The Cheap Splendor of Liberal Lies

There is no way to know with certainty that we have "made contact with reality." Even if all other knowers agree with us we could still be wrong; and no one might agree with us, yet we could still be right. Therefore, our conviction that we have reached truth "is always a fiduciary conviction, as are also the convictions of other people seeking to evaluate our vision" (Prosch).

Fiduciary is another word for trust, which is in turn closely related to faith: we trust what we have faith in, and vice versa. Whom do you trust? I, for example, no longer trust the left, to put it mildly. This is because I naively trusted them for half my life, and it turned out that most everything they told me was a lie or distortion or half-truth. They abused my trust. Which is a sin, especially when done to a child (which is more or less always, because it renders adults childish). As we said once before, liberalism is a Peter Pandemic

A passage in this article on feminist indoctrination reminded me of how it felt to be a leftist. It's important, because one reason why leftist thought takes root in the psyche is that it mimics truth in a compelling way.

As the author puts it, "When I first discovered women’s studies, I was lulled into a comforting sense that I had discovered the 'truth.' It was as if my veil of ignorance had been yanked away, and I was blissfully seeing the world for what it really was."

Exactly. Any intelligent person realizes -- for it is built into man -- that appearances are not reality. Indeed, what is intelligence but our ability to see beneath the surface of things and know their deeper principle? Science, for example, reduces multiplicities to unities, and the deeper the theory, the more phenomena it unifies. Quantum physics unites more than its Newtonian forerunner, as Darwin unites more than Lamarck or other purely biological alternatives.

Just so, it is not only that the left lies; rather, it must be the type of lie that mimics truth in bringing together disparate phenomena, providing us with a kind of counterfeit aha! experience. This is no doubt how all those intellectuals were pulled in by Marx. Here was a theory that explained everything (except how Marx could transcend class and know unconditioned Truth).

Freudian psychoanalysis accomplished the same thing. Speaking of Darwinism, it also serves this purpose for flatland ideologues such as Richard Dawkins and the like. There is something positively thrilling about a theory that liberates one from the appearances of things, and gives access to a deeper reality that "explains everything."

For this is precisely what truth is supposed to do: you know, set us free. Free from what? Well, from appearances, for starters. Truth is surprising, as we've been suggesting over these past several posts. It is not merely a logical operation, or deduction from first principles. To quote Dávila, Faith is not assent to concepts, but a sudden splendor that knocks us down. You could say that real truth palpably defeats our efforts to resist it.

Continuing with the article, "I have taken seven women’s studies classes.... After taking those classes, I realize that not only was I deluded, but I was led into an absurd intellectual alcove where objective truth is subordinate to academic theories used as political propaganda."

Yes: deluded and used. Weak and malleable women serve this purpose for the left, but not nearly to the extent that blacks do. Women of all ages are more likely than men to be on the left, but for blacks the ratio is usually higher than nine to one.

How is that? Again, it must be the satisfaction, the counterfeit thrill of a theory that explains everything. All you really need to know is that you are black, and all life's mysteries are revealed to you. Such is the meretricious beauty of identity politics, whether one is female, homosexual, Hispanic, Aryan, whatever. It is the key that opens the Cosmic Door.

Now, the real splendor is a prolongation of truth, as light rays are to the sun. Faith is its mode of receptivity -- like one of the five senses, only on a higher plane. How to tell the difference between this and its phony substitutes? Hmm, let's see. Let's think back to when Bob was a liberal.

Surely it must be important that I was not only irreligious but anti-religious, such that I explicitly excluded myself from any real graces, except the ones that could get past my defenses. Therefore, the only splendor available to me would by definition have to come from the left. And that it did.

Even today, for example, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is the bestselling work of history on college campuses. Thirty six years after its initial publication it is still #227 on Amazon, and must have made its Marxist author a small fortune (the wiki article on Zinn says it routinely sells in excess of 100,000 copies a year). Not bad for a torrent of lies.

In any event, I still remember the feeling upon reading Zinn and others like him. Again, like any good conspiracy theory, it explains everything. It also has a gnostic appeal, because now you are in on the secret. And it has a religious appeal, both because it saves (to be on the left is to be Good and therefore absolved of sin) and liberates one from appearances. It also provides meaning from evangelizing and converting those still living in darkness. Not incidentally, it also makes you a Superior Person, so the appeal to narcissism is transparent (no doubt accounting for its appeal to the featherbrains of Hollywood and the MSM).

I didn't intend to go in this direction, but here we are. Let's conclude with some aphorisms:

The only man who saves himself from intellectual vulgarity is the man who ignores what it is fashionable to know.

To feign knowledge of a subject, it is advisable to adopt its most recent interpretation.

Great stupidities do not come from the people. First, they have seduced intelligent men.

One Man's Floor is Another Man's Ceiling

Yesterday we came to the surprising conclusion that not only is a good problem already implicit foreknowledge of its solution, but that all knowledge is of this nature.

That is, any knowledge is a stepping stone to deeper comprehension, thus pointing beyond itself in ways we cannot fully predict or render explicit.

Indeed, "if all knowledge is explicit, i.e., capable of being clearly stated, then we cannot know a problem or look for its solution."

A good problem is a function of simultaneously not knowing and yet implicitly knowing: "somehow we are able to appreciate the wealth of its yet undiscovered consequences." If we knew its consequences explicitly, then it wouldn't be a problem.

Know them by their fruits: good problems are fruitful, whereas bad ones are like that barren fig true that irritated Jesus.

Again, the process of discovery doesn't function like a linear machine, or we'd already know everything. It would just be a matter of drawing conclusions from premises.

Having said that, this is what many thinkers do. For example, we can trace the known laws of physics back to a singularity some 13.7 billion years ago. That requires no "discovery," just an application of the math.

If we do treat this as a discovery, what exactly have we discovered? What we've actually discovered is that mathematics has built-in limits, and that we shouldn't confuse these limits with the limits of existence or being. In other words, just because math "ends" at the singularity, don't think this this means existence does. Please. Have a sense of proportion.

Even religious folk make this error, confusing the Big Bang with God's creation as such. But God's primordial creativity operates vertically, no less today than 13.7 billion years ago. This transcendent creative source is a metaphysical necessity irrespective of whether the cosmos is eternal or came into being at a specific point in time. If the Big Bang theory were disproved tomorrow, this would do nothing to negate the necessity of God.

Yes, the Big Bang was and is a creative act. But so too is everything else. Moreover, the Bang is still banging, and from God's perspective, it occurred just now. And now. And now.

Think of God's creativity as a lamp held at the end of a chain. No analysis of the chain will explain how it is held to the ceiling. God is the ceiling from which existence hangs, every moment, before, during, and after the so-called Big Bang.

The Big Bang is indeed a very curious event, such that it no doubt "points" to a Creator. But what isn't a Curious Event? Events themselves are curious. As Einstein said, physics has no explanation for why there is a Now from which to perceive these Events.

This is what I was trying to drive home in the book, that the sudden appearances of life and mind are no less mysterious and in need of a deeper explanation than can be provided by mere physics or biology. As with the Big Bang, we can trace the origins of life back (as of today) 3.7 billion years ago. Now, exactly what does this prove -- I mean in a meaningful sense, not just in terms of an abstract number?

For the researchers, whose minds are confined by their data, this pushes "the established fossil record more than 200 million years deeper into the Earth’s early history," and provides "support for the view that life appeared very soon after the Earth formed and may be commonplace throughout the universe."

Whoa, slow down, partner! It does no such thing, for shaving off 200 million years does nothing to alter the inexplicable suddenness with which life occurred on earth. And the notion that life "may be commonplace throughout the universe" is really an assumption masquerading as a conclusion. What they're really saying is that there wasn't sufficient time for life to develop as a consequence of chance, therefore it must be built into the nature of things.

Well, yes. It might be a "cosmic imperative," as one person puts it. But what does this even mean? That it necessarily and inevitably appears, like an output from a linear machine or program?

Again, compare it to tracing physics back to the singularity. Biology can trace life back to an outer limit, but do not confuse this limit with the origin, which must be vertical. Life, like existence, is held by that same chain affixed to the ceiling.

We know this, because it is quintessentially true of the Mind that engages in physics and biology. Nothing about the mind makes sense if it isn't dangling, so to speak, from the Absolute. To remove God from the equation is literally like removing the ceiling and expecting the lamp to remain suspended in mid-air.

Now, the mind is what explains everything below itself -- for example, the Big Bang and the origins of life. Furthermore, this mind is explained by the God without whom the mind explains nothing, precisely. Our minds can peer downward and skirt around "origins" of various kinds. But in order to make sense of these, it must look "upward," on pain of the ceiling being indistinct from the floor, and therefore having no "space" for humanness to flourish.

The Endless Search for Questions to Our Answers

Reader Ted alerts us to this piece by Robert Barron on why the Catholic church continues to bleed souls: "for every one person who joins the Catholic Church today, six are leaving," many of whom are young, and often due to "intellectual objections."

Which is interesting in itself, because that cannot be literally true. Rather, it is simply exchanging one vapidity or superficiality for another; or fleeing the non-intellectual for the anti-intellectual. Really, it is leaving the surface of a bottomless ocean for the surface of a desert. But whatever it is, it isn't "intellectual" -- unless one is using that word ironically or as an epithet.

My wife tried to raise this issue with the parish priest (a very nice man), but he waved it aside, essentially saying that the heart is all that matters. Well, yes. Not the heart of sentiment, but the heart-intellect, two very different things. True, the heart of sentiment is sufficient for the bhakti, and there's nothing wrong with that form of practice.

But not everyone, to say the least, is a born bhakti. The intellect has its legitimate needs and rights, and it is wrongheaded and ultimately oppressive to reduce a full-service religion to just one of the items on its celestial menu. If the intellect cannot find satisfaction in religion, it will simply look elsewhere. It will continue searching for truth, but in all the wrong places.

But to say that "X (e.g., science, philosophy) is for truth, while religion is for Y (e.g., consolation, anxiety, meaning)," is to guarantee the development of Split Cosmos Syndrome. It creates an insurmountable bifurcation in the world and in the soul. One becomes an implicit or explicit cartesian, with no way to reunite body and soul, matter and psyche, subject and object.

This goes directly to what we've been saying about the imaginal realm. Corbin notes that "there has ceased to be an intermediate level between empirically verifiable reality and unreality pure and simple."

In other words, the three-storey cosmos of empirical-rational-imaginal has been reduced to a one-storey empirical shack surrounded by unreality. The latter is no longer a cosmos at all, or at least not the cosmos -- rather, just an impoverished declension from the real deal: "between the sense perceptions and the intuitions and categories of the intellect there has remained a void" (Corbin).

You could even say that sensory fullness equates to spiritual emptiness. Think of lower animals, for whom there is no space between perception and reality; or rather reality is perception.

This is never true of human beings, and Gödel forever liberated us from that nonsense (or puresense) in proving that we always transcend whatever empirical or rational box we try to enclose ourselves in. There is and can never be any manmade "theory of everything," for it can never account for the man who makes it. Rather, there is only one rational theory of everything, in the absence of Whom we plunge into un- or anti-reason.

This whole subject is fraught with paradox, but it is orthoparadox, which is really another way of saying that what appear to be irreconcilable opposites are really harmonious complementarities. If anyone is keeping track of the various Raccoon Principles I have annunciated over the years, Bohr's principle of complementarity, filtered through Hartshorne, would be one of them.

Actually, it goes back to my days in psychotherapy. My analyst was a brilliant but quirky punster with a deep appreciation of paradox, who helped me realize that the most important things tend not to be conflicts but complementarities. Indeed, if you try to resolve such a complementarity, you're setting yourself up for a life of conflict!

Transforming conflicts into complementarities. That's one of the tasks of cosmotherapy.

You can come at the problem via the path of science or of religion. Polanyi, for example, "thought a false idea of science has left us with a skepticism about the nature of man and his works. We must, therefore, revise one to restore the other." In short, man cannot be treated, or even diagnosed, with a false idea of science.

One complementarity that unites Polanyi and Corbin is that of invention and discovery, or of reality and imagination. For example, "there are no explicit rules for making a discovery and since no discoveries can be made 'without creative passion,' the individual scientist cannot be directed in his work by other authorities."

Discovery is obviously not merely a logical extension of what is already known, or we would already know everything. Rather, by dwelling in the known, we make leaps -- not into the dark, but into a twilit world of possibility. The scientist must start with a good problem, but there is no logical operation that can distinguish between good and bad (i.e., fruitful and unfruitful) problems.

Indeed, "there seems to be a *paradox* involved in the very notion of a 'good problem,'" first gnosissed by Plato. That is, "To search for the solution to a problem... would seem absurd, since, if you know what you are looking for, then there is no problem." And if you don't "know what you are looking for, then you cannot expect to find anything."

Paradoxically, to (explicitly) conceive a good problem is to already (implicitly) perceive its solution: "to see a problem is to see something that is hidden. It is to have an intimation of the coherence of hitherto not comprehended particulars." It is as if the right brain runs ahead of the left, the latter of which searches for confirmation of what the former has intuited.

It gets more paradoxical, for "if all knowledge is explicit, i.e., capable of being clearly stated, then we cannot know a problem or look for its solution." So again, to recognize a good problem is already a kind of deep (fore)knowledge of its solution. Ultimately -- and this is pretty weird -- "all knowledge is of the same kind as the knowledge of a problem." Thus, there are no "solutions," only better or worse questions!

Can this possibly be the case? Well, as Dávila said in yesterday's post, Christianity does not solve "problems"; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level. Furthermore, Catholicism does not solve all problems, but it is the only doctrine that raises them all.

In any event, you will have no doubt noticed that most of our political problems are a consequence of good answers to bad questions and bad answers to good ones.

To be continued...

Middle Earth and the Cosmic Palace

It just popped into my head that "middle earth" would be a good name for the imaginal world discussed yesterday.

Again, there is the empirical/material world we encounter via sensation, and the intelligible world we negotiate via math and reason. In between is the imaginal world where vision, gnosis, theophanies, and other *interesting* phenomena take place. Just as the physical world is disclosed by (and clothed in) our senses, the imaginal world comes to us in the form or our religious sensibilities (in image, myth, archetype, etc).

This is really quite similar in structure to how Polanyi envisions science. One of the points of his philosophy is to demonstrate that the ideal of strict objectivity is an unrealizable abstraction, and that we can only know that from which we are not detached.

Rather, the object of knowledge emerges "only through our actual dwelling in its particulars," i.e., its subsidiary clues. There is no mechanical operation that can accomplish this. Rather, it requires a subject in order to dwell in and integrate the clues.

Yesterday I cited a few aphorisms that reflect this same approach, thus making for a surprising Polanyi-Dávila-Ibn Arabi nexus. Indeed, we might even surmise that if we dwell in all three long enough, perhaps a new reality will emerge from their joint integration, a la Polanyi.

Let's first dwell in a few more aphorisms. From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints. Or in other words, it is as if one has "touched" (or been touched by) the noumenal, which is clothed, as it were, in the art form. This is identical to how the imaginal works, in that, just as no one "sees" the realm of art as such, likewise no one sees God face-to-face. Rather, in both cases we have access to the forms which testify to the Formless.

Allusion is the only way to express what is intimate without distorting it. Allusion has a from-to structure, in that dwelling in the from gives access to an implicit and unstated to. This is precisely the structure of poetry, and why poetry reduced to prose generally becomes banal.

Ah, Nothing is more superficial than intelligences that comprehend everything. Such an intelligence consists of explicit knowledge only. It points to nothing and nowhere; it is enclosed within itself, or rather, it is the precipitate or crystallization of a mind that has closed itself to reality. Consequentially it is both dead and endeadening. It is experience reduced to a dogma -- or scientism elevated to religion.

Related: Man believes he is lost among facts, when he is only caught in the web of his own definitions. Has this ever happened to you? It happens to stupid people, but may become aggravated in bright people like yourselves who are more capable of abstraction. They are perhaps capable of building a bigger prison, but it's a prison nonetheless.

There's a gag by Kierkegaard to the effect that the philosopher builds a beautiful palace but is condemned to live in the shack next door. This goes to the essential grandiosity of such factsimians, whose imaginative eyes are always bigger than their existential stomachs. There is a palace, but you can't reside there without God's Moving Company.

Speaking of which, Christianity does not solve "problems"; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level. Or in a bigger house, as it were.

Nor does Christianity deny the splendor of the world, but rather invites us to search for its origin, to climb towards its pure snow.

That is straight-up Ibn Arabi, for it is "the world to which the ancient Sages alluded when they affirmed that beyond the sensory world there exists another universe with a contour and dimensions and extension in space, although this is not comparable with the shape and spatiality as we perceive them in the world of physical bodies."

It is not that this higher world is "in" the lower, rather, the converse. The ontological direction -- involution you might say -- runs from imaginal, to rational, to empirical.

And that is all we have time for this morning.

The Direction of Truth

Meaning "is always lost, sometimes for good, when in order to inspect them [tacit particulars] focally, attempts are made to withdraw ourselves from those feelings and perceptions, those particulars, within which one is dwelling in an act of knowing" (Prosch).

In other words, by rendering what is implicit explicit -- by turning it into the object of perception -- its meaning is lost: we see at instead of through, like a pair of dirty eyeglasses.

An aphorism or two pop into mind: for example, There exists no truth in the humanities that does not need to be rediscovered each week. And When things appear to us to be only what they appear to be, soon they appear to be even less.

Consider the first: it explains why religious truth can never be discovered just once; rather, faith is more like a continuous process of discovery; indeed, you could say that the endless discovery is the discovery, right? You can never really arrive at the (explicit) place toward which the (implicit) clues are pointing, or you would be God. Thinking otherwise is a little like looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Likewise, consider the second: to focus on the appearance instead of the reality toward which it points is to literally reverse the direction of the human vector. It is the quickest and most efficient way to bar or undo meaning. Not to bag on the left, but this is what they do, and why their worldview is so unavoidably nihilistic (because it flees from real meaning).

In fact, it brings to mind another aphorism: The left's theses are trains of thought that are carefully stopped before they reach the argument that demolishes them. They must not go to where the facts and clues lead, or they would be paralyzed. Thus, if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor. Period.

"B-b-but..." Zip it!

Along those same lyin's, The atheist devotes himself less to proving that God does not exist than to forbidding Him to exist. For one thing, it is strictly impossible to disprove the existence of God, so why waste time trying? This is why atheists construct their false gods which they then go about disproving. But in reality, if God doesn't exist, only He knows it.

While looking for those aphoristic nuggets of joy, I found several others, each looking at the phenomenon from a different angle:

To be stupid is to believe that it is possible to take a photograph of the place about which the poet sang. The scientistic/materialistic type must believe that the photograph is more "real" than the poem, but this only testifies to their own inadequacy, or lack of conformity, to the nonlocal object. It's like dogs, who presumably cannot hear melodies, rather, just noise. They cannot perceive, let alone appreciate, what the noise is pointing to.

Here is another malady that afflicts the left: Reducing another's thought to its supposed motives prevents us from understanding it. Misunderstanding is one thing. That is obviously susceptible to correction. Disunderstanding is another thing entirely, and it is what the left specializes in. It is why they do not deal in arguments, only slander.

Here is how it works, courtesy Happy Acres:

Everything is trivial if the universe is not committed to a metaphysical adventure. Again, the adventure takes place in the space between tacit and focal knowledge, or between matter and (ultimately) God, if you like. As it so happens, this is precisely Ibn `Arabî's view, albeit expressed in slightly different terms.

That is, there is the empirical/material world and there is the intelligible/rational world. In between is what Corbin calls the imaginal world, and this is the space were religion "takes place," as it were. Importantly, it is not "imaginary," for which reason Corbin coined the term "imaginal."

We don't have sufficient timelessness to give a full airing of the subject -- that's a coming attraction -- but this space is where spiritual knowledge, visions, and theophanies take place. It is where (k) shades off into (n). And no, you cannot take a photograph of it. However, icons, cathedrals, and sacred music, for example, point to it. As does scripture, of course.

Which is why scripture functions in a manner similar to the Aphorisms: My brief sentences are dots in a pointillist painting. The difference is that no single mind can comprehend -- i.e., wrap its mind around -- scripture, and "see it whole," like a painting. Again, it provokes an adventure of endless discovery in its imaginal space.

Humanizing humanity again will not be an easy task after this long orgy of divinity. Oh my! You could say that when human beings are seen as merely human, they soon become even less. There is a kind of infinite space -- the imaginal space, to be exact -- between merely biological human beings and our innate deformity. But the distance between man and beast is but a single step. Or vote.

To deny God is to divinize man, because again, only a being with divine capacities can know that God doesn't exist. But man without God is no longer man, rather, just a randomly evolved primate. Man "takes place" in the space between biology and O. Which is why anti-religion leads to a toxic and destructive religiosity, every time. It brings about another kind of dystopian imaginal space we call Hell.

What Does Meaning Mean?

"The modern mind must continue to work its own destruction," says Polanyi, "so long as it fails to reach a vision of itself -- and of the universe itself -- within which the unlimited demands of the modern mind can be seen to require their own framework of intrinsic limitation."

This is what I meant by venturing through and beyond postmodernism as opposed to retrenchment to a pre-postmodernism that is never coming back. Traditionalism, for example, is fine on a retail basis, but the culture at large is not going to return to a premodern mentality. Rather, the task before us is to bring the past into the future: neotraditional retrofuturism. Failing that, then we are, as Polanyi warns, on a path toward inevitable destruction.

What are the "unlimited demands" of the modern mind? They reduce to two, "our unbridled demands" for objectivity and for moral perfection. Right away you see the irony, because the left believes in neither intrinsic truth nor objective morality, and yet, who is more blindly dogmatic and shrilly moralistic than the unhinged leftist? Their stance is utterly incoherent -- which is why it requires force to make people comply with it, right down to bathroom usage (because they even presume to control biosocial reality).

It is noteworthy that the science Polanyi knew and revered is not the science of today. Even it has been infected by the left, at least in disciplines outside physics, chemistry, and engineering. I forget the exact figure, but something like 70% of scientific studies cannot be replicated, meaning they are less than worthless, because people may take them for true.

Are all of these the result of the left? I can only speak of my own field, psychology, which is so pervaded by leftist biases masquerading as scientific conclusions, that it is pretty much beyond repair. Certain conclusions are mandatory, while others are not even to be wondered about. Curiosity is forbidden. I would be surprised if a psychologist with politically incorrect opinions about homosexuality, IQ, motherhood, daycare, and feminism could be hired in a liberal university. Or even survive grad school.

Science was once guided by a prescientific morality founded upon a love of truth. Science can no more function in its absence than a democracy can survive with an ignorant and immoral citizenry. Consider, for example, how science functioned in the Soviet Union: the conclusions were already known; only the details needed to be worked out. Scientific Marxism was correct, period. Conclusions consistent with it were welcome, while those running counter to it were a threat to one's health.

What a soul-deadening enterprise! And why? It starts with the denial of the soul and its innate epistemophilic drive, i.e., love of truth. "Such views as these thus set men free to subvert and destroy the old order of things with all the fervor of their subterranean moral passions." The point is, we cannot actually be detached from commitment, from moral passion, from subjectivity.

Much of this centers around Polanyi's concept of tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge has a from-to structure, such that we perceive what it is pointing to without taking cognizance of the pointers, so to speak. Take an obvious example, the human face. We perceive the face holistically, such that it is always more than the sum of its parts. We do not additively see lips, nose, and eyes, and come to the conclusion that this is indeed a face.

And we can "know" or remember a face without being able to describe the parts of which it is composed. There can be no face without the features that constitute it, so we are obviously cognizant of them in some manner, but it is a tacit cognizance. As Polanyi would say, perception is constituted by a non-conscious seeing-from to a conscious seeing-to.

A useful way to think about it is to imagine what it must be like for an autistic individual who may perceive only parts but be unable to recognize the whole. Or, think of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which causes the individual to obsess over the trees to the exclusion of the forest. They literally lose the Big Picture.

More generally, perception is always "a meaningful but non explicit integration of many clues." This goes to why "artificial intelligence" is impossible in principle, because this is something no machine can ever do.

There is always a kind of living dialectic between parts and whole, between proximal and distal perception, between tacit and focal knowledge. Thus, there is always an element of subjectivity, because only a subject can dwell in the particulars in order to achieve an integration. Scientists who are committed to naturalism apparently don't like this idea, but there it is. There is no way around it.

Another key point is that focal perception is the meaning to which the tacit clues point. You might say that we look through and beyond the clues in order to perceive the meaning to which they point. Analogously, "brush strokes are meaningless, except as they enter into the appearance of the painting."

This applies to the distinction between semantics (meaning) and syntax (order) in language. Obviously, as you read this sentence, you are not consciously focussed on the letters or the words; rather, they are only tacitly present as you endeavor to grasp the meaning toward which they are aiming. "Without their bearing upon the distal they would be meaningless" -- literally just words.

Which opens up a whole can of wormholes vis-a-vis religious communication. I will stipulate, for example, that my words make no sense to our current troll, or even a kind of "negative sense," or destruction of meaning. I produce nothing of value except perhaps to weak minds, such that my "net contribution to humanity is deeply negative."

Suffice it to say that he not only doesn't see what we see, but generally sees in my words things I am not saying. In other words, he hallucinates things that aren't present. Meaning is surely present for him, only not the meaning I intend. He is like a dog sniffing my finger instead of looking at that to which I am pointing.

Now, meaning is really "a triadic term in that, in addition to the functionally different proximal and distal factors, there must always be a person, a user, an intender involved." Some people say that life is "meaningless." Is this true? Well, it's certainly true for them, as they do not see that to which all the clues are pointing.

Certainly we can agree that life is either meaningless or meaningful. There can be no middle ground, for if it isn't meaningful as such, than what we call "meaning" is just a trick of perception. If "God is dead," how did that happen? How did we un-meaning existence?

Polanyi says that meaning can be lost when, for example, we withdraw from focal awareness and focus instead on the particulars. Again, "brush strokes lose their meaning when studied focally," as do notes when taken in isolation from the performance -- by looking at instead of dwelling in.

Now, I take the position that God is that to which a multitude of diverse particulars are pointing. Thus, God is the meaning of things. Furthermore, I turn things around, such that because meaning obviously exists, therefore God does. The only alternative is to insist that God and therefore meaning do not exist. But that has no meaning, precisely. The One Cosmos we all see points to the one God we don't.

The Blind Looting the Blind

Kevin Williamson touches on many of the points discussed yesterday about top-down control of complex systems. You can't plan for creativity, novelty, and upside surprise. Rather, you can only foster conditions that either permit or strangle them. Guess which conditions liberal politicians prefer? When is the last time you heard of a politician being accused of creativity -- except perhaps creative ways to peddle influence?

"If we were relying on the intelligence, work ethic, creativity, entrepreneurship, scientific prowess, and far-sightedness of the members of Congress to produce treatments for allergic reactions or any other medical problem, we’d still have a million people a year dying from smallpox and preventable infections. We’d also be starving to death."

It's not that Obama or Bernie or Hillary aren't productive and valuable members of society. Not at all. Rather, they are outright parasites:

"You know what Bernie Sanders is? He’s a bum. He was damn near 40 years old before he ever found his way into a full-time job, and that was in elected office; before that, he collected benefits, sold his creepy rape fantasies for left-wing newspapers at $50 a pop, and never lifted a finger toward any genuinely productive enterprise. He’s been suckling greedily at the public teat since way back when he could remember where his car keys are. Funny thing, though: Now he’s a bum with a third home on the waterfront of a Vermont island worth the better part of a million dollars. Every good apparatchik eventually gets his dacha."

If everyone contributed as much to society as Bernie or Barack or Bubba, we would be living in caves. And yet, their personal affluence ranges from the very comfortable to the royally decadent.

Yes, every apparatchik eventually gets his dacha. For it is written (by Don Colacho): The progressive's intelligence is never more than the accomplice of his career. And Revolutions do not solve any problems other than the economic problems of their leaders. Well done, comrades!

Yesterday we spoke of the moral inversion of the left, which essentially comes down to a kind of fevered religious passion in the absence of religion, and involving a combination of childish idealism (to the point of naive credulity) and deep cynicism. You might say they invert Jesus' counsel, in that they are as wise as doves and innocent as serpents.

Two prerequisites are required for genuine liberalism, the second entailed in the first: freedom from authority such that truth is not imposed but discovered; and a tolerance of opinion rooted in the existence of philosophic doubt. Clearly, nothing can be discovered unless there is a space for the existence of doubt, and where scientific and religious faith are free to roam.

Note that leftism eventually redounds to the precise opposite of these, most notoriously on college campi. Which is why it is so noteworthy that one major university is actually pushing back against the liberal fascists. It is a mark of how far we have fallen that in America -- of all countries -- and on university campuses -- of all places -- it has to be announced that

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

A "safe space" is not an intellectual -- and certainly not spiritual -- space, and an eggshell mind in need of trigger warnings is simply not prepared to encounter or cope with the Hammer of Truth.

Leftists seem to think that religionists are the ones with all the answers, but isn't faith just the bright side of doubt? In other words, a functional faith opens the space between man and God, allowing for genuine adventure, discovery, and exchange of energies. Likewise, in order to make any progress, a scientist must doubt the present state of knowledge, while at the same time having faith that a deeper understanding is just over the horizon.

Even -- or especially -- the catechism of the Catholic church is hardly meant to be some kind of intellectual prison, but rather, the road map for a liberating journey.

Now, there are some things that cannot be doubted without the whole edifice of western civilization crashing to the ground. So, never wonder why the left doubts them. For example, it is only traditional ideals such as a commitment to truth that "can uphold a right to freedom of thought."

Note that the commitment to truth is illogical, or at least cannot be established by mere logic. As we know, logic is ultimately tautological, in that something from outside it must furnish the premises it operates upon, and there is no strictly logical operation for selecting them. Only human judgment can do that.

This is a major reason why the Anglo-American world was spared the intellectual and spiritual rot that overtook the European continent (and is also why the left wishes us to reject our own heritage and imitate the latter).

Since Polanyi wrote, the rot has not only spread to America, but is entering its end stages, especially if the left prevails in November. Until now, the spread of the disease "was prevented in the Anglo-American sphere by an alogical reluctance" to reject truth in favor of an absolute relativism. Polanyi correctly surmised that this reluctance was due "to the distinctive religious character of Anglo-American liberalism [i.e., conservatism]."

Furthermore, "the establishment of democratic institutions took place in England and America at a time when religious beliefs were still strong, indeed dominant." This "gave effect to the moral principles that underlie a free society," and grounded our rights and complementary obligations in transcendent reality.

This too is an example of positive closure, in that to doubt it is to damage the foundation of the whole structure. Which again is why the left relentlessly subjects it to its corrosive cynicism: progressives have been attempting to undo and override the constitution for over a century. Achieve that, and our whole beautiful tradition crumbles.

Which is why this election is so cosmically important. America began with the promise of a new birth of freedom, even a relaunch of mankind -- of mankind 2.0 (not coincidentally rooted in a tradition that sees Jesus as 2.0 to Adam's bug-ridden 1.0). In America one would be free to be good, which is the only way to be good. A slave has no choice in the matter.

The healthy restraints that bind us to truth "were absent in the Continent," where the movement "was antireligious from the start." As such, it "imposed no restraint on skeptical speculations," such that unhinged reason prevailed over truth. When this type of moral inversion occurs, the guillotine -- or gulag or concentration camp -- isn't far behind.

Thus "there emerged a liberalism unprotected by either a religious or civic tradition," with no defense "against destruction by a logical extension of the philosophic skepticism to which it owed its origin."

Call our line of thought obscure if you like, but it points directly to why Europe is right on schedule to auto-destruct due to a pathological liberalism that has opened itself to barbarian hordes happy to exploit its rejection of the universal truths upon which a functioning liberalism must be founded.

If you do manage to free your society of the obligation to truth, don't be surprised if you find yourself displaced by people who have no such qualms about their own possession of absolute truth. Note that neither side -- leftists nor Islamists -- has the functional faith described above, only a myopic certainty of uncertainty at one end, and a blind certainty of certainty at the other.

Implacable Warriors for Impossible Dreams

One thing Polanyi found curious was that calls for social control and the diminution of freedom always came from the intellectual class, not the workers who would supposedly benefit from their prescriptions: "Those who needed cultural freedom most in order to get along with their chosen work formed the bulk of those most obsessed with the notion of curtailing it through adopting a planned economy."

Nothing has changed in the interim. Is it any wonder that Obama is our most educated indoctrinated president ever? Or that the more Americans attend college, the more strangled we are by political correctness and other obnoxious forms of thought- and social control?

One problem is that Reality is not an exact science. Therefore, the attempt to render it fully rational is the height of irrationality. It reminds me of a friend who is having a little trouble with her teenage daughter. It became clear to me that she is becoming frustrated, hurt, and angry because her rational approach is completely impotent against the vast power of female hormones.

Polanyi saw the irrationality of wishing for a planned economy -- indeed, "planned economy" should be understood as an oxymoron. Because the plan is impossible, it eventually redounds to totalitarianism, since nothing short of this can make the plan work. Since there is only one Plan, it must necessarily override millions of other plans, AKA individual freedom.

Thus, Obamacare, for example, is literally (lower case t) totalitarian, in the sense that it forbids you to make your own plans and decisions regarding your healthcare. If you do that, then it interferes with Obama's Plan to control you: "No individual has any justification to act independently under a State which alone knows the whole plans for the future welfare of the community."

It is not that leftists lack faith; rather, they place all their faith in the Plan: "Such faith is narrowed down to the point of idolatry and intensified to the pitch of fanaticism." And here is a key principle: "It produces a curious type of fanaticism, deriving its strength from the destruction of all ideals; combining fanatic passion -- in an entirely novel way -- with hardheaded, biting cynicism."

Here again, this describes Obama right down to the ground: in him resides the combination of irrational dreamer and hardbitten cynic. Dreams From My Father. Implementation from Saul Alinsky. He combines a cynical absence of empathy with a deep passion to Help Us, thereby assuring that he will give us an abundance of what we don't need, good and hard.

This also characterizes the Social Justice Warrior more generally. As Hayek wrote, the idea of "social justice" isn't even wrong; rather, it's just nonsense. But warriors they are, nevertheless. What do you call someone who is a warrior for an impossibility? Yes, insane and dangerous. No one minds much if they are just yelling in parks or on street corners. But who would be foolish enough to grant them the power to pursue and enforce their war on reality?

Every genocidal movement of the 20th century was characterized by this insane combination of the impossible dream and the implacable warrior. Polanyi noticed that "if you scratched... a purely scientific and objective Marxist, he bled moral passion profusely." On the surface he has complete contempt for the realm of transcendent values, but underneath is seething with a passion that turns him "into a fanatical, dedicated, and self-sacrificing proponent of the changes" he regards as "immanent in the world."

For Obama, the moral arc of the universe bends toward Social Justice. Or else.

"Greater love of tyranny surely has no man than this: that he is prepared to lay down not only his life for it, but his personal integrity as well." Look at all the ritual self-denunciations of people who accidentally say something to offend the left. For example, no Democrat is permitted call Black Lives Matter what it is: a terroristic and racist hate group.

Polanyi refers to this as moral inversion: "the presence of moral passions so strong as to move those who hold them toward an immoralism in the means they adopt to satisfy these passions." They are armed bohemians, or weaponized hippies, or power-mad student body presidents.

But a genuine liberal (not leftist) society "entrusts its fate largely to forces beyond its control." This sort of trust is much closer to faith than it is reason per se; or, it is a higher from of rationality to understand the limits of reason to plan or even understand a complex system.

Leftists have no faith in the free market to solve problems, despite the fact that nothing invented by man has ever come close to its effectiveness in raising living standards for everyone. At the same time workers in England were doubling and tripling their wealth, Marx was coming up with a system that would freeze progress in place.

It is useful to imagine the counterfactual of what would have happened if socialist policies had been implemented at a given point in history. For example, if we had socialized medicine in 1900, today everyone would have access to the best medical knowledge and technology of 1900. Like a public school education, it may be worthless, but at least it's free.

To be continued...

The Diagnosis and Treatment of Man

Sorry. This bloated and slow-moving post didn't proceed as far or as fast as I had hoped, and now I have to get ready for work...

What is wrong with man? Other animals may do damage, but it is within limits, whereas man's possibilities for mayhem seem boundless. It must have to do with our being conformed to the Absolute. That being the case, we are unbound at both ends, for both good and evil, intelligence and stupidity, beauty and depravity.

All religions -- and I suppose all philosophies -- begin with a diagnosis, although the worst ones tend to give man a clean bill of health, and instead diagnose the system in which he is embedded.

For example, Black Lives Matter finds nothing whatsoever wrong wrong with black people. To the extent that there is something wrong, it is 100% due to white people. So white people earn the diagnosis of being racist oppressors. And if you deny you are racist, that only makes you more racist -- just as a mentally ill person who doesn't know he's mentally ill is that much more insane.

You will have noticed that this reflects a larger pattern, in that the left never diagnoses man as such, but only a class of men. For Marx, you could say that the proletariat class was free of disease, whereas all classes above were sick and in need of treatment, up to and including literal eradication. For feminists, men are the problem, never women. It is written into Islam that non-Muslims are the problem, not Muslims.

Conversely, conservatives always begin with universal human nature, for both good and ill (the dividing line of which runs through the human heart). The left denies that there is any such thing, but this means there is an absurdity at the very foundation of their worldview, for if there is no such thing as human nature, then there can be no such thing as a deviation from it. The left can call its opponents "greedy," but on what basis can they say that greediness is wrong? So it's really a bait-and-switch operation, such that they deny human nature up front, only to impose their own version of it through the back door.

For example, what the left calls "homophobia" is probably a part of human nature -- and for obvious reasons if you believe in natural selection. This hardly means it must redound to oppression, let alone violence, but it does mean that it's something that cannot be legislated away. Likewise sexual differences. To imagine they can be eliminated is to have utterly misdiagnosed mankind.

This book on Polanyi is divided into four main sections: diagnosis, prescription, treatment, and evaluation. What does Polanyi say is wrong with us? And is there anything we can do about it?

"Many people today suspect that something ails the modern mind." Yes, problems have been amplified over the past century, but this is mainly due to mankind having the means to do what in the past it could only dream of. Would the Romans have nuked Carthage if they had had the means to do so? The effect was the same, only it took a lot more man-hours to to accomplish. Nor did the Romans -- unlike the US -- extend a hand of friendship and help the Carthaginians rebuild a thriving nation. When the Romans nuked you, you stayed nuked.

What if the caliphate had had nukes when they were thrown back at the gates of Vienna in 1529? Same thing. As a matter of fact, Levin highlights a problem we've discussed here, and that is a people possessing a technology that it could have never developed on its own. Which is why we don't worry about Israel possessing nuclear weapons, whereas Islamic nations possessing them is an entirely different matter.

Polanyi points out that "it was intellectuals... who played the largest part in destroying those very things" that make the intellectual life possible. The list of infertile eggheads who spoke well of communism and fascism is a who's who of modern progressivism (AKA liberal fascism), despite the fact that no intellectual life is possible in the absence of freedom.

As early as 1940 Polanyi wrote of the "prevailing progressive obsessions" which "led him to believe that the modern mind was not well." There must have been something in the air, because this is around the same time Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom, and both men ultimately touch on the nature of complex systems that are beyond the reach of intellectual knowledge and control (even though this was prior to the emergence of complexity as a separate scientific discipline).

It turns out that the same intellectual pathogen that resulted in fascism and communism was very much present in the west. Now that I think about it, this pathogen can be traced all the way back and down to Eden, in that it is the presumption of a kind of omniscience that is absolutely barred to man. Any form of socialism is rooted in three delusions about mankind, which come down to the problems of incentive, the problem of knowledge, and the problem of calculation. These three not only make socialism difficult, they make it strictly impossible.

Nevertheless, there was a "concerted movement in England in the 1930s to deprive science of its autonomy and to make it responsible to society and for its welfare." This ends up not liberating science, but constraining it -- very similar to the billions of dollars governments spend on subsidizing the global warming hysteria that inevitably results in greater government power. Can you imagine the state subsidizing research -- or even paying for an education -- that calls for its shrinkage? That's like enlisting cancer to fight tumors.

To be continued...

No Cosmos For Old Men

Might as well continue our review of this Introduction to Polanyi. Like the Tommy Lee Jones character in No Country for Old Men, we "always like to hear about the old-timers. Never miss a chance to do so. You can't help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can't help but wonder how they'd have operated in these times."

I'll just flip through it and highlight some of my highlights. Here is one that gets right to the heart of the nub of the gist: "Popular thought seemed to imply that only scientific theories were capable of verification (i.e., proof), and that moral or ethical or political or religious ideals and principles were essentially unprovable, mere matters of emotional preference."

Well, not so fast. The existence of both a free science and the free society it depends upon are not themselves scientific principles. Rather, they rest "upon freely held beliefs in ideals and principles that not only could not be proved, but could not even be made wholly explicit." But just because they cannot be proved hardly makes them unworthy of belief.

We'll have more to say on what he means by explicit knowledge as we proceed, but think of it as analogous to one of those magic-eye 3D pictures. The three-dimensional picture is "composed" of the thousands of little two-dimensional dots, but cannot be reduced to them. The dots may be compared to implicit knowledge. Many if not most of our explicit beliefs and convictions are of this nature, such that we cannot specify all of the implicit clues that point to this or that belief.

Come to think if it, this goes to the overall purpose of this blog. We are always trying to understand how the countless clues surrounding us may be reconciled with the whole existentialiada. This is the very meaning of One Cosmos. It is why the book begins with the quote by Richard Weaver, comparing modern man to someone "furiously beating the earth and imagining that the finer he pulverizes it, the nearer he will get to the riddle of existence."

But that direction is not only away from meaning, but renders any logically consistent meaning impossible. Thus, "No synthesizing truths lie in that direction. It is in the opposite direction that the path must be followed..."

How is this latter even possible? Or, more to the point, is the meaning we attain real or only imaginary? This cuts right to the heart of our postmodern dilemma. Postmodernists have no problem per se with meaning. Rather, meaning is anything we want it to be. The text of the constitution means one thing to you, something entirely different to me. So, meaning exists. It's just that it's arbitrary and horizontal, pointing to nothing objective.

One thing Polanyi accomplishes is the reconciliation of our intellectual freedom and objective truth. As such, he is the best cure for postmodernism I've ever discovered. Instead of denying it and fortifying an intellectual position "prior" to it, he blows right through and past it. Truly, he is uniquely post-postmodern.

When I refer to myself as a neotraditional retrofuturist, this is what I'm referring to: I don't want to defend Christianity by denying current sensibilities, but by picking them up and carrying them through to safety. Falling back on mere dogma is fine -- at least it'll keep you out of trouble. But this is explicit knowledge, and it is always pointing to a gnosis that is its fulfillment, AKA (k) --> (n).

Here again, this is the meaning of verticalisthenics and mental gymgnostics. We are not like bodybuilders who only exercise their muscles in order to make them bigger. Rather, we exercise them in order to do something and get somewhere (and be someone). We are spiritual athletes playing a game. The glass bead one, to be exact.

From the first post that pops up:

It reminds me of Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game, which, if I recall correctly (it's probably been 30 years), is about a league of gentlemen slackers who play a sort of game in which the point is to unify diverse strands of knowledge, say, a Bach fugue with the laws of physics.

Here, let me look it up... Yes, here's the description: "Hesse's final novel is set in a 23rd-century utopia in which the intellectual elite have distilled all available knowledge of math, music, science, and art into an elaborately coded game."

Another review says that it is "about humanity's eternal quest for enlightenment and for synthesis of the intellectual and the participatory life. Set in the 23rd century, the novel purports to be a biography of Josef Knecht.... Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and scientific arts, such as mathematics, music, logic, and philosophy. This he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi," or Master of the Game.

Our quest for truth is motivated by an inbuilt passion for it. Think about this orthoparadox: sober science doesn't really get anywhere unless it is drunk with passion -- specifically, "a passion to attain comprehensive and meaningful wholes..." For Polanyi, organisms are "primordially meaning-seeking centers." The very first iteration of life had the ability to detect "meaning," if only the distinction between self and not-self.

Now, the mind, no different from the heart, lungs, and kidneys, is an organ. But it is different from the latter, in that it is obviously invisible. However, it is no less real, for it is our first hyperspatial organ. It is clearly multidimensional, operating transtemporally from past to future, vertically up and down, and horizontally in and out.

That's a lot of dimensions to juggle, but reductionism simply drops the colored balls by reducing their movement to brain activity. The brain too is an organ, but the material brain can never account for the transcendent abilities of our hyperdimensional minds. Truly, that is to reverse the arrow of meaning -- to deny what it is pointing toward and to aim it backwards. With this soph-defeating approach we deny ourselves the ability to novelgaze around the ocean of being.

This is no better than changing street signs in order to create a new world. This is what the British did in order to confuse the Germans in the case of an invasion. If the Germans landed in England and tried to use their maps, they would be utterly confused. Not only would they be meaningless, they would point in the wrong direction.

Is it any wonder that the postmodern beneficiaries of a liberal education are similarly confused, only in the transcendent realm? With a liberal education one internalizes all sorts of signs which either give bad directions or point nowhere.

In reality, the human being "points" to the God who is its sufficient reason, its meaning, its ground and destiny. Take away that vector and the human being is reduced to an absurdity. Postmodernism tries to come to the rescue by saying man is anything we want him to be (even a her), but that only exchanges absurdity for nihilism (a void which is immediately filled by power).

This is a job for which only a child is qualified, for in the child we so vividly see the mind transitioning from meaning to more comprehensive meaning as its world (both interior and exterior) expands. Reminds us of Heraclitus' old gag that The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls. So, amen for a child's job.

Liberalism and the Propagation of Mind Parasites

This book on Polanyi I'm randomly rereading is quite good. Polanyi is definitely one of the fondling fathers of our cult, in that his thought ranges from metaphysics to science to economics to politics, in a completely intellectually consistent manner.

Furthermore, he offers a cogent critique of pretty much everything that is wrong with the world, philosophically, politically, educationally, and economically. Perhaps I don't mention him often enough, because I have long since internalized his ideas as my own. I playgiarize with them all the time.

It reminds me of what Stevie Ray Vaughan did with Jimi Hendrix. Vaughan so mastered the Hendrix style that it became just another color in his musical pallete. He incorporated Hendrix without slavishly imitating him.

If there were a Gagdad University -- like Prager University -- then Polanyi would be one of the core courses.

As Prosch writes, "no one other than Polanyi has in recent years been so assiduous in ferreting out and criticizing those attitudes, beliefs, and working principles that have debilitated the modern mind by undermining its trust in its own higher capacities; nor has anyone else offered more pregnant suggestions for a truly new philosophic position free from these difficulties."

His philosophy is simultaneously revolutionary and restorative, or liberal (in the true sense of the word) and conservative; you could say that it is classically liberal, underlying the permanent revolution that is the quest for truth. Science always "rebels" against what it knows by trying to see further and deeper.

One refreshing thing about Polanyi (to put it mildly) is that he was not a philosopher per se. Rather, he was a highly accomplished scientist, and only began dabbling in philosophy around mid-life. Nor did he ever immerse himself in philosophy as such. He didn't read everything that came before. As far as I recall, there are few if any references to past philosophers. Given his age, I don't think Polanyi had the time to both study philosophy and conduct it. Therefore, there is a freshness to his approach, as he takes nothing for granted, and is always dealing with fundamental issues.

In this regard he is similar to Whitehead, who also came to philosophy late in life, after a career as one of the most eminent mathematicians in history. In neither man did mere academic knowledge interfere with their not-knowing. And it turns out that this very principle is one elucidated in Polanyi's philosophy.

For the philosopher, it is a question of whether one "should be a physician or a servant -- whether he should continually try to improve the minds and souls of his fellow citizens, or try to serve their existing tastes and interests" (Prosch). Like Socrates, Polanyi is clearly a physician of the soul. And his prescription is pro-biotic, pro-psychic, and pro-pneumatic. He activates Life on all levels, without saturating or stifling it with pre-digested dogma.

Several key principles come to mind when I think of his philosophy: freedom. Exploration. Adventure. Discovery.

His philosophy disposes of contemporary liberalism in such devastating fashion, that it is surprising how long it took for me to abandon it. In other words, I read and was influenced by Polanyi long before I discovered the truth about the left, and switched sides. How is this possible? What about the cognitive dissonance?

Well. There are pro-abortion and pro-redefinition of marriage Catholic Democrats, so we should never be surprised at the contortions of which the mind is capable. Look at all the liberals who insist we should discriminate on the basis of race when it comes to college or employment, but not practice common-sense affirmative action in policing or airport security.

I first read Polanyi in the 1980s, while working on my masters degree (not for my masters degree; rather, just for future blogging material). I didn't know anything about economics at the time, nor did I have any interest in it, so I must have just skipped over those parts. And so stupidly confident was I in the self-evident truth of leftism, that it is possible I simply hallucinated Polanyi's agreement with me.

Again, we shouldn't be surprised at such feats of ignorance. For example, Justices Ginsburg, or Sotomayor, or Kagan are no doubt 100% convinced they are defending the Constitution. They have read the document as surely as I have, and yet, somehow think it agrees with their positions. So, I wasn't exceptional, just a typical deluded liberal.

Cognitive dissonance. I can't stand it, on any level. Rather, the Raccoon demands complete consistency. The other day, Dennis Prager was saying the same thing. He wondered out loud if there are liberals who have listened to him for a long time, and yet, remained liberal, asking any such specimens to call in. I only heard one before I reached my destination, and he very much reminded me of me, back in the day. A lot of disconnected left-wing talking points were lodged in his head like rocks in a machine.

If you want to see a real-time example, then read the comments of our recent troll, whose mind has been entirely infiltrated and hijacked by self-replicating left-wing talking points. Speaking from personal experience, these memes take over the host in the same way viruses enter the nucleus of the cell and begin reproducing themselves.

Is a virus alive or dead? Has that question been decided by biology? At least on the psycho-spirtual plane, it is a kind of negative facsimile of life: it resembles a living process while promoting death and disease. Likewise, a liberal indoctrination surely resembles an education. But it serves death, not life.

Speaking of which, I ran across an article by Anthony Esolen called Exercises in Unreality: The Decline in Teaching Western Civilization. It's a little turgid, but he does point out how the left wrecked education, ruined everybody's lives, and ate all our steak. He focuses on the philosophically and spiritually retarded John Dewey, who

"was classically trained but would have none of it for the ordinary democratic masses. He had no use for the useless things -- that is, the best and noblest things: no use for poetry, flights of imagination, beauty, religion, and tradition. He was a hidebound innovator."

Hidebound innovator. That is a good encrapsulation of liberalism, in that it is regression masquerading as progress, or barbarism dressed in Pajama Boy's clothing. It is tyranny disguised as liberation, mobocracy as democracy, discrimination as equality, stupidity as wisdom, and cruelty as compassion.

By the 1960s, Dewey's methods had produced a cohort "well trained in his democratic scorn. Out with the notion that the academy is not a place for political recruitment, precisely because it is to be devoted to the truth. 'What is truth?' said the serious Dewey, and he could not wait to give us all his answer: truth was only what could be ascertained by empirical observation and measurement. That meant that only the hard sciences could rest upon their foundations. Every other building could be commandeered by the politicians, or blown to bits."

It is this hideous, anti-human philosophy that Polanyi tears to shreds. But liberals continue their insane project:

"They began to turn arts and letters into instruments of politics, or to blow them to bits. Thus the demand that literature be 'relevant.' Homer is relevant to me because Homer is relevant to man. But once you deny that there are stable truths to be learned about man by studying his history, his philosophy, and his art, what is left for Homer but to be adopted by a few curious souls who happen to like him.... And there are nearer ways to go to burn down buildings than by struggling over Homeric verbs. So in a few short years, centuries of learning were merely tossed aside. The central pier cracked, the bridge buckled, and the waters came crashing through."

Which is why a liberal indoctrination leaves its recipients all wet. A few weeks ago I was talking to our son's tutor, an extremely bright college graduate. She must be about 22, and has been accepted to graduate school. I don't recall how we got on the subject, but I mentioned the founders and their vision of a limited government.

Long story short, it was all new to her! Because she is bright, she was extremely interested in what I had to say, but I was telling her things she should have learned by the 6th grade.

For the left, it is not that such things are simply "not taught," i.e., ignored or overlooked. Rather, they are aggressively untaught and displaced by un-American principles like "diversity," multiculturalism, and state-imposed "equality," i.e., illiberal leftism.

That reminds me. Another listener called into Prager's show that day, and said that her son's high school history book has a chapter on the Cold War. In it there is no mention of Stalin, but a helpful chart that lists the pros and cons of communism vs. capitalism!

I would no sooner send my son to a public school than let him walk around uninoculated from disease.

What We Can’t Know & What We Can’t Not Know

Well, for starters, we can’t not know that there are things we can never know. All living beings know. Only man can know that he doesn’t know, and know that the latter category is inexhaustible. Thus, there is no permanent cure for curiosity; rather, the answer is the disease that kills it.

For Polanyi, there are “five indeterminacies to which he believed all our knowledge is subject and which must prevent our ever reaching complete objectivity and detachment” (Prosch). For example, reality “is always richer in its capacities to manifest itself in the future than we have grasped it to be in our explicit thought about it.” There is nothing we can do to make the surprise! go away.

For example, the most exhaustive account of physics nevertheless renders life completely inexplicable. Before 4 billion years ago, there was no biological life, only matter. No one could have predicted what was about to happen, i.e., the emergence of life, and with it, a theretofore inconceivable dimension of inwardness, awareness, experience. We can’t even say “inconceivable,” because there was no one to conceive or not conceive.

But just as climate change models cannot retrodict the past, nor can physics. Part of this has to do with complexity, as most systems — including the whole realm of biology — are too complex for physics to cope with.

Time out for Schuon: Whether we like it or not, we live surrounded by mysteries, which logically and existentially draw us towards transcendence. To put it another way, one thing our explanations can never explain is our transcendence — our transcendent ability to posit explanations.

Second, “The rules for deciding whether a discernible pattern in nature is due to chance… can never be rendered determinate.” We really can’t know where order ends and freedom begins. Take again the emergence of life. Most people who have thought about it realize it cannot have been random, because the number of finely tuned variables needed for that to occur approaches infinity. Is it therefore built into physics, something bound to happen? If so, then it only proves how little we know of physics, or about the deep laws governing the universe.

Time out for Schuon: When God is removed from the universe, it becomes a desert of rocks or ice; it is deprived of life and warmth, and every man who still has a sense of the integrally real refuses to admit that this should be reality…

This touches on Gödel, because man — as opposed to any computer — always transcends his own program, so to speak. This also goes to something Russell Kirk said to the effect that ideology is the opposite of conservatism, because the former is a closed system while conservatism is not only open to transcendence but is the tension between transcendence and immanence: it is the recognition of timelessly true principles from outside the universe, and the struggle to instantiate them herebelow, AKA “ thy will be done.”

Thus, To give oneself to God is to give God to the world. And If we want truth to live in us, we must live in it (Schuon).

Third, we do not necessarily “know on what grounds we hold our knowledge to be true.” This touches on what was said yesterday about the function of intuition and imagination. Any knowledge we render completely specific is an impoverished knowledge, or at least knowledge of a very simple system. I don’t know what I know or how I know it, and one of the purposes of blogging is to find out. Even so, I never really know why I know something of a higher order. I just know that it satisfies something in me, something that exists for that very purpose.

Time out for Schuon: It is a fact that man cannot find happiness within his own limits; his very nature condemns him to surpass himself, and in surpassing himself, to free himself. We're always searching for the teloscape that sees all the way to the end of things.

Fourth, “To focus on the subsidiaries in a scientific integration makes us lose sight of the vision formed by their integration.” The integration of subsidiaries is the meaning they point toward. Therefore, to reduce the vision to its components is to destroy the vision. If a pianist focuses on his fingers, he loses sight of musical truth he is trying to convey through them.

Which is why, ultimately, Only the science of the Absolute gives meaning and discipline to the science of the relative (Schuon). Science not only has no meaning outside God, it has no possibility, for the relative depends on the absolute, not vice versa.

Fifth, “we internalize that which we make function subsidiarily,” and “pour our body into it.” You might say we are incarnated, and that we specifically incarnate certain ideas and principles in order to see beyond them.

Even more basically, we are logocentric, such that language penetrates us all the way to the ground; being steeped in language, we use its internalized symbols for the purposes of exteriorization and exploration. Our logosphere is a kind of ever-expanding universe; or not, depending on other factors. But there is always an element of personal, even intimate, involvement in our internalized judgments and commitments. Language can never be reduced to mere words, only the Word that is prior to it.

In the end, “there are only three miracles: existence, life, intelligence…” And “with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite” (Schuon).

And although the circle is "closed," it ceaselessly expands both exteriorly and interiorly, thus combining absoluteness with infinitude.

God is a Meta-Mathematician

This article on What It's Like to Understand Higher Mathematics (HT Happy Acres) touches on a lot of the ideas discussed in our previous post on Guided Ignorance and Faithless Stupidity.

So, what is it like to be a genius at math? Ironically, it cannot be quantified, and mathematicians usually lack the qualitative/literary skill to express themselves mythsemantically. But this one is quite clear, and many of the skills he describes are generalizable to other fields, say, medical diagnosis. A skilled diagnostician can filter out all sorts of noise that may distract and deceive the novice, and hone in on subtle clues missed by the uninitiated.

Thus, "You are often confident that something is true long before you have an airtight proof for it." We call this "intuition," but that doesn't mean it isn't rooted in a kind of real perception (or perception of reality).

Rather, "you have a large catalogue of connections between concepts, and you can quickly intuit that if X were to be false, that would create tensions with other things you know to be true, so you are inclined to believe X is probably true to maintain the harmony of the conceptual space."

This is one reason why it can be frustrating to try to explain a higher or deeper truth to someone who isn't as intelligent or perceptive as you are. You may not be a particularly systematic thinker, so you may not even be able to articulate the implicit steps that led you to your conclusion. You could say that it's a "feeling," but it is much deeper than that.

For example, I always have a particular "feeling" when I read Schuon, but it's not merely an emotion. It's very hard to describe, because it is what it is and not something else. But it includes a kind of deep and expansive pneuma-cognitive satisfaction, almost comparable to how we are somehow satisfied by a musical piece. Why should music satisfy us at all, and what is being satisfied? There's something about the logic of the piece, as if everything about it is inevitable and complete.

When I read Schuon, there is a strong feeling that he goes as far as thought can take us. In that regard, it is very "satisfying." Again, what is being satisfied? Well, being that man is made to know, it must be a kind of comprehensive satisfaction of that need.

I suppose scientists and mathematicians experience something similar, but it's hard for me to imagine anything approaching total satisfaction from those fields. So much is left out of even their most sophisticated models, that they would leave me hungry for more.

I have read any number of biologists who talk about the deep intellectual satisfaction that accompanies their appreciation of natural selection. Well, yes. I am well aware of that feeling myself. Maybe I just have a bigger appetite, but I consider it only a first course. Metaphysics is the dessert. And theology is the after dinner cigar.

Polanyi was a "meta-scientist," as it were. He basically examined the logic of scientific discovery, and built a more general theory of knowledge based upon it. Thus, "imagination sets actively before us the focal point to be aimed at, but it is intuition that supplies our imagination with the organization of subsidiary clues to accomplish its focal goal, as well as the initial assessments of the feasibility of this goal. Intuition thus guides our imagination" (Prosch).

And all of this action takes place beneath the surface of consciousness. We are always guided by we-know-not-what. But it doesn't mean we aren't being pulled by this invisible gradient of meaning, AKA a nonlocal attractor.

Indeed, many if not most of the things we believe are due to prior non-conscious "commitments" to ideas, principles, concepts, and conclusions of various kinds. For Polanyi, these can never be rendered fully explicit, but we can in a sense know them by that to which they point. So, if, say, an atheist tells you that you cannot specify all the reasons why you believe in God, it is no different for the atheist: nor can he specify all of the implicit and subsidiary clues that led him to his conclusion.

A key thoughtlet occurs to me: if you believe all of your evidence can be rendered explicit, you have to be a pretty shallow individual. This was the philosophy of positivism, and although it has been discarded by philosophy as such, there are still a lot of crude scientistic positivists running around.

I recently evaluated an intelligent young woman who said she had discarded her Catholicism for Science. The problem is, you can superimpose Science on yourself from above, but it won't do anything to speak to all of those implicit clues demanding an answer. Therefore, you have to dismiss them as irrelevant, which can lead to a kind of existential pain that doesn't seem to have any "cure."

Here is another example of what it's like to be a math wiz: "You develop a strong aesthetic preference for powerful and general ideas that connect hundreds of difficult questions, as opposed to resolutions of particular puzzles."

Now, such ideas can obviously mislead, and we have to be cautious about indulging this ability. For example, Marxism is a quintessential case of a "powerful and general idea that connects hundreds of difficult questions." It is also utterly false, but that doesn't diminish its appeal to the susceptible.

To be perfectly accurate, we all have this susceptibility to total explanation by virtue of being human. It comes with the standard package. But is a total explanation even possible without God at the top? No, it is not. For starters, if there is no God, then there is no top or bottom at all, just as Darwin says. And there is no reason in the world we should pay attention to the pompous declamations of a randomly evolved talking monkey.

The piece concludes with a good one: "You are humble about your knowledge because you are aware of how weak math is, and you are comfortable with the fact that you can say nothing intelligent about most problems."

However, this particular mathematician just said a number of intelligent things about human problems. But it wasn't via math per se, rather, a meta-mathematical analysis of the mathematician's cognitive abilities. Quality trumps quantity every time, for the same reason that semantics can never be reduced to syntax. Math has no meaning that isn't ultimately self-referential. It requires a deeper insight in order to extricate oneself from that closed loop and make contact with the transcendent real, AKA God.

God is like a good accountant: he's surely adept at math, but can also tell you what to do to avoid an audit.

Guided Ignorance and Faithless Stupidity

If evolution is posterior to involution, then particulars must be posterior to universals. In other words, the "evolutionary space" cannot be a blank canvas, but must somehow be implicitly structured with nonlocal forms or archetypes.

Plato, of course, thought that these universal forms were more real than their instantiations, while Aristotle simply saw them as co-present in all existents: the form is somehow "in" the substance without inhabiting any shadowy realm of its own.

As an aside, many of my beliefs are simply intuitive. But intuitive doesn't necessarily mean arbitrary, because it seems to me that intuition is a kind of rapid-response, right-brainish cognition that instantaneously excludes countless other possibilities.

Indeed, this is how science itself proceeds. Polanyi has written of this at length, of how the scientist's "guess," AKA hypothesis, is founded upon a host of subsidiary clues that point toward their hidden coherence.

"Polanyi maintained this was a genuine paradox, because 'to see a problem is to see something that is hidden. It is to have an intimation of the coherence of hitherto not comprehended particulars" (Prosch). This is definitely not a deterministic phenomenon, as two scientists can look at the same set of particulars, with only one seeing the hidden possibilities.

As we've discussed before, in the years leading up to Einstein's great discoveries, it was thought that physics was pretty much "complete," with only a few loose ends to tie up. But those few unanswered questions ended up being the point of entry into vast new worlds, both on the macro and micro scales: those little holes ended up being huge windows and doorways.

So, Einstein looked at the same phenomena, only he saw deeper and further than other minds looking at the same things. But the implications were always there, at least implicitly. To put it another way, where other physicists saw only answers, he saw fascinating questions. His mental state was characterized by the Raccoon principle of Higher Unknowing, or dynamic ignorance.

Obviously, not-knowing must precede knowing, or no genuine discovery can be made. Rather, what we call a "discovery" will simply be the logical extension of what we know. However, it appears to me that worldviews function like complex systems, in that a small change in one variable can lead to massive changes at the other end. If you're aiming a rocket toward mars, the tiniest deviation at the start will cause the rocket to miss the target by orders of magnitude.

This, of course, is the problem with climate science: their models simply don't map the phenomena, such that their accuracy quickly breaks down completely. For Polanyi, "if all knowledge is explicit, i.e., capable of being clearly stated, then we cannot know a problem or look for its solution." In short, you can't have a solution if you don't have a problem.

Which is precisely why liberal solutions don't ever solve anything: they either ask the wrong question or don't properly see the problem. For example, to what is Obamacare the solution? Certainly not healthcare. Moreover, Obamacare now is the very problem it sets out to solve.

Which is almost a universal law of liberalism: liberalism is the problem it sets out to solve. Because it inhabits a closed circle of cognition -- of Bad Omniscience -- it renders progress strictly impossible.

Importantly, knowledge of a good problem is already a kind of sophisticated knowledge. The more intelligent you are, the more you will see interesting problems where lesser minds see... I don't really know what they see. Ideology, I guess. Or hedonic opportunities. Or possibilities for power. Or just surfaces, like an animal. Animals don't see any interesting problems, but are hardwired for a narrow range of solutions to a few biological and biosocial ones.

In this regard, many humans -- no offense -- but many humans are more animal than human. They don't necessarily have to be this way, but they simply choose to foreclose the Great Unknown and drift along on the surface of things. But to live this way is to cash in one's humanness, since a human being is not so much a "thing" as a vector, an arrow shot into the nature of things. You might say that we are aimed toward the only sufficient reason that can adequately account for our existence (including our relentless seeking) -- which I call O.

"Polanyi thought the intimations we have of a problem are akin to the intimations we have of the fruitfulness of any discovery that we come to accept as the solution to a problem. Somehow we are able to appreciate the wealth of its yet undiscovered consequences."

Again, note the orthoparadox: not knowing in this way is actually a richer and more sophisticated mode of knowledge. Indeed, it is a tacit foreknowledge of what is yet to be explicitly discovered.

And guess what? This is faith. The very essence of faith is foreknowledge of the as-yet-undiscovered God. Which goes to Paul's gag about faith being the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. Do you (un)see how this is identical to scientific faith? In both cases, faith is a kind of superior knowledge, in that it sees beyond the boundaries of mere knowledge -- or what in the book I call (k). The latter is fine, as far as it goes. It's just that we render ourselves stupid of we imagine that it is -- or ever could be --- complete.

For Polanyi, "we are guided by sensing the presence of a hidden reality toward which our clues are pointing." He's talking about science, but it is the same vis-a-vis religion. Really, "all knowledge is of the same kind as the knowledge of a problem." Ultimately we might say that faith is the answer to the problem of God, just as scientific faith is the answer to the problem of dealing with physical reality. This is one reason why science developed only in the Christian west and nowhere else: our faith in a rational creator.

Faith is "knowledge of an approaching discovery." To bring it down to bobworld, I approach each post with an attitude of faith that one will appear. They are very much structured by an attitude of open not-knowing, such that I am guided by what it is I am looking for. It very much feels as if there is an invisible attractor out there, and as soon as it starts tugging at me, it attracts the right ideas and books and other resources to fill it out. When I started typing this morning, I had no earthly idea I was going to snatch this book on Polanyi from the shelf. Rather, it just pulled me into its orbit.

But just because this is happening, it doesn't necessarily mean we have discovered a universal truth. I mean, there are false paths, dead ends, and nul-de-slacks everywhere. But you can tell when you've reached one of those, because there will be no more interesting problems.

"Our conviction" that we are on the right track "is always a fiduciary conviction," i.e., rooted in faith. Interestingly, this means that there are no "facts" out there, untouched by subjectivity. Indeed, a fact is already the result of a belief that something is a fact. One man's fact is another man's trivia, and vice versa. Think about "historical facts." Is there really such a thing? Yes, there are literally countless facts in history, but it is only the judgment of the historian that elevates one to a historical fact.

Notice that this is one of the functions of the liberal media, albeit in reverse. That is, they work furiously to "inform" (unform?) us what not to pay attention to, such as Benghazi, or the Clinton Foundation, or what actually happens during an abortion, or what happens when you raise the minimum wage, or the risk factors of homosexuality, or the science of human intelligence. Liberals literally have no faith, in that they cannot permit themselves to ask questions about these and countless other subjects.

About those nonlocal attractors that dot the psychic landscape:

"Our search for deeper coherence is guided likewise by a potentiality: 'We feel the slope toward a deeper insight as we feel the direction in which a heavy weight is pulled along a steep incline....' The gradient of deepening coherence tells us where to start and which way to turn" (all quoted material from Prosch).

Predestined to Freedom

We were talking about a possible relationship between involution and universals. My intuition tells me that one is impossible without the other.

Now, first of all, what do we mean by involution? For me, it is almost synonymous with "creation," or at least with the manner in which the creator creates. In other words, because the universe is created, it has certain features that mark it as being so. Indeed, the existence of these features cannot be explained in any other way.

Our creator is intelligent, which is the sufficient reason for the intelligibility that pervades the cosmos wherever we look. Likewise our own intelligence, which both mirrors and explores the intelligibility: intelligence and intelligibility are complementary sides of the same single reality, i.e., the createdness of things.

Our creator is also -- obviously -- alive, thus we inhabit a living cosmos. As I suggested in the book, biological life is a kind of focused concentration of a more general principle, like light through a magnifying glass. This is one reason why I was so drawn to the works of biologist Robert Rosen, because he says the same thing, even though he was not a believer. Rather, he just saw that biology was more universal than physics.

This is also why I was so pleased when a reader alerted me to the works of "metaphysical architect" (my term) Christopher Alexander. Alexander says that life is everywhere implicit in the cosmos, and that it is his job as an architect to render it explicit via certain patterns and relationships. Interestingly, you would think that this is a rather abstract theory, but it is really quite the opposite.

That is, it is empirical and experiential, at least if your soul remains open to it. You have one experience in, say, the Chartres cathedral, another inside a McDonald's. The former not only is more "alive," but it also radiates or transmits a spiritual presence. Conversely, the McDonald's transmits no life and no spirit. It is barren and dry -- even more barren and dry than the empty land on which it sits.

Which goes to another point: it is not as if the living spiritual reality is only made present by man's manipulation of patterns and relationships. Rather, it is spontaneously present everywhere in nature, in mountains, rivers, oceans, clouds, the animal kingdom, the starry sky, etc. Why should this be so? And why shouldn't we trust our intuition when it conveys the reality of a spirit-saturated nature?

That is one way I think of involution: that the Creator is everywhere involved in his creation. This is not the same as directing it from above or pulling all the strings in a deterministic manner. What I am saying doesn't so much go to cause as to presence; it is more a vertical reality than a horizontal one.

When we are in the presence of the sacred, it is not something brought about causally from past to present, but vertically from the top down. Sanctity is the downward prolongation of God into our world. We don't create it, but we must be open to it. Also, we can bring about circumstances that render it more visible -- or palpable -- but again, that doesn't mean we are its source.

To say that man is created is to say that we too are a kind of prolongation of God, such that God is intimately involved in and with us. In man there are both horizontal and vertical causes, not to mention different degrees in each. In other words, there is both horizontal and vertical hierarchy.

In one sense, we are a "creation" of the past. We can each trace past causes that led to our present circumstances. However, this can never be an exhaustive explanation, because the horizontal causes are always interacting with vertical ones. We are woven by a mysterious pattern of freedom and necessity, and it is easy to overemphasize one or the other, i.e., to fall into predestination at one end (no freedom) and existentialism at the other (all freedom, AKA nothingness).

This is something I tried to convey in an orthoparadoxical comment yesterday to a post by Bruce Charlton. I'm not sure I made my point clear when I suggested that "we are only truly free to the extent that we choose what we are and what is. Only a free being can comprehend predestination, and man is uniquely predestined to be free to realize the destiny that precedes him."

That soiled gem of bobscurity was inspired by an essay by Schuon called The Question of Evangelicalism. The theme of the piece is on whether protestantism is legitimate or not (short answer: yes), but it is a wide-ranging article that touches on many primordial issues, one of which being the paradoxical relationship between freedom and predestination -- or our freedom and God's omnipotence. How can these two coexist? I know, I know, but the standard answers don't satisfy my demand for logic, or at least compelling illogic.

I'm not sure I even understood what Schuon is saying, which is why I'm returning to it. Hopefully this isn't a distraction, but will somehow relate to the topic at hand, involution and universals.

First of all, Schuon points out that there are spiritual archetypes. By definition these archetypes are ontologically prior to us; we don't invent them, but rather, discover them. Or, more likely, we simply unconsciously identify with one.

God is obviously the archetype of archetypes. You could say that the archetypes are analogous to his primordial thoughts, at least as they pertain to our world. There is a human archetype, which is to say, our nature. Indeed, you could say that Jesus is God's archetype of man, just as he is our archetype of God. Both vectors meet in Jesus, which is pretty much the whole point of his being here with (and in) us.

For Schuon, an archetype is a "legitimate spiritual possibility." There are of course illegitimate spiritual possibilities, as found in everything from Nazism to new-ageism to leftism. These all involve counterfeit archetypes.

In the case of the funny pneumatic money, it is as if they invent and bow down to their own manmade archetypes. But this only encloses them in their own absurcular microcosmos, closed and cut off from the whole, the real source of life and spirit (not to mention intelligence; or, to be precise, intelligence renders itself stupid when it cuts itself off from its own vertical source -- just as life renders itself dead when it closes itself to the environment via starvation or asphyxiation).

"Each denomination manifests the Gospel in a certain manner," writes Schuon. A Catholic would say that his denomination does so in the fullest manner, but the Protestant would reply that too much of Catholicism is at the human margin, away from the core transmission. The purpose of this post is not to arbitrate that question, but rather, to point out that religion is somewhat analogous to Alexander's conception of architecture, in that it is a kind of vertical and nonlocal "structure" for rendering spirit present -- a cathedral of the mind (and spirit).

Schuon notes that Protestantism "retains from the Gospel the spirit of simplicity and inwardness while accentuating the mystery of faith..." Interestingly, he suggests that part of this has to do with the nature and needs of the Germanic soul -- needs that are not in and of themselves illegitimate. In fact, we all deserve a God who speaks to us, i.e., in our "language of being."

I wonder if the language of being changed with the emergence of widespread literacy? It must have. The iconography of Catholicism and Orthodoxy speaks even to the illiterate. You might say it is a direct transmission to the right brain, but what happened when people became literate and therefore more left-brained? It must have awakened a new need for clarity and individuality.

At the same time, "Lutheran doctrine is founded essentially upon the anthropological pessimism and the predestinationism of Saint Augustine: man is fundamentally a sinner, and he is totally determined by the Will of God."

Is this a "legitimate" archetype? Yes and no. For Luther, "the first condition of salvation... is the awareness of abysmal and invincible sin, and hence the impossibility of vanquishing sin by our own strength." There is a tension between grace and freedom, but Luther emphasizes the former. And it is true that grace is a necessary condition -- i.e., a condition without which -- but that doesn't mean there are no sufficient conditions that can cooperate (or not) with it.

Schuon suggests that "Without works, faith would not quite be faith, and without faith, works would be eschatologically inoperative," i.e., just horizontal arrangements cut off from God, with no intrinsic meaning or value.

But Luther sacrifices "freedom to the Prescience and Omnipotence of God," and therefore "intelligence to faith." For Schuon, "this is solely a question of spiritual temperament," not of the literal reality of things. I know people who are reassured by the idea that "God is in control" and that everything will somehow work out for the best. I am just not built that way, and if I said that, I would be lying to myself.

Back to the question at hand. Schuon points out that "Absolute Being comprises both Necessity and Freedom." And because this is the case, our world is comprised of the same things -- again, think of God's involution, his involvement in creation. Therefore, "it is false to deny the possibility of freedom in the world, just as it is false to deny predestination."

It would appear that freedom and necessity (predestination) are truly complementary. But in all complementaries, one must be prior. Which is what I was trying to convey in the comment above, in that it is necessary to be free in order to know our destiny. Necessity must be a mode of freedom, because the converse could never be true. We are predestined to freedom, and there is not a thing we can do about it. Except to use freedom to choose our (pre)destiny.