Progress is an Open Spiral, Progressivism a Circular Prison

Just more of the same:

When progressives talk about "progress," they cannot mean the same thing we do, for objective progress is precisely what is rendered impossible in their metaphysic. Rather, progress for the progressive always involves compelling others to the yield to the opinions and desires of the progressive. But real progress can never result from bypassing freedom and truth (i.e., truth freely accepted).

One can approach this from various angles, but the result is always the same, for a determined stupidity at the start of a journey assures stupidity at the end -- like insisting that if only one travels far enough, one can prove that parallel lines meet. Sleep with a premise, wake up with its conclusions.

Since there is no "fixed point" in leftism, it can claim no truth and hence no measure of progress. Schuon hits the troll on the head in his usual pithy style: "To claim that knowledge as such could only be relative amounts to saying that human ignorance is absolute."

Either that thought will appeal to you, and be used as a stepping stone to higher things, or you will literally find it "repulsive," in that it will repel you onto a relative and therefore subjective, idiosyncratic, and ultimately arbitrary path. You will go back to sleep, which is not quite as effective suicide, but a pretty good defense mechanism against transcendent truth.

Once on that false path, no matter how rigorously one otherwise applies reason, one will be in a world that is fundamentally unreal. Therefore, one will be apportioning clouds, nailing Jello, sowing wind, spanking the monkey, etc. That is the bad kind of cosmic circle, i.e., self-enclosed circularity.

The cosmos is, of course, "structured," so to speak, as a circle, but it is a benignly inspiraling one, not a viciously repetitive one, i.e. an eternal return (as feared by Nietzsche). When I first realized this, I thought I had hit on something kind of original. Now I wish I had compiled all of the statements I've subsequently stumbled upon that affirm the same thing.

For example, this one, by Schuon: "There are basically but three miracles: existence, life, intelligence; with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring which in reality has never parted from the Infinite."

In fact, even prior to the establishment of the first Raccoon lodge on March 4, 1355, Thomas Aquinas had used exactly this organizational structure for the Summa -- a chain of interior and exterior certitudes forming a 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.

There is a two-way journey; one can call it out and back, or down and up, or many and one, or conspiracy and slack, or fall and redemption, or just ø and O.

In any -- and every -- event, there is a

Journey away from Home, where creatures actively unfold their diverse dynamic natures as finite participations in the divine perfection and as centers of self-expressive and self-communicating action and interaction with each other, thus forming a universe, that is, a system of many real beings joined together by their interaction to form the community of all existents -- the ultimate of all communities. This part of the journey was called the exitus (journey out) (Clarke).

This is accompanied by the journey back toward the Great Attractor, O, whereby creation is "drawn by this same Source through the pull of the Good built in to the very nature of every being through the mediation of final causation," or what Bob calls the the personal telovator or cosmic eschalator.

The upshot is that this "ultimate One now appears as both the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and End, at once the Source and the Goal of the restless dynamism of all nature, of all finite beings."

It's just that in human beings, this restless longing, this passion for wholeness, has become conscious, and this consciousness, you might say, is the initial "spark" that occurs when two tingles intermingle and spark in the dark, i.e., the Divine and human:

There is religious conversion which is 'being grasped by ultimate concern. It is an other-worldly falling in love....' The outcome of such conversion is that the Holy Spirit and the human spirit encounter profoundly (Norris).

Love at first Light.

No Principles, No Problem

The problem with the left is not so much bad philosophy as no philosophy at all.

Progressives are truly "post-philosophical," which is what allows them to routinely hold views that are internally and externally inconsistent, and more generally, to appeal to "expedient principles" -- an oxymoron -- as the need arises to defend what can only amount to raw power and self-interest. (In other words, truthlessness actually has a purpose, and this purpose is to serve the acquisition and maintenance of power.)

No, this isn't just polemical, because this is precisely what the more sophisticated among them aver: to disagree with their relativism is to render oneself an authoritarian or fascist. We are indeed living in a "post-metaphysical" age, which is indistinguishable from a post-philosophical age, which in turn redounds to a post-serious thinking age, or even a "post-adult" one.

Things become stupid and childish when principles are absent. For, Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles. Indeed, Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest.

Which is why, by the way, Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time (NGD). You will have noticed that the only way the left can get around this truism is to ban our assumptions wherever they have the power to do so, e.g., on college campuses.

When the tenured break out the "post-metaphysical" canard, what they really mean is post-Western civilization in general and post-Judeo-Christian in particular. The only way to jettison those two obstacles to power is to discredit them entirely. Not to seriously engage them, because to engage them would be to leave oneself beclowned (just as engaging rather than ignoring the Constitution would put an end to the left's schemes).

Therefore, our bedrock principles must be dismissed with a kind of a priori contempt, as if man learned nothing about the nature of man during his first 200,000 years on the planet. Now, the mere presence of a species for 200,000 years argues for an essence or nature that defines the species. But this isn't a problem if one's post-philosphical and post-intellectual outlook tosses aside the whole notion of essence: if human nature is a an obstacle, just deny it up front.

Here metaphysical Darwinism comes in handy, for if man is but the effect of wholly random causes, then he has no essence. This being the case, we are free to turn man into anything we wish. For example, if we raise a boy as a girl, he will become one. For the left, the only thing in man that is absolutely fixed is homosexuality. That and the right to a dead baby. Unless the baby is homosexual. Then it's murder. And murder is a sin. Except there's no such thing as sin.

Principles!

The only way to overcome what man has learned about himself over the eons -- much of it rather unflattering -- is to adopt an attitude of abject cynicism. Now, as we see in our troll [William], this attitude is one of extreme corrosiveness, in the sense that it naively prides itself on being able to dissolve any argument before reaching its conclusion. This is why I refer to it as "negative omniscience."

Unlike positive omniscience, or "knowing everything," this is the negative capability of knowing nothing, but in a way that renders oneself superior. One routinely encounters it in clinical practice, among paranoiacs (in a more crude form) and narcissists (in more subtle forms).

As Clarke discusses, "The very notion of constructing a unified systematic philosophical inquiry into being as a whole... has been abandoned by contemporary philosophers." An exception to the rule is Whiteheadian process philosophy, which is how I initially got into the racket. In fact, I don't think he can be surpassed if one is attempting to construct a metaphysic on merely scientific grounds, i.e., to draw out the metaphysical implications of modern science.

But man is obviously not restricted to the scientific mode of knowing (to believe otherwise is to have internalized an implicit principle before the investigation has even begun). Rather, as Schuon writes, "One of the keys to the understanding of our true nature and our ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world never measure up to the real range of our intelligence." For "Our intelligence is made for the Absolute, or it is nothing."

I don't regard this statement as remotely poetical, or romantic, or "in a manner of speaking." Rather, everything must have its sufficient reason, and the only sufficient reason for man's restless search for Absoluteness is the Absolute. This is the real reason why science never rests content with any hypothesis (with the exception of manmade global warming, which, like homosexuality and the right to abortion, is another absolute).

But if man were only provoked to seek out the Absolute from the relative end of the cosmos, this would be a cosmic itch he could never scratch, for it is not possible for a finite being to reach or even know of the Infinite; to say finite is to implicitly know infinitude.

Therefore, just as man is on a perpetual search for God, history reveals God's perpetual search for man. If one prefers, one may express it in abstract terms and say that man, everywhere we find him, is characterized by (↑). But likewise, culture, everywhere we find it, is imbued with traces of (↓).

In the end -- as we shall see -- man's search for God is God's search for man, for there is no other way of looking at it, assuming God is God (in other words, transcendence necessarily spills over into immanence, as immanence points back and returns to transcendence).

To put it another way, every culture is characterized by a search for the ground, source, origin, or center -- the unchanging, or Ultimate Principle. Norris calls this the "search from below." He references Cardinal Newman, who remarked that "all the nations" seek God, and that "by feeling their way toward him, succeed in finding him." However, it is necessary to discern the principial truth within "the corrupt legends" with which it is inevitably mixed.

The story of the people of Israel isn't just another story of (↑), but more importantly, a -- the -- story of (↓): "it is not we who seek God, it is rather God who seeks us out." And for Christians, (↑) and (↓) meet -- or Cross paths -- in the person of Christ, who is both ground and destiny: "Here the human search from below, in its many different modalities and incarnations... effectively meets the divine descending search..."

Thus, "the Eternal enters time, the Whole lies hidden in the part, God takes on a human face." More to the point, "dialogue" becomes the possibility of "union" when the Absolute crosses "the ontological abyss separating the infinite and infinite." Again, to say that man cannot accomplish this union in the absence of (↓) is a truism.

Which is where I would say the Holy Spirit comes in, for he may be fruitfully thought of as an ongoing form of (↓), so that our sincere search is never in vain. The Holy Spirit "is the finisher and polisher of divine revelation with regard to us." Norris references an illuminating passage by the Orthodox bishop Ignatios of Latakia:

Without the Holy Spirit, God is far away, / Christ stays in the past, / the Gospel is a dead letter, / the Church is simply an organization, / authority a matter of dominion, / mission a matter of propaganda, / the liturgy no more than an evocation, / Christian living a slave morality.

Intelligibility and Freedom, Absurdity and Compulsion

Just another post that held my interest...

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One of the perverse characteristics of our age is that the world is simultaneously regarded as exquisitely intelligible and yet completely absurd.

Which is itself absurd, because it is impossible to understand how these two can be reconciled. I would go so far as to say that if the world were absurd, we could never know it; and that to think the world absurd results from an implicit expectation of non-absurdity.

When I say that the world is seen as exquisitely intelligible, what I mean is that we just assume -- correctly so -- that whatever or wherever we investigate in the cosmos, it will make sense -- that it will speak to us and disclose its secret. Intelligible order is everywhere (which is one of the operating assumptions of science). Faith in the rationality and intelligibility of the cosmos is a faith in God once removed (non-Judeo-Christian cultures have no such faith, unless it has been imported from the West).

As it bears upon ultimate questions, science is every bit as "faith based" as is religion (except in a naive and uncritical way). What I mean is that, for example, science actually has no idea -- nor will it ever, on its own terms -- how a supposedly dead universe suddenly sprang to life 3.85 billion years ago.

Nevertheless, most scientists (if they think about it at all) seem to have a serene confidence that this ultimate discontinuity is unproblematic. Which is why I felt so fortunate to encounter the brilliant Robert Rosen during the years I spent puzzling over the problem of Life Itself (can't really recommend him to layfolk; he didn't live long enough to maybe dumb it down a notch for our benefit).

Likewise the transition -- or leap -- from (mere) animal to man. You will have noticed that in facing this question, science doesn't really work inductively from the actual evidence. Rather, it begins with a Darwinian conclusion -- for them, an axiomatic truth -- and deduces how this or that human trait must have come about via random copying errors naturally selected.

Yes, the results are comical -- for one thing, any properly credentialed mediocrity can play the game -- but no more so than a religious person who, say, begins with the axiomatic truth that the world is 6,000 years old, and then tries to cram all the empirical evidence into that hypothesis. Both can be done, but only badly.

We endured an example of this type of pseudo-analysis the other day, with reader William's appeal to cosmic ignorance in support of his negative omniscience (similar to how scientism marshals intelligibility in support of absurdity). That is, in response to our belief that the universe must in principle be finite, he commented that he is

limited in [my] perception of the observable universe by the space time continuum in which [I] exist, and that [I am] able to perceive and theorize"; [and that] the particle horizon -- the maximum distance from which particles can or have traveled in the age of the universe -- represents the boundary between the observable and the unobservable universe.

Well, that's certainly one way of looking at it. An intrinsically absurd way. For example, is it even remotely true that man's understanding is limited to the laws of physics, or to what is empirically present to the senses? If this were true, then we couldn't even know the laws of physics, for we would merely be an expression of them; the answer to every human problem would be E = mc2, or Planck's constant.

More to the point, man is capable of pondering universal truths that operate in the realm of existence as such, in any conceivable cosmos. It isn't as if these universal truths are reducible to physics; to the contrary, physics must be a prolongation of metaphysics.

In other words, in order for something to be intelligible at all, it must share certain characteristics (which I will discuss in a subsequent post). Therefore, to the extent that there are things outside our "space-time continuum," if they are intelligible, then we can understand them. If they are absurd, then we can't.

However, there is every reason to conclude that "existence" and "intelligibility" are so intimately related that to exist is to be intelligible. To put it the other way around, it is obviously impossible for us to conceive of something that "exists" in an unintelligible way.

We can go so far as to say that the cosmos is "fulfilled" in knowledge of itself -- which is simultaneously man's fulfillment, at least on the natural plane (i.e., that being ends in contemplation of itself).

But even then, there can be no contradiction between Reason and Revelation, since both are creations of the same Author. Thus, in the face of apparent contradiction, we must re-examine and rethink the matter through. Atheists and other trolls never tire of raising such contradictions, precisely because they haven't thought them through. In other words, they take note of the contradiction and stop right there, instead of discerning the unity from a higher perspective.

While it is no doubt true that in premodern times epistemology was subordinated to metaphysics (or, more likely, theology), in our day it is the converse, such that metaphysics is subordinated to positivistic science, a strangely oedipal scenario in which the child (science) murders its parent (natural theology).

Norris Clarke writes that man innately possesses an "unrestricted drive" to know "all that there is to know about all that there is."

Good credo for the masthead: All There is to Know about All There Is.

As such, our mind is by its nature "oriented toward the totality of being as knowable, as its final goal which alone can satisfy its desire to know." Further, this is a kind of "natural hope" -- to go along with our natural faith -- "in the radical intelligibility in principle of all real being."

Blah blah yada yada, if you pursue this line of thought to its inevitable end, you are faced with a choice: "Either the universe is unintelligible," in which case you free -- or compelled, rather -- to wallow in your own absurdity.

If not, then "there must exist one and only one Infinite Source of all other beings, both of their actual existence and all the perfections (goodness) within them.... Our journey of the intellect, in search of the full intelligibility of what it means to be, has now finally arrived at the single Infinite Source of all beings, of the whole community of real existents."

O!

The original desire for the good takes its energy from the ever-pulsating momentum of that Origin in which man, answering the creative call of God, flew across the abyss which parts nothingness from existence. It is the moment with which the possible bursts forth with a roar into the radiant dawn of its first realization: the swift current of a stream that originating in the bright darkness of mere Nature and steadily fed by its source, crosses by the dictates of innate conscience into the realm of freedom (Josef Pieper).

The Body, Soul, and Divinity of Truth

Just a couple of old posts strung together. I have to put them someplace, and this is the place...

This post is about Truth and Freedom, since we can by no means have one without the other. For who could argue with the following proposition, that

The actualization of truth is no mere natural process but a spiritual event, which takes place only in the lightning-like encounter and fusion of two words -- the word of the subject and the word of the object. Outside of this event, there is no truth" (Balthasar, Theo-Logic).

Nature may embody truth, but it takes a supernatural act to pull the truthy rabbit out of its material hat, to quote Aquinas on one of his rare off days. No: "The truth of the object exists only so long as infinite or finite spirit turns to it in an act of knowing; the truth of the subject exists only as long as it abides in this act" (ibid.).

Our encounter with the object world releases the truth of the subject into being. This is why we all respond differently to different objects -- and subjects, i.e., persons -- which have a way of giving birth to a latent part of ourselves. This has much in common with the Platonic idea of education, the purpose of which is more to draw out what is within than to shove into us what we lack ("doctor" is cognate to docer, to "draw out.")

One cannot get to the freedom of truth unless one first appreciates the unfreedom that often surrounds it. The spirit must first apprentice itself to the object world before it can "attain to itself." This is similar to the manner in which one must first master scales and chords before one is truly free to play a musical instrument. In fact, for a true master, the unfreedom and freedom will live side by side for the remainder of one's life. John Coltrane used to practice eight hours a day long after he attained virtuosity.

Things are more than things, and facts are more than facts. If this weren't the case, then knowledge of them would be strictly impossible.

For human beings, facts are always enshrouded in mystery, for they are an occasion to know the great Mystery of Withinness. Facts speak to humans, again, in ways that engage us in particularly intimate ways. Take the simple example of this book we're discussing today. Not a single person in the world would have highlighted the exact same passages I have, either because it speaks to me or I hear it in a uniquely individualized way. So are the facts in the book? Or in me? Or in the space between?

If it weren't for the erotic mystery that enshrouds truth, we'd all be singing the same tune from the same boring hymnal. "The event of knowledge would cast a cold, pitiful, shadowless light into every corner, and there would be no possibility of escaping this scorching sun. Being, stripped of mystery, would be, so to speak, prostituted" (ibid.).

This epistemological ambiguity is the precise opposite of a cynical relativism or spiritually barren deconstruction. Rather, "radical cynicism only becomes possible wherever man no longer has a flair for the central mystery of being, whenever he has unlearned reverence, wonder, and adoration, whenever, having denied God, whose essence is always characterized by the wonderful, man also overlooks the wondrousness of every single created entity" (ibid.).

There is a perverse joy in this radical cynicism, which is just the negative form of omniscience. Nor is it difficult to trace its roots, now that I have a four year old boy who likes to build things, but not nearly as much as he enjoys tearing them apart, knocking them down, or disassembling them to see "what's inside." But of course, there is no inside without the outside. The outside is the manifestation of the inside, just as the inside is the invisible "essence" of the outside. Jettison either, and the cosmos is reduced to a flat and empty place.

The outside reveals the inside, just as the downside reveals the upside.

*****

The human being is faced with a range of phenomena -- both exterior and interior, i.e., thoughts and things -- of which he needs to take account and make sense. And if he is to comprehend the totality of existence, i.e., the Kosmos, then the True Philosopher, the extreme seeker after knowledge, the ardent lover of wisdom, the off-road spiritual adventurer, must exclude nothing (including, of course, Nothing; in other words, he must also be mindful of non-being, or more or less complete privations of the Good and True).

If embracing the fancies of a Dawkins or Dennett means rejecting the oceanic depths of an Aquinas or Maritain, then so much the worse for the modern misosophers who are blind to any reality that surpasses the circular limits of their projected models. For example, reader William, as usual, turns reality on its head by appealing to what he calls "the infinite" in order to maintain his rigidly finite, parochial, and earthbound attitudes.

What he forgets is that to posit the Infinite -- which only man can do, and which in a certain sense defines him -- carries with it certain immediate implications. If nothing else, to take seriously the principle of the Infinite is to to have left vulgar materialism behind and to have entered the realm of pure metaphysics. If the Infinite "exists," then it is obviously a first principle, since it cannot be surpassed. By definition nothing can surpass infinitude.

Looked at from the other end, "To say Absolute, is to say Infinite" (Schuon). "Infinitude is an intrinsic aspect of the Absolute." As such, "It is from this 'dimension' of Infinitude that the world necessarily springs forth; the world exists because the Absolute, being such, implies Infinitude."

Now, we all know the cosmos is "expanding," for that is an implication of Infinitude. Schuon:

The Infinite is that which, in the world, appears as modes of expanse or of extension, such as space, time, form or diversity, number or multiplicity, matter or substance...

In other words, and to be more precise: there is a conserving mode, and this is space; a transforming mode, and this is time; a qualitative mode, and this is form, not inasmuch as it limits, but inasmuch as it implies indefinite diversity; a quantitative mode, and this is number, not inasmuch as it fixes a given quantity, but inasmuch as it too is indefinite; a substantial mode, and this is matter, it too being without limit as is shown by the star-filled sky. Each of these modes has its prolongation" in our world, "for these modes are the very pillars of universal existence.

Those who "go off the deep end" receive all of the attention from mental health professionals, but it is also possible -- and more common, actually -- to fall off the shallow end, "to lose everything but one's reason," as Chesterton put it. These people can't really be helped, since they find the shallow end to be quite congenial to their desiccated souls. They know how to wade, to tread water, to dog-paddle, and that's all they want or need to know.

Materialists propose what amounts to an absurdly false hierarchy with man at the top, but no way to explain how he got up there (since there can be no objective progress in a random and meaningless cosmos). As Schuon explains,

To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence....

Once man makes himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses.

This is why there can be no philosophy more anti-human than secular (as opposed to Christian) humanism; you cannot turn man into a god without placing him beneath himself, for you will simply create a demon who is beyond good and evil.

"Intelligence is the perception of a reality, and a fortiori the perception of the Real as such" (Schuon). Therefore, intelligence is the ability to discern the Real from the unreal, or from the "less real."

Furthermore, intelligence itself must share something of the substance of the Real, or it couldn't possibly know it. Ultimately, Truth and Intelligence must be two aspects of the same thing, or both are meaningless, at least as far as humans are concerned.

As Schuon explains, "the sources of our transcendent intuitions are innate data, consubstantial with pure intelligence" (emphasis mine). This is a key insight into how and why the intellect "resonates" with divine revelation and with the "inward appearance" of things in general. As mentioned a couple of posts back, just as our physical eye perceives empirical reality, our spiritual vision is able to perceive the vertical realm. Or, as Eckhart says, "the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me."

To put it another way, Intelligence itself is proof of eternal values, since man's intellect would be inexplicable -- for it would lose its sufficent reason -- if deprived of "its most fundamental or loftiest contents," which include Truth, Reality, the One, the Infinite, the Absolute. To recognize the Infinite is to reject all idols and graven images, including those of science.

Conversely, you can claim that objective truth doesn't exist; but if so, then neither does intelligence, so there is no reason to pay any attention to your avowed lack thereof.

Scientific materialism provides us with facts and details, but no wisdom as to what they mean, or even whether it is worthwhile to know them. Philosophy, in the words of Josef Pieper, is simply "the hunt for that which is worth knowing, for that wisdom which makes one unconditionally wise..." "Without philosophy," aphorizes the Aphorist, "the sciences do not know what they know."

In fact, Pieper's conception is quite similar to Schuon's, in that he regards philosophy as being concerned with reality as a whole and with wisdom in its entirety, which can be seen as two aspects of the same underlying unity. He quotes Plato to the effect that the lover of wisdom seeks not this or that part, but "integrity and wholeness in all things human and divine."

Clearly this is not so of science (nor should it be), which explicitly limits itself (or should, anyway) to this or that aspect or part of the cosmos, not its totality. It does, however, assume that there is a totality, even though this totality can obviously never be observed or proven empirically. No one but the Creator has ever "seen" the cosmos. We only know of it because of our deiformity.

In fact, one could say that Cosmos and Creator are two aspects of a single reality. There is no cosmos that cannot be known, nor knowledge in the absence of a hierarchically structured cosmos. Again, Being is Truth, which is why knowledge is possible.

To reduce reality to what may be clearly and unambiguously known through the scientific method is to in effect say that "I want to know only what can be made blindingly obvious and is thoroughly demonstrable to the densest man."

The modern man only admits the evidence that the vulgar perceive. For the objective, as well, he limits it to the consensus of dull minds. --NGD

Secular Faith and Religious Knowledge

This is a repost of a repost going all the way back to 2008. Again, I'm just republishing things that Meet the Standard and hold my interest -- that make me wonder, where is BoB going with this?

*****

Yesterday we took a peek from behind the veil that separates us from five years ago. Today -- since I am once again pressed for timelessness -- we shall dial the time machine back four years, to March 2008, in order to examine the state of the cosmos at that particular moment.

Since this blog is an exercise in vertical downloading -- or verticalisthenics -- time should be of no consequence anyway.

I'm not saying they always succeed, but even stale bobservations are supposed to retain a degree of freshness, since things that are temporally distant in the horizontal are co-present in the vertical -- just as in our hyperdimensional dreamspace, where past and present blend into the eternal yesternow.

Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that the previous 1,899 posts -- like them or hate them -- have been "the work of a moment," that moment being the now. As such, in addition to revealing whatever they do about this and that, perhaps they also reveal something about the contours of the now, i.e., the form and not just the content.

After all, the aperture of the now is all we have -- it is our only opening on eternity, from which we must gather those rays of light into a coherent picture. Yes, there is Tradition, but Tradition can only be vivified in the now, otherwise it is a corpse.

So, what is the form of the now? Well, for one thing, it is not reducible to efficient causation, since that specifically runs past-to-present, and is the domain of science. Rather, this is a vertical causation that runs from the top down. You might say that, of the four forms of causation, material and efficient are in the horizontal, while formal and final are in the vertical.

Anyway, on to the post:

[R]eligion translates metaphysical or universal truths into dogmatic language. Now, though dogma is not accessible to all men in its intrinsic truth, which can only be directly attained by the Intellect, it is none the less accessible through faith....

[I]ntellectual knowledge... proceeds neither from belief nor from a process of reasoning, [but] goes beyond dogma in the sense that, without ever contradicting the latter, penetrates its "internal dimension," that is, the infinite Truth which dominates all forms. --F. Schuon

As we've discussed in the past, what makes man unique is not just his capacity for knowledge, but his capacity to know so many things that are manifestly false. To call this latter thing "knowledge" is a perversion of the term, for knowledge that isn't true isn't proper knowledge at all. Then what is it? Why are human beings so prone to believe nonsense?

Even (especially?) for most so-called intellectuals, most of what they know is not necessarily knowledge. Rather, it is plainly "belief." Belief is knowledge once or twice removed, for it means we are placing our trust in the experience of another, or participating in the knowledge of another knower. We don't really know, but somebody does, and we trust them.

For example, no one asks if you "know" about global warming; rather, they appropriately ask if you "believe" in it. And whether you believe in it depends upon whom you trust. In my case, I have enough common sense not to trust those who claim to know what the weather will be like in 100 years. The world will not end in 11.5 years, nor do 97% of scientists believe it will. QED.

So much of what people think they know -- but which they really don't know at all -- comes down to whom they trust. For example, with regard to economics, I trust, say, Thomas Sowell, but regard Paul Krugman to be not only untrustworthy, but mentally (and spiritually) ill. I say this as a psychologist, but any normal person can see there's something wrong with him.

But it's much deeper than that, because one's understanding of economics is always shaped by one's values. For example, I value individualism, low taxes, the rule of law, and a limited government regardless of the economic implications, because I believe these values are in accord with human nature and result in better human beings. The best economic theory in the world is pointless if, like Marxism, it only applies to a different species.

On the other hand, the leftist values collectivism, dependency, big government, high taxes, and an extremely elastic law interpreted by elites, depending upon the needs of the state. I derive my values from religious metaphysics and natural law, whereas the leftist derives his from... from what? From his feelings, I suppose. Or the feelings of his professors and preferred journalists.

For example, if an economist came along and "proved" that slavery created more wealth and affluence, I would still reject that economic theory on deeper grounds. Likewise leftists who reject the principle of non-discrimination, and insist that the law should discriminate on the basis of race. I am against discrimination for the same reason I am against genocide or child abuse. Even a little of it isn't a good thing.

Belief cannot establish its own legitimacy, but derives its legitimacy from someone who either knows, thinks he knows, or pretends to know. In this sense, it is superficially similar to faith.

However, belief is generally a static thing. It takes the unknown and superimposes the known upon it, thus foreclosing the unknown. Once one believes something, the issue becomes settled, even if in reality it isn't.

Again, for those who do believe in global warming, "the science is settled." But it's actually the reverse -- that is, the science is only "settled" because they believe in the theory. Nothing is truly settled until we have arrived at first principles, axiomatic truths, or empirico-sensory bedrock. Anything short of this is just arbitrary. (Climate models, for example, are entirely circular and cannot arrive at anything the believer hasn't plugged into them; conclusions are fore-ordained.)

Secular fundamentalism has certain superficial similarities to religious belief -- for example, our faith that the universe was created. For me this is indeed a "settled" matter, and no amount of sophistry could change my opinion, because it is a necessary (not contingent) truth. But that isn't to say my opinion is "static."

To the contrary, with the exercise of faith -- which is to be distinguished from mere belief -- one's understanding will deepen and deepen, in a kind of endless spiral. Looked at in this manner, faith is merely a placeholder for the accumulation of meaning along a gradient of depth and coherence.

This is again because profane belief is foreclosure of the known, whereas living faith is a dynamic engagement with the greater unKnown (ultimately with a person). Faith, properly understood, is not a cognitive structure or grid to be superimposed upon reality. Rather, it is a psychospiritual probe with which to explore transcendent reality -- somewhat like the way a blind person might use a cane to to construct an internal image of the dark space around him (to borrow an analogy from Polanyi).

Furthermore, unlike mere belief, faith should be convertible to real, i.e., "eternal" knowledge. It is actually a subtle and sophisticated way to gain knowledge that transcends the senses, not a means to provide false but comforting answers and to vanquish curiosity.

Scientific knowledge, by definition, is always relative, whereas religious knowledge is the closest human beings can come to knowledge that is absolute. In fact, religious knowledge partakes of the Absolute; or, to be exact, it is "infused" with the Absolute, such that any part of revelation mirrors the whole, so to speak, as in a fractal. (It reminds me of how Christ is entirely present in any part of the host, at any time or place.)

Thus, many people of faith are actually "people of (implicit) knowledge," whereas many so called intellectuals are actually no more than simple "people of faith." You can really see what little genuine knowledge people have when the discussion revolves around something you do happen to know about, whether it is quantum physics or plumbing repair.

For example, in my case, I happen to possess a lot of theoretical and first hand knowledge of psychology. Most intellectuals who claim to know about psychology don't actually have this kind of first hand knowledge. Rather, they have simply placed their trust in an expert whom they choose to believe. In so doing, they have placed the will higher than the intellect; or, at the very least, the intellect is in service to the will to believe.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, so long as the will is in the service of Truth. But most of the really serious problems of mankind -- the real wholesale evil -- are a result of the will in service to falsehood, e.g., communism and national (or "democratic") socialism.

I remember having a number of discussions with a world-renowned leftist historian who shall go unread. His historical thinking presumed a great deal of psychological knowledge, for how can one claim to study human history without some kind of implicit or explicit theory of human development and motivation?

And yet, his psychological ideas were so outdated (meaning absolutely up-to-date) and unsophisticated as to be laughable. Yes, he had his own psychological "experts" whom he relied upon -- fashionable ideas he picked up here and there from fellow leftists in the faculty lounge -- but I knew that his faith in these experts was entirely misplaced.

For example, he thought it outrageously presumptuous of me, not to say reactionary, to suggest that men and women are fundamentally different. Now, imagine studying history on the assumption that men and women are identical. Everywhere you look, differences appear. But instead of appealing to nature, you will require an alternate mechanism to explain the differences, such as The Patriarchy. All because of your stupid faith.

Ironically, it is just so in any debate between an obligatory atheist, or secular fundamentalist, and a man of genuine faith or gnosis. True, many people of faith simply place their trust in someone who knows -- or claims to know -- and leave it at that.

But others do know. They know directly, in the manner of vision or hearing. How then to discuss this knowledge with the obligatory atheist -- that simple and unsophisticated secular man of faith -- who has placed his childlike trust in those who not only do not know but obnoxiously insist that there is nothing to know and no way to know it anyway?

Imagine, say, an 18th century medical expert, the kind of quack that killed George Washington. He has internalized all the latest knowledge on disease. He knows all about the four humors, about the proper placement of leeches, about how germs are spontaneously generated by bad air, etc. Someone comes along and tells this arrogant fellow that germs aren't spontaneously generated. Rather, there are invisible microorganisms covering his hands, living things that he is actually unwittingly transmitting to his patients. Would this doctor not be far closer to the truth if he ceased believing his experts and stopped trusting his self-confirming personal experience?

As expressed by Josef Pieper, "belief has the extraordinary property of endowing the believer with knowledge which would not be available to him by the exercise of his own powers."

This is the point of practicing a proper religion.

Furthermore, "being wise with the head of someone else is undoubtedly a smaller thing than possessing knowledge oneself, but it is far to be preferred to the sterile arrogance of one who does not achieve the independence of the knower and simultaneously despises the dependence of the believer."

Since we begin the spiritual path without explicit knowledge, we must inevitably place our faith in the testimony of someone who does (or did) know (or who is perhaps knowledge itself). Ah, but how do we know that this person isn't a mere believer himself? How do we assess their credibility and trustworthiness? By what signs do we judge the false from the true prophet? It can't be turtles all the way back. Can we get a witness?

Human beings are equipped with means (i.e., senses) to apprehend exterior reality. But we are also curiously equipped to apprehend the interior reality of persons. It is said that a sophisticated scientist, strictly speaking, doesn't only judge the merits of a scientific theory on the basis of whether it is "true" or "false." Rather, he does so (at least partly) on the basis of its generativity, that is, by how much it explains, how well it ties together various other facts and observations, and the extent to which it gives rise to new and "interesting" problems.

Have you ever known a generative person in whose presence you experience the bracing flow of "life" along your keel? Have you ever been in the presence of a stagnant and lifeless person in whose psychic presence you feel your soul being sucked out of your body? Perhaps you've never read our comment section.

The spiritually generative lumin being doesn't merely report reality. Rather, such an individual imparts reality. They know. And we know that they know. And soon enough, we know too. Put it this way: we are equipped with the authority to recognize Authority (someone authorized by the Author himself).

An esotericism is addressed precisely to those "that have ears to hear" and for that reason have no need of the explanations and "proofs" which may be desired by those for whom esotericism is not intended.... Christ necessarily spoke from an absolute standpoint, by reason of a certain "subjectivization" of the Absolute.... --F. Schuon

Progressives & Other Humanized Personifications of the Subversive Aspect of the Centrifugal Existential Power

More of the same, this one on the relation between politics and devilry:

What the devil?

Good question. According Schuon -- and this sounds plausible -- the devil may be thought of as

the humanized personification -- humanized on contact with man -- of the subversive aspect of the centrifugal existential power; not the personification of this power in so far as its mission is positively to manifest Divine Possibility.

(This implies a non-subversive or legitimate aspect of this existential power. We don't have time to trace the implications, but this would go to all those obstacles, trials, and sundry Crosses to Bear that are necessary for our growth and maturity, and without which we would be too comfortable and complacent for our own good.)

In other words, the Absolute, insofar as it manifests in time and space, radiates from a cosmic center to the periphery ("the centrifugal existential power"), somewhat like a series of concentric circles with God at the center. God's energies are like radii emanating from the center outward (or top down), while the different concentric circles are the various levels of being, or the cosmic hierarchy. (You can also picture it as a cone, with the "point" of God at the top, degrees of manifestation below.)

Therefore, although everything is ultimately God, not everything is equally God. The idea that everything is equally God leads to pantheism, which is an indiscriminate flatland philosophy no more sophisticated than bonehead atheism. Call it a metaphysical heresy, one of those possibilities we can eliminate at the outset, like "there is no such thing as truth."

In any event, nothing is that simple, let alone everything.

Yes, ultimately everything "is God" in some sense, but God is not the sum total of everything. Things vary in their proximity to God. You yourself know when you are closer to, or more distant from, God, even though God hasn't gone anywhere. Even a child can see that, say, Notre Dame cathedral is (was) closer to God than the UN building. Come to think of it, the cathedral could be burned to the ground and would still be closer, since the UN building exists in a negative existentiating space.

At any rate, the greater cannot be derived from the lesser, and no merely scientistic theory will ever account for the miracle of the human subject, which represents a miniature "cosmic center" within the whole of existence.

And like the cosmic center of which it is a mirror (the "the centrifugal existential power"), the individual center has a natural tendency to radiate outward and lose itself in the playful phenomena of its own creation, or the form of its own sensibility, as Kant would have it.

However, in its properly balanced way, this radiation leads to further centration, not dissipation. For example, when we love what is beautiful, we identify the soul's "within" by locating it in the without, which has the effect of strengthening our central being. (This is what it means to "form the soul" of the child, which is the whole point of parenting.)

Conversely, if we love that which is ugly or "know" what is false, this has the effect of diminishing our center -- which, at the same time, necessarily pulls us further from God, the cosmic center.

The periphery must be -- i.e., there must be things that are more or less distant from God -- but it doesn't follow that they must be evil. Nevertheless, as Schuon implies, the divine radiation inevitably results in "cosmic interstices," so to speak, where evil enters the picture. This is where the soul-cancers arise and take root. It is one of the inevitable, even though unsanctioned, possibilities of the Divine radiation, somewhat like an existential blood clot. If you will the circulatory system, you may end up with blood clots, even though they aren't the point of the system.

The cosmos is permeated with arteries that carry "oxidized" energies away from God and veins through which creation returns to its source. Only human beings may partake of this vertical circulatory system in a conscious way, and become co-partners in the divine plan. It's an offer we can and do refuse, although no one in their right mind would do so.

On the one hand, creation is already "perfect," being that it created and sustained in, through, and by God. Nevertheless, by virtue of it not being God, it cannot be perfect, but can only "become" perfect (which is to say, move toward its archetypal telos) through man's conscious participation (i.e., cooperating with grace).

Or let us say that perfection is only a possibility because it is woven into the very warp and weft of creation. If it weren't, we wouldn't even have the word. Nor would we have words for truth and beauty if they were not coursing through the arteries of existence as divine possibilities. Truth is either "invented" or it is "discovered." If invented, then it isn't true. And if discovered, then it is of God -- or at least underwritten by God, the Absolute. Truth or atheism: take your pick.

Today (as always) we find ourselves in a struggle of truly cosmic proportions between forces representing the human personification of the Subversive Aspect of the Centrifugal Existentiating Power -- which is a very real, even if derivative and parasitic, power -- and those representing the center (or evolutionary return to the center).

It's funny where one can pick up important ideas, but a couple days ago I heard a promo for the new Dennis Miller radio program. In reference to the weather hysteria of Al Gore, Miller said words to the effect of, "hey, I'm not worried about the earth -- I'm worried about the world."

Exactly. The earth is simply a physical object deposited somewhere at the periphery creation. It is both anywhere and nowhere. The human world, on the other hand, is very near the top -- or at least the bottom of the top. If you imagine the earth is a fragile and delicate thing but the world is not, then you are quite naive, and possibly on the way to becoming a Humanoid Personification of the Subversive Aspect of the Centrifugal Existential Power.

Now, the cosmo-political battle in which we are (always) engaged is ultimately between forces who deny hierarchy and those who affirm it; and those power-mad drunks who ride the centrifugal waves to the periphery, vs. those who soberly partake of the centripetal return.

Importantly, those who deny hierarchy do so -- either consciously or unconsciously -- with the intention of replacing our naturally supernatural hierarchy with their own illegitimate, infra-natural one. This is where all the false absolutes of the left enter the picture and set up shop (remember those cosmic interstices alluded to above). Left alone they become cancers, which means that, as they grow in strength and intensity, they actually begin to take on a gravitational attraction of their own. It's why, say, AOC has become so popular: she is a personification par excellence of the Subversive Aspect of the Centrifugal Existential Power.

You might even say that these idols participate (or graft themselves to the vine of) an alternative cosmic center that sets itself against the real one. It opposes and arrests progress -- the cosmic return -- by pulling both the innocent and guilty into its dark principalities. Its methods are moral relativism, multiculturalism, and "critical theory," or deconstruction; its defender and guarantor is the coercion of political correctness rather than the "lure" of Truth; and its goal is the reversal of the cosmic order, the institutionalization of the Fall, the obliteration of the vertical, and the exaltation (and therefore bestialization) of man, thus sealing his spiritual fate and ending the possibility of divine co-creation and theosis, or God-realization.

It is appropriate that these cosmic tyrants are called "Democrats," for democracy is a system of information flow that can lead to the higher or to the lower. In fact, it will inevitably lead to the lower if we do not acknowledge at the outset that there is a higher toward which democracy must orient itself (for example, the preservation of our natural rights, including of course freedom of speech). In other words, in the absence of hierarchy, demo-cracy will become exactly what the word implies, which is to say, tyranny of the horizontalized masses, or demo-crazies.

The crazies of the left are half correct, in that we are ultimately faced with the choice between democracy and theocracy. Our founders, in their infinite wisdom, chose theo-cracy, in the sense that the only legitimate purpose of democracy could be to preserve and protect the spiritual freedom -- the complementary rights and obligations -- of the properly theocentric individual. In short, they created a benign theocracy that would be mediated not from the top down -- which is never a real theocracy, but man-archy -- through thousands and now millions of individual godlings, or "divine centers." But a democracy mediated by mere animal-men will sooner or later lead to the Reign of the Beast. The Founders were well aware of this and wrote of it at length (i.e., the need for virtuous citizens oriented toward transcendence).

In the specific sense we are using the word, theocracy is "the only guarantee of a realistic liberty" (Schuon). Otherwise, the centrifugal riptide in which secular man stands soon leads to the following ideas: that "truth amounts to the belief of the majority," and therefore, that the majority for all intents and purposes creates the truth, which is one of the explicit assumptions of the left -- i.e., "perception is reality."

The adage vox populi vox Dei has no meaning except in a religious framework which confers a function of “medium” on the crowds; they then express themselves not by thought but by intuition and under the influence of Heaven..., so that the feeling of the majority coincides in any case with what may be called “the good".... --F. Schuon

Here begins the gospel of Hell: In the beginning was nothing and it believed nothing was god, and was made man, and dwelt on earth, and by man all things were made nothing. --NGD

Pre-Critical, Critical, and Post-Critical; or Naive, Enlightened, and Stunted

Just an old post that kept my attention. Republished for its insultainment value:

I've been thinking lately of the "break in being" represented by man as we find him. Everything else in the cosmos just "is," from matter on up through animals. But man is always in some way divided from himself, which you might say is his gift and his curse.

With regard to the gift, what sets man apart from the rest of creation is his "self-consciousness," which implicitly posits a self of which we are conscious.

Ah, but there is the split: consciousness on the one hand, self on the other. Animals -- or let us just say "life" -- are also split off from the cosmos, except they have no conscious awareness of this fact. In order to know this, consciousness would have to wrap around itself, as it does in human beings. Only man may become "critical," so to speak, capable of offering everything from reasons and explanations to pretexts and likely stories.

Or, in the memorable words of Ben Franklin, "So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."

In "hindsight" -- which is also "downsight," vertically and ontologically speaking -- humans can see the various splits that are necessary for humanness to exist. We could also call these "multiplicities" that are necessary for the higher unity of humanness to reconcile in order to be an integrated "one"; for as we know, there are two very different types of one, the blob and the organism.

For example, life seems to somehow exist apart from matter. While obviously dependent on matter, it dances upon its precipice, somewhat like a whirlpool, which is a form created by the ever-changing water coursing through it. Thus, the form cannot be reduced to "water," since the water is always changing.

Any biological entity is a kind of stable form through which courses matter and energy. The same can be said of the person, except on a higher plane. Our minds are constantly taking in information and emotion, and metabolizing them via experience. For human beings, existence is the metabolism of experience (or maybe it's the other way around: experience is the metabolism of existence).

Evidently, man cannot be man without being aware of the splits that define him. Take, for example, Genesis. The "story of man" begins with the story of a primordial division that alienates man from his true station and exiles him from his earthright.

In this excerpt of J.G. Bennett, he writes of how parents and culture encourage and facilitate this split condition, which they apparently regard as "normal":

If we study our own childhood, and that of any children growing up around us, we can see how, by every means, we and they are led to accept, and to prefer to exist in, the dream state. The one thing that everyone without exception impresses on children is the need for insincerity, the need to appear to be other than what one is, to hide what one is and appear different" (emphasis mine).

This is a systematic form of "crazy making," because it forces one to distrust one's own perceptions and eventually reject and abandon one's intuition. In raising my son, I'm very much aware of not doing this to him. For example, when I was a child, I couldn't help but notice that certain adults were creepy, or crazy, or anxious, or annoying, or weird, or stupid, etc. But I could never discuss these intuitions in a free and frank way with my parents. Rather, adults were people one respected, end of discussion.

I also teach my son to respect -- or at least be polite to -- others, but not to ignore the subtle stream of data given to him by his perceptions and intuitions. Thus, of our neighbors, he knows that this one is a harmless nut, that that family across the street is rather loud and unrefined, that this lady is anxious and prone to projection, that that mother is a fearful, humorless, controlling, and judgmental "liberal" who is afraid of toy guns and thinks there is no difference between boys and girls, etc.

When the person is alienated from himself, it isn't as if the alienated core just closes up shop. Rather, as Bennett writes, "there is a progressive shutting out of all the experience of possibilities, and their replacement by dreams, and, with dreams, just living in the functional life only."

As a result, "man gets divided into two parts. He gets shut up in the world of facts and shut out of the world of possibilities" (emphasis mine).

I was propelled down this path this morning after reading this excellent talk on The Origins of Political Correctness (ht Vanderleun). Lind correctly points out that the regime of political correctness is just a new form of Marxism, or of Marxist principles applied to man and culture instead of economics, where it is too easily disproved.

What is so insidious about it is that, like Genesis -- which it explicitly replaces with its own counter-myth -- it recognizes the primordial split referenced above. Any religion begins with a "diagnosis" of man, for which it then offers the treatment.

Likewise, the pseudo-religion of cultural Marxism begins with a diagnosis of man, and finds him to be irredeemably stupid, to such an extent that he is incapable of recognizing his own interests (never ask why liberals are so sanctimonious and superior, because this is how they see you if you aren't one of them). If you are not a liberal, it is only because you are essentially infested with mind parasites of various kinds, including religious, class, nationalistic, gender, and sexual parasites.

Thus, you need to be purged of these impurities. Since not everyone can afford to take the cure at an elite college, the purging process has to be much more widespread, extending into elementary education, entertainment, and media in general. Only then will you be capable of recognizing your fallenness (e.g., "white privilege") and of making amends.

As Lind explains, Marxism and Freudianism had a grotesque baby known as "critical theory." This theory has no "positive content," so to speak; to be perfectly accurate, it does, but it conceals this sinister content behind an epistemological omnipotence -- i.e., industrial grade cynicism -- capable of dissolving the most settled truth acquired by man in his slow struggle up from barbarism. Thus, it truly results in the re-barbarization of man, at which point the "new man" may be programmed into him.

As alluded to above, never wonder about the source of the liberal's sanctimony and superiority; likewise, never wonder about the barbarism, i.e., the body mutilation, er "art," the celebration of animal sexuality, the replacement of morality with "authenticity," the promotion of sexual deviations, the mindless attacks on tradition (which are fundamentally no different than the Taliban blowing up religious statues), etc. Man must be demolished and demoralized in order to begin history anew.

Thus, the purpose of Critical Theory

is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression -- the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression -- we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down (Lind).

Consider the bait-and-switch involved in the "sexual liberation" of the 1960s. Yes, animal sexuality was "liberated," so to speak, with the result that human sexuality was eclipsed. As Murray documents in his Coming Apart, the liberation resulted in a vast increase in cultural pathology, including broken homes, fatherless children, criminality, abortion, drug addiction, new and deadly venereal diseases, etc. But progressives do not call this "pathology." Rather, for them it is progress: the progress of breaking eggs in order to cook your goose.

Herbert Marcuse was one of the most prominent thinkers feelers of the new left, and was quite explicit about the use of sex for political ends. In his Eros and Civilization he

argues that under a capitalistic order... repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes -- the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of "polymorphous perversity."

This is the bait: "here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, 'Do your own thing,' 'If it feels good do it,' and 'You never have to go to work.'"

Here is the switch:

America today is in the throes of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state.... The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it.... it’s not funny, it’s here, it’s growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.

Mission accomplished!

UPDATE from seven years later: with the emergence of the AOC/Omar/Tlaib wing of the party, we see a somewhat unexpected development, in that the left has gone from promulgating its extreme nonsense for purely tactical reasons (the smashing of existing society and the acquisition of power) to a generational cohort that actually -- and passionately -- believes all the BS!

This represents a real point of danger for the left, a conflict between the cynical tacticians such as Hillary and Pelosi, and the fully indoctrinated morons who listened carefully in school and are simply echoing their indoctrination. Which brings us full circle to the absence of critical distance that defines the human being.

Knock Knock: Is Anybody OM?

I see that the previous post was a multi-parter, so I might as well republish the sequels:

About those degrees of knowledge: we all know what they are, even if we can't explain how they relate. After all, no one treats rocks like persons, or mathematical equations like bricks, or spirits like --

Not so fast!

As we know, there is a neurological condition called synesthesia, in which the senses are confused. Thus, for the synesthete, colors may have distinct sounds, sounds may have flavors, or numbers may possess personalities. This is commonly experienced under the influence of psychedelic drugs, e.g., "listen to the color of your dreams" (J. Winston).

In fact, there was a lot of this going around in the '60s: strawberry alarm clocks, electric prunes, peanut butter conspiracies, chocolate watchbands, marmalade skies, etc.

We've discussed Bion's grid in the past. It looks like this:

It's so simple, I'm surprised no one ever thought of it before. Basically, the vertical axis has to do with the evolution of thought, while the horizontal axis has to do with the uses to which the thought is put.

Thus, for example, it is indeed possible to treat ideas as rocks, as the left proves every day. On the grid, the "rock idea" would be at the intersection of "concept" on the vertical axis and "action" on the horizontal. It's why the left never stops acting out, under the cover of "thinking" or "arguing." Ultimately, beneath all leftist thought is force. Always.

You might say that the left's political synesthesia involves the use of sophisticated ideas such as "liberty" or "democracy" or "speech" for purposes that are sub-ideational. Bernie, for example, might make all sorts of arguments, but ultimately it is in order to take your stuff and do with it what he wishes.

Consider the primitive manner in which the ACLU uses the Constitution. They love the Constitution, not for its intended purpose, of course, but as a bludgeon with which to club opponents and impose leftist polices: thus they love because they hate, and they hate what frustrates their dreams of omnipotence and utopia (two sides of the same coin).

The grid explains how and why, when the left uses words such as "equality"or "justice," they mean -- or intend -- something entirely different than we do. It is why they all want to change the world (including human nature) before they have undertaken the formality of understanding the world. As Patient Zero himself said -- on his gravestone no less -- "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."

In the Degrees of Knowledge, Maritain proposes to outline a synthesis of the integral man, "starting with the experience of the physicist and ending with the experience of the contemplative."

Again, we can all agree that there is an empirical world revealed to us via sensation, e.g., touch, sight, and sound. Above this is a logico-mathematical world that cannot be perceived by the senses. Rather, it is in the realm of abstract thought, but certainly no less real and enduring than the sensory world.

Science as we have come to understand it deals with worlds one and two, although there are some sciences that consist of more or less pure abstraction and deduction, others that rely upon observation and induction.

Bion, for example, specifically attempted to make psychoanalysis more of a logico-deductive discipline than a a wholly empirico-inductive one, by developing a system of abstract symbols to stand for various psychic categories and entities. In my book, I attempted the same thing vis-a-vis the spiritual dimension. It can be done. It's just that no one will really care until around 2075, when the Raccoon movement goes viral (or parasitic, depending upon your point of view).

After the rational/mathematical comes the metaphysical, although it should be clear that one can't really have worlds one and two in the absence of some (usually) unarticulated metaphysic containing implicit but necessary propositions.

For example, science cannot operate without various metaphysical assumptions such as the unidirectionality of time, the principle of non-contradiction, or the reality of the external world. Similarly, Darwinism cannot account for the cosmo-organismic wholeness that is a prerequisite for natural selection to operate. It cannot explain wholeness, only work with it.

While metaphysics leads to certain necessary truths, such as the existence of God (in the form of first cause, unmoved mover, pure act, etc), it cannot disclose the "within" of God, i.e., his relational personhood. Thus, metaphysics leads us to the penumbra of the Ultimate Real, but not beyond a certain threshold. Knocking on heaven's door, as it were. Is anybody om?

Having said that, because of the properties of this Ultimate Real, the latter can indeed radiate down into metaphysics, leading to an intellectualized form of "infused contemplation," or a metaphysic that reflects some of the luminosity of the Divine Object. Skeleton and blood. It's good to have both.

For me, Schuon accomplishes this, as he always makes it clear that he's attempting to communicate a vision, not just articulate a thought. Or perhaps it is a thought-vision that is still at least one degree removed from the beatific vision -- like standing in the corona of the sun, but not fully within. Schuon would be the first to draw this clear distinction, no matter how sublime the metaphysic.

But of course, when you get right down to it, we're all in the sun, aren't we? We can draw a distinction between the light flooding into my window and the vast explosion going on in the heart of the sun, but no such line can actually be unambiguously placed anywhere -- any more than there is a real ontological divide between a baby inside and outside the skin-boundary of the mother (speaking of intellectual honesty interfering with a desired action).

So, who's to say the photosynthesizing leaf is separate from the photopropagating sun? Perhaps a leaf is just the sun's way of establishing local centers of light elsewhere in the cosmos, just as the exploding stars of which we are composed are just the big bang's way of making a lot of little bangs.

Or, better yet, perhaps the sun is just a way to make sure the universe will contain leaves.

One question, Bob. Can I buy some pot from you?

Degrees of Reality and Dimensions of the Soul

Whew! That was a week -- worst cold of my life. I went to the doctor on Thursday, and she assured me she'd seen six people worse than me that day, so that was nice. Still lingering, but compared to last Wednesday I feel like Superman.

But it did put a crimp in Project X. Then again, sleep deprivation provoked some intriguing new angles on the whole thing. One thought that came to me is that -- as was the case before tackling the first book -- what I'm actually looking to write is what I need to read, and vice versa: I am in desperate need of a book, and the book doesn't exist. That's where I apparently come in.

Then another phrase popped into my head: metaphysical Catholicism. Which would be Catholicism aimed at people like me, of which there may well be as few as one. Nevertheless, if God made me this way, then I say he has an obligation to get me out of this mess I am. There ought to be a form of his Divine Message addressed to our sort, unless our sort is completely illegitimate.

Surprisingly, I both googled and searched Amazon for "Metaphysical Catholicism," and nothing came up; or rather, lots of stuff about Catholic metaphysics, but my interest is more along Schuon's lines -- of seeing Catholicism as in instantiation of universal metaphysics sprinkled with a few mysteries that are of necessity above our paygrade. (My approach would also be somewhat different from an esoteric Catholicism along the lines of Meditations on the Tarot.)

No, I do not intend to subordinate revelation to some manmade system. I'm not that clueless. After all, a God we could totally comprehend would be unworthy of worship. Worse yet, it would elevate man to the level of godhood, and that is always the recipe for hell on earth.

At any rate, my quest is probably totally inappropriate from a purely Catholic perspective, but it still interests me. What can I do? I feel that if I can "metaphysicalize" my way through certain stumbling blocks, I won't have to force myself to believe things I don't really believe. And why fool ourselves? God knows when we're pretending, so we might as well admit it upfront.

As it so happens, some of the material I'm about to repost touches on the above. This one begins in mid-thought:

Ah. Now I remember why I was intrigued by Maritain's The Degrees of Knowledge back in the day, when I was working out the Raccoon metaphysic....

As I have mentioned before, I didn't initially come at this huge mythunderstanding from a Christian perspective. Which was ultimately a good thing, because frankly, I never could have done what I did had I known what I was doing. Because I didn't know any better, I was free to violate disciplinary boundaries, blend irreconcilable thinkers and doctrines, engage in friction-free leaps of logic, and obey revealed hunches as demanded by expediency.

Now comes this Maritain fellow who claims to have accomplished the same thing from a Catholic standpoint! In 1932! Why didn't I know about this? Indeed, the Thing had essentially been accomplished some 700 years ago, and only required some touching up and tinkering at the edges in order to make it fully conversant with the scientific progress that had taken place in the interim. Here was no apologetic Uncle Thomist, but a Thomist apologetic capable of speaking to our age of stupidity.

When we talk about "the degrees of knowledge," we implicitly acknowledge the degrees of being that correspond to them. In my case, I divided these into the convenient categories of matter, life, mind, and spirit, each reflecting a different mode of being and requiring a different manner of knowing.

For example, one cannot know spirit empirically. However, one can know matter spiritually, being that truth emanates from the top down, not the bottom up.

When we speak of these essential distinctions, we're really talking about the vertical. As Maritain says,

"Every attempt at metaphysical synthesis, especially when it deals with the complex riches of knowledge and of the mind, must distinguish in order to unite." What is necessary above all is "to discriminate and discern degrees of knowing, its organization and its internal differentiations."

Looked at in this manner, any form of scientism, for example, is a non-starter, because it reduces the hierarchical complexity of the world to a vulgar monism. In so doing, it reduces reality to our most simple way of knowing it, and in the process denies any reality outside its narrow scope. "Leveling," says Don Colacho, "is the barbarian's substitute for order."

In the past, I have discussed the idea that the measure of soul is depth. To put it bluntly, a developed soul will see much more deeply into the nature of reality, whereas a shallow soul is satisfied by skirting along on the surface of things. The deep soul knows that no merely scientific explanation can ever satisfy man, whereas the shallow soul seems content to play in the little blandbox of efficient causes.

However, Maritain adds to this the dimensions of length, breadth, and height, which I had basically subsumed under depth. In any event, when we refer to these categories, we are referring to hidden or implicit dimensions of reality that are just waiting to be unpacked by man, and man only. No other species has access to these, in fact or principle. Indeed, access to them defines what it means to be a human being.

In a phrase I am very much tempted to steal, Maritain refers to the fundamental fact of a cosmos that is boundlessly intelligible. But it is only boundlessly intelligible to the extent that there exists an unbound soul to witness and testify to it.

To cite an obvious example, for the Marxist, the world is surely intelligible, but not boundlessly so. Rather, Marxism serves the function of placing sharp boundaries around reality. Dialectical Materialism explains everything, with no remainder. Indeed, if you deny it, you are actually an instance of it: "false consciousness," which has latterly morphed into our toxic identity politics.

I came across an unintentionally funny example of this at HotAir this morning, Does college really turn people into liberals? The authors cite some silly studies to deny the obvious, and conclude by stating that if you believe otherwise, then it's only because you are trying to protect "economic power." In other words, they trot out a classic Marxist explanation to deny their own Marxism, reducing great complexity to a simple pseudo-economic explanation!

A lexicon of ten words is sufficient for the Marxist to explain history. --NGD

This dismissal of an argument by projecting bad motivations into it is the cognitive Swiss Army Knife of the left. Any idea that threatens them is instantly attributed to racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc.

Back to the hidden dimensions in the soul. For Maritain, "length" bears upon "the manner in which the formal light that characterizes a particular type of knowing falls upon things and defines in them a certain line of intelligibility."

For example, in my case, I attempt to trace things back to (and before) the big bang, or forward, through the realms of matter, life, mind, and spirit. To put it another way, to deny this line of continuous development is to deny and even maim a vital dimension of the soul.

"Breadth" has to do with "the ever-increasing number of objects thus known." As such, a truly all-purpose metaphysic that is worthy of man, will explain the material world as well as the subjective world, without reducing one to the other. But to reduce mind and spirit to matter is the ultimate case of denying the breadth of the soul.

"Height" involves distinguishing the "different sorts of knowing" and "the degrees of intelligibility and immateriality of the object." In other words, it deals with vertical differentiations in the hierarchy of existence and being.

Finally, "depth" speaks to all those "hidden diversities," i.e., those relatively autonomous sub-worlds which are constantly disclosed to the mind that is free -- i.e., the liberal mind, as opposed to one that is servile to ideology.

To be continued...

In the Beginning

Starting in 2012, I'm finding far more good material, which, as I said, is slowing me down. Between 2006 and 2011 it was mostly the occasional sentence or paragraph that was worth preserving, but now I'm actually finding whole posts that don't let me down.

Therefore, in order to organize these Good Posts -- or at least know where to find them -- I'm going to republish them. This is more efficient than placing them in the files containing only sentences and paragraphs. There's still an overwhelming amount of information that needs to be pruned, but at least I'll know where to find stuff. It's for my convenience, but feel free to peruse.

This post is about Where to Begin; or rather, where is the so-called beginning:

What's first? And who's on it? Things? Or Principles? Or do they co-arise?

Way before I ever encountered Thomism, I attempted to think through all this on my own. Yes, you could say "needlessly," as it turns out, but not necessarily.

I say this because I'm always shocked at how frequently my own free application of reason ends up in the same attractor as this Thomas fellow. Details may vary -- after all, he couldn't have foretold 700 years of scientific development -- but the broad outlines are similar. Let's say we're in the same school, if different classes. He's long since graduated, while I am definitely a sophomore (or less, depending on how you look at it).

But in any event, we share the same principal. Why? Because the One Cosmos mysthead tells me so:

∞ ... LIFE IS OUR SCHOOL, THE COSMOS OUR TEACHER, TRUTH THE FIRST PRINCIPAL ... ∞

So, in the bOOk, I begin with the question -- the first question, as it were -- of "Where in the world do we begin? Do we have any right to assume that the universe is intelligible? If not, you can stop reading right now and do something else, something that actually has a purpose."

Wait, a footnote, the first one. Let's see what it says. "Bear in mind, however, that if the universe has no purpose, then neither will anything you do instead of reading the book. Therefore, you might as well read the book."

So you see, there's really no way to avoid reading the book. You have no excuse, only pretexts.

Back to the text: "But if the universe is intelligible, how and why is this the case?"

Blah blah yada yada, "Of course we should start our enquiry with the 'facts,' but what exactly is a fact? Which end is up? In other words, do we start with the objects of thought or the subject that apprehends them?"

And hey, "just what is the relationship between apparently 'external' objects and the consciousness that is able to cognize them? Indeed, any fact we consider presupposes a subject who has selected the fact in question out of an infinite sea of possibilities, so any conceivable fact" is bound up with the knowing subject.

So it seems that first things are immediately followed by first questions. That is, humans are uniquely capable of asking questions about the things they first encounter. Knowledge begins with this encounter between subject and object, but doesn't end there, as it does in animals and other atheists.

Rather, human beings may reason about their experience of things -- and, equally important, reason about reason itself. A better name for metaphysics might actually be "meta-epistemology," or "meta-ontology," or something similar, so the accent is on the unavoidably transnatural source and vector of reason.

Metaphysics begins in being, not knowledge. Which is why any metaphysic that begins with science is, in the words of Maritain, "false from the beginning," because science assumes being without attempting to account for it.

To use a construction analogy, science analyzes the building without getting into the question of how it got there or who planned it. Indeed, it cannot even address the question without fatal contradictions, e.g., the absurcular argument of natural selection.

But unlike science, metaphysics is utterly useless, which is another way of saying that it is completely disinterested and hence objective. Conversely, science always assumes a point of view, and more generally, a whole paradigm (usually unexamined).

Now, "useless" doesn't imply "worthless." Hardly. To the contrary, "nothing is more necessary to man than this uselessness. What we need is not truths that serve us but a truth we may serve" (emphasis mine).

My fellow Raccoons, now we're talking: ask not what Truth can do for you, but what you can do for Truth.

"For that truth is food of the spirit.... Useless metaphysics puts order -- not any sort of police order, but the order that has sprung from eternity" into man's otherwise rudderless -- or groundless -- intelligence (Maritain).

To express it poetically but then again literally, metaphysics allows man "to gravitate, head first, to the midst of the stars, while he hangs from the earth by his two legs."

In other words, in the Upanishadic formulation, the universe is a tree with its nonlocal roots aloft and local branches down below. Therefore, in the bobservational formulation,

history is a chronicle of our evolutionary sprint from biology to spirit, in which we first climb down from the trees of eastern Africa and then up the metaphorical Upanishadic tree....

Thus, we start our journey 'out on a limb' and soon find ourselves 'grounded,' but eventually find a radical solution to our troubling situation, arriving at the root' of the cosmos" ("radical" being related to the Latin "root").

UPDATE SEVEN YEARS LATER: This is all another way of expressing the Christian formulation, i.e., Creation-Fall-Redemption within the larger Divine-Cosmic circle of exits-redditus. I suppose it would be correct to say that the Incarnation allows humanity as such to participate in the trinitarian alphOmega.

Evolution or Natural Selection: Pick One

Evolution: a process in which something passes by degrees to a different stage (especially a more advanced or mature stage)

We are firm believers in evolution. What we do not understand -- in principle, mind you -- is how a believer in metaphysical Darwinism can simultaneously maintain a belief in evolution, since the one -- "passing to a more advanced stage" -- precludes the other -- "random error + survival" (and to say these two definitions are mutually exclusive is not to say the latter process doesn't take place, only that it is incompatible with words such as "advance" or "progress" or "purpose").

In short, when we say "evolution," we do not mean evolutionism, which is another species entirely, a flightless bird of a different father.

Evolutionism is a metaphysical doctrine maintaining that ultimate reality involves a kind of unfolding from primordial substance. It reduces to pantheism -- or elevates matter to God -- as everything is seen as an explication of what lies hidden in potential in mere matter. It violates reason and common sense, as it not only tries to derive the higher from the lower, but ultimately, if pressed to its conclusion, everything from nothing. Life must reduce to death, spirit to matter, absolute to relative, necessary to contingent, and your little theory of evolutionism to a sacred cow pie. Which you just stepped in.

I am not being polemical or unfair. Rather, just asking the evolutionist to be intellectually honest and consistent, and to draw his principles to their conclusion. After all, we are honest about our principles, and wouldn't dream of hiding their implications. Schuon:

We do not deny that evolution exists within certain limits, as is indeed evident enough, but we do deny that it is a universal principle, and hence a law which affects and determines all things, including the immutable.... [W]hat has to be categorically rejected is the idea that truth evolves, or that revealed doctrines are the product of an evolution (emphasis mine).

Ultimately it's one more lame attempt to deploy verticality in order to deny the vertical. Metaphysical evolutionism begins and ends in the invention of

“horizontal” causes because one does not wish to admit a “vertical” dimension: one seeks to extort from the physical plane a cause that it cannot furnish and that is necessarily situated above matter.

It naturally ends in "the negation of an entire dimension of the real, namely that of form, of the static, of the immutable; concretely speaking, it is as if one wished to make a fabric of the wefts only, omitting the warps." In its attempt to reduce semantics to syntax, it negates its own comprehensibility. It's one thing to eliminate truth, but don't then try to make a true statement!

As mentioned in previous posts, the idea of evolution had literally been around for hundreds of years prior to Darwin. Indeed, Maritain points out that a number of pre-Socratics hit upon the notion, which isn't surprising, since it is one of a handful of metaphysical possibilities presented to us in any attempt to grasp the unchanging reality beneath appearances (ultimately there can't be that many options, e.g., materialism, idealism, organicism, etc.).

If we think of these men as analogous to children (by which I do not mean to insult them; rather, that, philosophically speaking, man was in the position of a child, starting with nothing), then we can understand how one might arrive at the notion that all is Change, or Being, or One. In other words, they are searching for the ultimate abstraction, or principle, which can account for each and every particular instance (which is indeed the purpose of metaphysics).

So Maritain reminds us that various forms of evolutionism were taught by Greek thinkers of the fifth and sixth centuries BC, such as Anaximander, Empedocles, and Heraclitus, the latter of whom is famous for teaching that "all is change," and that one cannot step into the same stream twice.

But again, if this is true, then it must also apply to Heraclitus' doctrine, such that if he's right, he's wrong. The same applies, of course, to modern Darwinists, to the extent that they elevate their science to a metaphysic.

Maritian traces the evolution of philosophy -- which is to say, increased proximity to wisdom -- from these early thinkers, through Plato and Aristotle and on to St. Thomas. And when we say "evolution," we mean evolution. We do not mean random change, as if there were no essential difference between Heraclitus, Aristotle, and Thomas, and that one might as well flip a coin to determine which is closer to truth.

[Note to myself from yesterday: do not fool yourself -- ultimately the only objective measure can be proximity to God. Otherwise all is opinion, and man is sealed in cosmic stupidity.]

No, when we say that philosophy -- and science, for that matter -- has evolved, this is what we mean: that it betrays a clear and recognizable direction that only the fool or tenured could deny.

Not to speak ill of the dead, but this denial is precisely what our late uncle-through-marriage -- an esteemed University of Chicago historian -- maintained. It so happens that he was friendly with Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the celebrated Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In one of those rare occasions that I had it completely backwards, I argued that Kuhn wasn't implying that there was no such thing as objective scientific progress. (Admittedly, I didn't actually know this. Rather, I just assumed that no one could be so stupid as to believe otherwise. I was a little naive back then.)

So, when we talk about philosophic or scientific progress, what are we really talking about? In other words, what is the measure of progress, besides getting a lot of free stuff from the government on somebody else's dime? Thus far Maritain hasn't come right out and said it, but perhaps the most noticeable change we see between, say, the pre-Socratics through Aquinas, involves the power of abstraction.

In fact, we can indeed trace this arc all the back to animals, who have no powers of abstraction. In many ways man is defined by this power, which is largely rooted in language, and prior to language, in my opinion, the hand. Yes, the hand, because it is nature's first all-purpose tool. Because the hand can do this and the hand can do that, we grasp the underlying principle of grasping. (They say science is the invention of invention, but one must first hand it to the humble hand, without which we could never have extended our grasp to science.)

Remember a couple of posts ago, our discussion of how rational skepticism is the cure for a corrosive cynicism gone wild? Well, Maritain makes exactly the same point vis-a-vis the Socratic method. Note that both the cause and effect of cynicism is the absence of truth. I suppose postmodernists must pride themselves on being the first humans to be courageous enough to embrace the truth that there is no truth, but that is an ahistorical fiction.

Rather, this kind of relativism had already taken philosophy to a dead end by the time Socrates arrived on the scene. These early victims of tenure

were embroiled in confused strife, an interminable battle of opposing probabilities. The immediate and obvious result of these attempts at philosophizing seemed the bankruptcy of speculative thought.

It is not, therefore, surprising that this period of elaboration produced a crisis in the history of thought, at which an intellectual disease imperiled the very existence of philosophic speculation. This intellectual disease was sophistry, that is to say, the corruption of philosophy.

Sophistry is not a system of ideas, but a vicious attitude of the mind.... For the aim and rule of their knowledge was no longer that which is, that is to say, the object of knowledge, but the interest of the knowing subject....

[T]he most characteristic feature of all alike was that they sought the advantages conferred by knowledge without seeking truth.

They sought the advantages conferred by knowledge so far as knowledge brings its possessor power, pre-eminence, or intellectual pleasure. With this in view, they put themselves forward as rationalists and walking encyclopedias; to every question they had an answer, deceptively convincing....

They did not seek truth.... For with men and children alike destruction is the easiest method of displaying their strength.... Every law imposed upon man they declared to be an arbitrary convention....

Well, that's the tragic history. It reappeared in the 1960s, this time as intellectual farce. Time will tell if we ever reenter the stream of real progress (although no one is obligated to participate in the anti-evolutionary stupidity of his times!).

[And it's not so much a stream as metaphysical plumb line: To change thoughts repeatedly is not to evolve. To evolve is to develop the infinitude of a single thought. And A thought should not expand symmetrically like a formula, but in a disordered way like a bush (NGD).]