All Studies are Queer Studies

As we said yesterday, to say man is to say God -- which doesn't necessarily mean God exists, because what if man doesn't? A nominalist or a postmodernist, for example, says there is no human nature, only individual humans (never mind the performative contradiction of using the word "human"). 

Whatever else man is, he is an irreducible union of matter + spirit. Looked at this way, materialism is the denial of spirit by spirit, another performative c.

Now, 

For the man who lives in the modern world, it is not the soul's immortality in which it is difficult to believe, but its mere existence.

True, but why? Previous generations didn't seem to have this difficulty, but presumably because they were so backward, i.e., not the beneficiaries of all this Progress.

For similar reasons they didn't know that men can't be women, that members of the same sex cannot marry, that the mind has no contact with the extra-mental reality, that there exist no natural laws or natural rights, that no culture can be better than another, that nothing can be objectively wrong, or that human existence can have no telos.

What a relief to be unburdened of these superstitions!

Why deceive ourselves? Science has not answered a single important question.

Exaggerate much, Señor D? 

Well, what are the important questions? Let's see. Off the top of my head, why is there something instead of nothing? Why is being intelligible to intelligence? How does the animate arise from the inanimate and the immaterial from the material? Why are we here? Why all the truth, beauty, and vertical depth (and height)? 

A fool is he who thinks that what he knows is without mystery.

Which implies that the wise man knows about the Mystery, which is less disturbing than than the fatuous attempt to exclude it by stupid explanations. Which is reminiscent of the Tao:

When a foolish man hears of the Tao, he laughs out loud. If he didn't laugh, it wouldn't be the Tao.

I too laugh, just not in a contemptuous or dismissive way. Rather, with a robust guffah-HA!   

At any rate, the Chinaman is not the issue, since much of the Tao Te Ching can be trancelighted into the plain unglish of O:

[O] is like a well: used but never used up. It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities. 

There was something formless and perfect before the universe was born. It is serene. Empty. Solitary. Unchanging. Infinite. Eternally present. It is the mother of the universe. 

To which I would add, full, together-with, and changelessly changing, or something like the orthoparadoxical unknown origin prior to time and space, fount of all being, unborn thus undying, beginning and end of all impossibility, empty plenum and inexhaustible void. 

Approach it and there is no beginning; follow it and there is no end. You can't know it but you can be it...

That dude abides! 

Let's bring this existentialada down a couple of nachos, to brute matter, or rather, to the materialism of scientistic brutes. As Brennan observes, "no sensitive power can reflect upon itself." In other words, our five senses don't know they're sensing; they cannot transcend themselves. 

Rather, their knowledge is limited to that which they sense, which is always something material -- particular surfaces, colored light, air vibrations, etc.

Nor can one sense know what the others are up to. Eyes know nothing about sound, as ears know nothing about light. To understand that the bluebird is chirping is an immaterial synthesis of sensory information, not reducible to mere sense. 

I remember back in high school, a rumor made the rounds that it was possible to learn in one's sleep. Apparently, all that mattered was that the sound waves of the lecture enter one's ears. Being that I was no fan of homework, this was an attractive proposition. Why doesn't it work? Mainly because learning requires a conscious -- not unconscious -- subject.

Like the perception of music, it can only be synthesized by and in a human mind. It isn't merely sensed, although the sense of hearing is obviously a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for apprehending it. So the senses are involved, but converting the sensory vibrations into music is a synthetic process, or a process of interior synthesis.

Along these lines, Brennan writes that

The basic reason why sense is unable to make a complete return upon itself is the material texture of its being. A faculty that is able to reflect upon itself is necessarily devoid of all matter; and so its object is not limited like that of the senses.

That's a bold claim in these tenured times: that the most quintessential human power is devoid of ALL matter? After all, we live in a materialist age in which nothing can be devoid of all matter except, of course, the doctrine of materialism. 

But in order to be a proper materialist, one must believe both that everything is reducible to matter and that nothing outside or beyond matter can have any real existence.

Now, as we already stipulated in the previous post, A universe of matter alone would be simply unintelligible, period, full stop, end of story. The Fat Lady singing a song no one can hear. 

But matter devoid of form is (ironically) the very essence of unintelligibility, as if there could be such a thing as essential inessentiality. 

Thankfully, there can be no such thing, except conceptually, for we never encounter unin-formed matter, rather, matter + interiority. For again, everything in existence somehow wants to communicate. To us. Interior to interior. Queer studies indeed!

Now, to be human is to know damn well that we sense, and to understand that we know, and both of these powers are immaterial. How can this be? By virtue of what principle can an immaterial entity exist in a material cosmos? 

Well, math surely exists, and it is obviously immaterial. No one ever saw pi, or the square root of two, or Planck time. Yes, but math is objective. We're talking about the human subject. What's that about?

Not to run ahead of ourselves, but there is no such thing as an object in the absence of a subject. These two categories aren't just existential complementarities but ontologically irreducible to anything less, all the way down to the goround of being. 

Thanks to important advances in theology, man is able to move beyond the wild spookulations of pre-Christian metaphysicians, even while maintaining our sizable lead over post-Christian cranks and malcontents.

Theology advances no less than does science. This obviously doesn't imply that the object of theology evolves, which would be absurd. Rather, our understanding deepens; to be precise, it can proceed forward, toward the Godhead, or back, in the direction of soul dead materialism or braindead atheism. There's an aphorism for that:

Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper.

Philosophy, theology, and science are different activities, and let no Raccoon suggest it isn't helpful to distinguish them. However, we don't leave it at that. Rather, we distinguish in order to unite, in part because the distinctions are in the subject, not the object; and even the practice of science is always in the direction of deeper principles that unite disparate facts.

Put another way, realty is one, while our approaches to it are diverse. If one forgets this, then one will inevitably "evolve backward" and elevate something less than O to O, in order to make the unsettling diversity go away.

Put it this way: ether one acknowledges the mystery of O or one reduces it to an essentially idolatrous Ø. This is nothing less than "intellectual sin," and it is probably worse than the other kinds, because it can injure so many more people. You could say that a single crime of passion may be a tragedy, while the crimes of ideology are a statistic.

Of the modern substitutes for religion, probably the least heinous is vice.

That's about it this morning.