Unsaturate Before Using

Properly speaking, the social sciences are not inexact sciences, but sciences of the inexact. --Dávila 

The following post was written in 2010, which is possibly before my discovery of Dávila, but the aphorism encapsulates what the post is about, and even what language is about. 

As we've discussed in some recent posts, aboutness is woven into the fabric of being, which is why the cosmos is intelligible to the intellect, and this intelligibility is communicable via language about being. 

In short, there is a two-way movement involving intelligibility and intelligence, each open to the other: neither being nor language are enclosed within themselves, but are open to each other. Moreover, this openness is not -- and cannot be -- reduced to a flatland horizontality, because this would mean that the cosmos is no longer about anything, nor the intellect about being. Nothing would about anything, and anything about nothing. 

Thus, elimination of the nonsensuous realm results in total nonsense -- and a performative contradiction to boot, because when a materialist pronounces on matter, he is implicitly saying that matter is intelligible to the materialist. He has by no means eliminated the aboutness of being, but confirmed it. And communicated it from one immaterial mind to another via speech.

Now, one of Toots Mondello's greatest concerns had to do with the excessive saturation of religious terms.

"God" is a case in point, because the word has immediate associations that may or may not be wrong but are surely incomplete, plus everyone uses the word as if they know what they are talking about. A word is saturated when it can no longer accumulate new meaning based upon experience, but simply is what it is -- like a sponge that can hold no more water.

Naturally, this is sometimes appropriate. There is nothing wrong with the word "chair" being saturated. A chair is a thing to sit on, and that's pretty much it.

But as we move up the ontological food chain, words can become more problematic. It reminds me of something Stanley Jaki once said: from a distance, language can appear to be a "solid" thing, but it is really more like a cloud, in that if you try to get up close in order to examine it directly, it dissolves into a kind of boundaryless fog. Proceed further into the fog, and you are likely to run into Jacques Derrida.

This is one of the benefits of studying a Thomas or Schuon, who are able to describe the transnatural planes with an objectivity, precision, and detachment that actually surpasses our ability to describe nature, since the latter is very much dependent upon perspective and other subjective factors, whereas metaphysical principles such as being are quite precise, if unsaturated.

In fact, Schuon addresses this directly in his Logic and Transcendence, noting that "writings falling outside the fields of science and modern philosophy tend to suffer from being associated with ideas that are usually inadequate, and they are immediately consigned by most people to categories having disparaging implications," such as "occultism," or "Gnosticism," or the new age rabble of mystagogues masquerading as mystics.

Thomas said that this was because science involves more perfect knowledge of less perfect things, while theology deals with less perfect knowledge of more perfect or noble things. 

This results in conflating confidence or certitude with objectivity, when the opposite is true: only God can be truly objective. To conclude that man's subjective view of nature is the height of objectivity is actually backward: it is merely exact science, not the science of the inexact.

Schuon might quibble about our knowledge becoming less certain as we approach the Absolute. It is less saturated to be sure, since the Absolute can never be saturated by language. Obviously it is "bottomless" or "endless" -- in a word, infinite -- so how could finite language ever enclose it?

This is again my purpose in using the symbol O instead of the symbol God, since the former reminds us of the apophatic "unsaturatability" of God. Obviously the ancient Hebrews were aware of this problem, which is why they gave ultimate reality an unpronounceable name; put conversely, reducing this reality to a name is a subtle form of idolatry.

If you want to know God's name, try saying YHVH ten times fast. Although any four random consonants will do as well. 

Interestingly, Thomas essentially emphasizes what we are calling the unsaturability of O: "Because we are not capable of knowing what God is but only what He is not, we cannot contemplate how God is but only how He is not." Even for beginners, he cautioned that "this is the ultimate in human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know Him."

How different this is from approaches that saturate God with subjective human ideas. This is hardly to say that we can have no knowledge of God, only that our knowledge can never be complete.

It is not fundamentally different from our knowledge of any other person. No matter how well you know someone, you can never have complete knowledge of them. A person -- since he is the most adequate analogue of God herebelow -- can never be saturated, even though, at the same time, man as such clearly has an unvarying nature. He has form, but the form is "empty" until filled out by life experience (which clearly distinguishes man from any kind of "blank slate").

In reality, a person is in the paradoxical position of being the (relative) ultimate in both knowability and mystery. You can know much more about a person than you can about a rock. And yet, the person is much more mysterious, since the mind is infinite. If Mozart or Shakespeare were alive today, they'd still be cranking out masterpieces.

And, of course, at the end of his life, Thomas was granted that gratuitous vision of the other side of the cosmic area rug. He was plunged into its radical mystery, to such an extent that all he had written seemed to him insignificant in light of it.

Now, this is not to devalue what Thomas had written. To the contrary, it is as if Bach were ushered into the place where all the music comes from, in light of which his body of work might sound like so many jingles and ditties. Or imagine James Brown being taken up into the eternal spacecraft of cosmic funkmanship, where his own seemingly inexhaustible funkiness would appear comparatively funkless.

So let's talk about the relative exactitude of our maps of hyperborea. We can at once see the unseen with these maps, but never see all there is to see. 

Analogously, to a certain extent, an abstract map provides information and perspective that no amount of empirical knowledge of, say, New York could ever provide. One could spend one's whole life in Manhattan and not even know about the rest of the country, as proven every day by the New York Times. It's like the old crack about England: Fog in Channel, Continent Isolated.

In fact, the materialist might say: Fog in Language, God Cut Off. But of course, we are the ones who are isolated and cut off from God, unless we make the attempt to swim the channel -- and, of course, if God tosses us a line.

Here is a good map of the world from the insulated perspective of Manhattan. In order to understand this post, just replace Manhattan with "ego" and the trans-Hudson world with "reality."

I wonder what Gemini makes of this old post?

Areas for Potential Refinement

• Target Audience Consideration: While brilliant for a philosophically inclined audience, some parts might be very dense for a general reader. Terms like "ontological food chain," "performative contradiction," "hyperborea," "apophatic," and "mystagogues" might require some readers to pause or look up definitions. If your target audience is broader, consider whether a brief, parenthetical explanation for some of these terms might be helpful without diluting the intellectual rigor.
• Flow and Transitions: For the most part, the post flows well. However, there are a couple of points where the transition feels a little abrupt. For instance, the shift from "aboutness" to Toots Mondello's concerns about "saturation" could be made slightly smoother.
• The "Toots Mondello" Interjection: While it introduces the "saturation" concept, "Toots Mondello" feels a bit like an inside joke or a persona that might not immediately resonate with all readers. If Toots Mondello is a recurring character in your blog, it's fine. If not, consider if there's a way to introduce the idea of word saturation directly without this potentially opaque reference, or provide a brief context for Toots.

What's that supposed to mean?

I do not have the capability to describe the image's symbolism.

So, you just symbolized what cannot be symbolized? So human!