Yesterday’s post ended with a sneak peak of Book III, suggesting that religion in general “furnishes points of reference that allow us to speak of the farthest regions of the soul that extend into, and down from, the transcendent pole of the Cosmos, i.e., what we call a Grammar of Infinitude.”
Lot of problems with that sentence.
Agreed, if only because there are more or less adequate Grammars of Infinitude, just as there are more or less adequate grammars of finitude. Just as we don’t place critical theory on the same plane as biology or physics, nor should we place the immolation industrial complex of the Aztec on the same level as, say, Shankara or St. Thomas. But we’ll let that slide for now. On to part two of the penultimate section of Book II, as we approach vertical liftoff into O:
These points of reference are of course in the form of language. In an essay called The Abuse of Language and the Abuse of Power, Pieper discusses how “reality becomes manifested through the word.” Obviously — critical theory notwithstanding — “One speaks in order to make known something real in the act of calling it by name in order... to make it known to someone else.” Language is where “human existence comes to pass,” so “if the word decays, humanity itself cannot fail to be affected, cannot fail to be harmed.”
Regarding this corrosive truth decay, words can be false only because it is possible for them to be true. Thus, corruption occurs when this ontologically prior link between word and reality has been severed. Which is necessarily an ambiguous business as it pertains to the vertical, since it cannot be disclosed in the same cutandry way one would describe the objective/horizontal/material world. The grammar of the latter is more denotative, whereas connotations — e.g. myth, allegory, and metaphor — abound in the vertical order. There is even a sense in which one speaks transcendence into being and renders it present via language itself. One might say that the implicate transcendent meaning is rendered explicate through speech, somewhat analogous to the collapse of the wave vector in quantum physics, for both involve local specifications of nonlocal potential.
Pieper adverts to a “technologically-manufactured ignorance of the world characterized by the possession of an abundance of information.” However, all the LH data in the world doesn’t add up to RH reality, and “once we have lost sight of what is truly real, an illusory reality may take its place..., a pseudo-reality which looks so real that it is virtually impossible for me to find out the truth.” This is what Voegelin calls a “secondary reality” parasitic on the first. But for Pieper, “man’s chief nourishment is truth,” and “Anyone who wishes to live a truly human life must [or ought to] feed on truth,” for what is the alternative?
Feasting on delusions?
Here again, the RH intellect must be distinguished from the LH reason which is only one of the tools at our cognitive disposal. If man were literally confined to the foolbox of reason, he could never know it, because such knowledge obviously transcends reason. Mere logic in a sense encloses us in tautology: premises in, conclusions out. But there is no logical operation for choosing the premises that must be furnished by extra-logical, infra-logical, or trans-logical means.
Thus, although man is the rational animal, he also has access to a “view from above,” through which he is aware of his own rational powers. At the same time — you have noticed — he can sink beneath reason, which is to say, think and behave irrationally.
Now, even the rationalist will admit to the latter, which is to say that man can fall beneath his intellectual powers. But what he will not acknowledge is that man can also rise above himself, even though the one implies the other.
As to falling beneath oneself, this is usually handled by the psychology department, specifically, clinical psychology, AKA my old racket.
However, by mid-century—
We’re not there yet.
We are speaking of the 20th, when a number of fellow psychological theorists began to address the upper vertical as well, e.g., Abraham Maslow and his “hierarchy of needs,” with meta-needs such as self-actualization at the top. He also acknowledged aesthetic needs, which is to say, an instinct for beauty, and how did that get into our otherwise selfish genes?
So there is something in the Anthropos that allows him to not only perceive the world’s beauty but to participate in it via artistic creativity, which clearly isn’t reducible to LH reason, otherwise it could be fulfilled by pondering syllogisms or working out math problems. Not to say that math isn’t — so they say — beautiful in its own way, only that it is inaccessible to the likes of us who dropped out of Algebra 2. I found no beauty there, only toil, tears, and sweat.
Now, it is easy to see that the lower vertical has “content,” generally ascribed to the RH unconscious. And as indicated above, it is self-evident that man transcends reason, the question being “into what?”
In other words, it seems that modernity is characterized either by the loss of content, so to speak, of the upper vertical, or by an inability to perceive it due to LH capture and suppression of RH intellection.
It is a kind of forgetfulness of being, or perhaps it’s just plain carelessness. Whatever the case, it seems there is an attenuation in man’s ability to apprehend the upper vertical, even though his need for it — just like rational or aesthetic needs — remains the same as it ever was. Whatever happened to William Blake and the ability to see the world in a grain of sand and Heaven in a wild flower?
Whom do we credit for the disenchantment of the world?
Or whom do we blame? Because if the vocation of man is to know the eternal in the temporal and the infinite in the everyday, then somebody dropped the ball.
We have previously discussed this in cosmoneurological terms — of right brain capture by the left, through which a totalitarian scientism is superimposed upon the world, thus eclipsing the upper vertical. But the same occurs with the internalization of any ideology.
You could say that ideology functions as a counterfeit substitute for Maslow’s transcendent needs mentioned above. Which also accounts for the irrational passion of politicized vertical needs, i.e., secular religions.
Consistent with Schopenhauer’s crack that “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world,” then we have to somehow restore our vision from 20/20 back to 20/∞.
To improve his own infinite vision — or vision of the infinite — Schopenhauer actually relied upon revelation, just not the Christian one, rather, the Vedantic, enthusing that “In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads.”
Indeed, they were even his favorite bedtime story (he read them every night before turning in), “a source of great inspiration and means of comfort to my soul.... The Upanishads have been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death.”
Speaking of man’s meta-needs, he wrote that “Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all lands and in all ages, in splendour and vastness, testify to the metaphysical need of man, which, strong and ineradicable, follows close upon his physical need.”
Likewise, similar to what was said above about ideological counterfeits, this vertical need “sometimes allows itself to be satisfied with clumsy fables and insipid tales.”
Having said that, it seems that Schopenhauer conflated the upper and lower vertical —as if the Upanishads were speaking of nothing more elevated than his concept of the world as blind will. So, he got off to a good start but ended in a metaphysical non-starter.
Oopsie! He took the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Yes, it is an occupational hazard of the philosopher, whose proper job is to love wisdom — the Logos — not pretend to possess it. Frankly, for Schopenhauer, where there is the Will, there is no Why? Such a man, in the words of Schuon, wants his answers
to be as external and as easy as that of “scientific” phenomena; in other words he wants answers on the level of his own experiences; and since these are purely material, his consciousness is closed in advance to all that goes beyond them.
Which goes back to what was said at the top of this section regarding a Cosmos that is dependent upon a higher principle and an intellect that can dynamically engage this principle. To deny this “is to shut oneself off from the truth” in order to preserve an LH model of reality, such that one’s method determines what one perceives. But what method is required in order to know the Absolute?
A metaphysical cliffhanger!
No comments:
Post a Comment