If Truth Isn't the Ultimate Purpose of the Universe, There is No Purpose

So, I read yesterday's post. My takeaway? Life is the fulcrum of the cosmos.

Yes, truly truly, life is an unprecedented category of being: a luminous fissure, a restless declaration of subjectivity, the unimaginable opening of a window on the world, the dawning of an internal horizon in a universe now divided against itself. Which may or may not constitute purple prose, depending upon one's taste. 

Let's face it: a cosmos capable of giving rise to life is a peculiar place, but it's the only place we know and can know. Put conversely, is a lifeless -- and mindless -- cosmos even conceivable? Not for us, supposing we conceive it. Speaking of purple prose, 

That which is not a person is not finally anything.

Which implies that everything is just nothing in the absence of the living person.

The glory of God is man fully alive?

Assumes facts not yet in existence. We will concede that the glory of the cosmos is the man capable of knowing it, but is God not a gratuitous addition?

Not if we climb Antonio Livi's five step common sense ladder to and from God. He argues that

The “Dictatorship of Relativism,” the dominant culture of the postmodern world with its ideological roots in the Cartesian, Protestant, and French revolutions, is ultimately a revolt against Truth. It argues that man is incapable of knowing reality as reality but merely as physical-mathematical appearance; that unrestrained individualism, checked only by social consensus, is the essence of freedom and the standard for moral decisions; and that the most important truths  -- those regarding God and eternal salvation -- are unknowable. 

To defend Truth against this tyranny is to shield the very structure of logic, the meaning of language, the standards of beauty, the nature of love, and the divinely revealed doctrines of the Catholic Faith....

Slattery argues that the combined thought of St. Thomas and Livi is a compelling way to argue for the validity of immediate realism and the existence of absolute truths intrinsic to the structure of the human mode of knowing. Moreover, his conclusions imply the logical incoherence of the philosophies of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and the anti-realist Transcendental “Thomism” that epistemologically precludes the metaphysics of being and thereby the rational foundations of Catholic theology.

Now, man has a physical and a metaphysical dimension in the absence of which he wouldn't even know he's a man. 

Yesterday we alluded to novel and wild areas bordering on my inability to express them. But this book gets into novel and wild ideas bordering on my ability to comprehend them, if only because of all the Latin terms. 

Still, there were sufficient luminous fissures for me to get the gist of it. But reviewing them will be a slog. A necessary slog, but someone has to do it. It would be easier if I had a physical copy, but the book is only available by digital download, making the task even more unwieldy. Nor is it made easier by the fact that I can't just cut and paste the relevant passages.

Now, I am a realist, meaning that no one could convince me that the world is not intelligible and that man cannot know it. Any alternative to this is the end of both philosophy and science, and the beginning of tenure. Certainly it is the beginning of the Marxism that underlies progressivism. Recall the delusional words engraved on his headstone:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

No, the point is not to interpret or change the world, rather, to know the world as the basis for any rational change. It's called prudence: as expressed in a previous post,

Prudence is ordered to first reality. But modern philosophy has been skeptical of our capacity to know objective reality outside of our heads and the ideas we carry around between our ears. 

Prudence is both an awareness of reality, of the order of “what is,” and the ability to act based on the reality of things. 

In case you were wondering why the left is everywhere and at all times so imprudent: progressivism and wisdom are literally antithetical terms. One can look to an Antifa member for wisdom, just as one can try to milk a bull, but doing so will render one both thirsty and stupid. 

"The foundation of all knowledge" is "acceptance of man's natural ability to know reality and not just his ideas about reality." But our Dictatorship of Relativism -- the Reign of Tenure -- "is ultimately a revolution against Truth," for in reality

the individual discovers and assents to the truths discovered in and through the cosmos and self but does not and may not create truths.

And in the timelessly timely words of Orwell, "the further a society drifts from Truth, the more it will hate those that speak it." 

Where truth is imprisoned, ideologies rampage through the streets and menacing fanaticisms and fundamentalisms wait at the society's borders, scenting like wolves the weakness of such a society (Slattery). 

You don't say. The current counter-revolution against the Dictatorship of Relativism creates a veritable frenzy in those clinging to the power of the Lie, which is the very source of their power. Shine the light of truth on them, and they shriek like the demons that possess them.

Possess?

Well, do they possess the lie, or does the lie possess them? If they only possessed it, it would be susceptible to correction. But have you ever tried to reason with a leftist? Charlie Kirk devoted his life to doing so.

When "freedom has been forcibly separated from truth," "there is nothing to convert from and nothing to convert to, since truth no longer exists -- all that exists is me and my opinions, you and yours."

Is there really no exit from the postmodern Endarkenment of opinion? Must we tolerate the barbaric hordes of intolerable tolerantarians that attack tolerance itself?

relativism, although it hides behind masks of "tolerance" and intellectual modesty, is an egocentric tyrant who by denying absolute truths can enslave men to the intellectual fashion of the moment, thus controlling knowledge to its very foundations...

Slattery speaks of a societal "immunity to truth, which threatens to abolish man." But for Thomas, "Truth is the ultimate purpose of the entire universe."

That's the end of the preface. We'll get into the postface tomorrow.