When Normality is Absurd, Absurdity is Normal

Just a couple of old posts radically revised to meet the current standard and to see what kinds of images Gemini can come up with.

The first -- and in a way, only -- task of philosophy is to distinguish reality from appearances. Reality, of course, is one. If you do not accept this principle, then you are dismissed. For to differ on a principle so fundamental is to differ on everything else. 

As the Aphorist reminds us, 

Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles.

And 

Intelligent discussion should be reduced to clarifying divergences.

Therefore, it follows that the most intelligent discussion involves the clarification of differing fundamental principles. 

For example, we say political violence in a free society is always wrong. Conversely, the left believes it is good so long as it is being committed by the left, and besides, their violence is the mostly peaceful kind.

But on what deeper principle can the left's seemingly contradictory stance be founded? It can't necessarily be the principle that "might makes right," for if gangs of deplorable MAGA rioters and looters were to burn down our cities to exert political pressure, the left would immediately recognize it as fascism.

Nevertheless, there is a deeper (or lower) principle involved in the left's seeming lack of principle, most ably articulated by comrade Lenin; for him, the question always comes down to: Who and Whom. When the left is the hammer, it is Good; conversely, when the left is the anvil, it is Evil. 

We see the same principle with regard to racism: it is always bad unless the left engages in it. Thus, DEI and affirmative action are just racial profiling under new management.  

Back to our main theme, which is the one reality and its many alternatives. Now, man is always arguing 1) from principle; 2) toward principle; or 3) from or toward any or no principle at all, this latter corresponding to the intellectual Calvinball of the left. 

A normal person...

TRIGGER WARNING ACTIVATED!

The very word "normal" is controversial, for one of the first principles of the left is that there can be no such thing as normality because there is no such thing as human nature. "Normality" presupposes a transcendent telos -- the attainment of one's proper end -- but transcendence presupposes a divine ground, which is out of bounds for the left.

This principle-of-no-principle leads directly to a host of "illogically logical" entailments such as men can be women or marriage can be anything. For the normal person these are absurdities, but for the absurd person they are normalities. How can one argue with a person who doesn't even bow to the principle of non-contradiction? One can't. Not really. 

Nevertheless, we believe in human nature and in normality, including intellectual normality. Is there such a thing? Of course there is: for it is identical to asking whether truth exists. Supposing it does, then surely it is normal to conform to it. Conversely, if it is normal to be out of conformity with reality, then this equates to saying that mental illness is normal, and here we are.  

Now, to reject the transcendent reality of human nature is to reject any transcendent principle of objective morality. Again, give comrade Lenin credit for rigorous intellectual honesty and for arguing from first (anti-)principles:

We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts.... there is no such thing as a morality that stands outside human society; that is a fraud. To us morality is subordinated to the interests of the proletariat's class struggle.... all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters.

Mass struggle against the exploiters. Or, in our day, the left's victim culture whereby certain citizens are innocent and others guilty by virtue of immutable characteristics such as Whiteness or Maleness or Heteronormativity. 

About the principle of non-contradiction that both permits and constrains normal thought, a recent Hillsdale Imprimus discusses this in the context of Orwell's 1984:

As the first essential step of his education, Winston has to learn doublethink -- a way of thinking that defies the law of contradiction [which] is the basis of all reasoning, the means of making sense of the world.

Note well this last sanity clause, for it means that denying the law of non-contradiction renders one forever insane, i.e., incapable of making sense of the world. And there's a name for a world that isn't susceptible to rational sense: hell.

Speaking of which, here's a fine example:

In our time, the law of non-contradiction would mean that a governor, say, could not simultaneously hold that the COVID pandemic renders church services too dangerous to allow, and also that massive protest marches are fine (ibid.).

PART TWO

Postmodernism begins and ends with the anti-principle that objective truth is unattainable by man, and that to think otherwise is the gateway to tyranny, since it is just a mask of Power. Which they should know, since they are firmly in control of most of the mechanisms of politico-cultural power. 

But no one -- assuming sanity and intellectual honesty -- can consistently argue for the existence of "things that are not," much less "things that can never be," for this equates to the real existence of the unreal. In essence it is to argue that There is no possibility of truth, and that's the truth.

This goes to one of the more subtle proofs of (or ways to) God. The problem, of course, is that 

Proofs for the existence of God abound for those who do not need them.

Thus, no amount of proof is sufficient for the person without a knack for these things, i.e., metaphysical vision, intuition, gnosis, common sense, pneumacognition, and/or infused contemplation.

Ultimately -- and this is not a tautology -- 

The sole proof of the existence of God is His existence.

The reason this is not a tautology is that the final proof of God is the intellectual and/or experiential realization of his necessity, or of Necessary Being, AKA the Absolute.

In the book Transcendence and History by Glenn Hughes, he affirms that 

First of all, the timeless ground is real. The structure of reality includes the transcendent ground of meaning, which we experience through participation. It is a "flow of presence" in all human consciousness, whether we attend to it or not, and however sophisticated or unsophisticated our imaginative or conceptual portrayals of it.

So, the irreducible structure of reality is an experiential and participatory flow of presence, which is present to us in the form of a spiraling movement toward increased depth and richness, sponsored at every step of the journey by the always already complete but uncontainable transcendent ground of being. This presence

is understood precisely as the nonfinite condition for the existence and good of every finite thing. Every place becomes the place of the intersection of the timeless with time. And human being is where that intersection comes to self-recognition and self-realization, where the flow of eternal divine presence orients temporal existence, through human consciousness, toward timeless meaning and truth.

So, exactly what is the nature of this place we call reality? Correct: it is at the crossroads of transcendence and immanence, or at the innersection of the vertical and horizontal poles. Thus, human beings are always situated

in the "in between," in a temporal flow of experience in which eternity is nevertheless present.... [A]t every point of the flow there persists the tension toward eternal being transcending time.

Although Hughes doesn't express it this way, my view is that in a trinitarian cosmos -- or a cosmos everywhere stamped with the imprimatur of the Trinity -- our presence to Being is not so much a "place" as a relation, or a "place of relation," and why not?

Because only in this way do we avoid the twin errors of a radical transcendence or immanence, i.e., denial of half the experience -- of any experience, since experience itself is always in the Between. Pure immanence, for example, would equate to the experience of matter, which is no experience at all.

We'll leave off with this passage, because we agree with every word of it:

History is not simply the unfolding of time; it is the intersection of the timeless with time. Historical progress, consequently, is not simply movement forward on a time line. It is, most essentially, success in attuning social and personal life to the truths of timeless meaning, a success that waxes and wanes...

And with our self-styled progressives in the saddle, it is mostly waning. Indeed, it is wane's world, and we just live in it. But what cannot continue will not continue. And in reality the waxing is always already underway, if you know where to look.