, need fixing, are not what they should be; to stand in judgment. Sure, without this discernment, constructive actions would be hard to initiate or direct.
But still and the same, this judgmental function should not be accompanied by any feelings of disgust, hate, loathing, or anger. These are emotions which are of God, provided as exemplars of WHICH STATES NOT TO DWELL IN. And we take need to take them as such.
Thus concludes my long and convoluted comment, part the first.
My comment, part the second, and my apologies for going long this evening.
Now recently Trench sustained a minor flesh wound. This was attended to by a grieving widow volunteer of a medical unit. There was applying of the salve and bandaging and all frippery associated with wounds that should not get a man excused from guard duty.
There occurred a gross error of judgment involving the widow; she became infatuated with the worst possible candidate for her affections. Her perception of reality became grossly distorted and she thought Trench to be "all that." I was charged with the care of her throbbing heart, thrust into these callused hands. Like entrusting a baby to an ogre.
I've got woman troubles, I know not what I shall do. I simply do not know. She is a fine woman, I could not bear to see her harmed.
Oh dear. Reality. Why can't we just stick to reality.
"But Enlightenment thinkers "despised and eliminated the principle of ontological truth, together with metaphysical ontology as such," making them "among the first to reject the principle of the truth of all things" and to "even deny that it expresses anything meaningful at all."
Which means that there is no truth in things, and that supposing there were, we could never know it. Rather, we are sealed off from the thing itself, and therefore enclosed in our opinions and dreams about what's going on with them, i.e., with reality."
That is the situation in a nutshall. Someone commented on a xtweet yesterday about Descartes' part in that switcheroo, that really "Descartes really went "source?" on reality and everybody lost their minds."?
Yup.
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