The Imaginarium of Rationalism

To summarize: yesterday’s post ended with the repeated claim that our contingent Cosmos is dependent upon a non-contingent Principle. The anthropic intellect is a mirror of this Principle, such that the event of knowledge occurs in the dynamic space between the poles of immanence and transcendence (or Ø and O, respectively). To deny this “is to shut oneself off from the truth,” since it is necessary for us to remain open and thereby burn the anthropic candle at both ends. Being that the world is contingent, no scientific map can ever be complete, rather, the scientific method must remain open to the world. But what method is required in order to know the Absolute?

The cosmotheandric method?

Well, one must first acknowledge the a priori truth that the Absolute is what cannot fail to be, since it is the non-contingent ground of being, so any contingent truth we discover necessarily partakes of it. Conversely, “man, when he trusts to his reason alone, only ends by unleashing the dark and dissolving forces of the irrational” (Schuon).

In short, nothing could be more irrational than a reason enclosed in the LH imaginarium of rationalism. Again (as per Gödel’s Hammer), reason has its limits, so an “unlimited reason” is a contradiction in terms, an absurdity even.

In such a totalitarian rationalism, “an extreme mental dexterity goes hand in hand with a no less excessive intellectual superficiality.” The consequence is a “false lucidity” (ibid.) that only replaces the old sentimentalities with fashionable new ones, i.e., with novel passions, intoxications, and projected ideological mirages.

Schuon begins and ends with those immutable principles “which govern the Universe and fashion our intelligence,” one of which is the Absolute referenced above. This Absolute bifurcates herebelow into subject and object, or intelligence and intelligibility.

Now, “logic can either operate in accordance with an intellection or on the contrary put itself at the disposal of an error, so that philosophy can become the vehicle of just about anything” (ibid.).

Which — assuming you’ve been to college — checks out: no matter how frivolous or evil the doctrine, there is a philosopher somewhere who assumes its truth or thinks he can prove it. Schuon calls these absurdities “esoterisms of stupidity,” and says that when worldly intelligence “joins with passion to prostitute logic, it is impossible to escape a mental satanism which destroys the very bases of intelligence and truth.”

I hate when that happens.

Agreed, let’s not do that. Ultimately it comes down to the question of just 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.

Is there an aphorist in the house?!

Yes: 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.

For if RH intelligence can never exit the vicious circle of LH horizontal thinking, then truly truly, we are sealed in absurcularity. But in reality, it is absurd to posit the inaccessibility of truth as the first and last of all truths. Thus, “all anti-intellectual philosophy falls into this trap” in pretending

that there is only the subjective and the relative, without taking account of the fact that this is an assertion which, as such, 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.... (ibid).

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.”

Choose 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? “[L]eaving 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 is wrong with your dog, nor a degree in veterinary medicine help to understand what’s troubling your wife. Reality has its degrees, modes, and dimensions, and one doesn’t bring a scientistic knife to a metaphysical gunfight.

Schuon expresses the cosmotheandric view in affirming that any LH “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’ [RH] 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....”

In short, we ought to know better than to enclose ourselves in immanence, for blindness of transcendence isn’t just another form of vision.