If You Share My Disgust, You Earn My Trust

"Disgust" is related to such words as gustatory and gustable, or in other words, the digestive system, specifically, the sense of taste. Something that is dis-gusting is, among other things, in bad taste, and should be spat out.

We've all heard the old saying, de gustibus non est disputandum, which literally means that in matters of taste there can be no disputes. In plain English it means there's no accounting for taste. Among the tenured it means that everything is relative, so nothing is intrinsically superior to anything else, in any dimension (e.g., aesthetics, morality, culture, etc.).

One of our readers is disgusted by President Trump, to such an extent that it is "pushing me towards a belief in the existence of objective evil." Conversely, I am disgusted by the president's haters but believe in the existence of objective evil. Is there any accounting for our differing reactions, or in matters of disgust can there be no disputes?

More generally, disgust is both over- and under-appreciated. I, for example, find it to be a rapid and effective cognitive early warning system. However, our Trump-hating commenter would no doubt say the same thing, and yet, we are disgusted by opposite flavors -- as if what is sweet to him is bitter to me, and vice versa.

Now, some flavors that are initially bitter can become enjoyable; in fact, two of these are central to the Raccoon lifestyle, coffee and beer. In short, one must undergo some gustatory training in order to appreciate some flavors. I suppose the same is true of cigars, or hard liquor, or any number of more subtle distinctions known only to foodies, enologists, and other picky connoisseurs of this or that.

When it comes to disgust, there's always a lot of signaling and social mimicry going on. One signals to one's fellow posers by being attracted to, or disgusted by, the proper things. In the past I've spoken of my father-in-law's ugly collection of modern art. It wasn't disgusting -- like, say, a painting done with menstrual blood -- but just irrelevant to any normal person's conception of beauty.

Clearly, much of politics revolves around this mechanism of tribal signaling. Sometimes the purpose of being in a club is simply to identify whom we may licitly hate. Human nature being what it is, we have to hate someone or something, and politics is a nonlethal way to organize our hatreds. Even (or especially) God hates evil, and if we are the i. and l., then so should we.

Back when I was a knee-jerk lefty, I was disgusted by conservatives, even though I didn't really know any, and knew nothing about conservatism except what I'd heard from fellow members of my tribe. Now I am disgusted by the left, but it's because I'm so familiar with its ideas.

However, a leftist has to go very much out of his way to familiarize himself with conservatism. I live in a deeply blue state and an even bluer congressional district, and toil in one of the bluest of all professions, psychology. I routinely meet people who pretend to understand conservatism, but they are able to articulate only a straw man version to which they react with disgust.

Now, if you're going to be properly disgusted by something, you should at least understand it. I, for example, am disgusted and horrified by socialism, not because I don't understand it, but because I do.

Where is this post going, you might ask? Well, I was thinking of how there is something much deeper than just intellectual agreement. Living as I do among the primitive tribe of Blue Meanies, I am accustomed to "passing." In other words, I am circumspect about revealing my true identity and allegiances. I only know I'm fully in the clear if my interlocutor is absolutely disgusted by the same things: if you share my disgust, then you earn my trust!

Perhaps I should emphasize that this is distinct from merely hating the same things. I don't trust hate. It's too crude and simplistic, not to mention (if you pay attention to it) enjoyable. As alluded to above, it's fun to hate the Bad Tribe. But there's nothing fun about my disgust for, say, Adam Schiff. When I see and hear him on television, I can literally feel the rising of nausea at the base of the throat. That's genuine disgust.

But again, we must be disgusted by the proper things. Our disgust must be rightly ordered. How do we know when our disgust is operating as it should? For example, are "homophobia," or "Islamophobia," or "transphobia" just different names for "normal"?

Let me think for a moment day or two while giving you some aphorisms to ponder:

--I trust less in the arguments of reason than in the antipathies of intelligence.

--Our spontaneous revulsions are often more lucid than our reasoned convictions.

--One who does not share our repugnance does not understand our ideas.

--He who does not smell sulfur in the modern world has no sense of smell.

--Nothing makes more evident the reality of sin than the stench of the souls that deny its existence.

--Moral indignation is not truly sincere unless it literally ends in vomiting (Dávila).

In the natural world, disgust signals Danger! Do not swallow! In other words, same as in the transnatural world. Some kinds of fruit may look good but are not to be eaten or even touched without risking death (or so we have heard from the wise).

Liberal ideas are congenial. Their consequences are disastrous (ibid.).

Can the Abolition of Man be Arrested?

Well, I just finished this big ol' book of C.S. Lewis, consisting of seven works of apologetics. The last one is The Abolition of Man, a diabolical project that has infected millions more in the 76 years since Lewis diagnosed this spiritual plague in 1944.

If only we could have quarantined the victims back then! Instead, the infection has worked its way through people and institutions, such that the abolition of men -- and women -- is almost the default position. From the perspective of the abolished man -- say, Chris Hayes, or Anderson Cooper, or Rachel Maddow -- the unabolished man -- oh, let's say, President Trump -- is the problem!

When they say "patriarchy" I hear "parricide," AKA the Abolition of Man.

Why is our politics so divided and divisive? Well, first of all, because it is supposed to be. However, it is more divided than usual, because the two sides no longer share the same principles or goals. Nor, for that matter, do they inhabit the same reality (and by definition there is only one). And ultimately they are no longer the same species. For an abolished man is obviously no longer a man. Which is the whole point of the exercise.

What then is this former man? Is he merely an animal? In other words, if we eliminate human nature, are we left with but a trousered or tenured ape? Yes and no. For a man cannot actually abolish himself, any more than a snake can fly or a Bernie Bro can support himself. Being human means we can imagine alternate realities, such that a man can always pretend he is a woman, or a journalist, or intellectual, or pretty much anything.

He can even pretend there is no such thing as human nature and thereby pretend to have abolished man, just like that. Actually, the second part isn't "pretend," because unreal ideas can nevertheless have very real consequences. For example, Islamists imagine they please God by murdering innocent human beings. The idea is crazy but its victims are just as dead.

Notice that the feelings are subjective but the consequences are objective. However, one side of our culture war insists that its feelings are objective. For example, if someone says "believe all women," this means we should abandon all objective standards of innocence and guilt. More generally, has any conservative ever uttered the oxymoron "my truth?" For the personal pronoun reduces the impersonal and objective to personal and subjective. Which is one way to abolish a man, or at least cancel him.

Consider these two statements: 1) "President Trump is a white supremacist." 2) "Joe Biden is suffering from a progressive dementia."

The first statement isn't even false, whereas the second is so self-evident that one must be able to recognize its truth in order to deny its truth; in other words, the lie is parasitic on the truth of Biden's obvious cognitive decline. The statement about Trump is a different kind of lie, because it doesn't deny a prior truth but superimposes an alternate reality.

Having said that, there are nevertheless times that feelings are an adequation to reality. Lewis discusses one of them, the recognition of the sublime. Someone who says "this is sublime" isn't just making a statement about his feelings. Rather, the feelings are a wholly appropriate response to the object that provokes them, say a cathedral, or the Pieta, or Yosemite Valley.

However, if you have been indoctrinated into a scientistic worldview, your feelings of sublimity are completely subjective, and reveal nothing about reality. If one says "this musical performance is sublime," it really just means "I'm having sublime feelings." Which means nothing, since the feelings evoked are rendered wholly individual instead of universal. It's equivalent to saying I feel hungry or tired, which doesn't mean you should feel hungry or tired.

Nevertheless, when a normal man says "that woman is beautiful," he doesn't mean "I am having beautiful feelings." But a metaphysical Darwinian, if he is being intellectually consistent, will say "the form of that woman is tricking me into thinking she is a genetically fit candidate for the propagation of my DNA." There is no such thing as beauty, except insofar as it is a kind of deception, or bait-and-switch.

People who consistently deny that feelings can be adequations "will believe two propositions":

firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant (Lewis).

But no one really believes this; or certainly no one can live as if it is true. The person who feels President Trump is a white supremacist isn't just saying "I am having feelings of white supremacism." Rather, he believes his feelings are an appropriate adequation to an objective reality. In other words, if the president is a white supremacist, our reaction shouldn't be neutral, let alone positive.

But what if the feelings are coming first, the perception second? In other words, what if I simply have the feeling that the president is a racist, and then justify those feelings by excluding any evidence to the contrary? In that case, then the feelings are no longer an adequation, at least to objective reality.

Nevertheless, they are still an adequation. To what then? This is a long story, and since neither my body nor mind have adapted to the time change, we're running out of it. However, the problem is alluded to in the book, and has to do with the idea that the human mind...

Put it this way: say what you want about self-consciousness, but it is a predicament. For not only do we have to adapt to the world -- as does any other animal -- but we have the additional task of having to adapt to the exceedingly strange condition of mindedness, or of thoughts and feelings and what to do about them. Yes, "think and feel them" is correct, but perhaps you have no idea of how easy this is to say and how difficult to put into practice.

As a psychologist, I routinely deal with people who confuse their feelings with thoughts and thoughts with feelings, and wonder why their lives have run aground.

Let's take someone with deep anxiety. That's a feeling. But they turn the anxiety into a thought, for example, that the world is undergoing catastrophic warming and we're all gonna die in ten years!

It can work the other way as well: for example, if I have the thought that the president is a racist, then I will have all the righteous feelings that would be present if it were true. And these feelings are delicious. Not to mention addictive.

To be continued...

Why and Because

Another mundane post that flapped and flapped its wings but never got off the ground...

We all want to know Why? It seems that this question is bound up with humanness, because not only are human beings the only creatures capable of asking the question, we never stop doing so. We are homo curiosus from the moment we're born to the day we die. Then, after our biological activity has ceased, those around us will ask: where did he go?

Another way of saying it is that we are born philosophers. Knowledge -- in order to be knowledge -- is knowledge of causes, and we want to know all there is to know about all there is.

A true philosopher is someone who doesn't stop asking Why at some provincial truck stop on the road to knowledge, but recognizes the unrestricted nature of the human subject and its conformity to the unbound object; each pole of this ultimate complementarity partakes of infinitude in terms of depth, height, and breadth; and there is an endlessly fruitful reciprocity or dialectic between these.

For us, God is revealed in the space between these ultimates -- not as God-in-himself, but as our own Godward journey. In other words, our own quest for God is already evidence that we are being pulled into the divine attractor.

Lewis describes an important distinction between two very different forms of because. Let's say I am a conservative because I want what is best for human beings. The leftist responds by saying that the "real reason" I am conservative is because I want to harm people -- especially blacks, women, immigrants, homosexuals, cross dressers, etc.

But let's leave me out of it. Leftists apply the same rule to themselves (AKA "the revolution eats its own). For example, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand actually failed because of the deeply racist and sexist double standards of Democrat voters. Note that this explanation -- this Because -- means they don't have to examine the other types of Because, e.g., that they were rejected because of their daft policies and unpleasant personalities.

So, one type of because can be used to preserve another type from scrutiny. Not only are conservatives wearily familiar with the imputation of a fake Because, rarely are our arguments addressed on the plane from which they arise. If we support Trump, it is really because we are racists. If we oppose the redefinition of marriage, it is because we hate homosexuals. If we believe a man isn't a woman, we are "transphobic." If we point out that a model that fails to predict empirical measurements is simply wrong, we are called climate change deniers. Etc.

As Lewis writes -- and this was back in 1947 --

the most popular way of discrediting a person's opinions is to explain them causally -- 'You say that because (Cause and Effect) you are a capitalist, or a hypochondriac, or a mere man, or only a woman.' The implication is that if causes fully account for a belief, then since causes work inevitably, the belief would have to arise whether it had grounds or not. We need not, it is felt, consider grounds for something which can be fully explained without them.

But look at the double standards applied by the left: we often hear them say, for example, that crime is "caused" by poverty, so the criminal isn't really guilty of the crime. But if our beliefs are caused by extrinsic factors of which we are unaware, why aren't we equally blameless? Why do they hate us if we have no more control over our thoughts than a machine has over its actions?

And more importantly, is this post going anywhere? Does it have a deeper point, which is to say, is there a deeper Why and and a more satisfying Because to the above phenomena? Or is it Just Politics, a ubiquitous feature of the world's second oldest profession? We can't yet say. We can only hope.

"Acts of thinking," writes Lewis, "are 'about' something other than themselves and can be true or false." If the act of thinking "were totally explicable from other sources it would cease to be knowledge," just as, say, tinnitus isn't caused by extrinsic air vibrations, but rather, some intrinsic pathology in the organism. "Hearing" the ringing in one's ears is like seeing hallucinations; which is to say, these aren't really hearing or seeing at all, because they aren't caused by their proper objects (air and light vibrations, respectively).

The same must be true of thought, which is either an adequation or it is nothing. For example, a Democrat will say that if I can't see that President Trump is is a racist, my perception is indadequate. But what if Trump isn't racist? In this case, our critics must be hallucinating.

Bion symbolizes the hallucination (-K), which, as it so happens, often "substitutes morality for scientific thought. There will be no function in this approach for discriminating between true and false, between thing-in-itself and representation."

Ah, now we might be getting somewhere. The (-K) delusion may resemble abstract thought, but is really motivated -- caused -- by morality. However, a better term might be primitive morality, or moralism.

Now, what is primitive morality? Well, it is entirely preoccupied with guilt and punishment: something has gone wrong, and someone must pay. It is an animistic outlook that anthropomorphizes impersonal cause and effect.

For example, I remember reading in a book on the history of law, that it took some time for human beings to recognize that if a person is pushed out of a window, the falling person isn't to blame for injuring the fellow he lands on. It wasn't his fault, because there was no intent. For similar reasons, there were apparently instances of putting animals on trial for actions of which they obviously had no control.

But in an animistic world there is no such thing has bad luck. Malevolent forces -- malign wills -- are everywhere. In fact, you could say that this is the entire basis of the SJW outlook, in that it persistently attributes inequality to malevolent design (e.g., "white privilege" or the "patriarchy") when in reality it is the inevitable result of freedom + rules, i.e., fairness.

Back to primitive morality. It is primarily animated by envy and hatred. And envy is entirely bound up with the perception of inequality, and, more to the point, the inability to tolerate it.

Here is another deeper point about the attribution of ulterior causes to our beliefs. Perhaps it isn't surprising that the left is so vulnerable to this fallacy, because their whole worldview is predicated upon it. For materialism is an account of mental behavior which "leaves no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking, as a means to truth, depends."

It "is really a theory that there is no reasoning," because reason "must have come into existence by a historical process" which by definition wasn't "designed to produce a mental behavior that can find truth."

So if you really want to go down the path of "real reasons," you must go all the way, and conclude that there is no real reason for any belief; or that if there are real reasons, we could never know them.

The Spirit is Unwilling and the Post is Weak

Just some notes to myself that may or may not turn into a post. I only show up at the keyboard. If the inspiration decides not to show up, there's nothing I can do about it. Except maybe build a workmanlike post with bricks of common nonsense.

Again, we're just flipping through C.S. Lewis' Miracles, contained in this bargain compendium of his seven most popular works of Christian apologetics. I'm surprised at how good it is, but this is because I had thought of Lewis as a mere popularizer, providing a bit of sustenance to Christians who find themselves in one of those anti- or nonintellectal denominations cut off from the main trunk.

True, he was a popularizer, but the popularizer of 75 years ago is not the popularizer of today. Back then it required no more than a high school diploma to grasp his arguments, whereas today you need a college degree in order to have no idea what the hell he's even talking about.

Anyway, my notations.

"Naturalists would rather deny their own existence than affirm God's." As usual we mean this literally, because if there is no free will (and there is no free will if it isn't anchored in a transcendent reality), then we are merely cogs in an interlocking network of necessary entailments. We are simply the end-product of causes leading up to us, no different from any other machine. Therefore it is an illusion that anything exists in its own right. Rather, there is only the One Thing doing its thing, in which we are embedded.

Conversely, in Christian metaphysics there is still one thing, but this thing -- existence -- is grounded in a meta-thing -- being. In this view, the fundamental line is between Creator and creation, and it illuminates all other lines and distinctions. Creatures are on this side of the line. Except for human beings, who are somehow on this side and yet in conscious contact with the other; as if we are in this world but of another.

In the case of naturalism, there are literally no lines, or rather, any lines we discern are imaginary, because in reality there is only the One Giant Thing that determines everything within it. Monism means monism: you can't have your monistic cake and eat it too. Because if you can eat it, you have obviously transcended it.

In other words, you can't be nothing but a piston in the engine of nature and then pretend to know about the whole car. Indeed, to even say "cosmos" would be pure fantasy, like a blind person speculating about color.

For us, God is Necessary Being. Everything else is contingent upon this. But for the naturalist there is only existence, and everything "within" existence necessarily follows upon everything else. There is still necessity, and yet no freedom.

But here's a clue: knowledge of necessity is freedom. To know cause-and-effect is to have transcended it. I know that 2 + 2 = 4, every time, no matter what. Therefore, I am beyond mathematical necessity. Gödel's theorems merely prove this in a more systematic way -- ultimately that the human mind always transcends and escapes its own attempts to model nature.

"No account of the universe can be true," says Lewis, "unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight."

In other words, let's say physicists arrive at the very thing that is the implicit ground and sponsor of physics, the T.O.E., the universal equation that is the cause of all others, and which finally unifies all the loose ends, from quantum theory to general relativity and everything in between. Well, first of all, Gödel, who appears nowhere in these pages, at least explicitly. Yet, he's here in spirit, for

A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would simply eat its own tail..... [T]hat theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished.

Of course. Back then a popularizer could affirm such an obvious truth without insulting your intelligence.

Back a couple thousand posts ago, I wrote one called Proof of Proof is Proof of God. I don't recall what I wrote -- I'll reread it later -- but I probably thought it was a novel insight or something. So, what's Lewis doing in MY attractor?

In any event, we agree that a theory promulgated by the very thinking it demolishes

would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound -- a proof that there are no such things as proofs -- which is nonsense.

Of course. Like anyone could not know that.

I'm going to stop now. As usual, I have to get some work done.

Heads I'm Right, Tails You're Wrong

Back in the early years of the blog, we had a commenter who had convinced his sorryself that free will didn't exist, and endeavored to convince us as well.

This commenter would not -- or could not, if he had no free will -- be made to understand that if free will didn't exist, we could never know it.

Nor did he appreciate -- on the assumption that determinism is true -- the futility of trying to "change" another person's mind via an appeal to truth. And finally, he engaged in the persistent error of assuming that causation on the material plane must operate in the same manner as it does on the intellectual plane -- as if the cause of understanding is no different from the cause of a car crash.

Ultimately he naively conflated subject and object, subsuming the former into the latter. And once you've done this, then it's easy enough to deny free will, because objects have no will, let alone freedom. Nevertheless, this is what all materialists do, and cannot help doing once they embrace materialism. Their conclusion is indeed compelled by their premise, but the premise is compelled by nothing.

Do they embrace materialism freely? If so, then this refutes the doctrine. Or are they compelled to embrace it? If so, then they can only believe something because they are constrained to do so, not because it is true.

Therefore, there's no way to get around the reality of free will. Freedom or nihilism. Your choice. Or, you can pretend you have no choice.

But again, why try to convince others you have no choice? Even supposing you don't, that's hardly a reason to believe others don't. On what philosophical basis do you universalize what is particular to your own existence? For universalization and freedom are intimately related. You will have noticed that animals don't apprehend universals, because in order to do so, one must transcend immediate sensory/empirical experience.

I've been slowly making my way through C.S. Lewis's Miracles -- slowly not because it's difficult but because it provokes so many ideas I want to blog about. Already I have pages and pages of notes I want to expand upon, so the further I go in the reading, the further I fall behind in the writing. I simply can't keep up with myself unless I blog every single day. Bob! Come back!

But let's stay focused. Free will. Few things are as important. Come to think if it, I can't think of anything that surpasses its importance, not even truth, because truth cannot be realized in the absence of freedom to do so.

It reminds me of how Bernie Sanders praises Cuba's "literacy program." For truly truly, of what good is literacy if one is free only to learn repulsive and destructive lies? Literacy is neither here nor there in a world where one has access only to the New York Times. In such a world, the person who cannot read is more in touch with reality than the one who can and must.

As Lewis says, "no thoroughgoing Naturalist" -- to the extent that he is an intellectually consistent one -- can believe in free will, because it would necessarily entail

that human beings have the power of independent action, the power of doing something more or other than what was involved by the total series of events.

The total series of events. In order for determinism to be true, what I am typing at the moment must be nothing more than the present effect of causes extending back to... to what exactly? This itself is highly problematic, because if the chain doesn't originate in an Uncaused Cause, then we have a cosmos of effects with no cause. Which is absurd. Or magical. Either way, it makes no sense. Say what you want about atheism, but its appeal cannot be grounded in logic.

Which reminds me. At the Democrat debate the other night, the seven dwarves were asked a moronic question about their personal motto or something. I wondered to myself, what would I come up with in such surreal circumstances? How does one reduce a lifetime of thinking to a cliché that even a liberal journalist can understand?

It might be one of thousands of wise and witty comments by Dávila, or Schuon, or Whitehead, Chesterton, Churchill, Bob Dobbs... And yet, probably the most effective one -- simultaneously timeless and timely -- is Breitbart's succinct witticism, a sprightly bon mot that is appropriate for any encounter with a Democrat: Fuck. You.

However, that's not the one that popped into my mind. Rather, I thought of Paul's crack in 2 Corinthians 3:17: Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Conversely, although Paul doesn't say it in so many words, Where the Spirit of the Lord isn't, boom, there is the left.

At any rate, something must exist in its own right, right? We all agree that there must an Uncaused Cause and Unmoved Mover, otherwise there is no ground for anything, including our explanations for anything. There must be at least one self-evident axiom or principle from which all else is derived, otherwise we are condemned to immanence, enclosed in tautology, and sealed in tenure. Ultimately it is either God or nature, but can nature ever be self-sufficient and self-explanatory?

It's easy enough to default to nature as the ground and principle of everything else, but then you've painted yourself into something of a corner with respect to where all the information comes from.

What principle accounts for the generation of information from non-information -- or life from non-life, mind from matter, subject from object, contingency from necessity, freedom from determinacy? That's a tall order, especially from chaos. Yeah, you could just insist that the first terms in the above antinomies reduce to the second, but if that satisfies you, well... you've done all the thinking you need to do and that you're capable of doing anyway.

About that Uncaused Cause. What do we know about it? A lot, actually. How do we know? Well, it's one of those things with which we are intimately familiar, to such an extent that we can't not know it: in short, that we are persons, and that a person can be defined as an uncaused cause. Not that we aren't caused per se, but that, as persons, we share in the nature of the Uncaused Cause. Which is what Dávila means when he says,

The permanent possibility of initiating causal series is what we call a person.

Could I be wrong? Yes, but only if I'm right. For

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

One Small Step for the Son of Man, One Giant Leap for Mankind

Why do we have these two words: appearance and reality? If your philosophy begins with the idea that we cannot know reality, then the reality behind appearances is only more appearances, all the way down. In fact, there can be no down -- or up, or any direction at all, since there is no unmoving reference by which it can be perceived.

If ground zero of modern thought is I think, therefore I am, the battle cry of postmodern thought must be I know nothing, therefore I know it all; or I am unemployable, therefore I am tenured; etc.

To repeat something Lewis said a couple of posts back, "What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience."

First, this is absolutely true, and second, it must account for much of the appeal of various forms of bonehead relativism. And every philosophy necessarily reduces to bonehead relativism in the absence of God.

To be scrupulously fair to relativists, they would insist that my belief in God is just bonehead absolutism: that the only thing we can know is that there is no truth, only opinions and perspectives ultimately grounded in interest. Granted, while it is true that there is always a perspective, it doesn't follow that perspective is all there is.

For one thing, unlike an animal, we can know we have a "point of view," and awareness of this at once situates us outside or above this perspective. In short, we may partake of objectivity and detachment, which are quasi-divine superpowers -- and literally so, since perception of perception, knowledge of knowledge, and consciousness of consciousness are all immaterial powers that transcend nature.

Along these lines, Schuon writes that

Our intelligence is made for the Absolute, or it is nothing. Among all the intelligences of this world the human spirit alone is capable of objectivity, and this implies -- or proves -- that what confers on our intelligence the power to accomplish to the full what it can accomplish, and what makes it wholly what it is, is the Absolute alone.

In other words, we mustn't reduce human intelligence to the least thing it can do -- i.e., what it shares with the animals -- but approach it from the perspective of what it can uniquely do, and what no animal could ever do. The end illuminates the beginning; we can't know what a seed is for until we see the mature tree.

In order to prove the existence of God, one need only prove the existence of man. I mean this literally, because in claiming man is totally reducible to animal, animal to matter, matter to physics, etc., one is affirming that man doesn't properly exist -- that he is only the appearance of a deeper reality consisting entirely of subhuman law + stuff.

Could be. In the end, it's either something like that or something like this:

The Intellect, in a certain sense, is ‘divine’ for [i.e., from the perspective of] the mind and ‘created’ or ‘manifested’ for God: it is nonetheless necessary to distinguish between a ‘created Intellect’ and an ‘uncreated Intellect,’ the latter being the divine Light and the former the reflection of this Light at the center of Existence; ‘essentially’, they are One, but ‘existentially’, they are distinct...

What this really means, however you wish to characterize it, is that first there is Intellect: it is In the Beginning. It is what we call divine, and we have the word "divine" -- or "sacred" or "holy" -- in order to mark a kind of primordial distinction known to all men at any time, by virtue of being men. Everyone knows that some things are sacred, especially people who don't believe in the sacred, and that it is distinct from the profane and secular.

As we've discussed many times, leftism is a religion; or better, because it superficially denies religiosity, the denied religious energies and categories return in thinly disguised form.

Political correctness, for example, is an enforcement mechanism used to discourage and punish heretics and blasphemy. "Cancel culture" is just excommunication. Victimhood is righteousness, Trump is the devil, and the NY Times is scripture. The saints are too numerous to mention. Elite universities are progressive seminaries, and you shall have no gods before diversity. You are full of ecological sin, and you must purify yourself of carbon and its many minions. You must confess the sin of White Privilege and make reparations.

Man also has imagination and creativity, but the intellect is not these; it is not "active," but rather, passive and receptive, as container to contained, female to male, or soul to God:

The intellect is a receptive faculty and not a productive power: it does not “create,” it receives and transmits; it is a mirror reflecting reality in a manner that is adequate and therefore effective.

This is precisely what it means to be created in the image of God. If you want to be purely logical about it, put it this way: 1) we have certain abilities only a god could have, 2) we are not God, 3) therefore we must partake of God, or be a prolongation of God, or somehow share in his nature. But beware #2: we are not God.

Every profane philosophy affirms premise (1) but denies premise (2), which leads to... well, history, AKA, the fall prolonged in time, the cosmic battle between men who believe in God and men who believe they are Gods. In this Age of Metaphysical Shrinkage,

the intellect is atrophied to the point of being reduced to a mere virtuality, although doubtless there is no watertight partition between it and the reason, for a sound process of reasoning indirectly transmits something of the intellect; be that as it may, the respective operations of the reason -- or the mind -- and of the intellect are fundamentally different from the point of view that interests us here, despite certain appearances due to the fact that every man is a thinking being, whether he be wise or ignorant.

That was a bit of a mouthful, but it goes to what we said above about the impossibility of irreligiosity, for even the most hardened atheist with the most shriveled intellect nonetheless uses a desiccated reason in order to make his case, and reason cannot but help to transmit something of the light and truth that surpass it. Reason itself (like life or freedom) is always good, even if it is inevitably used for bad ends.

Now, here is a key point: yes, the intellect is simultaneously composed of light while being an adequation to it. But it may be compared to a candle against the sun, nor would you light a match in order to get a better look at the sun. That would be stupid, but nevertheless, that is what atheism is: I will flick my little Bic to disprove the existence of Light!

But put that stupid thing down and look up at the sun! For

There is no difficulty in the fact that pure intelligence -- the intellect -- immensely surpasses thought, and that there is no continuity -- despite the identity of essence -- between a concept as such and reality... to lament over the shortcomings of thought is to ask it to be something that it is not; this is the classical error of philosophers who seek to enclose everything in the cogito alone [I think therefore I am].

Rather, and we mean this literally: He thinks, therefore I am; and He is, therefore I think. We cannot be men if there isn't someone superior to man. Or, one small step for the Son of Man, one giant leap for mankind.

Mono-realism vs. Oops²

Miracles. What are they? It depends. For flatlanders, a miracle, even if it occurs, cannot occur, therefore it didn't. I don't discount this philosophy, except to say that it is a philosophy -- a philosophy which regards it as axiomatic that miracles cannot exist.

The trouble with an a priori axiom such as this is that it forecloses a possible dimension of reality -- as mentioned in yesterday's post, we may unwittingly enclose ourselves in tautology and then imagine that our method of looking just so happens to coincide with all that can be seen.

What are the chances of this occurring in a random universe (which would actually no uni-verse at all)? Now, that would be miraculous -- as if the keys to the cosmos just happen to be left in the only place where we are constrained (e.g., by natural selection) to look.

But what if we are under no such constraint? In other words, what if the human mind isn't just a contingent epiphenomenon adapted to an accidental universe? What if our world isn't just an appearance mirroring appearances -- oops² -- but rather, consciousness of, and conformity to, the Absolute? What if we are the real mirrors of that which we may truly know?

Well, science -- whether explicitly or implicitly -- says as much: that real adequation is possible between mind and reality. It's just that we 1) take this seriously (i.e., draw out the implications), and 2) posit multiple dimensions of reality which require very different modes of knowing.

Not to insult your intelligence so early in the morning, but understanding a chemical reaction, a mathematical equation, a work of art, or a person, require very different approaches. And understanding God requires all of these and then some -- in part because all of these are mirrors of, and pathways back to, the divine mind.

In short, to say mono-theism is to say mono-realism: there is one reality, but with diverse modes of... how to put it... output and input. We are always situated in a spiral between Intelligence and Intelligibility, but there are diverse manifestations and modes of each.

My son, for example, is gifted with a musical intelligence that allows him to perceive things others can't. He has access to a whole world that is more or less silent to others. Conversely, it's looking like math is a closed book to him. At any rate, he has zero interest. Except to say that music is -- of course, and among other things -- flowing math. So he loves math, just not the frozen kind.

But miracles. It's always helpful to warm up the mind by conducting some stretching exercises with our favorite nonlocal trainers. Schuon, for example:

This phenomenon [the miraculous] has in itself nothing mysterious or problematical about it: the so-called natural laws of a lower degree of Existence can always be suspended through the intervention of a higher degree, whence the perfectly logical term “supernatural”: but this degree also has its laws, which means that the miracle is “natural” on the universal scale, while being “supernatural” on the earthly scale.

Here again, it isn't so much that natural and supernatural are "out there." Rather, if they aren't "in here" as well, neither will be seen.

For example, for a primitive animist there is no natural world, no world uninhabited by spirits -- just as for the primitive naturalist there is no spiritual world that can't be reduced to a preferred building block (e.g., atoms, chemistry, DNA, the dialectic of history, etc.). But of course, both (spirit-and-matter) always exist and cannot not exist together.

More Schuon:

The miraculous is that which is due to a direct, thus vertical intervention of a heavenly Power, and not to a horizontal progression of causality.

Recall what was said yesterday about how humans beings are at once links in the great chain of being, and yet, the broken (feel free to interpret that word in two ways) links where freedom intrudes. You could pose the question as a paradoxical koan: What is the cause of indeterminism? In other words, what compels freedom?

Perhaps a better way of approaching this crossroads is to say that there is an unbroken chain of horizontal causation from Big Bang (or whenever you wish to begin) to Little Now. But this must -- MUST! -- be supplemented by a vertical chain that dangles from -- let's call it O -- to... let's call it the Big Now, because it's where everything happens and can only happen (blindingly soph-evident, since the past is gone and the future doesn't exist).

Now, nothing can dangle from above if it isn't anchored in something. Let's say Dupree wants to hang a chandelier in his converted tool shed. He's afraid of heights, and also a little buzzed, so he doesn't want to use a ladder. He solves the problem by purchasing a very long chain. But no matter how long the chain... you get the picture.

Same with free will. Here we can agree with the naturalist, that if nature is all there is, then freedom simply cannot exist. We may imagine it exists, but this is just an illusion.

But this actually makes no sense, since knowledge of necessity is itself a manifestation of freedom. In other words, if we were wholly determined, we could never know it. Nor could we have any valid knowledge, of anything.

The problem is solved if we simply sober up (attain objectivity) and overcome our fear of heights (theophobia), and attach freedom and truth -- will and intellect -- to the ceiling.

If truth and freedom aren't anchored above, then they simply cannot be. Likewise beauty. Dávila:

Aesthetics cannot give recipes, because there are no methods for making miracles.

Not even with Auto-Tune, a drum machine, and the most sincere adolescent doggerel.

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

To plagiaphrase Thomas, an error concerning the creation ends in false thinking about God and everything else. We're just about out of time this morning, but let's end by agreeing that there is really only one miracle, although everything else participates in it: the miracle of existence from being, or being from beyond-being. We'll sort it out in the next post.

We All Live in a Leaky Submarine

Last night I finally got around to watching Das Boot, the 1981 World War II film about life in a German U-boat. This post isn't about that. Rather, it's about the analogy of living in a little capsule submerged in an ocean of phenomena, and yet, sealed off from any actual contact with it.

What, for example, is the most salient feature of the ocean? Yes, it is wet. And yet, the submarine crew never touches water. Unless something goes terribly wrong -- which it did for 30,000 of the 40,000 men who served in das boots.

I'm tempted to cut straight to the chase and propose that the Christian is a swimmer, while most any other philosophy one can think of is either inside a submarine or floating atop the water. The latter resembles swimming except that only the ship touches water, not the crew.

Nevertheless, there are always rumors of water, and sometimes the real thing if the ship sinks. Sometimes reality floods in... No, it always does, right? This is our reason for hope. The progressive Ship of Fools is taking on water and going down as we speak.

Bob, this sounds like another one of those strained analogies. Where is this going? Well, modern philosophy begins with Kant, who places us inside a skin-encapsulated submarine, such that we never touch reality -- the noumenon -- but only have access to various instrument readings, i.e., those "a priori laws of nature that apply to all objects before we experience them."

See how this works? We come into the world with various factory-installed instruments and idiot lights such as substance, causality, and relation. These instruments may or may not tell us about "reality," whatever that is. We can never know. Again, all we can know is the instrument readings.

But this is a terribly unsatisfying metaphysic, which is why it is generally ignored. It is also incoherent and self-refuting, because Kant is simultaneously telling us about the nature of reality while claiming the impossibility of doing so.

But that's not my point. My point is that science, for example, gives us only instrument readings, but then goes right ahead anyway and conflates the readings with the reality. This is scientism, precisely -- the idea that what can be seen with the scientific method just so happens to coincide with all that can be seen. Like anyone could know that! Besides, scientism obviously isn't seen with the scientific method.

As a matter of fact, I was just reading about this yesterday in C.S. Lewis's surprisingly Coonish Miracles (contained in this giant compilation of seven books, an incredible bargain at eight or nine bucks).

Put it this way: we can never get away from those Two Trees in the garden. We have a choice: let's call one the trees natural, the other supernatural. Note that the first can never account for the second. But the second easily accommodates the first. So why do people choose the first?

I can think of several reasons, but the main one is pride. Functionally speaking we might call it "self-enclosure." This anticipates the principle that ultimate reality is trinitarian or relational, so to choose vertical self-enclosure is to choose... badly.

This is Lewis's approach. i.e., that we must choose either a metaphysic of naturalism or of supernaturalism. Eh, I don't really like the latter. It's too loaded. How about transnatural? In any event, Kant is half-correct in the sense that our perception of reality will definitely be colored by the categories we bring to it. It's just that we have a choice in the matter. We can touch water. Unless we choose not to:

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.

What comes first, the evidence or the metaphysic? Again, Kant is half-correct, because our perceptions will be conditioned by our metaphysic. But it's really a complementarity between evidence and metaphysic, because while we must be guided by evidence, some evidence -- indeed, the most important -- is only discerned with recourse to the metaphysic.

To take an obvious example, in my tree, truth is an adequation to reality. But just yesterday we had a visitor who disagrees with this proposition; rather he claims that "any communication is always about reality, no matter what the content." This is the kind of extreme postmodern view that equates Mozart and Taylor Swift.

The same commenter holds the view that "The assertion that deception or manipulation reduces a communication to useless unreality is clearly not the case." This is straight out of the leftist ploybook, in that, once language is no longer an adequation, it is all about power, not truth. And power is quite useful to the left, while truth isn't.

In a way, it all comes down to Truth and Freedom vs. Power and Necessity. Don't worry, we'll have much more to say about the subject, but we're running out of time this morning.

No thoroughgoing Naturalist believes in free will: for free will would mean that human beings have the power of independent action, the power of doing something more or other than what was involved by the total series of events.

Humans are at once links in the Great Chain of Being (the "total series of events") while being breaks in that very chain (the power of independent action). How can this be?

That's not how I would put the question. Rather, I would turn it around and ask, "what kind of cosmos must this be in order for free beings to exist?" In other words, begin with what is both experience-near and self-evident. If your metaphysic can't account for the miracle of freedom, it can't account for anything else, because only a free being can know truth to begin with, let alone deny it.

Reality ↔ Word ↔ Dialogue

Yesterday I was bedazzled by an essay in Pieper's The Weight of Belief, called The Abuse of Language and the Abuse of Power. (It looks like a pre- or reworking of his little book by the same title.)

This subject is so important and so full of implications that I don't know where to begin. WHY DOESN'T EVERYONE KNOW THIS? But not only does no one (or few people, anyway) know about it, they wouldn't care if they did, let alone be dazzled by it.

Let's begin with this observation; read it slowly and literally, that way I won't have to use a bunch of italics to emphasize every other word. When a fellow

ceases to govern his words with a view to stating the reality of things, he automatically ceases to communicate anything. For language becomes communication the moment it expresses a link to reality, and by the same token it ceases to be communication the moment this link is destroyed.

This link is everything; or, without it there is nothing, literally.

And yet, we have whole schools of philosophy which are founded precisely on the denial of this link (of word to thing, of language to reality). The result isn't just intellectual depravity, but -- because the True and Good are maimed if detached from one another -- moral retardation. If you want to know why academia is so bad and so stupid, this may be the biggest reason. And the poison trickles down into politics, entertainment, and journalism (but I threepeat myself).

An image comes into view: if journalism is the second hand, culture is the hour hand and politics and entertainment the minute hand of this giant crock. What time is it? It's always narrative time. The only difference between the news and Drag Queen Story Hour for children is...

Oh, wait. There is no difference.

In his Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, Roger Scruton describes "the capture of language by the left," founded in the "conviction that you [can] change reality by changing words." This occurs

whenever the primary purpose of language -- which is to describe reality -- is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it.... Newspeak sentences sound like assertions, but their underlying logic is that of the spell. They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance.

Satan's spell? Maybe. If so, it is undoubtedly his second greatest trick: not only does he disappear, he takes language with him.

We all know that leftists are irrational children, but few people understand that the irrationality isn't just at the level of knowledge, but much deeper than this, at the level of ontology: they aren't just wrong, but cannot help being wrong; they are wrongness as such.

Now, logocide is the gateway to homicide and even genocide. This is literally true when we examine the unhinged rhetoric of, say, communists or National Socialists; the abuse of people is always rooted in, and justified by, a prior abuse of language. For the left, the detachment of word from thing isn't a bug but a feature. After all, a human being is one of those real things from which language becomes detached when it detaches itself from real things. Indeed,

Human individuals are the most important of those real things, the obstacles that all revolutionary systems must overcome, and which all ideologies must destroy.

There's much more in Scruton, but I want to get back to Pieper, since he's more concise, not to mention a level or two deeper (since Scruton was, correct me if I'm wrong, an agnostic). Pieper agrees that

usage of words divorced from their roots in reality, actually has another purpose altogether: that namely this kind of language inevitably becomes an instrument of power, and at bottom is so from the very outset.

Outset of what? One wants to say Genesis 3 All Over Again, and maybe we will. But first we must lay a foundation. Not so much build a bridge to the past, as one which spans the vertical present: up and down.

It all begins with the corruption of the word, whereby our most precious gift is transformed into an almost infinitely destructive curse. What is the proper use of this gift? It has two powers, first "to make known something real in the act of calling it by name," and second, "to make it known to someone else."

Thus, two related purposes: to name and to communicate reality. In short, the word is a link between mind and reality; and between minds. Deny the first and you render impossible the second, for if we aren't speaking about reality, then of what are we speaking? Yes, unreality, AKA nothing. Or maybe you missed the Dem debate last Wednesday.

The communication of reality is the reality of communication, for if we weren't already in communion, then no amount of language could bridge that divide.

Two purposes, two potential logopathologies: these are "the corruption of the link between word and reality" and "and the corruption of the word as communication." We call the second lying, or at the very least conveying untruth. But the first isn't even lying, since it renders any communication of truth a priori impossible. Again, once you deny the link between words and reality, then exactly what are you talking about, anyway?

Speech which emancipates itself from the norm of (real) things, at the same time necessarily becomes speech without a partner.

Liberation! Yes, but is liberation from reality a good thing? Or should young people skip college?

You will have noticed that the people who are detached from reality don't stop speaking. If only! But again, of what are they speaking, and to whom? Of nothing and to no one: it is a kind of total cosmic narcissism sealed in tenure: crystalized nonsense. It is the flowing substance of nothing, as when Obama opens his mouth and the banalities fall out.

Let us not pretend that Republican politicians don't do the same thing. President Trump is not one of them, which is why they secretly detest him if they don't openly embrace him. Consider his joyous and freewheeling rallies. Pieper writes that

When one person ceases to speak to another in the artless and spontaneous manner which characterizes genuine conversation, and begins to consciously manipulate his words, expressly ceasing to concern himself with the truth -- when, in other words, his concern is something other than the truth -- he has, in reality, from that point on ceased to regard the other person a partner in a conversation. He has ceased to respect him as a human person. Thus, strictly speaking, from that point on all conversation, all dialogue, all mutual exchange of words, comes to an end!

Note that his enemies interpret Trump's respect as disrespect; and conversely, (say) Obama's profound disrespect -- his condescension and contempt -- as respect. Everything an Obama or Clinton or Warren says is calculated and manipulative. Who doesn't feel disrespected by their pandering?

I have no doubt that a large part of Sanders' appeal is that he has the appearance of Trump's genuineness and respect for his listeners, but let us not forget that he, more than any other candidate, is an unapologetic adherent of the very political philosophy that attacks language, denies reality, nullifies communication, and destroys the person.

Sanders can't actually respect his listeners, rather, only flatter and therefore manipulate them. They are fools and tools. When he speaks to them, "the word is deprived of its nature" and becomes instead a "drug which is administered to the other person" (ibid.).

Back in my day, college students at least used real drugs, which were far less dangerous than the verbal kind. The latter is a deadly threat to society itself, because "the decay of communication" leads to "the danger that reality and truth may become unrecognizable to us all." People may, for example, see Pete Buttigieg kiss his "husband" after the debate, and sense nothing weird or abnormal about it.

Of course, this has zero to do with "homophobia"; charges of homophobia are precisely what we mean by language becoming an intimidating and abusive instrument of force. After all, if gender and everything else are mere cultural constructs, and no culture is better or wore than any other, then on what basis can my cultural constructs be criticized?

Correct: on the basis of power, so don't pretend your outrage has any basis in morality, much less truth.

How Am I Here?

This is the ultimate question. We might say it is Alpha and Omega, first and last, because, supposing I am able to answer any question at all, this inevitably leads to the question of who has answered them and why we should give any credence to his answers.

Who are you? Who gave you the keys to the cosmos? By virtue of what principle are you qualified to be a truth-bearing primate? Certainly not the principle of natural selection, which plunges you into a horizontal network of pure contingency from which there is no escape (let alone inscape) except by means of scientistic magic.

In short, you can't just make up some convenient epistemology that is wholly decapitated from your ontology. You can't just saw off the limb on which you are perched and expect to remain suspended in midair.

Eh, most people don't think about such things. Why trouble oneself with trivial and inconsequential matters such as the nature of reality and the purpose of life? Don't you have better things to do?

Well, no. Some things are for their own sake. But only the most important ones. As we've discussed I-don't-know-how-many-times, the purpose of work is leisure, the purpose of leisure is contemplation, and the object of contemplation is....

The dazzle!

Sure, I could ignore the dazzle, but as a preeminent rockhead asked, Lord, to whom shall we go? It's not like one can just run over to the Dazzle Store and purchase a dozen epiphanies.

As mentioned at the conclusion of the previous post, once upon a time, and every time since, there were two trees.

A tall tale of two trees, one of which is the proper object of contemplation, the other of which negates its very possibility. The first tree is planted in an ontology that bears good fruit. The second tree... well, you can also know it by its fruits, which are alienation, exile, death, and permanent cosmic stupidity.

Alienation from what? From the ground; and ground from roots, roots from trunk, trunk from branches, branches from leaves, etc. One Cosmos. The second tree will still give you leaves, but in a way that reverses the order of the first tree.

Yes, it sounds like I am pushing a strained metaphor into overdrive, but this is precisely what modern philosophy does: it amputates knower from known, I from Is, and then pretends we can still know anything about what is and who knows it.

Let me say a couple more things in defense of my utterly useless life. Or rather, let Pieper say them. In his Happiness & Contemplation he writes that ultimate happiness consists in.... contemplation?

This implies a relationship between ultimate happiness and utter uselessness, in that contemplation is for its own sake and not the sake of anything else -- as persons are for their own sake and not a means to some other end. I wonder if there's a connection -- you know, between persons and contemplation? Might their uselessness be related?

For example, I don't love my son for some ulterior reason. "Ah ha!," says the Darwinian. "Yes you do. You do so in order to perpetuate your DNA." Whatever. Notice how Darwinism pretends to explain the human being while totally unexplaining his most salient characteristics -- like denying roundness while pretending spheres can still exist.

Both doing and knowing are ultimately in the service of being. Conversely, if doing is for the sake of doing, or knowledge for the sake knowing, we are trapped in a circularity from which there is no escape: a manmade counter-paradise with walls as high as pride and thick as tenure. Thus,

"It is requisite for the good of the human community that there should be persons who devote themselves to the life of contemplation" [Thomas]. For it is contemplation which preserves in the midst of human society the truth which is at one and the same time useless and the yardstick of every possible use...

Yes, a man has to make a living, but an art which is deliberately produced to conform to the tastes of the market is no longer art. Rather, the genuine work of art "has no utilitarian end, and certainly it is not a means to accomplish something else." Whatever it is that gives rise to art isn't under our command, although we certainly must -- as with any form of grace -- cooperate with it.

I'm fortunate that I don't have to "contemplate for a living," so to speak. Frankly, I can't even imagine. It would mess with the process at the very source, introducing all sorts of contaminants and motives. It could no longer be totally unself-consciously for its own sake, but for the sake of something else.

Isn't this the original rationale for the university? Yes, academia has become totally corrupt, but why? Lots of reasons, but surely one is that it is no longer for the sake of truth, but for the sake of a political agenda. In turn, this agenda is the poisonous fruit of the second tree discussed above.

Happiness is the contemplation of truth. And "it does not rest until it has found the object which dazzles it." I suppose the only hope for this blog is that you may glimpse the dazzle and share the bedazzlement. Otherwise my uselessness will be of no use to others.

Omniscience & Omnigorance

Numbers five and six of our metaphysical themes are The Good and The Person. I didn't highlight all that much in the former, I suppose because it's too self-evident. The bottom line is that "being and value are inseparable." Not only is value not epiphenomenal (appearance), it is entirely bound up with the noumenon (reality).

This is an example of something that is simultaneously radical and obvious. However, in our Age of Stupidity any number of self-evident truths have become radical, e.g., men can't menstruate, America isn't a racist country, socialism is a recipe for poverty and tyranny, etc.

Thus, the idea that being and value are intertwined is very much at odds with the Official View, which holds that Is is all there is, and that it is purely quantitative and material; in short, Is is fully reducible to It, with no remainder.

Another way of saying the same thing is that anything that can't be reduced to math and quantity isn't real. Of course, this means that this statement isn't real, much less true, but we'll let it pass. The point is, nearly everything that we regard as real, and which gives substance and meaning to the human journey, consists of secondary qualities that are supposedly no more real or enduring than a rainbow.

Whitehead hammered this untruism so far out of the park that they're still looking for the ball 100 years later:

Clear-sighted men, of the sort who are clearly wrong, now proclaimed that the secrets of the physical universe were finally disclosed. If only you ignored everything which refused to come into line, your powers of explanation were unlimited.

Omniscience on the cheap. Whitehead calls it the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, through which you can ruin philosophy in three easy steps: 1. start with concrete reality (as indeed we must), 2. translate it into mathematical abstractions, 3. conflate your abstractions with reality. Voila! You simultaneously know everything and nothing.

For which reason Dávila rubs it in with this radical but obvious truth: What is capable of being measured is minor. In particular, when compared to the measurer.

Nevertheless, the sophisticated person ought to worship at the altar of scientism, even though the Ought (let alone the Person who Ought) is impermissible in a cosmos stripped of essential qualities. Or rather, it's just your opinion, man, since there can be no appeal to anything transcending its own absurcularity. Dávila reminds us of another shockingly obvious truth:

If good and evil, ugliness and beauty, are not the substance of things, science is reduced to a brief statement: what is, is.

Therefore,

The Christian who is disturbed by the “results” of science does not know what Christianity is or what science is.

No quantity adds up to a single quality, not even the quality of bigness, since the latter requires a judgment and a judge.

Returning to the theme of the good, "the central tragic flaw in every human life and all of human history" is that,

blinded by too narrowly self-centered egocentric drives, or even by simple ignorance, we are bewitched by the quest for goods that are either illusory or destructive from a long-range holistic point of view (Clarke).

This is where the virtue of prudence comes in, as it is our vertical steering wheel toward objective goodness.

Analogously, the intellect aims at truth, or what good is it? Truth is the virtue of the intellect. If not, then our world is reduced to Will and the Power to enforce it: a joyless leftoid world unfit for human consummation. But in reality, in the words of Meister Eckhart, "God enjoys himself, and wants us to enjoy Him" (in Clarke).

Our sixth category, person, is the most important, and I'm not just saying this because I'm a person. Rather, personhood is the most consequential fact in all of existence, and it demands a reason -- a cause -- sufficient to its nature and scope.

Yes, one can easily explain away the person (for example, with the cheap omniscience of materialism), but in so doing one eliminates one's whole reason for being. Why would one want to do this? I know why, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Okay, a hint: once upon a time, and every time since, there were two trees.

The World Wide Cosmic Web

1. The unrestricted scope of the mind toward being; 2. Existence as the act of presence (and God as the act of being itself); 3. Participation and interiority; and now our fourth theme, Action.

By which Clarke means a kind of endlessly communicative universe in which the parts "pour over into self-expression and self-communication with each other." We've discussed this in many posts of yore, but the only reason a "part" can exist is because it constitutes its own "whole" in miniature.

For example, how can we look at a tree or dog or star, and instantly recognize its wholeness? I think because any recognizable thing partakes of the very wholeness that characterizes the cosmos itself. No one ever has or ever will perceive the cosmos -- obviously -- and yet, we all intuit its oneness, wholeness, and uniformity across space and time. Nah, it's stronger than "intuit," since the wholeness cannot not be.

In order to be a whole, the cosmos must be in contact with itself -- whole to part, part to whole, and part to part. And indeed, according to trinitarian metaphysics, even the whole is in communication with itself, without descending into partness! Rather, the trans-whole is a single substance of three eternally related and expressive persons.

At the bottom of the page I have a note to myself: "Does Jesus not bring a certain correction to the Jewish conception of God?" To say "correction" is to prejudge the case, but he certainly respects the radical oneness of the Jewish God while tweaking it in a wholly unexpected and seemingly paradoxical manner.

Chesterton wrote of how the former (oneness) was a prerequisite for the latter (threesomeness), in that the pagan cosmos had first to be cleansed of polytheism in order to properly approach the Trinity.

In other words, if the Trinity had been introduced in an extra-Jewish context, pagans would have undoubtedly understood it as tritheism rather than a deeper elaboration of strict monotheism. Moreover, they would have no doubt used it to explain how Jewish monotheism is all wrong.

Back to Clarke. As we've suggested on many occasions, going all the way back to the urtext itself, there is a big difference between a pile and a unity. We can recognize a pile of laundry as "one thing," and yet, it's really just a bunch of externally related but contiguous articles.

In contrast, a real unity -- such as an organism -- consists of internally related parts. My heart and lungs, for example, aren't analogous to billiard balls, but share a higher unity of relation and function. Thus, without this communicative interiority,

all we would have would be a collection of isolated beings, each a center of existential energy similar to all others, but totally bound up within itself, with no connection or communication with others, and hence no way of knowing them.

Each being would be plunged in total silence and darkness as far as the rest of the universe is concerned, a total "black whole," so to speak, except that it would not even exert any gravitational pull on the rest, as black holes do in our world.

Clarke's description is slightly misleading, in that there is literally nothing that could be said of any reality that weren't grounded in self-communicative interiority. There would be no "collection," no "beings," no "centers," no cosmos at all and no knowledge in, of, beyond, or before it; no darkness, light, isolation, unity -- just an inconceivable nothingness. You could say that this is either one cosmos under God or no cosmos under nothing. It's that stark a choice: God or tenure.

The vertical oneness of reality

enables beings to come out of their isolation, connect with each other, influence each other, and communicate with each other.... [It] truly allows there to be a universe, that is, a turning of all towards oneness, togetherness.

When anytwo are gethered in his name, there are -- boo! -- three. And this calls to mind a slightly cryptic aphorism: Any shared experience ends in a simulacrum of religion.

Get it? So simple and yet so fundamental. If not for this everyday miracle, we'd not only have no God, we'd have nothing (and no we to have it).

The Sovereign Good, because it is good, is radically self-diffusive, self-giving, and self-communicative. It is at bottom a radiant gift, so to speak. After all, it is free. And it does shine. And so do we. John Lennon was on to something:

Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void / It is shining, it is shining

That you may see the meaning of within / It is being, it is being

That love is all and love is everyone / It is knowing, it is knowing

Come Together Over Me Under I AM

We're up to number three of Clarke's six main themes of metaphysical reflection, participation, by which he means "the basic ontological structure of sharing in the universe." Each thing is participating in the All, as part is to whole; or, as Whitehead put it,

We habitually speak of stones, and planets, and animals, as though each individual thing could exist, even for a passing moment, in separation from an environment which is in truth a necessary factor in its own nature.

No can be. Metaphysically speaking. Indeed,

Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical, nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms. Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms.

To which I would add -- not in any woo woo way, but literally -- the cosmos is the largest organism. And yet, it cannot be ultimate, because organicism is a function of personhood, not vice versa. We'll no doubt come back this principle, if not in this post, then in themes four, five, or six. But "participation" already hints at personhood, since it is an entailment of persons, and persons are by definition irreducibly intersubjective.

Whitehead blows up both biology and physics, at least the orthodox but incoherent view that ether subordinates the former to the latter, or that places a sharp line between them. For, example, the doctrine of evolution "cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature." In other words, if organism is fundamental and not just epiphenomenal, then neither biology nor physics are what we (they) think they are.

Can't get more participatory than this: "in a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus, every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world" (ibid.).

By the way, I don't bring in Whitehead as some kind of appeal to authority. Rather, to common sense.

I suppose we could say that human beings are woven of the limitless and limited; or finitude and infinitude; or absolute and relative. Or, we could say that humans have the privilege of being finite and yet conformed to the infinite, which is what makes knowledge of totality possible but totality of knowledge impossible.

As Clarke describes it, "the immanent One in many is also a many from a transcendent One." This is a key, because what is knowledge -- of anything -- but a kind of participatory oneness-to-oneness in Oneness?

Is that obscure enough for you? If so, put it this way: knowledge of anything presupposes the existence of that single thing under investigation. But the investigation presupposes a single mind capable of knowing this one thing it has selected or abstracted from the whole. And the unification of these two -- intelligible object and intelligent subject -- presupposes a higher unity that is the source of these two, i.e., the unity of the object (that which makes it one) and the unicity (i.e., interior oneness) of the subject.

If things weren't structured in this way, then 1 + 1 would always = a pair of ones instead of a synthetic twoness, to say nothing of transcendent threeness (and all genuine creativity participates in a generative threeness).

The following sounds very much like Whitehead, and not just because it's a run-on sentence. The participatory cosmos

must be seen as a synoptic vision of the universe, in which all beings, from the lowest to the highest, come together to form a single great community, where each holds the common identification card of the act of existence, or active presence, plus its own individual signature as a distinct member of this ultimate club of real being, where everything has secret affinities with everything else from highest to lowest, where nothing real can ever be objectively alienated in any ultimate way (Clarke).

In short, "To be is to be together." And in the end, "psyche mirrors nature and nature mirrors psyche, each in its own way" (ibid.). This isn't a metaphor; rather it is why we have metaphor, or even language itself.

It's All Too Much

For me, anyway. The more I learn, the less I know. At this rate, we'll know nothing by the end of this post, if not before.

Number two of Clarke's six main themes of metaphysical reflection is existence as the act of presence. This involves a shift of perspective from the Whatness of things to their sheer Isnsess; from the form of existents to existence itself,

seen as the radical underlying act of presence in each real being by which all beings are real -- i.e., actually present in the universe and actively present to all other beings.

This is the most general category we may conceive, surpassed only by the God whom we can never conceive; I like to think of God the Father as Beyond-Being, and Being as eternally conceived and begotten in his matrix/womb. I'm not saying this is correct, only that it helps me to think the unthinkable. Ignore the names and just think of an eternally generative perichoretical dance between....

Come to think of it, this gnotion can be fruitfully applied to any number of ultimate categories, from Beyond-Being <--> Being on down, e.g., eternity/time, whole/part, absolute/relative, personal/interpersonal, wave/particle, subject/object, etc. We can never finally come down on one side or the other without either denying half of reality, or illicitly smuggling properties of one complementarity into the other.

For example, you can't just eliminate truth or free will from the cosmos and then proceed as if nothing has happened. Because if there is no truth or freedom, there is no thinking, period. Conversely, if you are actually thinking, and your thoughts are conformed to reality -- i.e., disclose truth -- this alone implies a great deal, to put it mildly.

Truth and Presence. Can't have one without the other: for

the Absolute is either Truth or Presence, but it is not one or the other in an exclusive fashion, for as Truth It comprises Presence, and as Presence It comprises Truth.

Such is the twofold nature of all theophanies; thus Christ is essentially a manifestation of Divine Presence, but he is thereby also Truth: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” No one enters into the saving proximity of the Absolute except through a manifestation of the Absolute, be it a priori Presence or Truth (Schuon).

In other words, we must know the truth, and the truth shall se us free, not as a horizontal "consequence" but because these are two sides of the same coin-cidence. Truth coincides with freedom and presence; not to mention love and beauty.

But let's not put words or thoughts into Clarke's mouth or head. What does he say?

The principle of existence is not a form or structure in things, a "what," but rather an inner dynamic act of presence that makes all forms of structures actually present as diverse modes of the radical "energy" of existence.

In short: existence is an inner dynamic Act of Presence.

It's difficult to put these things into words without sounding like one is high, or even Heidegger. But there it is, right here and right now: an interior dynamism presently acting as active presence of interiority-truth-freedom. Or something. Let's try to find some clarity here. We are fumbling around in the dark, but let us grope for the damn light switch!

Clarke:

every real being, in virtue of its in-dwelling act of existence, has the power to express itself, relate itself to the rest of the universe, communicate its own existential energy to other beings.

In other words, because the existence of the Cosmos is an Act of Presence, it is present before us as precisely that communicative Act. If this weren't the case, then the created world wouldn't speak to us so coherently and intelligibly, and to the extent that we "understood" it, we would be understanding nothing.

Bob, you are really on a roll this morning -- a roll of obscurity. You sound positively tenured. Another stab? I guess we're not alone:

this deep-lying act of existence at the core of every being, as the ultimate bond of union between all real things, does not come easily to a common-sense vision of the world, more concerned with what things are and how they act than that they are.

Mere common sense must be supplemented with uncommon nonsense. This requires a kind of "metaphysical conversion." I would say we must be born again, or undergo a metanoia, a "turning around" from existence to being; we have to get out of the tired rutness of Whatness and into the spirited business of Isness.

This latter is truly the business of God, or of God's first business: first and foremost he is busy with Isness.

Clarke quotes Shelley, who said that The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. Note the irony: clarity can impose its own special kind of fog, which is surely the case vis-a-vis any ideology, from Marxism to Darwinism to atheism and All the Rest.

Indeed, there is a power of negative thinking, or better, a complementarity between apophatic (+) and cataphatic (-) theologies. Can't get more mainstream than Thomas Aquinas, whose "anti-doctrine" of God

never tells us what God is, only what God is not. His entire approach is to undermine all our idolatrous attempts to turn God into something understandable or controllable....

Well, if that's the way he feels about it, I'll just shut-up.

The Marriage of Mind and Being

We're in the process of reviewing the six main themes that dominated Clarke's seven decades or so (he died at age 93 in 2008) of metaphysical reflection -- themes "that are central in my philosophical vision of the universe." These are irreducible, in that he couldn't boil them down any further without losing something vital.

Oh, and the reasons we're doing this are purely narcissistic, in that his whole approach is so similar to mine, even though mine has been going on for, I don't know, three and a half decades, but I didn't run into Clarke until -- let's make it official -- until May 30,2012. Which means that he plundered my ideas for over half a century before I even had the opportunity to think them. If this isn't a temporal injustice, I don't know what is.

The first theme, discussed in the previous post, is The Unrestricted Dynamism of the Mind Toward Being. Let's say a few more things about this before moving on the the second.

One thing that sets the human mind apart from the animal is our natural drive "to lay hold of intellectually and understand as far as possible the entire order of being, all there is to know about all there is" (Clarke).

More more more: this drive applies to "the entire life of inquiry of the human mind in any field," even though it is only properly realized in metaphysics (to which I would add the theology without which it can never be complete).

For example, consider my racket, psychology. As I've discussed before, I never intended to become a "psychologist." Rather, my curiosity simply got the better of me. But being crowned with a PhD hardly extinguished my curiosity! If that were the case, I'd be a poor excuse for a human being, let alone psychologist.

For a psychologist who is only a psychologist isn't even that. Which I mean 100% literally. If you fail to situate psychology in a hierarchical nest of diverse disciplines, you're just an ideologue, and your ideology is simply the disease that has killed your curiosity -- which is properly unlimited by anything short of God.

And even then, God can never be a human limit, since he is the Limitless, precisely. He is the sufficient reason of our own unlimited curiosity, which is the whole point of this first theme: "Mind is for being, and reciprocally being is for mind":

This absolutely fundamental mutual correlation of mind and being, mind for being and being for mind [is] a "nuptial relation," a natural marriage made in heaven, so to speak, where each partner completes the other (ibid.).

Yes, exactly. Not to get all political right away, but notice that ideology always results from an unnatural (or perhaps merely natural) redefinition of cosmic marriage, such that knowing can only be betrothed to knowing rather than being.

Is this clear? Kant presided over the official divorce of knowledge from being, and this was no amicable parting of the whys, since knowledge constantly stalks being while pretending to abide by its own self-imposed restraining order limiting it to visiting rights with childish phenomena. The noumena is supposed to be off limits.

Moreover, the marriage of knowing and knowing -- like the deconstructionist's marriage of language to language -- is literally a homotextual union. For

notice the appropriate roles in this marriage [of knowing to being]: the human mind is analogously like the female, or mother; reality is like the father. To know truly a reality that it has not itself made [i.e., the infertile union of knowledge with knowledge], the mind must make itself open to receive this reality, to be actively informed by it.

The mind, informed by realty, then actively responds, pours its own spiritual life into what it receives, gestates, then gives birth to the mental "word" or concept, which in turn flows over into the verbal word expressed to others.

Like right now. This is a family blog, so I don't want the be too graphic, but we symbolize the openness (o), and the reality to which it is open (↓). There is the even deeper mystery of (↓) proceeding from the womb of O, but we'll return to that later. Suffice it to say that Ultimate Reality is an eternal complementarity -- a relation -- of Father <---> Mother, of giving, receiving and giving back.

Not to be-labor the pain, but a con-cept is a con-ception. And guess what. Now that I'm plummeting down this rabbit hole, this notion was first born in me way back in 1985, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with Clarke or even religion. Rather, the following -- written by a psychoanalyst -- rang a deep bell:

"Conception is that which results when a pre-conception mates with the appropriate sense impressions" (Bion). There is an inherent expectation of a union of two objects to make a third which is more than a sum of its two parts (Hinshelwood).

The interior union -- of preconception or archetype with reality -- gives birth to the baby concept. Of course it never ends there, because the concept then becomes preconception for a new generation of concepts. This is how science -- or any discipline -- proceeds.

But if it's just knowledge giving birth to more knowledge -- but with no intimate contact with father reality -- then it is again completely sterile. Indeed, this is what it means to be an Infertile Egghead, a subject about which I am reading at this very moment.

Well, I guess the second theme will have to wait until Tuesday. We'll leave off with this:

to know is for the mind to conceive and give birth to an inner mental word expressing the real that has informed it, and bearing the features of both parents -- reality and the mind. Thus theoretical intelligence (knowing the world as it already is) is more like a she; practical intelligence, on the other hand... is more like a he... (Clarke).

However, please bear in mind that these categories aren't naive and primitive psychological projections of human gender; rather, the reverse: we are gendered because reality is.

All There Is To Know About All There Is

So, metaphysics presupposes a passion for wholeness and an intuitive sense of deep harmony.

Wholeness implies "partness," but the parts reveal an inner harmony, very much analogous to an organism, which is a unified harmony of countless parts. And as we suggested way back when, it would be strictly impossible for organisms to exist in a non-organismic cosmos.

You can't really build an animal out of Legos, only Logos.

This is something we rarely hear, but it's as fundamental as the principle that intelligence cannot be derived from unintelligence, or information from non-information, or light from darkness.

For if this cosmos weren't interiorly related, it is impossible to explain how interior relations could somehow emerge later (to say nothing of the intersubjectivity that makes humanness possible). Indeed, how could interiority ever appear in a universe of exterior relations only?

But there's really no mystery (in the colloquial sense) if we ponder the meaning of wholeness and harmony, because neither is thinkable in a cosmos of purely exterior relations. The best analogy that comes to mind is music, to which I believe we are attracted because it reveals or mirrors something fundamental about the very structure of existence.

For to be aware of harmony is to be aware of vertical hierarchy (in musical space, so to speak), and to understand melody is to understand a serial wholeness (in time). A melody is "one thing" despite having many notes; and musical structure is one thing in space, despite being composed of diverse voices, say, saxophone, trumpet, guitar, and piano.

These diverse voices are harmonized into one, but by shifting one's focal awareness one can also listen in such a way as to enjoy the inter-play of individual instruments. Indeed, this is one of the keys to enjoying jazz: appreciating how the parts relate to the whole and vice versa, in both time and in space. No animal can do this, because no animal can "enter" music. An animal can hear the notes but cannot perceive (get inside) melody or harmony.

For Clarke, metaphysics is "the systematic effort to illuminate our experience in depth and set it in a vision of the whole."

I suppose it goes without saying that this requires a person, so it is a non-starter to embrace a metaphysic such as materialism that renders persons impossible.

Indeed, it turns out -- not to get ahead of ourselves, but it turns out that metaphysics doesn't just presuppose personhood, but that... how to put it... personhood is both the alpha and omega of metaphysics, a principle to which we will no doubt circle back.

But let's slow our roll. Clarke goes on to say that metaphysics involves "a person taking reflective possession of himself" and his "place in the universe as a whole." Metaphysics is

that part of philosophy which attends explicitly to the vision of the whole, which tries to lay out the great general laws and principles governing all beings and rendering them intelligible, including what it means to be real at all.

But let's go back to the first part of that definition: metaphysics involves a person... You can really stop there, or again, you must at the very least propose a metaphysic that makes personhood possible, and certainly doesn't render it impossible. However, some things are just so flat-out weird and unexpected, that what appears "possible" starts to look suspiciously necessary.

That probably wasn't clear. Let's suppose you get into a coin-flipping contest with Hillary Clinton. You flip the coin ten times, and each time it comes up heads for Hillary. Is this possible? Sure. But it's more likely that you are dealing with a weighted coin, so odds are that the outcome is actually necessary (relatively speaking, of course).

How many cosmic coin flips have to come up heads in order for persons to exist? Last I checked, there are something like 150 fine-tuned conditions necessary for just life to exist. But I find this whole approach somewhat tedious. For if you just understand the quality of interiority, the quantities no longer matter. No quantity leads to quality, for the same reason that no degree of exteriority results in interiority.

Let's move on. And in. When God reveals his name as "I AM THAT I AM," he is saying more than a mythful. Rather, he am being quite literal. In other words, the ultimate principle of existence isn't just interior but personal: AM (being) is an I (interior unity).

Clarke describes six central themes that have dominated his metaphysical reflections over the course of his life. Let's take them one by one, perhaps one day at a time.

On the first day, Clarke speaks of the unrestricted dynamism of the mind toward being. We touched on this in the previous post, but to me it comes down to the plain fact that nothing in this world is proportioned to the scope -- the height, width, and depth -- of our intelligence.

This is very much analogous to the obvious fact that nothing in this world can fulfill our desires, such that desire is eliminated. Rather, our minds are proportioned to something vastly transcending this world, despite having evolved (according to Darwinism) solely in the world.

Is the latter possible? I don't think it is, not even with an infinite number of crooked coin flips. Why? Because no number of coin flips results in a coin that starts to decide which way it will flip.

Do you see the point? Numbers don't add up to mathematicians, not even a bad one. Yes, God is a mathematician. But have you ever heard of a mathematician who isn't a person? Even AOC knows that it's literally impossible for us to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps. Likewise, it is literally impossible to build a person out of numbers.

With this in mind, Clarke points out that human beings -- the metaphysicians among us, anyway -- have a drive to know

all there is to know about all there is. This drive knows no limits short of total understanding of all being, both in depth and in breadth.

Yes. That's a bingo. But consider the implications, or better, the underlying assumptions. For if man is to Know what Is, this presupposes a relationship between knowing and being.

Now, perhaps you haven't heard, but both modernity and postmodernity insist that there is no such relationship. Indeed, they don't even talk about being, even though this results in terminal incoherence. Nevertheless, ever since Kant, the Best Thinkers have been performing their cognitive tricks in a masturbatory cirque du jerque of inbred and sterile categories that prevent contact with "reality."

Like anyone could know anything while claiming to be out of touch with reality!

As we have been saying for I don't know how long, man can know many things about anything, but can never know everything about a single thing. This is strange but nevertheless absolutely true. By virtue of what principle is this not only possible, but necessary?

One word: creation (or perhaps better, Creator <---> Creature). Eliminate that word, and man cannot know anything about anything, and certainly nothing about everything. Yes, we are being quite literal.

Man is epistemophilic, meaning that he loves him some knowledge, which is what makes it such a passionate journey. On the other hand, a leftist is epistemophobic, or, to express it positively, "ideophilic," in that they love their ideologies, passionately. Which is why they hate us so.

But you can't hate real knowledge without hating being, AKA reality, and now you understand how and why the left is so passionate about so many impossibilities, whether economic, biological, anthropological, educational, meteorological, constitutional, etc. It's easy enough to blame that joker Kant. But he wasn't crazy, just ahead of the curve.

Anyway, being is not only "open" but radically self-giving, which is why our minds are able to intelligibly "receive" it. And this reduces to one circular and expansive dynamism.