The Last Temptation of Bob

To back up a bit, why does it even matter? You know, this business of esoteric vs. exoteric -- it sounds like you're having a relapse of new age gnosticism; or probably just fleeing from the unavoidable scandal of Christianity. 

The Last Temptation of Bob?

I can think of two main reasons why it matters, the first being metaphysical, the second evangelical, or understanding and communication, respectively. 

As it pertains to the blog, we never communicate what we haven't understood; we do not engage in speculation. For starters, if we give someone a bum steer, i.e., bad vertical directions, then...

Put it this way: just as we are responsible, forever, for any exuperant animal we tame, we are equally responsible for what we presume to teach. Let's say I confidently give a motorist directions, not knowing or caring that he will drive over an abyss or crash into a wall. The consequences are on me.  

Nor, in giving directions, should we go wobbly at critical junctures, unless the wobbliness is truly in the nature of things, which it sometimes is. The intellect has its rights and privileges, and in general these are both more and less extensive than the average person realizes. Human beings are much more intelligent than folks realize, but also much more stupid -- especially the intelligent ones. The stupid ones generally aren't so grandiose. 

Consider the village atheist, whose spiritual pathology is precisely a consequence of a ridiculous pride mingled with bottomless subjectivity. For truly, who cares about the inane babbling of an opinionated primate? Either these primates can know truth or they can't; and if they can, then they have thereby transcended themselves and left biology and physics and atheism below. Besides, we're Homo sapiens, not Homo opiniones. 

Biology and physics, or math and genetics, still exist -- obviously -- but the intellect explains them rather than vice versa. The lower realms are necessary but never sufficient conditions for the emergence of humanness. If they were both necessary and sufficient, we couldn't know it, any more than my dog can know she is a domesticated descendent of an extinct ancient wolf. 

Back to the question at hand: why is esoterism important? Come to think of it, let's first define our terms: what exactly is esoterism? 

Well, there's no such thing unless it is understood in the context of its complementary partner, exoterism. This is one of those primordial complementarities that suffuse our existence, e.g., subject/object, time/eternity, form/substance, self/other, appearance/reality, absolute/relative, etc. In each case, the one evokes the other, and cannot be conceptualized in its absence.

So in reality, to say esoterism is to imply exoterism, and vice versa:

The word “esoterism” suggests in the first place an idea of complementarity, of a “half” as it were: esoterism is the complement of exoterism, it is the “spirit” which completes the “letter" (Schuon).

Now, as we have said many times, in any Primordial Complementarity one pole must be prior, even if we never see them apart. For example, there is no subject without an object, but obviously subjectivity could never occur in a purely objective universe. Therefore, the subject must be prior, and ultimately this Subject-Intellect is God, but that's beside -- or above, rather -- the point.

The Point being that herebelow Truth takes a form, but the substance of truth cannot be reduced to its form, for the same reason that the subject can't be reduced to object, or semantics to syntax. 

As we mentioned in the previous post, we can express the same truth in an infinite number of ways, even if some ways are necessarily better -- not forgetting more beautiful -- than others. Come to think of it, the "best way" will be characterized by a maximum of truth, beauty, and goodness, by light and warmth and glorious living color. 

But we can't actually see pure light, can we? Or, we can see it for a moment, just before it renders us permanently blind. Humanly speaking, light for us is helpfully given the appearance of color, and Schuon often uses this analogy to distinguish pure formless truth from the forms it takes:

the word “esoterism” designates not only the total truth inasmuch as it is “colored” by entering a system of partial truth, but also the total truth as such, which is colorless. This distinction is not a mere theoretical luxury; on the contrary, it implies extremely important consequences. 

We live in a cognitive prismhouse of intellectual color-forms, and these forms simultaneously convey and veil the whitelight of Truth. 

Now, what is the most "esoteric" thing that could possibly happen in this cosmos?

Hmm. I suppose it would be for the pure Light to actually become one of its colors: for the Light to become color that the color might become Light. 

We'll end with some passages from this intriguing new translation and interpretation of John, called Mary's Voice in the Gospel (linked in the sidebar):

In him, there was life, and this Life was the light of all humankind....

The genuine light, the light which brings light to every human being, now coming into the world -- this is what he was.

He was in the world! [?!] And the world had come to be through him, and the world did not know him....

The Gift and the Truth came to be through Jesus Christ.

Again, it doesn't get more esoteric than this. As John (the Baptizing-Esoterist) exclaimed in his bewilderness,

After me there is coming a man who is placed before me, because before I was, he was.

Wut? Pakulak claims that in verse 18, a better reading of "only-begotten Son" is "Only-Begotten God." Apparently God never stops giving birth to himself, hisword; and we are invited to likewise give birth to this Godword in the womb of our godward soul: mission accompliced! 

And out of this Nothingness God was born (Meister Eckhart).

The Last Temptation of Bob

To back up a bit, why does it even matter? You know, this business of esoteric vs. exoteric -- it sounds like you're having a relapse of new age gnosticism; or probably just fleeing from the unavoidable scandal of Christianity. 

The Last Temptation of Bob?

I can think of two main reasons why it matters, the first being metaphysical, the second evangelical, or understanding and communication, respectively. 

As it pertains to the blog, we never communicate what we haven't understood; we do not engage in speculation. For starters, if we give someone a bum steer, i.e., bad vertical directions, then...

Put it this way: just as we are responsible, forever, for any exuperant animal we tame, we are equally responsible for what we presume to teach. Let's say I confidently give a motorist directions, not knowing or caring that he will drive over an abyss or crash into a wall. The consequences are on me.  

Nor, in giving directions, should we go wobbly at critical junctures, unless the wobbliness is truly in the nature of things, which it sometimes is. The intellect has its rights and privileges, and in general these are both more and less extensive than the average person realizes. Human beings are much more intelligent than folks realize, but also much more stupid -- especially the intelligent ones. The stupid ones generally aren't so grandiose. 

Consider the village atheist, whose spiritual pathology is precisely a consequence of a ridiculous pride mingled with bottomless subjectivity. For truly, who cares about the inane babbling of an opinionated primate? Either these primates can know truth or they can't; and if they can, then they have thereby transcended themselves and left biology and physics and atheism below. Besides, we're Homo sapiens, not Homo opiniones. 

Biology and physics, or math and genetics, still exist -- obviously -- but the intellect explains them rather than vice versa. The lower realms are necessary but never sufficient conditions for the emergence of humanness. If they were both necessary and sufficient, we couldn't know it, any more than my dog can know she is a domesticated descendent of an extinct ancient wolf. 

Back to the question at hand: why is esoterism important? Come to think of it, let's first define our terms: what exactly is esoterism? 

Well, there's no such thing unless it is understood in the context of its complementary partner, exoterism. This is one of those primordial complementarities that suffuse our existence, e.g., subject/object, time/eternity, form/substance, self/other, appearance/reality, absolute/relative, etc. In each case, the one evokes the other, and cannot be conceptualized in its absence.

So in reality, to say esoterism is to imply exoterism, and vice versa:

The word “esoterism” suggests in the first place an idea of complementarity, of a “half” as it were: esoterism is the complement of exoterism, it is the “spirit” which completes the “letter" (Schuon).

Now, as we have said many times, in any Primordial Complementarity one pole must be prior, even if we never see them apart. For example, there is no subject without an object, but obviously subjectivity could never occur in a purely objective universe. Therefore, the subject must be prior, and ultimately this Subject-Intellect is God, but that's beside -- or above, rather -- the point.

The Point being that herebelow Truth takes a form, but the substance of truth cannot be reduced to its form, for the same reason that the subject can't be reduced to object, or semantics to syntax. 

As we mentioned in the previous post, we can express the same truth in an infinite number of ways, even if some ways are necessarily better -- not forgetting more beautiful -- than others. Come to think of it, the "best way" will be characterized by a maximum of truth, beauty, and goodness, by light and warmth and glorious living color. 

But we can't actually see pure light, can we? Or, we can see it for a moment, just before it renders us permanently blind. Humanly speaking, light for us is helpfully given the appearance of color, and Schuon often uses this analogy to distinguish pure formless truth from the forms it takes:

the word “esoterism” designates not only the total truth inasmuch as it is “colored” by entering a system of partial truth, but also the total truth as such, which is colorless. This distinction is not a mere theoretical luxury; on the contrary, it implies extremely important consequences. 

We live in a cognitive prismhouse of intellectual color-forms, and these forms simultaneously convey and veil the whitelight of Truth. 

Now, what is the most "esoteric" thing that could possibly happen in this cosmos?

Hmm. I suppose it would be for the pure Light to actually become one of its colors: for the Light to become color that the color might become Light. 

We'll end with some passages from this intriguing new translation and interpretation of John, called Mary's Voice in the Gospel (linked in the sidebar):

In him, there was life, and this Life was the light of all humankind....

The genuine light, the light which brings light to every human being, now coming into the world -- this is what he was.

He was in the world! [?!] And the world had come to be through him, and the world did not know him....

The Gift and the Truth came to be through Jesus Christ.

Again, it doesn't get more esoteric than this. As John (the Baptizing-Esoterist) exclaimed in his bewilderness,

After me there is coming a man who is placed before me, because before I was, he was.

Wut? Pakulak claims that in verse 18, a better reading of "only-begotten Son" is "Only-Begotten God." Apparently God never stops giving birth to himself, hisword; and we are invited to likewise give birth to this Godword in the womb of our godward soul: mission accompliced! 

And out of this Nothingness God was born (Meister Eckhart).

In Other Words, There are Always Other Words

In rereading Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity I've been re-reminded of something Schuon said to the effect that Christianity is an esoterism masquerading as an exoterism. However, now I'm not so sure he said that, since I've spent the last couple of hours unsuccessfully looking for the exact quote.

Which doesn't mean the search was fruitless; to the contrary, I ended up gathering way more fruit than my head can possible contain or fingers can transmit in the allotted time. It just wan't the fruit I was looking for. 

A reminder that a form can never be the only possible form of what it expresses; in other words, there are always other words available to express the same principle, concept, idea, archetype, etc. You could call Bruce "Caitlin" but he's still a man. The substance doesn't change. 

Looked at from this perspective, we understand that God is the only possible uniqueness-as-such. One might also say that he is thereby the source and ground of the relatively unique, in particular, of the human individual. The human individual is, as it were, God's uniqueness reflected in us (assuming we choose to actualize this potential and not sink into the progressive blob). 

But no human is utterly unique, if only because we would no longer be an instantiation of the species "human." To say human is to advert to what we share with other humans; orthoparadoxically, one of the most important qualities we share is none other than our uniqueness! 

But again, by definition only God is unique. For similar reasons, only God can truly create. Man too -- since he is again the image of the Creator -- can "create," but not from nothing. We can write a poem, but no poet has invented language. Rather, it was here when the poet arrived on the scene. Moreover, the principle of language is the eternal Logos, and it was (is) here before the beginning, AKA always.   

My point is that fruit is a species, and I was looking for a particular one. Instead, I gathered lots of other fruit, but what is fruit, anyway? And why is it one of those words that pops up everywhere in scripture, not just ours, but everyone's?  

Moreover, fruit can be both good and bad, so much so that it plays a central role in everything from our primordial catastrophe (the fruit of which is fatal upon ingestion or even touch) to our salvation ("blessed the fruit of your womb," "I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit").  Some fruits are forbidden, while others are praised and highly recommended for a healthy vertical diet.

Which reminds me. Analysis and synthesis are the metabolism of being. Eating the fruit is one thing, but weaving it into one's substance another. Letter and spirit; geometry and music; essence and form.

As I mentioned in a comment or maybe it was a post, Ratzinger's "Introduction" to Christianity is more of a meditation on how to reintroduce Christianity to a world that no longer speaks its language. But this goes to what was said above about how the same concept can always be expressed in different word-forms. 

Some people -- atheists at one end, "fundamentalists" at the other -- get hung up on the words and thereby lose what they're referring to. Then again, not exactly, because God knows his own, and there is still something of the essence in the revealed forms the fundamentalist takes overly literally, while for the atheist there are only the meaningless words. 

In this morning's search, I found a passage by Schuon that parallels Ratzinger's point about how to convey the Christian message to today's mentality -- a mentality that is materialistic, scientistic, ideological, anti-intellectual, and deeply superstitious. Ratzinger:

belief appears on the scene in the garb of days gone by and, indeed, seems itself to be something old-fashioned, the mode of life and existence current a long time ago....it looks much like a demand to bind oneself to yesterday and to affirm itself as eternally valid.

Anyone who tries today to talk about the question of Christian faith in the presence of people who are not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought... soon comes to sense the alien -- and alienating -- nature of such an enterprise.

Frankly, it is precisely this alienation that is one of my motivations in blogging -- specifically, to make the faith less alienating to myself. If it also helps others, there's nothing I can do about that. I'm a lapsed unbeliever who shares the doubt of the unbeliever, just not his faith in his doubt.

For Schuon's part, he points out that the problem isn't so much one of modern/premodern but of exoteric/esoteric. In short, most of the problems of language can be resolved with a simple shift of planes, from the form (the words) to the substance:

The exoteric viewpoint is, in fact, doomed to end by negating itself once it is no longer vivified by the presence within it of the esoterism of which it is both the outward radiation and the veil.... the atrophy that overtakes dogmas when they are deprived of their internal dimension recoils upon them from the outside, in the form of heretical and atheistic negations.

The Passion of Marx and the stupidity of the New Age. 

In Other Words, There are Always Other Words

In rereading Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity I've been re-reminded of something Schuon said to the effect that Christianity is an esoterism masquerading as an exoterism. However, now I'm not so sure he said that, since I've spent the last couple of hours unsuccessfully looking for the exact quote.

Which doesn't mean the search was fruitless; to the contrary, I ended up gathering way more fruit than my head can possible contain or fingers can transmit in the allotted time. It just wan't the fruit I was looking for. 

A reminder that a form can never be the only possible form of what it expresses; in other words, there are always other words available to express the same principle, concept, idea, archetype, etc. You could call Bruce "Caitlin" but he's still a man. The substance doesn't change. 

Looked at from this perspective, we understand that God is the only possible uniqueness-as-such. One might also say that he is thereby the source and ground of the relatively unique, in particular, of the human individual. The human individual is, as it were, God's uniqueness reflected in us (assuming we choose to actualize this potential and not sink into the progressive blob). 

But no human is utterly unique, if only because we would no longer be an instantiation of the species "human." To say human is to advert to what we share with other humans; orthoparadoxically, one of the most important qualities we share is none other than our uniqueness! 

But again, by definition only God is unique. For similar reasons, only God can truly create. Man too -- since he is again the image of the Creator -- can "create," but not from nothing. We can write a poem, but no poet has invented language. Rather, it was here when the poet arrived on the scene. Moreover, the principle of language is the eternal Logos, and it was (is) here before the beginning, AKA always.   

My point is that fruit is a species, and I was looking for a particular one. Instead, I gathered lots of other fruit, but what is fruit, anyway? And why is it one of those words that pops up everywhere in scripture, not just ours, but everyone's?  

Moreover, fruit can be both good and bad, so much so that it plays a central role in everything from our primordial catastrophe (the fruit of which is fatal upon ingestion or even touch) to our salvation ("blessed the fruit of your womb," "I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit").  Some fruits are forbidden, while others are praised and highly recommended for a healthy vertical diet.

Which reminds me. Analysis and synthesis are the metabolism of being. Eating the fruit is one thing, but weaving it into one's substance another. Letter and spirit; geometry and music; essence and form.

As I mentioned in a comment or maybe it was a post, Ratzinger's "Introduction" to Christianity is more of a meditation on how to reintroduce Christianity to a world that no longer speaks its language. But this goes to what was said above about how the same concept can always be expressed in different word-forms. 

Some people -- atheists at one end, "fundamentalists" at the other -- get hung up on the words and thereby lose what they're referring to. Then again, not exactly, because God knows his own, and there is still something of the essence in the revealed forms the fundamentalist takes overly literally, while for the atheist there are only the meaningless words. 

In this morning's search, I found a passage by Schuon that parallels Ratzinger's point about how to convey the Christian message to today's mentality -- a mentality that is materialistic, scientistic, ideological, anti-intellectual, and deeply superstitious. Ratzinger:

belief appears on the scene in the garb of days gone by and, indeed, seems itself to be something old-fashioned, the mode of life and existence current a long time ago....it looks much like a demand to bind oneself to yesterday and to affirm itself as eternally valid.

Anyone who tries today to talk about the question of Christian faith in the presence of people who are not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought... soon comes to sense the alien -- and alienating -- nature of such an enterprise.

Frankly, it is precisely this alienation that is one of my motivations in blogging -- specifically, to make the faith less alienating to myself. If it also helps others, there's nothing I can do about that. I'm a lapsed unbeliever who shares the doubt of the unbeliever, just not his faith in his doubt.

For Schuon's part, he points out that the problem isn't so much one of modern/premodern but of exoteric/esoteric. In short, most of the problems of language can be resolved with a simple shift of planes, from the form (the words) to the substance:

The exoteric viewpoint is, in fact, doomed to end by negating itself once it is no longer vivified by the presence within it of the esoterism of which it is both the outward radiation and the veil.... the atrophy that overtakes dogmas when they are deprived of their internal dimension recoils upon them from the outside, in the form of heretical and atheistic negations.

The Passion of Marx and the stupidity of the New Age. 

Tunneling Up & Out of the Dueling Matrices

A pregnant passage from Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity:

Let us listen once again to St. Augustine: "In God there are no accidents, only substance and relation." Therein lies concealed a revolution in man's view of the world: the sole dominion of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality.

Our team of vertical fact checkers has determined that this is almost entirely true. We cannot confirm the bit about "no accidents," because there is reason to believe that an absence of all contingency would negate the revolutionary insight into the supernatural rights of relativity.  

We're on p. 184, by the way. I want to flip back to p.180, where Ratzinger expresses a view that is shockingly similar to mine as to the implications of elevating the category of relation to the plane of absoluteness. In short, the so-called paradox of a Godhead of three persons in or of one substance 

is connected with the problem of absolute and relative and emphasizes the absoluteness of the relative, of that which is in relation.

I don't want to put words into his mouth, but this does indeed have revolutionary consequences on every plane, from metaphysics on down. 

Off the top of my head, I would say that the principle of Relation is precisely where freedom is anchored: in the "space" between I and Thou, or Father and Son, or, more abstractly, between the Absolute-One and the Relative-Many.

And since freedom is not determinism, it seems to me that something like "accident"or contingency is introduced into the Godhead. Experts say this is Impermissible and even insulting to God, but he's been called worse things than related and therefore relative to his creatures. I think it's rather nice. 

Conversely, if everything is necessary, then freedom reduces to determinism, and we're back to an inconceivable and unrelatable Immutable Immutability.

I'm thoroughly familiar with arguments that prove God is immutable, but they are ultimately purely deductive. Using the same sort of logic, one could deduce that there is no such thing as change, anywhere or at any time, rather, that the cosmos is just one solitary block of spacetime. 

This has been a long argument. In one corner of Ancient Greek thought is Heraclitus, father of all philosophies of Becoming, right down to present day process philosophers and metaphysical evolutionists. In the other corner is Parmenides, who repudiated relativism and change by insisting "on an eternal, single Truth." He

taught a strict Monistic view of reality. Philosophical Monism is the belief that all of the sensible world is of one, basic, substance and being, un-created and indestructible....

[His] thought could not be further removed from that of Heraclitus in that Parmenides claimed nothing moved, change was an impossibility, and that human sense perception could not be relied upon for an apprehension of Truth. 

The central vision of Parmenides' work is that change is an illusion -- appearances change but not essence -- which is later reflected in Plato's Theory of Forms which claims that the observable world is only a reflection of a higher, truer, reality (worldhistory.org/Parmenides).

Pre-Christian thought is locked in this endless debate between the immovable object of eternal Being and the irresistible force of pure Becoming. No it isn't. Yes it is! That's just a contradiction, not an argument! No it's not!

Time's up.

How about a compromise? Why not just say reality is both -- i.e., changing and changeless? Well, for starters, because the intellect has an innate desire for unity, which is its natural telos. We're always looking for more comprehensive ways to account for diverse phenomena. What is science, for example, but the reduction of multiplicity to unity? 

Same with the supreme science of metaphysics. The least it can do is not end its search in an ugly dualism, whether it is between mind and matter, subject and object, empiricism and idealism, man and woman, whatever.

Looked at this way, we can appreciate how the trinitarian Godhead is indeed a breakthrough -- albeit from God's side into ours and not ours into his. 

We might say that the Incarnation is the breakthrough of the Trinity into time and history. On the one hand, the ultimate principle of substance-in-relation cannot be arrived at via mere (lowercase) reason, but on the other, not only is it not in any way repugnant to reason, but installs a giant picture window into the realm of natural reason, allowing the higher light to stream in.

A window for the intellect and a door for the will. But first you have to turn around and open it. Don't worry, it only locks from the inside. 

That's about it for today. To be continued... 

Tunneling Up & Out of the Dueling Matrices

A pregnant passage from Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity:

Let us listen once again to St. Augustine: "In God there are no accidents, only substance and relation." Therein lies concealed a revolution in man's view of the world: the sole dominion of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality.

Our team of vertical fact checkers has determined that this is almost entirely true. We cannot confirm the bit about "no accidents," because there is reason to believe that an absence of all contingency would negate the revolutionary insight into the supernatural rights of relativity.  

We're on p. 184, by the way. I want to flip back to p.180, where Ratzinger expresses a view that is shockingly similar to mine as to the implications of elevating the category of relation to the plane of absoluteness. In short, the so-called paradox of a Godhead of three persons in or of one substance 

is connected with the problem of absolute and relative and emphasizes the absoluteness of the relative, of that which is in relation.

I don't want to put words into his mouth, but this does indeed have revolutionary consequences on every plane, from metaphysics on down. 

Off the top of my head, I would say that the principle of Relation is precisely where freedom is anchored: in the "space" between I and Thou, or Father and Son, or, more abstractly, between the Absolute-One and the Relative-Many.

And since freedom is not determinism, it seems to me that something like "accident"or contingency is introduced into the Godhead. Experts say this is Impermissible and even insulting to God, but he's been called worse things than related and therefore relative to his creatures. I think it's rather nice. 

Conversely, if everything is necessary, then freedom reduces to determinism, and we're back to an inconceivable and unrelatable Immutable Immutability.

I'm thoroughly familiar with arguments that prove God is immutable, but they are ultimately purely deductive. Using the same sort of logic, one could deduce that there is no such thing as change, anywhere or at any time, rather, that the cosmos is just one solitary block of spacetime. 

This has been a long argument. In one corner of Ancient Greek thought is Heraclitus, father of all philosophies of Becoming, right down to present day process philosophers and metaphysical evolutionists. In the other corner is Parmenides, who repudiated relativism and change by insisting "on an eternal, single Truth." He

taught a strict Monistic view of reality. Philosophical Monism is the belief that all of the sensible world is of one, basic, substance and being, un-created and indestructible....

[His] thought could not be further removed from that of Heraclitus in that Parmenides claimed nothing moved, change was an impossibility, and that human sense perception could not be relied upon for an apprehension of Truth. 

The central vision of Parmenides' work is that change is an illusion -- appearances change but not essence -- which is later reflected in Plato's Theory of Forms which claims that the observable world is only a reflection of a higher, truer, reality (worldhistory.org/Parmenides).

Pre-Christian thought is locked in this endless debate between the immovable object of eternal Being and the irresistible force of pure Becoming. No it isn't. Yes it is! That's just a contradiction, not an argument! No it's not!

Time's up.

How about a compromise? Why not just say reality is both -- i.e., changing and changeless? Well, for starters, because the intellect has an innate desire for unity, which is its natural telos. We're always looking for more comprehensive ways to account for diverse phenomena. What is science, for example, but the reduction of multiplicity to unity? 

Same with the supreme science of metaphysics. The least it can do is not end its search in an ugly dualism, whether it is between mind and matter, subject and object, empiricism and idealism, man and woman, whatever.

Looked at this way, we can appreciate how the trinitarian Godhead is indeed a breakthrough -- albeit from God's side into ours and not ours into his. 

We might say that the Incarnation is the breakthrough of the Trinity into time and history. On the one hand, the ultimate principle of substance-in-relation cannot be arrived at via mere (lowercase) reason, but on the other, not only is it not in any way repugnant to reason, but installs a giant picture window into the realm of natural reason, allowing the higher light to stream in.

A window for the intellect and a door for the will. But first you have to turn around and open it. Don't worry, it only locks from the inside. 

That's about it for today. To be continued... 

Wide Open Spaces and Tight Shuttered Places

So, man is the rational animal, from which follows the free animal, religious animal, self-aware animal, speaking animal, moral animal, political animal, artistic animal, et al; to put it conversely, remove reason, and man is plunged back into mere animality and worse. 

Worse because man cannot actually eliminate reason; rather, he can only misuse it -- which is to say, order it to a bad end. 

For example, freedom minus reason = license; religion minus reason = superstition; education minus reason = the looniversity bin; politics minus reason = Democrats; etc.

Man minus reason is just an opinionated animal. A bloviating primate. A tenured ape. A crank with a blog. In a word, Bob. For "Bob cannot take criticism. I mean at all. Not even the slightest little thing. That is not normal. He will never be civil to you again" (A. Nonymous Troll). 

In the previous post we touched on the principle of substance, which comes to us through matter but cannot be reduced to it; rather, it

is a formal principle belonging to an order beyond quantity and sensible qualities. A whole entirely in the whole and entirely in each part, this formal principle assures the unity of the whole. The senses cannot grasp it. The intellect alone reaches it (G-L).

This relation works both ways. Which is why they call it a relation, for if A is related to B, then B is thereby related to A. Suffice it to say that knowledge of substances proves the existence of the intellect that knows them, and vice versa. 

But this knowledge is only "the first determination of being," i.e., that something is. We grasp that it is something, but what? According to G-L,

the multiple is intelligible only in function of the one, and the transitory only in function of the permanent or the identical.

Which goes back to what we said a couple of posts back about how the unity of the cosmos must be (albeit atemporally) prior to its diversity, both objectively and subjectively. If this weren't the case, then science would be impossible. Yes, the cosmos is divisible, but only because it is indivisible. Absent the latter, then the divisibility ends in an absurd logical atomism with no substantial ground: all discrete particles with no unifying wave, you might say. 

Speaking of which, I was a little surprised to see Ratzinger deploy the wave-particle complementarity to the trinitarian Godhead, as this principle is usually misused by woohoo pneumopaths of dopey Oprah-Chopra kind. 

But before transitioning over to Ratzinger, a few more words about the indivisible and immutable. Just as we can't coherently deny cosmic unity, nor can we coherently deny the immutable. Those who do merely elevate something less to the immutable (i.e., create a false absolute), and fall into idolatry -- like the frog at the bottom of a well who is sure the sky is a small blue disc. 

These folks may be known by their rigidity and closed-ness to Reality. They reduce Reality to ideology and then blame us for escaping from their little matrix! This is 

the immutability of narrow minds and tight hearts, the immutability of the obstinate who see only one side of things and wish to make it absolute.... This is the immutability of the fanatic and sectarian...., the egoist who is full of himself and satiated.

Which they can't help but project into us, because what else are they supposed to do with it? We literally become the Taliban -- even while they pretend the actual Taliban aren't so bad if you just give them a chance!  

Above this cadaverous immobility that arises from narrowness of receptive capacities and of desire, there is something superior, found only in natures capable of seeing the multiple aspects of things, without, however, being able to bring this multiplicity back to a superior unity. 

This describes the skeptic, the mid-level sophist whose mind is like an organism with catabolism (breaking down) but no anabolism (building up, synthesis):

Here, we have inconstancy and agitation, a seeking that does not arrive at a result. This is the state of mind of those who prefer... the search for truth to truth itself.

Above this intermediary and perpetually adolescent state is 

the immutability that arises not from the narrowness of capacities, nor from the poverty of desire, but rather, from the perfection of what one possesses, from the value of the realized end.

"This is no longer the immutability of the simplistic person, of the closed mind," but of "the synthetic thinker who knows how... to pass beyond the multiple, to give a unity to his science."

At the far (vertical) end there exists a "superior immutability" that converges on sanctity, of all things, for "the saint is a being who is immutably fixed in God." In other words, there exists an "immutability of beings who have passed beyond the relative and have truly found the Absolute."

Which makes perfect nonsense if we recall that truth and goodness necessarily converge at the toppermost of the poppermost, because the virtue of the intellect is Truth itself, and both share the same substance.

Probably a good place to end, rather than veering into a very different but intimately related subject.

Wide Open Spaces and Tight Shuttered Places

So, man is the rational animal, from which follows the free animal, religious animal, self-aware animal, speaking animal, moral animal, political animal, artistic animal, et al; to put it conversely, remove reason, and man is plunged back into mere animality and worse. 

Worse because man cannot actually eliminate reason; rather, he can only misuse it -- which is to say, order it to a bad end. 

For example, freedom minus reason = license; religion minus reason = superstition; education minus reason = the looniversity bin; politics minus reason = Democrats; etc.

Man minus reason is just an opinionated animal. A bloviating primate. A tenured ape. A crank with a blog. In a word, Bob. For "Bob cannot take criticism. I mean at all. Not even the slightest little thing. That is not normal. He will never be civil to you again" (A. Nonymous Troll). 

In the previous post we touched on the principle of substance, which comes to us through matter but cannot be reduced to it; rather, it

is a formal principle belonging to an order beyond quantity and sensible qualities. A whole entirely in the whole and entirely in each part, this formal principle assures the unity of the whole. The senses cannot grasp it. The intellect alone reaches it (G-L).

This relation works both ways. Which is why they call it a relation, for if A is related to B, then B is thereby related to A. Suffice it to say that knowledge of substances proves the existence of the intellect that knows them, and vice versa. 

But this knowledge is only "the first determination of being," i.e., that something is. We grasp that it is something, but what? According to G-L,

the multiple is intelligible only in function of the one, and the transitory only in function of the permanent or the identical.

Which goes back to what we said a couple of posts back about how the unity of the cosmos must be (albeit atemporally) prior to its diversity, both objectively and subjectively. If this weren't the case, then science would be impossible. Yes, the cosmos is divisible, but only because it is indivisible. Absent the latter, then the divisibility ends in an absurd logical atomism with no substantial ground: all discrete particles with no unifying wave, you might say. 

Speaking of which, I was a little surprised to see Ratzinger deploy the wave-particle complementarity to the trinitarian Godhead, as this principle is usually misused by woohoo pneumopaths of dopey Oprah-Chopra kind. 

But before transitioning over to Ratzinger, a few more words about the indivisible and immutable. Just as we can't coherently deny cosmic unity, nor can we coherently deny the immutable. Those who do merely elevate something less to the immutable (i.e., create a false absolute), and fall into idolatry -- like the frog at the bottom of a well who is sure the sky is a small blue disc. 

These folks may be known by their rigidity and closed-ness to Reality. They reduce Reality to ideology and then blame us for escaping from their little matrix! This is 

the immutability of narrow minds and tight hearts, the immutability of the obstinate who see only one side of things and wish to make it absolute.... This is the immutability of the fanatic and sectarian...., the egoist who is full of himself and satiated.

Which they can't help but project into us, because what else are they supposed to do with it? We literally become the Taliban -- even while they pretend the actual Taliban aren't so bad if you just give them a chance!  

Above this cadaverous immobility that arises from narrowness of receptive capacities and of desire, there is something superior, found only in natures capable of seeing the multiple aspects of things, without, however, being able to bring this multiplicity back to a superior unity. 

This describes the skeptic, the mid-level sophist whose mind is like an organism with catabolism (breaking down) but no anabolism (building up, synthesis):

Here, we have inconstancy and agitation, a seeking that does not arrive at a result. This is the state of mind of those who prefer... the search for truth to truth itself.

Above this intermediary and perpetually adolescent state is 

the immutability that arises not from the narrowness of capacities, nor from the poverty of desire, but rather, from the perfection of what one possesses, from the value of the realized end.

"This is no longer the immutability of the simplistic person, of the closed mind," but of "the synthetic thinker who knows how... to pass beyond the multiple, to give a unity to his science."

At the far (vertical) end there exists a "superior immutability" that converges on sanctity, of all things, for "the saint is a being who is immutably fixed in God." In other words, there exists an "immutability of beings who have passed beyond the relative and have truly found the Absolute."

Which makes perfect nonsense if we recall that truth and goodness necessarily converge at the toppermost of the poppermost, because the virtue of the intellect is Truth itself, and both share the same substance.

Probably a good place to end, rather than veering into a very different but intimately related subject.

Melody and Harmony in the Cosmic Suite

Along the vertical spectrum there are three principle degrees of abstraction to which we have access; from the bottom up, they are 1) the positive sciences, which still have one foot in matter, 2) mathematics, and 3) the metaphysical, this latter being completely immaterial and going to the sort of cosmos in which math and intelligible matter can even exist. 

The vertical spectrum can be further subdivided in any number of ways, for example, between physics and biology, psychology and neurology, theology and metaphysics. Nevertheless, despite these divisions, it's all still -- somehow -- One Cosmos. 

In the previous post we added "indivisible," but that's only half the story, for in reality, it is always both divisible and indivisible, continuous and discontinuous, radial (the Cosmic Ray from the center out) and circumferential (semiautonomous circles around Celestial Central).  

This goes to one of those primordial complementarities we've heard so little about. However, as with all such complementarities, one pole must be prior, and in this case it's indivisibility, for the alternative is both inconceivable and impossible: no amount of parts adds up to the whole if the whole isn't already fractally present in the parts. 

In the absence of this prior unity, the best we can accomplish is an aggregation, agglomeration, or agglutination; a blob, glob, or mob. 

G-L agrees that "A being's quantitative unity in space is not the criterion for its substantial unity. This quantitative unity presumes only an accidental union (an aggregation of molecules)." In short, there is the accidental unity of the blob, and the substantial unity of the whole: substance and accident, another one of those primordial complementarities. 

This calls to mind a mundane but insultaining political thought: you will have noticed that the left always makes transparently fraudulent appeals to "unity," even while its primitive identity politics assures that real (substantial) unity is impossible. They invent fake unities such as the LGBTQ community, the black community, or Latin-x community, etc.  

First of all, these aren't real communities, since a "black community" of Sharptons, Obamas, and Waterses has no commonality with a "black community" of Elders, Sowells, and Thomases. Second, there is no substantial unity among the primitive tribes to which the left never stops pandering. The only unity is accidental, revolving around force, cash prizes, and demonization of those of us who don't belong to a tribe of DNC certified victims. 

Rather, we are members of a community with a higher unity revolving around civilization, natural law, the Constitution, etc. Our movement rests upon a substantial unity, not an accidental one of skin tone, genitalia, or sexual deviance.   

Which, come to think of it, mirrors the substantial unity of the Vertical Church of the Friends of Reality, the body of Christ, in which it doesn't matter whether you are Jew or Greek, man or woman, slave or free, for all are one in this Christ person-principle.

Or, if you prefer to keep things metaphysical and not theological, the Logos-Christos is the very principle whereby this real substantial unity is possible. In the absence of this principle there could be no substantial unity-in-diversity on the human plane. Rather, we'd just be radically individualistic monads, which redounds to Marxism at one end or libertarianism at the other, for extremists meet.

Even so, humans can't help possessing implicit knowledge of the whole, even if they explicitly deny it:

Indeed, the most influential form of atheism, namely Marxism, asserts in the strictest form this unity of being in all that is, by declaring all being to be matter (Ratzinger).

This absolute denial conceals an affirmation of the Absolute. Conversely, we say Yes! to a rational cosmos right up front:

Logos signifies reason, meaning, or even "word" -- a meaning, therefore, that is Word, that is relationship, that is creative. The God who is logos guarantees the intelligibility of the world, the intelligibility of our existence, the aptitude of reason to know God and the reasonableness of God.... The world comes from reason, and this reason is a Person, is Love (ibid.).

With regard to the substance/accident complementarity, the alternative view is that substances do not actually exist, but rather, are only verbal entities. This modern baton was handed off to the postmodern crowd, which promptly hurtled into the abyss, with the view that words only point to other words, sealing us into an ever-shrinking circle of non-being.

For us, being is happily the object of the intellect, and the two -- intellect and intelligible being -- are a diversity-in-unity. We reject the notion that the sciences are just "well-constructed languages" with no anchor in being. 

I've gone on too long; we'll conclude with this: "What makes a man is not freedom, morality, religion, sociability, or speech. It is reason, for all the other notes are deduced from reason" (G-L).

I suppose we could say that Reason-Logos provides both the horizontal melody and the vertical harmony for the Song Supreme. Without a rationality rooted in being there can be no freedom, morality, or knowledge. In other words, our freedom is ordered to the good because our intellect is ordered to the true.

Melody and Harmony in the Cosmic Suite

Along the vertical spectrum there are three principle degrees of abstraction to which we have access; from the bottom up, they are 1) the positive sciences, which still have one foot in matter, 2) mathematics, and 3) the metaphysical, this latter being completely immaterial and going to the sort of cosmos in which math and intelligible matter can even exist. 

The vertical spectrum can be further subdivided in any number of ways, for example, between physics and biology, psychology and neurology, theology and metaphysics. Nevertheless, despite these divisions, it's all still -- somehow -- One Cosmos. 

In the previous post we added "indivisible," but that's only half the story, for in reality, it is always both divisible and indivisible, continuous and discontinuous, radial (the Cosmic Ray from the center out) and circumferential (semiautonomous circles around Celestial Central).  

This goes to one of those primordial complementarities we've heard so little about. However, as with all such complementarities, one pole must be prior, and in this case it's indivisibility, for the alternative is both inconceivable and impossible: no amount of parts adds up to the whole if the whole isn't already fractally present in the parts. 

In the absence of this prior unity, the best we can accomplish is an aggregation, agglomeration, or agglutination; a blob, glob, or mob. 

G-L agrees that "A being's quantitative unity in space is not the criterion for its substantial unity. This quantitative unity presumes only an accidental union (an aggregation of molecules)." In short, there is the accidental unity of the blob, and the substantial unity of the whole: substance and accident, another one of those primordial complementarities. 

This calls to mind a mundane but insultaining political thought: you will have noticed that the left always makes transparently fraudulent appeals to "unity," even while its primitive identity politics assures that real (substantial) unity is impossible. They invent fake unities such as the LGBTQ community, the black community, or Latin-x community, etc.  

First of all, these aren't real communities, since a "black community" of Sharptons, Obamas, and Waterses has no commonality with a "black community" of Elders, Sowells, and Thomases. Second, there is no substantial unity among the primitive tribes to which the left never stops pandering. The only unity is accidental, revolving around force, cash prizes, and demonization of those of us who don't belong to a tribe of DNC certified victims. 

Rather, we are members of a community with a higher unity revolving around civilization, natural law, the Constitution, etc. Our movement rests upon a substantial unity, not an accidental one of skin tone, genitalia, or sexual deviance.   

Which, come to think of it, mirrors the substantial unity of the Vertical Church of the Friends of Reality, the body of Christ, in which it doesn't matter whether you are Jew or Greek, man or woman, slave or free, for all are one in this Christ person-principle.

Or, if you prefer to keep things metaphysical and not theological, the Logos-Christos is the very principle whereby this real substantial unity is possible. In the absence of this principle there could be no substantial unity-in-diversity on the human plane. Rather, we'd just be radically individualistic monads, which redounds to Marxism at one end or libertarianism at the other, for extremists meet.

Even so, humans can't help possessing implicit knowledge of the whole, even if they explicitly deny it:

Indeed, the most influential form of atheism, namely Marxism, asserts in the strictest form this unity of being in all that is, by declaring all being to be matter (Ratzinger).

This absolute denial conceals an affirmation of the Absolute. Conversely, we say Yes! to a rational cosmos right up front:

Logos signifies reason, meaning, or even "word" -- a meaning, therefore, that is Word, that is relationship, that is creative. The God who is logos guarantees the intelligibility of the world, the intelligibility of our existence, the aptitude of reason to know God and the reasonableness of God.... The world comes from reason, and this reason is a Person, is Love (ibid.).

With regard to the substance/accident complementarity, the alternative view is that substances do not actually exist, but rather, are only verbal entities. This modern baton was handed off to the postmodern crowd, which promptly hurtled into the abyss, with the view that words only point to other words, sealing us into an ever-shrinking circle of non-being.

For us, being is happily the object of the intellect, and the two -- intellect and intelligible being -- are a diversity-in-unity. We reject the notion that the sciences are just "well-constructed languages" with no anchor in being. 

I've gone on too long; we'll conclude with this: "What makes a man is not freedom, morality, religion, sociability, or speech. It is reason, for all the other notes are deduced from reason" (G-L).

I suppose we could say that Reason-Logos provides both the horizontal melody and the vertical harmony for the Song Supreme. Without a rationality rooted in being there can be no freedom, morality, or knowledge. In other words, our freedom is ordered to the good because our intellect is ordered to the true.

One Cosmos, Indivisible

Yes, indivisible, which is the principle and prerequisite for a host of overlapping entailments, among which are interiority, unity-in-diversity, intersubjectivity, personhood, intelligence, intelligibility, understanding, and more. 

Each of these realkategories (a German-sounding term I just made up) is only possible because this is One Cosmos, indivisible; we could even add "with liberty and justice," and if time permits we'll explain why. Suffice it to say that only a very specific -- not to mention unlikely -- type of cosmos allows for the existence of free will.  

Okay, a hint: it must be a rational cosmos: if things are fundamentally irrational, then obviously the possibility of rational choice is eliminated at the root. Is this why, everywhere and everywhere, Job One of the left is to efface primordial distinctions and to thereby sow chaos? 

Yes, and because of this they never stop gaslighting us. They can scarcely yell one thing without dementedly screaming its opposite, e.g., "Our Afghan mission was an unprecedented success, and besides, it's all Trump's fault!," or "Black lives matter, and defund the police!," or "follow the science, and men can give birth!" 

It is precisely this cosmic indivisibility that is a necessary condition for the writing of this post -- indeed, for saying anything about anything, AKA discovering the truth of things: in a word, affirming their isness. As mentioned a post or two back, to say something is true may be reduced to the statement that something either Is or Is Not.  

But how are such statements possible unless there is a real underlying unity between knower and known?  We cannot know a thing that is fundamentally unconnected to us. From our perspective such things don't exist, because we can't know what we can't know. This isn't just the inevitable domain of unknown unknowns, but of unknowable unknowns. 

As G-L reminds us, "the first operation of the intellect" -- the operation we always do and can't help doing -- is "simple intellectual apprehension." This spontaneous apprehension is anterior to both reason and judgment:

The gaze of our intellect is fixed first upon the natures of sensible things.... To understand is a kind reading into the interior.... For sense knowledge is occupied with sensible, exterior qualities, whereas intellective knowledge penetrates all the way to the essence of the thing (Thomas, quoted by G-L, emphases mine).

This goes to what I meant in the first paragraph with regard to interiority, intelligence, intelligibility, and understanding being entailments of cosmic indivisibility. For ultimately -- in the first & last analysis and every one in between -- "the object of the intellect is that which is," AKA being.  

I know what you're thinking: this is all a bit abstract and eggheady, Bob. You're making dryasdust medieval scholasticism sound like a party at Foucault's place. But to say that being is, and is intelligible, is probably the most profound -- and surprising -- thing one could say about the world (for the implications are literally endless).

Do things make sense? Or does sense make things? That may sound like a Sphinx-worthy antithesis, but it really comes down to that: for modern Kantians, what we call things are just consequences of our own psychic categories. But for realists such as ourselves, it is the things themselves that truly make sense, i.e., disclose their real natures to the intellect.

After all, if they don't, then to hell with it. If the world is but a projection of our own neuropsychology, that's just a step away from saying that perception is reality. But if perception is reality, then there is no reality. To even say reality is to affirm the existence of something distinct from our own perceptions, and will still be there when we look away -- for example, Americans stranded in Afghanistan. The Matrix Media will of course expend every effort to make them go away. We'll see.

In truth, to say reality is to say appearances; but this is a complementarity, not a duality, for appearances are of reality. Isn't this the point? It takes the form of, "I thought it was this, but it turned out to be that." 

For example, "it sure looked like the sun circles the earth, but it turns out the earth circles the sun." Then, "it looked like the sun is stationary, but it turns out it's just one of a hundred billion stars spiraling around a galactic center many lightyears away." Etc. 

However, we don't just go from one appearance to another equally unfounded one, but to a deeper understanding of the reality behind them. Just because there's no end to this fun-filled interior journey, it hardly means reality doesn't exist, or that it's just a winding road from nowhere to nothing.  

I thought this post would get more deeply into the chapter, but it didn't. Oh well. More fun for future Bob!

One Cosmos, Indivisible

Yes, indivisible, which is the principle and prerequisite for a host of overlapping entailments, among which are interiority, unity-in-diversity, intersubjectivity, personhood, intelligence, intelligibility, understanding, and more. 

Each of these realkategories (a German-sounding term I just made up) is only possible because this is One Cosmos, indivisible; we could even add "with liberty and justice," and if time permits we'll explain why. Suffice it to say that only a very specific -- not to mention unlikely -- type of cosmos allows for the existence of free will.  

Okay, a hint: it must be a rational cosmos: if things are fundamentally irrational, then obviously the possibility of rational choice is eliminated at the root. Is this why, everywhere and everywhere, Job One of the left is to efface primordial distinctions and to thereby sow chaos? 

Yes, and because of this they never stop gaslighting us. They can scarcely yell one thing without dementedly screaming its opposite, e.g., "Our Afghan mission was an unprecedented success, and besides, it's all Trump's fault!," or "Black lives matter, and defund the police!," or "follow the science, and men can give birth!" 

It is precisely this cosmic indivisibility that is a necessary condition for the writing of this post -- indeed, for saying anything about anything, AKA discovering the truth of things: in a word, affirming their isness. As mentioned a post or two back, to say something is true may be reduced to the statement that something either Is or Is Not.  

But how are such statements possible unless there is a real underlying unity between knower and known?  We cannot know a thing that is fundamentally unconnected to us. From our perspective such things don't exist, because we can't know what we can't know. This isn't just the inevitable domain of unknown unknowns, but of unknowable unknowns. 

As G-L reminds us, "the first operation of the intellect" -- the operation we always do and can't help doing -- is "simple intellectual apprehension." This spontaneous apprehension is anterior to both reason and judgment:

The gaze of our intellect is fixed first upon the natures of sensible things.... To understand is a kind reading into the interior.... For sense knowledge is occupied with sensible, exterior qualities, whereas intellective knowledge penetrates all the way to the essence of the thing (Thomas, quoted by G-L, emphases mine).

This goes to what I meant in the first paragraph with regard to interiority, intelligence, intelligibility, and understanding being entailments of cosmic indivisibility. For ultimately -- in the first & last analysis and every one in between -- "the object of the intellect is that which is," AKA being.  

I know what you're thinking: this is all a bit abstract and eggheady, Bob. You're making dryasdust medieval scholasticism sound like a party at Foucault's place. But to say that being is, and is intelligible, is probably the most profound -- and surprising -- thing one could say about the world (for the implications are literally endless).

Do things make sense? Or does sense make things? That may sound like a Sphinx-worthy antithesis, but it really comes down to that: for modern Kantians, what we call things are just consequences of our own psychic categories. But for realists such as ourselves, it is the things themselves that truly make sense, i.e., disclose their real natures to the intellect.

After all, if they don't, then to hell with it. If the world is but a projection of our own neuropsychology, that's just a step away from saying that perception is reality. But if perception is reality, then there is no reality. To even say reality is to affirm the existence of something distinct from our own perceptions, and will still be there when we look away -- for example, Americans stranded in Afghanistan. The Matrix Media will of course expend every effort to make them go away. We'll see.

In truth, to say reality is to say appearances; but this is a complementarity, not a duality, for appearances are of reality. Isn't this the point? It takes the form of, "I thought it was this, but it turned out to be that." 

For example, "it sure looked like the sun circles the earth, but it turns out the earth circles the sun." Then, "it looked like the sun is stationary, but it turns out it's just one of a hundred billion stars spiraling around a galactic center many lightyears away." Etc. 

However, we don't just go from one appearance to another equally unfounded one, but to a deeper understanding of the reality behind them. Just because there's no end to this fun-filled interior journey, it hardly means reality doesn't exist, or that it's just a winding road from nowhere to nothing.  

I thought this post would get more deeply into the chapter, but it didn't. Oh well. More fun for future Bob!

World War ∞

If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then the converse is equally true: politics is the continuation of war by other means. And if the latter is true, then it follows that the war -- we call it WW∞ -- is literally endless, because man is -- among other things -- at once Homo politicus and Homo bellicose: a homicidal prostitute, if you like.

Man is the "political animal," but he is also -- among others -- the rational animal, the symbolic animal, the self-aware animal, the moral animal, the artistic animal, the transcendent animal, the comedic animal,  and the wise animal (LOL!).

But each of these is a vertical category, or a modality of the vertical. 

This being the case, it is a sad fact that man is also -- and more often than not -- the irrational animal (Homo pomo), the atheist animal (Homo literalum), the devoid-of-self-awareness animal (Homo progressivus), the immoral animal (Homo cuomo), the sh*t-masquarading-as-art animal (Homo MOMO), the immanentizing-the-eschaton animal (Homo gnosticus), the unfunny animal (Homo wokiens), and the foolish animal (Homo academicus), respectively.

Now, each of these polarities is a battleground and a front in WW∞. For example, when have we not been involved in a struggle between reason and irrationality? Or worse, between the merely weak and irrational and the aggressively insane, AKA Republican vs. Democrat.

Look at the Taliban. Conquering them on the battlefield is one thing, but forcing them to reason is another thing entirely. You can leave them to slaughter but you can't make them think.

Even comedy is a battlefield, for one of the preoccupations of progressive wokism (speaking of the Taliban) is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be laughing at them. Not for nothing do they call it the Late Night War, nor is it surprising that General Gutfield is routing these enemies of merriment.  

Similarly, what is the homeschool movement but a battle against the entrenched statist forces of Big Miseducation? 

What is America -- as originally conceived -- but an ongoing revolution against those perennial reactionaries who hate liberty, individualism, and private property?  WW ∞.  

Likewise, we supposedly defeated racism in 1865, or war itself in 1918, or fascism in 1945, or Marxism in 1991, but that's like saying we defeated Stephen Colbert in 2021. If only! For it seems that being born in the human state entitles one only to being a participant in the endless war, even -- or especially -- if it is only a war with onself.

Which my sound trite, but here again this goes to a major distinction between our side and the progressive forces of reaction:  a person incapable of governing himself is unfit for self-government. The left fundamentally agrees, but their solution is to dominate us. I suppose I would have no issue with the left if they only limited their activities to controlling their millions of constituents who are incapable of controlling themselves: Antifa, BLM, Joe Biden, et al. 

Now, back to Garrigou-Lagrange's Thomistic Common Sense, on which we've made no progress for a couple of weeks, having once again fallen from eternity into time. We try our best to minimize the latter, but it happens. At any rate, let's see if we can knock out a chapter.

"Common sense," writes G-L, "is nothing other than spontaneous (or primordial) reason." 

Now, there is, one might say, the intra-rational (logic as such) and the supra-rational, i.e., those foundational principles without which reason is impossible, e.g., the immutable laws of identity, non-contradiction, causality, finality, etc. These are the very laws of intelligible being, laws we cannot avoid and still be logical.

As we've mentioned before, Thomas doesn't so much prescribe as describe: he is simply describing what we are doing when we think rationally; from this follows the prescription, i.e., don't pretend you're thinking when you're doing something less, and certainly don't undermine man's ability to think -- to know intelligible being via the intellect.

In the margin there's a question to myself: in what philosophical universe is this activity we call "common sense" both possible and efficacious?

Big question! Big universe!

True enough, but the universe isn't so big that it can't be tamed with common sense. What I mean is that our universe is fanatically law-abiding, scrupulously adhering to certain fundamental laws such as the speed of light, Planck's constant, gravity, electromagnetism, etc. Without such laws there would be no stability below to permit all of the emergent teleological activity up here. Order comes from order. Disorder and chaos are always parasitic on order. But enough about the left. 

"Philosophy" may be reduced to four main candidates: empiricism, rationalism, idealism, or (moderate) realism. That's off the top of the voice in my head, so perhaps you can think of others. Some partake of two categories, for example, positivism, which pretends to be empirical but is really a narrow rationalism; or materialism, which is really an abstract idealism projected onto matter.

In any event. G-L says that only one of these truly recognizes common sense, and that would be the last, moderate realism. And again, moderate realism isn't really any kind of ism-ideology, but simply a description of what we are doing when we engage in intellection. 

For example, thinking begins with a conceptual abstraction from objects of the senses. You may not like this idea, but it's nevertheless true, for you can't disagree with it without confirming it. The ideology of materialism, for example, is not some bit of matter, but an immaterial abstraction from it, so the materialist is just an inadequate moderate realist.  

I gotta stop. This vertical guerrilla has some other things to do.

World War ∞

If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then the converse is equally true: politics is the continuation of war by other means. And if the latter is true, then it follows that the war -- we call it WW∞ -- is literally endless, because man is -- among other things -- at once Homo politicus and Homo bellicose: a homicidal prostitute, if you like.

Man is the "political animal," but he is also -- among others -- the rational animal, the symbolic animal, the self-aware animal, the moral animal, the artistic animal, the transcendent animal, the comedic animal,  and the wise animal (LOL!).

But each of these is a vertical category, or a modality of the vertical. 

This being the case, it is a sad fact that man is also -- and more often than not -- the irrational animal (Homo pomo), the atheist animal (Homo literalum), the devoid-of-self-awareness animal (Homo progressivus), the immoral animal (Homo cuomo), the sh*t-masquarading-as-art animal (Homo MOMO), the immanentizing-the-eschaton animal (Homo gnosticus), the unfunny animal (Homo wokiens), and the foolish animal (Homo academicus), respectively.

Now, each of these polarities is a battleground and a front in WW∞. For example, when have we not been involved in a struggle between reason and irrationality? Or worse, between the merely weak and irrational and the aggressively insane, AKA Republican vs. Democrat.

Look at the Taliban. Conquering them on the battlefield is one thing, but forcing them to reason is another thing entirely. You can leave them to slaughter but you can't make them think.

Even comedy is a battlefield, for one of the preoccupations of progressive wokism (speaking of the Taliban) is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be laughing at them. Not for nothing do they call it the Late Night War, nor is it surprising that General Gutfield is routing these enemies of merriment.  

Similarly, what is the homeschool movement but a battle against the entrenched statist forces of Big Miseducation? 

What is America -- as originally conceived -- but an ongoing revolution against those perennial reactionaries who hate liberty, individualism, and private property?  WW ∞.  

Likewise, we supposedly defeated racism in 1865, or war itself in 1918, or fascism in 1945, or Marxism in 1991, but that's like saying we defeated Stephen Colbert in 2021. If only! For it seems that being born in the human state entitles one only to being a participant in the endless war, even -- or especially -- if it is only a war with onself.

Which my sound trite, but here again this goes to a major distinction between our side and the progressive forces of reaction:  a person incapable of governing himself is unfit for self-government. The left fundamentally agrees, but their solution is to dominate us. I suppose I would have no issue with the left if they only limited their activities to controlling their millions of constituents who are incapable of controlling themselves: Antifa, BLM, Joe Biden, et al. 

Now, back to Garrigou-Lagrange's Thomistic Common Sense, on which we've made no progress for a couple of weeks, having once again fallen from eternity into time. We try our best to minimize the latter, but it happens. At any rate, let's see if we can knock out a chapter.

"Common sense," writes G-L, "is nothing other than spontaneous (or primordial) reason." 

Now, there is, one might say, the intra-rational (logic as such) and the supra-rational, i.e., those foundational principles without which reason is impossible, e.g., the immutable laws of identity, non-contradiction, causality, finality, etc. These are the very laws of intelligible being, laws we cannot avoid and still be logical.

As we've mentioned before, Thomas doesn't so much prescribe as describe: he is simply describing what we are doing when we think rationally; from this follows the prescription, i.e., don't pretend you're thinking when you're doing something less, and certainly don't undermine man's ability to think -- to know intelligible being via the intellect.

In the margin there's a question to myself: in what philosophical universe is this activity we call "common sense" both possible and efficacious?

Big question! Big universe!

True enough, but the universe isn't so big that it can't be tamed with common sense. What I mean is that our universe is fanatically law-abiding, scrupulously adhering to certain fundamental laws such as the speed of light, Planck's constant, gravity, electromagnetism, etc. Without such laws there would be no stability below to permit all of the emergent teleological activity up here. Order comes from order. Disorder and chaos are always parasitic on order. But enough about the left. 

"Philosophy" may be reduced to four main candidates: empiricism, rationalism, idealism, or (moderate) realism. That's off the top of the voice in my head, so perhaps you can think of others. Some partake of two categories, for example, positivism, which pretends to be empirical but is really a narrow rationalism; or materialism, which is really an abstract idealism projected onto matter.

In any event. G-L says that only one of these truly recognizes common sense, and that would be the last, moderate realism. And again, moderate realism isn't really any kind of ism-ideology, but simply a description of what we are doing when we engage in intellection. 

For example, thinking begins with a conceptual abstraction from objects of the senses. You may not like this idea, but it's nevertheless true, for you can't disagree with it without confirming it. The ideology of materialism, for example, is not some bit of matter, but an immaterial abstraction from it, so the materialist is just an inadequate moderate realist.  

I gotta stop. This vertical guerrilla has some other things to do.

What Have We Learned?

As most everyone understands by now, our ruling class hates -- for lack of a better term -- "Trumpist populism" because it has revealed their utter cluelessness to anyone whose livelihood doesn't depend upon maintaining this institutional stupidity. 

No sentient person is surprised at the sudden "realization" that our president is a feeble but compliant tool of various and sundry interests that are not our interests, from technofascist thought police to greedy public employee unions to the lucrative racist-industrial complex.  

So, what's the bottom line? What have we learned? Speaking for myself, I have learned that real intelligence is much, much rarer than people realize. What does it say that even a crank blogger such as myself knows more about military strategy than the woke heretic-hunting generals advising our president? Or that even I know more about the cause of inflation than his economic advisors?  

But these examples are too specific. I'm making a much more general point about the rarity of real intelligence. There are people who will tell you with a straight face that Ours is the most educated citizenry ever!, which just makes you want to laugh, after you're done vomiting. Can you even imagine deferring to someone because He attended Harvard!, or worse,  He's an Ivy League professor! 

Not to boast, but I'm guessing that longtime readers are attracted to a blog that speaks intelligently of religious matters. Now that I think about it, I only write to serve a small niche audience called myself. If there were someone else doing it, I could retire from blogging as well. (To be perfectly accurate, I know that others exist, but it takes me less time to write than to read.)

Anyway, back to Real Intelligence. Back when I finished grad school in 1988, I was still naive enough to believe that a PhD conferred some sort of special status. And now that I'm thinking about it, I'm sure that a big part of this was due to my own needs for status and distinction, long since extinguished. Back then, I still wanted to be a little Somebody instead of a big Nobody.  

Intelligence and Authority are intimately connected. Real intelligence -- the kind we're discussing here -- cannot be conferred in any extrinsic manner. Rather, it is communicated directly, intellect to intellect -- or better, heart-intellect to heart-intellect, since it transcends any transmission of mere "information," factual or otherwise. 

It's enough to hear it to know it's authoritatively true -- not necessarily because of the content but because of the mysterious source -- as in how some village carpenter said "follow me," and they did. Not only was his authority granted by no man, but the men with authority saw to it that he was given the Socrates treatment. Socrates too spoke with Authority, which brings to mind an Aphorism:

As long as they do not take him seriously, the man who speaks the truth can live for a while in a democracy. Then, the hemlock.

Or cross. Or cancefixion. The logos must be punished!

Most readers of this blog know when they are in the presence of this subtle intelligence-light (≈), and cannot be fooled by the other kinds. Some people radiate intelligence; others radiate stupidity. Who can see the face of Chris Cuomo or Sandy Cortez or Kamala Harris and not feel the stupid? 

But again, those examples are too specific, when I'm referring to something far more general: in our day and age the stupid pervades the pneumosphere; its sophicating presence is everywhere, so much so that it is difficult even to have an intelligent conversation with these spiritually coarse and intellectually crude masses of asses. It is much easier to have an intelligent conversation with my gardener or pool man than with a fellow psychologist. 

As if that's not enough, the diabolical alliance of tech giants and the DNC has emboldened the powers and principalities that aren't content to just marginalize intelligence, but ultimately wish to criminalize it. And one way they achieve this is by outsourcing the suppression of intelligence to hordes of credentialed submediocrities who gain a sense of identity and moral superiority by punishing and excluding people who are much more intelligent than they are.

Do you have any idea of the billions of dollars it costs to prop up the university apparatus designed to enforce this institutional stupidity -- i.e., the diversity goons, antiracism thugs, feminist whordes, multicultureless zealots, etc.?  The cost isn't just measured in student indebtedness, but in the assimilation of an impenetrable farcefield that repels all appeals to intelligence.

Imagine spending that much money to make oneself that stupid! These indebted students think they merely got a bad deal, but they have no idea, because they still think the product just cost too much, when the real problem is that the product is spiritually and certainly intellectually toxic.  

You can have the most expensive educational establishment in the world, but it will do nothing to alter the sobering reality of the Bell Curve. You can give a PhD to a person with a 100 IQ, but the former has no impact on the latter. 

Suffice it to say that this credentialism is one of the reasons that the ranks of our elite are packed to the gills with stupid. Not only is it affirmative action all the way down, but it is... how to put it... affirmative exclusion all the way up. In other words, they see to it with tools such as "diversity," "equity," and a ruling class that looks like us! that intelligence is not a criteria.  

But normal people are beginning to rebel, as we're seeing with CRT protests, mask rebellions, the homeschooling movement, etc. Here in California there is a slight chance that the handpicked face of technofascism will be defeated by the Black Face of White Supremacy -- in other words, an intelligent black person.

Now, all of the above was provoked in the course of reading Lee Siegel's latest collection of essays, The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump (in sidebar).  It provides a lot of history and context as to how we got here. HISTORY is difficult to see when we're in the middle of it -- which we always are. 

But Siegel vividly traces the line of progressive stupidity back a century or so, to the days of Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly, the latter being one of the fondling fathers of progressive perversity. Come to think of it, a better book to start with would be Siegel's The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, which goes into more detail on how we ended up mired in this tarpit of stupid.

What Have We Learned?

As most everyone understands by now, our ruling class hates -- for lack of a better term -- "Trumpist populism" because it has revealed their utter cluelessness to anyone whose livelihood doesn't depend upon maintaining this institutional stupidity. 

No sentient person is surprised at the sudden "realization" that our president is a feeble but compliant tool of various and sundry interests that are not our interests, from technofascist thought police to greedy public employee unions to the lucrative racist-industrial complex.  

So, what's the bottom line? What have we learned? Speaking for myself, I have learned that real intelligence is much, much rarer than people realize. What does it say that even a crank blogger such as myself knows more about military strategy than the woke heretic-hunting generals advising our president? Or that even I know more about the cause of inflation than his economic advisors?  

But these examples are too specific. I'm making a much more general point about the rarity of real intelligence. There are people who will tell you with a straight face that Ours is the most educated citizenry ever!, which just makes you want to laugh, after you're done vomiting. Can you even imagine deferring to someone because He attended Harvard!, or worse,  He's an Ivy League professor! 

Not to boast, but I'm guessing that longtime readers are attracted to a blog that speaks intelligently of religious matters. Now that I think about it, I only write to serve a small niche audience called myself. If there were someone else doing it, I could retire from blogging as well. (To be perfectly accurate, I know that others exist, but it takes me less time to write than to read.)

Anyway, back to Real Intelligence. Back when I finished grad school in 1988, I was still naive enough to believe that a PhD conferred some sort of special status. And now that I'm thinking about it, I'm sure that a big part of this was due to my own needs for status and distinction, long since extinguished. Back then, I still wanted to be a little Somebody instead of a big Nobody.  

Intelligence and Authority are intimately connected. Real intelligence -- the kind we're discussing here -- cannot be conferred in any extrinsic manner. Rather, it is communicated directly, intellect to intellect -- or better, heart-intellect to heart-intellect, since it transcends any transmission of mere "information," factual or otherwise. 

It's enough to hear it to know it's authoritatively true -- not necessarily because of the content but because of the mysterious source -- as in how some village carpenter said "follow me," and they did. Not only was his authority granted by no man, but the men with authority saw to it that he was given the Socrates treatment. Socrates too spoke with Authority, which brings to mind an Aphorism:

As long as they do not take him seriously, the man who speaks the truth can live for a while in a democracy. Then, the hemlock.

Or cross. Or cancefixion. The logos must be punished!

Most readers of this blog know when they are in the presence of this subtle intelligence-light (≈), and cannot be fooled by the other kinds. Some people radiate intelligence; others radiate stupidity. Who can see the face of Chris Cuomo or Sandy Cortez or Kamala Harris and not feel the stupid? 

But again, those examples are too specific, when I'm referring to something far more general: in our day and age the stupid pervades the pneumosphere; its sophicating presence is everywhere, so much so that it is difficult even to have an intelligent conversation with these spiritually coarse and intellectually crude masses of asses. It is much easier to have an intelligent conversation with my gardener or pool man than with a fellow psychologist. 

As if that's not enough, the diabolical alliance of tech giants and the DNC has emboldened the powers and principalities that aren't content to just marginalize intelligence, but ultimately wish to criminalize it. And one way they achieve this is by outsourcing the suppression of intelligence to hordes of credentialed submediocrities who gain a sense of identity and moral superiority by punishing and excluding people who are much more intelligent than they are.

Do you have any idea of the billions of dollars it costs to prop up the university apparatus designed to enforce this institutional stupidity -- i.e., the diversity goons, antiracism thugs, feminist whordes, multicultureless zealots, etc.?  The cost isn't just measured in student indebtedness, but in the assimilation of an impenetrable farcefield that repels all appeals to intelligence.

Imagine spending that much money to make oneself that stupid! These indebted students think they merely got a bad deal, but they have no idea, because they still think the product just cost too much, when the real problem is that the product is spiritually and certainly intellectually toxic.  

You can have the most expensive educational establishment in the world, but it will do nothing to alter the sobering reality of the Bell Curve. You can give a PhD to a person with a 100 IQ, but the former has no impact on the latter. 

Suffice it to say that this credentialism is one of the reasons that the ranks of our elite are packed to the gills with stupid. Not only is it affirmative action all the way down, but it is... how to put it... affirmative exclusion all the way up. In other words, they see to it with tools such as "diversity," "equity," and a ruling class that looks like us! that intelligence is not a criteria.  

But normal people are beginning to rebel, as we're seeing with CRT protests, mask rebellions, the homeschooling movement, etc. Here in California there is a slight chance that the handpicked face of technofascism will be defeated by the Black Face of White Supremacy -- in other words, an intelligent black person.

Now, all of the above was provoked in the course of reading Lee Siegel's latest collection of essays, The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump (in sidebar).  It provides a lot of history and context as to how we got here. HISTORY is difficult to see when we're in the middle of it -- which we always are. 

But Siegel vividly traces the line of progressive stupidity back a century or so, to the days of Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly, the latter being one of the fondling fathers of progressive perversity. Come to think of it, a better book to start with would be Siegel's The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, which goes into more detail on how we ended up mired in this tarpit of stupid.