The Fraternal Battle, Continued

I said at the end of the previous post that today we'll continue with the theme of the Brother Battle and the Invulnerable Philosophical Propositions. One brother has those superior propositions at the ready, while the other brothers's philosophical weapons are comparatively enfeebled. In case you missed it, this image was generated from yesterday's post:

Now, precisely because Brother #2 has unreflectively taken on board his flimsy principles, he isn't aware that he has done so. In a way, it's a case of philosophical Dunning Kruger: the weaker your principles, the less aware you are of their weakness. 

Conversely, the stronger your principles, the more aware you are of their ultimate weakness -- or rather, their weakness in the face of the Ultimate (O), which both undergirds thought but is itself unmappable. 

Here is another image of where we are in today's post. Obviously, Brother #1 has the bigger sword:

He who understands the least is he who insists on understanding more than what can be understood.

Those who reject all metaphysics secretly harbor the coarsest.

Thought can avoid the idea of God as long as it limits itself to meditating on minor problems.

The intellectual capital of the adult is often restricted to a small lottery he won in adolescence.

I -- or rather, brother Dávila -- could go on all day, but you get the point. Brother #2 is always the adultolescent who won that small intellectual lottery. 

And it is precisely because of his intelligence that he won it. I don't want to get sidetracked, but I'm reading an interesting book called The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution. 

That's weird. I misplaced the book. Suffice it to say, these are the good students who are quick to assimilate any nonsense thrown their way (for example, those pro-Hamas Hitler youth who are simply regurgitating what they learned in class). Often enough -- you will have noticed --

A high IQ is indicative of a distinguished mediocrity.

But for Brother #1,

That which is incomprehensible increases with the growth of the intelligence.

Ultimately,

Agreement is eventually possible between intelligent men because intelligence is a conviction they share. 

In other words, the very principle of Intelligence as such. Which -- obviously -- is only intelligent to the extent that it knows the truth of reality. Which many otherwise intelligent brothers claim is not knowable. 

But we say with brother Brennan: "The object of sense is a sensible, and the object of intellect is an intelligible." Yes, it's a Big Leap, but if you can't bring yourself to take it, you're done: you can't acknowledge anything.

Speaking for mysoph, the surface of my laptop is sensible, but I am deploying my fingers to both seek and describe the intelligible object, which is to say, O. It's rather simple: "When the mental judgment is in conformity with the way things are it is true," but "When judgment fails to match a state of affairs, it is defective, false" (McInerny).

Analogously, I could sit at the piano and use my fingers to try to discover a "musical intelligible," but the object wouldn't be very deep or complex. But supposing one has mastered an instrument, one may use it to discover music and snatch a nearby tune from the ether, like so:

An object of the senses must somehow be rendered immaterial in order to be understood, otherwise it remains entirely unthinkable; nor can one sense be combined with another unless this higher synthesis takes place in an immaterial space that transcends matter. 

So, how does the intelligibility -- and the corresponding intelligence to know and understand it -- get in here? Why is there even an in in things and in us? 

These are such basic questions -- in fact, among the first questions the human being asks once he has located food, shelter, and beer.

Recall too that ears know nothing of light, as eyes know nothing of sound (at least without a little help from a psychoactive friend). And yet, the senses are effortlessly integrated within the higher space of the intellect.

You could say that Brother #1 begins and ends here:

It is self-evident that truth exists, since to deny it is to affirm it. Truth exists because there are true judgments. But any truth is a participation in truth itself. But God is truth. So it is self-evident that God exists (McInerny).

Or, as formulated by Bernard Lonergan,

If the totality of reality is completely intelligible, then God exists.

But the totality of reality is completely intelligible.

Therefore God exists. 

As we always say, if you can prove anything, you can prove everything. Or in other words, to say man is to say O.