Drowning in Acid and Calling it Truth

In a recent video, Jordan Peterson uses the analogy of an iceberg to illustrate how people can appear to be standing on two different surfaces which are in reality united beneath the water.

I don't remember the context, but it reminded me of how liberals don't understand that they are standing on the same iceberg as conservatives. They don't see that the left is our mutual adversary. I am aware of only one prominent liberal who tries to point this out, Alan Dershowitz.

The progressive left is standing on an iceberg that shares nothing with the political philosophy of the American founding. Obviously, the Founders were classical liberals, whereas progressivism is fundamentally illiberal.

For example, no one should be surprised at their efforts to shut down free speech, or their attacks on religious freedom. On the conservative-liberal iceberg, these issues were settled long ago -- indeed, at the founding. On the American iceberg, freedom of speech is a natural right and self-evident truth. But on the progressive iceberg, there are no such things as natural rights or self-evident truths.

The progressive left always deploys lexicographical tactics in service of its ideological ends, perhaps the most prominent example being the conflation of liberalism and leftism, which are again at metaphysical antipodes.

Returning to our recent line of thought, you could say that our whole point is to show how Christianity and science are by no means standing on different icebergs. From a certain perspective they appear as two peaks separated by an expanse of water. But look beneath the surface, and damn! Same metaphysical berg. Not only that, but no other religious berg will cut ice for the scientific project, as explained by philosophers of science too numerous to mention.

Except for Whitehead, who may have been the first to notice. The following passage from Science and the Modern World is is copied from an amazon reviewer:

The greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement [is] the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this instinctive conviction... which is the motive power of research -- that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled.

How has this conviction been so vividly implanted on the European mind?... There seems to be but one source for its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, [such that] the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality....

In Asia, the conceptions of God were of a being who was either too arbitrary or too impersonal for such ideas to have much effect.... There was not the same confidence as in the intelligible rationality of a personal being.... My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.

So, science is an outcrop of the Christian iceberg. In the decades since Whitehead wrote that in the 1920s, his observations have gone from controversial to commonplace. To say unconscious derivative is to understand the relation between what is above and below the surface, the former derived from the latter.

Which also reminds me. In the early days of psychoanalysis -- and I suppose among the orthodox faithful to this day -- conscious/unconscious (or CS/UCS) was seen as a kind of vicious duality. But I came to understand them as a necessary and inevitable complementarity -- which is, incidentally, one reason why "artificial intelligence" will always remain so, for there is simply no way to model the UCS, nor its perpetual dialectical play with the CS. Even if we concede that the CS is somewhat analogous to a computer, the UCS definitely isn't, let alone the relationship between them.

This post is turning into the usual Friday ramble. So be it. I'm free associating, and you get what you pay for. But now I'm thinking of The Symmetry of God, which provides a useful way to think about what goes on above and below water. You might say that asymmetrical logic applies above the surface, whereas symmetrical logic rules below. Science is assymetrical, but is grounded in symmetry.

Example. Well, for me, perhaps the most consequential symmetry is that between man and God. If we we are in the image and likeness of the Creator, then that is literally a kind of symmetry. Analogously, my image in the mirror bears a symmetrical relationship to me, even if it is ultimately derivative, a "pale reflection" of the real thing, as it were.

But if there is symmetry between man and God, then that is saying a great deal. For example, it would explain our access to love, truth, and beauty, not to mention virtue, creativity, unity, objectivity, and more. Conversely, if there is no such symmetry, then there is no accounting for the gifts just mentioned. Indeed, they have no ground or even possibility. As such, they must be pointless illusions.

D'oh! You just melted the scientific iceberg with your metaphysical blowtorch.

Other symmetries. How about man and woman? That Eve is "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" is what you call a hint: above the surface they look like two different beings. Beneath the surface, oneflesh.

Or, heaven and earth, celestial and terrestrial, vertical and horizontal. These are not opposed, nor can the former ever be reduced to the latter. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. The counter-myth of the progressive iceberg is always My will be done, on earth because there is no heaven. Which soon enough brings about hell.

Daniel Dennett rightly calls Darwinism a "universal acid" that, as it were, melts all manmade icebergs. True enough. When "pushed to its logical conclusion," writes Hanby, it also -- necessarily -- "begins to dissolve the very subject and presupposition of Darwinian theory..." Is there an acid that eats itself last?

If you don't believe so, then you haven't been paying attention to this post, for if you acid-wash being with Darwinism, "intelligibility and truth must always be reducible, as a matter of principle, to the unintelligibility and untruth upon which they are premised." At which point you are plunged beneath the waves and drown, even if you're the last to know you've just committed cluelesside.

Religious thought does not go forward, like scientific thought, but rather goes deeper. --Dávila

Nothing Can't Explain Anything, Let Alone Everything

What ceases to be thought qualitatively so as to be thought quantitatively ceases to be thought significantly. --Dávila

Continuing with our vindication of plain language and its access to simple truth, I am reminded of a eulogy given for a distinguished mathematician: His contributions to our field are incalculable.

I'm not sure if the eulogist was being ironic, but in any event, he conveyed the truth outlined in yesterday's post, that quality cannot be reduced to quantity -- and conversely, that no amount of quantity adds up to quality.

Indeed, you can't even say, for example, that the cosmos is a big place without the quality of comparative smallness. You've no doubt noticed that astronomers such as Carl Sagan like to blather on about -- scientifically! -- the billions upon billions of stars, and the vastness of space. Well, maybe yes, maybe no. Compared to what? There's only one cosmos, and compared to its creator its actually pretty small, cozy even.

More troubling is the fact that they like to play up the vastness of space in order to cut man down to size. But this is a verbal trick rooted in a category error of epic proportions; for man may be physically smaller than the cosmos, but can nevertheless contain it. Who's fooling whom? What is more impressive, a dead cosmos or a living scientist? A cosmos that can host life, mind, and spirit, or one that can't?

You might say that the contributions of our cosmos to humanness are incalculable. Or, you can attempt the calculation, but will soon find yourself in the realm of the infinite. In other words, the statistical chance of persons emerging from the incalculable quantitative contingencies -- all the equations lining up -- is more or less zero. So on that basis alone -- i.e., quantity -- we need recourse to another explanation, which is to say, quality.

Now, notwithstanding what was just said above, sometimes quantities do have qualities. They just don't add up from below.

To take an obvious example, the threeness of the Trinity is not to be understood quantitatively but qualitatively -- as intersubjectivity, as an eternal relation of love. In fact, other primary numbers convey lessons of their own, especially the One, Two, Four, Seven, and Zero, the latter signifying both nothingness and infinitude.

The One, for example, has always stood for God, unity, the Absolute. Furthermore, that each subsequent number is just a multiple of One conveys the idea that God -- the principle of unity -- is in all subsequent quantities. Likewise, twoness is static duality unless reconciled in the living synthesis and harmony of the Three.

You might say that complementarities are downward projections of threeness, whereas dualities are always from below. Not only that, but one of Satan's favorite pastimes is reducing complementarities to dualities -- or, even worse, unities, for example, man and woman.

In other words, it is bad enough to render man and woman opposed to one another, worse yet to pretend they are the same. Feminists can't decide which of these they prefer, but neither comports with reality.

Here's an interesting claim in No God, No Science; either you get it or you don't, but it is true nonetheless: "the only universe in which natural selection could work was the universe Darwin inherited and then stole from the natural theologians." Why stole? Isn't that a bit inflammatory? Not at all, for it's like breaking into a house and stealing the jewels, and then burning it down with the family inside to eliminate the witnesses.

What are the jewels? Oh, little things like a rational cosmos that is uniquely intelligible to human beings, not to mention the prior existence of living organisms that inexplicably appear in a presumably dead cosmos.

A more subtle point is that Darwinism doesn't actually account for change, even while putting itself forth as the last word on the subject. To paraphrase Hanby, genes are abstracted from the teleological wholeness of the organism. According to natural selection, "change" is a consequence of random genetic mutations.

But notice that no entity has actually changed: we have one organism, then another. The first one hasn't "changed," nor has the second. They both simply are what they are. You could say "the species" has changed, but this is just the attempt to sneak an abstract essence or quality in through the back door.

In other words, we superimpose an imaginary backstory or line of continuity, when the whole operation has been discontinuous. But continuity can only come from the top. As I've put to before, if we can explain natural selection, then natural selection cannot explain us. Isn't this obvious?

From the perspective of natural selection, an organism is the sum of its accidental mutations. But from our perspective, "organicism" is a prior condition that is "localized," so to speak, in biological objects. Organisms are ultimately only possible because of the wholeness and interiority of the cosmos, itself a reflection of the unity of being. You cannot get from pure exteriority to interiority, or from existence to experience. Just ask a rock, which will give you an infinitely more honest answer than a materialist. A materialist is not as dumb as a rock. Rather, dumber.

Bottom line: the metaphysical Darwinian

is in the awkward position of affirming in practice what his theory would deny and denying in theory what what his practice affirms, of paradoxically failing to see what he cannot help but see, of presupposing the interiority and unity of living organisms, and yet being prohibited by his ontological commitments from rendering an account of them. Darwinian biology is predicated upon a denial of the obvious which, as obvious, will not be denied.

Ontological commitments. AKA faith -- or better, faith in faithlessness, which is a bit like Gödel in reverse. For with Gödel, we always know more than we can say, whereas Darwinism can't help saying more than it could possibly know.

But no Darwinian actually is one, because it is an impossible metaphysic. For it begins with a rejection of its own implicit cosmos (itself a metaphysical construct), and posits "a counterfactual world of inertial singulars indifferently related to each other." It then reconstructs "the whole as a mechanical aggregation of those singulars brought about by extrinsic pressures or forces," which only "empties reality of its interiority and deprives universals of any ontological foothold."

The Aphorist sums it up: As it is unable to explain that consciousness which creates it, science, when it finishes explaining everything, will not have explained anything.

I would put it this way: you can't get from zero to One. The One, however, radiates infinitely, ultimately tending toward zero without ever arriving there. Unless you count the tenured.

Science, Magic, Metaphysics

The question before the bus is whether we need math, or logic, or some special science in order to understand the totality of existence, or whether it is possible to do so with plain language that anyone short of end-stage tenure can understand.

Naturally I believe the latter, or I wouldn't have wasted the last twelve years blogging millions of words of plain unglish on the totality of existence. There is indeed a general (not special) science for understanding the whole of reality: metaphysics.

In turn, religion is metaphysics incarnated, so to speak; the former is to the latter as a particular language is to the deep structure of language common to all human beings. We'll come back to this idea later.

Neither math nor logic can get the job done, for reasons etched into the substance of reality by Gödel. Until his theorems are disproven -- and they cannot be -- logic's arms are not long enough to spar with God.

The reverse, however, is not true: God can certainly speak with logic, or better, speak logic. Which is why we can say that things are not true because they are logical, but logical because true. Math and logic can only "prove" tautologies. They are ultimately circular; we can of course expand the circle, but this hardly means we've left it behind. Like astronauts, we can leave the earth behind, but only by taking it (its atmosphere) with us.

Logic is always inside its own circle. In contrast, we are after knowledge from beyond or outside the circle. Is this even possible? No, better! It is necessary, or the circle couldn't exist to begin with. So, how do we exit or see beyond it?

In a word, faith, another subject to which we will return. But faith is form before it is content; and its form is submission and conformity to what transcends us. Which is just like any other object of knowledge, only this one outside the circle.

In other words, all knowledge, if it is knowledge, is adequation, and each science differs as to the objects and methods of adequation. You don't study biological objects with a particle accelerator, just as you don't study God with a microscope or women with feminism, for none of these tools or methods are adequate to the object of study.

Many fine Aphorisms anticipatorily plagiarize the points we have made above. Each of them is self-evidently true, such that if you don't understand them, it's your fault, not Davila's. The following maxims judge you, not vice versa, and thank God there are such maximal judges in the cosmos, for without them we would be ineluctably lost in spacetime without map, canoe, or compass. For example,

That which is incomprehensible increases with the growth of the intelligence. Again, we can surely expand the circle, but this only renders the border between the known and unknown that much longer -- comparable to a light surrounded by darkness. No terrestrial light can hold a candle to the sun above.

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions. This is just an informal way of saying Gödel! One needn't be a trained logician to see this truth directly. Don't forget: Gödel doesn't escape his own theorems: they aren't true because logical, but logical because true.

Whether we like it or not, Philosophy ultimately fails because one has to speak of the whole in the terms of its parts. Only (traditional) metaphysics and theology turn this around and speak of the parts in terms of the whole.

In other words, we begin with God, not end there as a result of some syllogism or equation. Not to say that proofs aren't helpful in terms of being points of reference, but that's all they are. The proofs can only take one to the threshold of what transcends them. Then you have to leap.

So, The honest philosophy does not pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery. This is a somewhat paradoxical formulation, for how does one "circumscribe" -- i.e., envelop or enclose -- a mystery that surpasses us? How does one contain that which contains us?

Good question! To which there are a number of answers, each a point of reference from the seen to the unseen. In other words, to paraphrase Paul, the things of this world point or refer to the world beyond; appearances point to their reality. Otherwise they are not appearances but reality itself. Which is what the materialist must believe.

Here are some primordial ideas that point to an answer: God incarnates in history, such that the author of history becomes a subject within it; Mary gives birth to her Father; the Church is the womb of holiness and sanctity. I'm sure there are others that I'm not thinking of at the moment.

Always remember that doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book. Any reductionistic science is obviously a linguistic rabbit bulled out of an asshat.

Many scientific words and concepts readily slide into magic, such as "evolution," "mind," and "rational." But To believe that science is enough is the most naïve of superstitions. And Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.

But In philosophy nothing is easier than to be consistent. Here again, Gödel's theorems tell us that a logical system can be consistent or complete, but not both. In short, a strict scientistic consistency must be purchased at the price of completeness. The only way out is up. Or better, down, for if God doesn't condescend to meet us, no amount of lifting ourselves by our own buddhastraps will take us to the toppermost of the poppermost.

Ha ha: Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest. Er, which ones? He doesn't say, but off the top of my head I would suggest the complementarities between Absolute and relative, man and God, group and individual, male and female, necessity and contingency, being and knowledge. Certainly on our side of the veil, these are as warp and weft to the tapestry of existence.

It's this simple: existence is an area rug woven of verticality and horizontality. But although these are complementary, verticality must obviously be prior, for the converse is impossible. It is for this reason that man is the one being uniquely inside and outside the circle. Like God.

How is Possibility Possible?

This note to myself last Friday seemed urgent at the time, but I haven't thought about it since, and now we have to figure out why it was so important, or at least compelling. It reminds me of what Polanyi says about the importance in science of seeing good problems. Mediocre scientists have all the answers, but gifted ones come up with the good questions.

When you think about it, the history of science is a chronicle of asking the right questions. For example, a big question in physics before Einstein came along had to do with the nature of the ether. But the theory of relativity proved that there was no such medium, and that space and its objects were each reflections of a deeper principle.

If I recall my Thomas Kuhn correctly, a scientific paradigm generates its own questions. At first the paradigm is fruitful, but eventually it generates questions that not only can't be answered, but are absurd or paradoxical. These latter let us know that the paradigm cannot be complete -- that it is simply a useful way to interrogate reality.

For example, the theory of the Big Bang is useful up to a point -- that point being the instant the Bang occurs. Asking what happened "before" the Big Bang lands one in absurdity, since time is said to be a function of the Big Bang. You might even say there's no such thing as a question prior to the Big Bang, so stop asking. Bu-- Shut up!

So, we know there must be more to it than what physics can say. Unless ultimate reality is indeed absurd, which makes no sense at all. Or rather, because it makes sense. In other words, if existence is absurd, man could never know it. Or anything else, for that matter.

Which converges with today's subject, which is the role of language in all of this. The central question before us -- before all men at all times -- is whether we can actually understand reality, or whether we're just making things up in order to conceal our bottomless ignorance.

Paradoxically, science wants to have it both ways: that we are the absolutely contingent residue of genetic copying errors, and yet, that we may know the truth of ourselves. Only one of these can be true. And that's the truth. So we know we're on to something.

The anemic myth we have been given to understand is essentially that man knew nothing -- or nothing but error -- prior to the Enlightenment and scientific revolution, and now we know it all; not all of the details, of course, but the Big Picture, which will never change. In other words, there is no possibility of "progress" beyond the idea that everything is reducible to transformations of matter, such that man is nothing and life ultimately meaningless.

I'm reading an excellent book called Deconstructing the Administrative State, which is unfortunately named, because the authors range much wider and deeper than the title suggests, such that the bureaucratic deep state is seen as the mere side effect of a much more fundamental turn into political darkness. The soft tyranny of the administrative state is what happens when progressivism displaces reality. And it's only soft so long as we don't resist -- which is why they pound the president so hard. He threatens their whole beautiful nightmare.

Make no mistake: children who attend government schools are indoctrinated into the myths of statism -- the myths that support statism -- from the earliest age. Hold on a moment -- This Bus Stops for Aphorisms:

Man is an animal that can be educated, provided he does not fall into the hands of progressive pedagogues. Therefore, The State imposes obligatory and free instruction, for making a stupid man still stupider at the public expense (Dávila).

Remember Socrates? Or better, Remember Socrates! He was murdered by the state for "refusing to recognise the gods acknowledged by the state, and importing strange divinities of his own; he is further guilty of corrupting the young."

As Jesus is our paradigmatic religious figure, Socrates is our paradigmatic philosopher. Socrates is a reminder that if you love wisdom the state will hate you, just as Jesus warned us that love of him will provoke the world's hatred. Strangely, loving truth places a target on one's back, a proposition to which Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro can attest. The truth is of course safe on liberal college campuses, so long as it is surrounded by a retinue of body guards.

Here are some of the founding -- and therefore enabling -- myths of the left. Paraphrasing from the book, they include the ideas that we inhabit a cosmos with no end or purpose, that everything within it is subject to constant change, that man is strictly continuous with nature, that he cannot transcend his genetic programming, that all values are culturally and historically conditioned, that there is no ultimate truth, and in any event no soul that could possibly know it.

Why is this incoherent jumble of myths so important? Because it provides metaphysical support for the political myths of the left: that man has no rights that exist prior to the state, that there are no self-evident truths (only relative ones), and that there are no limits to the size and scope of the state.

We're still dancing around the periphery of the main subject, which is language and reality. The question is, does plain, everyday language go deeper than any and all sciences put together? Does language transcend -- or subtend -- anything math can say about the world? What comes first, quantity or quality? And if the former, how can quality -- say, the beauty of a face, or a landscape, or even just a pure color -- be reduced to quantity?

This line of thought was provoked by an essay of Schuon's called The Problem of Possibility, although most any of his essays would serve as well, for his entire corpus consists of plain language about ultimate reality. There are no equations, no special terms, no academic bloviating, just complete clarity on his end and perfect understanding on mine.

Regarding the latter, this is not to imply that I possess perfect understanding of reality. Rather, what I mean is that when I understand something Schuon says about the nature of reality, the understanding penetrates so deeply that something inside clicks and is convinced that no deeper understanding is possible: that we have hit ontological sheetrock, as it were.

I'm quite sure that many people have this same experience in their religion; indeed, it is this experience that makes one religious, that converts us. Something clicks on a deep level, and that's that.

Let's talk about "the problem of possibility." Going back to paragraph one, is this a real problem, one worth pursuing, or is it just an illusion, or dead end, or pointless exercise? Does science even recognize this problem? And if science says it isn't a problem, then it isn't one.

Nevertheless, exactly how is possibility possible? Is it a thing? Or is everything necessary? More to the point, if everything is reducible to necessity, where does all the possibility come from, most pointedly, free will? For free will is essentially possibility.

Which is why scientism tries to make it go away be denying its possibility. A number of years ago we had a commenter who would get into arguments with us over the impossibility of free will. Well, he's absolutely right: within his paradigm, free will is indeed impossible. But since free will is self-evident, his paradigm is self-evidently wrong. And of course, he's just emblematic of metaphysical materialism and scientism: garbage in, tenure out.

As Schuon (self-evidently) explains, if something exists, then it was possible for it to do so. But if something is possible, it may or may not exist. So, where or what is this realm of possibility? For if things are possible, you need to account for how this is possible.

We'll continue down this rabbit hole Wednesday. Meanwhile, a few related aphorisms:

If determinism is real, if only that can happen which must happen, then error does not exist. Error supposes that something happened that should not have.

So, To admit the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.

And ultimately, The free act is only conceivable in a created universe. In the universe that results from a free act.

I'll make it easy for: if you could be wrong about the absence of free will, then you are wrong.

What You See is What You Grok. Or Hallucinate.

A note to myself in the margin says "What you see is what you grok." I've never actually read Stranger in a Strange Land, so I only know the word on a second hand basis. According to Prof. Wiki it has to do with deep understanding -- so deep "that you merge with [the knowledge] and it merges with you":

It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science and it means as little to us as color does to a blind man.

From context, I always thought of it as analogous to Polanyi's tacit knowledge:

All knowing, no matter how formalised, relies upon commitments.... A knower does not stand apart from the universe, but participates personally within it. Our intellectual skills are driven by passionate commitments that motivate discovery and validation.... Tacit awareness connects us, albeit fallibly, with reality. It supplies us with the context within which our articulations have meaning.

So literally, what we see is what we grok, the purpose of this blog being to grok the entire cosmos from top to bottom, inside and out. Some people (and philosophies) grok very little, while others grok in a completely insane way that has no basis in reality. Regarding the latter, I'm thinking of Joe Kennedy's response to the the President's SOTU. Here is what "we see," according to Joe:

"Russia knee-deep in our democracy. An all-out war on environmental protection. A Justice Department rolling back civil rights by the day. Hatred and supremacy proudly marching in our streets."

In reality, only the last is more than a hallucination, but I don't think he's referring to Antifa or bitter witches marching on Washington. More:

"This administration isn’t just targeting the laws that protect us -- they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection. For them, dignity isn’t something you’re born with but something you measure."

True, dignity is not something conferred by the state if we manage to escape the abortionist. Rather, we're created with it. Big difference.

Other targets of this administration include "the gender of your spouse. The country of your birth. The color of your skin. The God of your prayers." Kennedy is a Catholic. Neither the God of his prayers nor conservatism attacks the gender of anyone's spouse, so long as it is a spouse and not some novel, logophobic redefinition imposed by the state.

In any event, either leftists actually believe these things -- i.e., they are hallucinating -- or they are just cynical lies for the purpose of manipulating their low watt base. I have always suspected a combination, with cynical manipulators at the top -- the One Percent -- and the mob simply taking directions from above. However, due to the nature of the conscience, which has a way of persecuting us for lying, many people at the top convince themselves that the lies are true.

For example, if you take a speech by Bill Clinton from 20 years ago, or Hillary Clinton from 10 years ago, they are among those who target the gender of your spouse and country of your birth. In other words, like most people, they defended traditional marriage and understood that it is bad for the country to import millions of uneducated and unskilled people from shithole countries. Were they lying then, or are they hallucinating now?

Wow. I hadn't actually heard Kennedy's talk and am reading the transcript for the first time. It's even worse than I thought. Let's stipulate that someone is hallucinating, either them or us. But as Scott Adams helpfully explains,

if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.

The question is, how do we know we aren't the ones who are hallucinating? Like so:

One sign of a good mass hysteria is that it sounds bonkers to anyone who is not experiencing it. Imagine your neighbor telling you he thinks the other neighbor is a witch. Or imagine someone saying the local daycare provider is a satanic temple in disguise. Or imagine someone telling you tulip bulbs are more valuable than gold. Crazy stuff.

Being that I am -- back off, man -- a clinical psychologist, this is my stock in trade. In other words, either the patient is somehow out of touch with reality, or I am. But I'm not the one paying the patient to talk to me, so there's that. However, how does that explain all these left wing psychologists? Easy. Change is hard. People would prefer to have their hallucinations confirmed and not confronted.

Ever noticed that Fridays tend to be rambly posts? It must be because I have more time to get lost in my thoughts. But Bob, it's Thursday. True, but until you just said that, I thought it was Friday. In any event, I have no pressing work to do, so I'm in the slack zone.

I want to try to wedge another point into this jumble, a brief aside in the biography of John Paul II that arrested my attention, that "the Holy Spirit can work his will by darkening as well as enlightening people's minds."

I'd never heard this before, but I grokked it right away. It makes total sense. However, it raises a new problem, which is to say, how to distinguish between a lie or hallucination on the one hand, and a Spirit-sponsored, providential endarkening of the mind on the other? I don't know that there is any surefire way, and perhaps we don't need to know, since we still need to confront the lie either way.

But now that I'm thinking about it, there is a kind of intoxicated lying that goes too far, and is too stupid to blame Satan. Satan is subtle. Sophisticated. For this reason, it is impossible for me to believe that he is the author of, for example, Joe Kennedy's fatuous hallucinatory blather.

Another point: hallucination is a term of art, and it is not necessarily helpful to conflate schizophrenic hallucination with whatever it is that leftists such as Kennedy engage in. Leftists may be out of touch with reality, but it doesn't mean they are hallucinating per se. What then?

Bion referred to the process as hallucinosis, or "transformations in hallucinosis," in contrast to "transformations in thought." The former occurs when emotionally-tinged mental content cannot be contained, which is to say, transformed into thought. Instead, it is projected (in what is called unconscious phantasy) into an external container. It creates a "domain of nonexistence," or a "mental world where what is nonexistent 'exists.'"

Moreover, it brings about a kind of "'freedom' that is really an enclosure and a restriction." It feels free, because, via this process, the person has indeed "freed" himself of the painful content. But the person is now persecuted by his own projected mental content.

Along these lines, another thought has been rattling around in my head for the last few days. That is, we all know about the left's incessant virtue signaling, which is done to conceal the signaler's lack thereof (for example, Hollywood predators who are the loudest feminists, or leftist professors who see everything in terms of race while accusing others of racism).

Perhaps even more problematic than virtue signaling is "intelligence signaling" (for lack of a better term). But now that you have the term, you will notice that so much of leftist hivethought is no more than a vacuous exercise in intelligence signaling. And like virtue signaling, it is motivated by its unconscious opposite, which is to say, intellectual insecurity, stupidity, and imitation.

Put conversely, intelligence signaling is a way for these vapid morons to fool themselves into thinking they are among the cognitive elite.

To be continued...

The Cosmic Eclipse

Here is how a man loses the cosmos, and then proceeds to become lost in it. Pay close attention:

First, reduce the world "from act to fact," which results in a flattened and opaque blandscape of "absolute things." In order to accomplish this reduction, one must "separate in thought what exists together in reality," thus granting "analysis priority over synthesis" and conferring metaphysical primacy to "the analytically abstracted parts of reality... over the wholes from which they were abstracted" (Hanby).

This is all done unconsciously, of course, or at least without due diligence. Indeed, no one would invest in this dodgy isness or proceed down this path if they thought about it beforehand or reflected upon it afterwards. If there is a metaphysical equivalent to the primordial D'oh! of Genesis 3, I'm thinking this must be it.

Consider the alternatives: either the cosmos is contingent or it is necessary. There is no in between, unless, as I believe, God extends a private sphere of contingency known as free will.

But if the cosmos is strictly necessary, it is impossible to explain how beings have escaped this necessity, from life on up to free will. Certainly there is no explanation of how science could conceivably arise -- of how subjects can even exist, let alone stand above and understand the objects of existence.

Nowadays, science operates as if it can accomplish this in any old cosmos -- or not even a cosmos as traditionally understood. However, its very existence implies a very specific sort of reality. If we could only recover or re-member that reality, it would be... a good start. At least we'd have a foundation we can all agree upon, like a Cosmic Constitution.

Which, when you think about it, is what the Founders had in mind, what with all the talk about Nature (meaning the essential nature of things), Nature's God (for there can be no essences without God), createdness (or contingency and dependence), self-evident truths, and the inalienable rights that flow from these. It's all of a piece, don't you know. Shatter the primordial unity, and none of it makes any sense or has a legacy to stand on.

Which I suppose is the point of the left, which itself starts with division rather than unity. As they say, diversity is our strength! In reality, without the prior unity, it is our weakness-unto-death. As we've discussed in the past, diabolos, or diabolical mischief, comes down to division, blending of hierarchy, and applying truths to the wrong level. Most fundamentally it is a lie; or, the Fundamental Lie.

Exactly what is the Fundamental Lie? It must be "this reduction of the single actuality of the cosmos to an aggregation" (Hanby), to a vast collection of private parts, to the metaphysical nul de slack of logical atomism.

I first ran into that term -- logical atomism -- in the works of an apparently little known philosopher, Errol Harris, for example, in a book called The Reality of Time. There he writes that change and diversity are "impossible apart from some permanent and unifying matrix within which they occur and of which they are the diverse accidents."

Conversely, a strict logical atomism "leads finally to sheer chaos" because it assumes a jumble of objects "excluding all order and system that might impose unity on the plurality." But -- and I think I yoinked this exact passage for the bʘʘk -- "What is intelligibly diverse must be unified and whole, and only what is whole and unified can be intelligibly diverse. At the same time, only what is diversified can be intelligibly one."

So, this is your cosmos: "a single unity" but "at the same time a unified diversity." Moreover, "the reality of time... establishes concurrently the reality of a whole which is nontemporal." That last crack veers into a somewhat different subject, but you can nevertheless see how it must be the case: time is indeed the moving image of eternity, as relativity is the shadow of the Absolute.

Literally. Allegorically speaking. Think, for example of Plato's famous cave, where the dancing shadows can only exist because of the absolute light shining from outside the cave. Science studies these shadows -- AKA appearances -- but then pretends the shadows can subsist without light! Which is a kind of madness. Metaphysical madness, anyway.

Note that these shadows are not "nothing." However, they are indeed made nothing if man detaches them from the light that produces them. Then we're lost in the (anti-) cosmos, as alluded to in paragraph one.

From another angle, we can start with the Absolute, which is necessary being. But it doesn't end there. For Schuon, "To say Absolute, is to say Infinite," for "Infinitude is an intrinsic aspect of the Absolute." It is a way of saying that God is good, such that it is in his nature to radiate this goodness. Therefore, in a way, he can't help creating. Christian orthodoxy holds that creation is a radically contingent and pure gift, which conveys an important truth.

Nevertheless, it only applies to this creation, not to the divine creativity per se, which is what God does, or better, is: In the beginning, God creates. Period. For it is always the beginning, if you look upon things vertically. From this perspective, absoluteness radiates infinitely, all the way down and into worlds of contingency and possibility. Looked at this way, possibility is necessary, so to speak, or we couldn't have a (our) world.

But every thing that exists, no matter how contingent, nevertheless shares in absoluteness, for the distance between existence and non-existence is infinite. In other words, to exist is participate in being, which is God's primordial and continuous act.

Only man's ignorance and presumption are vast enough to eclipse the One Cosmos. It takes a big man to render man so small, and vice versa.

In the Beginning...

A brief review before we dive further into No God, No Science.

One of the most fundamental distinctions in traditional philosophy -- by which I mean the Aristotelian-Thomist stream leading to us -- is that between act and potency, which are as opposite as opposites can be, conditioning the distinctions (in my opinion) between change and permanence, many and one, time and eternity, necessary and possible, whole and part. At least from our standpoint, all of being is a division of these two rascals.

One purpose of the distinction is to account for change, for it is by no means obvious how and why it exists. But it does, which means it must ultimately be relative to something changeless -- to the ultimate cause of all change, but which does not itself change. That would be pure act, AKA God.

Conversely, potency is the potential for change. In order for that change to occur, it needs to be actualized by some other cause, since things can't cause themselves.

Let me just remind the reader that I have no actual training in this sort of thing. Rather, my only training is in psychoanalysis. Philosophy has just been picked up along the way. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing, because it has allowed me to cross-reference certain home truths.

For example, I regard the act/potency distinction as one of those home truths. What would be its equivalent in my psychoanalytic bag of tricks? Well, one rough equivalent -- or at least prolongation -- would be that between ego and self, the latter being the much more expansive of the two.

In this context, you could say that a purpose of life is to become one's self, or in other words, to actualize one's potential. Being that we are in the image of God, the self is analogous (a distant analogy to be sure) to God: specifically, it shares something of God, who is pure act.

It can only be expressed orthoparadoxically: compared to God, who is pure act, we are indeed potency. But compared to the potency of the ego, the self is like act. Which, in a way, it is; recall what the Meister says about it, that "there is something in the soul which is above the soul, divine, simple." It is "higher than knowledge, higher than love, higher than grace, for in all these there is still a distinction." For me, it can be conveyed visually by the symbols O and ʘ. If God is the circle of being, we are like a circular fractal of that primordial circle.

Put it this way: God is necessary. Everything else, including us, is possible. And yet -- miracle of miracles! -- we are given a share in God's necessity. How do we know this? Well, for starters, because we know it.

No, that is not a just a cute comeback. Rather, as Schuon takes pains to elucidate -- and this is one of those principles that one either sees or doesn't see -- "The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute." You could say that in all of creation we are the only potency that knows of act. For

Man is made for what he is able to conceive; the very ideas of absoluteness and transcendence prove both his spiritual nature and the supra-terrestrial character of his destiny.

In this regard, our "destiny" can be none other than our source, in an inspiraling adventure from potency to act -- or of actualizing our divine-human potential. And if I'm wrong about this, then to hell with it. Life isn't worth the hassle of living. Here's is some further explanation by Schuon:

"Our deformity implies that our spirit is made of absoluteness" and "our will of freedom." In case you were wondering, that is how all this otherwise inexplicable truth and freedom get into the cosmos. They get in here because they share in God's eternal act.

We needed that little review in order to understand what Hanby means when he says that "The universe is an inherently metaphysical idea because the unity of the universe is a unity of being-as-act." Its presumptive unity is derivative of the transcendent unity of its creator, who is at once infinitely beyond the creation and within it; his immanence is a function of his transcendence, which is why everything is what it is, and yet, transcends what it is, most pointedly in the case of man.

Which is why we can know all about, say, an ant, and yet, never have complete knowledge of so much as an ant. The world is radically contingent, but traces of absoluteness are everywhere. All true knowledge is really a vapor trail of God.

This is all by way of trying to understand what Hanby means when he says that

The Incarnation of Christ disclosed a God at once nearer and more remote than that of the Greeks and was indeed both for the same reason: being no part of any cosmic monism, this God was so wholly other as to be able to become "non-other" in Christ without diminution of his divinity or negation of his humanity.

The universe, which is radically contingent, is paid a visit by its ultimate principle. Which makes one wonder: how did the cosmos not simply explode on impact? Well, maybe it did. How else do you explain that giant hole in history, the divine asteroid that ripped the space-time continuum such that we continue to mark time relative to its appearance?

In a way, creation is the "first book" of revelation. Adam must be the second. On the most abstract level these are subject and object, intelligence and intelligibility, which ultimately reduce to the logos that permeates everything. That's the logos that was with God from before the beginning, and with whom he made everything that was made.

Before Christ, the logos is implicit. With Christ, logos is made explicit. God first has to nurture a culture in which such an event is possible before it is made actual. Pregnancy precedes birth, even though birth is the point of pregnancy. Likewise, Mary precedes Jesus, but before Mary was, He Is.

Now, perhaps the most consequential error of scientism is to revert to a cosmos that, as it were, becomes pure act, or its own cause and explanation. It is no longer a contingency that depends upon something necessary, but becomes a kind of self-sufficient absolute. As a result, the scientistic philosopher who "knows" this is granted (by himself) a kind of sham omniscience. Science not only explains everything, but explains everything that can be explained. If it is not reducible to scientific categories, then it doesn't exist.

So, it's an inverted image of the truth:

In the beginning was Matter, and Matter was with the Facts, and Matter was the Fact. It was factual in the beginning. Through Matter all facts were made; without Matter nothing was factual that was factual.

It's Only "Natural"

Let us beware of discourse where the adjective "natural" without quotation marks abounds: somebody is deceiving himself, or wants to deceive us. --Dávila

So, one of Hanby's points is that there can be no such category of the "natural" per se; rather, natural and supernatural (or perhaps better, transnatural, to avoid certain unnecessary baggage) define one another.

When you think about it, it makes no sense for a materialist to call something "natural," since his metaphysical presumption is that everything is natural; it is literally equivalent to existence. Everything that exists is natural; anything that is not natural does not exist. As usual, garbage in, tenure out.

Obviously that makes no sense, even on its own terms, because of the distinction between semantics and syntax. In other words, if it is meaningful to say that naturalism is the case, then naturalism cannot be the case, since meaning cannot be reduced to matter.

But this is all so much cognitive idling while we sip the morning coffee and wait for some actual inspiration. How about something new, bOb, instead of the same old same old?

A challenge, eh? Look, I don't plan these things ahead of time. I am reminded of something from the foreword of Dr. Peterson's new book -- that he's just a guy who likes to share interesting stuff. If he finds something interesting, then he assumes you will too. The difference is that his book is in the top ten on amazon, while mine is in the top two million. That's a lot of disinterest!

Which brings to mind a question: can a man control what spontaneously interests him? I can't. Truly, I just follow my nous. Certainly I can't do anything about what bores me. Which is most of the things that interest everyone else.

Perhaps we'll move on to a serious consideration of 12 Rules after we finish the present book. People tend to either idealize Peterson or regard him as Literally Hitler, but I'd like to explore the intersection between what interests him and what interests me.

Here's a trick question: has science actually increased our knowledge of the universe? Well, yes and no. Certainly there is a lot more of it, but if you add it all together, does it actually penetrate as deeply as, say, Genesis? Indeed, does it even add up to a universe?

More to the point, supposing the world is created, what does all the knowledge that denies creation amount to? But if the world is not created, how is knowledge even possible?

If you have a quick answer to that question, it is because, to repeat the words of the Aphorist, As long as we can respond without hesitating we do not know the subject. For Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will not have explained anything.

In short, you may know nothing, but at least you know it well.

In reality, "science's remarkable advances are premised largely upon the thoughtful destruction of any coherent notion of a uni-verse" -- of One Cosmos, you might say. It's an interesting if perverse game, in which they begin with the metaphysical principle of a cosmos and then deploy it to destroy the principle. In this sense, scientism is like a cognitive autoimmune disorder that attacks the host. Sad!

If the One and the Many are always complementary, scientism is manyness run amuck. Which is really a definition of cancer, isn't it? For cancer is a part that declares independence from the whole. As such, it occupies an ambiguous category of being a part of the body while not really being one -- analogous to obnoxious illegal aliens who demand that we treat them like citizens. But that's how we can tell we don't want you as a citizen: your presumptuous arrogance and grotesque sense of entitlement.

The thing is, many victims of scientism are no longer consciously aware of what they have lost. In other words, they have lost what they have lost, and don't know where to begin to find it. It is like a crime against the Creator with no clues whatsoever.

But the loss of the uni-verse, of the One Cosmos, "is the destruction in thought of a single order of reality comprehensive of its own intelligibility, an order large enough to include us," despite the fact that this single order "remains a necessary starting point for scientific inquiry."

That's a Big Thing, in fact, the biggest. What makes man think he's so big, big enough to take down something so much bigger? Yes, Genesis 3, but a well worn Aphorism comes to mind: In order to challenge God, man puffs up his emptiness.

How many universes are there? For the anti- and irreligious, the answer is ultimately "as many as there are people." For the heteroparadoxical doctrine of relativism is that truth doesn't exist, and everyone has it. Which is no truth at all. Or else. In other words, power and domination.

So, To believe that science is enough is the most naïve of superstitions (Dávila ). For reason is only competent in its own field if it keeps its gaze fixed upon truths beyond its competence (St. Bonaventure, in Hanby).

Attention Deviance Disorder

This is something I've long believed, mainly because it's impossible not to believe it, at least if you're paying close attention -- that "the act of attention itself is an act of abstraction," being that it exists within an "infinite web of relations." As we attend to the abstraction, the web "recedes into the background, if not into complete invisibility" (Hanby).

I tried to capture this principle in pp. 55-60 of the book, the main idea being that if you remove the subject from the cosmos, there are no things all, just everything-all-at-once. The point is that subject and object co-arise, and that an object is an abstraction by the subject from its web of relations.

No, this is not to be confused with a philosophical idealism that places the subject before the object. We begin with the world, in that sense experiences are prior to our abstractions from them.

Conversely, to what would a consciousness without attention amount? A coma, I suppose. A person who cannot pay attention is -- no offense -- but somewhat beside the point in human terms. Come to think of it, paying proper attention must be the first act of self-discipline, upon which all subsequent acts will depend.

And now that I'm thinking about it, what we call Attention Deficit Disorder must be much more widespread and generalized than we realize. It's a real problem.

Consider the liberal media, which are nothing if not a giant blob of inattention to That Which Matters. They focus like a laser on the trivial, the sentimental, on ideological fakery, while systematically missing the point. Indeed, they exist to Miss the Point, which is equally true of liberal academia: attention, but in the service of inattention; direction for the sake of misdirection; knowledge in support of the Lie.

Look! Russian collision! Look! Trump said a naughty word! However, every look is a look-away. Which is fine, so long as one is looking from appearances to reality. But the vector of the media-academic complex is in precisely the opposite direction: from reality to appearances. Not so much attention deficit as attention deviance.

Let's review: subject and attention seem to co-arise. Certainly objects do not pay attention, while a subject that doesn't pay attention is asleep, in a coma, or Jim Acosta. And attention is abstraction. And abstraction has the proper structure of surface --> depth, or existence --> essence, or appearance --> reality.

Where am I going with this? I don't yet know, so let's keep going there.

For Hanby, this means that any form of empiricism or naturalism is just a non-starter. Every form of thought begins with an abstraction, but it is as if these defective approaches attempt to cover their tracks and pretend the abstraction never took place -- they dig themselves into a metaphysical hole and attempt the pull the hole in after.

But you can't get rid of the subject that easily. Yes, you can kill yourself, but that doesn't make the world disappear. Only an infant thinks that way (and they do think that way, which is why for some people suicide is the ultimate attack or revenge upon the world).

So, we can all agree that "ontological naturalism is, at bottom, a bad theology that does not know itself." It is hardly "an alternative to theology," but rather, "an alternative theology that determines in advance both what sort of God can appear to thought and what sort of 'nature' may manifest itself" (Hanby).

But guess what? Just as one cannot rid the world of subjects, one cannot rid nature of the supernatural. For reasons we will further illuminate tomorrow, because we are out of time.

Unhinged Abstractions and Animals with Opinions

In a sense, everything is an abstraction from God.

Put conversely, God is concrete absoluteness. I say this because people tend to look at it the other way around -- as if matter is concrete and God abstract. Prime matter in particular can be thought of as abstraction as such. In the absence of a concrete form, it is just nothing, but with the potential to be anything. It is indeterminacy awaiting determination. Sort of like the quantum field.

As Hanby puts it, if we begin with the actual world -- the world as we encounter it -- "the existence of each thing" is "characterized by a near infinity of relations which help to constitute it." At bottom, the universe is an infinitely complex system of dynamic relations, both interior and exterior, not to mention upper and lower. If this weren't the case, the future would be entirely predictable and we would be omniscient. Except that human persons could not exist in such a narrow, linear cosmos.

Which is one of the reasons I pretty much abandoned psychology. Yes, you can understand human beings, but only by superimposing a theoretical grid of understanding upon them. Some theories are a good match for some people, but no theory fits everyone, nor does any theory come close to explaining everything in need of explanation.

But man is afraid of the dark, so he is quick to grab onto any source of illumination, even if it's fake fluorescent light that is ultimately harmful. Why is it harmful? Because it is at once too narrow and too bright. Like scientism. God is light + warmth, whereas fluorescent is light with no warmth. Like scientism.

Come to think of it, light with no warmth is a kind of brutalism, isn't it? Some people are quite sensitive to it, and become distracted, irritable, and agitated. I wonder if the same thing happens on a cognitive basis?

Of course it does. Could this help explain why the left is going crazy? They are bathed in the artificial light of their abstract ideology, which in no way conforms to the world in all its concreteness. They simply have no idea what to do with the roaring economy. This morning Instapundit linked to a 2017 editorial called If Trump thinks he can get more than 3% economic growth, he's dreaming. But now it's happening, so it's the Obama economy.

Fake news, fake light.

Back to No God, No Science. For similar reasons, you might say No Concrete, No Abstraction:

"To abstract -- literally to take or pull from -- is to distinguish or isolate in thought what actually belongs together in reality: form and matter, parts and wholes, a thing and the context which is the presupposition of its flourishing." Certainly there is nothing whatsoever wrong with science, which functions by abstracting and isolating a part from the whole. Just don't confuse your method with the prior reality, otherwise you will only see what your method permits you to see.

Whitehead called this the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" -- in other words, taking your abstractions as concrete realities. Now that I think about it, there must also be a fallacy of misplaced abstraction.

Take the natural family, which is as concrete as it gets: mother-father-baby, in a harmonious unity-in-diversity. The left abstracts from this, as if it is possible to duplicate it by forcing arbitrary parts together, say, two men, and calling it a "family." But this is no more a family in the concrete sense than a zoo is a united herd, or flock, or gaggle. It's a human creation, not a natural, AKA divine-human one.

Note that they do the same thing with the nation, as if a nation is just anything. Indeed, Democrats make it abundantly clear that they value illegal aliens more than citizens. But even prior to this, the doctrine of multiculturalism is pure abstraction -- or a valuing of the abstract over concrete, flesh-and-blood Americanism (which they detest).

So too are the ideals of "social justice" and "equality." As defined by the left... Well, first of all, these terms are so abstract that neither can actually be defined. Conversely, the founders had a very concrete definition of the latter, meaning "equality under the law."

As for "social justice," there is no such thing, or at least it has nothing to do with the powers delegated to the state. The state is of course empowered to create and oversee a system of justice in the courts. It is not empowered to steal from some in order to give to others what the latter think the world owes them. That is abstraction run wild. Such ideas can only flourish in a place that has no contact with reality, such as academia. In concrete reality -- say, Venezuela or California -- they result in disaster.

Again, not only is abstraction legitimate, it is humanly unavoidable. If we couldn't perceive abstract universals, we wouldn't be human. I have a note to myself in the margin: L/R brain. That is to say, we have a left cerebral hemisphere that specializes in abstraction, and a right one that specializes in context, relations, and wholeness. Obviously the two are complementary, not opposed per se. Just don't try to reduce right to left, you nincompoop!

It reminds us of several aphorisms worth memorizing:

When things appear to us to be only what they appear to be, soon they appear to be even less.

To be stupid is to believe that it is possible to take a photograph of the place about which a poet sang.

Man believes he is lost among facts, when he is only caught up in the web of his own definitions. Of anything important there are no proofs, only testimonies.

Nothing is more unforgivable than voluntarily imprisoning ourselves in another's convictions, when we should be trying to break through even the bars in the dungeon of our own intelligence.

And finally, Let us respect the two poles of man: concrete individual, human spirit. But not the middle zone of an animal with opinions (Dávila).

Understanding Understanding

Not much time. Just a short blast...

How do we understand the ultimate nature of the cosmos? Via astrophysics? Astronomy? No, scientific disciplines simply assume the cosmos. But they assume it for religious reasons, in that they assume the cosmos of the Bible, not, say, Buddhist cosmology, in which, according to Prof. Wiki,

there is no ultimate beginning nor final end to the universe. It considers all existence as eternal, and believes there is no creator god.

Or Mormon cosmology, in which

The Earth's creation... was not ex nihilo, but organized from existing matter. The faith teaches that this earth is just one of many inhabited worlds, and that there are many governing heavenly bodies, including a planet or star Kolob which is said to be nearest the throne of God.

In short, "Though we are led to think that the universe is the province of a special science," the cosmos "is an irreducibly metaphysical and theological idea" which we only subsequently investigate via scientific methodology.

Moreover, the transcendent unity of the cosmos "is most fundamentally a unity of being" (Hanby). It really is One Thing, not an agglomeration of units, "each separated by an ontological abyss from each other."

"[I]f the cosmos is not inherently intelligible, if its logos is not intrinsic to it," then knowledge and truth become "impossible by definition.... The very possibility of cosmological truth depends upon reality being intelligible 'all the way down (and up)'" (ibid.).

A key point is that scientific knowledge -- in fact, any knowledge -- follows from this principle of the unity of being. Put conversely, if not for the prior unity of being, no knowledge of any kind would be possible.

But a cosmos lacking in oneness is an absurd proposition, because in a fundamentally fragmented and dis-unified "cosmos," there couldn't be any organic unity, and therefore no organisms or knowers. (I put cosmos in scare quotes because there couldn't be one; rather, each atomistic monad would be its own enclosed world, as it were; this would be a multiverse of exteriorly related billiard balls.)

Speaking of unity of being, did you know that cosmos, cosmetology, and cosmetics are related? The term kosmos

denotes order and beauty, even more specifically the beauty resulting from order, the beauty that is still implied today by an activity that derives its name from the word -- cosmetics (ibid.).

So now we see that both order and beauty are built into the cosmos. Why are we surrounded by such beauty? Because of a unity of being that at once gives rise to truth, beauty, and goodness (or the moral law). "Cosmology and anthropology are always correlative" (ibid.).

Not only are they correlative, but of the two, anthropos is ontologically prior. You might say that it is with God from the beginning. In other words, while they are complementary, the cosmos ultimately derives from the person(s) in whose image we are.

In this context, what we call causation is itself "a communication of meaning" (ibid.). Science is only possible because of our communion with being; or science is a communion that takes place between between subject and objects that are unified in being. Knowledge is a reflection of being, as immanence is a reflection of transcendence, or infinitude of absolute: I AM, therefore we can think.

For Schuon, "the laws of intelligence... reflect the laws of the divine Intellect." The Intellect is a prolongation of the Absolute, which is why reason "prolongs the Intellect in the direction of relativity." In other words, man always faces in two directions, up and down. But you cannot derive up from down!

So yes, man can understand the physical cosmos. But "one cannot understand the world unless one understands the place of understanding within it" (Jonathan Lear, in Hanby). In other words, it makes no sense to understand the cosmos while failing to understand how and why you can understand it, or worse, positing a cosmos that cannot account for its own capacity to be understood.

The Case of the Missing Cosmos

Whole and part: one cannot refer (explicitly) to any object within the cosmos without alluding (implicitly) to the cosmos without it. Things don't only go on within you and without you; but any thing is necessarily within and without (or beyond) itself.

In short, parts are never independent atoms radically separate from the whole, but involved in a network of internal and external relations. And although these objects may not be biologically alive, please understand that this implicit organicism is the necessary condition for the very possibility of biological life. In other words, if the cosmos were not (as it were) a big organism, then the little ones would be strictly impossible. "Darwinism" could never get of the ground, because there would be nothing above the ground.

So, whole and part are always complementary. Another related complementarity is container/contained. Everything partakes of this relation, whether we recognize it or not. And importantly, it applies both in the objective and subjective worlds. For example, every thought in your head is contained and conditioned by a container. In fact, one might say there are levels of containment: as thoughts are contained by the soul, the soul is contained by God, the Absolute Subject.

Can we even imagine something without a container? No. Imagine, for example, a painting with no frame. Rather, it just goes on "forever." If that were the case, then there would be nothing to see, nothing to set it apart from its surroundings.

Interestingly, this also applies to time. Analogously, what if human beings had no spatial boundaries -- no containment -- but again went on forever. Then we couldn't see each other! Likewise if we lived forever: the price of being something is containment in time and space.

I can hear you now: can I buy some pot from you?

All of the above is also related to the complementarity of immanence <--> transcendence. Everything partakes of both, except that in the case of human beings we are consciously aware of having a foot in each camp. Every bad philosophy tries to eliminate one or the other, which is how we can know ahead of time that any form of idealism or materialism is wrong. It is also what makes the Incarnation possible, and is indeed its Whole Point: that it has pleased the Absolute, the MetaCosmic Person, to dwell in history and mingle among its relativities.

So, I am not at all surprised to read the following in No God, No Science:

Every conception of scientific knowledge harbors within itself a metaphysics and a [natural theology] that shape in turn both how the objects of knowledge are conceived and what knowledge of the universe itself -- truth -- is taken to consist in.

Thus, "the very idea of a universe remains irreducibly metaphysical and theological." Not to belabor the point, but no one has ever seen the cosmos, and no one ever will. No man can contain that which contains him.

To take an obvious point, even if physicists were to arrive at a Theory of Everything, in which the laws of cosmology are reduced to a single equation, one must nevertheless posit something like a divine mind in which the equation is contained. Otherwise it is like writing on an imaginary blackboard with invisible ink.

Interestingly, Genesis approaches this question in a unique -- and correct -- way. Other cosmologies posit a primordial substance with which God works, but this then reduces to the absurdity of two absolutes: God and the substance. But the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo teaches that the Creator at once creates both the blackboard and the equations written on it.

And this doctrine points back -- or up -- to the Trinity, such that creation down here is very much in the image of the primordial creativity that goes on upin there. As I have put it before, we live in an intersubjective cosmos because it is grounded in an intersubjective Godhead. Only because of this are truth, love, beauty, and other transcendentals available to us. If they're not available, then we're not even human. But we are definitely human, even if certain widespread philosophies deny the fact. Which is why secular humanism is an egregious form of un- and anti-humanism.

Exactly: "the ontology of scientific materialism, with its exclusion of intrinsic meaning, is tantamount to 'cognitive suicide' and makes ordinary experience miraculous beyond explanation." The good news: miracles are real! The bad news: they're absolutely meaningless if not frankly perverse, such that the only meaning of which we can be sure is the meaninglessness of it all. You can kill the cosmos, but human persons will be among the collateral damage.

Ultimately, the cosmos within is proportioned to the cosmos without. Which is how and why science is even possible. Every scientific discovery proves the point -- that our minds are in deep conformity with the nature of things, that "there is a single order of reality comprehensive of its own intelligibility, an order large enough to include us..."

But you will have noticed that scientism posits a universe that is not large enough -- or better, deep enough -- to contain its most vital and interesting content, AKA human persons. In short, it tosses out the vertical, such that there is no longer any space for humans to inhabit, or even any container for truth. How can scientistic minds posit scientism when the positer no longer exists? They never say.

Do you know why universities are the way they are -- which is to say factories of indoctrination into fragmentary shards of a once unified knowledge of being? Because

The universe as a comprehensive order of reality was the presupposition and impetus behind the original universities and their ideal of an order of knowledge that was comprehensive and nonreductive, unified without being uniform.

Instead, we see

The degeneration of the university into a 'multiversity' of disintegrated disciplines suppressing their own metaphysical character, refusing integration into a comprehensive view equal to the truth of human life and experience, and vying with one another to become a 'theory of everything'...

Parts pretending to wholeness, contained presuming its own containment, horizontal swallowing vertical, and ultimately man become God, AKA Genesis 3 All Over Again.

Your Trial, Your Ego's Funeral

Continuing with yesterday's theme, it is simply The Case that no philosophy can determine the mind's limits without implicitly surpassing those limits. At the the very least, there always has to be an exception to your arbitrary rule.

For example, all thought is determined by unconscious motives except for Freud's; or minds are solely the result of selfish genes except for the theory of selfish genes; or our ideologies are a consequence of class interest except for Marx's. Which brings to mind a timeless Aphorism:

The left's theses are trains of thought that are carefully stopped before they reach the argument that demolishes them.

I have trained my son to recognize that all bad or inadequate philosophies do this -- that they always contain the self-refuting seeds of their own destruction. One can either proceed downward into an infinite regress, or upward in a progression toward infinitude. The word metanoia refers to the latter, i.e., to turning away from the shadows and looking out the cave door.

Here is a riddle: "What makes truth compelling? What is the force of reason?" (Hanby). The answer is that man is designed to know and love truth. That being the case, the pursuit takes care of itself. Except when it doesn't, for people are passionate in defense of the truth irrespective of whether it happens to be true or false. You could even say that this is man's most fundamental and persistent problem, the most obvious residue of the fall: passionate defense of the Lie.

We've said before that if Satan can get an otherwise good person to believe the Lie, then his work is done. The person will do all of his heavy lifting. For it is written: The devil can achieve nothing great without the careless collaboration of the virtues (Dávila). Which is precisely why prudence is the highest virtue: thanks to the left, every day is a lesson in how justice minus prudence = tyranny. Likewise, courage minus prudence = oppression, or terror, or bullying.

Some things are true simply by virtue of their existence. They cannot not be, nor can we not believe them, at least implicitly. Of course, being that we are free, we are free to deny these truths, but only on pain of a primordial contradiction, as alluded to above. The contradiction is simply the price one pays for denying integral reality. This is all spelled out in Genesis 3.

In reality, "Philosophy in its aspiration to ultimacy is inherently open to theology" (ibid.). In other words, philosophy, in its pursuit of the ultimate principle, necessarily shades off into what surpasses philosophy. Here again, you may or may not see this, but it is you who are on trial, not the principle. The principle judges you, not vice versa. You might say that its ways are not your ways.

Any formal structure of philosophy "cannot be explicated without at least implicit reference to the absolute." Yes. I just said that. More to the point -- and this is the whole premise of One Cosmos, so pay attention --

Theology resides in the heart of philosophy because an intuition of the whole inheres in the apprehension of a part, because it harbors a legitimate aspiration to ultimacy, and because some form of the God-world relation is inherent in however it understands the subject.

You might say that theology/philosophy is an irreducible complementarity: engage in one and you are engaging in the other, so you might as well be explicit about it. Do you see this? If not, you are on trial.

Philosophy can never exhaust, much less contain, Being. You are again free to imagine otherwise, but a crack by Jesus comes to mind: he who loses his life shall find it, and vice versa. It is your self (or soul) vs. your ego, and only one can prevail. And to assimilate a truth is to die a little. In a good way.

"In the dynamic interplay between essence and existence, there is a certain bottomless depth, a certain infinity within the being of the creature itself..." (Hanby). This immanent infinitude answers, so to speak, the transcendent infinitude of God. We are an image, albeit an inverse one. In any event, you could symbolize this ultimate dialectic as O <--> ʘ; ʘ is not O, but nor is it not not O.

It's like the old Vedantic formulation: Atman and Brahman are not so much one as not-two. In our terms, the Son is not the Father, and yet they are one-in-love.

Left and right cerebral hemispheres. In a certain sense, you could say that profane philosophy is in the left, mystical theology in the right. But here again, our brains are one. We must always see the world stereoscopically, such that its infinite depth jumps out at us. Boo! We could no more demystify the world than we could remove the wetness from water.

The title of today's post was inspired by the immortal Sonny Boy Williamson:

True Ape and False God

The following will be a free-associational post on No God, No Science. Perhaps an order will emerge from my spontaneous bobbling. But there is nothing wrong with deferred meaning, in that we want to avoid the cognitive sin of eagerly grasping at a superficial answer in order to make the question go away.

Hanby say something in passing that is for us a Bottom Line Take, or Irreducible Cosmic Principle, that "because I always already belong to the world -- because the world and I are distinct poles of a single actuality -- there is no 'subjective experience' of myself that does not already include the prior objective order of the world..."

In other words, intelligence and intelligibility are not two unrelated things, but rather, spring from a single nonlocal source.

Note that I ended that quote with an ellipsis. This is because Hanby adds something -- a therefore -- with which we do not agree, that "there is thus no real possibility of separating subjectivity from this order." That very much depends upon where one is situated vertically.

Whereas scientific knowledge is always conditioned by the subject/object complementarity, there are metaphysical truths that are wholly objective, and which transcend science. These truths are of course known by the subject, but this higher subject -- the intellect -- is capable of objectivity, disinterest, and dispassion.

The other day we spoke of how modern man has a tendency to deny certain primordial complementarities, such that the denied partner always returns in some hidden form.

Thus, for example, scientism purloins the objectivity of the divine subject, as if science can account for its own possibility. But as Schuon says, "The rational faculty detached from its supernatural context" necessarily gives rise "to a way of thought and a form of life both of which are opposed to man." Or just say Prometheus. Or Icarus. Or Genesis 3. Or Earwicker.

If you need it spelled out, "Intelligence separated from its supra-individual source is accompanied ipso facto by that lack of sense of proportions which one calls pride; conversely, pride prevents intelligence, when it has become rationalism, from rising to its source; it can only deny Spirit and replace it with matter..." (ibid.).

Note that pride covertly contaminates objectivity with a passionate subjectivity. It reminds me of the absolute hysteria in the media over the weekend. A big reason why people despise the media is that it pretends to a detached objectivity while being the most histrionically partisan gaggle of teenage girls one could imagine. And the lack of self-awareness only aggravates the pride behind it all. Is there anyone more pompous or self-important than a News Anchor?

At any rate, as it pertains to scientism, "Rather than bow to the evidence of the Spirit, proud reason will deny its own nature which nonetheless enables it to think" (ibid.). And you know what that is? It's cutting off your nous to support your farce: "[T]orrents of intelligence are wasted for the sake of conjuring away the essential and brilliantly proving the absurd..." (ibid.). Nothing can be that shallow and stupid, let alone everything.

Back to NoGodNoScience: "the world must be so constituted in the first place that the soul and its activities of life are genuine possibilities within it" (Sachs, in Hanby).

Or in other words -- for those of you living in Rio Linda -- if something exists, that's a big hint that it is possible for this thing to exist. A cosmos is not just "what it is," but what it is possible for it to be; in other words, actuality does not exhaust being. Rather, there is also potentiality (or potency).

To take an obvious example, the cosmos appeared to be a lifeless blandscape for what, 10 billion years? Wrong. Then it seemed to be devoid of persons for another 4 billion. Wrong again. What other potentialities are tucked away and awaiting actualization? Only a rash man would claim that the novelty is over. More to the point, human creativity participates in the Divine Novelty, and that will never end, although Marxists tried their best.

Note that they too pretended to an absurd promethean objectivity. Suffice it to say that it simultaneously killed God while divinizing man. And of all the false gods, man is the most destructive by far.

It all comes down to "a proper understanding of creation understood (in its passive sense) precisely as a relation" (Hanby), an idea we will explicate as we go along. But relation is indeed a, if not the, key to the whole existentialada. For example, to say creature is to say Creator; to say man is to say God. If there is no God, then man is indeed just a prolongation of apehood, so there is no reason why we should respect him or his opinions.

Hanby mentions another one of our Bottom Line Takes, that "all cognitive beings also know God implicitly in any act of knowledge" (Aquinas, in Hanby). Thomas is correct. Maybe you don't see it. But bear in mind that Thomas is not on trial. You are.

Here is another point: "the theological standpoint revealed in Christianity purifies and deepens philosophy and does not negate it..." It most definitely negates certain philosophies, but we can negate most of these with pure metaphysics -- for example, the postmodern claim to absolute relativism.

It reminds me of what Slattery says about St. Augustine, who internalized "the wisdom that calls on man to travel to the utter frontiers of reason in the quest for life's ultimate meaning."

There is no intrinsic limit to what the mind can know; or, any limit we put there is manmade, itself a product of the mind. Put conversely, the mind transcends any limit it tries to place on itself, and it is in this transcendent space that we meet our creator.

Which is another reason why "the notion of a 'pure' science free from metaphysical and theological contamination is a fiction and therefore already the expression of a theology" (Hanby). Just a bad theology, or a theology unworthy of both man and God.

Truth to Power, Resistance to Shitheels

I read something in the biography of John Paul that reminds me of our current cultural crisis, and which indeed must be universal. However, there are degrees.

I'm referring to what Vaclav Havel called the communist "culture of the lie." It is like any other lie, only collective, systematic, and institutionalized. There are cultures that are a "total lie" (or Lie, in caps) -- for example, Nazi Germany and the USSR -- but the phenomenon exists along a continuum of spiritual lethality.

What makes the Lie total, and why does it exist to begin with? First and foremost, the Lie is a total repudiation of human nature, and more generally of "the nature of things." Every culture is more or less in conformity with the nature of things (or perhaps less and lesser).

Which is precisely why people from shithole countries want to come to ours. We could easily draw a shithole/in-conformity-with-human-nature matrix, and situate each country somewhere within it.

For example, during the Cold War, East and West Germany were situated in very different places in the matrix. If not for the Berlin Wall, most everyone would have fled the former from the latter. Why? Because East Germany was a shithole country.

The same thing would happen if we stopped enforcing our southern border. Obviously, Mexico is a shithole country. But the direction of the flight tells us something about human nature, as people spontaneously seek out places more in conformity with the nature of things, so long as they are free to do so.

For example, before he was pope, Wojtyla insisted that human beings have "a natural instinct for the truth of things, a built-in inclination to the true, the good, and the beautiful." Therefore, "To reduce those choices, as communism did, to expressions of class interest or other economic forces was to dehumanize the human person."

Simple as. But again, there are degrees, for this is precisely what goes on today in academia: the whole regime of identity studies is an institutionalized and systematic method of dehumanization. And they're clever about it, because they call it "progress" and "liberation." It is indeed the latter -- i.e., liberation from the constraints of human nature.

How does one fight back against the Lie? You will note that in the culture of the Lie, nothing is more forbidden than truth-telling. As someone said, political correctness is a "war on noticing." For example, we are not permitted to notice that the UN might more accurately be called the United Shitholes:

(HT Ace of Spades)

Weigel cites an old Polish joke, in which the party boss asks the worker how much is 2 + 2: "How much would you like it to be?" That is no joke. For example, Scholars claim that statistics 'serve white racial interests'. So, what percentage of violent crime is committed by blacks? What percentage of homosexuals suffer an early death due to their lifestyle? Er, what percentage would you like it to be?

In far left California I am immersed in the Lie. I well remember a psychological evaluation I conducted a couple of decades ago, in which the whole case hinged upon the fact that this patient had AIDS. However, the word was blacked out throughout the extensive medical file, nor was I permitted to utter it in my report! It was the key to the whole case, and yet, because of California law, I was prohibited from saying it. Writing the report was like an absurd Monty Python skit or Seinfeld episode in which everyone must linguistically dance around and deny the obvious.

If you must think twice before expressing an opinion about the obvious, then you are living in a culture of the lie, if not Lie. In most any social setting, I am constantly aware of just how far I can go. It's probably a big reason why I blog, because it is so freeing. But I wouldn't want my neighbors to know about the blog, any more than I would put a Trump sign on my house or car.

I guess that makes me a coward. How did Wojtyla deal with far worse circumstances? How did he help Poland escape from being a you-know-what country?

Communism was not just wrong; it was unnatural. It taught a false humanism, for men and women could only be free when they lived the truth about themselves, their communities, and their destiny. The truth about the human person was thus the most powerful weapon of resistance that could be deployed -- particularly in a situation in which proponents of the lie had a monopoly on other forms of power.

Even if we cannot publicly utter the truth, we need to preserve it and pass it along to future generations. This is one of the lessons of Heroism and Genius: How Catholic Priests Helped Build -- and Can Help Rebuild -- Western Civilization

It is always the Middle Ages, and indeed, a Dark Age between oppression and liberation, darkness and light, the lie and truth. That is what History is and will always be.

I had intended to tie this all in with No God, No Science, but I'm pressed for time this morning. The wife is visiting the mother-in-law, so it's all on me, including a very active Great Dane puppy.

No God, No Science

No God, No Science: Theology, Cosmology, Biology. Used to be that some things were just so obvious that it required a Ph.D. to not see them. But just as technology trickles down to the masses, so too does metaphysics, such that most any idiot can learn how to not see God -- or at least not understand the metaphysical necessity of God.

It reminds me of what has happened to the humanities, which is to say, the Victim's Revolution. It's not really a revolution, rather, a counter-revolution against ordered freedom and spiritual individualism, even against reality itself. As Bawer writes, because of the great affluence resulting from these two (freedom + individualism),

by the late twentieth century virtually every young person in America had the opportunity to acquire a real higher education -- to devote precious time not only to training in some practical science or skill, but also to the contemplation of things like painting and poetry, music and literature.

Hmm. How's that working out? The fact is, in order to make higher education accessible to "virtually every person," we've had to dumb it down to the point of miseducation. And because of the inexorable law of supply and demand, there is a tremendous demand for idiot professors to indoctrinate an uneducable horde that has no interest in, or capacity for, higher education.

"This ignorance is not their fault. The simple fact is that they live in an almost historyless society in which nobody" -- least of all the educational establishment -- "has ever explained to them just how fortunate they are to live in the time and place that they do." Indeed, they are taught precisely the opposite, that they are -- of all things -- victims! Attending college in order to be indoctrinated into victimhood is truly like going to the hospital in order to get sick.

Nobody has ever helped them to understand just how different their lives are from those of their great-great-grandparents, and why. Nobody has ever told them that only a few generations ago, the lives of most human beings in even the richest countries in the world were poor, nasty, brutish, and short; that most people were illiterate; that there were far more teenagers working themselves to exhaustion in factories or on farms than sitting in classrooms reading Shakespeare.

Who?

Education is the very essence of slack, and yet, so few people realize it:

Indeed, from the beginning of recorded history until a time that is still within living memory, only relatively few people anywhere in the world had the time and the means to sit for hours at a spell.... Only a few had the privilege of being able to read great books, experience great art and music, and discuss these things seriously with others.

It reminds me of how police go to where the evil is, whereas satan goes to where the good is. Is it any wonder that he is most easily encountered in the blighted world of higher education? That's not ironic. It's inevitable. It is why academia is the leading edge of the Culture of the Lie: "the replacement of a true education in the humanities by identity studies is a betrayal, in the profoundest sense, of the promise of America."

Indeed, the purpose of the liberal arts is to liberate the soul; it is to equip the person "to make the fullest and freest use of one's mind." Instead, students are seduced into a spiritual servility through which they transform existential constraints into political categories, and project their self-imposed chains onto their imaginary oppressors. The snowflake movement is just the inevitable end result of this demonic trend.

How does it all start? It has to be with the elimination of God -- or, let us say the vertical -- which results in the flattening of the cosmos. Then, a being designed for transcendence is confined to immanence. No wonder they feel oppressed! Who wouldn't be?

It just so happens that I'm reading part 2 of the biography of our recent Pope Saint whose early life revolved around finding ways to nurture transcendence within two truly oppressive regimes that did everything possible to enclose man in immanence.

In this context, spiritual liberty -- verticality -- is both impossible and a crime. This is just the other side of a Marxist paradise that is both inevitable and must be forced upon us. For communists, "ideas were ephemera, the exhaust fumes of economic processes, and intellectuals were by definition incapable of coping with the 'real world'" (Weigel). Good thing we defeated those malevolent fools.

D'oh! American higher education is dominated by an identity politics that likewise reduces thought to race, class, and gender. So it's the same old prison, the same war on freedom and truth. Something tells me that this war will not only always be with us, but that our lives take place at its front.

So: no God, no science. How so?

First, not only does science always already presuppose a theology which is tacitly operative in its conception of its objects, but also it requires a true theology to be adequate to its own nature and to the world.

For, what does science presuppose in order to get off the ground? Well, for starters, that science is possible. And how is it possible? We'll get to that as we proceed.

Second, the content of this true theology is already operative to some extent within scientific reason despite its best efforts to deny it, because science and its objects are creatures.

A lot of this comes down to what Freud called (in a completely different context) the return of the repressed. In this case, it is the return and revenge of the missing complement, for example, Creator <-> Creature. Other irreducible complementarities include Subject <-> Object, Intelligence <-> Intelligible, Individual <-> Group, Time <-> Eternity, Absolute <-> Relative, God <-> Man, and Freedom <-> Order. In each case, people tend to default to one side of the complementarity and then deny the other. But it always returns.

I'm not sure what could be more absurd than the use of intelligence to deny intelligence, or of spirit to deny spirit. It's like birds using flight to deny wings, or a fish that swims in order to prove water doesn't exist.

You will note that in the case of each primordial complementarity, one side is ontologically prior, even if they are never (from our side) seen apart; thus, Subject, Intelligence, Individual (or better, person), Eternity, Freedom, and Absolute all give rise to their partners, for the converse could never be true: no amount of time, for example, adds up to eternity, just as no amount of matter adds up to the subjective experience of matter.

And no creature adds up to his own creator, even all the selfish genes in the world -- as if there are no prior conditions necessary for genes to even exist.

Bottom line for today: "because the world and I are distinct poles of a single actuality," there is "no real possibility of separating my subjectivity from this order." Indeed, "the world must be so constituted in the first place that the soul and its activities of life are genuine possibilities within it."

In short, it makes no sense to deploy a tacit scientistic metaphysic that renders both science and scientist impossible. To paraphrase Alan Watts, that's like jumping into a hole and pulling the hole in after you.