Being Is, Therefore I Am

I was still thinking about learned ignorance and the ignorance of the learned when I remembered a tweet by the late lamented Happy Acres guy that crystalized an important aspect of the problem: "Recently, and in its defense, I've heard leftism likened to Credo quia absurdum."

Or, in plain English, I believe because it is absurd. 

Now, no one should believe something merely because it is absurd, but the deeper point is that superior truths often appear absurd to inferior, trollish minds struggling to grasp matters above their comprehension. 

Call it metaphysical Dunning Kruger, and there is no question that it is a genuine limitation. Schuon has many comments and asnides along these lines, for example, that if all men were capable of metaphysics, there would be no atheists. 

Being is not absurd, but it is absurd to imagine we could ever exhaust or contain what contains us. Nevertheless, you can well imagine how the credentialed midwit might pretend otherwise. In reality,

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

Or simultaneously increases and decreases, such that the more we know, the less we realize we know (or the more there is to real-ize).

Proof of metaphysical Dunning Krugery resides in the tenured and all who come under their malign influence, because it is precisely the somewhat intelligent who are most susceptible to internalizing the truth or paradigm or false ideological certitudes of the day. 

Thus the tyranny of inferior minds, which is the very principle of DEI if not Our Democracy™ itself:

In an essay called The Philosophical Spirit and the Sense of Mystery, Fr. Garriguou-Lagrange provides a helpful map to the stars and beyond. What is it, he asks, that "differentiates the philosophical spirit not only from common knowledge but also from knowledge obtained by the cultivation of sciences that are inferior to philosophy"?  The former

differs from them above all and essentially by its formal object and by the point of view under which it considers its object. 

This or that science establishes only "the laws of phenomena" -- for example, the object of physics is the material world, while the object of mathematics is the quantitative world. 

But to reduce reality to what mathematics or physics can say about it is an error that is fatal to the intellect, since it eclipses its proper object, which is to say, intelligible Being itself. 

It is to put the effect before the cause, the part before the whole, the many before the one, existence before essence, matter before form, accident before substance, exterior before interior, container before contained, related before Relation, potentiality before actuality, possible before necessary, surface before substrate, appearance before reality.

Ultimately you could say man before God, but that is the subject of a slightly different post.

In any event, as a result of this inversion the intellect literally sophicates, since it is created to breathe in the upper atmasphere of Being. 

With regard to the latter, yesterday I read a little book called Metaphysics: A Basic Introduction in a Christian Key, which sings the following:

In the beginning, all. In the end, all. Being before beginning. Being after end. For being, beginning is end and end is beginning because being is. Being prior to existence because anything that stands out in its being thanks to being. Being before me because it is clear that there was a time -- most of the time -- when I was not. Thanks to being I am.

Which is either clearly absurd or absurdly clear. For Garrigou-Lagrange,

the sciences that are inferior to philosophy, such as the positive and mathematical sciences, in certain senses resemble sense knowledge insasmuch as they have objects that are less universal than philosophy's object [which is to say, being].

Empirical knowledge, for example, can know only of this or that man. But the intellect transcends the particular and ascends to knowledge of mankind, to the universal. Without this mysterious operation, "no other knowledge would be possible." Indeed, even to deny it is to affirm it.

St. Thomas is not promulgating a theory, much less an ideology. Rather, he is simply describing what we are spontaneously doing when we think: we are thinking about intelligible being. The alternatives are to not think at all or to think about non-being.

This latter defines the left, for to think about non-being is to affirm things -- to make judgments -- that are not the case. The purpose of the leftist education-indoctrination complex is not to help the intellect reach beyond the stars but to clip its wings and mire it in sub-celestial pseudo-realities. It is a trap, literally. 

But the trap is ultimately self-imposed, as the inscape hatch is always present in the truly philosophical spirit, which

seeks to connect, in an explicit and distinct manner, all things to the most universal, simple, first principles. That is, the philosophical spirit wishes to connect all things to the most general laws of being and of the real.

The intellect perceives "the mysteries of the natural order where the common outlook sees no mystery; indeed, it sees them where even the inferior sciences do not suspect there to be such mysteries." 

The most prominent mysteries are present to us in the vertical interstices of reality -- for example, where matter somehow becomes animate, where biology becomes self-aware, or where intellect conforms to intelligible being. 

Suffice it to say that none of these mysterious discontinuities are eliminated with recourse to reductionism; this merely deluminates the mystery and drags the intellect from the celestial to the terrestrial -- like an ontological fall or something.

For between matter and even the most teenytiny sensation of matter is an abyss -- an abyss that is Against the Law -- the law of a scientism that pretends the lower can be the sufficient reason of the higher. Such dull and unimaginative sorts

never see any mystery, any profundity, in the same place where the philosopher is astonished with the wonderment that is, as Aristotle has said, the very beginning of science. 

We'll leave off here. Let's just repeat that Being Is, but that this is hardly the end of it, rather, only the beginning -- or again, the beginning and end.