Recap: knowledge of any kind is an irreducibly immaterial and spiritual event. Of all forms of knowledge, our first principles abide at the top of the psycho-pneumatic food chain, entailing and encompassing all truths below them. These principles apply both to what Is and what cannot possibly Be, or in other words, reality and absurdity, disrespectively. In short, I am right and everybody else is wrong.
I wasn’t sure if the following transitional passage is strictly necessary, as it is only the bridge to a major section called The Absolute Certitudes. But Grok assures me that it is functional and even adequate, which is high praise coming from our jaded AI critic. It concedes that the passage “does not damage the narrative,” so we’ll go with it. It may not help you, but it won’t hurt a bit.
Easy, man, relax. No physical harm intended.
∞
In our first approach to the world, it certainly seems to be divided into three related modes or aspects: appearances, reality, and nous (intellect). Any and every philosophy, whether implicit or explicit, and even the very possibility of philosophy, must respect and rest upon this fundamental trifurcation.To put it another way, any utterance that pretends to express the merest truth of reality will reflect this triune structure of reality-appearances-knowledge — even an assertion that denies this structure. Go ahead and try. We’ll wait.
Thus, “To ‘discern’ is to ‘separate’: to separate the Real and the illusory, the Absolute and the contingent, the Necessary and the possible, Atma and Maya” (Schuon). One cannot “get around” the Absolute, for every denial is a backhanded compliment to its necessity.
I’m trying to imagine how one could be absolutely certain of relativism.
Don’t bother. Analogously, being-intelligibilty-intellect are like sun, rays, and eye, for the rays are at once separate from the sun, but looked at another way, just its prolongation to the periphery, so to speak. We are ultimately inside the sun, for where is its literal boundary, and who says? Thus we are at once inside and outside the Cosmos itself, for its immanent appearances are of a transcendent reality, precisely. And we not only know this, but cannot fail to do so without rendering life itself a Total Fail.
A metaphysical stereo vision is needed in order to reconcile the Absolute and the Relative, appearances and reality, the sun and its rays. If the sun is O, the rays are its phenomenal appearance, and we are the bridge: we aren’t just looking at the sun; we are inside the sun, participating in its light. Should we sever the link between the Intellect and What Is, we don’t just lose truth, we lose the ability to act rationally or even have a meaningful opinion. The intellect is not a closed system, rather an opening to the entire domain of intelligible reality. We are not things that happen to relate; we are Relations that also happen to be things: substances-in-relation (Axiom 11).
The Cosmos is not mute matter onto which we project meaning. Rather, it is a Vertical Event of intelligibility disclosing itself to intelligence. In this regard the intellect is like light itself, which in Vedantic philosophy is simply that which reveals: just as physical light illuminates a material world, intellectual light reveals an intelligible world, and how convenient is that? The first act of intellect is to at least acknowledge its own existence.
Be a man!
Yes, and all it implies.
Thinking About Thinking
Let’s put the kibosh on this dualistic manichee business once and for all. For cosmotheandrism there are two irreducibly related books through which the Theos has revealed itself, the Cosmos and Anthropos, and we know all about both.
Agreed, but as they say, but aren’t fish the wrong people to ask about water?
I see what you mean: some people say that the Anthropos is the wrong animal to ask about consciousness, because we’re swimming in it, whether in the shallow or deep end.
No intellect, no problem. But with intellect, life is an endless but fruitful problem. The value of thought derives from its being in conformity with reality. To put it another way, if thought isn’t the link between being and truth, then to hell with it: this book is not only over, it cannot begin.
Traditional philosophy — which our competitors like to call “pre-critical” — begins with common sense. Its basis is the certitudes of the immediately evident principles which are apprehended by the transpersonal Light of intelligence from the most simple and evident facts about both existence and ourselves. One may call it naïve, but no one has to believe in common sense, rather, only rely on it to get through the day.
Of course it wasn’t always this way. I myself dabbled with postmodernism back in grad school, but reality kept breaking through, especially once I was tasked with helping patients adapt to it. Nor would it be possible consistently parent — or coach Little League baseball for that matter — in a postmodern style, for this would be a surrender to anti-intellectual barbarism and bush league amateurism. Come to think of it, I never coached a kid who refused to wear a helmet because the ball just is a social construct. On the other hand, I did have to contend with anti-realist parents who insisted their sons be permitted to pitch despite their failure to master the rudiments of playing catch.
∞
In any event, for our cosmotheandric purposes, we are tracking down the principles with which one cannot possibly disagree without implicitly agreeing with them. Are there such principles? Or are postmodernists correct that we live in a Cosmos of absolute relativity and subjectivity, in which case we are permanently sealed in ignorance and tenure? This is still a principle, albeit one that immediately cancels itself out, a principle of no principles, and entropy takes care of the rest.
Again, how do we know a genuine first principle when we see one? What are its qualifications? First, it “ought to be one about which it is impossible to be mistaken.” It should “be so evident as to admit of no error” (Sheen). Moreover, it must be unconditional: no special pleading and no appeals to authority: it must be naturally known. Here we are not playing the Theos card, even if he latter turns out to be the dealer.
The first principle of thought must be the foundation of any and all our intellectual constructions. In the last analysis there is no certitude of any kind unless it can be resolved back to the first principles of being. Only on condition that the first principles are firm and stable will the conclusions drawn from them be unassailable, and the nearer our conclusions are to the first principles the more certain our knowledge must be.
What instinct is to the animal, intellect is to man. And for Thomas Aquinas, “Our intellect in understanding is extended to infinity.” This appears self-evident, for there is no limit to what we may know: “the intellect is therefore naturally capable of knowing everything that exists.” While we cannot actually reach the limits of knowledge, this is not to say there is no knowledge of the Limitless, or of O.
Note that the concrete sensible isn’t even a “fact” until there exists an intelligence to regard it as one. A dog or chimp does not dwell in a world of disinterested facts, nor is it possible to “evolve” into the human world, again, because we’re not talking about a continuous line but a discontinuous leap in being. There is no line that leads from touch or sight to the concept of pi, or to the theory of relativity, or to the self-evident truths that once undergirded our political system.
This is by no means to deny the fact of evolution. Indeed, it is to render the fact of evolution intelligible. To imagine evolution “explains” human intelligence isn’t superstitious, rather, it is substitious, since it is we who explain evolution. It begs the biggest question of all, which is how the intellect transcends the mere shuffling of material genes. No sense organ is aware of itself or of its operation. The eye neither sees itself, nor does it see what it sees. But the intellect is aware of itself and of its act of knowing.
Here again, if one believes this capacity of ours is a miracle brought about on the sixth day of creation, it is closer to the necessary truth than the person who believes it miraculously came about as a result of immanent matter somehow transcending itself. This latter doesn’t explain anything, i.e. how transcendence appears in an immanent world — how objects become subjects, how the outside gets in, how mere existence becomes experience.
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