Possession is Nine Tenths of the Flaw

Lately I'ver been revisiting old posts and reworking them into new ones. In other words, plagiarizing myself, and why not? 

More often than not I write about what I happen to be reading, and who says you can't read yourself, especially with so much to work with (18+ years worth), plus the fact that the originals were dashed off so quickly that I don't remember having written them. 

This also affords me the opportunity to polish the wurds worth polishing and flush the rest. And of course, now we can include the entertaining images Gemini comes up with.

But I don't see a book in here. It's all too... something.

Queer?

That's one way of putting it. There aren't enough queer folk in the world to make the effort worthwhile. Supposing you are a reader, you probably don't even have a friend to whom it would be appropriate recommend the blog. I certainly don't. I have friends, but not that kind.

Here's an old post that asks whether there is such a thing as a non-Christian philosophy, based on an essay by Josef Pieper. Was he being ironic? Or just trolling? Let's find out.

Well, supposing one is a Christian, then obviously there can be no non-Christian philosophy, for what is a philosophy that excludes the most important facts and principles of existence, e.g., Incarnation and Trinity? 

But more broadly, it seems that any philosophy must begin with an acknowledgment of its own ultimate impossibility -- or in other words, that we are not God and never will be (Mormons notwithstanding).

Philo-sophia implies we can love but never exhaust the source or ground of transcendent Wisdom. Change my mind.

"Philosophizing," writes Pieper, "means asking what is the meaning of all that we call 'life' or 'reality' or simply this 'totality.'" And should you imagine you are actually capable of fully comprehending the meaning of Life-Reality-Totality, then -- well, you're still not God despite your godlike omniscience.

The only viable stance toward the Infinite is a humble openness that can never be fulfilled from this side of finitude. We can only form a loving relationship with the object of philosophy, or what I called in the book (o) toward O.

Only? Only?! You're telling me we can only form a dynamic and fruitful relationship with the living ground of being? I'll take it.

Petey says that philosophy was ruined when it became a mere academic discipline. A degree in mathematics or engineering is one thing, but to be a credentialed philosopher is to not know what philosophy is. Or, a person who is only a philosopher isn't even that, I'll bet. 

A dentistry degree is respectable, but a philosophy degree is grotesque.

The same is often true of the (merely) "academic theologian," because one cannot think about God without thinking in -- or better, with -- God. There can be no such thing as an "impersonal" theology, any more than there could exist an "impersonal psychology" or "objective subject." 

Pieper:

a person cannot be called wise, but at most he can be called one who lovingly seeks wisdom.... The essential philosophical question is about the search for a wisdom which -- in principle -- we can never "have" as a possession as long as we are in our present condition of bodily existence.

(No image, but "Imagine a winding path illuminated by a warm glow, stretching through a lush forest. The path represents the lifelong journey of seeking wisdom. The warm glow signifies the love for knowledge that motivates the seeker. The dense forest symbolizes the vastness and complexity of knowledge, with endless paths to explore. Though the destination [perfect wisdom] might not be reachable, the beauty and richness of the journey itself hold value.) 

So -- as torched upon yesterpost -- the first philosophical question is whether philosophy is even possible. Yes, so long as it is understood as loving-relation as opposed to a one-sided possession. The latter is strictly impossible. Crowning it with a PhD is like covering a dungheap with snow (to borrow an analogy from Martin Luther which he used in a very different context).

No image for that either, but

Imagine a person with a determined expression on their face, carefully shoveling pristine white snow onto a pile of steaming dung. The more snow they shovel, the more the absurdity of the situation becomes clear. The snow melts rapidly, revealing the unpleasant reality beneath.

This image represents the idea that trying to possess philosophy through academic achievement (the PhD) is futile. Philosophy, as described in the text, is about a loving-relationship with ideas, a constant engagement and exploration. It's not about acquiring a fixed set of knowledge, but about a continual process of understanding.

Even God doesn't "possess" wisdom; or at least he is never possessive, in that he -- literally -- never stops giving it away. According to Christian metaphysics, the very essence of God is the loving generation of wisdom in the Son; there is nothing prior to this inspiraling dance of perichoresis or circumincession. In a roundabout way, God is only the perpetual gift of wisdom.

Which is only the whole point. Or at least a Big Hint. In the book mentioned yesterday, America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, Reilly quotes Justin Martyr:

The Logos is the preexistent, absolute, personal Reason and Christ is the embodiment of it, the Logos incarnate. Whatever is rational is Christian. And whatever is Christian is rational.

"Christianity," says Reilly, "contains an invitation to reason because God's rationality guarantees reason's integrity." For backup, he calls in James Schall, who adds that "What is revealed does not demand the denial of intellect, but fosters it."

For "If God is Logos, reason and revelation are not at an impasse." And any so-called philosophy which "a priori excludes the possibility of revelation is a philosophy that is not true to itself. On its own terms, philosophy must remain open to revelation" (Reilly).

Me? I think the philosophizing intellect is already a kind of revelation. Or at least a Big Reveal without which nothing else can be; you might say it is the "first revelation," in that it is a necessary condition to receive the others. No intellect, no problem.

Most things we seek to obtain are for the sake of something else: for example, we eat in order to survive. But why do we want to survive? I don't know. Must be for its own sake. It's like happiness that way: no one ever asks himself why on earth he wishes to be happy. Rather, happiness (in the Aristoteleological sense) is the point of it all.

In an essay called Mystery and Philosophy, Pieper makes the point that

wisdom cannot be the property of man for the very reason that it is sought after for its own sake; what we can fully possess cannot satisfy us as something sought after for its own sake; the only wisdom that is sought after for its own sake is the kind that man is not able to have as a possession.

No wonder there's no book in here: I am seeking something I can never possess, and now I want to sell it to others who lackwise will never have it? What a wild nous chase!

"Philosophical questioning," writes Pieper, "aims at comprehending, at ultimate knowledge." However,

not only do we not possess such knowledge, but we are even, on principle, incapable of possessing it, and therefore we will also not possess it in the future.

Great: we don't have it, we've never had it, and we'll never get it. Anything else before we wrap this up? Have we learned nothing in 18 years of blogging? What were we hoping to find, anyway? And how can such a vacuous exercise result in so much writing about it? That's a lot of posts, but 4,000 x 0 is still 0.

Yes, but O is not 0. Big Infinite difference!

Imagine if we could gather together all the poets, painters, and musicians, and tell them, "look, you've been at this for 50,000 years, but I don't see that you're any closer to possessing Beauty. Now, go out there and bring back Beauty once and for all!"

Ah, but the pursuit of beauty is another one of those activities that is for its own sake. What Pieper says of wisdom can be equally applied to it: beauty sought after for its own sake can never be possessed. One can try, but it is a sort of category error, for it is nothing less than the attempt to contain infinitude within finitude (or transcendence in immanence).

As is the blog. It also goes nowhere, with no hope of ever arriving there. If a final Answer were attainable, this would imply that

the thing is known to the full extent that it is knowable in itself. In other words: the adequate answer to the philosophical question would have to be an answer which exhausts the subject, a statement in which the knowability of the object in question is exhausted to such an extent that nothing purely knowable remains but only the known (Pieper).

In the end, O = O. But we are not O. This is why God can never be known in full this side of the grave: because he is only infinitely knowable.

Thus the claim to have found the "formula of the world" is without hesitation to be called unphilosophical. It is of the essence of philosophy that it cannot be a "closed system" -- "closed" in the sense that the essential reality of the world could be adequately mirrored in it....

The deeper one's positive knowledge of the structure of the world the more one becomes clear that reality is a mystery. The reason for inexhaustibility is that the world is creature, i.e., that it has its origin in God's incomprehensible, creative knowledge (ibid.).

Simultaneously clear and obscure; Joyce called it clearobscuro, a pun on the intermingling of shadow and light in chiarascuro (clear-dark). So I hope this post shed sufficient obscurity on the subject. I sometimes have a tendency to be too clear.

How about queerobscuro? D'oh! Be careful what you ask for:

 Upon closer inspection, you see subtle clues hinting at a hidden LGBTQ+ presence. Maybe a courtier has a handkerchief with a discreet rainbow pattern, or two figures of the same sex stand a little too close for comfort, or perhaps a historical figure known for being LGBTQ+ is subtly included, like a writer disguised as a servant or a scientist with a knowing look.