Get Your Filthy Anschauung Out of My Welt!

This is yesterday's post sifted through the filter of today. In other words, it ended in another brainwreck, when things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed on the cosmos. 

Then it's hard to relocate the durn center from which the post proceeded. I can try to put it back together, but this is a top-down or "exterior" exercise that feels very different from the insight-out process of giving birth to the post. The nonlocal portal is more or less closed for isness.

It sounds pretentious to say that every post is a kind of "automatic writing," and a critic would no doubt call it BS masquerading as even more of it. Being that I am simultaneously the liberatory and the gliberator, we're always poised on that fine line between surprising discovery and pretentious nonsense. But like any good experiment, we don't know the results in advance. 

Automatic writing,

also called psychography, is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. Practitioners engage in automatic writing by holding a writing instrument and allowing alleged spirits to manipulate the practitioner's hand. The instrument may be a standard writing instrument, or it may be one specially designed for automatic writing, such as a planchette or ouija board. 

So, it's not that. Besides, "There is no evidence supporting the existence of automatic writing, and claims associated with it are unfalsifiable. Documented examples are considered to be the result of the ideomotor phenomenon." Ideowhat?

The ideomotor phenomenon is a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject makes motions unconsciously.... The phrase is most commonly used in reference to the process whereby a thought or mental image brings about a seemingly "reflexive" or automatic muscular reaction, often of minuscule degree, and potentially outside of the awareness of the subject. 

Not that either. Maybe it's just free writing, "in which a person writes continuously for a set period of time with limited concern for rhetoric, conventions, and mechanics." It is "comparatively formless or unstructured" and "often produces raw, or even unusable material."

As the cliché goes, we write in order to find out what we think. Nor is this the royal we, because no post is simply what I think. I abandoned that approach within weeks of starting the blog in 2005. That is, I quickly exhausted the modest storehouse of what I knew, which called for the desperate measure of pouring out what I don't. 

That explains a lot.

Let's call it pneumography. Anyway, on to the post -- which is still flawed, but we tried: 

For readers who obviously aren't golfers,

The term worldview is a calque of the German word Weltanschauung, composed of Welt ("world") and Anschauung ("perception" or "view").

And I suppose every welanschauung reflects its zeitgeist, i.e., 

the "spirit of the age," an invisible agent, force, or daemon dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history. 

So, what is the invisible geist haunting our zeit, and the implicit anschauung that dominates our welt? 

Bor-ring. Another post about scientism? Just because it -- or reductionism, materialism, dualism, subjectivism, relativism -- is wrong, it doesn't make you right.

That's true: if no one understands quantum mechanics, how can this essential darkness illuminate what is superessentially above and beyond it? 

Well, I am told that even people who believe in God struggle to comprehend the Trinity. Expressing it in terms of quantum physics mitigates this somewhat, in that it shows how the world itself can likewise be at once continuous and discontinuous, local and nonlocal, i.e., wave and particle: what looks like a contradiction is a complementarity. Analogously, if the Persons are "particles," the substance is "wave."

That's it?

You're putting me on the spot. However, if the Trinity is the ultimate reality, then everything should be stamped with its imprimatur, no? Ultimately, it is not only why there's such a thing as a we, but why the we must be prior to the I.

But God says his name is I AM.

True, but I AM implies WE ARE. Besides, if God is love, then at the very least there must be a beloved, unless God is the first and last word in metacosmic narcissism. If love is selfless concern for the other as other, then otherness must be built into God: God must have his own Other.

Couldn't this Other be the creation?

Could be, but we say the very principle of creation is located in divinas, in the generation of the Son from the Father. This being the case, then creation is a word from our eternal Sponsor, hence the irreducible intelligibility that infuses things -- you know, all this Light that lights up the world from the inside out. 

That's very poetic, but -- 

No, it's as literal as literal can be. Intelligibility is to intellect as light is to eye. The eye doesn't have to prove the existence of light in order to see.

The point is, no one understands quantum physics because they don't know what understanding is -- or what is is.

What is it? 

For starters, it is us -- or we rather, in the act of understanding, i.e., the union of intellect and intelligibility in the act of knowing. 

Like anybody could even know that.

Like anybody could not know that and still know anything. The very possibility of knowing truth is gorounded in the ceaseless actualization of the Father's knowledge of the Son in the eternal remurmurance of his Word. 

The eternal collapse of God's own wave function?

Something like that. As you know, I dropped out of high school physics. But if even Gemini can come up an image for it, maybe there's something to it:

For reason itself, whether it knows it or not, only derives its power of knowing from the liberality of a God who is the "Father of lights," and from a Word who is the "True Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man" (Bérard).

Why are we even talking about this? Because we're reading chapter 3 of Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology, called Subcorporeal Physics and Vertical Causation. 

Why is there such a thing as vertical causation? It must exist, otherwise there is no explanation for intellect, free will, creativity, disinterested love, i.e., all the things that make us human. These are quintessentially top-down phenomena, and where there are phenomena there are -- or is, rather -- the noumenon.

Hallow, noumenon!

In philosophy, a noumenon is knowledge posited as an object that exists independently of human sense. The term noumenon is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to, the term phenomenon, which refers to any object of the senses.

And God, hallowed be his noumenon, is independent of the senses, but not entirely so, since he is omni-present. There is no knowledge per se at the level of the senses, but nor is perception not knowledge (i.e., of appearances, precisely). My dog knows a lot of things without knowing she knows them. 

After all, who among us really knows what a bone is? Man is surely a knower, but when all is said and done, we cannot perfectly know the essence of a single fly, let alone an electron, hadron, or quark, so, to say no one understands quantum physics is par for the curs, and every dawg has his deity.  

Just because you think of a pun, it doesn't mean you have to share it with the restavus.

Can't be helped. Automatic writing is automatic.

Yada yada, the reality of vertical causation in the corporeal act of measurement "impacts the physical to the point of affecting its very laws." 

The fact is that our scientistic Weltanschauung is not only oblivious of all but the crudest aspects of our cosmic reality -- i.e., the quantitative -- but is inverted as well: in our moments of scientistic orthodoxy, we are literally "standing upside-down." 

Indeed,  

The very "instantaneity" of vertical causation militates in fact against the "flat" cosmology of the evolutionist Weltanschauung, which simply has no room for anything "vertical."

In the words of Bérard,

ideologies constitute the true mythologies of the modern world.... To reach its true objective philosophy must transcend its own constructs, relinquish its own logic and its very thought in order to take possession of that which is beyond logic, beyond all thought....

Here we see knowledge converted into being in precisely the same way that being is converted into knowledge... 

Pneumography? We'll try to regroup tomorrow...