Breaking the Fifth Wall & Living on the Right Side of History

Viewed from the inside, or from below, it seems that history is a jungle. Or a maze. Or a blind alley. How then can anyone presume to speak of the "right side of history"? If such a side exists, it could only be seen from outside, or from above or beyond history -- by a god, or an Obama.

Alternatively, the beyond-history would have to enter history and disclose its own meaning, direction, and telos. Supposing this occurred, we might even be able to demark history with, say, "BCE" (Before the Centration Event) and "AD" (Annus Diametros).

Hold that silly thought for a moment. In Hope and History, Pieper discusses how "theology expands the scope of empirically accessible history into a realm of trans-empirical reality" and "testifies to the conviction that the history we can experience derives its meaning... from being anchored in a more comprehensive, universal structure..."

Time could never be "complete" from within itself. In terms of pure temporality, one moment is no different from any other, and they just keep coming. The second hand on your clock knows nothing of qualities, just identical units of space.

Like history, time could only be complete in reference to something beyond time, and this something would have to be qualitative (I would say personal, but we'll leave that for another post). And again, it could also be complete if the transtemporal Beyond were to somehow pay us a timely visit.

This reminds me of the theatrical convention of breaking the fourth wall, when the actor steps out of the play or film and directly addresses the audience in a "metatheatrical" manner.

Analogously, what if the playwright could break the fifth wall (or ceiling rather, i.e., time) and enter his own play? Is there a name for such a meta-metatheatrical occurrence? Besides incarnation?

Note that we're not talking about the play simply submitting to the playwright, because this happens anyway; rather, in this case, the playwright submits to his own play -- i.e., the creator becomes subject to his own creation, even while remaining wholly playwright.

In our cosmos, I suppose a prophet is someone who breaks the fourth wall in a big way, whereas the Incarnation breaks the fifth wall in a final way, such that it stays broken once and For All.

Now, if the fourth and fifth walls cannot in principle be broken, then this has certain dire implications, for I don't see how such elementary human realities as freedom, science, or creativity would be possible. Put another way, if human beings can grasp even the most trivial truth, we have broken the fourth wall of the cosmos. We are prophets with a message to deliver.

In the past I have said something to the effect that either natural selection explains man, or man explains natural selection; and if the latter, then natural selection doesn't explain man. Why? Because, in effect, man has broken the fourth wall of natural selection. If natural selection is true, then one of its players can't leap off the stage and begin telling the monkeys where they came from!

Pieper writes that "human existence takes place wholly and utterly within the force field of an infinite, trans-historical, and 'creative' reality," such that "what can be experienced of the here-and-now could never be identical with the totality of existence." Rather, again, "the end, and also even the beginning, of human history as a whole and of individual biography, must necessarily remain beyond our empirical grasp."

Nevertheless, we do -- all of us -- receive bulletins from the eschaton, or we couldn't be human. In other words, a human is human because he lives downstream from his own telos, and the discovery of this vertical stream is the event of human awakening. I know, I know, all of this no doubt sounds a bit woo woo, but I mean it literally: man is a longing for what surpasses man, and that's just the way it is:

Man is not a mundane object to be examined and grasped within the confines of a concept; rather, he is a process in which a center of mystery attempts to illuminate itself reflexively....

[M]an as such is constituted by a relation to infinity, a transcendental dimension within his very existence and without which he could not properly deserve the name of "man."

He is man, in other words, by virtue of the presence within his experiential field of the divine pole that draws him, and by drawing him -- insofar as it does so effectively -- constitutes him as the being that tends toward the divine -- toward the light of truth, toward beauty, toward love, toward all possible perfection of being (Webb).

Anyone living on that side is on is the right side of history. And on our side.

Alternatively, I Have a Point & I'll Never Get To It

Either way, the point is the unending tension between two knowable unknowns: immanence and transcendence. No one in principle can ever "know himself," any more than the eye could ever see itself. Nor can God ever be known. Rather, both the immanent self and transcendent God are known in the knowing.

Which also means that certain "arrows" or vectors are built into the nature of things, which I believe goes to the mystery of time.

For what is time but a direction? Yes, it is also a flow, but it never flows backward. Just as spatial immanence points to transcendence, the temporal present points to a future that is also a knowable unknown. Freedom, in the fullest sense, is a combination of the two movements. Put conversely, neither temporal (horizontal) history nor present (vertical) illumination are inevitable or complete.

In both cases -- space and time -- we should focus on the knowable links, or fruitful relations, between the two unknowables: what Voegelin calls the metaxy is to space as the present is to time. History is unknowable in part because there exists freedom in the luminous space between man and the transcendent ground. We might say that mere duration intertwines with human choice, resulting in history (since bare time isn't history at all, just change).

Compare this to, say, dialectical materialism, in which what happens must happen. Although this sophistry is a form of "historicism," it fundamentally removes history from time, and should be called "dehistoricism."

This has practical considerations, because it explains why leftism is always and everywhere so ahistorical. It's not that they're ahistorical because they're leftists; rather, they're leftists because they're ahistorical. Not only do they immanentize the eschaton, they horizontalize the vertical and then wonder where all the fun went.

Moreover, cosmically speaking this is the literal opposite of "progress," because it reverts to a con-fusion of realities that history has differentiated (de-fused). You'll even hear certain tenured yahoos say they prefer paganism to Christianity, and then wonder why it results in tribalism, oppression, sacrifice, uniformity, loss of individuality, in short, a barbarous world of identity politics unfit for human habitation, like an armed college campus:

The tensional movement in consciousness develops as a striving for attunement: we seek attunement with truth as far as we can. If we do not attain it with some degree of satisfaction, then there is discord and misery in our own being. We become what is variously represented as evil, unjust, and unhappy men. The higher capacities do not master the lower. Such men may be a walking civil war... (Webb).

And talking civil war, or maybe you don't pay attention to the MSM. In any event, "Man's existence is not primarily an external or phenomenal reality but rather the In-Between existence of participation" (ibid.).

This In-Between existence is our permanent condition: "Somehow we participate and must participate in both the temporal and the spiritual, if we are to live lives esteemed to be fit for human beings" (ibid.).

The choice is ours, even though there's really no choice, any more than we can choose to ignore gravity. We can, but not really, for the person who denies reality is nevertheless subject to it -- as is true of the atheist vis-a-vis God, a subject to which we will eventually circle back.

Now that we've cleared that up, let's try to actually clear it up. I'll start with Pieper, because he's the clearest and most concise of the various authors I'm attempting to juggle here.

Recall the title of the book: Hope and History. History isn't only "in" time, but it is the form of human temporality; there is no such thing as a human without history, as the two come into existence simultaneously. But hope can only occur in the present. While it reaches forward, it is first a "reaching upward" toward the transcendent. Again, it is fundamentally a link between two great knowable unknowns.

This is about as clear as it can be said:

The one who hopes, and he alone, anticipates nothing; he holds himself open for an as yet unrealized future fulfillment while at the same time remaining aware that he knows as little about its scope as about its time of arrival.

Again, hope flourishes in a space of vertical openness (o) toward the transcendent (O). You've no doubt noesissed that history conceals its own meaning from us, and can never never be comprehended from within. Which calls to mind a cryptic aphorism by Señor D:

If history made sense, the Incarnation would be superfluous.

I hate to end this discussion right in the middle, but then, where else could it possibly end? But there are errands to run and nuisances to check off the list, so we'll try to clear things up in the next post.

I Don't Have a Point, and I'm Getting To It

I suppose the bottom line -- presented to you at the top -- is that faith, hope, and love aren't so much verbs as they are interdimensional links between immanent and transcendent objects (or subjects). Each of these functions to lift us out of our paltry and pneumatically sophicating existence into a dynamic and fruitful relationship with the source and ground of being.

I might add that these aren't in the realm of the "ought"; or, to the extent that we ought to cultivate them, it is because they always are. We could never invent them if they didn't already exist, but -- like truth or beauty -- we can certainly deny them. Pieper:

fundamental hope (singular) is not directed toward anything that one could "have" but rather has something to do with what one "is," with one's own being as man...

Homo viator: man is always on the way to himself. And Genesis 3 is a mythological account of how we are inevitably in the way of ourselves.

This is absolutely consistent with Voegelin. In fact, he says it in so many ways and in so many contexts, that it seems to have been his One Big Idea.

But by the very nature of this idea, it can never be simply presented in a cutandry manner, because it is necessarily participatory, such that one must explicate by demonstrating; or, as in, say, music, the demonstration is the explication: hearing is believing.

Now hear this: the links -- call them (F), (H), and (L) -- alluded to above disclose a real (as in reality) tension

which one may resist but which one does not dream up. It manifests not as a proposition to be proved but as an appeal to be responded to and a force to be trusted.

As an experience it has an immediacy that makes it palpable, even if this is an immediacy that can never be arrived at once and for all but will have to be endlessly pursued through a lifelong process... (Webb; I've also taken the liberty of making the past tense present for the sake of clarity).

We'll no doubt amplify it later, but I'm sure that the most abstract way to describe this endless process is O → (¶). Again, this isn't how the world "ought" to be structured, it is how it is structured. And the most vital component to re-member and re-cognize is the →.

Or better -- and you will understand this too as we proceed -- we have to see it as a spiraling process with two distinct movements that are ultimately resolved into one. Not only will this become clear to you, but you'll understand its necessity by the time we're done with all this endless nonsense.

Consider: "The reality that [discloses] itself [is] not an object to be looked at but a life to be entered." It is not primarily intellectual but existential -- or, intellectual because existential: the philosopher must "live in the truth and participate in the reality of which he [is] in search" (ibid.).

Not to re-belabor the point, but this isn't just "advice." Rather it simply is. Nor is it "paradoxical" except when viewed through the lens of a prior unexamined belief about reality. It is not difficult to believe. From my perspective, your belief -- scientism, atheism, leftism, et al -- is literally impossible to believe. These -- or any -- ideologies aren't just wrong but literally delusional. Literally.

Nevertheless, we are free to deny the O → (¶) process. We are "presented not with a simple fact but with an invitation, a call to decision."

I don't want to jump too far ahead, but this is undoubtedly the same decision one must make with regard to Christ. Or, for that matter, the same decision faced by Abraham, Moses, Mary (believe all women!), Paul, and other luminous sparchetypes who just said Yes.

In Voegelin's case, "If he did decide to trust it, he could live in its truth, but he would know it only in the dark glass of trust, hope, and love" (ibid.).

Which is why, I think, he can never get to the point, but never stops getting to it. Could it be that I too am in the same attractor, in that my point is the endless getting to it?

It's all about the Exodus, isn't it? Or rather, the Exodus from is always an Introdeus to. It is "the conscious realization and willing acceptance of the tension of existence with its transcendental dimension" (ibid.).

Okay then. I think I'll stop for now and pick up the endless thread in the next post.

Hope and Reason

Reading Voegelin can be exhausting. Is there a shortcut to a quick fix to a lazy man's workaround to the bottom line? Life is short and his books are looooong -- over 2,000 pages just for his magnum opus, Order and History.

In contrast to the title of the book we're discussing -- The Voegelinian Revolutions -- Voegelin himself averred that

The test of truth, to put it pointedly, will be the lack of originality in the propositions.

In fact, he was no revolutionary, but rather, a counter-revolutionary who wanted to restore King Reason to his throne over the Dominion of Commonsense. For him, modern philosophy had been derailed in the modern era, and he simply wanted to get it back on track, for when it is off the tracks it is no longer even philosophy (since it is no longer oriented to its proper end). Rather, it is reduced to philodoxy (love of opinion) if we're lucky, misosophy (hatred of wisdom) if we're not.

Let's pull back to the ultimate wide angle, or Big Picture. God understands as well as anyone that few of us have the time, ability, or inclination to devote our lives to thinking our way back to him. Therefore, he makes the burden easy, with a light yoke to sweeten the deal: Incarnation.

Now that is radical. And revolutionary. No philosophical tracts to digest, no costly academic studies, no pitting one ideology against another to try and figure out which one is closer to the truth. Instead, just a person and a relationship, and all this entails.

True, it entails a great deal, but instead of starting at the periphery of the cosmos and trying to burrow our way toward the center, the center is given to us at the outset, gratis. Thus, it is literally the ultimate shortcut, although again, the implications are infinite and thensome.

A question: off the top of your head, what would you say is the single best idea anyone has ever had? Perhaps it will be difficult to narrow down the candidates, but I think you'll recognize it when you see it. It has several moving parts, and I am also putting it in the present tense, because that's the only place where and when ideas can actually live:

In the beginning is the Logos, and the Logos is with God, and the Logos is God, and 2) the Logos becomes flesh and dwells among us.

Irrespective of whether to not you agree with it, if you don't re-cognize this as the ultimate idea, then you haven't cognized it at all.

Now I'm going to switch gears, or fast forward a few decades to something attributed to Peter in his first epistle, that we should "always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you."

A reason for the hope. As we know, "reason" and "logos" are synonymous, but that's not my point. My larger point is that hope, properly understood, is the most thoroughly rational way to approach the Logos.

Now lets fast forward another 1,900 years or so, to Pieper's Hope and History, which, for my money, conveys much of what Voegelin is trying to say, only in 100 instead of 10,000 pages.

For starters, why is hope one of the top three theological virtues? How is it different from, say, mere wishful thinking, and why should we cultivate it? And how can it have anything to do with thinking about reality? Isn't the whole point of thinking to purge it of desire, and to look at things the way they are as opposed to the way we want them to be?

Yes, and hope is an adequation to the way things are, precisely. For example, the One Minute Philosopher distinguishes hope from wish by saying that the former "looks to the future, but is rooted in reality as it is."

Thus, reality as it is includes an intrinsic tension that reaches forth to a future that isn't yet. Analogously, think of how the phenomenon of Life Itself by definition reaches beyond the moment and anticipates its own future.

That is an exceptionally weird thing to occur in a heretofore purely physical cosmos, but leave that to the side. My point is that the identical process occurs on the cognitive plane, as our minds reach forth toward truths which they do not yet possess. Continuously. Unless we are mentally and spiritually dead, in which case our minds no longer live in that space of hope that exists between present and future, anticipation and fulfillment.

To live -- or think -- only in the present would be to neither live nor think. In a very literal way, life itself is hope, in that its continuance is always possible but never necessary, nor is hope ordered to the impossible.

Hope can of course be disappointed, but by its nature it is ordered to the possible, not the impossible or the necessary.

Regarding the latter, we don't hope the sun comes up tomorrow, because it will. Nor do we hope it comes out at midnight, because it won't. At the same time, we don't hope for things that are fully under our own control. For example, I don't hope that today I can avoid robbing a gas station, because I won't. I do, however, hope that Cousin Dupree can avoid robbing one, because he just might.

There is a vast middle ground covered by hope, and in a way, this middle ground is everything. It is where we actually live, i.e., not in our neurology or in the physical world, but in the space between.

For example, I hope I can get this post to make sense before I run out of time. I have partial control, in that I have to be here, but it doesn't at all feel as if I have anything like total control. All I can do is keep typing and hope for the best. As Pieper says, "The only genuine hope is one directed toward something that does not depend on us."

Imagine the alternative: that I don't have to hope this post makes sense, because I have a total mastery of the subject right here inside my own noggin. But if that were the case, then I would no longer be reaching out in hope toward the transcendent object, and that would be wrong.

In other words, there isn't just a correct content to thought, but a correct process of thought. And the correct process is always in tension with its own transcendent source and ground.

We're almost out of time, but we'll have much more to say about this process as we proceed. For now I'll leave off with a passage from Hope and History, that genuine hope

appears to have no object that can be found to exist in the world in [an] "objectlike" way. There is, then, nothing specific and concrete that can be pointed to; it is directed toward something "indefinite," "nebulous," "formless," "unnameable"....

This functional hope

tends to transcend all "particular objects" and cannot really be grasped until one stops trying to imagine the thing hoped for. But of course there is certainly "something hoped for," even if its mode of being is quite different from that of all objective goods and all conceivable changes in the external world.

O.

When Intellectuals Attack

If the cosmos is intelligible, then I say we should go the whole hog: that is, if we can understand anything, there's no principle barring us from knowing everything. Come, Icarus! To the sun, and beyond!

Yes, not so fast. There is a difference in principle between anything and everything, because the former occurs within the cosmos, whereas the latter presupposes an extra-cosmic view that only God could possess (we do not say "gods," because pagan deities were always understood to be inhabitants of the cosmos, not the radically transcendent creator of it).

Genesis 3 presents a timeless -- AKA eternally true -- cautionary tale about indulging in any Godlike intellectual pretensions. Rule One for would-be thinkers: don't be an irritating Gnosis-all!

Speaking of which, the last page of Johnson's Intellectuals has a good summary of what's wrong with these babeling kleptomaniacs, who can't help themselves from trying to steal fire from the gods, and who don't know their place in the cosmic scheme of things:

One of the principle lessons of our tragic [20th] century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is -- beware intellectuals.

Note that he doesn't say to beware intelligence, which would constitute an endorsement of stupidity. There is, however, a way for intelligence -- no matter how intelligent -- to go off the rails and transmogrify to evil.

Now, how could intelligence ever become so naughty? Well, this is one of the threads that runs through Voegelin's entire corpus. We'll get to him in a moment, but allow PaJo to finish his point and his book:

Not only should [intellectuals] be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.

Is it any wonder that the great majority of these boneless brainiacs want us to give up the second amendment? It's our last line of defense against the implementation of their homicidal ideas. And why do they all think alike, anyway? If they're such free thinkers, why are universities the least intellectually diverse places on earth?

intellectuals, far from being highly individualistic and non-conformist people, follow certain regular patterns.... Taken as a group, they are often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value (ibid.).

Ah ha. This is indeed a key point, because, while they imagine they are fearlessly seeking truth wherever it may lead, they are actually fearfully seeking approval -- and avoiding disapproval -- whatever the cost (paid in the coin of intellectual honesty and integrity).

The same pattern is seen in our mainstream media. How is it that they can, in unison, systematically unsee what is by far the most consequential political scandal in the nation's history? Is it a conspiracy?

I don't think so, any more than fish conspire to avoid dry land. We'll return to this idea as well. Johnson is almost finished. The instinct to spontaneously assemble into an intellectual cirque du jerk (pardon the French)

is what makes them, en masse, so dangerous, for it enables them to create climates of opinion [i.e., the water in which they swim] and prevailing orthodoxies, which themselves often generate irrational and destructive courses of action.

A lone intellectual, like a single madman, can only cause so much damage. But when a swarm of them takes over an institution, then we have a problem, because it causes the institution to become a madhouse.

This is how the university has become the Looniversity Bin, and how the deep state has become a political and judicial insane assoulum (Judge Sullivan, presiding over the Flynn case, is just an Adam Schiff in robes, while the impeachment showed Schiff to be a hanging judge disguised a legislator). What can we do about it?

Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.

Now, we've had our share of intelligent presidents, but only a handful of true intellectuals. Among modern presidents I can think of only two: Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama, two of the most dangerous and destructive in our history.

By way of transition, I want to switch gears for a moment and touch very briefly on A Very Brief History of Eternity, as it shares some commonality with Voegelin. For one of Voegelin's central points is that the normative condition of mankind is to live in tension with a transcendent reality that can never be reached but must never be forgotten.

I won't presume to speak for Voegelin, but I would say that human beings necessarily live in a dynamic space between now and eternity; indeed, the passage of time occurs within this space, and in a sense, is what time "is."

To put it another way, eternity and the present moment are as two ends of a single transcendent reality to which human beings have unique access. Animals, for example, more or less live in an "eternal now," but have no conception of eternity.

But the human now stretches forth to eternity, thus illuminating a space of history, creativity, progress, etc. And as Eire describes it, "when we lose eternity as a horizon we can end up with totalitarian, materialistic nightmares."

I agree, but would omit the "can," because materialism -- or any other ismolatry -- forecloses the proper human space and seals us in a matrix of soul-dead journalism, authoritarian tenure, and ideological fantasy. Conversely, the "paradoxical conjoining of the eternal with the temporal," writes Eire, is "the very essence" of Christian metaphysics.

The bad news: we're just about out of time. The good news: I invented a new word: episteleology. It means that temporal knowledge occurs -- and can only occur -- because it is in dynamic tension with the transcendent absolute.

How Not to Be a Human Being

I'm warning you ahead of time that I'm not happy with this post, but I'm trying to tame a bucking corpus, and it's not easy. I keep getting thrown, but this isn't my first rodeo. We'll subdue this beast yet... Besides, it's only blogging, so there's no time to properly edit or polish.

What Voegelin spent his life trying to describe is either 1) among the most important discoveries of mankind, or 2) the trivial preoccupations of an eccentric thinker with too much time and intellect. Really, it comes down to whether he is describing objective reality or it's just, like, his opinion, man. I think Voegelin would agree that if it's not the former, then his work is indeed pointless.

What was he attempting? Oh, not much. Only "a new analysis of reality" and "a new science of human affairs"; a "universally significant philosophy of history" that isn't just an ideological projection (i.e., historicism) but reflects the order of the soul in its dynamic tension with existence.

In a postmodern world of spiritual decay and intellectual rot, we are unaccustomed to an approach to human affairs that claims to be both objective and normative, or Is and Ought. Indeed, Voegelin would say that postmodernism itself is literally a disease -- AKA pneumapathology -- more on which as we proceed.

I've mentioned before that one of my favorite subjects in grad school was psychopathology. In the late 1980s it was still possible to affirm that there is a way humans are supposed to be, and that deviations from this norm comprise the essence of pathology, no different from any other organ system. But the left ruins everything, and psychology is one of the most important disciplines to ruin if its diabolical (i.e., anti-divine and therefore anti-human) project is to succeed.

In other words, the left must redefine human nature -- or, more to the point, define it out of existence. And if there is no human nature, then there can be no objective psychopathology. With no telos, sickness and health have no objective basis at all. There is no principle defining them, which leads to a radical individualism -- each man his own species, so to speak, so out the window go the natural law and natural rights that underpin our tradition of classical liberalism.

Nevertheless, human nature exists, so its denial leads to inevitable problems. If a man thinks he is a woman, that's a problem. For him. You can solve the man's problem by pretending it is possible for men to be women, but this only leads to deeper and more widespread cultural and political pathologies and absurdities.

Imagine, say, a thief arguing that he was born greedy and that it is natural for him to steal. In order to accommodate him, we change our laws so that people who identify as thieves are considered a normal variant.

Or, how about pedophiles? Polygamists? Note that we're not arguing that people who are confused about their sexual identity are "bad people." Rather, we are talking about the consequences of calling abnormality normal, or unreality real. Either there exist timelessly true objective standards rooted in human nature, or there are no standards. The left wants it both ways: there are no standards, and the raw power to enforce them.

For Voegelin, philosophy isn't just tenured bloviating, or error on a grandiose scale, or an endless argument leading from nothing to nowhere, but "a form of existence-in-truth." Not "my" truth, but truth itself, which isn't just the only truth worth knowing, but the very definition of truth (in other words, "my truth" is no truth at all). Thus, "the only way to challenge effectively a defective view of history is to provide an alternative that is philosophically sound."

So, just as there exists psychopathology, there are are cognitive and spiritual pathologies. These pathologies are a necessary consequence of spiritual, philosophical, anthropological, and political reality.

Wait -- political reality? You have to be a Constitutional Scholar to understand there's no such thing. In the words of Obama, implicit "in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or 'ism,' any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course..."

The usual straw man, false dichotomy, and overall lazy thinking. In contrast to this foolish approach, Voegelin's "primary commitment" was "to serve truth," wherever it may lead. Obama is typical of an academic mentality that isn't just wrong, but truly deviant. Voegelin contended (way before it was completely obvious) that such "massive illiteracy" -- masquerading as its opposite -- "pervades the educated stratum of society."

One of Voegelin's surprising bottom-line takes is that "the essence of modernity is the the growth of Gnosticism." Which very much reminds me of something Johnson says in his highly insultaining Intellectuals.

To back up a bit, to acknowledge the reality of human nature is to affirm the undeniable religiosity of man. Later we'll get into exactly what we mean by "religiosity," but it can never be eradicated, only denied and transformed. Along these lines, this introductory passage by Johnson is worth pondering:

Over the past two hundred years the influence of intellectuals has grown steadily. Indeed, the rise of the secular intellectual has been a key factor in shaping the modern world.

In one sense this is a wholly new phenomenon. Not so fast! For "the decline of clerical power" merely created a vacuum into which the secular intellectual leapt, and this rascal "was just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs." Yes, here comes the new clergy, same as the old clergy, only much worse. This pretentious assoul

proclaimed, from the start, a special devotion to the interests of humanity and an evangelical duty to advance them by his teaching. He brought to this self-appointed task a far more radical approach than his clerical predecessors.

"The collective wisdom of the past, the legacy of tradition, the prescriptive codes of ancestral experience" might be "selectively followed or wholly rejected entirely as his own good sense might decide.... men arose to assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and cure them with their own unaided intellects," whereby "the fundamental habits of human beings could be transformed for the better." No longer "servants and interpreters of the gods," they were substitutes for them.

Yes, magnanimous philanthropes such as Rousseau, Marx, Lenin, Mao, et al. But for Voegelin, Marx, for example, isn't just wrong, rather, the quintessence of a spiritually diseased approach to the world, not just unphilosophical but antiphilosophical, revealing a deep and abiding hatred of reality (and of mankind):

The Marxian spiritual disease... consists in the self-divinization and self-salvation of man; an intramundane logos of human consciousness is substituted for the transcendental logos.

Such an approach must "be understood as the revolt of immanent consciousness against the spiritual order of the world. This is the core Marxian idea." At its root "we find the spiritual disease, the Gnostic revolt.... Marx is demonically closed against transcendental reality.... His spiritual impotence leaves no way open but derailment into Gnostic activism," a "characteristic combination of spiritual impotence with a mundane lust for power."

But "one cannot deny God and retain reason. Spiritual impotence destroys the order of the soul," leaving man "locked in the prison of his particular existence."

Marx essentially imagined he'd discovered a loophole in Genesis 3: he "knew that he was a god creating a world. He did not want to be a creature."

To be continued...

I Don't Have the Time... or Space or Intelligence

Ever since my mind unexpectedly came on line in my mid-20s, I've been... haunted is too strong a word... Pestered? Shadowed? Annoyed?

At any rate, there has always been the simultaneous presence of a sense of a hint of an inking that my mind just isn't capacious enough for what I'm trying to do. There's not enough space: you can't fit two gallons of truth into a one gallon cranium.

Either that, or there's not enough raw candlepower: like I'm trying to light the cosmos with solar when I need petroleum or nuclear. I realize I'm not smart enough for the task, but no one else is attempting it, so what am I supposed to do? Ignore it?

Yes, my reach exceeds my grasp, but perhaps this is just an objective description of the human situation. In other words, God is the only person(s) whose reach and grasp are identical.

Would things have turned out differently had my brain been functional back when I was in school?

No, I don't think so. If that had been the case, then I would have simply absorbed all the wrong things. Instead of being filled with a benign nothing, my head would have been cluttered with all the malignant sophistries that dominate the culture: liberal orthodoxy, politico-scientistic religiosity, tenured mythologies, etc. I'd have been sealed in a demonically closed reality tunnel, and perhaps even become an enforcer or gatekeeper of the matrix, as are our media-academic goons.

But then, I also wasted a lot of time wading through so much BS along the way. I've obviously read a great deal, but with no one to guide me, it has been an inefficient and zigzag course. I had to swim upstream for a couple of decades before even spying the source. My son will never have to do that. Rather, I can help him cut straight to the chase: ignore all that, focus on this.

If I had to sum things up at this juncture, my go-to sources would be few. But I always leave one out: Voegelin. He is as important as any, and yet, I've never really taken him on board as an ongoing touchstone -- as I have, for example, Schuon or Dávila -- folks that find their way into nearly every post.

Why is this? Well, for one thing, as alluded to above, I don't have sufficient headspace. He's just so sprawling. If one attempted to master his corpus alone, it would take one's whole thinking life. You'd have to become a Voegelin specialist, which is the opposite of my loose and lazy cosmic generalism. My ideal is Dávila: to be as brief as possible, with a dash of humor or insultainment thrown in. Sharp as a knife, but also twist it a little. With lemon juice.

I don't pretend to be scholar. What am I then? I suppose you'd have to tell me, but I would say, visionary humorist, or metaphysical comedian, or mystic adventure guide, or theological entertainer... Some combination of grave seriousness and utter frivolousness. Sober intoxication.

So anyway, I've been reading a book called The Voegelinian Revolution, which is blowing my mind all over again -- as Voegelin always does. And because he blows my mind, I've never been able to fully wrap it around him. I can't cut him down to size and properly digest him.

But I can try. If ever someone were in need of popularization, it's Voegelin. As with Schuon, even the secondary literature is too serious and forbidding, so followers end up speaking only to one another. He needs a jester. A vulgarian. An interpreter with a clown nose.

But the other thing -- along with insufficient memory and intelligence -- is that there's never enough time. So we'll try to tackle the book tomorrow...

God Can't be Known; Rather He is Only Infinitely Knowable

Most things we seek to obtain are for the sake of something else: for example, we eat in order to survive. But why do we want to survive? I don't know. Must be for its own sake. It's like happiness that way; no one ever asks himself why on earth he wishes to be happy. Rather, happiness (in the Aristoteleological sense) is the point of it all.

Now, anything below the realm of metaphysics -- you'll excuse me, but I'm thinking this through for the first time -- must be for the sake of something else. For example, right now I'm typing. Why? Don't laugh, but I can't think of any other reason but to seek and communicate wisdom. Okay. Why do that? I don't know. Must be for its own sake.

It's certainly not for any of the usual suspects: money, fame, power, status, the fine Colombian, the Cuervo Gold, etc.

In an essay called Mystery and Philosophy, Pieper makes the subtle point that

wisdom cannot be the property of man for the very reason that it is sought after for its own sake; what we can fully possess cannot satisfy us as something sought after for its own sake; the only wisdom that is sought after for its own sake is the kind that man is not able to have as a possession.

In short, -- in reference to why I'm doing this -- I am seeking something I can never possess, and trying to communicate something I don't have. There's a name for that: a fool's errand, or wild nous chase.

"Philosophical questioning," writes Pieper, "aims at comprehending, at ultimate knowledge." However,

not only do we not possess such knowledge, but we are even, on principle, incapable of possessing it, and therefore we will also not possess it in the future.

Okay then. We've never had it, we don't have it, and we'll never get it. Anything else before we wrap this up? Have we learned nothing in 15 years of blogging? What were we hoping to find, anyway? And how can such a vacuous exercise result in so much writing about it? That's a lot of posts, but 3,423 x 0 is still 0.

Yes, but O is not 0. Big Infinite difference!

Imagine if we could gather together all the poets, painters, and musicians, and tell them, "look, you've been at this for 50,000 years, but I don't see that you're any closer to possessing Beauty. Now, go out there and bring back Beauty once and for all!"

Ah, but the pursuit of beauty is another one of those activities that is for its own sake. What Pieper says of wisdom can be equally applied to it: beauty sought after for its own sake can never be possessed. One can try, but it is a sort of category error, for it is nothing less than the attempt to contain infinitude wihin finitude (or transcendence in immanence).

Of which I am guilty, with an explanation, or at least rationalization. I am an audiophile and collector, or, if you want to cut to the chase, you could say that I don't have a hobby, rather, my hobby has me. Well, first of all, a man needs a hobby. Second, I see what I'm doing. I see right through myself -- occasionally -- so a I don't pretend it has any end, or that I can cure the habit by indulging in it. I'll never have everything I want, if only because I want to want. It's pretty harmless, at least compared to cocaine.

As is the blog. It also goes nowhere, with no hope of ever arriving there. If a final Answer were attainable, this would imply that

the thing is known to the full extent that it is knowable in itself. In other words: the adequate answer to the philosophical question would have to be an answer which exhausts the subject, a statement in which the knowability of the object in question is exhausted to such an extent that nothing purely knowable remains but only the known (Pieper).

In the end, O = O. But we are not O. This is why God can never be known: because he is only infinitely knowable.

Thus the claim to have found the "formula of the world" is without hesitation to be called unphilosophical. It is of the essence of philosophy that it cannot be a "closed system" -- "closed" in the sense that the essential reality of the world could be adequately mirrored in it....

The deeper one's positive knowledge of the structure of the world the more one becomes clear that reality is a mystery. The reason for inexhaustibility is that the world is creature, i.e., that it has its origin in God's incomprehensible, creative knowledge (ibid.).

Simultaneously clear and obscure; Joyce called it clearobscure, a pun on the intermingling of shadow and light in chiarascuro (clear-dark). So I hope that was sufficiently obscure. I sometimes have a tendency to be too clear.

Is There Such a Thing as a Non-Christian Philosophy?

Don't look at me. That's the title of an essay by by Josef Pieper. Is he serious? Or just trolling?

Well, supposing one is a Christian, then there obviously can be no non-Christian philosophy, for what is a philosophy that excludes the most important facts and principles of existence? That's not philosophy, rather, the opposite: love of ignorance. It is also idolatry.

A genuine philosophy must begin with an acknowledgment of its own impossibility -- or in other words, that we are not God. Otherwise, one is essentially claiming that "There is no God, and I am him." But if there is no God, then only he could know it, for it requires godlike vision to make such a categorical claim.

"Philosophizing," writes Pieper, "means asking what is the meaning of all that we call 'life' or 'reality' or simply this 'totality.'" And if you imagine you're actually capable of fully comprehending the meaning of life-reality-totality, then -- well, you're not God, but you certainly think you are.

Which is a real danger. It is a danger because the only possible stance toward infinite reality is a humble openness that can never be fulfilled from side of finitude. We can only form a loving relationship with the object of philosophy.

Only? Only?! What a dangerous and dismissive little word! You're telling me we can only form a dynamic and fruitful relationship with the living ground of being? I'll take it.

What's the alternative? Only idolatry.

I suppose philosophy was ruined when it became a mere academic discipline. A degree in mathematics or engineering is one thing, but to be a credentialed philosopher is to not know what philosophy is. Or, a person who is only a philosopher isn't even that. Likewise an "academic theologian," because one cannot think about God without thinking in -- or better, with -- God. There can be no such thing as "impersonal" theology, any more than there could exist an "impersonal psychology" or "empirical logic."

Pieper:

a person cannot be called wise, but at most he can be called one who lovingly seeks wisdom.... The essential philosophical question is about the search for a wisdom which -- in principle -- we can never "have" as a possession as long as we are in our present condition of bodily existence.

So, the first philosophical question is whether philosophy is even possible. Yes, so long as it is understood as loving-relation as opposed to a one-sided possession. The latter is strictly impossible. Crowning it with a PhD is like covering a dungheap with snow (to borrow an analogy from Martin Luther which he used in a very different context).

Even God doesn't "possess" wisdom; or at least he is never possessive, in that he -- literally -- never stops giving it away. According to Christian metaphysics, the very essence of God is the loving generation of wisdom in the Son; there is nothing prior to this inspiraling dance of perichoresis or circumincession. In a roundabout way, God is only the perpetual gift of wisdom.

Which is only the whole point. Or at least a Big Hint. In America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, Reilly quotes Justin Martyr:

The Logos is the preexistent, absolute, personal Reason and Christ is the embodiment of it, the Logos incarnate. Whatever is rational is Christian. And whatever is Christian is rational.

Which answers the question posed in the title of this post. "Christianity," says Reilly, "contains an invitation to reason because God's rationality guarantees reason's integrity." For backup, he calls in James Schall, who writes that "What is revealed does not demand the denial of intellect, but fosters it."

For "If God is Logos, reason and revelation are not at an impasse." And any so-called philosophy "that a priori excludes the possibility of revelation is a philosophy that is not true to itself. On its own terms, philosophy must remain open to revelation" (Reilly).

Me? I think the philosophizing intellect is already a revelation. You might say it is the "first revelation," in that it is a necessary condition to receive the others. No intellect, no problem. But with intellect, life is an endless problem.

If you want to see it that way. Instead of problem, I would say mystery-adventure-love story. If that's not the form of your life, then you do indeed have a problem. But only a problem.

Whaddya Know?

I mean really. What do we know? What can we know with absolute certitude?

Hmm. The title of this post smells familiar. Haven't we belabored this point before?

Yes. It's been eight years though, and perhaps in the meantime human nature has undergone a fundamental change, such that there are permanent truths we can know today that we couldn't know then. I'd better skim the post. You needn't bother -- if I find anything worthwhile, I'll drag it up. Be right back...

It seems to me that everything hinges upon whether or not man may know. If we cannot know, then our whole pretentious house of cards collapses, and we are reduced to competing forms of nihilism, or survival of the frivolous. But if we can know, then...

To approach this question is truly to begin at the beginning, because no other questions can be answered until we establish the fact that questions are answerable -- i.e., that man may possess true knowledge of himself and of the world.

Indeed, some thinkers believe we must go even further back, and first establish the existence of the world. For example, this is what Kant does, and concludes that it doesn't exist. That being the case, we cannot know anything about it. The end.

That's an exaggeration, but only an uncharitable one. The point is that Kant placed a dark line between What Is and What We May Know About It, which ultimately results in an unbridgeable chasm between being and knowing.

Right. You can't know a little bit about the unknowable -- even that it's unknowable. I mean, that's a yuge claim. And more than a little presumptuous, for it is saying a great deal to say that ultimate truth consists in not knowing it. Well, you may be lost at sea, but that doesn't prove dry land doesn't exist, does it?

Our dry land consists of self-evident truths. How do we know when we've found one? I would say when denial of it entails absurd or monstrous consequences. It reminds me of something Chesterton said of the "thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped."

One such thought is that our thoughts do not disclose reality and that truth is therefore inaccessible to human beings: come for the absurdity, stay for the monstrosity. Literally, because once you enter such an epistemological hellworld, there is no rational exit: mandatory stupidity, no exceptions.

Since truth is the conformity of mind to reality, the very notion of truth is poisoned at the root. Thought and Thing go through an ugly divorce, and Thing gets to keep all the real properties to herself, since you Kant take 'em with you. Man becomes closed upon himself, and tenure takes care of the rest.

The whole thing can be boiled down even further, which is why I developed my irritating system of unsaturated pneumaticons. For truly, it all comes down to O and/or Ø, does it not?

Speaking of boiling things down further... I'm tempted to go off on an important tangent that would derail this post. I'll try to be brief. I'm reading an interesting book called America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, in which the author doesn't just trace the intellectual roots of the founding, but drills all the way down to the very foundation of the cosmos, similar (but different) to what we do around here.

Who else uses "cosmos" and "America" in the same sentence? Well, the founders did so implicitly in justifying our existence on the basis of its conformity with the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God. This makes their efforts "cosmic in scope. It is a drama across time" (Arnn, in Reilly). It is transhistorical before it is historical, because it begins at the end: with universal truths and immutable human nature.

Speaking of beginnings,

"Every metaphysics that is not measured by the mystery of what is, but by the state of positive science at such and such an instant, is false from the beginning" (Maritain)....

Let us stipulate that man may know. But what does this mean, to know? What is happening when we know something? The answer isn't obvious -- at least not anymore -- but for Maritain it is an irreducibly spiritual event through and through. For

"There is a vigorous correspondance between knowledge and immateriality. A being is known to being to the extent that it is immaterial."

And with that we're back to where this post started, in an essay by Josef Pieper called On the Desire for Certainty.

Certainty is good. But is there something better -- or at least prior to it? Yes. Call it trust. Or faith. One way or the other(s), there's no way to avoid this leap. Of course, faith in oneself is wholly unwarranted, but nor is faith in God warranted if we can't trust our faith in his faith in us. It's a spiral, or spiration.

I suppose the bottom line for today is that either we are enclosed in the circle or there is an exit from it. The rest is commentary, more than half of which is absurd. And eventually monstrous.

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.