The Only Defense Against Common Nonsense

While we await new and exciting cosmic insights, here is a synthesis of several reworked posts from a few years back:

Lotta innarestin' questions raised by Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange in this here new translation of Thomistic Common Sense. I'm not far into it, but so far it's a purt' good story. Made me cogitate to beat the band. Parts anyway. 

Just one thing: does he have to use s'many Latin words?

As we know, one of the perennial cosmic heresies of the left -- or alternatives to common sense -- is historicism. 

This common nonsense has a number of connotations, but the main idea is that all truth claims are historically conditioned and cannot be understood outside their historo-cultural matrix. In short, truth is a function of becoming rather than Being. 

It may be further reduced to the impossible anti-principle that all being is a long and windy road of endless becoming, so there are no permanent trans-historical truths accessible to man. Is this true? Don't ask.

Here we arrive at hell's bottom, the earthplace of such immanent ideologies as Marxism, multiculturalism, moral relativism, deconstruction, CRT, BLM, DEI -- indeed, to the coming reign of Kamalot, at least should we not exceed the margin of cheating. 

Like all cosmic heresies, historicism takes a perfectly useful and even trivial partial truth, but expands it all out of proportion -- as is true of any ideology. 

It reminds us of the perennial gag that philosophies are true in what they affirm, only becoming false in what they deny, in this case the ontological priority of Being.

Why is a metaphysic of pure becoming intrinsically false? Is that wrong? Is that frowned upon here?

I myself once dabbled in a philosophy of pure becoming, of cosmic evolutionism. It's a superficially attractive doctrine, since it sure looks like everything is always in process.  

At the other end of historicism is the proposition that the most important moral, political, and philosophical truths are timeless, necessary, universal, eternal, and self-evident; that they are "in the nature of things" and are accessible to any person in all conceivable times and places, for example, to our founders.

Garrigou-Lagrange agrees that 

there are fundamental metaphysical principles constituting the ground of enduring dogmatic truth, that people know without need for study. These principles allow dogmatic propositions to be ontologically understandable by all.

While Christian doctrine surely develops in time, it does not do so in any historicist manner that would negate what went before; rather, with the passage of time the Church "does not know 'more' revealed realities, but rather knows more of what is (and was) present in the revealed realities" all along. 

It reminds us of an aphorism, that

Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper.

Thus, as suggested in the previous post, there is metaphysical truth and "meta- metaphysical" revealed truth, and these two should be susceptible to harmonization -- which I'm working on -- whether explicitly or implicitly. 

For there is only One Truth; or, perhaps better, Truth is One, allowing for the multiplicity of truths that are only possible because each is anchored in the One and a reflection of it: at the center of everything is the very truth of being. 

Note, for example, that only a being who has transcended the becoming of evolution can even know about evolution.

Schuon has something important to say about this in an essay called Vicissitudes of Spiritual Temperaments: 

Human nature is made in such a way that it tends to enclose itself in some limitation, and this tendency can only be accentuated in an age that is everywhere engaged in destroying the framework of universality.  

IS. Not only is this an interesting little word, but it is probably the most important word in all of philosophy, since it is -- as Garrigou-Lagrange has written elsewhere -- the soul of every judgment.

In other words, a thing either is or it is not; every argument, philosophical or otherwise, ultimately reduces to whether or not something really exists and is therefore "really real." 

Philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, science -- each, in different ways, revolves around this business of isness. It's just common sense.

But if common sense is what is natural to all men, why is it so uncommon in our day? 

"Common sense," writes Garrigou-Lagrange, "is nothing other than spontaneous (or primordial) reason." It goes to those foundational principles without which reason is impossible, e.g., the immutable laws of identity, non-contradiction, causality, sufficient reason, finality, etc. Or in other words,   

Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest.

These are the very laws of intelligible being, laws we cannot ignore and still be logical: 

Common sense is the father's house to which philosophy returns, every so often, feeble and emaciated.

About which we will have much more to say in the next post.