The Structure of Scientific Retrogressions

As part of my self-imposed continuing education requirement, I read a book called Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. It came highly recommended from some random blogger who said it was the best book on the subject by far.

Meh. I'll stick with Michael Polanyi, Stanley Jaki, Errol Harris, and the rest of my crew.

Can I even pull a post out of it? The chapter on Feminism and Science Studies might yield some fine insultainment, but it wouldn't be gentlemanly. Too easy. 

Suffice it to say, if you want to become a living exemplar of the retrograde belief that women are incapable of science, logic, and accountability, by all means obtain a degree in Feminism and Science Studies. Its very existence is an insult to women. To paraphrase the Aphorist, 

When the progressive condemns, every intelligent woman must feel alluded to.  

Do they actually condemn real science?

many began to treat science as part of a larger, multi-tentacled political structure that acts to reinforce subtle forms of exclusion and coercion.... The anti-authoritarian image of science came to be seen as just "good PR." 

Mansplaining in disguise:

some feminist epistemologists have argued that even our most fundamental concepts of reason, evidence, and truth are covertly sexist.... The idea of a single "true" description of the world that transcends these different perspectives [of race, class, and gender] is a harmful illusion.

All perspectives are equal, except for that of Marginalized Peoples, who have a special and superior insight into reality than do the Privileged. You'd think that no cognitively functioning person could believe this premodern nonsense, and you would be correct: the White House has decreed that

Indigenous Knowledge is a body of observations, oral and written knowledge, innovations, practices, and beliefs developed by Tribes and Indigenous Peoples through interaction and experience with the environment. 

The Biden-Harris Administration has formally recognized Indigenous Knowledge as one of the many important bodies of knowledge that contributes to the scientific, technical, social, and economic advancements of the United States and our collective understanding of the natural world.

In other words, watch for falling planes. 

When “following the science” becomes pure quackery dressed up in cutting-edge native garb:

Without anyone seeming to notice, then, governments in the United States, Canada, and other Anglo settlement countries have become institutionally committed to medieval quackery, notably on the watch of left-wing governments that claim to be “following the science.”

The big bull of indigenous knowledge has turned into the very sort of mysticism that its advocates claim to oppose. Like most aspects of native identity, it has grown up on a rich manure pile of European romanticism and Marxist oppression narratives. It has become an evil spirit, and we desperately need a vaccine against it.

There is a chapter on Popper, who famously argued that scientific theories can never be proven in an absolute sense, but rather, must be capable of falsification. 

For example, what would falsify the theory of global warming? Correct: nothing, which is why it does not qualify as science. Indeed, everything proves it:

In properly Popperian science, 

We take a theory that someone has proposed, and we deduce an observational prediction from it. We then check to see if the prediction comes out as the theory says it will. If the prediction fails, then we have refuted, or falsified, the theory.

Catastrophic global warming excepted: not just some, but "all of the models yielded more warming than actually occurred, most to an absurd degree."

A model is a hypothesis. Like any scientific hypothesis, it is confirmed or refuted by observation. A model that is refuted by observation is worthless. And yet, these models, which have repeatedly been shown to be wrong, are the basis for enormously destructive policies that have been adopted across much of the western world.

It comes back one of my ontological bobbyhorses, man as open system:

For Popper, science is characterized by permanent openness, a permanent and all-encompassing critical stance, even with respect to the fundamental ideas in the field. 

There are a couple of chapters on Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, probably the most influential book ever on the philosophy of science. While reading them, I couldn't help noticing that such a revolution has occurred right under our noses, and here we are. Certainly it has happened in my own racket, psychology. I wonder what's happening with the American Psychological Association?

Psychologists Persevere in EDI Work Despite Growing Backlash Against Racial Equity Efforts 

There was never a debate about this. Rather -- in my professional lifetime -- just a sweeping away of the old liberal paradigm and its replacement with the new leftist one. It reminds me of when Ego-Dystonic Homosexuality was summarily removed from the DSM, not because of any scientific breakthrough, but by fiat due to the pressure of activist groups.   

Abortion Bans Cause Outsized Harm For People of Color 

Indeed, they lead directly to more People of Color suffering the outsized harm of being born. 

Speaking of suffering, I'm already on to the next book, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering, but thus far it is rather slow-going. It also comes highly recommended, but the degree of pedantry is causing me a lot of suffering. I'll report back tomorrow.

Linking, Verticality, and Symmetry

Because we are so immersed in it, it's hard to say exactly what time is. In this regard it is like the words "experience," "consciousness," or "self," none of which can be defined without presuming their existence. But Thomas is onto something when he suggests that 

The soul is on the horizon of eternity and time, existing below eternity and above time (emphasis mine).

Now we've got something, because we have three terms in which to map things out. We are surely in time, but only partly so, because we can be aware of its flow -- like standing on the bank of a river and watching it go by. Thus we can be aware of past and future, since we are not totally immersed in time. If we were, then we couldn't be aware of it. 

In short, transcendence trumps time, and proceeds all the way up to eternity. Although we partake of transcendence, we are not totally transcendent, otherwise we would be angels. We always have a dry foot in the land of immanence. 

The human person, whatever else it is, is a Link between various terms, for example, between intellect and being, between material and spiritual, or between other subjects. Without this primordial betweenness, we could never be.

This is not natural. Or rather, there is no purely natural -- or immanent -- explanation for such a strange condition. This condition at once "reaches down into matter" while "lifting up matter into the light of consciousness and enabling the material world to return to God in the great circle of being" (Clarke, emphasis mine, because this is the same below and above cited in the first quote).

Above and Below, Up and Down. Is it even possible to think about the human condition in the absence of these terms, or in other words, without positing verticality, whether implicitly or explicitly?

And is it possible to posit Verticality in the absence of the Link referenced above?

Here again, man is the Link between terms, but how? By virtue of what principle?

By virtue of the triune God, of course. For the Godhead consists of irreducible links between the divine persons, like so:

Does this not violate the principle of non-contradiction, since Is and Is Not are claimed to be equally true?

Nah. We have only to partake of Matte Blanco's symmetrical logic in order to see why. Or just use the dream logic of the right cerebral hemisphere. 

Can you back that up?

I can try. Let me flip through Bomford's The Symmetry of God.

Ontology failed to make rational what the doctrine of the Trinity asserted, that there could be absolutely and completely one, and yet be distinctly, also, three. Symmetric logic, however, has no difficulty with this problem whatever.... Symmetric logic makes unities out of things apparently different.

Things like Father and Son, or, for that matter, God and human nature, AKA the Incarnation, not to mention our unity with the latter: "The identification of the believer with Christ may... be seen as effected by symmetric logic."

Perhaps you could define "symmetrical logic"?

Asymmetrical relations are relations that are nonreversible. For example, “Jack reads the newspaper” cannot be reversed to the newspaper reading Jack. In this way, asymmetrical relations are logical relations and underlie everyday logic and common sense. They govern the conscious sphere of the human mind. 

Symmetrical relations, on the other hand, move in both directions simultaneously.... Matte Blanco states that the symmetrical, unconscious realm is the natural state of man and is a massive and infinite presence while the asymmetrical, conscious realm is a small product of it. This is why the principle of symmetry is all-encompassing and can dissolve all logic, leading to the asymmetrical relations perfectly symmetrical....

Matte Blanco gives this mixture of two logics the name bi-logic and points out that our thinking is usually bi-logical, expressing the both types of logic to differing extents (Wiki).

Always both. Here again, I suspect this is why we have right and left cerebral hemispheres that give access to both modes. In short, they are complementary. But denial of half this complementarity results in the Flat Cosmos Society whereby

there is clearly no place for the conception of the human being as living on the frontier of matter and spirit: there is nothing there on the upper side of the border! It has all been leveled out and absorbed down into the material underside (Clarke, emphasis mine).

But how can there be a down without an up? This violates everyday cutandray logic, let alone dreamtime symmetrical logic.

This could veer into any number of directions requiring posts of their own. But this post is apparently done.

Thoughts on a Nonlocal Cousin

One Cosmos -- literally, while you wait: the material and spiritual, horizontal and vertical worlds are harmonized in the human person, who "now becomes the bond, the nodal point, that gathers together the whole universe into unity (Clarke, emphasis mine). The person

thus becomes the symbol and expression of the unity of the whole of creation, and so of the unity of God, its Creator. Only a human being can do this, partaking as it does of both extremes, matter and spirit, and integrating them into unity within himself. Thus the human being becomes truly the center of the universe.

Very much in contrast to the secular view that pretends to displace us from the center of the cosmic action to the galactic hinterlands. Truly truly, we're still big, it's the metaphysics that got smaller. 

I suppose this represents my ultimate argument, after which there's not much to say except Wake the f*** up, people. 

Of course, I've made the same point in many ways and from diverse angles, beginning with the book, so have we really made any progress?

Yes, in the sense that there is Doctrine and there is Realization, or Getting It Into Our Thick Skulls. Or in other words, timelessness takes time.

So, does this mean we're finally done here? I suppose I could try my hand at mystical poetry, as Schuon did in his dotage. Not a big fan of that part of his oeuvre, but my own puny efforts would be comedic by comparison.

So, no change.  

Come to think of it, one reader compared the opening and closing sections of the book to poetry, but that was at first glance, nor do I believe he got the jokes. Was part of me really making a stab at poetry? Certainly not consciously. Rather, it's just a kind of an experiment with language, trying to say what can't be said -- to eff the ineffable. 

Oh, by the way, at the end of the book Remaking the World, there's a discussion of an 18th century German thinker I'd never heard of, Johann Georg Hamann, who very much sounds like Coon material: his writings are "fragmentary" and "baffling,"

peppered with allusions, riddles, jokes, epigrams, parodies, parables, and pranks, often in multiple languages.... The results can be anywhere between idiosyncratic and impenetrable. Reading him is like reading Ulysses in German.

This guy -- sounds likes my kind of guy. He

hides behind the appearance of a madman, painting the doors of his writings with bizarre signs, allusions, and ciphers -- not out of mere eccentricity, but as an appropriate, calculated posture before a proudly rational audience... a faithful enacting of divine folly in an age that proudly considered itself the age of "Enlightenment."

Same. Minus the audience.

He affirmed a number of conclusions that we can get behind, for example, that the philosophes of the so-called Enlightenment 

claim to be skeptics, but when it comes to their own beliefs they are nowhere skeptical enough. Only by genuinely humbling themselves, admitting their ignorance, and doubting their doubts can they gain self-knowledge...

Or again, beginning with what we don't know. 

He also agrees with us that the Incarnation is a big deal metaphysically speaking, in that it resolves

the most sticky Enlightenment dilemma: how to reconcile idealism and realism, form and matter, subjective and objective, reason and experience.

Although he was friends with Kant, he politely blew him out of the wasser.  

He also highlights the importance of speech -- or of the reality of interpersonal communication -- in the cosmic scheme of things:

Every time we we speak to each other, we participate in a process that is both rational and empirical, involving abstract concepts on the one hand and sensations on the other.... And ultimately, the reason why sensibility and understanding come together in words is because they come together in the Word... in whom Value becomes fact, Reason is experienced by the senses, the Ideal becomes real, and the Word is made flesh. 

A few posts ago we wrote of how Kant's philosophy cannot justify the success of its own communication and comprehension. Rather, he just assumes this mysterious intersubjective phenomenon, which amounts to stealing first base, even while pretending to have hit a home run. Which is of course against the rules!

In reality, language itself "gives us the finest example of the hypostatic union of the sensible and intelligible natures." Concur. 

Why, he even prefigures Gödel in his "demonstration that reason cannot provide the grounding for itself." As one fellow put it, "It takes a prophet to contribute to debates two hundred years before they start." 

There's also this, in that 

Hamman's way forward is very different from the postmodernists'. They would reject all metanarratives and move toward nihilism; he rejected all metanarratives except one, and embraced Christianity. They thought the alternative to self-illumination was darkness. He thought the alternative was illumination from somewhere -- or Someone -- else. 

Back to Clarke. We'll conclude with this:

the human person becomes the mediator between the whole material world and its Creator, enabling it through him to complete its own return to God in the Great Circle of Being that pours out from God in creation and then strives, drawn by the pull of the Good, to find its way back home to him again.

To paraphrase Babe Ruth on the occasion of his 60th home run, Let's see some other son of a bitch top that!

The Monkey in the Middle and Freak at the Frontier of the Cosmos

I guess it's fair to say that I am a single issue voter: against insanity.

Ah, but in a groundless world of radical subjectivity and pure relativism, what is insanity?

Supposing the latter exists, it must have something to do with persons, since only a person can be insane. Everything else in nature is what it is and does what it does, but we don't say that gravity or entropy ought not happen.  

What even is a person? This would seem to be a good place to start. 

Here's a thought: the person is a "frontier being"

living on the edge, on the frontier, between matter and spirit, time and eternity (Clarke).

But looked at another way, this edge is the center. Certainly it's where all the action is. This is the idea of the human person as microcosm "or small cosmos, the cosmos in miniature":

A human person unites in itself all the levels of the universe from the depths of matter to the transcendence of spirit and is capable of union with God himself and thereby mirroring the unity of the cosmos itself (ibid.).

And why not?

the early Christian thinkers transformed the concept [of the microcosm] to celebrate the great dignity and glory of the human person as the central piece, or "lynchpin," of the universe (ibid.).

Plato too 

describes the human soul as a "middle being" situated between the pure upper world of soul and ideas and the lower world of matter and body, linking the two but also pulled in opposite directions by both (ibid.). 

Verticality, with attractors at both ends: one is 

upward toward the world of Ideas, guided by reason; the other, guided by irrational appetites, looks toward the earth...

Thus "the center of gravity of this composite being, the 'location' of the frontier point, is not fixed but movable" within this vertical phase space. Obviously I'm trotting out a very old idea, but am I wrong?!  

the human soul is the "traveler" of the universe. All other kinds of being are fixed by nature in their paths; only the human soul can choose to be, to live, on whatever level it wishes, from total absorption in matter to the highest spiritual union with the One (ibid).

This situates the question of "pathology" in a much wider context, in that the upper movement symbolizes our proper telos:

The human soul is truly a being that "lives on the edge," on the frontier, between matter and spirit, time and eternity (ibid.). 

We are in a sense the center at the periphery of being, or the periphery at the center, depending on how we look at it. Either way, we cannot do without these two terms or poles, since we always dwell within them. Which is Voegelin's whole point: since it is the reality of our cosmic situation, denial of which being a kind of ontological pathology he calls DEFORMATION,

the destruction of the order of the soul, which should be "formed" by the love of the transcendental perfection inherent in the fundamental tension of existence.

Formed -- in my opinion -- in the manner of an open system or dissipative structure. The intrinsically pathological alternative is CLOSED EXISTENCE or CLOSURE, 

the mode of existence in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental.

Conversely, properly OPEN EXISTENCE is  

the mode of existence in which consciousness is consistently and unreservedly oriented toward truth and toward the transcendental pole of the tension of existence.

Again, it is important to start with what we don't know, and yet is infinitely knowable, AKA O, or what Voegelin calls the Apeiron, which is 

Unlimited, indefinite, unbounded...., the "unlimited" source of all particular things. Because it transcends all limits, it is in principle undefinable.

Nevertheless, here it is, since it is both everywhere and everywhen; for it is truly APODICTIC, 

Certain or necessary. Used to refer to knowledge of what must be, as compared with what can be (and may even be).

We should be able to stipulate this much: that you and I may or may not be -- we are contingent -- but that the Ultimate Reality of O cannot not be. Man is situated between the Necessary and the contingent, but here again, we have the great privilege of participating in the former -- which is another way of saying that the Center is at the periphery, and that we peripheral persons participate with, or have access to, the Center.

Especially since the Incarnation, but let's hold off on that and talk about our mysterious PARTICIPATION in Celestial Central, which 

Refers to sharing the qualities of the supreme exemplar, in which they are present in their perfection.

Again, supposing the Incarnation of this Supreme Exemplar -- of its participation in us -- that's a rather big deal. For it 

merges with the old idea of "man as microcosm," already present in pre-Christian Greek and Roman thought, so that the latter takes on a whole new richness (Clarke).

It actually represents quite a metaphysical advance, in that it overcomes older dualistic Manichaean and Gnostic views that devalue the immanent pole of bodily being; rather, there is "a more positive valuation given to the human body and to the whole material world along with it."

Now the body is no longer something to be looked down upon, to be escaped from and left behind as soon as possible....

the human person now becomes a microcosm in a new and richer sense than in the Platonic tradition: it incorporates into itself all the levels of the material universe and all its values, stretching from the lowest level of the material universe all the way up to the highest spiritual level.

Bottom line for today: the human person

now becomes the center or middle point, the "middle being," of the universe in a new, enhanced sense.... [as] the whole human person, body and soul together, embodied spirit (Clarke).

I Am Ignorant, Therefore I Am

I have nothing new to report. I was hoping to squeeze another post or two out of Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, but not that much of it is Coonworthy. It's a moderately interesting book, but here at One Cosmos we like to keep things highly interesting. 

A few random points. As we've been saying, man is an open system. This being the case, then the culture that is equally open will best conform to man's nature, and therefore be more successful. 

As such I was struck by a letter written by the Chinese emperor to King George III, that helps to explain why the Chinaman fell so far behind while Christendom zoomed ahead:

Strange and costly objects do not interest me.... we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures.... Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There is no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce.  

Okay, if you say so. This difference in outlook -- a closed vs. open economy -- "would shape the next two centuries in profound ways," and you know the rest. 

Yesterday we touched on our WEIRDERness, i.e., Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. Regarding that last category, Wilson cites eight alliterative elements that shaped our culture, calling them Inwardness, Infinity, Imagination, Individuality, Inspiration, Intensity, Innocence, and Ineffability.

For example, inwardness is the idea that the most important things come "from inside a person rather than outside," while individuality focuses on the "specific rather than the universal." These two in particular

are so central to our understanding of identity and the self that we cannot fathom how people in previous centuries could possibly have thought about personhood differently.  

Seems to me that the 1960s were nothing if not a resurgence of unalloyed romanticism, and I have only to think of my own father to highlight the difference in sensibility. I doubt if he spent a moment wondering "who he is." If asked, he would have said "a salesman." Or an American, or husband, or father. No need to complicate matters.

But in the span of a couple of generations we've reached the point that various obscure identities are everything, so much so that "disagreeing with them is viewed as hate speech or even violence in some quarters, since it strikes at the heart of who they are." Thus, identity has gone from an objective banality to the sacred category around which progressive politics revolves.

There's also a chapter on how the West became so wealthy and affluent, which economic historians call "the great escape," "the great divergence," or the "European miracle." 

That is to say, prior to the industrial revolution "the living standards of the average human had hardly changed" in a thousand years. No wonder the mass of people had no time to indulge in neurotic questions about identity.

gross domestic product per person when Shakespeare wrote his plays, estimated at about $550 per year, was barely higher than it was in the time of King David.

Problem was, we were trapped in the "Malthusian trap," whereby increased productivity resulted in a higher population which consumed any increase in productivity.

But quite suddenly the flat line becomes a true hockey stick, and "productivity outstripped population growth by an order of magnitude":

Today, human beings consume around seventy times more goods and services than we did two centuries ago -- an increase not of 70 percent but of 7,000 percent. 

I'm with Thomas Sowell: the question isn't why people are poor, since this is the norm. Rather, the question is how we escaped this universal condition. Wilson trots out the usual suspects, which include good institutions (e.g., rule of law and secure property rights), but 

Institutions do not spring up out of nowhere; they are products of long-term social, cultural, theological, legal, and economic developments. 

So we need a deeper Why. A progressive might say greed, but that's just a universal feature of the human nature they deny. I'm as greedy as the next guy, but so far it hasn't resulted in being a billionaire.

Part of the answer comes down to the closed systems alluded to above, for 

Historically speaking, virtually all cultures put a higher value on tried and tested ancestral wisdom than on newfangled, unproven contemporary innovation.... What needs explaining is why early modern Westerners started doing the opposite.

"Three factors were particularly significant," beginning with -- surprise surprise -- Christianity, "whose influence on the psychology, sociology, eschatology, and theology of Western Europeans over the course of a millennium can scarcely be exaggerated."

We have devoted many posts to this subject. Is there anything new to add? Whitehead spoke of this radical change in the European mind, which must ultimately "come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God."

We have also in the past spoken of the incredible importance of ignorance, i.e., of starting with what we don't know, which can, of course be traced all the way back to Socrates. This is nothing less than "the discovery of ignorance" whereby

we encounter entirely new things that we know nothing about and that appear to be surprising and/or important [and] are driven to investigate.

But here again, I would say that this comes back the the question of man as open system, whereby

The more people knew, the more they realized they didn't know, and the more motivated they became to find out. 

We are only properly human when we are open systems, both horizontally and vertically. So again, nothing new to report. 

Why Us?

In yesterday's post we reviewed Norris Clarke's Person as Being, and let's extract a few bullet points:

--Ultimate Reality is neither substance nor relation, but an irreducible complementarity of the two. 

--There is an "indissoluble complementarity" with regard to an "in-itself dimension of being" and a "towards-others aspect." 

--The higher the form of existence, the more developed becomes the relatedness to reality, also the more profound and comprehensive becomes the sphere of this relatedness.

--The human mind is an open system, and most states of pathology can be traced to the question of how open or closed the system is.

These are all metaphysical statements, but how do they apply on the ground, i.e., in the contingent realms of culture and historical flux? I'm reading a book that implicitly touches on this, called Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Superficially the book has nothing to do with Bob's airy abstractions, but looked at another way, it confirms them. 

I say this because if our notion of person is correct, then the most functional and successful civilization will be the one that most conforms to what it means to be a person. 

To cite some obvious counter-examples, the Marxist notion of personhood has had catastrophic results wherever it has been implemented, from the USSR to North Korea to the American university. It seems that bad anthropology results in bad everything else.

The same could be said for the Islamic notion of personhood, which is why Muslim countries bottom out the scale in terms of human flourishing. 

The founding principle of our own nation is that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights. The left is systematically opposed to this metaphysic, and if we were to hold a constitutional convention today -- the horror -- they would come up with something more like the following:

We hold these truths to be historically conditioned.... [that we] derive rights that are alienable and transferable depending on the larger question of needs.... that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, the people will refrain from appealing to self-evident truths, there being no original self to which truth must be true....

We submit a list of grievances knowing full well that our dispute... may only be a matter of language and communication.... To prove this let all our opinions, our deeply felt sentiments and emotions, be submitted to a candid world not in the form of a declaration but a message whose meaning will require interpretation by historians of future generations....

Whereas the very identity of Americans lies in their symbol-forming, language-using nature, whereas we the colonists have no recourse to God, nature, or history to guide our actions, and whereas, therefore, we must rest our case on language and its context...

Not a joke! For we are living through the most left-wing government in modern American history, a grotesque experiment in which 

For the first time in their lives, a truly radical socialist program would supposedly fundamentally transform the way America dealt with the border, immigration, the economy, race relations, foreign policy, energy, law enforcement, crime, education, and social questions such as religion, gender, abortion, and schooling.

In a sense, we were all to be lab rats of sorts, to be experimented on by the radical left and their various critical theories. Now in the last year of the Biden term, we can see the results of that experiment -- and the unfortunate disasters that followed.

Again, these are not just different policies, but they presume -- and enforce -- a different anthropology.  Hence the civil war. We are close to Orwell's prophecy that "History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."

One of the recurring themes of the book is just how we became so much WEIRDER than the rest, which is to say, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. 

I am happy to be WEIRD, but I find the -ER to be problematic. The progressive left in particular is not only aggressively -ER, but has appropriated the EI, what with the florid pathologies of academia and woke capitalism. 

I'm old enough to remember when literacy and education didn't serve politics, but rather, we learned "things simply because they interest us and expand our horizons." 

We once saw "learning for its own sake as integral to human flourishing" instead of integral to envy, grievance, auto-victimization, and identity politics. That this has happened in the span of a generation is head-spinning, but there were warning signs along the way, and this book documents them.

Think of how in psychology there is no longer a place for psychologists, hence Canada trying to yank Jordan Peterson's license. I can relate. Wilson writes of how

Society was individualized; the individual was psychologized; psychology was sexualized; sexuality was politicized.

And here we are, with Transgender Visibility Day displacing the most consequential event in all of history (irrespective of whether or not one is a believer).

Back to the -ER, to say "ex-Christian" is not to say "un-Christian," because the former borrows liberally from Christianity. For example,

Ideologically, it draws heavily from the Christian moral imperative to exalt the humble and humble the exalted, as reflected in Christ's teachings... 

Such a stance would be incomprehensible in a pre- or truly anti-Christian civilization. It's just that

The diffusion of a few drops of Christianity into a leftist mind transforms the idiot into a perfect idiot.

And

In the Christianity of the leftist Christian, one of the two elements sooner or later eliminates the other.

Moreover, 

The Christ of the Gospels is not concerned with the economic situation of the poor, but with the moral condition of the rich. 

And it is this warped form of post-Christianity that

reflects deeply Romantic convictions -- channeled and reinterpreted through Marx and Freud in particular -- about innocence, pity, freedom, and the corrupting effects of society.

To be continued, depending on the level of interest, beginning with mine.

The First and Last Miracle

I was going to top off yesterday's post with a review of Norris Clarke's Person and Being, but since I slept late and I've already written about it, why not dive into the archive and see what's down there? What else is it for, if not to plagiarize myself? I won't so much repeat it as dialogue with it and see what emerges.

We are all persons, but what is a person? And how is such a thing possible? By virtue of what principle? Physics? Biology? No, in neither case can you get here -- especially in here -- from there. Yes, we're talking about the Miracle of Subjectivity, and without which no other miracles could be known:

The first ascertainment which should impose itself upon man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of that miracle that is intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- and consequently the incommensurability between these and material objects, be it a question of a grain of sand or of the sun, or of any creature whatever as an object of the senses (Schuon).

This is what we really want to know, is it not? Putting it personal terms, how am I even possible, and what does my existence mean in the ultimate scheme of things? How does I -- or I-ness as such -- matter?

No other book of which I'm aware expresses Bob's views so clearly and concisely -- in particular, about what on earth Bob could be. A couple of posts ago I alluded to how Schuon so often "verbally actualizes what is latent in my own intellect." Same with this book. 

For example, I couldn't agree more with him that Christian thinkers have tended not to adequately appreciate the revolutionary metaphysical implications of the Trinity. He quotes an article by Ratzinger, who wrote that "In the relational notion of person developed within the theology of the Trinity"

lies concealed a revolution in man's view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality (Ratzinger). 

Jumping ahead a bit, our nonlocal sources can now confirm that Ultimate Reality is not substance and not relation, but rather, an irreducible complementarity of the two. 

Again, this has extraordinary implications, none of which, by the way, negate what science reveals about the world, but extend and perfect it (not to mention explaining how the scientific enterprise is even possible). Ratzinger:

person must be understood as relation.... the three persons that exist in God are in their nature relations. They are, therefore, not substances that stand next to each other, but they are real existing relations, and nothing besides.

In God, person means relation. Relation, being related, is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation.

A great many metaphysical implications follow. For example, through them we could understand a priori that the Newtonian paradigm of reality, useful as it was, had to be wrong in the ultimate sense, since the universe does not and cannot consist of externally related atomistic units. 

For the same reason we can say on the political plane that Lockean individualism is way off, since its anthropology is a non-starter.

Schuon agrees that "The human form cannot be transcended, its sufficient reason being precisely to express the Absolute, hence the unsurpassable." 

In an abstract sense, there is an "indissoluble complementarity" with regard to an "in-itself dimension of being" and a "towards-others aspect" (Clarke),  

This extends to being itself, which is intrinsically diffusive and self-communicating. Ultimately, this is why the universe is intelligible to our intelligence. These two -- intelligence and intelligibility -- are intrinsically related. If this isn't the case, then we end up in a closed, Kantian universe of metaphysical ønanism.

Reality is an ec-static process of self-communicative being-in-action. Which not only explains a lot, but explains everything -- literally, because it explains how we can explain anything. What's the alternative?

Suppose a being that really exists, but does not act in any way, does not manifest itself in any way to other beings. There would be no way for anything else to know that it exists; it would make no difference at all to the rest of reality; practically speaking, it might just as well not be at all -- it would in fact be indistinguishable from non-being.

If this were the nature of reality, then each existent thing "would be locked off in total isolation from every other. There would not be a connected universe." There would be substance but no relation, like particles with no wave, so to speak.

The full meaning of "to be" is not just "to be present," but "to be actively present" (Clarke).

The relationality of this active presence "is a primordial dimension of every real being, inseparable from its substantiality." Being is an act, and the act of being is relational: 

it is turned towards others by its self-communicating action. To be fully is to be substance-in-relation (Clarke).

But why? Because every being -- every existent that partakes of being -- is an image of the very trinitarian God who too is irreducibly substance-in-relation. That every lower being has both an in-itself and towards-others dimension finds its ground and principle in the triune godhead. 

The alternatives don't work. For example, Buddhism and process philosophy posit a universe of pure relations with no substance. But a relation is precisely between substances, not between nothings. A relation between nothing and nothing is just more nothing: śūnyatā yada yada.

Josef Pieper (cited by Clarke) agrees that to exist

means "to be able to relate" and "to be the sustaining subject at the center of a field of reference." Only in reference to an inside can there be an outside. Without a self-contained "subject" there can be no "object." 

We might say that subject is to interiority as object is to exteriority, and the two are always related or linked. Moreover -- and this has important implications for the definition of psychopathology --

The higher the form of intrinsic existence, the more developed becomes the relatedness to reality, also the more profound and comprehensive becomes the sphere of this relatedness: namely, the world (Pieper).

Back in another life in the mid-1990s I published an article ponderously titled Psychoanalysis, Chaos, and Complexity: The Evolving Mind as a Dissipative Structure. I won't bore you with pedantic details, but in this article young Dr. Bob suggested that

While many may consider it a truism that the human mind is an open system, this is not always so, and we may trace many states of pathology to the matter of how open or closed the system is.

Among others, the article mentions schizoid states, autism, narcissism, and "false self" or "as if" personalities. But nearly every diagnosis I can think of involves either pathological closure (too rigid boundaries) or openness (relative absence of boundaries). 

Later it dawned on me that the human person is an open system both horizontally and vertically. And if this is the case, then it accounts for spiritual pathologies -- pneumopathologies --  ranging from atheism (i.e., self-sufficient vertical closure) to full blown demon possession (vertical invasion) and everything in between (e.g., metanoia, prayer, grace, communion, sanctity, infused contemplation, etc.).

What did Jesus say? Two rules: love God (vertical openness) and love your neighbor (horizontal openness). 

This openness is bi-directional: there is an outward facing communicative pole and a complementary pole of receptivity. These function analogously to metabolism on the biological plane.

With this in mind, we now have a conceptual basis for understanding the receptivity and relationality in and of God. Is God related to us? How could he not be, if God is the very principle of substance-in-relation? 

Moreover, this divine receptivity "should be looked on not as essentially a sign of imperfection [or] poverty," but rather, as a "positive aspect or perfection of being."

In the absence of this perfection of receptivity, "authentic mutual love would necessarily remain incomplete -- and love is of itself a purely positive perfection." 

We'll conclude by suggesting that "all being tends naturally toward self-transcendence," and that our cosmos may ultimately be regarded as "an immense implicit aspiration towards the Divine."

Like the whole creation groans with labor pains or something. 

The Journey Home

Picking up where we left off, if our Cosmos

were totally unconscious there would be no way for it to complete its return to God in the Great Circle of Being as we shall see in a moment when dealing with the universe as Journey (Clarke). 

That moment has arrived. All aboard! 

Not to go woo woo on you right away, but as I said in the Book -- and I meant it -- if the Cosmos is conscious anywhere it is conscious everywhere, due its part-whole, or holo-fractal organization. That's not the Norco talking, because I ran out. I mean it in a very literal way, but let me first defer to another authority:

The order of the parts of the universe to each other exists in virtue of the order of the whole universe to God (Thomas).

Argument from authority is a logical fallacy.

That's true, unless what the authority says can be independently verified. Nobody's perfect, but

The source of every imperfect thing lies necessarily in one perfect being (ibid).

And

The complete perfection of the universe demands that there should be created natures which return to God (ibid).

Assumes facts not in evidence, i.e., God. 

Okay, let's leave God out of it for now, and put it this way: 

Intellect is the first author and mover of the universe.... Hence the last end of the universe must necessarily be the good of the intellect. This, however, is truth. Hence truth must be the last end of the whole universe (ibid.).  

Still sounds circular to me.

Precisely, bearing in mind that this is the only alternative to a radical absurcularity, or cosmic nul de slack. It's either one or the other:

The creature is vanity in so far as it comes from nothingness, but not in so far as it comes from God (ibid).

And if we came from nothingness we could never know it. Turns out that -- because of the holofractality referenced above -- the intellect is "naturally capable of knowing everything that exists," and 

every intellectual being is in a certain manner all things, in so far as it is able to comprehend all being by the power of its understanding (ibid.). 

Conversely,

This ordering of the intellect to infinity would be vain and senseless if there were no infinite object of knowledge (ibid.).

But there is an infinite object of knowledge: O. Which is why we aren't plunged into the darkness of vanity and senselessness:

The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing else than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light in which the eternal ideas are contained (ibid.). 

Which is why I find the cosmos s'durned innarestin' -- the way the whole human comedy keeps perpetuatin' itself down through the generations.... Aw, look at me, I'm ramblin' again. Let's get back to Clarke. He says that

our -- and any -- universe turns out to be a radically personalized one, in its source, its meaning, and its destiny.

Any universe? 

The person is ultimately the key to why there is anything at all and not rather nothing.

And again, an isolated person is not, and could not be, a person: "the notion of person itself necessarily turns out to be interpersonal. There is no 'I' without a 'Thou,' and hence a 'We.'" 

So the real mystery is intersubjectivity. How did it get here, and by virtue of what principle? One possibility is that Christianity is true, for the existence of God "as a Triune Personal Being, or "a Three in One" 

sheds immense light on the very nature of being and person. For it reveals that the Supreme Being... must be interpersonal, a Personal 'We,' rather than a solitary, utterly simple, and nonrelational One. No wonder, then, that human personality also is intrinsically interpersonal, since it us such a lofty image of the divine perfection.

Unless you have a better idea. Or a more comprehensive vision, one that leaves nothing out, in particular, the interpersonal personality which is the very lens through which we see this and any other vision. In this vision there is first an exodus,

or journey outward of all created being from its Infinite Source, the emanation of the Many from the One.... But no sooner has the outgoing journey begun than it pivots upon itself and starts back on a journey home again to its Source, drawn by the pull of the Good in each being.

Bearing in mind that the Good of the intellect is Truth. To repeat what Thomas says above, 

the last end of the universe must necessarily be the good of the intellect. This, however, is truth. Hence truth must be the last end of the whole universe.

Or as Clarke puts it,

the exodus and the return, the leaving home and the returning thereto, the way out and the way back, are a journey motif woven into the very ontological structure of every being and thus of the universe itself as a whole.

Man is the mediator, the "bridge builder"

standing in the midst of the material universe, arising out of it as a synthesis of matter and spirit, a microcosm imaging the whole in himself, and with the capacity through his intellect and will to understand the whole process, the entire journey and its meaning...

That's pretty much the vision of my divine cosmody, and I'm sticking to it: badda-bing, badda-BANG!

the Big Bang Theory of the origin of the material universe now reveals that the entire cosmos from the first fiery moment of its origin to the present is enveloped in a single great unified journey. Physics and metaphysics here reinforce each other. And the spiritual journey of each one of us becomes a microcosm of the larger journey.

Someone ought to write a book.

Person, Light, and Presence

To reset: we've been talking about an autobiographical essay by Norris Clarke, in which he discusses six themes that "have dominated my metaphysical reflection over the last 50 years" and "are central in my philosophical vision of the universe." We've saved the last for last, which is 

the person, or the universe as radically personalized, from and for persons as the supreme value in the universe.

You know the drill: last in execution is first in intention, all other metacosmic intentions being #2 or lower. Persons are not only open to the purpose of the cosmos, they are that purpose. But only if understood in a certain way, since the wrong way leads to cosmic narcissism, solipsism, nihilism, and even progressivism, which, you might say, is the sum of all metaphysical heresies and misguided intentions. 

By the way, I don't have any idea what Clarke is about to say, having not read the book in many years. But since we think alike, I trust that we'll get a post out of it.

He starts with Thomas' claim that the person is "that which is most perfect in all of nature," but of course this is mostly in the form of potential. Other animals are limited by the potential to fulfill their genetic program, but the span of human potential is vertically unlimited at both ends, from saint to psychopath, or from wisdom to tenure.

While tracking down the source of that quote, I found some other relevant observations by the T-man, for example, 

The further a being is distant from that which is Being itself, namely God, the nearer it is to nothingness. But the nearer a being stands to God, the further away it is from nothingness. 

Which goes to the vertical spectrum in which man qua man is always -- and cannot not be -- situated. This means that if we could travel back in time and track down the first man... 

Well first of all, for reasons we'll probably get into later, it would have to be the first men, since a radically individual person is a cosmic impossibility, a metaphysical nonstarter. Supposing such a being, how would he go about ushering the other men into the vertical world of the very intersubjectivity that defines man? 

It would be exactly like, say, trying to teach language to an ape. No matter how hard you try, the ape will still be enclosed in a slightly larger apehood. I won't belabor the point, but you will have noticed that God says, and I quote, Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, which is what I would call a Pretty Big Hint about our nature. 

Moreover, male and female he created them, which implies that otherness and relation are built into the human cake. Just like inside God's own cake. 

In the later version, God literally fashions woman from man, which I take as a mythopoetic way of saying that they share the same substance -- or substance-in-relation, as we will later elaborate. Horizontally speaking, man refers to woman, and vice versa, each being a vertical prolongation of God's own interior relationality.

The classic definition of man is the "rational animal," but prior to this he must be the relational animal, otherwise he could never be reasonable, since reason would be unrelated to the world or to anything else. Reasoning is always about. 

Here's another good one by Thomas, going to the telos of creation (and why #6 is really #1, as per the above):

The highest step in the whole process of generation of creatures is the human soul, towards which matter tends as its ultimate form.... Man is therefore the end [i.e., telos] of all generation (emphasis mine).

Here again, matter is first in execution, but only a materialist would say that it is the end of things. There are things higher than matter, otherwise to hell with it. Turns out

it is possible for the perfection of the whole universe to have its existence in one single being.... the ultimate perfection to which the soul can attain is that in it is reflected the whole order of the universe and its causes.

It seems that the existence of a single Perfect Man is the whole durn point of the Cosmos, or of what this is all leading up to. Let's hold that thought in abeyance and get back to Clarke. He asks "What is so special about the person that situates it at the apex of the order of being," hmm?

We can't just say the Bible says so, because the Bible is not self-authenticating. Rather, for us, it must be true by virtue of the standards of truth. 

Of course, it reveals certain truths that we could not know in the absence of their revelation to us, but once known, they make a heckuva lot of sense, which in turn tends to authenticate the text, or in other words, how could such primitive people know such timeless truths about human nature without a little vertical assistance?

What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?

Exactly what powers distinguish us from the beasts and nihilists? I would say two things -- not the two you're thinking of, but rather, Truth and the Freedom to know it. 

Now, I believe in natural selection as much as the next ape, but it can in no way account for its own truth and our freedom to know it. And this truth-freedom reduces to the immaterial intellect, which obviously cannot be explained by any material process. 

Here again, intellect is related to the world, but with a big difference. Lower animals are also related to the world, but only in an exterior sense. They cannot know interiors, that is, essences. My dog can pee on a tree, but knows nothing about the concept of treeness. 

Conversely, man is related to the interiority of things, beginning with the interior of other people, AKA intersubjectivity. It's how we are even having this conversation.

The luminous presence of human interiority. Absent this interiority, there would be no place for the light to shine. In Voegelin's terms, the light shines in the space between the poles of immanence and transcendence, and here we are. 

But what is the source of this mysterious light that bathes the intellect? Rabbi Leonard says There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in," but that makes it sound like an accident, when it's really Voegelin's metaxy, 

the experience of human existence as "between" lower and upper poles: man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on.

For Clarke,

Personal being is nothing but being itself, freed from the limits of material modes of existence that hold it down in the darkness of un-self-conscious lack of self-presence, being itself allowed now to take on the full dimensions of what it is meant to be... 

The alternative -- your choice -- is what Voegelin calls scotosis, i.e., "Darkening, turning toward darkness. Voluntary ignorance," or the "eclipse of reality."

How to escape this self-inflicted blindness? Periagoge, 

Turning around, conversion. Plato's term for the cognitive and moral reorientation toward the True and the Good as such (Webb). 

Through such a metaphysical metanoia, we are, in Clarke's words, able 

to realize the full "nature" of being as presence, tending toward the ideal fullness, found only in God, of total luminous presence.... To be without restrictions, therefore, necessarily means to be personal.

That seems like a jump. Could you say a little more? 

[T]he unrestricted dynamism of the mind is a mystery of light, of super-personal being, rather than the darkness of infra-personal being.

Go on.

Not only must the ultimate Source of the universe be personalized being..., the rest of the universe derives from personal being.... for the universe to make full sense it would have to include personal created beings within it -- in a word, it would have to be for persons.

Put conversely, 

What could possibly be the point of a created universe entirely plunged in the darkness of unconsciousness, unable to know or appreciate that it is there at all? 

Hmm? It reminds me of Voegelin's QUESTION, which is his term for 

the tension of existence in its aspect as a questioning unrest seeking not simply particular truth, but still more the transcendental pole of truth as such: "not just any question but the quest concerning the mysterious ground of all being" (Webb). 

Truly truly, this puts the quest into the question, or the deustination into the journey, for if the Cosmos

were totally unconscious there would be no way for it to complete its return to God in the Great Circle of Being as we shall see in a moment when dealing with the universe as Journey. 

That's way over 1,000 words already, so that moment will have to await the next post.

Where the Action Is

Yesterday we discussed the first two of six themes of the Cosmic Symphony, 1) the unrestricted dynamism of the mind toward being, and 2) existence as an act of presence. 

Put these two together and we see a complementarity between the intellect's unrestricted desire to know the world, and the world's equally unrestricted intelligibility, which reduces to a luminous space of experience, and how convenient is that! 

We already have it on authority -- Voegelin's -- that EXPERIENCE as such is a "'luminous perspective' within the process of reality," and that's good enough for me. But we'll shed further light on the Subject of Experience in next post.  

Next up is what Clarke calls participation but I would call the holo-fractal structure of being. 

For example, he describes how "the immanent One in many is also a many from a transcendent One," or in other words, this is a weblike cosmos in which everything participates both in and with everything else, both horizontally and (because) vertically. 

Or, you could say that this is an interiorly related cosmos, but whence this mysterious interiority? I mean, here we are, experiencing the inside of the Cosmos. Here again, we'll save the definitive answer for next post. But don't worry, there's still lots to cover and uncover in this one.  

As to the horizontal worldwide web, we don't have to deepak the chopra to know that "An instant of time, without duration, is an imaginative logical construction," and that "each duration of time mirrors itself in all temporal durations" (Whitehead). Same with space:

In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatiotemporal standpoint mirrors the world (ibid.). 

I could cite many similar passages from The Book of the Same Name, for example, "If the whole did not participate and serve as the ground for the existence of the parts, the parts would not exist," and

Simply put, the classical assumption that the collection of parts constitutes the whole has proven invalid. We now know that the properties of parts can only be understood in terms of the dynamics of the whole, and that what we call a "part" is a pattern in the inseparable web of relations.

Back to Clarke, "Thus the whole universe appears as a vast participation system, a One in many which is also a many from One," and why not? "To be is to be together," such that "Togetherness and community are woven into the very stuff of all being, as being."

Again, convenient if we want to think about reality: "For if psyche mirrors nature and nature mirrors psyche," then "either can illuminate the other," and we're back to that mysterious Light to which we alluded at the end of the previous post. 

What is the source of all this luminosity? Why aren't we in the dark, or rather, how does experience become the sensorium of transcendental light? How many beings does it take to create an existential light bulb?

Good question. I'm gonna guess three, but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

Supposing two mirrors facing each other, we still require light in order to see anything in them. We'll hold that question in reserve and move on to the next theme, which Clarke calls Action, which strikes me as similar to our second theme, which was the idea of Existence as the Act of Presence.  

Action refers to 

the activity by which the various centers of existential energy in the universe pour over into self-expression and self-communication with each other. 

Without it -- inconveniently -- "all we would have would be a collection of isolated beings" bound up within themselves, "with no connections or communication with others, and hence no way of knowing them." A total eclipse of O, so No philosophy for you!

Every being would be plunged in total silence and darkness... a total "black hole," so to speak....

It is action alone that enables beings to come out of their isolation, connect with each other, influence each other, and communicate to each other. 

Indeed,

It is action that truly allows there to be a universe, that is, a turning of all towards oneness, togetherness.  

So, that's a relief: to even say Cosmos is to have assumed a great deal. Clarke says a great deal more about it, but you get the point. We'll move on to our next theme of the Cosmic Symphony, which is The Good, which -- surprise surprise -- is also "woven into the very fabric of being itself," just as God said all those years ago. 

It seems that there is an Ought built into the nature of things, which is conformity to the Good: "Being and value are inseparable," in that action is "dynamically drawn or magnetized by the good." 

Why, he's talking about Celestial Central, AKA the Great Attractor! And here again, I thought I was the only one. 

The last -- and for me, most important -- theme is The Person. We are going to save this for a separate post, because it is the principle that unifies all the others, and without which there wouldn't be any others. Truly truly, it is the very ground of being -- why you are and I am and we are.

The Cosmic Symphony and How to Hear It

In an autobiographical essay called Fifty Years of Metaphysical Reflections, Clarke asks whether there is "something like a metaphysical bent of mind." Were we just born this way? If not, how did we get bent? 

To be sure, "not everyone has the aptitude or the inner attraction to become a self-propelling, self-motivated metaphysician." What are the seemingly inborn characteristics of such an autotelic personality? One is

A passion for unity, for seeing how the universe and all things in it fit together as a whole, a meaningful whole, a longing for integration of thought and life based on the integration of reality itself.

I have that longing. I didn't always have it, or rather, it began as a kind of (mustard?) seed that eventually got out of hand. 

It reminds me of a giant pine tree that began growing on the side of my house some thirty years ago. I didn't plant it, but just left it alone, and now it's too big to remove. Or at least too expensive. 

A second predisposition is a sense -- the sneaking suspicion -- that there exists

some kind of overall hidden harmony of the universe, which could be picked up and possibly spelled out if one listened carefully enough.

Like a musical sense which not everyone possesses, at least to the same degree:

I felt there was something great going on under the surface of things, some kind of hidden music, some harmony of all things that I could not quite hear but somehow knew was there and longed to lay hold of it in my consciousness. 

Same. Nietzsche too heard it, even while denying the composer:

The philosopher seeks to hear the echoes of the World Symphony and reproject it into concepts.

Clarke goes on to list six main themes of what what we shall call the Cosmic Symphony, beginning with The Unrestricted Dynamism of the Mind toward Being, by which he means 

the deep natural drive of the human mind to lay hold of intellectually and understand as far as possible the entire order of being, all there is to know about all there is. This drive knows no limits short of the total understanding of all being, both in depth and in breadth [i.e., vertically and horizontally].

This requires a great deal of continuing education for which there is no fixed syllabus, since it involves both anything and everything. 

Frankly I can't keep up, because it involves assignments in physics, biology, anthropology, psychology, history, economics, politics, theology, and more. 

Since I can never catch up, I'm always looking for shortcuts, some way to reduce the sprawl to something manageable via unitary and unifying, cross-disciplinary concepts, more on these as we proceed.

Obviously nobody could never master a single one of these disciplines, let alone all of them:

as soon as we reach the limits of the thing in question..., the mind naturally rebounds beyond to something more. And so on and on until we reach the totality of all being. The natural correlative of the human mind is being itself in all its fullness. 

O.

No, literally: we come to realize that the intellect as such is the inverse image of this "totality of all being." In the book, I symbolize this relation as [(¶) (⇆) (⇅) (O)]. That's what you call the visual representation of a unifying meta-concept.

At our end (¶) is the unrestricted desire to know, which corresponds to "the intrinsic intelligibility of being," or O. 

Thus there is openness at both ends: we are open to O, while O is open to being known. The noumena is not closed, a la Kant, but "open, in principle, to being known"; "Mind is for being, and reciprocally being is for mind." Otherwise to hell with it. We're just wasting our timelessness. 

To deny it [O] explicitly us to cut the nerve of any intellectual inquiry, since every inquiry presupposes, at least implicitly, that there is something there to be understood... 

The second great theme of our Cosmic Symphony is that Being itself is the act of Being, so -- in my words -- it is as if every existent is a fractal expression of this initial act of Being. 

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

Not only is this a talking universe, it never shuts up, in that it is endlessly intelligible to intelligence, at every level. 

Looked at this way, knowledge is the bond or union between intellect and thing. The existence of any thing is itself "a kind of light" which "shines forth to other things." Finite beings "are not the source of their own existence," or in other words, "they are not 'the light itself." 

Rather, there is a kind of two-way Light that illuminates both things and the intellect that knows them. 

Two themes down, four more to go.

Critique of Pure Criticism

For a guy who thought it was impossible to know the thing itself, Kant sure went to a lot of trouble trying to make sure people understood his thing itself. 

After the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason he "felt it to be generally misunderstood," so he dumbed it down with a smaller and more accessible volume, the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science. At the same time, he revised the Critique, "still struggling to not to be misunderstood" (Magee). 

That right there is what you call ironic: if everything outside our minds conforms to our a priori ways of knowing it, then how can Kant make an exception for how we receive his work? Wouldn't it too just slide into our own preconceptual categories? He should rightly expect to be misunderstood, as proof of his theory.

I didn't come up with that critique of the Critique. Rather, I was flipping through a book by Norris Clarke called Explorations In Metaphysics, in which he explores this contradiction. 

Kant is very much the doorway into modernity and worse, so we need to go back and close that door and nail it shut if we want to get back on the right track. He is widely regarded as "the outstanding figure to have emerged in the subject since the ancient Greeks" (Magee), so we have no choice but to debunk him, good and hard.

I wonder what Schuon thought about Kant's bunkum? He calls it 

a gratuitous reaction against all that lies beyond the reach of reason; it voices, therefore, a priori an instinctive revolt against truths which are rationally ungraspable and which are considered annoying on account of this very inaccessibility. All the rest is nothing but dialectical scaffolding, ingenious or “brilliant” if one wishes, but contrary to truth.

Moreover, it is an

altogether “irrational” desire to limit intelligence; this results in a dehumanization of the intelligence and opens the door to all the inhuman aberrations of our century. In short, if to be man means the possibility of transcending oneself intellectually, Kantianism is the negation of all that is essentially and integrally human.

Anti-humanism masquerading as humanism; or a humanism that ushers in the infrahuman. And of course, in all of creation, only a human can fail to be what he is. Put another way, God and human are an endlessly fruitful cosmic complementarity. 

In Voegelin's terms, man qua man is always situated in the dynamic space between immanence and transcendence, whereas for Kant, the Transcendent Real is inaccessible to us. This is philosophical progress? Rather, it is the end of philosophy, as it blows up the bridge between intellect and reality.

Kant's "basic thesis" is "that the human mind projects its own forms onto reality rather than receiving them from reality" (Clarke). The essence of his so-called Copernican revolution in thought is that "it is our thinking that gives form to the world rather than the world that gives form to our thought."

You will have noticed that every ideology has a special exemption for the person who promulgates it. For example, consciousness is a function of class, except for Marx. Or, thinking is just a rationalization of the id, except for Freud. Or again, no one can know the thing itself, except for Kant's thing: he

quite obviously and without question takes for granted the existence of other persons like himself and just as real as himself..., and can receive and send, basically intact, intelligible messages from and to each other (Clarke).

Otherwise, why be so irritated at those of us who receive and reject the message? 

In fact, he became quite indignant when other philosophers did not get his message straight but misinterpreted it...

But of course we do understand communications from other people, because man as such is the intersubjective being, an intersubjectivity that arises in the transitional space between mother and infant. Of course, he knew nothing about developmental psychology. Still, perhaps it would have helped if he had had a child. 

But "nowhere in his works does he ever discuss how it is possible to know other human beings as real," and who are "able to receive from each other intelligible messages" -- "in a word, how information can be successfully communicated at all."

This reminds me of what Stanley Jaki said about the philosopher having to reach first base before pretending to get to second or third, much less make it all the way home. Kant nowhere explains how he got to first base, or in other words,

there is not a word in Kant as to how interpersonal dialogue is possible at all; it is simply taken for granted as the implicit framework of all his writing (Clarke).

Some critique! On the one hand he "insists that we cannot know any thing-in-itself as real outside of the field of our own subjective experience," but  

in the experience of an authentic successful interpersonal dialogue, it is impossible for him or anyone else to believe sincerely that the other is not equally as real as his own self and equally interacting with him... 

If "we inform the world, rather than the world informing us," why so irritated? Nevertheless, he "was indignant when others did not, he thought, get his message straight."

Now, we not only believe that interpersonal communication is possible, but that the Cosmos itself is a network of intelligible speech -- "a vast system of interactive communicating centers, with ourselves as privileged self-conscious centers in the midst of it all." Both Being as such and every particular being is "self-communicative." 

Don't look at what Kant says, rather, what he does, especially the very first thing he does, and which presupposes the rest: 

Whenever a philosopher offers the kind of message which is philosophy, it must contain, at the very minimum, a justification of the means used to convey the message to beings no less real than the author himself (Jaki).

Deny this, and the philosopher "will have to bring in through the back door the very objects the use of which his starting point failed to justify."  

This truth cannot be evaded, let alone refuted, because the refutation itself is an act of communication, an implicit falling back on objective means whereby alone other philosophers can be reached (ibid.).

An objective means of communication, like a book or something: "the first duty of a philosopher is to endorse the reality of the book (or the physical reality of a discourse) which is the means making his message available" (ibid.).

So the only flaw, as I see it, in Kant's reasoning, is that if it is true it is false, and besides, no one could know it.

A Heaping Helping of Nothing for Nobody

Different objects require different methods: if your only tool is a material hammer, then you can never hit the immaterial nail. 

As such, it is unscientific to pretend to contemplate what it would be unphilosophical not to contemplate. Contemplation is a method, but its object is not reducible to the object(s) of science, even while subsuming them.

Nevertheless, scientism is the Philosophy of the Hammer:

it ignores, not only the degrees of reality and the fact of our imprisonment in the sensory world, but also... the gushing forth of our world from an invisible and fulgurant Reality, and its reabsorption into the dark light of this same Reality (Schuon).

Fulgurant: amazingly impressive; suggestive of the flashing of lightning. This impressive flash of lightning tracks with what we hammered home a couple of posts ago vis-a-vis the Great Circle of Being:

In the emergence of creatures from their first source is revealed a kind of circular movement, in which all things return, as to their end, back to the very place from which they had their origin in the first place (Thomas).

Schuon adds that "All of the Real lies in the Invisible," meaning that the most crippling kind of blindness sees only visible surfaces and superficial appearances. Rationalism is scarcely better, as its eyes see only backward, to what is inside the head subsequently projected outward: 

by wanting to exhaust all the knowable by thought alone, one ends by no longer knowing how to think at all.

More generally,  

By a curious and inevitable backlash, the abuse of intelligence is always accompanied by some inconsequentiality and some blindness (Schuon).

This is not to say that reason has no place in the scheme of things, only to recognize its limits:

a rationalist can be right on the level of observations and experiences; man is not a closed system, although he can try to be (ibid.).

Why is man not a closed system? Indeed, how did we ever transcend selfless instinct and selfish genes to become vertically open to the Real? To say that this defies Darwin was said even by Darwin:

with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.

He's not wrong:

Supposing Darwinism is true, how could Darwin know it without being a great exception to Darwinism? 

Must be because the Cosmos itself is an open system, which in turn is a reflection or vestige of the ultimate open system, which is to say, the trinitarian Godhead in which the Son is always open to the Father and vice versa. But this is getting ahead of our post.

We've said before that modern progressivism is the institutionalization of man's fall, which encloses him in immanence, precisely.

On the whole, modern philosophy is the codification of an acquired infirmity: the intellectual atrophy of man marked by the “fall” entails a hypertrophy of practical intelligence, whence in the final analysis the explosion of the physical sciences and the appearance of pseudo-sciences such as psychology and sociology (Schuon).

Imagine going to all the time and trouble of acquiring a Ph.D. in one of these pseudo-sciences.

D'oh! 

Thankfully, I've been able to recover from that and move on to the discovery my own higher uselessness: the actual philosopher

will not fit naively into the functioning of the workaday routine; he... will not be "fit" for this world; he as well will look at things differently from those who primarily are dominated by the pursuit of practical purposes...

Philosophy by its nature is a free endeavor, and for this reason it serves no one and nothing (Pieper). 

One Cosmos, serving nothing and nobody for 18 years!

Survival of the fitless?

Yes, but man as such is a cosmic misfit, is he not? How is it that we can explain most everything but ourselves, nor can we fit into any manmade scheme without procrustean amputations?

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will not have explained anything. 

Just how do we explain the explainer in the absence of the openness alluded to above? Science discovers -- or presupposes rather -- a rational world of intelligible law. But

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.  

So, science illuminates the Mystery even to the nth degree without ever eliminating it. And even then,

Being only falsifiable, a scientific thesis is never certain but is merely current. 

On the other hand,

We believe in many things in which we do not believe we believe.

First and foremost of which must be O, in which we can only pretend not to believe. Is it even possible to engage in science without presupposing it? 

Bear in mind that when we say O, we are referring to, among other things, the world's infinite intelligibility-to-intelligence, or to the "actually infinite Plenitude of Being" in which "all other beings participate yet of which they are but imperfect images." 

This is the "unifying center and source" which "confers magnificent intelligibility on the natural dynamism of my mind and the whole intellectual life arising out of it" (Clarke). 

Turns out we "cannot deny the existence of God without asserting a whole raft of beliefs about the nature of the world" (Lennox). I suppose we'll see if this raft floats in the next post.