Genuine and Fake Uselessness

The "perfect idea," says Brennan, "would be one which, from the depths of its utter simplicity, would picture the whole schema of cosmic reality in a single act of understanding."

This idea would also be perfectly useless. The other day, a troll asked what we think we are doing with our life -- what is our purpose, what do we hope to accomplish, what is our mission, etc. Well, we do not wish to brag, but our goal is to be as utterly useless as the perfectly useless Idea toward which we are being attracted.

Yes, the ultimate humble brag.

Now, metaphysics is the last word in uselessness, or at least the last human word before one leaps into the translinguistic void. According to Pieper, metaphysical knowledge

refers to knowledge concerned with the whole of reality, with the structure of the world as a whole.... It is the application of our knowing faculties -- from deep within our spirit -- to the totality of all that is, to the meaning and foundation of all reality in toto: i.e., the application of the mind to its complete and undiminished object.

Commenting on another post, the same troll referenced above confessed that, "I don't get it. The intelligence of man is potentially total? So what is total intelligence? To know everything? And how is this totality explained by a transcendent reality? I'm not making the connection."

There is a deep connection between the perfect idea and our ultimately futile attempt to know and describe it: they are equally pointless.

"This kind of knowledge," writes Pieper, "is what Aristotle says is the only free kind." And by "free," he means "non-practical," in contrast to practical knowledge aimed at achieving an end.

I have a friend who is a contractor. He can do pretty much anything. He could build a guesthouse in the backyard made out of junk sitting in my garage. He might be the most useful person I know. In other words, we are polar opposites. For

the kind of knowledge which deals with the ultimate foundation of the world is supposed to not "serve" a purpose.

Rather, it is "not even possible or thinkable to put it to any use: 'it alone is there for its own sake.'"

And this means it is free: no strings of purposefulness attached. Like the human person and other ultimate goods, it can never be a means to an end. You might say it is "sabbath knowledge," when we stand back from the whole existentialada and just enjoy the handiwork.

Having said that, we can never quite get there. Try as we might, we can never become perfectly useless:

[T]he knowledge that focuses on the totality of the world, purely for the sake of knowing and to that extent free -- this knowledge cannot possibly be achieved by man; he never fully grasps it; it is therefore not something that man possesses without limitation, since as a human being he himself is subject to many kinds of necessities.... One would have to say that only God can achieve this knowledge completely....

So, only God can be perfectly useless, for he is the ultimate "for his own sake." Then again, the very essence of God is for the sake of the other: God is substance-in-relation, such that the Father makes himself useful by giving himself to the Son, and vice versa. This cannot be for the sake of something else; it is not as if the Father has an ulterior agenda or secret payoff in so pouring himself into the Son.

It must be the same with creation. If creation is an icon of trinitarian love, then it too can have no practical purpose, rather, a wholly impractical one.... What am I trying to say? Perhaps this:

First, however much man is a practical being who needs to use the things of the world to meet his requirements for living, he does not acquire his real riches through technical subordination of the forces of nature but through the purely theoretical knowledge of reality.

The existence of man is all the richer the more deeply he has access to reality and the more it is opened up to him. Through his knowledge he achieves the purest realization of his being, so that even his ultimate perfection and fulfillment consist in knowledge...

And we're back to paragraph one, the Perfect -- and perfectly useless -- Idea.

Anaxagoras expresses it his own way when, in answer to the question, "Why were you born?" he says: "To look at the sun, the moon and the sky" -- by which he would not have meant the physical heavenly bodies but the construction of the world as a whole (Pieper).

A final point: science is obviously practical. But to the extent that it transforms to scientism, it tries to be as useless as metaphysics, but only renders itself soulless and nihilistic, which is another thing entirely. It is a pseudo-uselessness, a nothing masquerading as everything. It doesn't release the intellect into freedom, but rather, eliminates freedom at the root.

Pieper ends with a crack by Boethius: The human soul is necessarily at its freest when it remains in contemplation of the divine spirit.

O <--> (k) Boomer

I'd like to wrap up our discussion of Thomistic Psychology so we can move on to the next subject, whatever it is. Much of this material isn't new per se. In fact, it's straight out of the Raccoon playbook, except I arrived at it in a circuitous and nonlinear manner, just scratching my intuitchin' and following my whimful thinking wherever it loiters. Given our very different approaches, it's rather striking that we somehow ended up in the same place, more or less.

The intellect of man has nothing to start with, yet it is potentially a whole creation. It reaches out and conquers the world by the process of becoming the world (Brennan).

Turns out that knowing and being are very much linked; in fact, if they're not, then there's nothing to talk about but our own neuropsychology. One could express the relation of knowledge to being with a very simple formula: O <--> (k).

The philosophistry of materialism makes no sense, because it cannot make sense; it is literally the denial of intelligibility, of intelligence, and of any real relation between them:

the singular does not resist understanding because it is singular, but because it is material, since nothing is understood except immaterially (emphasis mine).

A single tree, for example, isn't understood as a tree, because doing so requires the abstract concept of treeness. "The essences of corporeal things are opaque rather than translucent, so far as our ability to understand them is concerned."

In fact, it is impossible for us to imagine such a world of absolute singularities, because we would be reduced -- literally -- to psychosis. The psychotic person lives in a world of terrifying novelty, with every object in each moment de-linked, so to speak, from the others; one exits meaningful history and enters a catastrophic collidescope from which there's no escape from the constant collisions.

Ogden describes it well: "symbol and symbolized are emotionally indistinguishable since there is no interpreting self to mediate between" them. "Thoughts and feelings" become "palpable objects and forces that appear, disappear, contaminate, transform, destroy, rescue, etc." Such a person

may shake his head to get rid of tormenting feelings, may literally put his thoughts into a letter and send the letter to the person who should hold these thoughts, or may request x-rays in order to be able to see the things inside of him that are driving him crazy.

Or, he may put his disturbing thoughts and feelings into President Trump, which solves one problem only to create another: the unenending torment of Orange Man Bad! Not only is this story as old as politics, but the raison d'etre of vulgar politics. The founders saw and recognized this, and hoped to create a system that would neutralize it.

But right away political philosophy devolved into faction, and here we are. Beneath the conviction that politics can solve one's problems is the fantasy that politics is responsible for one's problems. So, hating President Trump is every bit as sensible as putting one's sins into an animal and killing it. It even works. For awhile, at which point a new sacrifice is necessary. This is why the News Cycle was invented by the Aztec. See Bailie for details.

Note that the process is "psychotic," even though we don't label it as such. But clearly, a different sort of logic is at play when we enact such an unconscious political phantasy. Come to think of it, The Symmetry of God explains the basis of the process in both health and illness.

For there is a healthy basis for such confusion of symbol and symbolized, for example, in the experience of art. In appreciating drama, one must "lose one's mind" and give oneself over to the imaginary world. This constitutes the healthy use of a power that becomes unhinged and autonomous in various states of pathology.

For example, what is a conspiracy theory but an imaginary drama into which one projects oneself? I've been binge-watching The Man in the High Castle, but its alternative world is no more bizarre than Rachel Maddow's long-running soap opera, The Russian Operative in the White House, which I occasionally cringe-watch.

Back to Brennan (Robert, not John). Like the materialist, we begin with material objects. However, we don't end there (in truth, neither does the materialist, except he has no principle to explain how he gets from first base -- sensation -- to second -- abstraction). An angelic intelligence requires no object, but can proceed straight to the essence. But we aren't angels, although some people come close. Not for nothing is Aquinas called the "angelic doctor." Schuon too seems to fly in that gossamer plane, right at the threshold between the local and nonlocal.

But for the restavus earthbound dirtclods, our knowledge "is not central but radial knowledge. It proceeds inward from without, and reaches the center only by starting from the periphery. It apprehends the essences of sensible things, not in themselves, but in the symbols which these essences manifest to the senses."

In fact, I think this might constitute a fork in the road between Thomas and Frithjof, because, if I am not mistaken, Schuon believes the True Metaphysician has access to the principial world of a priori truth. There are permanent truths we can know directly and infallibly, and indeed, we have a right to these truths (along with an obligation to know and live from them). Let me see if I can dig up a suitable passage.

It is indispensable to know at the outset that there are truths inherent in the human spirit that are as if buried in the "depths of the heart," which means that they are contained as potentialities or virtualities in the pure Intellect: these are the principial and archetypal truths, those which prefigure and determine all the others (Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism).

I suppose I'm partial to the Schuonian view, while also maintaining a healthy respect for the Gnostic temptation: the Tower of Babel, the Promethean usurpation of divinity, the idea that we can build our own stairway to heaven. That always ends badly, although it can be lucrative while it lasts. Humility is the thing. If it doesn't vary directly with knowledge, then you're doing it wrong. Certain truths have moral and characterological prerequisites, which is why we don't toss our pearls before trolls or give what is holy to the Dems.

For Schuon, not all knowledge is from the periphery to the center. I will speak only for myself, and say that it must be a two way street, or better, an inspirling circularity between God's descent and our ascent, bearing in mind that the latter is strictly impossible in the absence of the former. It is in this context that I would understand the following passage:

if there were no pure Intellect -- the intuitive and infallible faculty of the immanent Spirit -- neither would there be reason, for the miracle of reasoning can be explained and justified only by the miracle of intellection. Animals can have no reason because they are incapable of conceiving the Absolute; in other words, if man possesses reason, together with language, it is because he has access in principle to the suprarational vision of the Real and consequently to metaphysical certitude.

So, the intelligence of man is potentially total, "and this totality is explained only by a transcendent reality to which the intelligence is proportioned."

Boom.

O <--> (k) boomer.

On the Space Between Appearances & Reality, Time & History, Subject & Object

The following mess is what results if I disable the filter and just let it rip, without thinking about whether it makes any sense to the reader.

I'm going to start with a quote from Thomistic Psychology, which provoked the whole fiasco:

Subject and object must in some manner be related if we are not to lose our grip on reality. Related they certainly are.... But separated, too, they must be, if existence in the intentional order is different from existence in the real order.

On the one hand, everything is what it is. On the other, nothing is what it appears to be. There is reality; and there are appearances. However, we only ever experience the former in terms of the latter. Animals too only have contact with appearances, except they don't know it. Nor do they not know it. Rather, they only know what they know, in a closed neuro-instinctual loop.

How did human beings ever exit this loop? Some people insist we never did. If that's the case, how do they communicate the idea to us?

In any event, it seems -- no, it is the case -- that there is a kind of breach or crack in the cosmos, and that this crack is everything. We can't deny it without reverting to animality, but nor can we ever fill it without exiting humanness from the other end. Supposing we manage to escape, we don't become better than human, rather, like a human only worse. This is, for example, what ideologues do, i.e., imagine a world unfit for humans.

Now, this crack in the cosmic egg is both spatial and temporal. This latter is what we call "history," and here again, it's not something we can ever stop, or from which we can ever disembark. Except when we can, in which case we are also plunged into a world in which everything is what it is -- the world alluded to in paragraph one, prior to the real world where nothing is what it appears to be.

That real human world is full of irony, not to mention humor, ambiguity, and play. Which is why ideologues are never funny, and why late night comedy has become so unfunny. You can't be an ideologue and a comedian at the same time. In North Korea you can't make fun of Kim Jong Un, nor in Iran ridicule the mullahs.

You might think things are different here in the U.S., since our late night ideologues constantly ridicule the president and his supporters. But they aren't permitted to laugh at or even point out the absurdity of figures such as Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Joe Biden, Jerry Nadler, Al Gore, etc.

Back to history. There is the historical stream into which we are born, and our own personal/developmental history situated within it: wheels within wheels. Let's call the first (H), the second (h). Now, one of the most fascinating things about (H) is how easily it can be distorted by (h) due to emotional, cognitive, and spiritual pathologies of various kinds.

I was reminded of this when bashing out the previous post, with reference to a book called The Matrix of the Mind, which I read back in grad school in 1987 or so. It made a big impression on me at the time, but I wonder how it squares with my current, more traditional approach to things? Can it be translated to my current language?

Recall from the previous post that the defense mechanisms of splitting and projection are rooted in an imaginary distancing of the self from a feared or despised intrapsychic object or feeling state. Ogden writes that "splitting creates a state of mind in which there is no 'in between.' A plane has two faces and two faces only; an observer can never see both sides at once."

So, in this polarized state of mind, it is as if half the world disappears; or, as if we were to look at the moon and forget it has a dark side we can't see. Again, it is reduced to the world of mere Is, as we withdraw from the second world in which we understand that nothing is what it appears to be.

Example. Let's say you have a patient with borderline personality disorder -- or a coworker, spouse, or other relative. "When a borderline patient feels angry and disappointed by the therapist, he feels that he has now discovered the truth.... History is completely rewritten.... There is an assault on the emotional history of the object relationship. The present is projected backward and forward, thus creating a static, eternal, non reflective present."

This especially happens when the mind is overcome by primitive hatred. I'll spare you the tedium, but I could cite hundreds of examples of how Trump Derangement causes its victim to distort past and future by projecting the explosive hatred forward and back.

Okay, one example: Ms. Ocrazio says the U.S. is a brutal, barbarian society for the vast majority of working-class Americans. How did she find herself in this parallel universe? Clearly, she didn't think her way there. So, what was the mode of travel? Easy: uncontainable rage exploding out from the moment into the past and future -- like a frustrated three year old who suddenly hates his parents, now and forever.

They say history was discovered by the Jews, and I think I know why. It's because they formed an ongoing relationship with the one transcendent God, whether or not they were frustrated, angry, disappointed, etc. Of course, the OT documents the struggle to maintain the relationship instead of running to another god at the first sign of trouble. In short, in order to enter history, humans had to stop splitting off their various emotional states and projecting them into imaginary gods for comfort and safety.

The same process occurs, by the way, in Christianity. Think of the day after the Crucifixion. How does one reconcile the idea that the Kingdom of God is at hand and that Jesus is the messiah, when the messiah has just endured a brutal death at the hands of the state? It would be very easy to split, both literally and figuratively, as did the two figures the resurrected Jesus encounters on the road to Emmaus.

Among other things, they must have been discussing What That Was All About -- how they had been taken in by the excitement surrounding this charismatic figure, only to have all hope dashed. But Jesus proceeds to give a discourse on all the various scriptures concerning himself, and then,

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight.

At that point, the travelers heal the split, and this integration allows them to return not just to history, but to a deeper time that touches on the meaning and vector of (H) itself. Again, their momentary grief and despair are integrated into a much higher unity -- a reflection of how the ancient Jews, beginning with Abraham, did the same thing (for example, reconciling the demanded sacrifice of Isaac with a loving deity; it would have been easy to simply flee such a request and run away from God).

When Your Mind Needs a Sewer

An object of the senses must somehow be rendered immaterial in order to be understood, otherwise it remains entirely preconceptual and unthinkable; nor, for that matter, can one sense be combined with another unless it takes place in an immaterial space that transcends matter. Again, a wholly material world wouldn't even be unintelligible, because an absence of intelligibility implies an intelligibility that is unthinkable in such a world.

So, how does the intelligibility get in here? And the intelligence to know and understand it? And what about the "space" in which these occur? The soul is incorporeal, which means that it takes up no space at all. Or so we have heard from the wise. If that's the case, then why is my head always so crowded?

These are such basic questions -- in fact, among the first questions the human being asks once he has located food, shelter, and beer.

Recall too that ears know nothing of light, as eyes know nothing of sound (at least without a little help from a psychoactive friend). And yet, the senses are effortlessly integrated within the higher space of our minds.

Except when they aren't. I'm thinking in particular of more serious forms of mental illness, a hallmark of which is the dis-integration of the senses and fragmentation of identity.

It's been awhile since we discussed how this intrapsychic process works, but it is no doubt relevant in these unusual times, when so many people are stressed as a result of an "invisible enemy." This is practically an invitation to a mental breakdown for those vulnerable to one. As they say, adversity introduces a man to himself.

More problematically, it may introduce a man to split-off parts of himself, which are projected into the external world. The person then reacts to this menacing and persecutory world with fear and anxiety, but it's preferable to having the feared object inside one's head.

I sometimes check in on CNN or MSNBC in order to take the emotional temperature of the progressive psyche. At the moment it's COVID-19 hysteria 24/7, but it wasn't that long ago when it was Russia hysteria 24/7. Well, I've traced the fear, and it's coming from inside their heads:

What we call "splitting"

is analogous to the chick's unlearned response to the perception of the hawk's wing pattern. The chick's reaction is to flee and not attack the hawk (unless cornered), i.e., to separate itself from the danger. I understand splitting to be a similarly biologically determined mode of managing danger (Ogden).

Sounds like a bit of a stretch, but what's a chick supposed to do when the hawk is inside her head? What would Rachel Maddow do without President Trump? "Primitive psychological defenses" such as splitting and projection are "built upon the biologically determined effort to create safety by distancing the endangered from the endangering":

Projection, for example, can be understood as an effort in phantasy to remove an internal danger by locating the danger outside of oneself, i.e., separating oneself from it as if it were located in another (ibid.).

So, when I check in on the MSM, it's to find out what they're projecting and into whom they're projecting it. Actually, the former changes, while the latter is always the same: the dreaded Orange Man, Eater of Left Wing Projections.

In my lifetime, nothing and no one has been the receptacle of so much left wing projection as has our current president. Interestingly, there is a psychoanalytic term of art for such an object. It will no doubt make you chuckle until you think about it and realize how apt it is. In order for projection to occur,

there must be a conception of a container into which the projection can be sent. In other words, there must be an object which has depth so as to be able to contain the projection.... Klein's conception of the toilet breast corresponds to this entity (Grotstein).

Maybe this sounds crazy -- and it is -- but Klein didn't just make it up. For example, the Aztec had a goddess known as Tlazōlteōtl, the "eater of filth," a transparent psychic projection who functioned to purify people of their guilt: "Sins were symbolized by dirt. Her dirt-eating symbolized the ingestion of the sin, and in doing so purified it."

Orange Man Bad is the means by which our Bluefolk -- journalists, entertainers, the tenured -- imagine they purify themselves of what the rest of us can see is so obviously wrong with them.

What? Of course there are aphorisms:

The sewers of history sometimes overflow, as in our time.

When handling today’s events, the future historian will have to wear gloves (Dávila).

Nietzsche too:

The soul must have its chosen sewers to carry away it ordure.

God is a Rock but He Also Rolls

Pithy and precise: "The object of sense is a sensible, and the object of intellect is an intelligible" (Brennan).

The surface of my laptop is sensible, but I am deploying my fingers to both seek and describe an intelligible object. At the moment I'm not in contact with this object, nor am I yet in its orbit, but I have faith that I will be, since it's happened so many times before. For those keeping score at home, this is post #3,416.

Before I commenced to blogging, it was more as if I were attempting to force intelligibles into existence as opposed to merely discovering them. In the argot of sports, you should let the game come to you. Then again, I suppose a sort of apprenticeship is necessary, otherwise one will have no medium of discovery or expression.

Analogously, I could sit down at the piano and use my fingers to discover a musical intelligible, but the object wouldn't be very deep or complex. Once one masters an instrument, then one may use it to discover music and snatch a tune from the ether.

A musical object exists in time, whereas a spiritual object... Here we come to a difference between the Judeo-Christian stream and all others, because our object is indeed deployed in time; or, to be perfectly accurate, it is simultaneously in and out of time. This, they say, is one of the scandals of Christianity, since it can never be reduced to any abstract formulation.

Why not? Well, ultimately because the ultimate object is a person, and what is a person but a process, a narrative, a relation, a being in time?

In my view, our concept of God had first to be purged of all movement and change before we could understand how to properly apply these categories to him -- similar to how the Trinity could only be revealed once man had been purged of polytheism.

Thus, just as God's threeness can and must be understood in the context of a strict monotheism just so, his "change" must be understood in the context of a strict changelessness. Otherwise we will be imagining something less than God: an idol.

Along these lines, Bishop Barron writes that

Thomas denies of God the changeableness characteristic of creatures, that is to say, a development from nonbeing to being.

But I would argue that this denial by no means implies other types of movement cannot be ascribed to God, viz., those changes that entail not imperfection but perfection, fullness of being.

Cooncur 100%. Being that we are the Image & Likeness, I suspect that most everything essential in human nature -- e.g., love, reason, beauty, goodness, etc. -- must have some analogue in God, however distant.

For example, man can "create," even though, strictly speaking, only God creates. Analogously, could it be that only God changes? This will no doubt sound theologically Messed Up if we don't explain what we mean.

"As a perfection" -- and insofar as it is a perfection -- change "should be rigorously affirmed of [God]. Similarly, the mutability in a beautiful song or an elaborate dance, the changeableness of a lively and vivacious personality -- such perfections are ascribable to the unchanging God of Thomas Aquinas."

Yes, God is a rock, but

utterly unlike the Rock of Gibralter, which is a being at an extremely primitive level of existence. No, the perfect, unchanging God of whom Thomas speaks must be a gyroscope of energy and activity and at the same time a stable rock.

Not either/or but both/and, and then some, a unique object which includes and transcends such binaries. Our gyroscopic God is

a blending of qualities that seem mutually exclusive in creatures. In the words of the mystic theologian pseudo-Dionysius, God must be both great and small, both changing and unchanging, both high and low.... the immutable God, defended by Thomas, is no Aristotelian principle, no uncaring force, but indeed is the God disclosed in Jesus Christ as ungraspable perfection.

Now, this ungraspable subject/object "is the magnet luring the universe into the future." And this post to its conclusion.

May the Best Delusion Win

You don't say:

The conflict between passion and reason makes up a major portion of the drama of [man's] existence on earth; and when the struggle is over, passion very often emerges the victor. This is the sad epic of humanity from the beginning (Brennan).

Frankly, I think this understates the power of reason to mess things up just as badly as passion. For as Chesterton said, "A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason." One can go off the shallow end just as easily as the deep end.

The problem is that reason, in order to get off the ground, must begin with an appeal to self-evidence. However, most people hide the evidence and proceed with the reason anyway.

An example of this occurred the other day. As you know, we homeschool our son -- not just because of the Chinese virus but because of the far more dangerous and deadly progressive virus that has devastated California. Because of this pandemic of idiocy, it isn't safe to have contact with any state-mediated institution.

Anyway, he was watching some kind of science video that happened to be narrated by planetarium director Neil Dyson. I forget why, but I reassured my son that whatever Dyson says about science is probably sound, even though he is probably in error when he strays from his lane and opines on anything unrelated to whatever it is he actually knows about. He is as superficial and conventional as one would expect of someone whom the MSM has anointed a Pundit.

But I don't actually know that much about him, only that he is a figure of fun amongst people I respect. So I consulted with Prof. Wiki, who confirms that Dyson regards philosophy as "useless" and is "unconvinced by any claims anyone has ever made about the existence or the power of a divine force operating in the universe."

Now, why would anyone care what a science popularizer believes about anything unrelated to his role of ratifying the Conventional Wisdom? No doubt because he is an effective apostle of the left's naive religiosity and simplistic philosophy, plus he's a Scientist of Color, so there are bonus points for virtue signaling (which is of course not his fault).

Like a Bill Nye or Carl Sagan, his opinions pose no threat to the progressive agenda and worldview. He can be trusted not to go near the science of IQ, or the absence of science of transgenderism, nor point out the wild inaccuracy of the global warming models. He's safe. He won't poke his head out of the Matrix.

Timeout for timelessness:

--Each one sees in the world only what he deserves to see.

--The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

--He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary (Dávila).

The following paragraph describes what the philosophistry of the flatlander excludes, nor it does this expanded view limit science one iota -- rather, it places it in the context of a far grander vision, one worthy of the human station:

[W]ith the advent of the thinking process, a completely new world is opened up to us: a universe of ideas and volitions, an immaterial expanse of creativeness, a region liberated from the palpabilities of sense....

Because it can overreach the restrictions of matter and rid itself of all time-space dimensions, it is truly infinite in its potentialities of understanding, a microcosmos which, by its ability to know and become the universe, is actually the universe (Brennan).

IS the universe -- not in the manner of perception-is-reality, but rather, because to exist is to be intelligible. And

The highest type of living activity consists in the intellectual grasping of reality. This penetrative power of mind presupposes that what is real is by that very fact intelligible, otherwise it has no title to reality (Brennan).

This paragraph adverts to one of our first principles, but it is hardly arbitrary or indefensible, rather self-evident. For either the mind can penetrate beneath the ever shifting surface of things to the intelligible reality beneath, or it can't. And if it can't, then scientific knowledge isn't possible, let alone anything that transcends or grounds science.

Without knowledge of essences and universals, we would be like animals, confined to sensory data about our surface contact with matter. "Knowledge," such as it is, would be reduced to prescientific rumors, gossip, anecdotes, and single instances. Generalization and induction would not exist because they could not exist. Nor could deduction exist, because there would be no principles or axioms from which to do so. It would be a subhuman world, precisely, with no possibility of escape or inscape.

It is quite obvious that the senses do not capture the inner meaning of things. They are in surface contact, so to speak, with their objects; and the best they can do is to register the accidental or phenomenal qualities of matter.

Nor could they ever know these qualities as accidental or phenomenal, because these latter can only be understood in contrast to the necessary and noumenal. As freedom is knowledge of necessity, reality is understanding of appearances (because they can only be understood as appearances from the perspective of a higher or deeper view). The intellect

plunges beneath the surface and grasps the very thing which holds all phenomenal qualities together. The senses exist in a sort of perpetual twilight.... Intellect, by contrast, moves in the clear atmosphere of immaterial knowledge.

A man who is only a man isn't even that, for

Man alone, of all earthly creatures, exhibits a complete emergence from the conditions of subjectivism that make the animal's knowledge concrete and particular and restricted to the tangible realities of sense.

Bottom line: man is the animal that may know reality. If not, then what are we debating? Whose delusion is more powerful?

Love is the Answer!!! Unless it's the Problem

A small but important point: "no sensitive power can reflect upon itself" (Brennan.) In other words, our five senses don't know they're sensing; they cannot reflect upon themselves. Rather, their knowledge is limited to that which they sense, which is always something material.

Nor can one sense know what any other sense is up to. Eyes know nothing about sound, as ears know nothing about light. To understand that the bluebird is chirping is an immaterial synthesis of sensory information, not reducible to mere sense.

I remember back in high school, a rumor made the rounds that it was possible to do homework in one's sleep. Apparently, all that mattered was that the soundwaves of the lecture enter one's ears. Being that I detested school from the depths of my being, this was an attractive proposition. Why doesn't it work? Mainly because learning can only take place in the depths of one's b. It doesn't take place on the surface of the senses.

Analogously, I always listen to music when going to sleep. Upon awakening I can remember the last song I heard before falling asleep, often even the point in the middle of a song. Obviously the music continued playing and entered my ears. Or did it? Music is only synthesized in a human mind. It isn't merely sensed, although the sense of hearing is obviously required in order to apprehend the music. So the senses are involved, but converting the sensory vibrations into music is pure nonsense. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

Along these lines, Brennan writes that

The basic reason why sense is unable to make a complete return upon itself is the material texture of its being. A faculty that is able to reflect upon itself is necessarily devoid of all matter; and so its object is not limited like that of the senses.

That's a bold claim in these tenured times: that the most quintessential human power is devoid of ALL matter. After all, we live in a dark and materialist age in which nothing can be devoid of all matter except, of course, the doctrine of materialism. But in order to be a proper materialist, one must believe both that everything is reducible to matter and that nothing outside or beyond matter can have any real existence.

However, as we already said (in the previous post) A universe of matter alone would be simply unintelligible, period, full stop, end of story. Matter devoid of form is the "essence" of unintelligibility, if there could be such a thing. But there can be no such thing, except conceptually, for we never encounter uninformed matter. You could say that "matter" (or what Thomists call prime matter) is analogous to the placeholder 0 in math. In order for 0 to be something, it requires another digit. Otherwise nothing is nothing.

Now, to be human is to know that we sense and to understand that we know, and both of these powers are immaterial. How can this be? By virtue of what principle can an immaterial entity exist in a material cosmos? Well, math surely exists, and it is obviously immaterial. No one ever saw pi, or the square root of two, or Obama's college GPA. Yes, but math is objective. We're talking about the human subject. What's that about?

Not to run ahead of ourselves, but there is no such thing as an object in the absence of a subject. These two categories aren't just existential complementarities but ontologically irreducible to anything else, all the way down to the goround of being. Thanks to important advances in theology, man was able to move beyond the wild or tame speculations of pre-Christian metaphysicians, even while maintaining our sizable lead over post-Christian cranks and malcontents.

That probably sounds like a gag, but theology advances no less than does science. This obviously doesn't imply that the object of theology evolves, which would be absurd. Rather, our understanding deepens; to be precise, it can proceed forward, toward the Godhead, or back, in the direction of soul dead materialism or braindead atheism.

Philosophy, theology, and science are different activities, and let no Raccoon suggest it isn't helpful to distinguish them. However, we don't leave it at that. Rather, we distinguish in order to unite, in part because the distinctions are in the subject, not the object; and even the practice of science is always in the direction of deeper principles that unite disparate facts.

Put another way, realty is one, while our approaches to it are diverse. If one forgets this, then one will inevitably "evolve backward" and elevate something less than God to God, in order to make the unsettling diversity go away.

Put it this way: ether one acknowledges God or one conflates and confuses the non- or anti-God with God. Which is why idolatry is such an intrinsic error. Intellectual sin is probably worse than the other kind, because it can injure so many more people. You could say that a single crime of passion may be a tragedy, while the crimes of ideology are a statistic.

Speaking of which, Brennan notes that

When we sift the matter down, it will be found that love is at the root of every passion. It is, in a sense, the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, of all the movements of our appetites.

Another bold statement, but the first thing one must understand is that love itself is neither here nor there. Rather, there is disordered love and rightly ordered love.

A quintessential example of the former is the left's cliché that we shouldn't discriminate against others based on WHO THEY LOVE!!! (sic). Taken on its own terms, it means that love has no proper object or order. Which is precisely analogous to insisting that knowledge has no object or order. Which is to say that truth not only doesn't exist, but is an impossibility.

Which is to say: anarchy, chaos, and nihilism.

Or maybe you haven't noticed.

Strange Neighborhood

Let's stipulate that man is without question the most interesting and important fact in all of creation. If you can't stipulate to this, then you haven't yet begun to think.

I say this because thinking isn't just anything. Rather, it is ordered to reality, and exists for that reason. And unless you are a bit dim or just plain tenured, you will notice -- for starters -- that man qua man is the only creature that inhabits two very different worlds.

Indeed, man effortlessly reconciles these worlds in his own being. There are various theories of how this can be so, but they're just theories. Irrespective of your little theory, the fact remains that there is a material reality and an immaterial reality. Modern sophisticates like to reduce the latter to the former, while unsophisticated retro-Platonists such as Deepak prefer it the other way around -- i.e., "consciousness" is all.

But neither of these approaches fits the case. They're just two sides of the same sophistry aimed at making the problem go away instead of confronting it head on in all its strangeness: that we are embodied and we are ensouled, and although we can distinguish these, they are "not two." The body isn't analogous to an empty vessel into which an immaterial soul is inserted, nor is the soul a material entity or side effect of physics and chemistry. In reality,

man stands on the fringe of two universes: one, the world of matter and material dimensions; the other, the world of spirit, which has neither length, nor breadth, nor weight, nor any other tangible property (Brennan).

What a queer neighborhood! On the one hand, man shares the same zip code as animals, plants, minerals, atoms, and quarks. Yet, man is also "neighbor to the angels. Truly, he is a denizen of two worlds, a horizon and a meeting place. Though angelic by his intelligence, yet he is not a pure spirit; though sensitive and passionate by his brute powers, yet he is not entirely material" (ibid.).

The question isn't that this is the case, but how it is the case: by virtue of what principle(s) can such a strange situation obtain?

We mentioned a few post back that people naturally wonder how a divine nature and a human nature can coexist in the same person. Nevertheless, it is equally puzzling how animal nature and human nature can coexist in the same person, which is to say, in all of us, in varying proportions.

This is probably going to be a non-linear post, since I'm just flipping from page to page. Or perhaps we should put a positive spin on it and say it will be a holographic post, such that each part will reflect the whole.

At any rate, Brennan -- writing back in 1941, before it would have been controversial -- makes the surprising claim that the growing baby is never, nor can it ever be, "inside" the mother. As soon as you think about it, you'll understand why:

Man's body may be likened to a cylindrical mass of of matter, perforated by several tracts or cavities that open to the outside world.

For example, there is the alimentary tract, the respiratory tract, the urinary tract, the uterine tract. This being the case, there are obviously "two surfaces to the human body: an outside surface covered by skin; and an inside surface covered by mucosae."

So, just because something is "in" your stomach it doesn't mean it is in your body per se. Rather, digestion is the process of absorbing and transforming it into the body, precisely. And the most complete scientific account of this process will never explain how an it -- food -- is transformed into I -- the person.

It's an everyday analogue to the mystery of life itself -- of how, with the appearance of life, existence becomes experience. By virtue of what principle? And is this related to the principle of how two natures can coexist in one person?

Not to get ahead of ourselves, but Yes.

Back to the growing baby. If we want to be literal about it, the fetus is never inside the mother's body; rather, only in contact with the inside surface. If you want a baby to be literally inside your body, you'll have to eat one.

Speaking of outside and inside -- or interior and exterior -- Brennan makes the point that "certain requirements are demanded of the object if it is to be known, that is, if it is to be united with the subject."

In other words, waaaaaay before we can claim to know anything about any thing, there must be a principle by virtue of which such knowledge is even possible. What is this principle?

Here again, I suspect it will ultimately be related to the two mentioned above. But if we're going to know something -- anything -- the knowing subject and knowable object must share something in common. What sort of something? Well,

a certain degree of immateriality is a primary requisite. A universe of matter alone would be simply unintelligible.

Now, what renders matter knowable? Its form, which is the intelligibility that may be known by intelligence, both of which are obviously immaterial. So, man dwells in a haunted neighborhood, with invisible ghosts of intelligibility running around everywhere.

Boo!

Occam's Hammer & the Disintegration of Reality

Oh, hello. What am I doing? Just flipping through Thomistic Psychology, looking for a post. Or rather, groping around for the Idea that organizes all the passages I've highlighted.

That right there could be the idea: that man isn't just uniquely capable of abstraction, but then abstracting his abstractions into a meta-abstraction. This is why metaphysics isn't just possible but necessary. It is necessary because it is what we inevitably do. Therefore, we might as well do it well. But first we have to recognize we're doing it, which most thinkers refuse to do, especially for the past, oh, 700 years or so.

Why do the beast and blighted of modernity refuse to admit they are metaphysicians? Well, there are a number of reasons, some of which are almost coherent.

As to when it all started, Richard Weaver, in his consequential Ideas Have Consequences, blames the triumph of nominalism over realism, or Occam over Thomas, way back in the 14th century. According to Prof. Wiki, Occam is considered "the father of modern epistemology" by many modern idiots

because of his strongly argued position that only individuals exist, rather than supra-individual universals, essences, or forms, and that universals are the products of abstraction from individuals by the human mind and have no extra-mental existence.

So lacking in self-awareness was this Occam fellow that he didn't even realize that the philosophy of nominalism is itself an abstraction.

Imagine a fish who denies the existence of water becoming the most important thinker among fish. That's what happened to man: despite being founded on an overt denial of reality, this denial became the new foundation of western thought (or anti-thought, if you want to be literal).

Not coincidently, this is precisely when religion and theology went off the rails of reality, for Occam was also "a theological voluntarist who believed that if God had wanted to, he could have become incarnate as a donkey or an ox, or even as both a donkey and a man at the same time."

He is closer to Islamic than Christian metaphysics, because he is one of those folks who would say that God doesn't command certain things because they are right and good, but that they are right and good because God commands them. If God commanded abortion, or theft, or idolatry, then these would be good instead of immoral. There is no natural law written on our hearts, because abstract universals can't exist, and besides, we're so wrecked by original sin that we can't think straight anyway.

Oddly enough, just two days ago I ran across the same analysis in Barron's The Priority of Christ, except he's much more polite about it. He writes of how Occam's kooky voluntarism renders both God and man "self-contained, capricious, absolute, and finally irrational."

And of course, "Both Martin Luther and John Calvin were formed according to the principles of late-medieval nominalism," leading them to propound a foundational principle that makes God look more like a monster than a savior, in that he arbitrarily creates people only in order to damn them, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Which, among other difficulties, flies in the face of the principle that everything God creates is good.

Now, modern secularism is a lot of things, but it isn't un-Christian. Rather, it is anti-Christian, and could only have arisen in a thoroughly Christianized culture that denies its own ground, starting with Occam. I don't want to spend much more time on this subject, because this post is supposed to be about psychology, not the history of ideas, but Barron writes of how the turn away from realism redounds to

a not very convincing form of Christianity and the opponent to whom it naturally gave rise. Modernity and decadent Christianity are enemies in one sense, but in another sense, they are deeply connected to one another and mirror one another. In most of the disputes between Christianity and modernity, we have advocates of the prerogative of the voluntarist God facing down advocates of the voluntarist self (emphasis mine).

In short, the human world is reduced to will vs. will, and may the most ruthless win. The infinitely wider, deeper, and richer world of human intelligence and divine intelligibility is reduced to will and the power to enforce it.

This is precisely why Thomistic psychology was tossed aside in favor of modern superstition. If you want a perfect example of the insane and irrational advocacy of the voluntarist self, look no further than the website of the American Psychological Association, which tells us that "A psychological state is considered a mental disorder only if it causes significant distress or disability."

If this is the case, then there's nothing wrong with a contented pedophile, a fulfilled psychopath, or successful terrorist. Who are we to judge? In a post-realist world there can be no objective right or wrong. Man has no reason for being -- no telos -- so it no longer matters if you do bad, so long as you feel good about it.

If everything is a function of will -- or is Just Your Opinion, Man -- then naturally we can not only choose a gender but invent one, and we have no basis on which to object.

For these individuals, the significant problem is finding affordable resources, such as counseling, hormone therapy, medical procedures and the social support necessary to freely express their gender identity and minimize discrimination. Many other obstacles may lead to distress, including a lack of acceptance within society, direct or indirect experiences with discrimination, or assault. These experiences may lead many transgender people to suffer with anxiety, depression or related disorders at higher rates than nontransgender persons.

There's no such thing as right or wrong, except it's wrong to judge someone's gender delusion. But what if doing so causes me no distress?

I can't even. Well, I could, but I need to get some work done.

Ovary Towers and Spiritual Testes

Is it possible that thinkers who lived 700 or even 2400 years ago had a better understanding of psychology than do our present practitioners? Sure, Aristotle and Thomas were wrong about some things, but never this wrong:

A review of dozens of studies found that men and women are basically alike when it comes to personality, thinking ability and leadership. The differences that do exist may reflect social expectations, not biology. Despite this evidence, the media continue to spread the idea that the sexes are fundamentally different -- with real-life consequences (from the APA website).

A review of Charles Murray's Human Diversity explains why this is so much agenda-driven magical thinking, because our sexual complementarity persists all the way down to the furthest reaches of the biosphere. And up to pneumosphere, for that matter. Here is how one Thomistic psychologist describes it:

physical propagation cannot be separated from higher conscious phenomena in the total scheme of life. It colors and intensifies the mental and spiritual achievements of the individual (Brennan).

For example -- better sit down, or don't wander far from your fainting couch -- "Testes and ovaries possess functions of an overwhelming import for the sexes."

These intrinsically patriarchal and sexist organs "impress male and female characteristics on all the tissues of the human body and give to human behavior the peculiar intensities by which the sexes are differentiated." Indeed, "Every cell of the human body bears the stamp of its respective gender."

To imagine otherwise is to succumb to a naively woohoo "angelism," one of two dysfunctional forms of dualism, the other being materialism. Testosterone, for example, "engenders masculine characteristics at their best," such as aggression in the service of a higher good.

However, in and of itself -- i.e., isolated from personality and character -- it is neither here nor there, for it may also contribute to masculine traits at their worst, such as brutality and callousness (as may too little testosterone, as amply demonstrated by the annoying existence of male feminists, AKA toxic unmasculinity).

Brennan also has a good description of toxic femininity -- AKA feminism -- pointing to "feminine characters at their worst" such as "instability, emotionalism, and vacillation." These three traits are among the most important prerequisites for majoring in Women's Studies. There are also physical requirements, but we won't get into those.

With these preliminary insults out of the way, I think I'll just flip through the book and discuss some of the passages I found most noteworthy.

Incidentally, not all of this is new to me. However, up to this point I'd picked things up on a piecemeal basis by my exposure to Schuon, Pieper, Robert Spitzer, Peter Kreeft, and others. But this is the first time I've ever read a single comprehensive book on the subject of Thomistic psychology. So now I finally have an area rug to pull all these loose ends together in a more systematic way.

But unfortunately, I have a videoconference coming up shortly, so I have to stop now. Apologies for the brief post, but at least you have something to look forward too.

Here's a little preview, under the heading of The Peak of Cosmic Perfection:

Man is a person. When we have said this much about him, we have paid him the highest possible tribute that can be given to a cosmic creature. He is, so to speak, the top rung on the ladder of corporeal substances. He is the most perfect being composed of matter and form. The reason he is most perfect, of course, is that his form is most perfect. His soul is a rational thing. It is gifted with the properties of intellect and will.

Intellect and will are ordered to the true and good, respectively. As we proceed, we shall find out how and why this is so -- in other words, by virtue of what principle and toward what end.

Gentlemen! You Can't Study the Soul Here -- This is the Psychology Department!

I missed my calling. If I had only known psychology was this interesting, I would have studied it in graduate school instead of...

Just what did I study, anyway? Both -- Thomistic and non-Thomistic -- are called "psychology," but only one of them even acknowledges the soul (psyche), let alone illuminates it in depth and with precision. Which is ironic, because my focus in grad school was on psychoanalysis, which calls itself depth psychology.

Now, deep -- that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about psychology that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. But then again, maybe that's why I found the field s'durned innarestin'.

In any event, "deep" isn't necessarily synonymous with profound. One can be deeply confused, or maybe you don't pay attention to the liberal media. For it is written: Confused ideas and murky ponds seem deep (Dávila).

Moreover, Profundity is not in what is said, but in the level from which it is said. At the same time, The depth of an idea depends on the capacity of the listener.

Putting these three together, we see that there is a true and false depth, and that depth not only transmits a content, but is a kind of form, such that that depth must call out to depth, so to speak.

While this may at first sound novel -- or, worse yet, original -- it is actually quite mundane and experience-near. There are credentialed morons who know more about quantum physics than we ever will, and smelly Walmart shoppers who know more about the soul than the physicist will ever even suspect. Which is why there is infinitely more wisdom at a single Trump rally than in the entire Harvard faculty lounge. For

Great stupidities do not come from the people. They have seduced intelligent men first.

Indeed, if you've spent any time in college, you know that A high I.Q. is indicative of distinguished mediocrity, and that The learned fool has a wider field to practice his folly. The institution of tenure is a way to transform idiocy into a permanent instead of temporary condition.

Now, back when I was in graduate school, I began to have my suspicions, although who was I to question the basis of an entire discipline? Nevertheless, I couldn't help noticing two things: first, that a discipline is defined by its object, and that psychology didn't have one. For example, one of the first courses will acquaint you with all the major theorists and theories of psychology. But if psychology is a thing, there shouldn't be wildly divergent opinions about the nature of its object.

Analogously, if you study physics, you don't begin with a survey of all the various disputed and discarded theories about the nature of physical reality. Rather, a mature discipline converges on a unity of both object and method.

But someone who approaches psychology in this way will probably be called fascist, or authoritarian, or medieval. At the very least, one will be told that's just, like, your opinion, man (or other preferred gender).

For example, just try uttering a banal truth such as "homosexuality is objectively disordered." That's not an insult. Rather, just a logical entailment of the deeper principles of biology. I myself am objectively disordered, because I have diabetes. It's an inconvenience, but not an insult. A dead pancreas is a lot of things, but I don't pretend it's normal.

So, the first thing I noticed was that psychology was and is pre-paradigmatic. It's not so much that the theories disagreed with one another, but that there was no agreement as to the object of psychology. Is it behavior? The brain? The mind? The unconscious? Attachment? Affect? Neurobiology? Neurochemistry? At least we can agree: it's not the soul, because there is no such thing.

What about morality? Is this totally subjective, or is there objective good and evil? Does human development have a telos, or do we make it up as we go along? Is there such a thing as human nature, or do we define ourselves by our own choices? Do we even have choices, i.e., is there such a thing as free will? If so, what is it and how did it get here? By virtue of what principle can freedom even exist?

Etc. The second thing I noticed is that there is no objective way to choose one of these 238 theories to guide one's life -- and the life of one's patient. So, on what basis do we choose? It occurred to me that we choose based on "what works for me." Being that clinical psychology isn't just a discipline of study but a "healing art," one will pick the one through which one was "healed."

Healed of what? Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's just call it "pain," which covers a lot of territory.

We're almost out of time. But as usual, I see that Dávila was here before me. For as he observes,

The great imbecilic explanations of human behavior adequately explain the one who adopts them.

Ah ha. This explains a great deal, not just with respect to psychological theories, but vis-a-vis every theory that pretends to be comprehensive. (I believe Nietzsche said something to the effect that philosophy is just autobiography in disguise.) It explains why feminists are feminists, why Marxists are Marxists, why atheists are atheists, critical race theorists are critical race theorists, ad nauseam. The theories explain them, but not us. And yet, so many of them want to force us to live under their theories, when all we ask is to be permitted to live in reality.

To be continued...

I May Be Boring, But I'm Not Bored

Someone needs to write a history of boredom. Perhaps someone has. Let's do some quick research.

The only thing that comes up on amazon is Boredom: A Lively History, which has only 3.5 stars from 15 reviewers. I'll bet right now that more than one reviewer will call the book "boring."

1. Toohey teaches boredom by causing it.... When the author himself gets bored, he throws in another piece of artwork and spends a page or two talking about what boredom looks like.... It takes the author 181 pages of demonstrating to the reader that he's discovered the thesaurus feature of MS Word.... In plain English, Toohey's genius cure for boredom is to get a hobby.

2. Upon purchasing this book, I found it boring and put it up on Amazon to sell, which it did immediately.

In fairness, a few reviewers weren't bored by the book. I'll bet right now that more than one of them is a bore.

1. The sections on neurology tell us, among other things, that smell sensations travel from the nose to spinal pathways and thence to the insula.

2. Mr. Toohey's location at the University of Calgary, approximately 200 miles north of Glacier National Park, might seem out in the boondocks and a bit boring, but that is not the case. Calgary, Alberta, is a very large metropolitan area some 50 miles east of the Canadian Rockies. The city, the university, and the professor, as the book reveals, are good to know.

Who knew Canada could be so fascinating!

One of the reviewers makes reference to a psychological test called the Boredom Proneness Scale. Now, I only rarely experience boredom, and it is always a consequence of external factors such as airport terminals, continuing education requirements, and other people. Left to my own devices, I'm never bored -- if anything, over-stimulated.

So let's take the survey and see how we do: You are bored 0% of the time. Sounds about right, although, in another sense, I am extremely vulnerable to boredom. Only the unusual structure of my life saves me from being bored out of my skull. The only reason I'm not bored is because I can pretty much do exactly what I want to do when I want to do it.

Which isn't much, at least if viewed from the outside. If the average person were forced to adopt my eccentric (incentric?) lifestyle, he'd probably go nuts. As would I if forced to adopt his.

I don't understand how most people don't die of tedium -- or how it is that they aren't bored by the sorts of activities they engage in, whether it is the movies they watch, the books they read, the music they listen to, the news they consume. For me, enduring any one of these would constitute hell.

The Happy Acres Guy strikes me as a kindred spirit who is never bored. In a recent tweet he mentions that he is spending his Quarantime learning all about the Fourier Transform, and "having so much fun with it that I don't want the quarantine to end." What an odd bird! What is an FT, anyway? Easy: it

decomposes a function into its constituent frequencies. It refers to both the frequency domain representation and the mathematical operation that associates the frequency domain representation to a function of time, which is itself a complex-valued function of frequency, whose magnitude (modulus) represents the amount of that frequency present in the original function, and whose argument is the phase offset of the basic sinusoid in that frequency.

I probably don't have to tell you I that nodded off halfway through that paragraph. As I said, I am easily bored. Unlike Happy Acres Guy, I'm not an odd bird at all. Rather, I've been spending my splendid isolation immersed in the psychological theories of a pedantic medieval philosopher, here, here, and here, and having the time of my life.

Fourier and Aquinas: different blokes for different folks. Science vs. philosophy. Both approaches try to discover the causes of things, the difference being that science deals with proximate causes while philosophy digs down -- or reaches up -- to ultimate causes. (Scientism elevates proximate to ultimate causes, which is why it is so intrinsically stupid.)

Science investigates the world of becoming, metaphysics the world of being as such. One involves temporal truths that may or may not be, the other timeless truths that cannot not be. One looks at the phenomena, the other into the noumenal, i.e., the enduring reality behind shifting appearances.

Science progresses by a transition to new and better knowledge, often discarding the old as false or unsatisfactory. Philosophy progresses by a deeper and richer understanding of principles that are already known (Brennan).

I hope that wasn't too boring. To be continued....

Trials and Evils, Absurdities and Inevitabilities

Just a brief post, unless things get out of hand. I hope everyone is enjoying the unscheduled vacation, or at least making good use of it. A confrontation with an -- or the -- Ultimate, assuming one survives the ordeal, is often of great benefit. Not necessarily while it's going on, but in hindsight. Sometimes the worst thing that happened is the best thing that ever happened to you.

I suppose it comes down to the difference between a trial and a mere evil, the latter of which is totally pointless. I don't know that it's possible to distinguish one from the other on this side of the cosmic area rug, although it is often helpful to consider the bad tidings as a trial -- again, up to a point.

It would be difficult, for example, to have survived communist tyranny by reminding oneself that it's "just a trial" for the purpose of a transmitting a spiritual lesson from which one will emerge stronger or wiser: one death is a tragedy, but a hundred million deaths is an unparalleled opportunity for spiritual growth!

We're all familiar with the insipid happy-talking Flanderian Christian who regards everything as "God's will," out of which some gooey goodness will emerge.

I don't like this idea, for it makes God complicit in evil. The fact that, say, the great good of the state of Israel emerged from the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust doesn't make the latter any less horrific. Evil is evil and is never permissible, no matter what good may spring from its ashes. Besides, it's hard to find so ill a wind that it doesn't blow a little good someone'e way:

Such is the complexity of every historical event that we can always fear that from a good an evil might be born and always hope that from an evil a good might be born (Dávila).

Also, it's always easier to look at someone else's evil as an abstract trial, and one's own trial as an concrete evil. New York is no doubt being tried. But then, I'm 3,000 miles away. Or, for them it's a trial by fire. For me it's a trial by water. Big difference -- like the difference between meditating on death vs. a life-or-death confrontation.

Similarly, consider how global warmists have no compunction about wrecking the global economy for the sake of mitigating their abstract evil, since poor people in far off countries will suffer the most. We will suffer such inconveniences as more expensive energy, diminished wealth, and a reduced standard of living, while those in developing countries will suffer the concrete evils of disease, famine, and inescapable poverty.

Some people are saying this pandemic is a cleansing fire that will burn the progressive rot from our midst. Nothing reveals more the deadly plague of identity politics than a deadly plague. That would be nice, but still, I'd prefer that it be accomplished via ideas rather than plagues.

Others are proclaiming that the Progressive Moment has arrived, and that finally the scourge of capitalism will be vanquished. Me? I say the rot will always be with us in one form or another so long as man walks the earth. For

The progressive forgets that sin frustrates any ideal he longs for; the conservative forgets that he corrupts any reality he defends (Dávila).

Schuon writes that

A trial is not necessarily a chastisement, it can also be a grace, and the one does not preclude the other. At all events: a trial in itself not only tests what we are, but also purifies us of what we are not.

Perhaps the most we can do is ask ourselves how we might make some good come from this. I have this feeling that "things will never be the same," but one often feels this way in the midst of a confrontation with the Ultimate, only to revert back to isness-as-usual once the storm has passed. Soon enough people will once again take for granted the unmerited gift of toilet paper. Yes, our sleep is occasionally disrupted by the intrusion of reality, but never underestimate man's somnambulistic abilities.

Come what may, we should "look straight ahead and let the world be the world" (Schuon). For what choice does one have? Regardless of our hopes, fears, and wishes, the world is going to be the world, and although it is created good, there are other nonlocal forces and wills at play in it. Nothing we can do about that:

The whole purpose of our life lies before us, and [this] is one of the meanings of the injunction not to look behind when one has put one's hand to the plow. It it is necessary to look towards God, in relation to Whom all the chasms of the world are nothing.

Yes, of course there are aphorisms that speak to this existential moment:

The imbecile does not discover the radical misery of our condition except when he is sick, poor or old.

Modern man believes that death is “natural” except when he approaches dying.

Death must not be the object of our meditations, but rather the foundation of all of them.

I suppose one could say that for the person who is truly in touch with reality, the blows of reality should never really come as a surprise. Indeed, the more plans we make, the more fate and contingency bellow with laughter. But Serenity is the fruit of accepting uncertainty.

Flattening the Curve of Original Sin

The modern man is the man who forgets what man knows about man. --Dávila

"It is a commonplace of the Christian tradition," writes Barron, "that the fall had implications at all levels of a person's being," affecting "not only the will but the body, the passions, the imagination, and the mind as well."

Well, that's kind of a downer. Is there anything we can do about it? Is there a vertical CDC that can help us mitigate this spiritual malady, and perhaps prevent it from spreading down and out, to our descendants and contemporaries, respectively?

Yes, but it's not a government agency. Indeed, the whole idea of the intrusive, activist, all-powerful state is founded on the presumption that it -- its highly trained experts in self-deception -- knows how to undo the effects of the fall without even acknowledging its existence: we can fix it, and besides, it never happened!

Which is precisely why the credentialed morons of the state end up amplifying the effects. Analogously, if we know the Chinese flu is out there, it provides a modicum of protection against it, being that this knowledge will alter our behavior. But if we deny the problem, we end up like Kaiser Wilhelmio: it's no big deal, and besides, it's Trump's fault!

There are so many aphorisms about state-sponsored stupidity, it's hard to pick just a few:

Liberals can be divided into those who believe that wickedness is curable and those who deny that it exists.

Asking the State to do what only society should do is the error of the left.

With the generosity of his program does the liberal console himself for the magnitude of the catastrophes it produces.

Political wisdom is the art of invigorating society and weakening the State.

While we ourselves cannot fully undo the effects of the fall (more on the only efficacious treatment later), we can at least mitigate them if we know in advance the mind is fallen. In short, we will be less likely to fool ourselves because we will be less likely to trust ourselves. Unlike, say, atheists and Darwinians, we won't be so quick to naively accept the pronouncements of a contingent being such as man.

In short, if we are totally ignorant (or in denial) of original sin and place our full faith and trust in man, we are headed for an even greater fall. For which reason the Aphorist says (again, it's hard to confine ourselves to a few):

Men are divided into two camps: those who believe in original sin and those who are idiots.

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

Evil, like the eyes, does not see itself. May he who sees himself as innocent tremble.

He who does not believe in God can at least have the decency of not believing in himself.

To believe in the redemption of man by man is more than an error; it is an idiocy.

So, if you're rotten and you know it, clap your hands!

Barron goes on to say that it isn't only Christians who will clap. Rather,

the philosophical schools of the ancient world were moral training grounds, places where one passed through a strict discipline in order to learn how to properly think. It was a basic assumption among these philosophers that there is something wrong with the way most people naturally act and reason (emphasis mine).

Who can doubt it? There is no question that 30 years ago I had more raw neurological candlepower than I do today. There is also no question that I had more raw stupidity than I do today. Why is that? Well, I can think of One Big Thing of which I was totally ignorant, and which colored everything else: I completely trusted my own mind, of all things.

Now, it is possible to go too far in the other direction, as did, say, Luther. In overemphasizing the corruption of the mind, he purged his novel and idiosyncratic version of Christianity of intellection, clearing the field for a host of rotten philosophies to dominate intellectual discourse down to this day. Luther railed against "whore reason," but had no earthly idea of the tenured whores to come. Gonorrhea is one thing, AIDS another.

Thus, Barron suggests that "this very exaggeration of the motif of the fallen mind contributed to the counterreaction of the Enlightenment." While the enlightened ones would have agreed that there is something wrong with the mind, they felt it could be fully rectified. (To be perfectly accurate, the radical Enlightenment thinkers felt this way, in contrast to our own Biblically informed and therefore properly skeptical founders.)

Enlightened. As if there can be such a thing as light without the divine Light!

Yes, en-lightenment can be facilitated, but one must first acknowledge the darkness, or rather, the nature of the darkness. For it isn't just that we lack light. Rather, the light shines alike on the good and the wicked, the wise and the tenured. However, we are so composed that this light is always mingled with our own darkness, if only because we are material beings, and matter isn't fully translucent to intellection.

Anyway, if you assume people are stupid until proven otherwise, you'll rarely be disappointed, plus you'll have a good laugh along the way.

Mystical Objectivity and Scientific Vision

There are two ways of knowing the world, or rather, two principal modes: there is a passive mode in which we receive the world, and an active one in which we project our abstractions onto the world. The former isn't really passive per se, because for a human being the intellect is always involved in the senses; moreover, there is always a dialectic or complementarity between these two modes, analogous to anabolism and catabolism vis-a-vis the body.

The human person is not only a unity, but personhood is the quintessence of diversified unity, since all our "parts" are human parts. Humanness is not "additive" -- as if the parts become human at a certain point. Rather, we are human -- not to mention gendered -- the very instant sperm and egg unite to form a new person. Our oneness is always anterior, not acquired, except to say that we are also "ensouled" at conception, and the immaterial soul obviously cannot originate in matter.

Which reminds me. It is difficult for us to imagine how two natures -- divine and human -- could be present in one person. Then again, maybe not. For human beings have an animal nature and a human nature, and yet, here we are, a single person. While we can talk about our animal nature, it isn't actually a separate or autonomous entity, like a Dr. Bob and Cousin Dupree.

Then again, sometimes it is. Specifically, this is what we call neurosis or psychosis, in which psychic parts are more or less split off from the central self.

Here it is important to point out that these parts cannot literally be split off, any more than the Trump-hater can successfully rid himself of unwanted psychic fragments by projecting them into the president. While it certainly feels to the haters as if the president truly harbors the nasty things projected into him -- just ask them! -- the process is really just one of introspection in reverse: extrospection, so to speak.

If the ethos of the philosophical life is know thyself, the battle cry of the pathologically fragmented psyche is deceive thyself! The Raccoon calls this mechanism auto-pullwoolery. If the purpose of life is the assimilation and acquisition of increasingly higher and deeper integration and unity, this mechanism tends in the opposite direction: paranoia instead of metanoia.

It occurs to me that this touches on why Jesus should be so emphatic about loving one's enemies, praying for one's persecutors, turning the other cheek, and generally refraining from returning tit for tat. If you presume to judge others, be careful, because the same criteria you apply will be applied to you: no double standards. No hypocrisy. No special pleading. No condemning Republicans for things you completely overlook in Democrats (and vice versa).

This is just rudimentary intellectual honesty and consistency. And yet, how rare it is. For example, anyone can see how ridiculously inaccurate various models of the Chinese Flu have been, so we disregard them. Garbage in, garbage out. But many of the same people are unable to generalize the principle to climate change models, which have proved to be just as ridiculously inaccurate.

One epically wrong model predicted 510,000 deaths in Britain. So far there are 2,619. But this guy has nothing on the climate fantasists, in that not a single one of their models predicted that warming would enter a two decade "pause." No doubt at least one of the Coronavirus models will turn out to be correct, if only by chance. Interesting that climate change models can't even aspire to the accuracy of a broken clock, since the latter is correct twice a day, while the former haven't been correct in 50 years.

Back to the actual point of this post. I had wanted to say something about the mystical foundations of science upon reading a passage in Barron. Here it is:

To be attentive -- to see, hear, taste, smell, and touch what is before us -- is much more difficult than it may seem.... Above all, [the mind] must overcome its tendency toward selective perception, seeing only what it wants to see, only what it might be convenient to see.

But this presupposes that there is something real to see -- AKA truth -- and that man is capable of putting his interests and biases to the side, and recognizing it (AKA objectivity).

Probably most people would place "objectivity" and "mystical" at antipodes. Not so fast! For mysticism is, among other things, the empiricism of the vertical, for there are stable and intelligible truths to be found there, just as there are in the material world. This is the context in which to understand the following observation by Barron:

To be intelligent... is to look for formal patterns, to seek out the intelligible structures that run through whatever exists. The summons to intelligence corresponds to the assumption of universal reasonability, the mystical intuition that undergirds the sciences.

Mystical intuition. This intuition is either true or false, but cannot be proved logically. Nevertheless, it is perfectly objective.

In the Christian vision, the truth of a thing is a reflection of the Truth that made it, a participation in the Logos that informs it (ibid).

Can I prove this? No, because it is the nonlocal principle whereby proof itself exists -- through which truth pervades creation and is accessible to us. But it can be intuited and envisioned, just like any other rock-solid transcendental truth.

Terra Firma

Solid ground. What's yours? No, you can't just ignore the question. Or, you can, but this will only mean your terra firma is ignorance: rock solid, invincible ignorance.

Ignorance itself -- so long as it is vincible -- is actually a fine place to begin, and too few people begin there. It is, however, a terrible place to end.

It's a good place to begin because it is precisely where we must begin, being that we come into the world with no explicit knowledge of it. We have a range of implicit knowledge, AKA instincts, but this natural prudence only gets us so far. For animals it is more than enough to ensure survival and reproduction, thereby tossing the keys to the next generation. Your Darwinian mission has been accomplished. Now die. You have outlived your evolutionary purpose.

But a human being who merely follows his instincts thereby sinks beneath the animals, as is proved by every Democrat-run urban center. It reminds us of an aphorism or two: To educate man is to impede the “free expression of his personality.” Similarly, Educating the individual consists in teaching him to distrust the ideas that occur to him.

Some people will immediately identify their terra firma as God, or Christ, or the Bible; or the Koran, or samadhi, or Brahman; I suppose for a Buddhist the solid ground is the lack thereof, while for the process philosopher the ground of being is becoming. For materialists it is matter -- whatever that is -- while for existentialists it is nothing until we decide what it is. For feminists it is resentment of men (beneath which is hatred of female nature), while for other professional victims it is race, sexual preference, global warming, etc.

How do we approach this question in a logical manner? Supposing there is a ground, by virtue of what principle can we say that human beings are capable of knowing it? Computers, for example, don't know they are computers. If they did they would be persons, thereby transcending computerhood. Nor can computers sink beneath themselves. They don't make mistakes unless they've been programmed to do so by a person.

Computers are much like leftists in this way: one of the purposes of any ideology is to provide unthinking human beings with the comfort of having opinions, thereby eliminating the healthy pain or anxiety of not-knowing. Ideologies are a form of cheap omniscience which answer any question you might throw at them. If the answer is always ORANGE MAN BAD, then what is the question? Or, more to the point, what is the nature of the questioner?

It reminds me of something I read this morning over at Instapundit: "NBC’s Chuck Todd under fire for asking Biden if Trump has ‘blood on his hands’ for delayed coronavirus response."

Again, how comforting it must be to so readily be able to identify the source of all one's -- and even the world's -- problems.

I suppose I remember the feeling. Back in the '80s I would have no doubt blamed Reagan rather than pointing the finger at myOldBob. While this blog often touches on politics, anyone with even the hint of a clue will understand that I never suggest that politics can solve the problem of humanness, which can only be remedied one assoul at a time. And absent a spiritual cure, there is no cure at all, otherwise all the trouble of the Incarnation is wholly superfluous.

To be perfectly accurate, the leftist implicitly recognizes that there can only be a spiritual cure, but the recognition is unconsciously transformed and projected into an explicit political or economic sickness and cure. It is an incredibly seductive promise, which is why it is one of the Adversary's favorite tricks. The soul is the interior reality of man, but the spiritually naive or untutored person routinely exteriorizes it and then freaks out over the projected demons.

You'd think such people would wish to be liberated from the shackles of their toxic projections, but they don't. There's something comforting in them, as they exteriorize and contain what would otherwise be interior and uncontained.

For example, a lunatic who believes President Trump is a racist doesn't want to know the truth, any more than a Palestinian wants to know that maybe Jews aren't all that bad. Rather, every Palestinian loser knows precisely whom to blame for his loserhood, and that's a priceless alibi for a wasted life. It's hard to be unhappy, harder still when there's no one to blame.

Aw, look at me. I'm ramblin' again. Back to the point, which is the question of Solid Ground. In fact let's belatedly return to ground zero of this post, which is a passage in Barron that describes the wrong turn taken by philosophy back with Descartes and similarly misgodded souls.

As you know, I'm not one of those folks who likes to blame this or that thinker for our problems, since it gives way too much credit to particular people instead of human nature, which is the real culprit.

For me, Descartes is more of a synecdoche for a whole cultural and historical trend which is in turn grounded in the unfailing perpetuation of wounded human nature. Human beings will disappoint you every time if you actually think they can redeem themselves. That's not even nonsense, just total historical amnesia mingled with inexcusable naiveté. Truly, it renders you innocent as a snake and about as wise as a pigeon.

Let's cut to the chase: in Christian metaphysics, the epistemological ground is "a conversation between two divine speakers." Note that knowing is grounded in being, and that being is always dialogical; and this applies both horizontally and vertically, accounting for the very possibility of both science and theology, respectively.

It's getting late, so we'll end with the following: God -- AKA the Divine Attractor -- is "the lure for the mind, even in its simplest acts of cognition. Whenever the mind seeks truth, it is operating under the impulse and aegis of the Truth itself (Barron).

God's intelligence has grounded the intelligibility of the world and hence animated the intelligently seeking human mind" (ibid.).

Ultimately the living ground is both attractor and attracted -- a flowing conversation between them; the ground of knowing is an image or echo of the go-round of being. To be continued...

As long as we do not arrive at religious categories, our explanations are not founded upon rock. --Dávila

Et Cetera

Must every post be an epic? Why not more frequent posts with fewer ideas, or maybe even one idea per post? Who has the patience to slog through your internal dialogue, Bob, in search of a point?

I'll take that under advisement with the council. I get a lot of ideas during the day. More than I can possibly organize, much less write about. They're everywhere -- on post-it notes and book marks, in margins and back covers, in spiral bound notebooks, sometimes even on the back of my hand. I swear, I have a coffee cup containing dogeared bookmarks with scribbled notes, some of which may be as old as the blog itself.

In fact, let me grab a handful and see what they say. Maybe I can finally recycle them.

The first one is a little trite, or at least I don't get the deeper significance. Let's move on. Hmm. Some have vocabulary words written on them, for which I probably have no use. Some authors like to deploy rare and unusual words to demonstrate how intelligent they are, even though it interrupts the flow of ideas. Many of them are out of town words like soupçon, aperçus, dishabille, purlieu, recherché, deliquesce, avois dupois, parti pris, clerihew, obiter dictum...

There are many more, some of which have the definitions next to them. I try to remember the meanings, but there's really no point, since I'll probably never see them again, nor is it likely I would ever use them in a sentence. I like to be understood, plus I'm generally writing about subjects that require deep and sustained focus. Interrupting the flow with obscure foreign phrases draws attention to the form instead of the substance.

Yes, yes, I know, I am hardly one to complain, being that I so often make up my own words. Well, that's different. Those are meant to be fun, not work. I don't imbue them with private meanings accessible to no one else.

Anyway, even if I had these exotic words at my fingertips, it is unlikely I would ever use them, because I prefer the common ones. Besides, it's not the words you use, but the way you arrange them. Using obscure words cannot rescue a poorly organized sentence. If you really know what you're talking about, you should be able to explain it in such a way that a 13 year old can understand it.

It reminds me of something Churchill said: "Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all." Obviously he was a powerful communicator, but he didn't have to use obscure words to convey the power. True, he tossed in more than a few obscure ones, but that's partly because of the very different time and place in which he grew up.

Hmm. While looking up that Churchillism I stumbled upon many more I've highlighted, all having to do with language, writing, and communication. They're all right here, just waiting to be used in a future post. I guess that post is now.

"Clarity and cogency can be reconciled with a greater brevity... it is slothful not to compress your thoughts." Indeed, "It is sheer laziness not compressing thought into a reasonable shape." As Dávila says, we ought to "Write concisely, so as to finish before making the reader sick."

To one of his prolix cabinet members, he wrote that his memo, "by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read." More generally, he detested that "kind of vague palimpsest of jargon and officialese with no breadth, no theme, and above all, no facts."

Get to the point!: "don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time."

In the language department Trump is obviously no Churchill, but he is a pile driver. Compare this to Obama, who fancied himself a wordsmith but who spoke in leaden clichés and indeed never conveyed an original idea or uttered a witty remark.

Liberals and their feeling-based thinking have always been with us: "It is a deplorable thing" when such people "allow their language to be rather the means of giving relief to their feelings than an actual description of the facts." I came across a typical example this morning of someone whose "Climate Grief" has prepared her for the Corona Dread. Not very well, I guess:

I’ve been crying a lot. So much I worry that my neighbors can hear me through the plaster walls of my apartment building in the South Bronx....

I feel like I’m floating on an ominous cloud of dull terror, or flailing through molasses. There’s a lump in my throat. Everything is heavy. Everything is hard. Even as I type this, my fingers are shaking, and I have to take long pauses to do something, literally anything, else. Often, I just stare at the wall.

No wonder so many young people are committing suicide. This is not the year 1020. There is treatment for mental illness.

At the other end of the linguistic spectrum, "official jargon can be used to destroy any kind of human contact or even thought itself."

Speaking of bad writing, Churchill thought Mein Kampf so awful that he even compared it to the Koran: "turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message."

How's this for a coincidence: he even penned a bit of adolescent doggerel about some kind of oriental bug that seems to have been going around in 1890: Oh how shall I its deeds recount / Or measure the untold amount / Of ills that it has done? / From China's bright celestial land / E'en to Arabia's thirsty sand / It journeyed with the sun.

Anticipating Madonna's deep thoughts on the strict egalitarianism of the virus, It made a direful swoop; / The rich, the poor, the high, the low / Alike the various symptoms know, / Alike before it droop.... And with unsparing hand, / Impartial, cruel and severe / It travelled on allied with fear / And smote the fatherland.

Then it jumped across the channel to threaten even Freedom's isle itself. Get well, Boris!

The New York Times? Washington Post? "Fancy cutting down those beautiful trees we saw this afternoon to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilization."

Politically correct abuse of language? "I hope I live to see the British democracy spit all this rubbish from their lips."

Here's to frankness and simplicity: "All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: Freedom; Justice; Honor; Duty; Mercy; Hope."