Introduction to Reality

It seems one wouldn't have to be introduced to reality, but the Matrix gets to them so young these days, that it is possible to go straight from child to fully indoctrinated NPC without ever having made contact with it. So an introduction is indeed in order. 

Man is an animal that can be educated, provided that he does not fall into the hands of progressive pedagogues.

Modern education delivers intact minds to propaganda.

The fool, to be perfect, needs to be somewhat educated,

The learned fool has a wider field to practice his folly.

The leftist does not have opinions, only dogmas.

Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles.

Those who reject metaphysics secretly harbor the coarsest.

Intelligence is a train from which few do not deboard, one after the other, in successive stations.

All truths converge upon one truth, but the routes have been barricaded.

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

Etc. Taken together, it seems that thinking about reality involves taking the intellectual train all the way to the last -- and from the first -- station, which is to say, Being. Anything short of Being is not reality, precisely. For example, 

We are sure of the truth of the proposition that subsistent [or necessary] being exists.

This is because an infinite regression of caused causes "would not account for the least being in the world." Rather, "There would merely be an infinite series of existential zeros" which "would never add up to any being at all. In their sum total they would remain from start to finish existentially zero."

I'm not saying this is the best way to look at being, rather, the only way, because if one doesn't start with being -- with reality -- there is no way to get back to it. 

Nor can there be "two or more subsistent beings," because "all effects are from that one source." A vertical source, mind you, not a horizontal or temporal one. This principial source or ground 

occupies no space, It is not in any place, in the way definite extension locates a thing.... It has accordingly no past nor future, but has its existence all together. Its duration is an eternal now.... it is entirely unlimited. It is infinite.

Here again, this is the last station, the one truth upon which all truths converge, but to which the routes have been barricaded. Barricaded by progressive pedagogues and thought police.

Which leads to some form of cosmic anthropomorphism, which foolishly places "the nature and activity of the first cause on the same plane as our own." Which is to say, Genesis 3 All Over Again. 

A philosophy of being is the "process of making explicit what is implicit in the fact of existence." Now existence is a fact, or to hell with it. But it is not a self-explanatory fact, much less self-caused. Rather, "the production of things out of nothing is called creation, and the product creatures."

Here again, to usurp the first cause and elevate creatures to creator is just G3AOA.  

Now, only in subsistent being do essence and existence coincide, for its essence is to exist, precisely. For the restavus contingent beings, our being is an accident. Again, we didn't have to be, but here we are, participating in a beingness for which we aren't responsible. 

Rather, being was already here when we arrived on the scene, because it is always here and cannot not be here. Our being here adds nothing to being itself, which is again infinite, and infinite + x = infinite.

Now, about this matter of truth. It is

what the mind strives to attain in its own endeavors. It is reached when the intellect knows something as it actually is.... In a word, truth is reached in a judgment, when the judgment reaches the actual being of a thing.

Well, good. 

Where there is being, truth can be had by an intellect capable of knowing that being. Truth accordingly follows upon being, when being is considered in relation to any intellect that can know it.

If this is not the case -- if the intellect is not conformed to intelligible being -- then truly truly, we are done here: "The being may be called true, because it is able to ground the truth that is in the intellect." In short, "truth is being as conceived in relation to the intellect." 

Any alternative this is a non-starter. Nevertheless, we are immersed in these metaphysical non-starters which begin and end in the nothingness of finitude -- i.e., in existential nothingness because dismembered from intelligible being. Without being, nothing isn't even nothing, because nothing is just non-being; it is dependent, or parasitic, on being. 

Now, "The same world that exists in reality is the world that is known in thought." If this is not the case, then our knowledge again amounts to nothing, for knowledge of non-being isn't even knowledge, just absurdity.  

As intelligence, then, it it has as its object being; for as true all being is intelligible.

Isn't it? It certainly seems so, i.e., that "the human intellect has an unlimited range" because it is ordered to unlimited being, precisely: "The kinds of things that a man can know through his intellect are consequently unlimited." 

In conclusion this morning,

To know the truth about a thing, then, means to know that your judgment about it agrees with the thing as it actually is.... the natural desire of man  to know tends not only toward knowing things but also toward the truth about them.... 

Knowledge of truth, accordingly, is the perfection of the human intellect. It is the goal toward which the intellect strives.

Even if the goal has been barricaded, or if one deboards before the train has reached the station. 

In any event, we can all agree that postmodernity is a metaphysical train wreck.

(All quotes from An Elementary Christian Metaphysics.)