Footnotes on Metacosmic Stupidity and the Sweet, Sweet Revenge of Reality

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

Yesterday's footnotes in search of a post ended with a couple touching on the ontological roots and axiological flashes of Christianity. 

These roots are above, the leafy flashes (AKA pneumosynthesis) below, and let's try to figure out just what's going on down here. 

Our first hunch is that it all revolves around the inner and upper meaning of personhood per se. 

Analogously, I'm thinking of the following aphorism:

The transcendent God is not a projection of the one who is our father in the flesh. To the contrary, a reflection of God turns the animal progenitor into a father.

Just so, God is not a projection of our own concept of personhood, rather, that which is its very principle, and without which we are obviously just animals, fundamentally no different from any other, only worse, if you're familiar with the blood-spattered history of atheist ideologies, from communism to national socialism to "global boiling," et al.

Human beings embody a new cosmic category, this again being persons. Let us comb thorough this big pile o' aphorisms for any other clues about the goround of this mysterious personhood. 

At this point we'd like to keep things abstract and above board. No monkey isness!

In other words, we want to avoid delving into matters of explicit faith, and try rather to hone in on what every intellectually dishonest person agrees with, regardless of (implicit) faith. 

Faith (our kind) is more an explicit "fine-tuning" or differentiation of those principles we can reach via nature.

Which goes back to a couple of ground aphorisms that are worth repeating, 1)

Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. We do not talk of God with those who do not judge talk about the gods as plausible.

And 2)

Christianity does not construct a rational explanation of Christ, but constructs the universe as the sum of necessary postulates to the existence of Christ...

Put these together, and we're looking for -- or at -- a vision of the world in which Christ -- the Godman, the metacosmic person -- is possible. After all, in order for anything to exist, it must first be possible for it to exist, otherwise it's impossible in principle and therefore in fact.

Let's start with some necessary entailments of the anti-Bob contingent, AKA reductio ad trolliums, so we can rule out a whole lotta BS, before considering the alternative. Note that each of these addresses the same cosmic bullshidiocy from a slightly different angle: 

If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.

Man is the animal that imagines itself to be Man.

Only man pretends to be the anti-God.

"To have faith in man" does not reach the level of blasphemy; it is just one more bit of nonsense.

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

He avoids announcing to man his divinity, but proposes goals that only a god could reach, or rather proclaims that the essence of man has rights that assume he is divine.

Humanity is the only totally false god.

The human has the insignificance of a swarm of insects when it is merely human.

Even so, you are nevertheless free to be an inane and idiotic progressive insect and pest. Indeed, nothing is stopping you besides reality, even if it takes time for reality to exact its revenge. Progressivism is already -- I mean, just look at their faces! -- dead, but death takes time:

An expert stab in the nerve center of an error kills it in seconds. But it requires centuries for its corpse to decompose.

How cosmically appropriate that their leader is literally an undead and decomposing corpse! Truly truly, the author of progressivism is a humorist without a sense of humor, and who might this unintentionally amusing author be? 

Indeed, who could it be, if not a person, since dark angels are persons too. And there are plenty of persons we don't like, but we do not jump to the conclusion that they aren't persons. A little perspective, please. Rather, forgive them their trespasses yada yada.

BUT

The Lord’s Prayer does not say: “... Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against whomever they wish.”

Dig? Let us stupulate that

In every moment the majority lives from dead ideas.

And that 

Religious pathology is the key to history.

We'll leave off with this one, and tomorrow we'll get into the living and healthy alternatives: 

The leftism of the majority of leftists is perfectly explicable, but the intelligent man who has left-wing ideas must severely examine his conscience.

Well, maybe a little preview: 

That which is not a person is not finally anything.

Footnotes in Search of a Post

What can I say?

The divine light shimmers upon the sea of being.

And not a moment too soon, for 

The momentary beauty of the instant is the only thing in the universe that concurs with the eagerness of our souls.

D'oh! There's always a BUT: 

 The luminous intensity of certain truths makes them invisible.

Then again, not to everyone, AKA the living: 

Life is delightful in the moments in which one is left to think or dream. 

But there is Life (the abundant kind) and life, for which reason we can say that mere 

“Life” is the consolation of those who do not know how to think.

Gentlemen, you can't think in here, this is academia!

In every moment the majority lives from dead ideas.

Dead and rotting. Conversely,

By limiting our audience we limit our falterings. Solitude is the only incorruptible arbitrator.

What an excellent way of spinning the selectiveness of my audience!

The rest are just too busy and distracted with merely living their mere lives. Frankly, I don't know how they do it, but

Man needs a busy life. No one is more unfortunate than the idler who was not born predestined to be one. An idle life without boredom, stupidities, or cruelty is as admirable as it is rare.

Fortunate indeed is the idler born to abide, who is bored by the busyness of living and can tolerate the isness of being. 

The pleasure with which we walk down the trail that a system opens up for us into the woods makes us forget that on each side the forest remains intact.

Not for me, at least not anymore. Certainly it used to, but now I am always aware of the Mystery of (and in) the four quadrants (↑, ↓, ←, & →) for which reason

Any explanation soon seems naïve.

And 

Any explanation seems inadequate when we hear it repeatedly.

Aaaand

Any idea is always too simple.

Naïve, inadequate, and simplistic, thy name is tenure, and thy dickname is journalism!

Dunning-Kruger + confirmation bias is everywhere:

There are few intelligences that we do not hear fluttering blindly in their cage of unconscious convictions.

What good are wings if one is grounded and caged? But supposing you are, that door locks from the inside:

When a system provides automatic answers to all questions, let us change the system.

You're free, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it except default to auto-subjugation. Today's masters are every bit as oppressive as yesterday's, only they've been internalized: every man his own victim and master. But who does the master serve?

This will be controversial, but

Religions would be simple figments of the imagination if their ontological roots were not all in Christianity.

In what sense? Perhaps this?

Christianity is the paradigm of the gratuitous insertion of axiological flashes into time.

Of the perpetual incarnation of the vertical into the horizontal, whether by book, by aphorism, by experience, or ultimately by Person. 

Perhaps everything is a footnote on Personhood?

Feral Christianity in the Wild Godhead

We've been rummaging around the bottom of the cosmos in search of ground aphorisms to build if not Babel upon. How about we flip the crypt and look around for some top-floor aphorisms? 

For us, the great middle zone can take care of itself. It is metaphysical flyover country, which can be safely left to scientists, technicians, and other autopilots. The real action is located...

Well, it's ambiguous, because it is always located here and now, of course. But here and now only exist as such in the luminous tension between the top and bottom, between transcendence and immanence, respOʘktively. So,

Let us respect the two poles of man: concrete individual, human spirit. But not the middle zone of an animal with opinions. 

Unless the middle zone is in dialectical tension with those two poles. Otherwise one drifts into some ghastly ideology, materialism at one end, idealism at the other, AKA the two varieties of Gnosticism, which usually combine in some fatheaded animal form to lard it over us.

Speaking of the Tension, 

The two poles are the individual and God; the two antagonists are God and man.

The latter as in "mankind," that abstract thing progressives love because they so passionately hate concrete men. 

Two contradictory philosophical theses complete each other, but only God knows why.

Or how. But there are plenty of hints, clues, and allegations.

This one too touches on our immanence and transcendence:

God is infinitely close and infinitely distant; one should not speak of Him as if He were at some intermediate distance.

Noted.

So, Meditations on the Toppermost, or something. Now, God is the name folks typically give to the Principle of principles, but to name it can be to tame it, and what could be more wild and less domesticated than our Principle? 

Supposing it could be brought to heel, well, feel free to make up a predictable pun about the shoutheels who have never stop yelling about it.

Liberty intoxicates man as a symbol of independence from God.

And

Man calls "absurd" what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence.

Secret? If only! Nowadays we call it "tenure," and it won't shut up.

Freedom isn't free, or rather, only totally so when detached from the Principle of which it is a vertical prolongation:

God allows man to raise barricades against the invasion of grace.

We need a name for this, or rather, an un-name, i.e., an unsaturated pneumaticon; let us call this anti-grace (-↓ ), just as the pseudo-omnipotence referenced above would be (-↑).

At any rat,

God is the impediment of modern man.

And another name for postmodern man, who speaks the very word in which he is enclosed, or is deceived in the lexical web he weaves, like a drunken insect or sober Kafka.

Truly truly, what an omnescient path to omniscience! For  

God does not ask for the submission of the intelligence, but rather an intelligent submission.

Or a submission of the intellect to Intelligence as such. How hard is that? Or how easy, rather, if you get the yoke.

God is the term with which we notify the universe that it is not everything.

 "O" is the term I like to use, in light of which the universe is ( ). 

This latter symbol is apt or at least forgivable, because it implies the necessary incompleteness of any manmode system, which, if complete is inconsistent, and if consistent incomplete. Of course, Gödel didn't make up the rules, he only proved them.

Again, for our purposes I prefer Principle or O, so as to prevent us from imagining we can really know God from the inside out or top down, even though we can, in a manner of speaking. In fact, speaking as such is a prolongation of the one and only Word eternally spoken up there, but I think that's enough spicy nonsense for today, speaking of which, 

The transcendence that permeates things is the salt that seasons their blandness. 

Existence: What is it Good For?

Absolutely nothing? Or everything absolute?

Some additional ground aphorisms while we ponder our next (dance?) move:

Creation is the nexus between eternity and history.

Creation is a relation of dependence upon the Absolute principle; from the Creator's side it is an act, a verb, while from our side it is a link between terms. 

The free act is only conceivable in a created universe. In the universe that results from a free act.

Nor are we free to reject this necessary condition for the existence of freedom, for to reject it is to prove it once and for all. 

To please the determinist we say that there is no action without a cause. To annoy him we say that there is no cause without an action.

This one's important because it goes to the necessary relation between cause and effect, and the impossibility of beginning the series with the latter. For which reason the Aphorist says

The permanent possibility of initiating a causal series is what we call a person. 

Indeed,

What is not a person is not finally anything. 

 "Creation" (from Godsend) is but the first Person and his first act, only forever? Father and Son? Yes, but not in time, or perhaps thinkable as a divine analogue of what we experience as temporal flow, i.e., the timeless time "between" the first and second Persons. This must be where all the relation and relativity come from, since they're everywhere and in everything. We aren't isolated atoms or unrelated Adams. 

This distinction is at once the principle of time and space, and I suppose this is why our own spacetime is full of particles that appear distinct but share a wavy substance. Again, the woowoo starts at the top.

I suppose it also accounts for the eternal now where we all live and can't not live, because this beginningless and endless now is simultaneously the most timelike and atemporal thing we can imagine; it's not only as close as we can get to eternity, but, come to think if it, as far from it as we as can get. Even though each moment is infinitely close and infinitely distant from eternity.

Oh, and -- now that I'm thinking about it -- what we experience as freedom must also be grounded in this eternal moment, for where else could it be? Can't change the past, nor exercise a choice in the future. 

Unless, of course you're a progressive time traveler. They rewrite history so quickly that no one know's what's going to happen yesterday; likewise, only they know what happened tomorrow. Although we have a pretty good guess, since they're getting so predictable.  

Let's try to dumb this down a little a little further -- I'm not sure I understood it, or worse, did understand it. 

Surely there are aphorisms?

One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time. 

I'm going to be so bold as to tweak this one a little, because time isn't necessarily disloyal. While I have reactionary tendencies, I don't think time as such can be all bad, because after all, it too is a creature, and we are told at the outset that everything God makes is good. If he is the cause of time, he must also be the time of causality, i.e., the time it takes for anything and everything to happen.   

Therefore, it must be the other way around -- that we are somehow disloyal to time? If so, what would loyalty to time look like? 

You're putting me on the spot, but something like Thy will be done? Obviously the expression of said will takes time, likewise our alignment with it. 

Finally, 

The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality.

But it is appearance, obviously. Therefore it is important.

We'll bite: for what, exactly? 

You've put me on the spot again. 

For

What is difficult is not to believe in God, but to believe that we are important to Him.

At the other end,

The human has the insignificance of a swarm of insects when it is merely human.

Hmm. Proud insect or humble image? Kafka or Christ?

Faith?

There are arguments of increasing validity, but, in short, no argument in any field spares us the final leap.

From entomology to theology, and I can only hope I don't repeat myself. Then again,

Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition, it is a perception of a special order of realities.  

Okay, but why?

Well, because for one thing, not only does the Creator create, but if he's the Creator, then he can't not create and still be the Creator he always is. 

And it is my strong suspicion and holy hunch that creation as such ascends to the point from which it descends, this being the very Principle irreducibly situated right there in the Perichoresis, the eternal dance of the Persons. A verb, mind you, and this must be the very verb that becomes flesh?

Best I can do at the moment. 

What's the Point? And Who?

 To repeat:

My brief sentences are touches of color in a pointillist composition.

But even if one were to examine a realistic paining -- or photograph -- one eventually arrives at the units of which it is composed. Evidently, the smallest dot is a Planck Unit, which

may be characterized by particle energies of around 10¹⁹ GeV or 10⁹  J, time intervals of around 10⁻⁴³ seconds, and lengths of around 10⁻³⁵ m.

In case you were wondering. Does this imply that time and space themselves are discontinuous, and that we simply superimpose the continuity?

Nah, not if you start at the top:

We understand more easily from the top down than from the bottom up -- the reverse of what they claim.

Remember,

We call “origins” the limits of our science.

So those dots & plancks at the bottom of being are just the limit of science's reach, i.e., a function (and intrinsic limitation) of the method. 

But what's really going on down there, up here, and beyond? 

Yesterday we spoke of "the simultaneous placement of the consciousness in the world and of the world in consciousness," but if this were literally true, we could never escape the ontological absurcularity. But there is always something that escapes definition, and we call this something someone.

Yes, someone named Gödel, but he speaks for everyone everywhere anytime, because there can be nothing more stupid than to say that logic "evolved" or has an expiration date. 

For what makes a man? Achievements, overcoming obstacles, competitors bested?

You're joking, but perhaps it is... Put it this way: there is a minimum of "components" that constitute man, and to exclude any one of them is to cut a man off at the knees if not beneath the belt.

Let's try to nail down these principles in such a way that they cannot be reduced any prior ones, and worry later about how they get here. The point is to arrive at metaphysical truths that 1) cannot not be true (i.e., in which error is strictly impossible), 2) which presuppose no prior truth or principle, and 3) denial of which results in absurdity and self-refutation.

Can we build such a cake? Yes we can!

For example, perhaps the most obvious principle is that man may know truth. If not, then truly truly we are done here, are we not? Or all done except for the endless scuffle for power, dominance, and tenure. 

But truth cannot exist unless we are free to accept it, so it seems that man is also condemned to freedom, so now we have two principles that define a man, truth and freedom. Any more?

You're joking again, but what would life be without beauty, that light of our lives? Nor can we leave out virtue -- of being prepared to do the right thing -- and of course we have to include sentiment, even if it means tolerating rank sentimentalists and hysterics. Strong men also cry.

Anyway, put all of these together into one package, and now you've really got problems. 

But these units of humanness are like the Planck Time referenced above. Just as time (let alone eternity) cannot be the sum of these units, nor can a person be just a bag full of truth + freedom + virtue + beauty + sentiment, because these are all posterior to the one principle that is prior to them, this being....

In a word, the Person.

So, Person is the only thing that is irreducible to anything less. Change our mind.

We'll try, but perhaps this is a good place to insert some brief, maybe the briefest, aphorisms. Why brief?

Because

To discover where the reasoning of the philosopher slips, just observe where he becomes more loquacious.

And 

A clear writer is one who does not catechize, but whose sole ambition is that his sentence be the immortal huntress of the instant.

That means now, so let's be clear and concise:

The deluded are prolix. 

So let's start right now with Bob, a name we give -- or rather, a name given by his lovin' parents -- to a mystery:

We presume to explain history, and we fail before the mystery of the one who we know best.

But guess what?

Let us call the individual the existent that is transparent only to God.

Moreover,

For God there are only individuals. 

 So, someone gets me. 

To feel oneself a creature is to feel oneself to be contingent but mysteriously sheltered.

And 

For one who feels himself to be a creature the existence of God is an analytic proposition.

Penultimate line:

The truth is objective but not impersonal.

Bottom line: 

Truth is a person.

So, Change My Mind, but you'll have to do so without a mind, nor can you be a proper person. In other words, a troll.

An irritating man is one who claims that the solution he adopts has been reached in an impersonal way, who does not want to take responsibility for what he adopts.

Sub-bottom line:

Only God and the central point of my consciousness are not adventitious to me. 

O and ʘ.

Dots in the Matrix and I-Popping Metaphors

So, we must begin our philosophy not only with a tangible means of communication, but with a defense and justification of the very possibility of communicating. Again, answers are one thing, but how are there questions -- especially fruitful ones?

Communication is certainly possible; if not, then philosophy itself is impossible, because reality couldn't communicate itself to us, nor we to others. The question is, is this communication necessary? In other words, is it just a contingent accident, or bound up with the very nature of being? 

Here again, if communication is only contingent, it is difficult to conceive of how it could know the Absolute, or any principle, really. For the Absolute is necessary being; indeed, to know of it even implies our own immortality, since only transcendence can know the transcendent.  

Let's rummage through our secret stockpile of illegal aphorisms for epistemic backup. Good morning, Nicolás. Whaddya got for us?  

This one from yesterday is worth repeating:

Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others.

And which are in turn contained by the "Absolute container" (or better, Container <--> Contained, but that's getting ahead of ourselves). In any event, 

The real “double truth” is the simultaneous placement of the consciousness in the world and of the world in the consciousness. 

I want to say "triple truth," but that's again getting over our skis as we glide up the magic mountain. But that is a Verigolinian way of expressing it, i.e., that we are always conscious of a world out of which consciousness arises, so the miracle is that we are not thereby enclosed in a contingent absurcularity.  

Which is touched upon here: 

The world is explicable from man; but man is not explicable from the world. Man is a given reality; the world is a hypothesis we invent.

No, this does not imply any kind of mere subjectivism or Kantian deformation of being. Rather, it highlights the fact that man qua man is the existent who transcends his own existence, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. 

Conversely, "the world" is always a symbolic expression in the luminous space between immanence and transcendence.   

This one touches on the same principle from a different angle:

Subjectivity is a straight line between the knowing subject and the interiority of the known object.

Or, knowledge takes place in the subjective space between intelligence and intelligibility, which mirror each other herebelow, but are united in the Principle above. 

And even up there it is a dynamic unity, but once again we are getting ahead of ourselves. But since we're up there anyway, let's bring down a nugget:

Jesus Christ is the sole point in history where axiology and ontology are fused.

Or, we might say the very intersection of vertical and horizontal as such; not just in the vertical but of verticality, and the Incarnation thereof, i.e., as if to say "the vertical becomes horizontal that the horizontal might become vertical." 

'Nother aphorism, 'nother angle:

[Man the citizen] lives in the thickness of time, in the landscapes of ravines and barricades of contingencies and determinisms of history. Homo spiritualis [Man of the spirit] lives in this atemporal time of the values emerging in the course of millennia.

There aren't "two men" in us, except maybe literally, in that the one can be split off from the other, which is one way of looking at the Fall. Fallenness doesn't just depend upon verticality, it proves it. We might even say that 

To believe in God is not to believe in God; it is not possible not to believe in Him.

If that's a difficult pearl to swallow, just substitute "Absolute" for the G-word, for it is not possible to not partake of it and still be a knower, except in the cosmically onanistic sense. 

Orderly thinking is that which has a secret center, even when it does not have a secret articulation.

The "secret center" is none other than Celestial Central, and without it there would be no centers anywhere. Your own I AM -- obviously a kind of center -- is a reflection or re-verberation of the Center (or center at the periphery). 

Unless you have a better idea, which I can assure you you do not. Rather, if it's better it's worse, because 

He who is not resigned to the fundamental asymmetry of the world ends up falsifying his measurements.

And 

I merely desire to draw an ellipse that has for its foci the absolute contingency of being and the absolute gratuity of value. The consciousness of being a creature and the experience of grace.

From your ellipse to God's ear!

The Creator-creature dualism is at the same time a perfect dualism and a transcendent dualism.

Making it a trialism, but that's a future post. Put it this way:

Briefly, religious history ascends to a point from which it descends.

But 

We leave the synthesis to God.

About this synthesis. None of the above should be taken literally, but nor should it not be so taken; rather, a kind of 20/∞ vision should begin to emerge, in the sense that

My brief sentences are touches of color in a pointillist composition.

Like those magic eye paintings, which look random, but if you stare into them while relaxing your gaze, the 3D image pops out. 

Boo!

How Are There Questions?

Especially that one.

Slept late this morning, so just a brief cosmic update, because it just doesn't feel right to start the day without a dip into the radiant ocean of being. It's not just the refreshment, rather, the penance, like justifying my otherwise frivolous existence or something. 

I want to begin with an aphorism from the end of yesterday's post, that

Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others.

Now, if we're going to try to pin down the Ground Aphorisms of a universe composed of them, this one comes close to being absolutely necessary, if not sufficient. It's a punchline that punches way above its weight, that's for sure.

You could equally say that the world is made of language or of stories or of myth or math, but the very existence of language presupposes certain ontological conditions that cannot be denied on pain of instantaneous soph-refutation and eternal banishment to the lowest ring of tenure.

One wishes, anyway.

What I mean is, to say anything at all about the universe is to have said a great deal indeed; but that's not the end of it, because then we have to enquire or even inquire into the meaning of this "great deal" of implicit meaning, which no one ever does except for poor unheralded Bob. 

Rather, people go on exchanging invisible information from head to head as if it's not the weirdest thing ever. At least ants touch heads to pass along information, but we do so through the ether. And from what to what? I mean, we're doing it right now, and what's going on? 

Well, first of all, what is language, anyway? We'll go with this: communication through a system of arbitrary signals. It's somewhat tautological, because what is communication, and how is it possible? 

Appropriately enough, the first chapter of Stanley Jaki's Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth goes into this question, because truly truly, it is the first question -- which is to say, how and why do we ask questions, and, weirder still, how and why are there answers?

Of course, there are never enough philosophers and always too many people who philosophize. And yet, from the wise to the tenured, they all share one thing in common, to such an extent that if they were true philosophers they would be in agreement instead of engaged in a 2,500 year food fight.

for all their differences, philosophers are at one in a crucial and fundamental respect, be they skeptics, dogmatists, realists, idealists, rationalists, empiricists, positivists, phenomenologists, deconstructionists, materialists, or what not.

We'll bite.

They all use tangible means for the delivery of their respective messages. The means may be the spoken word, a clay tablet, a scroll, a parchment, a codex, a broadsheet, a book, an email projected on the monitor..., but it has to be a means, that is, something tangible.

This is at once trivially true, since it is something we can't not know (and do) and still presume to communicate. And yet, it is so profoundly true as to evoke the ontic WTF?! as soon as we explicitly think about it.

"If philosophers are logical" -- admittedly a big if -- then

their strictly primary concern should be about the extent to which their particular philosophy justifies the use of any such means, indeed its very reality and all the consequences, both numerous and momentous, that follow from this (Jaki). 

Now, to say "numerous and momentous" is to say quantity and quality, which is a whole 'nother can of wormholes, but I think I've communicated the bare minimum to justify my existence for one more day. We'll continue tunneling tomorrow.

Cosmotherapy with a Resistant Patient

Supposing the world is made of aphorisms, what's the first one? 

Bear in mind that in order to qualify as a first rate aphorism, it can't merely be true. Anyone can speak truth, assuming he's not a journalist or regime operative (but I repeat myself). Rather, it must be witty, ironic, and maybe even a bit pointy: In the beginning is the Word, and OUCH! 

Also, anyone can fake intelligence. But there's no such thing as fake wit. Ideally our aphorisms must provoke the guffah-HA! experience, which is a rare quality, hence the highly selective appeal of my audience.

Perhaps you've never noticed the quote by Wittgenstein above the comment box: A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes. I just looked up his Top 25 quotes, the funniest now being this one:

When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote. 

 You think I'm funny? That I'm here to amuse you? 

I don't know why we're here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

 I'm sorry to hear that.

My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks and being depressed.

I suspect logic won't get you out of this predicament, Ludwig.

I wish to God that I were more intelligent and that everything would finally become clear to me -- or else that I needn't live much longer.

If I were a clinical psychologist -- well, first I'd ask if you have a plan and a means -- but I would innocently wonder out loud if lack of intelligence might not be the *real* problem. 

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

Well, yes and no. If that were the case, you wouldn't even know of the world. 

All I know is what I have words for.

Oh please. Don't enclose yourself in absurcularity. 

Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me.

That's what we in the business call a baby step.  

Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.

Where did that come from? No, "betwixt the Almighty & me" doesn't mean only only betwixt em' -- it doesn't work that way, even -- or especially -- in the Godhead. Professor Wiki tells me you have an interest in Catholicism. Tell me about that....

Well, that was an unexpected deitour. 

Yesterday I spent the day whistling past the grooveyard, going for a swim, and consulting with Nicolás to identify his most purely metaphysical aphorisms. In so doing we had to bypass all the ones touching on art, literature, politics, ethics, history, et al. 

Here is a good place to begin, only insofar as it tells us where not to begin:

The scientific encyclopedia will grow indefinitely, but about the very nature of the universe it will never teach anything different from what its epistemological assumptions teach.

As to the overall purpose of... of my mission from God, or at least what we works out betwixt us, 

Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. We do not talk of God with those who do not judge talk about the gods as plausible. 

A vision of the world outside of which religion makes no sense. That's a bingo. 

Now, this vision must be capacious enough to contain everything. But it must do so in a coherent manner. It can't be just a pile of unrelated stuff. 

Indeed, to say coherent is to say related, and the latter is KEY, and here is an aphorism that may seem to come out of left field, but is actually a grand slam over the left (or any other) field wall:

Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others.

For now we're not only using language to dig beneath, behind, below, and above language, but to advert to what language is in its essence, and why we even have it. 

Yes, Ludwig?

The limits of the world are also the limits of logic.

Oh bullshit, Wittgenstein. There you go again. --Gödel 

He who adopts a system stops perceiving the truths that are within his reach.

Ludwig, you spoke of walking with logic. You might consider walking with the Almighty in order visit the place where all the logic comes from, otherwise you're just whistling in the dark:

God is the region that one who walks forward finally reaches. One who does not walk in circles.

And while walking, please remember, you're plenty smart enough, doggone it. That's not the issue, for

Intelligence knows no barriers, but it has stairs. 

Yeah, well, when we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote. 

That was amusing the first time you said it, Ludwig, but you know as well as I that your cynical devaluation of therapy is just a defense mechanism. Our time is up. See you again tomorrow morning.

No, Really, What if the World is Made of Aphorisms?

This line of thought was provoked by sentence in the preface to All Desire is a Desire for Being: "It's been said that the universe is made up not of atoms, but of stories." 

Of course, nowadays these stories are called "narratives," and according to the grand narrative of our day & age, there are no grand narratives, just the pretextual stories that mask the Grand Competition for Power.

In reality -- in addition to the one just cited -- there are so many irritating grand narratives and controlling myths that you must have a cast iron stomach to not want to vomit. They're everywhere, from the media and academia and pop culture, all way down to government. Who can breathe amidst such stifling repression? The dead, that's who. Or at least insentient. 

But that's another narrative. Ours is at once more analytic and integral, in that we want to pull it apart, down to its simplest components, and then reassemble the parts into a proper metanarrative with which no honest or awake person could ever disagree. Of course, we'll never convince the lofo NPC brain-eating Zombies. But that's only half the country. 

What's the alternative narrative to ours? Actually, there are two: you can throw up your hands and affirm that nothing makes any sense -- that we are plunged into a meaningless existence of total absurdity, for reasons we can never know, even supposing there were a reason.

I call that a Manly and Muscular Existentialism, and hats off to the person who believes and lives it, irrespective of where they are hospitalized.

The other alternative is to peacefully turn oneself into the Matrix, and to spend the rest of one's days living in one of those off-the-rack meta-narratives mentioned above. 

Coincidentally, I'm reading this lame book I picked up for a dollar at the library sale, a memoir by Bob Dylan's girlfriend after first arriving in New York when he was 20 (A Freewheelin' Time, by Suze Rotolo). Although she wrote it in her 60s, she's one of those terminal hippies who believes exactly the same things she did at 17.  

Imagine, for example, upon Mature Reflection, writing the following passage:

There was a fascination with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, who had made the revolution in Cuba and were challenging the monoliths of the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union, with their dashing, rebellious thumb-in-your-eye-plague-on-both-your-houses behavior.

No, they weren't mass murdering thugs, and besides, you have to break a few eggs if you're going to bravely stand up to the Soviet Union!

She herself was a red diaper baby raised by Marxist parents, and whose greatest achievement in life was the transition to adult diapers. She at once spends a lot of the book declaiming anti-communist hysteria, while being a caricature of an empty-headed communist hysteric.

Bob, why are you even reading this book by a commie bubblehead?

Eh, I thought it might give some insight into the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the early '60s. It's doing that, minus the insight. 

More generally, this woman lives in a meta-narrative in which she is the Victim of everything from the Repressive '50s to Dylan's genius. I won't bore you with examples. Where were we?

A World made of Aphorisms. Now, Dávila gave his 10,000 aphorisms the ironic title, Annotations on an Implicit Text. 

I am stealing that, because what are the 4,000 posts but endless commentary on the Implicit Text I am always searching for? They started out innocently enough as commentaries on an explicit text -- AKA One Cosmos, the book -- but have long since become something else. Then again, perhaps not, because 

Every writer comments indefinitely on his brief original text.

Is that what I'm doing? Do I resemble that remark? 

The only claim that I have is that of not having written a linear book, but a concentric book.

Now we have two hints of what the Aphorist is up to, in that the text is implicit and concentric. What is this implicit thing at the Center?

Yes, let's explicate it. Let's render the implicit explicit.

Speaking of One Big Idea -- supposing I have one and have been beating it to death, not just for 17 years of blogging, but ever since I donned the Thinking Cap -- certainly this tension between implicate and explicate orders has been one of them. My doctoral dissertation involved the application of physicist David Bohm's theory of the implicate order to human metapsychology, but in hindsight, it's just another iteration of a more fundamental insight that....

It's been refined since then, but today I would simply say that human beings are always situated between the transcendent order above and immanent order below -- each direction extending to infinitude -- and there's not a damn thing we can do about it, except deepen it, both symbolically and experientially.

I read another book over the weekend that I picked up at the library sale, this one called Paths that Lead to the Same Summit, by a clinical psychologist whose lovin' parents gave him the handle Samuel Bendeck Sotillos. It is also not raccoomended, but there were some innarestin' passages, plus it was only a buck, so it's not as if I feel like the good lord gypped me.

The book is also the annotation of an implicit text, this text being the perennial religion and philosophy, supposing such a thing actually exists. Uppercase T Traditionalists, of course, believe it does exist -- in other words, that all orthodox religions are themselves explicit expressions of an implicit metaphysic. 

I go back and forth.

In other words, is Christianity the truth, full stop? Or is it true because it is in conformity with a metaphysical truth we can know directly via the nonlocal and uncreated Intellect?

Maybe a little bit of both?

I guess my favorite chapter was on Meister Eckhart -- actually, a book review of C.F. Kelley's Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge, which I'm sure I myself reviewed somewhere down there. All I remember is that it suffered in comparison to my favorite book on the subject, which is Bernard McGinn's The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing, which I do raccoomend.

The main thing about Eckhart is that, broadly speaking, he has the Right Approach, and it is as right today as it was 700 years ago. Of course, there are plenty of new age types who get Eckhart fundamentally wrong, and see him as some kind of dashing revolutionary who stuck his thumb in the eye of the Church, but we have no use for such a tendentious, agenda-driven nonsense.

Well, this post didn't get far. In the next one we will redouble our effort to explicate those aphorisms of which the world is implicitly made.

The most subversive book in our time would be a collection of old proverbs.

The World is Made of Aphorisms

As mentioned a few posts ago, the editor of All Desire is a Desire for Being has compiled a list of 172 maxims by Girard, extracted from lengthier works. 

But since Girard has only that one Big Theory, I'll bet I could sketch out the whole thing in 20 or fewer aphorisms, in which case we can all take 'er easy and enjoy the rest of the day. Since her list is just random, I will attempt to wrestle them into some kind of order from the bottom up:

When mutual love is absent, the only sentiment that can reconcile human being is its opposite, a common hatred.

Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.

Unanimity in accusation is in itself a cause for suspicion. It suggests that the accused is innocent.

To have a scapegoat is to not realize you have a scapegoat.

No one ever sees himself as casting the first stone.

Scapegoating is effective only if it is nonconscious. Then you do not call it scapegoating; you call it justice.

Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.

We are ready to deconstruct anything except the idea that we are self-directed and that the persecutors are always the others.

Christ reveals and uproots the structural matrix of all religions.

When we criticize the Bible we can only criticize it with the Bible.

The best way not to be crucified, in the final analysis, is to do as everyone else and join in the crucifixion. 

Either we surrender and join the persecuting crowd, or we resist and stand alone. The first way is the unanimous self-deception we call mythology.

If you do not have a real religion, you end up with a more dreadful one.

There is a great irony in the fact that the modern process of stamping out religion produces countless caricatures of it.

[Political correctness] is the religion of the victim detached from any form of transcendence. 

We are living through a caricatural 'ultra-Christianity' that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by 'radicalizing' the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner.

It is because we have wanted to distance ourselves from religion that it is now returning with such force and in a retrograde, violent form... In this it will perhaps have been our last mythology. We 'believed' in reason, as people used to believe in the gods.

It's now no longer possible to persecute except in the name of victims.

The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition. 

The refusal of the real is the number one dogma of our time.

And here we're are, with the news of the day, whatever it is. You are now up to date with the scapegoat mechanism and logic of human sacrifice.

BUT WAIT, there's more! BONUS APHORISMS that converge with Girard: 

Socialism is the philosophy of the guilt of others.

When one does not concede to the leftist all that he demands, he proclaims himself the victim of an institutional violence that it is licit to repel with physical violence.

The political platforms of the left are gradually transformed into scaffolds.

If the leftist is not persecuting, he feels persecuted.

Only the honest prophets are lynched.

"Social justice" is the term for claiming anything to which we do not have a right.

Minorities that become majorities continue to believe they are brave.

The leftist screams that freedom perishes when his victims refuse to finance their own murder.

Man prefers to apologize by offering another person's guilt, rather than his own innocence, as an excuse.

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

The frightened liberal is a bloodthirsty animal. 

The cult of Humanity is celebrated with human sacrifices.