Thinking About Thinking

Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give opinions. --Dávila

Picking up where we left off yesterday, we're ultimately talking about how far thought can go. Kant, for example, would say it can't go very far -- not even as far as reality, rather, only to appearances.

A symmetrical pair of errors is believing: that beyond what we can know there is nothing, or that what we know is what there is.

Schuon is raising his hand:

on what grounds would it be possible to judge when one denies, implicitly or explicitly, the possibility of objective judgment, thus of judgment as such?

If intelligence can never exit "the vicious circle of thinking," then truly truly, we are sealed in tenure. But "it is absurd to present the inaccessibility of truth as being a truth," for "all anti-intellectual philosophy falls into this trap," claiming

that there is only the subjective and the relative, without taking into account of the fact that this is an assertion which... is valid only on condition that it is itself neither subjective nor relative, for otherwise there would no longer be any difference between correct perception and illusion, or between truth and error. 

Schuon has a better idea:

The intellect is a receptive faculty and not a productive power: it does not "create," it receives and transmits; it is a mirror reflecting reality in a manner that is adequate and therefore effective.

Which is another way of saying that intellect and intelligibility are as it were mirrors of one another; that what we call knowledge is an adequate reflection of being; and

If there were not something absolute in man -- he is "made in the image of God" -- he would be only an animal like other animals.... Man alone can step outside the cosmos, and this possibility proves -- and presupposes -- that in a certain way he incarnates the Absolute.

However, at the same time, Schuon acknowledges that in our day, "the intellect is atrophied to the point of being reduced to a mere virtuality." 

Use it or lose it?

It would seem:

One man can spend his whole life in searching and looking, and still know nothing, "see" nothing; another may arrive without trouble at intellectual certainties, and this proves that his ignorance was only accidental and not fundamental.

Why this difference?

leaving aside mere stupidity, we would say that intelligence may be extremely acute on the rational level alone, while being quite inoperative beyond that level...

In other words, even the best method for approaching the horizontal is entirely inappropriate for grasping the vertical. 

Analogously, a degree in physics doesn't help your vet understand what's wrong with your dog, nor a degree in veterinary medicine help to understand one's wife. Reality has its degrees, modes, and dimensions, and one doesn't bring a knife to a gunfight.

Any "science of the finite has need of a wisdom that goes beyond it," for

what could be more naive than to seek to enclose the Universe in a few mathematical formulae, and then to be be surprised to find out there always remains an elusive and apparently "irrational" element which evades all attempts to "bring it to heel"?

After all,

the man who is intelligent enough to grasp nature in its deepest physical aspects, ought to know that nature has a metaphysical Cause which transcends it, and that this Cause does not confine itself to determining the laws of sensory existence....

That's about it this morning.