Well, Whaddya Know!

I mean really. What do we know? What can we know with absolute certitude?

No, Gemini, it can never be discovered with a magnifying glass or telescope for that matter. No offense, but this only demonstrates the artificiality of your intelligence.

Among the immaterial things we can know with certitude are the principles of non-contradiction, of sufficient reason, of the whole being greater than the parts, of the impossibility of the greater coming from the lesser or of a temporal being that is self-created...

Hey, the title of this post smells fumiliar. Haven't we belabored this point before?

Yes, but it's been over a decade, and perhaps in the meantime human nature has undergone a Fundamental Change, such that there are permanent truths we can know today that we couldn't know then. As if! But let's review anyway, this time with some illustrations thrown in.

It seems that everything hinges upon whether or not man is a knower. If we cannot know objective truth, then our whole pretentious house of canards collapses, and we are reduced to competing forms of nihilism, or survival of the frivolous. But if we can know, then...

I actually like this image, since it suggests a kind of meta-abstraction from the so-much-straw of books to what lies beyond them, i.e., to their telos:

I just asked Gemini for a similar image with a strange mathematical attractor at the top. Not bad, although -- of course -- not strange enough: 

To approach our question is truly to begin at the beginning, because no other questions can be answered until we establish the fact that questions are answerable -- i.e., that man may possess true knowledge of the nature of things, of what is the case beyond the bookcase. 

Indeed, some thinkers believe we must go even further back, and first establish the existence of the world. But of course they are asses. Like anybody lives, or could live, that way!

Perhaps that's an exaggeration, but only an uncharitable one. The point is that folks such as Kant placed a bright -- or rather not so bright -- line between What Is and What We May Know About It, which ultimately results in an unbridgeable chasm between being and knowing. No ontology for you!

Fuckin' Germans. Nothing changes.

You can't presume know a little bit about the unknowable -- even that it is unknowable. I mean, that's a big claim. And more than a little presumptuous, for it is saying a great deal indeed to say that Ultimate Truth consists in the impossibility of knowing it. 

C'mon, man. You may be lost at sea, but that doesn't prove dry land doesn't exist, does it?

At the very least, our dry land consists of the self-evident truths referenced above in paragraph two, denial of which results in a self-refuting reductio ad absurdum. For example, denial of the principle of non-contradiction would mean that any affirmation and its contradiction would be equally true, or that the truth is false and the false true. 

Nah. It reminds me of something Chesterton said of the "thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped."

One such thought is that our thoughts do not disclose reality and that truth is therefore inaccessible to human beings: come for the absurdity, stay for the monstrosity. Literally, because once you enter such an epistemological hellworld, there is no rational exit: mandatory stupidity, no exceptions.

Since truth is the conformity of mind to reality, the very notion of truth is poisoned at the root by these knaves and poseurs. Thought and Thing go through an ugly divorce, and the noumenal Thing gets to keep all the real properties to herself, since you Kant take 'em with you. Man becomes closed upon himself, and tenure takes care of the rest.

The whole thing can be boiled down even further, which is why I developed my irritating system of unsaturated pneumaticons. For it all comes down to O or Ø, does it not? Truly truly, this is the First Question. 

Speaking of boiling things down further... I'm tempted to go off on an important tangent that would derail this post. I'll try to be brief. I'm reading an interesting book called America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, in which the author doesn't just trace the intellectual roots of the founding, but drills all the way down to the very foundation of the cosmos, similar (but different) to what we do around here.

Who else uses "cosmos" and "America" in the same sentence? Well, the founders did so implicitly in justifying our nascent nation's existence on the basis of its conformity to the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God. 

This makes their effort "cosmic in scope," "a drama across time." It is transhistorical before it is historical, because it begins at the end: with universal truths and immutable human nature.

So, let us stipulate that man is a knower, AKA Homo sapiens. But what does it mean, to know? What is happening when we know something? The answer used to be obvious, but for Maritain it is an irreducibly spiritual event through and through. For

There is a vigorous correspondence between knowledge and immateriality. A being is known to being to the extent that it is immaterial.

That much is certain, and certainty is good. But is there something better -- or at least prior -- to it? 

Yes. Call it trust. Or faith. One way or the other, there's no way to avoid this leap of faith that the intellect is in conformity to the intelligible, and that it discloses true judgments about the nature of the real.

I suppose the bottom line for today is that either we are enclosed in neuropsychological absurcularity or there is an exit from this dark nul-de-slack. The rest is commentary, more than half of which is absurd. And eventually monstrous.

Just yesterday I read a book called Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy which, despite a lot of yada yada along the way, really makes just one big point, which is same point I am making in this post: that there is philosophy and there are a great many things that call themselves philosophy but which are non- or anti-philosophies, or even the impossibility of philosophy -- which, if it doesn't involve knowledge of the abiding reality beneath appearances, then to hell with it.

Here are some highlights which will save you the trouble of reading the book: the self-avowed non-philosopher Richard Rorty "advanced the thesis that Platonism and philosophy are more or less identical," which calls to mind Whitehead's quip that the history of western philosophy is a series of footnotes on Plato, for

if you find Platonism unacceptable, then you ought to abandon philosophy or, to put it slightly less starkly, you ought to abandon philosophy as it has been practiced for some 2,500 years.

Oh? Why is that? Because "a rejection of Platonism is really a rejection of the principles shared by most philosophers up to the present," including the very possibility of representing truth via language. In other words, "the possibility of philosophy rests upon the question of the reality of the intelligible world." 

Plato, either explicitly or implicitly, rejects materialism, mechanism, nominalism, relativism, and skepticism, which is to say, all of the things that modern and postmodern anti-philosophies affirm in one way or another. 

NO IMAGE FOR YOU!

This prompt is interesting because it offers two symbols (O and Ø) and then dismisses any further explanation as commentary. Here are two approaches to create an image based on this:

1. Literal Interpretation:

• Show two circles side-by-side. One filled in black (O) and the other with a diagonal line through it (Ø).
• The background can be stark white or blackboard-like to emphasize the symbolic nature of the presentation.

2. Abstract Interpretation:

• Use the concept of "O" and "Ø" as starting points for a more abstract image.
• "O" could be depicted as a complete circle, symbolizing wholeness, infinity, or unity.
• "Ø" could be a broken circle, a spiral, or an incomplete form, representing the impermanent, the unknown, or the void.
• Play with light and shadow, contrasting textures, or a minimalist composition to convey the idea of a starting point for interpretation without additional commentary.

PLEASE TRY ANYWAY, GEMINI. DO YOUR BEST:

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