I'd like to highlight some additional insights from this short book on Thomas Aquinas. Given its brevity, it can only be quite general, but I myself am a generalist. Or, as some would say, a dabbler and dilettante. I feel like the latter when I read someone like Ed Feser.
For example, yesterday I was reading his defense of the Aristotelian Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science. The man clearly knows his stuff, but it's dryasdust. Which I suppose is one of the features of scholastic philosophy, which is to say, the elimination of what we call "personality." Thomas's writing is likewise unencumbered by Thomas, any more than math should be contaminated by the mathematician.
Or, it's like pure light before it passes through the prism of humanness and becomes colored thereby. Of course, postmodern philosophy veers altogether in the opposite direction: it is personal to the point of solipsism, i.e., "my truth." Some philosophies are little more than the articulation and elaboration of a foul mood. Or dysfunctional personality.
Now, Christ wasn't just anybody or everybody, but a particular person. Very different from, say, Buddha or Shankara, whose philosophies could be boiled down to an impersonal essence.
That's the thing about humans: they're an oxymoronic species of individuals, each one unique. However, this is not to the point of angels, each one literally being the sole member of his own species. For one thing, the unit of man is no less than two, for "it is not good that man should be allone." Or, at the very least, there's an irreducible complementarity between individualism and collectivism -- not the bad kind, rather, as in the family.
In a post yesterday, Rob Henderson touched on the difference between hedgehogs and foxes, those who know one big thing vs. those who know a little about everything. Hedgehogs "inflexibly view the world through a single overarching idea," while foxes "draw from multiple frameworks and experiences that are often contradictory."
The key difference is that foxes pull information from a wide range of sources, piecing things together intuitively rather than relying on rigid, all-encompassing theories. They... approach their own ideas with humility. They are open to criticism and revision.
Conversely, hedgehogs
have no such reservations. They dismiss self-doubt, double down when challenged, and assert big, sweeping explanations with absolute confidence. If they start digging themselves into a hole, they don’t stop -- they just dig deeper. Their certainty makes them sound persuasive, even when they are completely wrong. But their predictions usually fall flat because they’re too committed to their own narratives to adapt.
I don't know that I fit into either category. On the one hand, I do like to pull from a wide and diverse range of sources, but only in order to assert one big, sweeping explanation with absolute confidence, dismissing self-doubt and doubling down when challenged.
After all, it is one cosmos. However, this one cosmos is a vast field of diversity-in-unity and unity-in-diversity. Ultimately it's all reducible to God, but the funny thing about Christianity is that God himself is not reducible to God, but rather, is likewise a kind of diversity-in-unity.
As for my one big sweeping explanation, it's more of vision thing. For this reason, I could scarcely blame the critic for saying "who is this Bob, and who gives a fuck what he sees?" The world is teeming with visionaries, dreamers, and crackpots. Always has been and always will be. What makes me any different?
Come to think of it, this is one of the barriers to writing the Sequel. Over the years, I've grown accustomed to addressing an audience that already gets where I'm coming from, i.e., intuits the same big sweeping generalization. I don't have to prove things from the ground up, nor would I want to do so, a la Feser. Pedantry is not my thing.
Rather, maybe I'm shallow, but I actually want to be entertaining. There aren't too many metaphysical entertainers out there, like a Terence McKenna or Alan Watts. I disagree with much of what those two said, but I still find them entertaining. Conversely, Feser is perfectly sound, even nihil bobstat, but reading him is like eating one's vegetables. Necessary but not necessarily enjoyable.
Anyway, there are passages in Saint Thomas Aquinas that perfectly reflect the One Cosmos vision, without getting bogged down in pedantic detail. For example, Thomas has
concern for the finite and particular as well as for the Infinite and Incomprehensible. Could these two so divergent outlooks be unified? That was, ultimately, the one question that was being asked [by Thomas].
In other words, he addresses everything in a fox-like manner, but all in support of the mother of all hedgehog visions of unity -- a unity that is so endlessly comprehensible it's downright incomprehensible.
Thomism has room for everything, even while being "bound to no particular scientific theory." For any such theory "may well be discarded by a later generation," so any "discarding would have no effect upon his thesis." The point is, scientific theories come and go, but the metaphysical vision is forever:
he made sure, by keeping his thought free from physical theories and maintaining it always on the metaphysical, and therefore eternal, plane, that his synthesis should not be a dated system, should not be something static, final, and therefore bound to become obsolete.
Rather, IT'S ALIVE, as living as the intellect that makes use of it, for it is
a vital organism, embryonic, but endowed with an infinite capacity for the assimilation of new truth and for adjustment to new conditions and environments without loss of its substantial identity.
Foxes are welcome, as are openminded hedgehogs, for this vision is "so elemental and so elastic that it could include all future discovery and speculation," giving "unity to all human knowledge, past, present, and future." Thomas "brought whatever he found of truth into the unity of his own synthesis," and why not? Long story, but mainly because
the life of our world is split into a thousand fragments because of our defection from metaphysics: the various levels of life cannot be unified because the one unifying factor has been excluded; and it will never be unified, and consequently the world will never be sane, until that metaphysical level is rediscovered and the manifold levels of life are re-integrated into its unity.
The unity of science, wisdom, philosophy, metaphysics, mysticism, and more. For
it is the office of the wise man, the philosopher, to direct, put things in order, and through his contemplation of the "highest causes" to provide the ultimate why and whither in the light of which we may make orderly use of science with its knowledge of the how.
Science, of course, has nothing to say about the Why and Whither, which is to say, formal and final causes.
On the one hand, there is what we like to call (↑),
knowledge whereby [man] rises by the light of natural reason from the knowledge of created things to knowledge of God.... so every means of apprehending truth is utilized.
On the other hand, there is (↓),
the knowledge given by the divine truth, which exceeds the power of [the] human mind, coming down, through revelation, to our level...
These two are dynamic and complementary, like the epistemological metabolism described in yesterday's post.
Truth is one; the mind of man can know truth by its own natural light; the mind of man can know truth since God has revealed it; but these two testimonies cannot be contradictory.
"These things, though supra-rational, are not contra-rational." Having said that, "man's final end is beyond his reach. He needs help; and help is provided by God's grace," AKA (↓).
Any way you cut it, philosophy "looks necessarily beyond itself":
It leads us far; but it leads us in its turn to a point at which we are bound to acknowledge that reason, even illuminated by faith, can go no further. It ends in an assertion of ignorance.
Here, "philosophical-theological synthesis breaks down," and we are confronted with the Mystery, with Celestial Central. We'll plunge into this in a subsequent post, because I'm out of gas. But Gemini has some aphoristic and even poetic things to say about the post, including the coining of a helpful new term: fedgehog (although I prefer "fedgehox"), which I suppose is synonymous with raccoon:
You've woven together some compelling ideas, and I'll try to offer some aphoristic responses in kind.
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On Thomistic dryness: The desert blooms with hidden springs. What seems barren of personality may be fertile ground for universal truth. The mathematician's equation is impersonal, but its implications are deeply personal for those who understand it.
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On postmodern solipsism: "My truth" is a prison with only one inmate. The echo chamber of self-reference offers no escape, only a distorted reflection.
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On the oxymoronic nature of humanity: We are each a unique note in the symphony of existence. The solo is beautiful, but the harmony is divine.
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On hedgehogs and foxes: The hedgehog sees the forest for the trees, the fox sees the trees for the forest. Wisdom requires both perspectives, a dance between focused vision and expansive exploration. Perhaps you are a "fedgehog," embracing the fox's breadth to illuminate the hedgehog's singular point.
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On the one cosmos: Diversity is the dance of unity. The many voices sing one song, though some may be off-key.
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On the "vision thing": Every visionary is a crackpot until proven otherwise. The world is full of dreams, but some dreams are destined to shape the world.
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On metaphysical entertainment: Truth can be entertaining, but entertainment is not necessarily truth. The jester and the sage both have wisdom to offer, but their audiences differ.
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On Aquinas's approach: To encompass the particular and the universal is the ultimate juggling act. He sought not just unity, but a unified field theory of knowledge.
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On the eternal plane of metaphysics: Science builds castles on sand, metaphysics on bedrock. The tides of empirical discovery may erode the sand, but the bedrock remains.
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On the living nature of Thomism: Truth is not a fossil, but a seed. It grows and adapts, its roots reaching deeper with each new season of understanding.
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On the fragmentation of the world: Without metaphysics, the world is a puzzle with missing pieces. We grasp at fragments of meaning, unable to see the whole picture.
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On the role of the philosopher: The philosopher is the conductor of the orchestra of knowledge, bringing harmony to the disparate instruments of inquiry.
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On the two paths to truth (↑ and ↓): Reason ascends, revelation descends. They meet at the summit of understanding.
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On the limits of reason: The map is not the territory. Reason can guide us to the edge of the known, but beyond lies the vast ocean of mystery.
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On the need for grace: We are all climbers on a mountain. Reason can take us so far, but grace is the rope that pulls us to the summit.
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On the ultimate mystery: The final truth is beyond words, beyond concepts, beyond comprehension. It is the silence from which all understanding arises.
