Dwelling on the Fringes of Eternity

As usual. 

The annoying part is that I misplaced the book we were discussing -- The Openness of Being -- and I don't have a backup plan. It's not that big of a house, so I am prepared to believe that Satan himself has hidden it from me.

Let's not get carried away.

Maybe, but I'm looking it up anyway. Here, chapter 8:III:C, p. 257: Oppression Related to Work, Finances and Property.

Since demons can affect people's perceptions as well as influence physical things, they can cause damage to one's work or job, finances, or even property.

Oh? Please continue.

They can cause loss or damage to property.

Okay, but how can we tell?

demons are essentially thieves and human beings are those who own the exterior goods.... it is necessary to communicate to the demon that is afflicting the particular external goods that those goods by right belong to [us] and not the demon. Then he must command the demon to depart since he has no right over these exterior goods.

DEMON DEPART FROM ME BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO THAT BOOK!

At times, the demon does not necessarily depart immediately, but as long as a person is persistent, in most cases the demons will leave the exterior goods alone.

GET BEHIND ME, DEMON, AND GIVE ME BACK MY BOOK! READER(S) ARE WAITING, AND WE DON'T HAVE ALL MORNING!

Found it. Don't ask.

Back to our coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. Whitehead apparently couldn't make the leap to a God transcending the eternal process of the universe, but rather, saw God as a consequence of Creativity. It reminds me of the old joke about asking the process philosopher if God exists: Yes, but not yet.  

Nevertheless, in positing creativity as the ultimate principle, he's on to something. In the past, we've discussed how, based upon scripture, this is the very first thing we know of God: In the beginning, God created.... 

But that's just one way of translating the passage, For example, 

What are the very first words of the Bible? Everyone knows that: In the beginning God created.... But for the Zohar, which insists on interpreting the original Hebrew words in their precise order, the verse means something radically different: With beginning, It [Ein Sof] created God (Matt).

Which comes close to what Whitehead is saying -- as if God is a consequence of some sort of primordial creative principle. But God, who is necessary being, cannot be an accident of creativity... unless. 

Unless what?

Unless I consult an essay by Norris Clarke called A New Look at the Immutability of God, which I discussed in a previous post and will republish below: 

Mutability... in the Aristotelian metaphysics of change, necessarily involves imperfection. 

But what if change is a perfection? Or rather, what if it can be construed in such a way that there is something analogous to change in God? 

Recall that the analogy of being means that our similarities to God are always dwarfed by the dissimilarities, since He is infinite and we're not. So we can say that everything and anything is a more or less distant reflection of the Creator, but we cannot turn this around and say that God is limited by these analogies, for this would merely be a projection of our own finite categories. 

You get it. The point is that since God is a person, and a relationship of persons, and therefore interpersonal, this cannot imply "the unqualified immutability in all domains which seems to have been the ideal of the classical Greek mind" -- as if God is a static object. Rather, 

the immutability which must be affirmed of God is the unchanging, indefectible steadfastness of an infinite plenitude of goodness and loving benevolence, but a benevolence which also expresses itself in a process, a progressive unfolding of mutual interpersonal relationships, spread out in real temporal succession at our receiving end... in terms of which he is truly related to us....

I think of it this way: the very Principle of "time," of "change," and of perfection is located in the non-distant "distance" or "gap" between the First and Second persons. How to put it....

This is from another book, The Philosophical Approach to God: "God is the supremely perfect Being, surpassed by no other, yet constantly surpassing Himself, as He both gives and receives" -- both to and from the world, as the Father gives to, and receives from, the Son. This latter is the Principle of -- in my opinion -- time, change, and relation: "To receive love as a person"

is not at all an imperfection, but precisely a dimension of the perfection of personal being as lovingly responsive. What remains fixed as the constant point of reference in our concept of God is Infinite Perfection. 

"Perfect change," not from the imperfect to perfect, but rather, "from perfection to perfection," so to speak. Which shouldn't be any more difficult to reconcile than a strict monotheism in three persons, and indeed, this is the whole durn point of the Trinity:

God's "receiving" from us, being delighted at our response to His love, is really His original delight at sharing with us in His eternal Now His own original power of loving and infinite goodness which has come back to him in return.  

Again, it is only an analogy, but "God is not only the universe's great Giver, but also thereby its great Appreciator, its great Receiver" -- in a qualified way and a manner of speaking, and with all due yada yada.

Turn Around and Do the Raccoon!

Speaking of Whitehead's definition of metaphysics as A coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted, he also wrote that "God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles," but rather, "their chief exemplification."

I don't know about that one. It may be going too far, or it may not go far enough, depending on one's metaphysic. 

For to say that God is the chief exemplification of our metaphysic would seem to enclose God in our categories, which would be one of those philosophical non-starters we've been discussing.

But so long as God is the chief exemplification of his own metaphysic, then we'll allow it. The question is, do we have access to this metaphysic? Our answer must be NO, unless it is revealed to us. 

Now, Whitehead was a much smarter guy than I am, and perhaps this is why he was by no means immune to Cosmic Blunders. The same could be said of, for example, the Big Brained Stephen Hawking, or other scientistic luminaries. 

Perhaps their minds are so godlike that they are more vulnerable to the temptation of thinking their thinking goes all the way to the top floor -- straight to the penthouse, skipping past the repenthouse. But no human thinking -- none of our maps or models or logical schemes-- can do this because Gödel.  

Rather, it can only be done supposing God does it. We have to first posit God in order to discover what or who he is. Which is why for such purposes I prefer to call this metacosmic variable O -- which stands for what Voegelin calls by various names, for example, the agathon, "A term for the transcendental pole of the tension of existence"; or the apeiron, which is 

Unlimited, indefinite, unbounded.... the "unlimited" source of all particular things. Because it transcends all limits, it is in principle undefinable (Webb). 

He also uses the term aphtharsia to characterize its "imperishability," and "the Beyond," which "is ultimate and in itself indefinable because it surpasses all categories of understanding." Then there's the (divine) "ground," which is

the supreme, undefinable transcendent reality which may be considered either as the source or origin of both the world and the metaxy [the great In Between] or as "the Beyond" that forms existence by drawing it into participation.

All of the above predicates go to what we mean by O: transcendent, unlimited, indefinite, unbounded, imperishable, source, ground, beyond. And yet, these are simply different human vertices -- perspectives -- of the oneness that is prior to them.

Voegelin also hints at another important quality, the power of "drawing," which is what we mean when we call O the Great Attractor in the nonlocal phase space of verticality. Voegelin, who is partial to Greek terms, calls it helkein, which is

To draw, drag, pull. In Voegelin, the tension of existence when it is experienced as the power of attraction exercised by the transcendental.

A related term is zetesis, "that aspect of the tension of existence in which it is experienced as a seeking or striving toward the transcendental pole of the tension."

In other words, our non-stop seeking toward the transcendental pole -- which defines the scientific endeavor as much as the spiritual/religious -- is already a function of the Great Attractor. It has no other possible explanation. It is why both the heart and head -- or RCH and LCH -- are restless until they rest in O.

But there's a reason why a genius like Voegelin will never be popular, what with all the obscure Greek terms. Not to say I'll ever be popular, but I like to think my list of meta-cosmic variables is more readily grasped by the average subgenius. For we are just humble spoudaios, a "serious, earnest person[s].... capable of intelligent thought and responsible decision and action."

If we're not at least spoudaios, then to hell with it.

But here again, I don't like that word. Rather, why not just posit another cosmic variable called (¶)? Man qua man is the mysterious being who always lives in the tension between O and  (¶) -- or better, (¶) is that conscious entity that exists between the poles of immanence and transcendence. 

Not only can we all agree on this definition, I don't believe it is possible to not agree with it. For it is The Way It Is, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it except live it. 

Well, to be Perfectly Accurate -- as always -- there are a number of things we can do about it, but this would introduce a host of other Greek terms such as amathia, scotosis, doxa, philodoxy, and libido dominandi, which, in plain English simply mean various forms of CLOSURE or CLOSED EXISTENCE.

How do we avoid the latter? Easy: periagoge: "Turning around, conversion. Plato's term for the cognitive and moral reorientation toward the True and the Good as such." In other words, get out of the cave more often -- the cave of pure immanence.

Long story short, the cosmos is an open system, and we use the symbols (↓) and (↑) to characterize the openness, bearing in mind that the latter arrow is just the former in disguise -- that our seeking is already a finding -- boo! -- and that it takes a spiroidal form, more like this:

Come to think of it, it's much like a dance between two very unequal partners. What shall we call this dance? I know!

College men, knowledge men, / Do a dance called the raccoon. / Buy a coat and try it / I'll bet you'll be a riot / High brow, low brow, intermediate, / Make believe they're all collegiate / Rough guys, tough guys, men of dignity, / Join the raccoon coat fraternity, soon, / To do the raccoon!

Which leads directly to our next subject, perichoresis, the divine dance to which we are all invited.

Little Big God

We left off with Ratzinger's comment that "The three-ness of God -- the relatio -- stands beside the substance as an equally primordial form of being"; and that in this vision "lies concealed a revolution in man's view of the world" (emphasis mine). 

We aren't usually fans of revolution, but in this case we'll make an exception. Seen in its light the progressive left is a thoroughly reactionary movement, except to say that one cannot be "post-Christian" without reverting to pre-Christian barbarism, more or less. In other words, one cannot actually "surpass" the truth without falling short of it.

True, things are happening so fast it feels as if history is "speeding up." It is, but in reverse, that is, both down and out. The direction it is receding is also vertical in nature, so it is toward the pole of immanence

Which reminds us of one of the classic definitions of fascism: the practical and violent resistance to transcendence. Resistance to transcendence equates to the embrace of various anti-intellectual philosophies of immanence, e.g., Marxism, materialism, scientism, metaphysical Darwinism, etc. 

Modern history is a dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god.

Except you can't actually have an intellectual dialogue with those whose first principle is denial the intellect. You've noticed that 

The progressive travels around among literary works as the Puritan did among cathedrals: hammer in hand.

Now you know why.  

As to verticality, i.e., transcendence,

Hierarchies are heavenly. In Hell all are equal.

Of course, the left substitutes its own inverse hierarchy -- or lowerarchy -- with White Christian Males at the bottom. Surprisingly, equity wasn't was invented by the devil but by self-hating people of pallor:

Modern civilization: the invention of a white engineer for a black king.

That was rude. But don't blame Dávila:

I am not trying to poison the wells. But to show that they are poisoned.

You've also noticed that 

Progress finally comes down to stealing from man what ennobles him, in order to sell to him at a cheap price what debases him.

But

The revolutions of the left only shuffle the cards.

A shuffling that is another word for the chaos of immanence.

The Marxist does not think it possible to condemn except by distorting what he condemns.

To be subjected to the vile accusations of the gaslight media is to hear oneself being condemned for various crimes, from racism to Hating the Planet. 

When the progressive condemns, every intelligent man must feel alluded to. 

We could cite aphorisms all day, but let's get back to Ratzinger's real revolution -- the one that grounds us in the immanent transcendence of substance-in-relation, for it is the only real way out of the progressive chaos. 

liberal modernity -- despite its putative neutrality on matters religious and metaphysical -- harbors a hidden logic of being (onto-logic) that takes as given the radical independence of entities, whose interaction and relation [are characterized] as extrinsic and mechanistic (Gourlay, in Theological Anthropology). 

Which reduces to a metaphysic of logical atomism, of pure exterior relations. One might say it focuses on the particle to the exclusion of the wave -- or, as we discussed at length earlier this year, the left cerebral hemisphere (LCH) to the right, for it seems that ideologies are lodged in the left. You may accept this literally or metaphorically, so long as you accept it. 

The organicism of being can only be apprehended via the RCH, for it comes down to the difference between machines and living systems, the former consisting of externally related parts, the latter of an unspecifiable number of interior relations. And this is an interiorly related Cosmos, from the top on down, for everything bears the stamp of the Trinity (and of the interior relations therein). The

radically independent entities within this order can only relate to one another externally and materially.... things are approached as though they only had an "outside" as it were.

You've noticed that there can be no outside without an inside, and indeed, we only know of the outside from the inside. But the outsiders forget all about the inside, or deny it altogether, when it is without question the most important and consequential data point in all of existence. Recall Schuon's Undeniable First Ascertainment:  

The first ascertainment which should impose itself upon man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of that miracle that is intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- and consequently the incommensurability between these and material objects, be it a question of a grain of sand or of the sun, or of any creature whatever as an object of the senses.

Right, but how? By virtue of what Principle from which all else flows? Recall Whitehead's definition of metaphysics, as A coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. 

Here again, this is a truth that cannot be surpassed without falling short of it. "Relationality is anchored already in the first act of substance," and "therefore already as a matter of principle open to the other" (Schindler, ibid.). 

Being is always already being with -- not exteriorly but interiorly: "the human person is then understood to be receptive not only chronologically but ontologically." 

We mentioned yesterday that this openness and relativity are not to be understood as privations but perfections: "Rather than being a source of humiliation for the human creature," this receptivity is not only a perfection, but the very principle by which perfectibility -- AKA progress -- is possible. 

The greater a thing's capacity for receiving that which is not itself, the greater is its capacity for self-transcendence and the more distinct it is (Hanby, ibid.). 

Ultimately,

a relational rationality is, in point of fact, more adequate to the task of coming to know reality as such.

That's my story -- my metapersonal metaphysic -- and I'm sticking to (and in) it.

Microcosmos, Macroperson, and Qualified Immutability

Just a short post that relates an important point or three.

Early Christian thinkers

spoke of the human as a microcosm, a small cosmos, and the cosmos as macroanthropos, a large human, and of the two as an inseparably intertwined whole (Kaldas).

And why not? I'm pretty, uh, relationally pretty cool with it, while others might not like the implications of man and God being "inseparably intertwined." 

For example, supposing I change, does this mean God changes? Leading authorities say NO WAY, GOD IS IMMUTABLE, but believe me, there are ways. 

We've posted about them before, and might even do so again this morning. The key is to preserve the principle of immutability while considering the possibility that it might be a kind of privation if not considered rightly in the total context of Macroanthropic Being. 

In this larger context, relationality is by no means a privation but a perfection -- even a Theory of Everything (T.O.E.), and I can get you a T.O.E. by end of this post. 

For example, Ratzinger writes that 

In God, person means relation. Relation, being related, is not something superadded to the person, but is the person itself. By definition, the person exists only as relation.

Can't get much clearer than that. Nor more queerer, because folks are not accustomed to thinking this way, neither pre-Christians nor post-Christians. The former had no earthly idea of a triune Godhead, while the latter have no excuse. Nevertheless, here we are, but Ratzinger wants to come back to

an understanding of created human persons in order to counter the hyper-individualism of modernity. In order to do so, [he] needs to prioritize relations..., and move them (at least) into, or alongside, substance itself (Gourlay, ibid.).

Ratzinger goes on to say that "In God, person is the pure relativity of being turned toward the other," and as far as I'm concerned, it's for the defenders of radical changelessness to to explain how the "pure relativity" of the Trinity can be squared with it. 

I get it, but maybe our whole duality of change-changeless needs to be rethought from the ground up (and down) -- as do our finite conceptions of finitude-infinitude and temporal-timeless. The macroanthropos transcends all those dualistic manmodalities.

This "dialogical reality" and "relativity toward the other" needs "to be recognized as a third specific fundamental category" (Ratzinger).

In a word, our T.O.E. must include relationality and relativity as ultimate and unsurpassable terms.  

Changing seers for a moment, Whitehead helpfully defined metaphysics as

the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. 

And I say it is impossible to interpret any experience in the absence of the category of relation. In other words, any experience is of something to which we are mysteriously related, whether objects, persons, or God. If we are the micropersonal reflection of the macroperson, well, that explains a great deal indeed.

The three-ness of God -- the relatio -- "stands beside the substance as an equally primordial form of being." 

And "therein lies concealed a revolution in man's view of the world" -- a T.O.E., or at least a vital component of one. 

There's much more to say about this, but we've had a lot of dense posts lately, and you deserve a break.

One Giant Leap for Mankind, One Small Step from God

Richard Feynman remarked that 

The exception proves that the rule is wrong. That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.

No, this post is not about global warming models, rather, about any and all models of man, save one.

For man is the Great Exception, in that he surpasses -- without denying or nullifying -- the rules of every lower level, from physics to chemistry to biology. Perhaps this is just another way of talking about transcendence, which can never be reduced to any immanent quality, much less quantity.  

Think about, for example, the theory of natural selection. If man were actually enclosed in it, he could never know it. In knowing it we have transcended it, but there is nothing in the theory that can explain how the organisms subject to it can escape it.  

I wish a physicist were here, because I have a genuine question. The question is this: supposing I freely decide to, say, clench my fist, doesn't this mean that those trillions of atomic and subatomic particles of which I am constituted are obeying my command? In other words, that no bottom-up theory can account for our top-down control?

Are we or are we not the Great Exception to the rules of physics? Can physics account for the physicists who understand physics?

It's no big surprise that the world is intelligible. The shocker is that it is intelligible to man's intelligence. It doesn't take an Einstein to know that

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

He also said that 

 The more I study science, the more I believe in God.

But his was more of a deistic conception, not the metacosmic principle of personhood that we are about to get back to discussing. 

As alluded to in yesterday's post, the first issue to resolve is whether we are realists or idealists, for this resolves the matter of whether we can know reality or rather are confined to our heads. For once so confined to the head, there is no getting out. 

But to paraphrase Gilson, one has only to acknowledge that one has always been a realist -- and cannot not be one -- and move on. Let the dead bury the tenured. 

Of course, there are people who struggle to be realists, and who are tormented by their own persecutory projections. We used to call these demon-haunted wrecks mentally ill, whereas now they are called MSNBC hosts.

"For the consistent idealist, there can be nothing to differentiate illusion from reality," or One Cosmos from MSNBC, your jehovaial Gagdad from the joyless pursuits of Joy Reid. The horror.  

The realist proceeds from things to thoughts, whereas the idealist proceeds from thoughts to... other thoughts, never actually reaching things (or at least pretending not to). "Knowledge presupposes the presence of the thing itself to the intellect," and 

Knowing is not apprehending a thing as it is in thought but, in thought, apprehending the thing as it is.

That's a somewhat subtle distinction, because it is actually a middle position between two extremes -- of a radical idealism at one end, and a naive realism at the other, as if to say our ideas are a carbon copy of the extra-mental world. Our ideas are not the world per se, but of the world. Otherwise to hell with it.

To borrow a book title from Terence McKenna, the realist world is a true hallucination. Conversely, ideologies are false hallucinations -- just more subtle forms of mental illness. Or crude, depending. But enough about MSNBC.

Let's get back to the mystery of personhood, because it is again the mysterious portal through which streams everything from knowledge of matter, to other persons, to ourselves, to God. Chronologically, 

we are aware of the existence of beings outside our own minds more immediately than we are aware of the existence of our own selves.

Again, this begins in the intersubjective space of the mother-infant dyad; or rather, this is where we are ushered into an intersubjective world which we never actually leave, thank God. Literally, because the vertical world turns out to be the intersubjective space between man and God -- or between (¶) and O, if you prefer. In any event, one may

build up an argument for the existence of God on the basis of this inbuilt urge of the human mind to take all beings as its object and to press beyond the horizon of the material world toward the realm of subsistent being itself (Mascall). 

But why argue? For who lacks the urge to merge beyond the horizon of the material world? The purely horizontal, "finite world cannot contain within itself the sufficient reason for its own existence," to say nothing of its radical intelligibility. 

[I]f only we perceive finite beings correctly we shall perceive them as created and sustained by infinite and transcendent being.

Hold on a second. We're trying to proceed on a step-by-step basis without any leaps, and have we just made an unsupportable leap to God? Let's retrace our steps.

Perceive finite beings correctly. We've already established that we can indeed do this, because we are Realists and cannot not be Realists. Does this entitle us to jump to the conclusion that the intelligible extra-mental world is therefore created and sustained by infinite and transcendent being?

A few months back we were discussing Bernard Lonergan's Insight, wherein he goes so far as to suggest that

If the real is completely intelligible, God exists. But the real is completely intelligible. Therefore, God exists.

But again, no leaping! In the next installment we shall determine whether this is a giant leap for man or just a small step to, because from, God.

Fake Philosophy and Real Religion

Fake news, fake education, fake women, fake marriage, fake medicine, fake vaccines, fake science, fake statistics, fake democracy, fake art, fake judicial system, fake intellectuals, fake comedians, fake victims, fake borders, fake president... Have I left anything out? 

As we know, Satan is the arch-counterfeiter. If nothing else, he stands for the principle that unifies all the diverse snd seemingly unconnected fakery that surrounds us. Each can only exist because it is parasitic on the real thing -- just as funny money can only exist if there is the serious kind.

The question is, why the increase in counterfeiters and counterfeiting in our time? 

On a related note, it seems that the average IQ of college students has plunged to a paltry 102, down from a respectable 119 in 1939. 

Obviously, many more people attend college today than then, but that doesn't increase the pool of raw intelligence: there are no more geniuses or dullards today than there were a century ago, but there are exponentially more credentialed idiots with fake degrees in "Fuzzy Studies" or Intersectional Grievances. 

In 2017, Education Testing Service experts estimated that physics (133), math (130), philosophy (129), and materials science (129) majors have the highest IQs.

Now, they say that Satan himself is a bit of a genius -- being that he has an angelic intelligence that greatly surpasses that of man. So, why is he sponsoring all this fakery? Or rather, why the Peter pandemic of juvenile fakery?

We left off yesterday's post with the question of what kind of being man must be in order for God to incarnate as man. Which leads to the question of what kind of being he must be in order for Satan to -- we won't say incarnate, but to so easily "in-spirate," co-opt, hijack, infiltrate, or otherwise influence him. Preacher Powell, what say you?

Right. The old story of LOVE and HATE. Let's just continue our discussion of meta-cosmic anthropology, and perhaps an answer will come to us along the way.

Again: "if God became man, man must be the kind of being it was possible for God to become." There must already be something special about man in order for him to play host to the absolute principle of creation. 

Hmm. Must have something to do with our infinitude, which is related to what we said yesterday about our necessary incompleteness. Other animals are in fact "complete" and know nothing of infinitude. But man is the forever restless being who

possesses an infinite horizon. The horizon which we see with our eyes is finite, we share it with animals. The horizon which we know with our intellect is infinite. It is the horizon of being (Coreth, in Mascall).

Although God and man are both infinite, the word is equivocal, in that it implies something different for man than it does God. For us it just means not constrained by finitude, while for God it means transcending finitude altogether -- more like transfinite, which is beyond our (finite) antithesis of finite-infinite.

Conversely, man transcends his limits, but not every limit. He is not THE unlimited. Unless. Unless Incarnation, which would well and truly surpass the limits, or perhaps reestablish relations with the Unlimited. Just as the Son (on earth) is God's I-Ambassy in a limited form, the Father is our I-Ambassy in the Unlimited.

I'm just spiritballin' here, but I don't see how man escapes the great In Between -- between the poles of immanence and transcendence -- absent the principle of Incarnation. It reminds me of Moses, who never reaches the promised land, and we are all Moses wondering in the desert bewilderness absent a messiah or something. 

Jews invented -- or discovered, rather -- the Messiah Principle, but then again, this is a principle that is hinted at in virtually every religion worth the name. For example, I recently read a book called The Christ Connection: How the World Religions Prepared for the Phenomenon of Jesus, and it has many examples of these anticipations. For example, in India

The original sacrifice in the Vedas is that of a divine person called Purusha Prajapathi, who sacrificed himself so as to bring into being the cosmos.... He is both sacrifice and the one to whom the sacrifice is offered. 

The author cites various passages from the Vedas, for example,

His hands and legs are to be bound to a yoopa [a wooden pole] causing blood shed.... The sacrificial victim is to be crowned with a crown made of thorny vines.... None of His bones must be broken.... Before death he should be given a drink of somarasa [sour wine made of an herb called somalatha].

Now, that's either an uncannily good guess, or the intuition of a universal archetype woven into the fabric of being or something.

There's a lot more along these lines, both within the Vedas and in the religions of ancient Persia, China, Greece, Africa, etc. Something is going on here besides mere coincidence.

What would be the opposite of this Messiah Principle, or something like it? I suppose we would say any form of Kantianism that pretends to enclose us in our phenomenal limits with no way out. I don't want to rag on Kant, because his anti-philosophy has taken many forms over the millennia, beginning, I suppose, with Genesis 3. But if these folkers are correct, then you

are launched on the endless process of trying ineffectually to escape from the prison of your own subjectivity.... you are involved in ever more complicated gymnastics in your attempts not to saw off the branch on which you are sitting (Mascall).

This is nothing less than the great cosmic nul-de-slack from which we are forever trying in vain to lift ourselves via our own buddhastraps.

Kant has the reputation of being the greatest of modern philosophers, but to my mind he was a mere misfortune. 

Not just a bump in the road but a dead end street; for Idealism

means the view that the objects which we perceive are simply ideas inside our heads, while 'realism' means the view that we perceive real beings outside them.

Back to the question of what kind of being man must be in order to play host to the Absolute Principle, he must, at the very least, be a philosophical Realist. And according to Gilson,

The first step on the path of realism is to recognise that one has always been a realist; the second is to recognise that, however much one tries to think differently, one will never succeed; the third is to note that those who claim that they think differently, think as realists as soon as they forget to act a part.

So, we can pretend we are confined to immanence, but 

Good place to pause. I shouldn't even be trollin' on the Christian Shabbos anyway. Let's just say that the philosophistry of Idealism is a Big and Deep Fake, and regroup tomorrow around this time.