To repeat what was said yesterpost, there is a fundamental and ineradicable difference between man and animal, and that's all there is to it. Indeed, to deny it is to affirm it.
In the final unalysis -- or synthesis -- man is "Total intelligence, free will, and disinterested sentiment," with the consequent vocation to know the True, will the Good, and love the Beautiful, and why not? What's the alternative? Believing the false, doing bad, and celebrating the ugly?
Leave progressives alone!
Moreover, man is an open system, both vertically and horizontally: he "possesses a subjectivity not closed in on itself, but open to others and unto Heaven" (Schuon).
Maybe you don't like the word "heaven." If so, just say "transcendent telos." And if that's too fancy, just say O.
I'm partial to telovator.
Say what you want, but "Without objectivity and transcendence there cannot be man, there is only the human animal."
The performative contradiction of "absolute relativism" is the stupid beyond which there can be no stupider, whereby "the abuse of intelligence replaces wisdom," and here we are.
Again, these are all authoritative truths vested with the authority of your own intelligence, or intelligence as such. Intelligence has the right to Truth, or to hell with it.
Now, how does this square with the book under discussion, David Bentley Hart's All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life? For some reason he chose to write the book in the form of a dialogue with four characters, each a voice of the author himself, including a snarky materialist skeptic who speaks
for my doubts and hesitations, my impatience with an attitude of certitude where some degree of uncertainty seems not only inevitable but virtuous, and perhaps even for my frustration at not being any better able than anyone else is to prove my convictions on these issues to be absolutely correct, to the world at large or even to myself.
Why would someone include other voices in his own writing?
Good question, Petey.
It is not so much that men change their ideas, as that the ideas change their disguises. In the discourse of the centuries, the same voices are in dialogue.
Good observation, Nicolás.
Speaking of Gödelian incompleteness,
almost all of the solutions regularly proposed to the question of the origin and nature of mind are not really solutions at all, but rather mere reformulations of the question itself, restating it in ways that momentarily... look like answers.
The name "Gödel" does not appear in the index, but of course such mechanistic and reductive pseudo-explanations are circular: materialism in, tenure out.
In many cases, the entire project of the philosophy of mind today is simply an elaborate effort to arrive at the prejudice as though it were a rationally entailed conclusion, no matter what contortions of reasoning this might require.
I remember someone saying something about the abuse of intelligence replacing wisdom.
It would be difficult to exaggerate how fanatical this devotion to an essentially mechanistic materialism can prove at times. Otherwise seemingly sane and intelligent persons regularly advance arguments that, but for their deep and fervent faith in a materialist picture of nature, they would undoubtedly recognize as absurd and circular.
Absurcular, to coin a word.
We know from our Voegelin how ideological second realities are superimposed on the one & only. Come to think of it, we also know this from Genesis 3.
In the discourse of the centuries, the same voices are in dialogue.
Yes, you already mentioned that.
This is the chief danger in any ideology: the power of determining our vision of the world before we have ever turned our eyes toward it.
The idea is to check one's theory in light of the evidence: "only in modern philosophy of mind is it routinely the case that the phenomenon is eliminated in favor of the theory," such that reason becomes captive to an "arid dogmatism."
Only in modern philosophy of mind? How about in politics, academia, journalism, COVID, climate change, gender ideology, and the racial grievance industry, for starters?
Now, one thing we've suggested in the past is that the mysteries of life, mind, and language (or meaning) converge at the top (or rather, descend from it), and are otherwise groundless and inexplicable.
Someone ought to write a bʘʘK.
Hart agrees that not only are Life and Mind "irreducible," but "they are one and the same irreducibility." He bungs in Language "as yet another aspect of one and the same irreducible phenomenon, ultimately inexplicable in mechanistic terms."
After all, it is One Cosmos.
We also often highlight the mysterious ordering of intelligence to intelligibility, and how these are two sides of an Infinite Act of Intelligence. Well, a careful investigation of this cosmic situation
discloses an absolute engagement of the mind in an infinite act of knowing that is nothing less than the source and end of all three of these realities [mind, life, language], and indeed of all things; or, to say this more simply, all acts of the mind are participations in the mind of God.
Or even more simply, open engagement with O.
As we so often say, any truth is a participation in, and reflection of, the Truth without which there can be none. The material order "originates in the spiritual," and "all rational activity,"
from the merest recognition of an object of perception, thought, or will to the most involved process of ratiocination, is possible only because of the mind's constant, transcendental preoccupation with an infinite horizon of intelligibility that, for want of a better word, we should call God...
And "the existence of all things is possible only as the result of an infinite act of intelligence that, once again, we should call God."
That's the same infinite horizon of intelligibility we often call O, since God tends to be saturated with so many idiosyncratic and conflicting meanings, prejudices, and preconceptions that it may interfere with the larger point, that the only alternative to this view is the absurcular tenured animal alluded to above.
Maybe a good place to pause. This might take a while.
4 comments:
(sorry if this publishes multiple times, Google is glitching)
Why would someone include other voices in his own writing?
Ha - indeed. I suppose if he didn't, it would all just be a monologue instead of a conversation.
We all contain multitudes. It's a matter of containing them.
Keep in mind he also published the book "Roland in Midnight" a few years back where he dialogues with his dog. (Roland was really his dog, and recently passed.) So the multitudes includes the canines too in his world.
Note, dogs are ensouled beings. We recognize animals as junior partners, spirit children as it were, of Earth. Now we know they don't do the heavy lifting, but there's no reason to count them out of a spiritual life. Animals go on to become people, and before we lived this life as a person, we lived many, many animal lives. Respect for the beasties.
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