The Authority of Intelligence Itself

Once things in my head began to settle down a bit, I became fixated on the subject of subjects, which are literally the last thing you'd expect to pop up in a universe with nothing but objects for 10 billion years. Suffice it to say, it is an enduring mystery how to squeeze a subject out of an object.  

Which is one of the themes of the book we will soon be discussing, supposing it draws me in, which it may or may not do. I can't say I care for his -- what's the word?

Hoity toity? Highfalutin?  

Whatever you call it, his pompous prose doesn't meet the down-to-earth standards of the Raccoon Style Guide, but who does? Some have the style but not the substance, while some have the substance but not the style.  

Ian McGilchrist -- whose latest book we spent a month reviewing last year -- likes the book, even calling Hart "one of the greatest living writers on theology and the cosmos," but we'll be the judge of that. 

He goes on to call it "a telling counter-argument  to reductionist materialism" that is "subtle, imaginative, beautifully written -- and highly original."

But we'll be the judge of that.

Who are we to judge? By what authority? Who died and left us in charge of cosmic theology?

No one did. It's just that so few writers were engaging in it to our satisfaction, we just claimed the mantle for ourselves. Doing a job earthlings don't want.  

Alfred North Whitehead was one of the last serious thinkers to elucidate a grand cosmic metaphysical scheme of everything. Credit for trying -- and we don't hesitate to plunder him for all he's worth -- but we have some serious issues with process theology, full stop. It doesn't work for me to say that God exists, only not yet. 

For me this paradox of Being and Becoming is ultimately resolved via the triune Godhead, but that's a different post.

Back to this question of Authority. We know from our Gödel that any formal system cannot be both consistent and complete, but will contain truths which the system cannot justify. 

So right away we are faced with a choice: either we can, or cannot, know Truth itself. There is no system that can get us there. Rather, we either see it or we don't (or see it via "faith").

Which goes to one of the purposes of revelation, which is to convey truths that are otherwise inaccessible to us. Such truths can never be proved from our side of the veil, but must be accepted on faith. Faith in an authority.

Now, at the same time, I'm re-re-reading one of Schuon's last works, in which he -- as is his custom -- makes many authoritative statements seemingly backed up by nothing more than his own authority.  

But his type of authority strikes me as fundamentally different from Hart's kind, which is thoroughly conventional. He wants to be taken seriously by all the right people, whereas Schuon just dismisses the right people as hopelessly wrong and hardly worth refuting. Let the dead bury the tenured. 

From the foreword: "metaphysics aims in the first place at the comprehension of the whole Universe, which extends from the Divine Order to terrestrial contingencies." 

Boom. No apologies, no reservations, and no attempt to justify this view before the tribunal of Right People. The latter are not to be taken seriously except as a serious distraction, for "we live in a world wherein the abuse of intelligence replaces wisdom," and you can say that again.

We won't start our formal review of The Play of Masks this morning, but just highlight the first (authoritative) sentence of the book: 

Total intelligence, free will, sentiment capable of disinterestedness: these are the prerogatives that place man at the summit of terrestrial creatures. 

Take it or leave it. Supposing you take it, read on:

Being total, the intelligence takes cognizance of all that is, in the world of principles as well as that of phenomena; being free, the will may choose even that which is contrary to immediate interest or to what is agreeable; being disinterested, sentiment is capable of looking at itself from without, just as it can put itself in another's place.

"Every man can do so in principle, whereas animals cannot."

So, there is a fundamental and ineradicable difference between man and animal, and that's all there is to it. And man in principle "possesses a subjectivity not closed in on itself, but open to others and unto Heaven." Similar to what we wrote in yesterday's post,

Total intelligence, free will, disinterested sentiment; and consequently to know the True, to will the Good, to love the Beautiful.

Horizontal and Vertical: the former "concerns the cosmic, hence phenomenal, order," the latter "the metaphysical, hence principial, order." 

Now, Schuon may be an authority, but supposing one understands what he just said, it is thanks to a kind of "inner authority" that assents to self-evident truth. We just need a little reminder. 

And not to get ahead of ourselves, but revelation functions as just such a vertical reminder -- again, emanating from "outside" the cosmic system but by no means contrary to it or to reason. Indeed, "Human intelligence is, virtually and vocationally, the certitude of the Absolute." 

At least when you think about what thinking is. Remove the Absolute and it is nothing, reducing to that shrunken world mentioned above, "wherein the abuse of intelligence replaces wisdom." 

Fasting forward to the last sentence of this essay,

Without objectivity and transcendence there cannot be man, there is only the human animal; to find man, one must aspire to God.

Again, authoritative, but with the purpose of awakening or resonating with the inner authority that is Intelligence itself.