Brief recrapitulation: if there is exists a way upward & inward to a post-disenchanted Cosmos, then we had better get the RH off the disabled list or at least into rehab. For only with its bat in the lineup will a religious vocabulary be meaningful. The latter is what we cosmothandrians call a grammar of infinitutude for which verticality and transcendence are as real as the immanence and horizontality apprehended by the LH. We ended with the proposition that the Cosmic Area Rug is woven of Absolute and Infinite, or Necessity and Possibility, which are mirrored herebelow in the LH and RH, respectively.
∞
Certitude of Certitude: How Can We Be Sure In a World That’s Constantly Changing?
Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles. —Dávila
What do we know? And what can we know with absolute certitude? To approach this question is to return to the beginning and know it for the first and last time, because no other questions can be answered until we first establish the fact that questions are answerable — i.e., that our shaky witness — the Anthropos — may possess true knowledge of himself and of the world.
Kant, as we have seen, placed an untraversable boundary between What Is and What We May Know About It, which ultimately results in an unbridgeable chasm between being and knowing — like an intrusive sign blocking out the scenery and breakin’ our minds.
Nevertheless, Kant’s epistemological toe slipped a little over the line, because you can’t know a wee bit about the unknowable — even that it is unknowable. You may be lost at sea, but that doesn’t prove that dry land doesn’t exist. If we cannot know the truth of reality, then our entire pretentious house of canards collapses, reducing us to competing forms of nihilism and survival of the frivolous.
That’s an exaggeration—
Yes, but only an uncharitable one. The point is that all human beings — as human beings — start with the pre-philosophical and pre-scientific conviction that Of course there’s a real world, doofus. WTF are you talking about? Man is uniquely instructed by O, which is why the rigorous discipline of Truth is a transfiguring and purifying process.
Hello, noumenon!
Our dry land consists of self-evident truths.
How do we know when we’ve found one?
When denial of it entails absurd or monstrous consequences repugnant to reason. It is reminiscent of what Chesterton says of the “thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” The inaccessibility of truth is #1 on the Index of Forbidden Ideas, all others being #2 or lower in our metaphysical flawchart.
One such thought is that our thoughts do not disclose reality and that truth is therefore unavailable to human beings. Since truth, in order to be true, must be the dynamic — not static, as we shall see — conformity of mind to being, the very notion of truth is poisoned at the root. Thought and Thing go through a nasty divorce, and Thing gets to keep all the real properties, since you Kant take ‘em with you. The Anthropos thus becomes closed within himself, and we’re done here.
Let us stipulate that man is a knower. But what does this mean, to know? What is happening when we know something? The answer is not obvious — at least not anymore — but for Maritain it is an irreducibly spiritual event through and through. For “There is a vigorous correspondence between knowledge and immateriality. A being is known to being to the extent that it is immaterial.”
Seriously, the immaterial mind is as different from material matter as anything we could possibly conceive. But as we have seen, even matter is conceived by the mind, so it’s not that easy to reduce the conceiver to the conception. If matter is but an appearance that corresponds to sensation, how could it have given rise to an immaterial reflection of the material sensation?
∞
At the top of our cosmotheandric vision are the necessary principles that do not rely upon any other principles, and presuppose no prior truth. They constitute the pre-flight checklist for the intellect before it attempts the vertical ascent. These propositions are in us by nature (i.e., they are self-evident), nor can we deny them without falling into absurdity -- for example, beginning with the soph-defeating principle that “there is no truth,” which is false if true, thus violating the principle of noncontradiction.
Now, could everything be an illusion or projection of our own subjectivity? No, because then we would have the absolute certitude that everything is an illusion, and whence this certitude? How did it, of all things, get into the Cosmos? There is just no way to get around the Absolute, even if we absolutely deny it. For it turns out that we believe in a number of things we don’t believe we believe, and maybe even don’t want to believe.
Unbelievable!
∞
Is it asking too much to be given a reliable map out of our trackless bewilderness? All men look for it, it’s just that most either pretend to have found it or just give up early for an untroubled life of sensory pleasure and ideological distraction.
Supposing our Axiom 7 — that the Anthropos is a reflection of the ultimate principle — then any Theos worthy of the title would naturally want us to know what the flip is going on here. This is not some kind of deadbeat deity who has no interest in rearing his children. Why otherwise would he give us an intellect, not to mention other vertical courtesies such as an endlessly intelligible Cosmos? If we are theomorphic, then the intellect isn’t just a biological accident to help us find ripe fruit and attractive daughters of men, rather, a vertical gift designed specifically to enable a fruitful rendezvous with terrestrial being.
Every sense has its object: surfaces for touch, color for the eyes, sound for ears, taste for the tongue. Likewise, being is the object of the intellect, as intelligibility to intelligence. Science, of course, assumes that reality is intelligible and that the human intellect has unique access to it, and that is certainly the right attitude.
Bina and Ziarani begin with the question, “how do we know if anything is true?” Notice that the question presupposes the existence of the very thing it wants to prove, truth. Is there any way around this faith in truth?
We could say, for example, that the truth is logical, but who says logic is absolutely true? Certainly not Gödel, since logic is ultimately tautological — premises in, conclusion out — nor is our selection of premises dictated by any logical operation. Logic cannot discover anything but what it presupposes, and besides, how does logic get here, and how is it that the Anthropos has unique access to it? There’s no dodging it: “before we can begin to look for the criterion of truth, we have to ascertain that there is such a thing as truth.” For “unless one accepts that there is indeed such a thing, nothing holds: remove truth, and everything collapses” (ibid.). The Cosmic Area Rug is either forever lost or torn asunder.
Not only must one “assume that there is such a thing as truth before one presents any reasoning,” but one must also assume that it can be symbolically formulated and communicated to other minds, and this further presumes a Cosmos so peculiar that it again looks as if it is ordered to the Anthropos, and vice versa.
In considering our few-in-number but great-in-reach principles that explain what in the world is going on with the world, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the intellect is “essentially relative to intelligible being, as sight is to color. In this way, the intellect is not enclosed within itself but, rather, is opened to the entire domain of intelligible reality” (Garrigou-Lagrange). This at once covers several of our Axioms, e.g., openness, relationality, and intersubjectivity.
Now, you’d think this would be uncontroversial, since its denial immediately results in the destruction of “every form of truth,”
indeed even every form of opinion [man], all the degrees of probability, and all those of error. No longer would there be any difference between a great error and a small one. Consequently, we would also in this way be led to suppress every form of desire and action. Thus, we would not only be faced with the death of the intellect but, moreover, with the death of action in all its domains (ibid.).
In other words, we couldn’t even be wrong, and who wants that?
All knowledge comes down to the binary question of Is or Is Not. But if the very first act of knowledge is to sever its link to what Is — AKA reality — then the mind is forever enclosed in its own knowledge of other knowledge, never of reality.
Better pause here—
The book doesn’t stop and start at your convenience!
Yes it does, otherwise we’ll be here all day.
