Coon Mind, Beginner's Mind

Since we don't know how far off the end of the human journey is, we have no way of knowing how close we are to the beginning. 2,000, or 10,000, or 50,000 years might seem like a long time from our present perspective, but these may represent relative drops in the temporal bucket. The human journey may be just getting off the pre-human ground. 

Even on an individual basis it takes a long time to wrap one's mind around being one of these humans. I'm shocked that more people aren't shocked that they exist. Frankly it makes me a little... ill at ease. 

Might not one even say that the deepest meaning for anything is to exist? If a person had no existence, what could anything else mean for him?

.... Without existence, either real or cognitional, nothing else matters for a thing. Being, rather, is the primary consideration in meaning. Without it, a thing cannot have any meaning at all. Being is what is most striking, what is deepest, in everything (Owens).

So, being here at all is the last word in (?!). Nothing requires that we exist, and yet, here we are. Being "is universally what makes a thing different from nothing." Although "originally known in the concrete," it "can also be known in the abstract." Thus, Being is "the supreme genera," uniting everything "in its embrace." It is "absolutely basic in sensible things."  

At any rate, as depicted in the film 2001, perhaps the gap between the bone cudgel and the starship is but a blink of the eye. The first invention implies the eventual invention of invention, and here we are.

Having said that, despite all the new inventions, invention as such has apparently been slowing down since reaching a high point on a per capita basis in the mid 19th century, this due, according to Dutton, to a to a precipitous decline in intelligence. 

Could be, but we may have to wait another thousand years to see if the DEI trend -- or Kamala Factor -- continues. Either way it wouldn't surprise me, history being full of upside and downside surprisal.

What has been the biggest surprise of history apart from my own appearance? For every person must regard his own existence as the biggest surprise, all other surprises being number two, or lower. 

Probably the Incarnation, supposing it happened. Truly truly, no one saw that one coming, or did they? Certain prophets, poets, and myths certainly made out its dim outlines, but that's the subject of a different post. This one is about what man knew, and when he knew it.

Or perhaps about what we cannot not know, and when we forgot it. 

As to the Beginner's Mind in the title, I'm reading yet another Elementary Christian Metaphysics, which is not so elementary to this metaphysical beginner. It's another one of those books that was first published a couple of generations ago, when it certainly seems that our undergraduates were more intelligent than today's postgraduates.

More generally, metaphysics is certain habit of mind which takes practice. The practice is made more difficult in light of the fact that everything in our contemporary culture is anti-metaphysical, anti-intellectual, and (therefore) anti-human, so one is always swimming against the current. Probably this is why readers like their daily dose of Bob. 

Of course, I am patient zero, and physician heal thysoph. I am both the dolt and anti-dolt, the illness and the treatment. However, we are all individuals, so it seems that a treatment that is effective for this person may not be perfectly effective for that one. Which is no doubt why my audience grows more selective by the day.

But one thing we know for certain is that self-cure is out of the question -- that there is an outside vertical x-factor that is a necessary condition, even if we are the sufficient condition, supposing we cooperate with that sine qua non. 

For the Christian, Christ's redemptive act is the necessary condition (the condition without which), but this doesn't leave us out of it, for our cooperation becomes the sufficient condition (the with which made possible due to the prior without which). To say that "with God all things are possible" is to say they are impossible without him, for they lack their necessary condition, precisely.

As to swimming against the tide, Owens observes that 

metaphysical thinking goes against the natural bent of human intellection. Man is a sensible nature and he thinks in terms of sensible natures. It is through sensible natures that he has to understand being, as best he can.

The Raccoon, of course, is bent differently, in that no one would accuse him of being a sensible man, the question being whether he is a nonsensical man:

[O]f what use will such knowledge be? Aristotle was quite outspoken in maintaining that metaphysical knowledge was pursued for no use at all. It could not be subordinated to anything else, for it was the highest goal that man could achieve. It was an end in itself, and was not meant for anything outside itself. 

In fact, it has "a far higher value than the useful," so there. It is meta-useful. For example, 

Have you ever tried to realize how much it means to know things? 

Then you just might be a Raccoon, which is to say, someone as interested in knowing things as knowing knowing, AKA the perfect nonsense of meta-knowledge. 

Such meta-knowledge is indeed completely abstract, immaterial, and supra-sensible, and cannot even be imagined, rather, abiding only in the intellect: "In its own nature metaphysics exists only in intellects, and not in books or writings."

The physical sciences, bound to qualitative and quantitative procedures, are therefore totally unable to reach the properly supersensible plane.

We are not content with mere knowing, but again, want to know about knowing, not to mention the knower. Such folks 

are not sufficiently at ease in their spiritual life until they have made the journey over the trails that reason blazes into the supersensible. For such persons metaphysical thinking will form an integral part of a Christian life. 

In case you were wondering why you are so ill at ease with the Matrix, or with any ready-made system at all. 

Rather, we want to know "how the various orders of things fit together into one complete universe, and how the individual sciences are to be integrated in their functions of explaining such a world."

In short, we want to know how and why this is One Cosmos Under God, or something.