What is the Left's Bottom Lyin'?

We left off yesterday with an incomprehensible crack about left wing speech recapitulating the Incident in the Garden, i.e., man's fall. I ask you: does that make any sense at all, or is it just another gratuitous insult? Does it advance the debate, or are we just conveniently dismissing a priori anyone with whom we disagree?

Could be. But I recently read a book that makes the identical argument, The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, by Michael Walsh. I don't recommend it -- too much pompous and unfocussed gasbaggery for my taste -- but one finds back-up where one can. The whole book could have been reduced to a chapter, or maybe just this post.

When will writers learn that we don't have all the time in the world? As it stands, there are more required books on the cosmic syllaBus than we can ever drive to in one lifetime. If you're going to add another to the pile, you'd better have a damn good excuse. And make it brief. We don't have all day. Well, sometimes we do, but we don't want to waste that on an elective.

We've heard this argument before -- that the Frankfurt School of Marxist-inspired critical theorists ruined everybody's lives and ate all our steak. I see that the wiki article has a section that dates this conspiracy theory to 1992:

"Although it became more widespread in the late 1990s and 2000s, the theory originated with Michael Minnicino's 1992 essay New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness', published by the Schiller Institute. The Schiller Institute, a branch of the LaRouche movement, further promoted the idea in 1994. The Minnicino article charges that the Frankfurt School promoted Modernism in the arts as a form of Cultural pessimism, and played a role in shaping the 1960s counterculture."

Later it says that "The message is numbingly simplistic: all the ills of modern American culture, from feminism, affirmative action, sexual liberation and gay rights to the decay of traditional education and even environmentalism are ultimately attributable to the insidious influence of the members of the Institute for Social Research who came to America in the 1930's."

When you put it that way, it does sound kind of stupid, doesn't it?

I do not place the blame on any movement, or system, or ideology, or even Uncle Rico. Rather, each of these rides piggyback on something much deeper. First, when ideology is in the saddle, it rides on man. But what is it in man that permits him to be so easily saddled?

This is something we're always thinkin' about. The other day my site meter alerted me to an old series of posts from 2009 on the subject (in the context of a review of Bradley Watson's Living Constitution, Dying Faith: Progressivism and the New Science of Jurisprudence ). Let's linger over some of our greatest hits from six years ago (and I apologize for the length; it's just that I kept finding interesting little nuggets. You'll have to extend a little slack my way, because when I read an old post, it's like reading it for the first time.)

--What if the "truth" of natural selection were known at the time of America's founding? Suppose that instead of being sophisticated Christian thinkers and biblical exegetes, the founders believed the simplistic notion that man is nothing more than an accident of the genes, just an animal with no conceivable claim on truth, justice, or liberty.

--Obviously, our founding creed would have been equally inconceivable, i.e., that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.... Clearly, unless you are very stupid, you must realize that Darwinism does not permit the existence of permanent truths or natural law accessible to man's reason. The very idea is absurd, and the Darwinist should come right out and admit it.

--Make no mistake: in order for progressivism to even be "legal" -- that is, constitutional -- it must first carry out an attack on the existing Constitution. Most of what progressives have done and wish to do cannot be done unless they first reframe the Constitution in Darwinian terms as an evolving document.

--[I]t never occurred to America's founders that they were simply affirming convenient or time-bound principles subject to later revocation by pettifogging mediocrities with law degrees, who are more "evolved" than they. Rather, their "understanding of law was structured around the idea of a knowable, unchanging moral order, to which human law and the Constitution -- and therefore constitutional interpretation -- were subservient." They would have fully endorsed the Socratic/Platonic principle that "law aims to be a discovery of what is," and that human law "cannot contradict the natural law that reflects the divine reason" (Watson).

Note that the founders were implicitly aware of the contradictory metaphysic, such that the weenies of the Frankfurt School couldn't have been the foist to foist it upon us. Again, they just exploited a timeless mytho-logical reality, or tendency, in man. Note that the myth of Genesis takes place outside time; or, time is structured by it, rather than vice versa. The divine clueprint of "Genesis time" becomes human time, as a building to blueprint.

--In other words, the metaphysics of the Founders is precisely the opposite of the contemporary Darwinist, in that the former starts at the top of the cosmos, with the One, the Absolute, the Divine Reason, not the bottom, i.e., matter and the random accidents of nature. A political philosophy derived from the latter is going to look quite different, and will be irreconcilable with America's.

--To cite one obvious example, if one realizes that there are permanent truths or moral absolutes that are not strictly time-bound, and that they are accessible to man's intellect, then one cannot possibly believe in reductionistic Darwinism, irrespective of what the science does or doesn't show. It's like when scientists try to tell us that free will doesn't exist. Right. Whatever. They are simply wrong, because they are wrong in principle, a principle that is a priori true and cannot not be true on pain of the very abolition of truth. (In other words, only a free being may know or deny truth.)

Obviously, the lesson of Darwin came before the Frankfurt school. And

--progressivism takes its cue from Darwinism, in that it "is characterized by a set of ideas that have at their core a marked historicism -- which is to say, a belief that truth is always and everywhere relative to its time and place" (Watson). Under Darwinism, the intellect cannot be a faculty that adequates itself to truth and therefore reality, but rather, is merely "a method of dealing with adaptation and change." In such a myopic view, our "minds" are adapted to the environment, not to truth. And "truth" would simply be a good fit between mind and environment. And a good fit means that it promotes survival and reproduction, or babes and power.

So, here is the sort of constitution a Darwinian -- limited to his Darwinism -- might come up with:

We hold these tautologies to be self-evident. That all men are intrinsically unequal; and that they are endowed by nature with very different gifts and abilities; that among these are strength, intelligence, and the will to dominate; that to nurture these gifts, governments are are instituted by the vanguard of evolution, deriving their just powers from nature's iron will and from the New York Times editorial board; that whenever any government, constitution, or religion undermines these powers, it is the right of nature's elites to alter, abolish, or deconstruct it, and to institute a new government rooted in a Living Constitution, as to them shall seem most likely to effect the perpetual rule of the better sort.

But in reality,

--"there are certain fixed principles beyond which progress is impossible." Think about that for a moment, for it says everything you need to know about what man is, and how dramatically he stands out from the rest of creation.

Therefore -- and this again goes to the timelessness of the question --

--the real debate is between absolutism and relativism. And it is a debate that the relativists of the left cannot win unless they first undermine the plain meaning of our founding documents. Instead of embodying the fixed principles toward which our task is to evolve, the founding documents must become an elastic and mutable organism that itself evolves, a la Darwinism, in which all is change and nothing is fixed. Everything is back on the table -- life, liberty, property, slack.

Not only are we back at mythogenetic ground zero, but the left is taking the side of the serpent -- which is precisely what the Gnostics did wayback when, i.e., revere the serpent of salvation. So, maybe that wasn't a snake in the garden. Rather, a Frankfurter.

Now, there is a good and bad -- or appropriate and inappropriate -- omniscience. There is an absolute knowledge to which we are freaking entitled by virtue of being human:

--Lincoln advocated the good kind of omniscience, which provides the rock upon which our nation was built. Like a "secular revelation," these petrine principles were "handed down by the Founding Fathers for later generations to preserve," not to squander like a bunch of irresponsible and good-for-nothing trust fund babies.

--"progressivism" is grounded in a combination of Darwinism and philosophical pragmatism, which render the whole notion of timeless truth null and void. The elimination of timeless truth is both the origin and goal of progressive thought, just as timeless truth is the origin and goal of our liberal Founders (and which again makes genuine evolution possible).

--with a single stroke, these anti-intellectual mediocrities such as John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson were able to elevate themselves above the Founders, and affirm that "there are no fixed or eternal principles that govern, or ought to govern, the politics of a decent regime." Rather, all truth was situated in a strict historicism, meaning that "truth" was simply what was believed to be true at the time, and nothing more. With the passage of time, we'll arrive at better truths, just as natural selection has produced better eyes and more clever apes. But there is no truth that is true for all time -- no annoying natural rights to interfere with the prerogatives of the state. Again, this view begins and ends in change as opposed to permanence.

We have rearrived at the left's bottom lyin':

--From this false premise the left pulled off the ultimate fraud, by identifying the liberating belief in absolutes with authoritarianism, and the acceptance of radical relativism with "liberation." Yes, it is a sort of liberation -- into nihilism on the one hand, and the omnipotent state on the other. For if there is nothing but change -- "permanent change" -- this is just another way of saying "absolute relativism" and pure subjectivity, which is a self-refuting metaphysic that elevates Will over Truth. Truth becomes a function of raw power, and we are reduced to obedient Adams in the void.

Or just say Hell.

A Word from Jehovah's Withness

Time only for a brief blast.

Is it possible to speak if you haven't first been spoken to? Babies who are not immersed in language during the critical developmental window never learn how to speak, at least not properly.

You know the old crack about how ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny? Well, there first has to be a phylogeny -- a course of evolutionary development -- to recapitulate. Obviously the origin of language cannot be an infinite regress. It had to start somewhere.

Among other things, Genesis recaps the genesis of language. Brueggemann points out that "of all the creatures of God's eight creative acts, God speaks only to human creatures. The others have no speech directed toward them at all."

This implies that we learned how to speak from God himselves. For example, early on he twice addresses us (man-and-woman) directly as "you."

Thus, man is a You to God's I AM; he "has a different, intimate relation with the creator." He walks and talks with God, whereas other creatures cannot be "with" in the intersubjective sense of oneness-in-twoness. "With" implies relation, or a unity beneath division.

"God has made a peculiarly intense commitment" to this freaking speakish creature; at once he gives him the capacity to speak-with, but at the same time, the freedom to end the con-versation (flowing together) by growing his own separate way.

Note the ways in which the theme of language reappears later in the Bible; I count at least three major ways, and they must be related to the great theme(s) enunciated in Genesis.

First there is the Tower of Babel, which is just a collective recapitulation of the theme of appropriating language for ourselves and forgetting where it came from, such that we all fall downagain.

Then there is the fresh take on the Word of God in John 1: instead of speaking with man, this very speech becomes man and is thereby with him in a new way. This implies that in being "with" Jesus, man is with the same with-ness that was available to Adam in the Garden.

I want to say that Jesus is Jehovah's withness.

And I suppose Matthew 1:23 expresses this idea quite literally: 'and they shall call His name Immanuel,' which is translated, 'God with us.'

In the passage immediately thereafter, Joseph is awakened from his sleep and once again God is speaking; he is in-formed about some vital in-formation carried by Mary.

Later, we read of how John the Baptist was a voice crying in the wilderness, implying that not a lot of people were listening, or at least not hearing. He is not in the temple or the town square, but in the middle of nowhere. Few people are getting with the far-out things he has to say.

If Babel is the fragmentation of the divine gift of language due to misuse, then Pentecost represents the healing of this fracture.

And one way -- I would say the way -- language recovers its wholeness is via the Spirit of the Word-Jesus.

In author's word, God -- as if to emphasize the point -- has given a "last word" whom it is much more difficult to mis- and disunderstand, although it obviously isn't impossible. We still have our freedom, the same freedom Adam had to imagine he invented language.

There are many ways to look at the incident in the Garden, but in the present context I would say that when Adam eats of the forbidden fruit, he is granted ontological tenure. He is now a professor of deconstruction, in that language loses its transcendent reference (and source) and devolves to a self-referential tool of power instead of truth.

This is also the birth of the left. Whenever a liberal speaks, ontogeny is recrapitulating an unfortunate phylogeny.

Creator Creates Creation

Whitehead can sometimes be difficult to understand, but at least he is trying to describe what is going on beneath what we all experience, as opposed to those pseudo-profound postmodernists who painfully and pretentiously describe what no sane person has ever experienced.

I can only hope I don't sound like the latter, but I can well imagine a stranger to these parts thinking my blah-blah-blogging is no different from theirs -- as if I am trying to imitate the tenured rather than distinguish mysoph therefrom.

Yesterday I linked to a bleat in which Lileks serves up some examples of postmodern pneumababble (scroll down past the first break). The writer in question "elucidates the slippery, gendered in-betweenness of everyday ritual in a manner reminiscent of Derrida’s disquisition on the chora -- that most mysterious and mundane of spaces, not unlike the anonymous corridor of a hotel."

You can't just say that staying in a hotel is different from being at home. No, that would be too banal. Rather, "The hotel becomes a kind of disorienting counterfeit to the authentic shelter of the home, which is the dominant space of traditional Western values because it’s a place of permanent or rooted dwelling -- in the Heideggerian sense of the word."

Then again, "Homes have a lot of blank spaces. It’s easy to get lost there," so you're Heideggered if you do, Heideggered if you don't. Which I think is the point: verbal mystagoguery masquerding as intellectual depth.

The good news? "If we could shift our traditional notions of 'placeness' from the home to the hotel, we could find a new way of considering modern space."

Notice what a trivial project this is compared to a Christian metaphysic in which we shift the space of the entire cosmos. Nor is doing so a matter of will ("if we could shift..."), because whatever we merely will will merely be more whatever. Rather, the opposite movement is required, surrender to, and cooperation with, a power that transcends and contains us.

Anyway, my point is that Whitehead can at times sound like he is depaking the chopra with the worst of them (especially in Process and Reality), but he's really just trying to say something new and difficult with the limited arsenal of existing language. Sometimes you have to invent new terms -- that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it -- or use the old ones in a novel way in order to shock or annoy the reader out of the familiar.

We've discussed this many times over the past decade, the problem of saturation. A word or concept becomes saturated when it can no longer... how to put it... attract the unknown. This is especially problematic in religion, where we can imagine we know what we're talking about merely because we have a word for it.

Even (or especially) "God" -- literally the most unsaturate-able word imaginable -- routinely loses its depthless unKnowability in the mouths of fundamentalists -- both the religious and atheistic kinds, who speak of a God in whom I cannot believe.

The first and surest thing we can say of God is that while he is nameable, he is not knowable. Thus, we can name the mystery, but that is hardly the same as knowing the mystery. I have a name for Alaska, but it doesn't mean I've ever been there or know much about it.

Indeed, the more I learn about it, the more I will realize there is to know. Often when we know little, we assume that's all there is to know. But the little we know is superimposed on vast stretches of ignorance. But enough about Obama.

If the postmodern bullshit artist cited above (above Obama) really wants to rock her own crock, she should try unsaturating what she thinks she knows. This will plunge her into a very different space -- the space of reality -- irrespective of whether she is at home or in a hotel.

Regarding early Christians, Whitehead writes that "A gracious, simple mode of life, combined with fortunate ignorance, endowed mankind with its most precious instrument of progress -- the impracticable ethics of Christianity."

A better word would be "non-utilitarian" ethics, or one always converging upon the absolute instead of the everyday; or better, the everyday seen through the prism of the absolute. Lileks for example, is a connoisseur of the everyday. What is the bleat but the mundane under the aspect of a jehovial witness?

I think the unknowability of God goes to the creative novelty of the world; they are two ways of approaching the same reality. I agree with Hartshorne that God couldn't "wish not to go on experiencing novel content," if only because "his ideals are incapable of final exhaustive realization." Again, God is the ultimate instance -- the very source -- of unsaturatability.

The divine inexhaustibility goes to "the intrinsic nature of his own primordial essence," which is to say, ceaseless creativity. This is reconciled with his changelessness in that creation is "his eternal and unchangeable purpose."

Think about it: God's creativity must be his alphOmega, for how could creativity ever be created without a creative act?

So, creativity is prior to, or at least coequal with, any other branch of the Ultimate Principle. Love, truth, beauty, freedom, and oneness are all bound up with it. Each of these must also be uncreated, in that how could one create freedom if not in freedom? How could one honestly speak truth without it? How could the many ever become one without oneness? Etc.

Again: In The Beginning, Creator Creates Creation. These three are one, and the one is always now. But not in the Heideggerian sense.

Good & Bad Newness

Since we've spontaneously veered into the mode of Whitehead, let's continue down that cosmic limb and see what we can shake from it.

Here's a bold statement: "Apart from God, there could be no relevant novelty. His unity of conceptual operations is a free creative act, untrammelled by reference to any particular course of things" (in Sherburne). You might say that creativity is necessary, but never this or that particular creation.

This is another way of saying that we live in the sort of cosmos in which anything might happen. You just never know.

For example, after 10 billion years, it might suddenly come alive. Or, it might start thinking. It might be capable of knowing and relating to its own source -- i.e., the very source of creative novelty.

Novelty is obviously "newness." And while what is new may not be creative, what is creative is always new, i.e., something that hasn't existed before.

As we have pointed out many times, the very first thing the Bible tells us about God is that he likes to create. Therefore, he is not so much mathematician as novel-ist.

And it is remarkable how much the Bible novelgazes on the subject of newness. Indeed, the Gospels are good news; now that I think about it, since bad + new = destruction, good + new must = creation.

"Behold," he says in Isaiah 43:19, "I will do a new thing" -- for example, make roads in the bewilderness and rivers in the desert. Later, in 65:17, he advises us to "be glad and rejoice forever in what I create." Revelation 21:1 implies that the creativity continues forever, and I say, why not? Why should God ever stop creating? "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had passed away." Indeed, with Christ we "walk in the newness of life" (Rom 6:4).

That is remarkably strange language, but let's try to tie it in with a modern conception. Whitehead is about as modern as one can get without passing over the peak and proceeding down the windword slide into dumb-as-a-postmodernism and other psychopneumatic pathologies.

Or, since he was ahead of his time, we might say that metathinkers such as Whitehead and Polanyi are the post-critical antidopes to the tenured sophists who erode and desiccate man.

To paraphrase Schuon, these latter either freeze us under a thick sheet of ice or dissipate us into incoherent fragments. The latter in particular can be misperceived as creativity, since it is certainly "new." New, like a tumor.

Another good one: "God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles," but "is their chief exemplification" (in Sherburne).

Thus, "apart from the intervention of God, there could be nothing new in the world, and no order in the world. The course of the world would be a dead level of ineffectiveness," with any progress cancelled out by horizontal crosscurrents. Death would be the rule instead of the exception.

Bottom line: "The universe is thus a creative advance into novelty." But what does this mean to you, the coonsumer? "[O]f course, there is no meaning to 'creativity' apart from its 'creatures,' and no meaning to 'God' apart from the creativity and the 'temporal creatures,' and no meaning to the temporal creatures apart from 'creativity' and 'God'" (ibid.).

Therefore, if you are as far out on the limb as I am, you could go so far as to say that God is the meaning of man -- no shock there -- but that man is the "meaning" (in a manner of speaking) of God -- big or small shock there, depending upon where you sit.

Then again, not such a big shock if you read some of the early fathers, who, if I remember rightly, made this point quite explicitly: that in Jesus we simultaneously have man's icon of God and God's icon of man.

An icon is something through which we see into the beyond which the icon instantiates. Its meaning is not itself -- for that would be idolatry -- but beyond itself.

Whitehead also talks about the "novel togetherness" of each temporal occasion, in which the many become one. You don't have to understand what I just said in order to see how this relates to a trinitarian metaphysic, which is whatnow?

I'm not saying this is correct, but in my mind I see a continuous relationship of "novel togetherness," meaning ever new, ever creative, and ever one-ing; it reminds me of a kaleidoscope, in which new patterns of oneness are constantly coming into being as a result of the shifting parts.

Thus, "the ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction" -- a more perfect union, to coin a phrase. "The world expands through recurrent unifications of itself," such that "the many become one and are increased by one." This is the literal meaning of One Cosmos Under God.

Think of birth: at first, the baby and mother are literally one in the womb. Then the mother gives birth, and the task of motherhood is to prolong the oneness into a psychic union. As the child develops, he is able to break away from this oneness, only to rediscover it anew in a mature love relation.

The point is that this follows the metacosmic trinitarian pattern of loving within higher and deeper unions of novelty.

It may indeed be said that this is one of the first philosophies which has any intellectual right to speak of divine personality. For personality, as any psychologist knows, is a sort of cluster of habits and purposes and ideas... --Hartshorne

Adventures in Blogging: Let There Be a Post!

Continuing with yesterday's theme, note that in Genesis it specifically states -- over and over -- that the Creator creates by simply allowing things to be, as in let there be light. That's a curious way to express it, and yet, there is an analogue to our own creativity, which also cannot be forced, cajoled, or willed.

Like right now: I would like for a post to happen, but it's more a matter of Let there be a post. I suppose that's why I enjoy the process: it's nothing like, say, school, where you are forced to write something on demand. None of my teachers ever said, let there be an essay on the Civil War; rather, write what is expected or suffer the consequences.

Again, "the command is not authoritarian. It is, rather, 'let it be.' God gives permission for creation to be. The appearance of creation is a glad act of embrace of this permit" (Brueggemann).

Yes, God wants the creation to be; but back off, man, he's an artist, not a mechanic.

Note also that this cosmic artwork isn't just situated in space, but in time. It is a ceaseless outflow of creativity, such that time itself a mode of creativity in the Whiteheadean sense: "Cut away the future, and the present collapses, emptied of its proper content. Immediate existence requires the insertion of the future in the crannies of the present" (Adventures of Ideas).

He's not talking about weeks or years or decades, but seconds or even fractions of seconds; the present is immediately entangled with its own future, and vice versa, otherwise it could never arrive. There are no gaps, and God is in them.

It is in this transitional space from present-to-future where all the novelty gets in. Novelty is what hasn't happened before, and thus, creativity: "The intermediate stage in this transition is constituted by the acquisition of novel content..." You could say that the future is implicate in each moment, and that time renders it explicate via the creative attractor, the cosmic telovator. It's an overall movement, like waves endlessly crashing on the shore of the now.

Each moment is a janus-faced occasion looking toward its own past and future. "In between there lies the teleology of the universe." In this sense we are hurtling toward our own destiny, but again, not in a deterministic way. Some aspects of the present are indeed dominated by the past, and each moment has more or less slack, or Cosmic Wiggle Room.

One reason, I think, why we so value art (both the creating and consuming), is that it is the residue, as it were, of this cosmic ingression of novelty, to a maximum degree. Creativity is always present -- it cannot not be -- but there are degrees.

But so too is necessity always present; we could say that in each moment it is as if there is a dial that goes from extreme necessity at one end to complete freedom at the other. Obviously, existence is woven of freedom and necessity, as is creativity.

However, orthoparadoxically, real freedom can never be free of a degree of necessity; as Whitehead says, "It is the reconciliation of freedom with the compulsion of the truth," the latter being identified with "the indwelling persuasion towards the harmony which is the height of existence." (This is how and why the truth sets us free.)

I'm just flipping through the book in search of some additional nuggets, and I see this: "The creation of the world... is the victory of persuasion over force" -- which places Pope Francis in a rather bad light, being that leftism represents the victory of force over persuasion.

And "the worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion," which is why with leftism we are not permitted to be good or to love truth for its own sake. Rather, we are forced by third parties to imitate their version of the good. This they call "social justice," a system so perfect that no one is free to do bad -- or good.

Whitehead well describes the opposite of social justice: "reverence for that power in virtue of which nature harbours ideal ends, and produces individual beings capable of conscious discrimination of such ends. This reverence is the foundation of the respect for man as man. It thereby secures that liberty of thought and action required for the upward adventure of life on this Earth."

Captain Beefheart said something to the effect that art is the organization of accidents. And I say: if accidents are good enough for man, they ought to be good enough for God! People seem to recoil from the idea that there are "accidents in God," but we have to think of accident in a non-pejorative way, because if there were no accidents there would be no fun. And no creativity. Again: God lets, he doesn't force. He is not a control freak. He is not a leftist.

Hartshorne quotes Schelling, who wrote that "It is necessary that accidents happen [in God], though not necessary just which accidents." Again: creativity.

Later Hartshorne observes that "Divine power is an ability to deal with free beings, not an ability to suppress or avoid their existence or to manipulate them so thoroughly that they would not be free." If God is in total control, then we can't properly exist -- be -- at all. But the reverse is equally true: if we are in total control, then God cannot be. Thus, as God lets us be, we must let God be. God suffers our freedom; it is only fair that we suffer his.

The last word in God's creativity is the Nothing, or nihil-O, from which creation emerges:

"We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of negation.... this pure nothing is the nothing of not having been born.... It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom" (ibid.).

And we are spirals within that vast creative arc.

Ben Carson and the God of Slack

We left off with the passionate interiority which characterizes our vertical openness to the infinite. This vibrantly intersubjective space extends from the deepest within -- our part so ptee -- to the highest beyond -- the toppermost of the poppermost.

Thus, within and beyond -- or depth and height, or immanence and transcendence -- are the immeasurable measures of the soul. These dimensions explain why it is so roomy in here -- but also, why some people feel so cramped and confined within themselves -- but more problematically, toward others upon whom they attempt to impose their own strangled sense of self.

For example, Hitler infamously sought lebensraum, or living space, but why? There's more than enough room for everyone, at present about 2.3 acres of inhabitable land for every person on earth. Clearly, there wasn't enough space in Hitler's head, which he projected outward.

Some on the left imply that there isn't enough space in Trump's head, but he's talking about a very different phenomenon. It is not so much that we don't have the physical space, but rather, the psychic space. Since so many immigrants refuse psycho-cultural integration (or are prevented from it by the left), this does represent an aggressive invasion of our psychic space. With enough of them, it will no longer be our cultural space at all (whereas in Germany, Jews were completely assimilated and even proud to call themselves German).

Indeed, in California, where I live, it has already happened. Thanks to illegals, we have one-party rule. There are a few pockets of conservatism left, but they have no influence on the overall cultural-political atmosphere (the space of freedom), which has gotten progressively smaller in my lifetime. How small? This small.

Speaking of space, one of the important characteristics of the Christian God is that he leaves us plenty of it. Or in other words, our God is a God of slack. You might think this is funny on the one hand, or just irrelevant on the other, but you would be wrong. In Christian metaphysics, slack is of the essence. It is the infinite space in which we live, such that no seelor can circumnavelgaze the soul, whereas for he whose soul is flat -- the sky / Will cave in on him by and by (Millay).

This is one of the organizing themes in Barron's explorations. For example, he writes that "In almost all the mythic and philosophical accounts of the God-world relationship, something like a zero-sum game obtains: the more one attributes to God, the less one can attribute to the universe and vice versa."

This is how it is in Islam, where there is literally no room for man's freedom. At present Ben Carson is undergoing his Ritual Humiliation by the left for adverting to this elementary truth.

It is the same with any form of predestination. Predestination is not only wrong, but anti-Christian to the core, because it leaves no space for human freedom. Indeed, to affirm predestination is to say that there is no distinction between Creator and creature. It is literally as if there is no creation, since the creation is just an extension of God.

But "the Christian tradition holds just the opposite." This is how Jesus can be man and God, without the one overwhelming or displacing the other. Somehow there's room for both! Which is a wild idea: in the same space there is room for the ultimate-universal and for the individual-particular.

"A second implication is that God can give and give and in no way be exhausted, for the world cannot take away from the infinity of the divine being." Indeed, "the divine life increases in the measure that it is given away," such that we may participate in this soul-expanding "self-forgetting generosity."

I can't help thinking of poor Pope Francis, who seems to have a rather narrow and cramped view of God's creation -- as if there isn't enough of it for everyone! Our immortal Sowell touches on this today, asking "which has a better track record of helping the less fortunate -- fighting for a bigger slice of the economic pie, or producing a bigger pie?"

Or in other words, when smallminded souls enviously fight over their piece of the flaming pie, we all lose. Not too long ago a million people a month were being lifted out of poverty in China thanks to Pope Francis's dreaded capitalism. Has there ever been a leftist program that accomplished a tiny fraction of this?

Want to know how to make a leftist miserable? Just double everyone's income. Everyone will be more affluent, but "income inequality" will be twice as wide, so envy will eat away any joy.

Now, God-world, or Creator-creation, is a relationship. Unlike in ancient metaphysics, the world is not an emanation, or mere prolongation, of God. In many ways, creation is the key to biblical metaphysics; or better, as Brueggemann suggests, the irreducible trinity of creator/creates/creation (or creatures), for a creator by definition creates, and creatures are what he creates.

Thus, the intellectual tradition animating Genesis is concerned with "the large issue of the relation of creator and 'creature'" (emphasis mine). Here again, we cannot have a relation to God if predestination is the case. A relationship can only exist in the space of freedom, and we could even say that freedom is literally a kind of higher dimensional phase space of potential choices.

And as alluded to by Barron, this represents a sharp break with both the ancients and the recents, in that the "'mythological' perception of reality... assumes that all the real action is with the gods and creation in and of itself has no significant value." For example, in Greek mythology, the gods just fuck with us for the sport of it, like Obama.

For the same reason, this latter metaphysic cannot support science, since science assumes an autonomous space that is free of God's direct meddling, so to speak. In other words, he allows us to figure stuff out instead of, say, putting it all down in a book from which we are not permitted to deviate. There is a reason why science did not develop in the Muslim world, and why it is under assault by the authoritarian left.

In short, "the world has been positively valued by God for itself," and "must be valued by the creatures to whom it has been provisionally entrusted." Like science, environmentalism -- the sane kind -- is a thoroughly Christian phenomenon.

Unlike that irascible nonlocal y'oql known as Allah, "the purposes of the [Judeo-Christian] creator are not implemented in a coercive way nor imposed as a tyrant might. The creator loves and respects the creation. The freedom of creation is taken seriously by the creator" (emphasis mine).

Thus, the Judeo-Christian God "authors life, but there is no hint of authoritarianism" in the text. Rather, gnoetry of Genesis valorizes a "movement towards a unity of harmony, trust, and gratitude."

In short, "the creature whom [God] has caused to be, he now lets be." That's cosmic slack, baby, and without it, life is scarcely worth creating.

Why Believe in God when You Can Undergo Him?

Continuing with yesterday's line of thought, "discovery is not a matter simply of accurate sense perception." Countless people saw apples falling from trees before one of them apocryphally perceived gravity. A human being is someone who is (at least in potential) conscious of consciousness. But in the case of discovery, it is as if we perceive perception and thereby extend it.

I wonder if every discipline follows this bimodal pattern? For example, in psychotherapy the therapist monitors his own subjective flow of impressions: he listens to the patient while simultaneously listening to his reactions to the patient.

Or history: a mere chronicle of the past reduces to antiquarianism. Rather, the exploration of the past must be guided by some implicit vision. Of course, this vision can be on a higher or lower dimension (e.g., the meta-cosmic Arc of Salvation vs. Marxism and its retarded cousins of tenure).

Consider "Bullshit Bernie" Sanders, who looks at the American founding -- surely one of the most miraculous divine ingressions in history -- and literally sees a nation founded on racist principles. Well,

"Bullshit. The United States was founded on egalitarian principles which took a while to fully effectuate because the country was born in a world where slavery was common. (It still is, in many places where Anglo-American rule does not govern.) We fought a great civil war to validate the principles of our Constitution, whose promises of freedom had nothing to do with race, as Lincoln insisted. Granted, the Democratic Party fought a spirited rear-guard action on behalf of racism that lasted for more than a century. Bernie is an inheritor of that disgraceful history."

Not only that, but "racism" didn't even exist at the time of the founding. It was later invented by Democrats to legitimize the existence of slavery once the institution was under serious threat. Slavery existed always and everywhere, and no one needed to justify it with theories of racial superiority prior to the 19th century. True, coastal Africans assumed they were superior to the less developed interior Africans they captured and sold, but this obviously wasn't a matter of race.

Recall too that racial differences were and are a matter of empirical observation. No theory was required to see them. Rather, a theory was required in order to not see them ("all men are created equal") -- just as a theory is required to counter the empirical observation that the sun revolves around the earth.

The emergence of modern science did not involve coming to our senses, but coming from and through them into deeper and more integral dimensions. Science is a new way of seeing sight or perceiving perception that transforms the particulars into new meanings. (This is the whole basis of Raccoon Emeritus Michael Polanyi's philosophy.)

It is not a matter of looking carefully. Indeed, doing so can function to reify the misapprehension. Anyone can see that the earth is flat. Yet everyone knows it isn't. This is what we mean when we say that liberals are flat-earthers: that they are always trapped in their unexamined prejudices. Cultural Marxism is simply a catchall way to keep them gorounded in absurcularities of race, class, gender, sexual preference, Power Relations, etc.

"An observational discovery is a cognitive process, and not an instantaneous point-event." In addition to "the sensory aspect, there is also a nonsensory factor in cognitive perception" (Bortoft). A discovery involves a fusion or coalescence of the two, of sense and nonsense. It is analogous to a match striking the abrasive surface and producing fire. Either one alone keeps you in the dark.

If we naively begin with the fire, we will miss the components that go into it. Consciousness has always been analogized to fire and light, and it too involves one thing striking another to produce the flame.

As we have written many times and in many ways, the human person is not located in the head, but rather, in the space between persons (i.e., person is relation). You know the gag: there is no such thing as an infant, but rather, the transitional space between infant and mother. This space is where it all goes down -- and up. But it is also the space where nothing can happen, a kind of persecutory anti-space.

I've been thinking lately about what distinguishes the one from the other, and have come to the conclusion that it involves love and passion. Remove these and the space collapses into a dead zone of boredom, restlessness, ingratitude, anhedonia, envy, etc. But when they are present, then the space is full to the point of overflowing.

If you have the "one thing needful" (or it has you, rather), then various other things are added. But if you try to elevate the secondary things to the necessary one, you end up hollowing yourself out from the inside. So, I think Christianity is correct that it comes down to the metaphysics of love.

In keeping with what was said above vis-a-vis perception and vision, religion is obviously a way of seeing and organizing and relating to the phenomena.

Now, some things are only known via an orthoparadoxical absence. To cite an obvious example, in order to see that the world is round, you have to "void" your senses so as to open up the space of theoretical vision. You have to unknow what you know in order to make a little womb for the developing seed-idea.

Obviously this absence is not nothing. I read somewhere that there are two kinds of empty. There is the empty like the inside of a basketball, and there is the empty like the inside of your stomach. Your head should be empty like your stomach (or better, a womb).

We'll leave off with some observations by David Schindler that might help pull this womb together:

"The term 'life,' rightly understood, indicates more than bare physical existence.... [I]t signifies an ordered power that comes from within, a power bearing interiority and hence depth.... Human life, whose interiority takes a spiritual form, manifests the fullest richness and intensity of life among the beings of the world....

"It is passion and interior power, then, that enable human life and action to be truly dramatic. But what is it, concretely, that gives passion and interior power their substantive content?

"To be a creature is... to bear a relation to God that presupposes a 'space' inside what is deepest and most original in the creature, one that reaches from within the roots of the creature outward.... toward the highest heights, infinitely beyond us....

"Passion and interiority, in short, disclose the deepest truths of what characterizes our creaturely openness to the infinite. They indicate the human receptive capacity for relation to God."

The point is, you don't believe in God, you undergo God. You know, like an experiment.

Now Presenting, God!

God is not here. Rather, we here God. In other words...

Better start with something that came out toward the end of yesterday's post, that

"ideas are active, in that an idea about reality brings about the reality the idea is about. This is similar to how God works: he 'speaks' his ideas into creation, whereas it is down to us to hear [and thus 'here'] them. Remove the ideas, and there is no there to be perceived. There is raw sense perception, and that is all. But raw sense perception doesn't disclose reality. Rather, limited to our senses, real reality would be foreclosed."

Now, this sounds suspiciously like the popular new age perversion of quantum physics, such that we literally "create reality" via perception. That is not what we are saying. Rather, the reality is implicitly there. We cannot create it, only bring it to the surface, so to speak: "What we are concerned with here is the emergence of organization rather than its imposition" (Bortoft).

He continues: "The 'organizing' of the organizing idea is an act of distinguishing which is simultaneously an act of relating." These are not two different acts, but two sides of the one act of "here-ing" something. Thus, "the primary act of distinguishing does not point out something which is already 'there.' It 'theres' it!"

Or, you could say the idea presences itself in our act of distinguishing it. For example, I'm looking at a chair in the back yard. Now, the idea of a chair is unitary, and yet, it may take on an infinite number of specific forms. How do I know it's a chair at all? I didn't consciously think about it, and yet, there it is. A chair has come to be.

Think of a dog, who has no idea of a chair. For it, the chair might be a meaningless obstacle on the way to that nice peeing spot, if it is seen at all. Conversely, the dog perceives many things we don't, but are these ideas? If so, they are quite narrow in scope and limited in number.

To here something is to idea-ate it, so to speak. This process of instantiation quintessentially involves placing boundaries around something. Or in other words, to idea-ate is to bound or contain. Without the boundaries, the something will be nothing (or at least perceived as such). This is a point Judaism has always emphasized, i.e., the importance of fundamental (God-given) distinctions such as sacred/profane, male/female, creator/created, man/beast, etc.

Think of the chaos that ensues if we forget or ignore these boundaries. For example, ignoring the male/female distinction leads to the possibility of "homosexual marriage." But that is no longer marriage, since one has effaced its terms. Rather, it is a regressive descent back to the primordial chaos and darkness.

Likewise, atheism hardly elevates man into the light. Rather, it again blurs the distinction between light and dark and reverts to relativistic chaos -- moral, intellectual, and aesthetic. Eliminate the gulf between man and beast and we end up with PETA fanatics who (literally!) equate Corporal Hitler with Colonel Sanders. After all, they both targeted specific populations for death.

So, it's not a question of whether or not chairs exist. I see a book, whereas an aborigine would see just a bunch of random squiggles.

Which leads to the question of how we perceive God. Now first of all, God, by definition, cannot be an object of perception. Rather, he would be the principle that allows objects to be perceived -- bounded and presenced -- to begin with. You might say that he is the principle of distinguishing and presencing, which is none other than creativity.

I can't recommend this book on Genesis, although the author does make some helpful points. For example, we could reduce the bottom-line point of Genesis 1 to Creator-Creates-Creation. These three are distinct, and yet, always one, or part of a single eternal movement. And since we are in the image of this movement, we do (and are) the same thing.

I mean, in my own little way, I am doing it now. I, the Creator, am Creating something, but I have no idea what it's going to be until it presences itself. Then, like God, I stand back and determine whether or not I can pronounce it Good.

At this point I really don't know. Could be a lot of deepaking the chopra. If I'm honest, something in me is saying that I need to tie this together on a higher plane. In other words, the post is not yet fully half-baked. When it is, the same little voice tells me to stop, usually quite abruptly.

For the Christian, Jesus is the presencing of God. John, of course, makes this quite plain. Looked at one way, Jesus is just a man, like any other. As John says, some people saw him in the flesh but didn't perceive the divinity. They did not presence God.

Note that God "presented himself," but this wasn't sufficient. Rather, each man must do his part to render God present. You might even say that we each must incarnate the divinity. I mean, if we don't, who will?

Note that in God, there are distinctions but no divisions. This is another way of saying that God is relationship, such that living in relationship is living in a state of distinction-unity, with neither being prior to the other.

Now, if Jesus is who he says he is, then he is one with mankind. And yet, he is distinct from mankind, since he is God and we aren't. But by relating to him, we presence his divinity. The word becomes flesh -- in us.

"Just as creation, for Eckhart, is a continuous and eternal process, so too the Word taking on flesh is not a past event we look back to in order to attain salvation, but rather an ever-present hominification of God and deification of humanity and the universe -- an incarnatio continua" (Bernard McGinn).

Every time a form is generated and comes to perfection in the natural world, and even the artificial world of human creativity, we can catch a glimpse of the glory of the Only-Begotten of the Father taking on flesh (ibid.).

"Okay, you can stop now."

Out of My Head

In yesterday's post we pondered the question of how the whole can be "contained" in one of its parts: "How is it that something vastly smaller can contain what is immeasurably larger?"

For example, what is Paul talking about with his Christ-living-in-me isness? That idea is fundamental to Paul, but it is rooted in a more general biblical metaphysic that doesn't necessarily obey Euclidean geometry and Aristotelian logic.

So, what kind of logic does the Bible reflect? This is important, because if one doesn't understand the logic, one might be tempted to think something in it is illogical when it is merely obeying a different and possibly higher logic -- perhaps even the Logic of logic.

Barron suggests that "When Christ is the center of one's life, then all the elements that constitute the self" will "tend to fall into an ordered pattern around it." Thus, the Christ-principle is the magnetic center, or the person-to-person call that pulls order from chaos.

Which is not too far from our very first description of the Creator in Genesis 1, where he hovers over the dark and formless void. Nor is that too far from its sister passage in John 1, where we read that nothing is created without God's Logos, his creative word-logic. This implies -- sort of -- that there are things in the world that are not created by God.

This is an ill-sounding assertion, but what I mean is that, just as creativity is a signature of God, un- (or better, anti-) creativity would be its counter-sign. For practical purposes it would mean that where we see the trite, the trivial, the banal, the lifeless, the boring -- you know, leftworld -- God has been exorcised from the persons involved. Say what you want about God, he is never boring. Rather, the boredom is in you.

As you probably know, "sin" is etymologically related to "missing the mark" or target. What target? "Because we are, by nature, supernaturally oriented toward intimacy with God," deviation from our target "results in the disordering and disintegration of the entire self: mind, body, spirit, and passions." In short, sin "involves the unmooring of the self from its properly divine origin and telos."

Thus, when we are not aimed at our proper telos, our prior wholeness breaks up into its constituent parts. You might say that when we fall, we fall apart. Instead of pneumanauts orbiting around the central sun, we are like those stranded astronauts in the film Gravity.

In that situation, the astronaut discovers that all of his usual gifts -- from physical strength to training to intelligence -- are precisely worthless. He is missing the one thing that would render all the others efficacious: connectedness.

However, now that I'm thinking about it, the George Clooney character does accomplish one thing, which is to mysteriously transmit something of himself into Sandra Bullock. This is depicted as a kind of dream-hallucination, but this whole scene is riding piggyback on our still (albeit distantly) Christo-centric culture, such that she assimilates and "contains" his spirit in order to summon the skill, creativity, and presence of mind to save herself: not I, but Lieutenant Kowalski in me.

Gravity indeed: something organizes her hysterical, deathbound fragmentation before it takes her life. Something pulls her together, such that she rises above slavery to her dysfunctional passions into a higher freedom.

Now, I think you'll agree that this is weird. I just looked up the film on wikipedia, and it says this: "Some commentators have noted religious themes in the film." Oh? Like who?

"For instance, Fr. Robert Barron in The Catholic Register summarizes the tension between Gravity's technology and religious symbolism. He said, 'The technology which this film legitimately celebrates... can't save us, and it can't provide the means by which we establish real contact with each other.... there is a dimension of reality that lies beyond what technology can master or access... the reality of God.'"

If this were a movie, Fr. Barron would no doubt be sitting next to me in a spacesuit.

The "real contact" to which he alludes is not surface-to-surface, as in two contained substances coming into contact. Rather, we must abandon the "language of substance" in favor of a "sheer relationality and other-orientation, the coinherence of love."

Referring back to the meta-logic of our cosmos, we see that the principle of coinherence cannot even be expressed in the language of Euclid or Aristotle. And yet, if we fail to apprehend (and express) it, we are missing its most important feature.

As Bortoft puts it, if we begin our analysis with the "self-conscious subject, conceived as a self-entity," we are actually beginning at the end, which is therefore literally pre-posterous.

Rather, we must begin with coinherence and intersubjectivity. In practical terms we must "go to the stage prior to our usual awareness, which has the effect of reversing the direction of our thinking so that we can recognize that we usually begin from what is, in fact, the end." This is what it means to reverse worldward descent and cross the bridge of darkness to the father shore (p. 256).

All of this suggests that ideas are active, in that an idea about reality brings about the reality the idea is about. This is similar to how God works: he "speaks" his ideas into creation, whereas we hear them. Remove the ideas, and there is no there to be perceived. There is raw sense perception, and that is all. But raw sense perception doesn't disclose reality. Rather, limited to our senses, real reality would be foreclosed.

Bottom line for today: "We are accustomed to thinking of mind as if it were inside us -- 'in our heads.' But it is the other way around. We live within a dimension of mind which is, for the most part, as invisible to us as the air we breath. We usually only discover it when there is a breakdown" (Bortoft).

Which is to say, when we lose contact with the nonlocal source that is simultaneously beyond and within.

And the Melody Became a Note, But the Other Notes Didn't Hear It

Speaking of wholeness, Barron implies that Thomas was one of the most holographic thinkers in history, in the sense that "it is usually quite possible to show the variety of ways that any one section of the Summa relates to any other." It's a micro-cosmos, a uni-verse (one turn) in itself.

Now, I don't want to pretend I've read the whole thing. That's not my job. But I am intrigued by this vast nocean of the wave being contained in its particles. Indeed, a fundamental orthoparadoxical question is how the whole can be "contained" in the part. How is it that something vastly smaller can contain what is immeasurably larger?

....

I can think of many ways, and we're not even talking about the eucharist. For example, a library that has one good book -- say, the Bible -- contains something infinitely larger than itself. Indeed, perhaps this is one of the appeals of libraries per se: the illusion that we can somehow contain and assume mastery over knowledge which is in reality infinite.

Back when my brain was coming on line and I was randomly reading everything in sight to try to catch up with mankind, I even read some of the fiction of Jean Paul Sartre, including Nausea. In it there is a character, the self-taught man, who spends all of his time trying to read everything that exists.

Beyond that I don't exactly remember the point, but it must be that the autodidact is trying to make up for his -- and our -- intrinsic incompleteness by swallowing the entire library -- as if this will redeem and render him whole. But this would merely lead to a bad case of existential indigestion.

One suspects that tenured ideologues attempt to do something similar, but it is essentially the opposite movement, in that they elevate a trivial part to the whole. This is what the left always does, despite the fact that it cannot be done.

Which is interesting, because when I say it cannot be done, that is an absolute, isn't it? Therefore, it is an example of containing the uncontainable in a healthy and realistic way. To be aware of Hayek's knowledge problem is to be aware of the limits of knowledge -- just as to be aware of Gödel's theorems is to be aware of the limits on man's theorizing. Conversely, to not be aware of Hayek and Gödel will lead to unlimited delusions of containment and mastery.

To put it another way, man can contain a lie or a partial truth. But he is always contained by Truth. Which is not the same as relativism; yes, man is always relative, but relative to the Truth that precedes and transcends him.

The two errors are 1) rejecting Truth, as in moral relativism, academic diversity, and multiculturalism; and 2) imagining one contains or possesses it in the absolute sense. Again, to the extent that we possess Truth, it is only because it has first possessed us. Numerous biblical passages reflect this metaphysic, and indeed, the experience of metanoia -- repentance -- involves being turned inside-out in this holo-fractal manner.

I suppose what I want to emphasize is that you can know a lot by knowing a little. In fact, I am always on the vertical trail of that itsy bitsy that is the key to the whole existentialada.

Again, the Way of the Self-Taught Man is a non-starter, because no matter how much one knows, it is always a tiny fraction in comparison to what can be known: you may know a lot, but only about a little. I guess you could say that a headfull of the things that happen to be true is no replacement for a soph-taught heartfull of things that must be true.

Or as it says plain as night in Finnegans Wake, when a part so ptee does duty for the holos, we soon grow to use of an allforabit. I suppose I'm always on the lookout & -in for that allforabit. Conversely, Somedivide and sumthelot but the tally turns round the same balifuson. A bally ball of confusion I'm tempted to sing.

Again, the holos is always grander than the summa the parts. It's why in marriage, for example, 1 + 1 = 3, whereas in its homosexual counterfeit 1 + 1 = 1. Unity without unification. Big difference!

Barron comes at the knowledge limit from another angle, noting that although "truth concerning God can be discovered through metaphysical speculation," this truth is always asymptotically over the subjective horizon. "Thus, paradoxically, both the mind and the will need to be drawn beyond their own powers in order to realize their proper ends..."

Here again, it is a relationship with Truth, through which the supra-stance of Truth is assimilated into our own finite sub-stance; it is part-icipation in that which con-tains us -- something no part could do in the absence of the transcendent whole of which it is a part.

As Bortoft writes, "the plot is not another detail in the story and the tune is not just another note..." But what if the cosmic plot could become one of its characters, or the Song Supreme one of its notes? What if the Absolute could become relative, or eternity enter time, or Creator enter his own creation, or theory assume its own facts?

We might say that the facts speak for himSelf: "The theory is the facts when these are seen in another dimension.... This transformation from an analytical to a holistic mode of consciousness brings with it a reversal between the container and the content" (ibid.).

We can all agree that facts are external. But external to what? Which is to say, whom?

"[I]n science, as in art, truth is active and not passive, as the dogma of factualism implies.... The scientist is an active participant in scientific truth, but without this meaning that truth is thereby reduced to a merely subjective condition" (ibid.).

What To Do When History Breaks

We are juggling with three diverse texts, hoping to keep them all vertical: specifically, we've been reflecting on a ravaged 20th century while exploring Catholic theology in light of the wholeness of nature. Is there something that ties these three together -- these three being metaphysics, theology, and history? Or of which each is a reflection? Are they quasi-necessary reflections of one another?

Probably the latter. I would say that theology is concrete where metaphysics is abstract, or that theology is metaphysics concretized: the nonlocal Truth taking local form.

And history? That would be the God-man whirlpool (i.e., the mysterious transcendent Third Space inhabited by man) extended in time. Recall the timeless words of Professor Commentbox: The quest, thus, has no external 'object,' but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable.

Therefore, history itself -- the historical quest -- is a kind of concretization, for the one thing we can agree upon about the past is that it happened. Nor did it have to happen, so it is a movement from possibility to actuality, or again, abstract to concrete.

Obama, for example, famously promised those beautiful abstractions while delivering all these ugly concretions.

The past is what it is, as is the present. Only the future changes. Which of course changes what the past and present are "about," i.e., what they converge upon. To read the signs of the times is to see the cheesy future hidden in the creamy present -- or what events are converging upon if our craniorectal extraction should fail. (Think too of how the New Testament is "hidden" throughout the Old, such that everything old is made pneumagain.)

As with Friday's post, this one will careen forward in a quest for its own hidden unity. There are no guarantees except the quest for wholeness. In other words, same as it ever was.

Speaking of wholeness, Barron notes that the Bible "ought never to be read simply as a congeries" -- a collection -- of diverse texts from various sources (which it must be to the uninitiated). Rather, "the Bible is a symphonos, a sounding together of tones and melodies, under the direction of the supreme artist."

And importantly, part of the symphony involves man, because revelation is not the word of God per se, but obviously the word of God in the words of man. If it were literally the words of God it would be too hot to handle. "In authentic scriptural exegesis, the primary focus is on the manner in which God has used a human instrument to communicate his meaning."

Note also that since "God is the author of both the Bible and history itself, we shouldn't be surprised to find a whole set of figural or typological correspondences throughout the scriptural witness. We should expect that God will speak in a distinctive accent and according to certain characteristic patterns and rhythms."

Yes to the latter, although I would take issue with God as sole author of history. Rather, as with scripture, he must be the secret co-author or holy ghostwriter. Or, might we say of history: the acts of God in the acts of man, so to speak? In other words, God has a plan, but the plan must largely be executed via men who are free to ignore the plan. Is this not the whole drama of history, whether personal or collective?

Barron implies as much. He cites the early father Irenaeus, who wonders if God didn't allow our archetypal parents to fall "so that through the pain of sin they might come to a deeper life." In any event, "the rest of the biblical story" -- the adventure and quest -- "is the account of the process by which the Father, using his two hands, the Son and the Spirit, shaped the descendants of Adam and Eve back to friendship with God."

In this description there is no sense that God forces the history. Rather, he conditions it by shaping the people who respond to the shaping -- beginning with the shaping of Abraham followed by the shaping of Israel, to say nothing of the shaping of Mary and the apostles. It seems that the overall pattern is from part to whole to part -- right down to individual baptism into the body of Christ.

The culmination of this process would have to be the God-in-man of the logos incarnate: "Jesus is, in person, the recapitulation of time and history." He "draws all the strands of history and revelation together in himself, preserving and repeating them even as he brings them to fulfillment." Furthermore, "he draws all that was implicit and potential in Adam" -- man-as-such -- "to completion."

Now, that is concrete theology. But it is also abstract metaphysics, or at least can be abstracted so as to sound more plausible to modern ears. In other words, it can be expressed in the form of principles and possibilities in archetypal man -- at least so long as he remains engaged with the Object of transcendence, without whom man is nothing, precisely. Only God can show us what we are, in principle and in fact.

Grinding gears over to Bortoft -- just to make the quest more challenging -- we read of how "It is a superficial habit of mind to invent the past which fits the present" -- which reduces the past to an extrapolation or backward projection of the present.

But in reality, each past-present was pregnant with possibilities, such that it is almost impossible to put ourselves there in its infinitude. In other words, we reduce history to a kind of line, when it is more like a rolling catastrophe (as in catastrophe theory) in hyperdimensional phase space. And if we weren't lured by God -- the nonlocal attractor -- history would break down completely.

As it has on numerous occasions, most infamously in that recent ravaged century Conquest writes about. Seriously, why was it so ravaged?

Conquest writes of how one of the attractions of collectivism is "an economy without sin." In Marxism it boils down to "a society without capitalists," while for Nazism it was a world without inferior races. Either way, it starts with a crude denial of the archetypal history that shapes all men.

God lures history, while orthodox Marxism reduces it to a mechanical clash of economic classes. But the clash-machine didn't work as predicted, so history had to be forced from above (the opposite of God's soft-sell approach):

"Lenin saw that history was not behaving in accordance with Marxist theory, so he decided to force it to do so by subjective effort..." For the leftist, history has been a very bad boy, and must be punished! You in particular are grounded, mister, until the arrival of utopia!

This pathological and dysfunctional attitude -- get this -- "still affects the mental atmosphere even in circles that repudiate it at a conscious level."

Digging Up to the Foundation of Reality

Wittgenstein remarked that "when you discover the foundations, you find that they are being held up by the rest of the house" (in Barron).

It seems to me that this goes to the part-whole relations that everywhere characterize our cosmos, and also to its fractal and holographic nature.

Example. I used to think that the mother-infant dyad was about as deep down as one could go in human psychology. If there was a foundation to our humanness, then this dynamic relationship had to be it.

But then I realized that this foundation is being held up by the rest of the house, the ultimate house being the Trinity. Thus, the mother-infant intersubjective dyad without which we wouldn't be human is actually a kind of fractal-echo of the Trinity. I could think of more examples, but my brain isn't yet awake.

Think of scientism, in which things are ultimately reduced to mathematical quantities. That's all well and good, but what's holding up the mathematics? Only the cosmos itself, from which the math is abstracted and derived. If one forgets the real world, one is liable to fall into an infertile angelism that sees reality as a reflection of the theory rather than vice versa. This is literally pre-post-erous, i.e., putting the end (post) before the beginning (pre).

The same principle comes into play with regard to economics. This new book by Brother Sowell reminds us that a nation's income is not measured in terms of money, but is a reflection of its wealth. Actual wealth consists of the real goods and services produced by the country. The money is just an unreal measure of something real.

If you don't have money, it's because you are -- get this -- not producing a good or providing a service that anyone wants. Your input -- income -- is dependent upon your output.

The left turns this around and wonders why people who produce nothing of value have -- get this -- nothing to show for it. But you can't make a man more valuable by paying him more than he's worth -- otherwise Obama would have made us wealthier by piling up more debt than all previous presidents combined.

Back to Wittgenstein's comment. I have no problem with the idea that physics is the foundation so long as we stipulate that theology is the house that holds up the physics.

This is not "intelligent design," but far beyond -- or before -- it. That the world is intelligible at all is already a reflection of intelligence. "Intelligent design" is a pleonasm. Just say intelligent.

Barron quotes theologian John Milbank, who writes that "Any secular science, cultivated exclusively, may become dangerous to religion," on account of its narrow focus on one aspect of reality. We can say that God is a mathematician, so long as we stipulate that he's a bad one, in the sense that things never add up with him. Rather, everything is always more than the sum of its parts. Or just say wholeness: wholeness is the house, where the parts are the foundation.

Which leads to a nice segue to this book on The Nature of Wholeness, which I found to be entirely congenial to the Raccoon POV. I first read it when it came out in 1996, but it didn't resonate. For some reason I reread it a couple of months ago, and it was as if Bortoft had committed anticipatory plagiarism and stolen my ideas before I had had the chance to think of them.

Weird. I just flipped open the book, and I read this: "We can now recognize... that the fact that modern physics is true -- which it certainly is -- does not mean that it is fundamental. Hence it cannot be a foundation upon which everything else, human beings included, depends" (emphasis mine... and Wittgenstein's).

Importantly, our view does not in any way contradict science. Rather, it complements and completes it. It closes the circle which is otherwise an absurd line, or Bad Infinite. In the case of the Good Infinite, the parts converge on the whole -- the Infinite Good -- while the whole is constituted by the parts. To say part is to say whole, and vice versa. A part with no whole would be literally inconceivable. It certainly couldn't be part of this cosmos. Or any cosmos.

As Bortoft says, "Both can be true" -- the holistic/organismic and the atomistic/mechanistic -- "not because truth is relative, but because they reveal nature in different ways."

Thus, for example, "it may be useful to reverse the relationship and understand the local environment as being the result of the rest of the universe" (recall what was said above about infancy and the Trinity).

Or, think of the meaning of any text. "The meaning is the whole of the text, but this whole is not the same as the totality of the text.... We do not have the totality of the text when we read it, but only one bit after another." But it is not as if we add up these bits to arrive at the meaning -- the whole.

Instead, "the meaning of the text is discerned and disclosed with progressive immanence throughout the reading of the text."

In other words, the whole is in each of the parts. Like right now: you are reading these individual words without even being aware of them as words. Rather, they are transparent to the meaning I am conveying from my mind to yours. The words are like the radio waves that carry the meaning of the broadcast. I am right now focussed on the whole and trying to enlist or attract the words to transmit it.

"Thus we can say that meaning is hologrammatical," such that "the whole is present throughout all of the text" and "present in any of the text." A hologram, in case you don't know, is a three-dimensional photograph. Shine a laser into the holographic plate, and the image appears.

What is intriguing about the hologram is that if you break the plate into fragments, each part will nevertheless contain the whole, and be capable of reproducing the entire image, only less vividly. Thus there is a trace of the whole in every itsy bitsy of the hologram -- just as each cell contains the DNA necessary to reconstruct the whole organism.

As we were saying a couple of posts back, the transcendental of transcendentals is oneness itself. In order for something to exist, it must stand apart as a thing. But these foundational things only exist as things because of a primordial Oneness, such that each part is, as it were, like a little broken fragment of our venerable hologrampa: or as Joyce called it in his Hologrammatical Book of Fractals, Only a fadograph of a yestern scene.

We can never actually possess the whole; rather, we can only converge upon it. Under-standing is always a process, a moving-toward. Conversely, "When we do not understand, we merely pass along the parts." This is a profound observation.

I'm thinking of my own meaningless education, which was meaningless precisely in the degree to which disconnected parts were merely passed along. To be perfectly accurate, I have subsequently been able to confer meaning on many of those parts with reference to the nonlocal whole. But the parts that don't fit into the whole are simply meaningless, absurd, at a right angle to Meaning.

The parts are "things," while the whole must be no-thing. If you see the latter as a thing, then this thing is simply another part. I would say that this is a reflection of the fact that we can never contain God, because to do so is to reduce him to thingness, and this in turn redounds to the thingdom of heathen, AKA tenure.

Parts are a kind of passive presence, whereas the whole is an "active absence" which pulls us into its nonlocal attractor. Thus, -- and this is a key -- wholeness only manifests through our receptivity, our own active absence, so to speak. In the book, I symbolized this absence (o), which is a kind of hologrammatical fractal of the big O of which we are image and likeness.

I suppose the bottom line is that man is the cosmic foundation held up by God. This is not preposterous but properly postpreperous.

Ignorance and Power: Is There Anything They Can't Accomplish?

In pondering these reflections on the last ravaged century, what strikes the reader is that we are making the identical mistakes that are putting us on course for more of the same. Instead of waking from the historical nightmare, the left is gobbling down more ideological Ambien and hoping the dream will be better this time.

Can these really be called "mistakes"? For example, Obama knows full well what he is doing with Iran, and he doesn't consider it a mistake. It's not fair to compare him to Neville Chamberlain, because Chamberlain would never have tried to appease Hitler and finance our own destruction with billions of dollars.

Either in this book or in The Dragons of Expectation, Conquest makes the point that the struggles with communism and Nazism weren't "good vs. evil," but rather, man vs. monsters. It's the same with regard to Iran and ISIS. The left forgets that because we are men, our society will never be perfect; and that because Islamic supremacists are monsters, their societies will never be decent.

Here is a psycho-political orthoparadox: "A democratic community enjoying political liberty is only possible when the attachment of the majority of the citizens to political liberty is stronger than their attachment to specific political doctrines." In practical terms, "on many controversial issues a certain comparative apathy must prevail among a large part of the population."

It used to be called tolerance, but mere tolerance of the freedom of others is the new intolerance. Our liberty is under a ceaseless assault by activists who are attached to only one form of freedom, which is no freedom at all. Freedom only works if I leave you alone, and you -- and your state -- leave me alone. Note the asymmetry of power, such that one of these is not like the other.

So, "all the major troubles the world has had in our era have been caused by people who have let politics become a mania."

I would love to not have to think about politics, but that doesn't mean politics isn't thinking about us. Liberals are always thinking and scheming about us, right down to reaching into the shower and adjusting the temperature. In Los Angeles County -- with some of the worst traffic in the world -- they have a new scheme to make the traffic worse by designating lanes for bicycle use only. Likewise, there's not enough water for existing residents, but they have sanctuary cities for illegal aliens who will only make matters worse.

File under plus ça change: "One principle basic to these regimes is that the parties concerned came to power while concealing from their rank-and-file supporters the inevitable sacrifices that would be asked of them."

Like, you know, I was under the impression that there would be enough water to go around, or that I could keep my physician, or my healthcare costs would go down, or we wouldn't be arming our sworn enemies with nuclear missiles, or racial healing!

True, but as Lenin said, "The victory of the workers is impossible without sacrifices, without a temporary worsening of their situation." So, if Clinton is elected president, expect another temporary worsening of your situation, at least until we elect the next leftist.

In the Soviet Union they had the Five Year Plan. Liberals have the Eight Year Plan.

The result of these revolutions is always "a lowering of the standard of living of the working class," but citizens need to know that they are making this sacrifice for the greater good of state bureaucrats, crony capitalists, and ultra-wealthy Democrat donors.

Is there some fundamental reason why they are so illogical and anti-scientific, and why they embrace frauds and pseudosciences like climate change and Keynesian economics? "There was and is a strong tendency among Marxists to accept pseudosciences. The mechanism seems to be related to the desire for complete solutions -- which are of course more commonly found in the pseudosciences than in the sciences proper."

I well remember that one of the appeals of leftism was that it "leads to the condition in which many people possessing it feel that they are already fully educated and, in effect, capable of judging any subsidiary studies without adequate humility or effort."

Yes, there was a time that I was young and stupid and lazy enough to be as omniscient as Obama.

Spinning In Coherence

Some random thoughts from and about Robert Barron's Exploring Catholic Philosophy. Feeling a bit fuzzy this AM. I'll just start typing, and with any luck Barron's stimulus will provoke an actual post with coherence and everything. You know, just let go and hope we get pulled into a nonlocal vortex.

Speaking of coherence, Barron reminds us of a bold statement by Wittgenstein to the effect that "the most puzzling problem in all of philosophy is how we manage to see something as something."

This capacity of ours must be a reflection of the first transcendental, Oneness, in that to perceive anything is to first abstract and isolate it from everything else. How do we do this? It's especially puzzling with complex and temporally extended things such as music, literature, even our own selves. Are we really one? Or only trying and hoping to be? If thine eye be single... Did that guy anticipate everything, or what?

Orthoparadoxically, however, everything is one, and yet, a part of everything else. Nor is this Everything Else merely a horizontal reality, but rather, like the body, there are wholes within wholes within wholes (as in body/organ/cell/DNA). Each part is a whole, but part of a more encompassing whole.

Where does this wholeness end? Or begin? For a pantheist it simply ends with the physical cosmos, and there is no doubt that he is partially correct. Modern physics demonstrates without question that the cosmos is indeed one, such that no part of it can be radically independent of any other -- both in time and space. See Whitehead for details.

But this only ends up conferring godlike properties upon the cosmos. There is also the perennial problem of how one obtains the greater from the lesser, that is, how man can appear in a cosmos that is less developed than he, for as a patient of mine once said, you can only get so much blood out of a turnip. To say "the cosmos did it" is the biggest philosophical dodge since "Darwinism did it." These are examples of what we call the "godlessness of the gaps," or "don't worry, there's nothing that can't be explained by the one-two punch of ignorance and chance."

As a brief aside, one thought that occurred to me while reading this book is that it is so full of truth, and yet, it would be quite difficult to convey this truth to someone who doesn't already believe it. And I don't mean "believe it" in a faith-based way, but rather intellectually. It's like any other tradition, whether religious or irreligious.

For example, it's impossible to swallow any of the left's nonsense unless one is already conditioned by Marxist assumptions about power, class, and economics. If you've assimilated those kooky things, then Obama doesn't sound stupid or deranged.

The real problem is that you can't just tell a modern person, "here, eat this. It's God!" To modern ears, that doesn't just sound wrong, but insane. It takes an awful lot of groundwork to get to where that statement makes total sense -- i.e., is part of a completely coherent system -- but how many people are willing to do the spadework? And even then, the sufficient cause of the coherence is always God himsoph: understanding where God is coming from always comes from God, i.e., grace.

In Christian metaphysics, Jesus would be considered the local icon of the nonlocal Father. He is God pouring himself out into a human vessel for our benefit. This too sounds a little crazy, but on a more abstract level it is hardly different from scientism, whereby man presumes to speak for the entire cosmos.

Indeed, to even say cosmos is to intuit a transcendent oneness that no one has or will ever directly perceive. Similarly, when man pronounces that Darwinism is both the necessary and sufficient cause of man, man is speaking for the entire biosphere. But how? How is he transcending and standing above the rules that supposedly determine him?

Shut up, that's how.

The Christian metaphysical view is that "Jesus is the iconic representation of the very mind of God." Moreover, he is "the enfleshment of the pattern according to which God fashioned the universe."

Here again, while no doubt true, I think it is possible to formulate this in a more abstract manner that is not so shocking to modern ears. For example, few normal (or non-tenured) people would disagree with the assertion that the cosmos is intelligible and that man may know it. But if you accept this postulate, then it has implications that lead directly to the Christian doctrine of man.

For there can be no intelligibility without intelligence, meaning that these two are not just complementary but irreducible reflections of one another. Can they really be explained with reference to blind matter? I don't see how. Rather, they are explained with reference to a reality in which the two are united in One -- where existence and essence are not bifurcated. This One is what we call God. And this God is a personal intelligence because there can be no other kind. Intelligibility is the vapor trail of personhood.

Paul says that Jesus is the "image (eikon) of the invisible God." He is the firstborn over all creation and the one in whom all things hold together (in Barron). Thus, he is creativity, coherence, and intelligence. Unless you have a better idea of where these come from.

Barron writes that this icon is "the lens through which the whole of reality is properly read, the means by which we correctly see the universe as something." This is starting to sound not-so-crazy, because again, scientism affirms the same truth, only leaves it dangling from the cosmos with no coherent account of how it got here.

What I mean is that if man can account for the cosmos, then the cosmos cannot account for him. Likewise, if man can account for himself -- as in, say, Darwinism -- then Darwinism cannot account for man. Rather, the "account" hangs suspended in midair, without even the possibility of an explanation with the preconceptions at hand.

We mysteriously see the universe as a universe. In our opinion this is because a Person sees us as persons, or because we are intelligible to His intelligence, just as his intelligibility may be known by our intelligence. It's a relationship, don't you know, with give-and-take.

"... Jesus is the final and definitive pattern by which reality is interpreted -- the manner in which we 'get' God and the world, and the dynamics of our own spiritual transformation."

Crazy? Yes, if one forgets or rejects everything we have written thus far. For this is really a way of affirming that God participates in man, and man in God; or that the relative participates in the Absolute, and that a personal transformation takes place in the dynamic space of this relation.

This represents literally the most radical humanism imaginable. All others are number two or lower. Other humanisms stop at the border of the human, and thereby become less than human. In other words, all of the gifts that render us human -- truth, freedom, creativity, beauty, etc. -- are denied any source or referent. They might as well be anything. Which for the modern secularist they are.

"... [H]uman liberty is not suppressed by the proximity of the divine liberty but rather enabled by it. We are, in fact, freer the more fully we surrender to the divine will." Note that there are two wills in Jesus -- divine and human -- but that these function in harmony, or in wholeness; they are coherent, not at odds or battling to occupy the same space.

Man can and does experience an echo of this. For example, genuine liberty "is not so much self-expressive choice as the disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good first possible and finally effortless."

It is the same vis-a-vis the pursuit of truth. God forbid that I use my freedom to find my own truth, for this eliminates both! And any coherence will be forced and superimposed rather than intuited and harmonized.

"Christians know that all acts of knowledge here below are acts of re-cognition, thinking again what has already been thought by a more primordial knower." Which is why "it is absolutely no accident that the modern physical sciences emerged precisely in the universities in the Christian West...." So, you may believe the world and everything in it is one big accident, but your believing it is no accident, because only a Christianized mind would have the confidence to make such a totalistic claim about the cosmos.

Recall from a few posts back that diabolos is the scatterer, and that to scatter is to oppose coherence. For example, when political operatives put a spin on what you just saw or heard, they are attempting to scatter truth far and wide. They are devils in human form. Or maybe the devil is a human in Carville form.

We are all spinning in the void. But there is the centrifugal spinning of the scatterer, and the centripetal spin of love. Or as Frank sez, In a spin, loving the spin that I'm in / Under that old black magic called love.

Jesus' entire preaching and ministry should be read under this rubric of the great gathering.... to live according to the coinherence that constitutes the grain of the universe.... Without knowledge of Jesus, people are like actors who don't know what play they're in (ibid.).