The First Guest on Our Imaginary Podcast

I guess I'm not quite yet prepared to tackle the Principle of Everything. A little more immersion is required before I can boil it down to something more digestible. Funsized, as it were. 

While I am profiting immensely from the book (Christ the Logos of Creation), it requires intense and sustained cooncentration (600 pages worth), nor does it help that it is repetitive, full of overly cautious reservations, qualifications, and having-said-thats, and has far too much respectful engagement with other philosophers, metaphysicians, and theologians whom I would dispatch with my customary flippancy.

The goal, of course, is to boil it down to something that could be printed on a tee-shirt, or perhaps a series of aphorisms or jehovial witticisms, recalling Wittgenstein's observation that A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes. 

What the author is saying is desperately needed to be heard, but not in this form. Rather, straight to the point, pulling no punches.  

Meanwhile, four years ago we were rifling through Voegelin's mail, and noticed a reference to Balthasar's A Theology of History, which prompted us to reread the latter. Akashic records indicate that we first read it in 2004, which, truth be told, is before we could have possibly understood it. We are now much more qualified for such an undertaking.

Looks like we only got up to page 40 or so before throwing in the towel, so "reread" isn't quite accurate. But nor is "reading" the correct word, because we were just as capable of reading then as we are today. What's going on here?  

Whether due to limitations in Herr von B or in us, we often find him obscure and wordy, which, somewhat paradoxically, go together, possibly because it would take a genius to edit a genius. No offense, but 

Wordiness is not an excess of words, but a dearth of ideas.

Only ideas save us from adjectives.

The deluded are prolix.

The idea that does not win over in twenty lines does not win over in two thousand pages.

Nevertheless, -- we will dispense with the royal we -- this time around I understood more than I did the first time. And I wonder if this in turn speaks to Voegelin's theory of history, in that the cosmos I inhabited in 2004 was less luminous than the one I am sitting in today. 

The quest, thus, has no external "object," but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable.

It reminds me of the phrase "shedding light on the subject." The subject hasn't changed, but somehow I -- the subject engaging with the subject -- am able to shed more light on it (or it on me). 

In any event, it's all about the Light, speaking of irreducible principles we will be getting back to vis-a-vis The Principle of Everything.

Voegelin calls Balthasar's tome a "masterwork of its kind," and claims it "is the most competent philosophy of history from a strict Catholic position that has ever come under my eyes." 

Credit where it is due: I do understand the first sentence:

Since man began to philosophize he has sought to grasp things by distinguishing two elements: the factual, singular, sensible, concrete and contingent; and the necessary and universal (and because universal, abstract), which has the validity of a law rising above the individual case and determining it.

This is a profoundly important point, going to the ultimate (from the human end) categories of essence and existence, transcendence and immanence, heaven and earth, dirt below and inbreathed spirit from above, and other cosmic complementarities we will soon be discussing in more detail. 

In short, man -- the human person -- always inhabits (or points toward) two realms which can be formulated in different ways, but it is strictly impossible to reduce one to the other. Not only does this correspond "to man's way of knowing" but "to the structure of being." 

Which is a good thing, because it means that knowing corresponds to being, or epistemology to ontology. How convenient is that -- that we are in touch with reality!

Having said that, there is a person in whom these two vectors are indeed reduced to one, AKA God, whose essence is to exist and whose existence is essential, which is to say, Necessary Being.

Consider the Kantian alternative: knowing and being are like two circles with no contact. All we can ever know is the phenomenal. The noumenal -- the thing in itself -- is forever unknowable.

In other words, to claim reality is unknowable is to claim a great deal indeed about reality. How does he know it's unknowable? Who is he, God?

Notice that Kant cannot help distinguishing the two elements as described by Balthasar. However, he doesn't so much distinguish as drive a permanent wedge between them. 

For the Raccoon, this is literally the most soph-defeating thing one could possibly do, for it seals one in a state of permanent and ineradicable stupidity, and why? Just to preserve a perverse form of poorly understood Christianity?

Let's open up the lines. Our first caller is Frithjof from Bloomington, Indiana. Hello Frithjof. Am I pronouncing that right?

No. Not close.

Okay. May I call you Fritz?

Not even my friends call me that. You may call me Shaykh. 

Let's move on. I understand that you disagree with Kant?

Yes, Bob -- is that how you pronounce it? Longtime listener, first time caller.

For starters, Kant's whole approach is reducible to a gratuitous reaction against all that lies beyond the reach of reason; it is an instinctive revolt against truths which are rationally ungraspable and which are considered annoying on account of this very inaccessibility. All the rest is nothing but dialectical scaffolding, ingenious or "brilliant" if one wishes, but contrary to truth.

Let's get ready to rumble! Sounds like you're accusing Kant of an impeccable logic starting from a basic error?

Thaaat's right, Bob. What is crucial in Kantianism is its altogether irrational desire to limit intelligence; this results in a dehumanization of the intelligence and opens the door to all the inhuman aberrations of our century, to say nothing of the previous one. 

In short, if to be man means the possibility of transcending oneself intellectually, Kantianism is the negation of all that is essentially and integrally human.

So by committing logocide, as it were, modern and postmodern philosophy redound to genocide?

Indeed, Bob. Negations on this scale are an assault on the very dignity, value, and meaning of the human station. The true philosopher and metaphysician is not just open to reality, but open to the fact of intellection itself. In the grand scheme of things, primordial intellection is as it were the "first word" that never stops speaking. Our friend Eckhart says as much.

Conversely, the modern philosopher wishes to have the "last word," and this last word is ideology in all its grotesque forms, from Marx to Comte -- scientism, positivism, progressivism, the whole ball of wax.

Wax or whacks?

Both: seeking to free himself from the servitude of the mind, the ideologue falls into infra-logic. In closing himself above to the light of the intellect, he opens himself below to the darkness of the subconscious.

Isn't that an insult to Satan? Is he really that stupid -- as stupid as, say, Obama?

Never heard of her. 

No, Satan is not that stupid. But the people who are seduced by him render themselves stupid thereby. 

You've heard the old line by Mencken: the demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. Satan is the world's most accomplished demagogue. 

As it applies to Kant, unintelligence is put forward as a "doctrine" and definitively installed in European "thought," giving birth to countless monsters of ideology. Hence the whacks. Ideology means that some group or class is not only subject to a good whacking, but with impunity for the wacked whackers.

Are you not being a little rough on the sage of Königsberg?

Some people may reproach us with a lack of due consideration, but we would ask what due consideration is shown by philosophers who shamelessly slash down the wisdom of countless centuries. 

For Kant, intellectual intuition -- of which he does not understand the first word -- is a fraudulent manipulation which throws a moral discredit onto all authentic intellectuality. That includes you, Bob. Are you going to just take it, or fight back with equal energy?

No one, least of all your so-called sage, knows the limits of thought. To the extent that he pretends to know them, he has discovered only his own self-imposed limits. By its very nature the intellect is in principle unlimited or it is nothing.

We're coming up against a hard break. Care to summarize?

One can try. Kantian “criticism" decrees that no one can know anything, just because they themselves know nothing, or desire to know nothing.

You are alluding to the tenured? 

Correct: if the intelligence as such is limited, what guarantee do we have that its operations, including those of critical philosophy, are valid? Any so-called philosopher who casts doubt on man’s normal subjectivity thereby casts doubt upon his own doubting. 

So, modern and postmodern philosophers are anything but?

Think about it: if our intelligence is incapable of adequation, then there is likewise nothing to prove that the intelligence expressing this doubt is competent to doubt. 

Analogously, if the optic nerve has to be examined in order to prove vision is real, it will likewise be necessary to examine that which examines the optic nerve, an absurdity which proves in its own indirect way that knowledge of suprasensible things is intuitive and cannot be other than intuitive.

Moreover, since philosophy by definition could never limit itself to the description of phenomena available to common observation, it is perfectly consistent only when exceeding itself -- like man himself, who, should he fail to transcend himself, sinks beneath himself.

Speaking of putting listeners to sleep, I want to say a few words about my friend Mike Lindell at my pillow.com...