I like this little prayer John Duns Scotus offers at the beginning of his Treatise on the First Principle:
May the First Principle of things permit me to believe, discern, and disclose whatever pleases His Majesty and elevates our minds to contemplate Him....
Help me, Lord, as I seek the utmost limit of the knowledge our natural reason can achieve concerning the True Existence you are, if we begin with the being you have predicated of yourself [i.e., "I am who I am"].
If we're going to try to grasp something of the vertical, might as well go straight to the source. In fact, there's only so much we can understand about the source without its cooperation in some form or fashion, which we touched on yesterday vis-a-vis necessary and sufficient causes in the creation of art.
It must be the same with regard to theology, God again being the condition without which it is impossible. Which is an orthodox doctrine, i.e., that God gives sufficient grace to every man to turn toward him, such that the turning is already a finding.
I hope that's true, otherwise I have no explanation for all the seeking I've been documenting over the past two decades of pneumablogging, let alone the existence of readers. It reminds me of what Leonard Cohen said about the people in his Zen monastery:
“Everyone here is fucked up and desperate,” he says brightly. “That’s why they’re here. You don’t come to a place like this unless you’re desperate.”
Truly truly, you people must be as desperate as I am: desperadOs?
This vertical desperation was equally characteristic of my more mundane dream of becoming a certified and certifiable psychoanalyst back in the day. I remember lamenting to my analyst about my suspicions that I was just too neurotic for the job, to which he brightly responded with words to the effect that "neurosis isn't a disqualification, rather, an absolute prerequisite."
In other words, it is a far better thing to have been neurotic and sorted it out than to have never been neurotic at all.
Which is very much a secular version of the idea that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine who need no repentance.
As I've mentioned before, I ended up not pursuing my post-doc studies; or rather, my studies took a different form, i.e., a wholly vertical one.
That is to say, upon the occasion of my 40th birthday, I decided to dedicate my life to looking into this God business instead of looking into my own unconscious. Both are more or less infinite, except that the former proceeds "upward" while latter looks "downward" for the Answer.
Of course, the one doesn't exclude the other, and Jordan Peterson is probably the most prominent explorer who tries to be mindful of both. I've been viewing a lot of videos pertaining to his full-blown descent into hell, which rendered him totally disabled for a few years not too long ago. It's hard to know what to make of that, but whatever it was, he seems to have emerged stronger and wiser.
By the way, just to conclude the little story of my own lower vertical adventures in psychoanalysis, I never did get to the bottom of Gagdad Bob and what makes him tick. Rather, I more or less conceded that I was one of those incurable INTPs, and that there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it: INTPs are preoccupied with
the search for the universal law behind everything they see. They want to understand the unifying themes of life, in all their complexity. They are detached, analytical observers who can seem oblivious to the world around them because they are so deeply absorbed in thought. They spend much of their time in their own heads: exploring concepts, making connections, and seeking understanding of how things work... [their] life is an ongoing inquiry into the mysteries of the universe.
Etc. Leopards and spots, nor did I choose to be this way. If God didn't make me this way, I fail to see how my selfish genes could be responsible, because why would natural selection select someone so unfit for anything conventionally useful? More generally, how can evolution account for the man who is seemingly preadapted to the vertical? Evolution doesn't know anything about verticality.
Switching into a lower gear, I suppose scientism is like chemotherapy, in that it fails to discriminate between healthy and unhealthy cells. Thus, while it eradicates superstition, it sweeps away metaphysics along with it. But in so doing, it becomes its own superstition (or perhaps substition):
To believe that science is enough is the most naive of superstitions.
Scientism basically collapses the vertical into the horizontal, but this can never be done in any coherent or consistent manner. Again, for science to even recognize and ponder horizontality is to have risen above it, but without any principle to explain how or why this is possible.
Which is okay. It is not the job of science to tell us how science is possible.
Without philosophy, the sciences so not know what they know.
The most complete explanation of the How will tell us nothing whatsoever about the Why. To even ask Why? is ultimately a vertical matter. Math is silent on the question of why there are mathematicians. Their very existence is wholly unreasonable, unless they are the entailment of a higher reason, an emanation from the Logosphere. Yes, God is certainly a mathematician, but not only a mathematician.
Recall yesterday's point that the Creator doesn't create in time but with time. This is a subtle and tricksy doctrine for a timebound primate to wrap his head around, but recall also that the soul is partly in time and partly in eternity, so we aren't entirely without resources to grasp our ambiguous situation. Wolfgang Smith observes that
the creature is more -- incomparably more! -- than its manifestation in space an time. It does not coincide with the phenomenon, the organism as conceived by the scientist....
Even the tiniest plant that blooms for a fortnight and then is seen no more is vaster in its metaphysical roots than the entire cosmos in its visible form: for these roots extend into eternity. And how much more does this hold true in the case of man!
Details. It's a nice sentiment, but what exactly is going on here? How is it that man in particular is incomparably vaster in his metaphysical roots than the entire cosmos in its visible form?
Yes, because his roots extend into eternity, to the toppermost of the poppermost, to the Absolute invoked by Duns Scotus at the top, and whose help we need in order to get anywhere in our desperate quest.
Football is calling, so we'll have to end this circumnavalgazing for now. But we'll try to fill in some details in the next post. We'll end with a favorite quote by Leonard Cohen, which is sort of a guiding principle of the blog and its ceaseless effort to provide vertical entertainment for fellow desperadOs:
“What [else] would I be doing? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don’t know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.
“I think that’s the real deep entertainment,” he concludes. “Religion. Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. The real feast that is available to us is within this activity. Nothing touches it.”
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