Plato For the Win!

Yesterday we spoke of our inverted Weltanschauung and perverted Zeitgeist; which is to say, our view of the world is upside-down, and the spirit of our times is deranged. 

Now, who is to blame? Or what? As mentioned a few posts back, I am loathe to blame philosophers, because history is a complex system and spontaneous order, with no one and everyone in charge of it.

Also, most everything is a mixed bag, a tradeoff. I'm thinking in particular of the so-called Enlightenment, which certainly lit up some things but relegated others to the shadows. Including, ironically, the most luminous things. 

Who lights a candle to look for the sun?

Enlightenment Man, that's who, with his grab bag of flickering isms: materialism, mechanism, reductionism, rationalism, empiricism, relativism, Kantianism, Marxism, et al -- and even the "Christianism" which was its reaction, which is to say, a diluted Christianity excised from the explicit science to which it gave birth and the implicit metaphysics it preserved. The three solas are comparatively dim bulbs.

Way back in the day, Plato said Science is nothing but seeing. But what is sight? Human vision is not like a camera, which records only surfaces. 

Rather, it can see what it doesn't see, for example, the dark side of the moon. We don't literally see it, but in seeing the bright side, we know it's there. In other words, we can't see the totality of a single object, even though we know -- unlike animals -- that there's always more to what we see.

Analogously, with the tools of science we see the bright side of the cosmos. But here again, there's the other side which we cannot see, the noumenon. By this we do not intend a Kantian bifurcation that encloses us in phenomena with no possible contact with the real, rather, a different mode of vision -- a transpersonal seeing "within" or "beyond" the surface.

Our current worldview doesn't view the world at all, i.e., in its integral wholeness, rather, is a certain diminished view that brings into being a broken world of imaginary fragments. We can try to put the fragments back together in a multitude of ways, hence all the arbitrary isms that do just that. 

For example, imagine viewing a painting with a microscope of infinite power, which would at once reveal "everything" and "nothing." More generally, the tool determines what we shall find.

This is the paradox at the heart of quantum physics, and why "no one understands it." The experimental set-up determines what we see, but again, what determines sight? Sight is the unseen side of anything we see -- put another way, the subject is the mysterious dark side of any object it perceives. 

But whence the intellectual light with which we see -- or enlighten -- intelligible objects? This primordial light is perhaps the most important thing that has been overshadowed by the Enlightenment. It's the central sun we've exchanged for the scientistic candles that light the surface or periphery. 

No one can see the cosmos, and yet, we see it just the same in seeing anything. In other words, every intelligible existent is the visible side of a cosmic area rug that extends over a transcendent horizon of total intelligibility. Which is why any truth speaks of all truth. One might say that science is embedded in omni-science, as part is to whole.

Thus, if the cosmos

were even remotely what the physical sciences declare it to be, it could not be "viewed" at all. To speak seriously of a "worldview," one needs consequently to assume the incompleteness of our physics-based scientific knowledge (Smith). 

To what can be seen through physics needs to be added what is in principle not seeable through it. Smith has in mind irreducible wholeness, which in turn implies vertical causation, when physics by definition sees only the horizontal parts. But you can spend your entire life in search of a sphere in Flatland, and will never find one.   

Unless you know how to look at circles, i.e., see the dark side from which visible circles are a declension.

Plato for the win!

Correct: the light is coming from outside the cave. Moreover, the call is coming from outside the cosmos, i.e., from the transcendent horizon of total intelligibility alluded to above.

Switching seers for a moment, I want to touch on a book called A Metaphysics of the Christian Mystery -- which I do not recommend, because I only understood about ten percent of it. I think something must have been lost in translation. Which is to say, about ninety percent. Nevertheless, parts are clear, for example,

ideologies constitute "the true mythologies of the modern age." Any philosophy, moreover, disconnected from its roots (from the enigmatic question "Why and how do I think?") runs the risk of being reduced to an ideology. 

I'll bite: why and how do I think? In giving it some thought, I don't. For example, I'm not thinking about this post, rather, thoughts merely arise -- from somewhere -- and it is more a matter of catching and transcribing them. Some editing is required, failure of which results in a train wreck. But I'm more of a middleman between thoughts and post. 

Middle earth?

Yes, in the sense that earth is indeed the center of the cosmos after all, certainly with the arrival of Homo sapiens. Analogously, the center of Flatland is not a point equidistant from the sides, rather, any place bisected by the sphere. In other words, in rising above the merely physical cosmos, this is an infinitely deeper center than any mere sun, star, or galaxy.

To reach its true objective philosophy must thus 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 (ibid.).

In other words, into the Great Attractor just over the vertical horizon. This is the place where knowledge converts to being and vice versa, otherwise we could have neither. Well, being would still be being, but we couldn't know of it. 

To the incompleteness of reason... corresponds "its natural demand for a supernatural completion in the intellective and even supra-intellective order"; intelligence "is supernatural by nature," "its essence is metaphysical"; "the intellect (nous) is already something divine." 

Bold claims. Nevertheless, 

the intellect enables the human being, in his present state, to intelligibly make contact with realities that ontologically surpass him... 

That's the ever-present dark side of our knowledge, except that it's not really dark at all, rather, the very source that lights up the surface and renders it visible to us.

We haven't yet reached the End, only the end of the post. We'll end with this:

The fact is that our physics-based sciences as such can tell us nothing about being: they are literally and incurably blind to "that which is."

You might say that a particle collider is the biggest candle ever invented, but it will never find the sun, since it is at the other end, i.e., outside and beyond the quantum shadows dancing on the walls of the cave.