Hey Buddy, Do You Have Change for an Infinity?

This post started off one way, but ended up another. It was supposed to be a pretend interview with Josef Pieper, as in me asking questions and he supplying answers. But I got carried away with the first question, so the answer(s) are thoroughly intermangled with my own bobservations, so it's really a case of aggravated playgiarism.

Let's start with the difference between science and philosophy, and why the former can never take the place of the latter.

A: The specialized sciences abstract from the meaning of Being as a whole, and must be satisfied with that. Conversely, the object of philosophy is 'the holy and manifest mystery of Being.'

Now, science is only possible because truth emanates from Being; when we conform to Being, truth is the result. So the method of this or that science is correct only when it allows itself to be determined and molded by its object.

The problem with postmodernism is that not only does it not submit to the object, it doesn't believe it is possible to do so. This is precisely how we end up with the perverse educational adventures of Bathroom Barry, who refuses to consider the biological object in order to determine the truth of its sex. It is literally no different than refusing to open one's eyes and distinguish a wall from a door or window.

In short, to accept the given as it gives itself is the precondition for learning anything about any thing. The only alternative is to project one's own psychic content onto the object, i.e., to be trapped in Kantworld or worse. And yet, this is the world to which we are forced to adapt, in which "perception is reality."

Note the demonic switcheroo, in that the essence of political correctness is forced submission to a reality which is only perceived. It is a secondary reality superimposed upon the first, say, "women earn 60 cents to the dollar," or blacks are disproportionately imprisoned. The left is all about replacing first reality with second reality, and then forbidding curiosity about the former.

This is why the left's answers are always so dreadfully simplistic. Reality is never as simple as the left's policies, or, more to the point, the left manages reality via a crude simplification. For reality always gives more than can be grasped by man; it is an inexhaustible 'light that can never be drunk up.'

The other day we were talking about original sin and the fatal conceit. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek talks about why the left is always totalitarian at its core:

"The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends.... it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends."

Which is why philosophy -- in the sense described above -- is forbidden by the left. Hey, it's why the state murdered Socrates, right? 400 years later the state tried to murder God. You'd think humans would get the message. The state certainly hasn't forgotten:

"So long as dissent is not suppressed, there will always be some [subversive Socrates or revolutionary Jesus] who query the ideas ruling their contemporaries" and put them to the test. Our new climate of intellectual fascism isn't new at all. The spirit of Obama was there in ancient Greece, preparing the hemlock.

As philosophy is adequation to Being, theology is adequation to God. Being is one of the names of God, so theology is obviously higher up the ontological food chain than is philosophy.

One reason why the left can never engage in philosophy is that philosophy -- obviously -- operates at the threshold of theology, and the left doesn't permit God. Analogously, it would be like attempting to study human biology without human psychology. There is a flow of intelligibility from the unitary human subject-object, and it is we who direct the flow into this or that sub-discipline.

But man, who is the mirror of the totality, is precisely the terrestrial analogue of the 'holy manifest mystery' of being. If we are ordered to the totality, we must in some sense be the totality in an implicit way.

Clarke touches on this in his The Philosophical Approach to God. He posits a kind of dialectic between two infinities, a "negative" and "positive" one. In reality there can be only the one infinite, but it is as if the infinite bifurcates into positive and negative images of itself, so to speak.

It's orthoparadoxical is what it is. Here is how Clarke describes it: man does not have the "positive infinite plenitude" which "is proper to God alone."

"But there can be an image of the divine infinity in silhouette -- in reverse, so to speak -- within man, precisely in his possession of an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less. This negative image points unerringly towards the positive infinity of its original, and is intrinsically constituted by this relation of tendential (sic) capacity."

That's too much light. Can you dim it down a little?

Okay, it is as if "God had broken the coin of His infinity in two, holding on to the positive side Himself and giving us the negative side, then launching us into the world of finites with the mission to search until we have matched our half-coin with His."

But there's no such thing as a free launch. Rather, if you want the whole coin you have to pay with your ego.

A Quick Cure for News

Still a bit under the weather. Being that a head cold causes me to lose 20 IQ points, I don't want to risk posting, what with so many lives at stake.

However, it doesn't mean I can't exploit someone else's intelligence, in this case, Nicolás Gómez Dávila's.

I was thinking, wouldn't it be nice if we could replace our worthless news media with a guy who simply reads a few astringent aphorisms into the camera?

Todays top stories, via Don Colacho's Aphorisms:

With a picture of campus crybullies in the background:

Liberty is the right to be different; equality is a ban on being different.

Over a stat showing broad support for Bernie Sanders among young adults:

Civilization is what old men manage to salvage from the onslaught of young idealists.

The gender perversion and bathroom confusion of the left?

Conservatism should not be a party but the normal attitude of every decent man.

Bernie Sanders' free stuff?

Compassion is the best excuse for envy.

Farcebook's anti-conservative news aggregation?

The journalist collects the previous day's garbage in order to feed it to us for breakfast.

Hillary's six figure speaking fees (not to mention the somehow wealthy community organizer occupying the White House)?

The only man who should speak of wealth or power is one who did not extend his hand when they were within his reach.

Multiculturalism?

The man who says he is respectful of all ideas is admitting that he is ready to give in.

Progressivism?

The cost of progress is calculated in fools.

Social justice?

"Social justice" is the term used to claim anything to which we do not have a right

The Marriage of Time & Eternity

In Norris Clarke's The Philosophical Approach to God there is a helpful section that attempts to reconcile (orthodox) Christianity with process philosophy. For on the one hand, "process thought contains a number of basic insights that can and should be fruitfully recognized by Christian theism."

However, it is nevertheless "in serious tension, if not incompatibility, with traditional Christian theism on several key points..."

This is consistent with what I've said in the past -- that while Whitehead was one of my biggest influences, I could never be a "Whiteheadian" per se. You could say that certain aspects of process philosophy help me get past certain personal impasses in Christianity, while certain doctrines of Christianity help me get past the dodgier aspects of process philosophy.

Whitehead is probably more compatible with, say, Buddhism than Christianity, for like Buddhism he posits a world of pure process with no substantial reality underneath. But to jump ahead a bit, I am personal where he is impersonal, and trinitarian where he is... uni-processual, or something. I suppose that makes us Trinitarian Personalists, which about sums up the Secret Raccoon Doctrine.

By the way, I am still laboring under this manflu, so I'm hoping that much of this post can just consist of playgiarizing with Clarke instead of having to think for myself.

Here is a nice passage that clears up that whole predestination problem, which comes down to the nature of God's omnipotence:

"The actual carrying out of divine providence (and predestination) can take place... by persuasion, by luring to the good, not by coercion.....

"God determines the general set of goals He wishes to achieve, the goals at which he aims the universe, and knows that in general he will be able to achieve by His suasive power, but does not determine ahead of time in detail just whether or how each particular creature will achieve its share or not in this overall goal."

In keeping with the spirit of jazz, "Divine providence unfolds by constant instantaneous 'improvisation' of the divine mind and will -- from His always contemporaneous eternal now -- precisely to fit the actual ongoing activities, especially the free ones, of the creaturely players in the world drama" (or cosmic jazz combo).

One big issue is whether God changes. Process philosophy says Yes, of course, while orthodox Christianity says No Way. But the latter makes no sense to a Trinitarian Personalist, since God is not only related, but is relationship as such. And to be "in relationship" means to be relative to someone else.

Even so, the process philosophers are, in my opinion, a little too facile in positing a God of constant change.

For Clarke, "our metaphysics of God must certainly allow us to say that in some real and genuine way God is affected positively by what we do, that He receives love from us and experiences joy precisely because of our responses..."

However, "God does not become a more or less perfect being because of the love we return to him and the joy He experiences" therefrom.

As I've said before, if we can change but God can't, it means that we have a capacity that is denied God. Which can't be right.

God is Person, and "to receive love as a person... is not at all an imperfection, but precisely a dimension of the perfection of personal being as lovingly responsive." God never stops being "infinite perfection," it's just that the perfection of personal being is love and all it implies.

In a trinitarian perspective, the Father never stops sharing and receiving his love. If the cosmos is a fractal of God -- in that every wee part will be a reflection of the Whole We -- then this would explain how "God's 'receiving' from us, being delighted at our response to His love," equates to "His original delight in sharing with us in His eternal now His own original power of loving and infinite goodness which has come back to him in return."

Or as Blake said, eternity is in love with the productions of time.

Pride Goeth Before an Economic Fall

It all begins with a seductive lie about man's ability to become godlike via a certain kind of knowledge.

And again, it is a permanent temptation, not just something that occurred at the dawn of history; or, it occurs at the dawn of both collective and individual psychospiritual development, and is always there waiting to be exploited.

Karl Marx was reenacting the drama when he claimed to have discovered the secret engine of history, just as Bernie Sanders does today in his crude reduction of the infinite complexity of the market to a simple and universal emotion such as greed.

In fact, doesn't our Unknown Friend touch on this? Marx, "being impressed by the partial truth... that it is first necessary to eat in order to be able to think, raised the economic interest to THE principle of man and the history of civilization." Which is why Marx's cheap omniscience destroys its supposed object, man.

The serpent "appeared to Karl Marx and showed him 'in an instant all the kingdoms of the world,' where all the slaves of the past are transformed into sovereign masters who no longer obey God, having dethroned him, or Nature, having subjected her" (ibid.).

Since the Marxist is neither of God nor of Nature, he is truly a monster. Note too the stolen omnipotence: they produce and eat a kind of bread "which they owe solely to their own knowledge and effort in transforming stones into bread."

Just as a practical matter, we have all heard the gag about the impossibility of one person producing so much as a single pencil. Here are three passages from the essay, which converge on everything we've been saying about Fatal Sin and the Original Conceit:

"There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me [the pencil] into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the invisible hand at work."

"Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree."

"The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed."

Or, we can have Obamacare, government mandated mortgages to unqualified borrowers, and college subsidies. Is it any wonder that these three are the main goods (medical care, housing, and higher education) that are beyond the economic capacity of the typical American? As usual, Government creates the disease it then proposes to cure.

It is as if Satan tells the government: Command these stones to become loaves of bread, and the government responds white or whole wheat? Since the left also attacks religion from every angle, it means that the higher is collapsed into the lower, and that we become increasingly dependent upon the godlike state for our daily bread.

Satan embodies the principles of seduction, hypnosis, and intoxication. Or maybe you've never seen a liberal university campus or a Sanders rally (but I repeat myself).

In this passage from The Counter-Revolution of Science, Hayek speaks of this drunken hubris: "two fundamentally different and irreconcilable attitudes manifest themselves: on the one hand the essential humility of [liberal] individualism... and on the other hand, the hubris of [leftist] collectivism, which aims at conscious direction of all forces of society."

The latter operates under the assumption that it can comprehend systemic knowledge that no human being possesses or could possibly possess. Thus, "consistently pursued it must lead to a system in which all members of a society become merely instruments of the single directing mind and in which all the spontaneous social forces to which the growth of mind is due are destroyed."

And to bring the discussion full circle, it is urgently necessary for man to rationally comprehend the limits of his own reason. And guess what? "Historically this has been achieved by the influence of various religious creeds..." (Although a little familiarity with Gödel also goes a long way.)

There is no excuse for the pride that comes before our economic fall, because "Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is insignificant" (ibid.).

Hayek, the Fatal Conceit, and Original Sin

We begin with a pointed Dávilism: There are two kinds of men: those who believe in original sin and idiots.

Original sin is an important subject, being that it is the diagnosis for which Christianity is the cure. But the way it is conceptualized is not always helpful, at least for me. Ultimately, I suppose the important point -- in keeping with the spirit of the aphorism -- is that one believe in it (or "hear me now, believe me later," so to speak).

Let's see what the CCC says about it. "Where does evil come from?," it asks (p. 97). Well, we must "approach the question of the origin of evil by fixing the eyes of our faith on him who is alone its conqueror." "We must know Christ as the source of grace in order to know Adam as the source of sin."

Well, yeah. But that sort of begs the question by advertising the cure without ever answering the question of how we got sick.

But man is sick, no doubt about it -- sick in a way that other animals are not and can never be: "Sin is present in human history; any attempt to ignore it or to give this dark reality other names would be futile."

That's an important point: we cannot rid ourselves of sin by calling it something else. And "to try to understand it," we "must first recognize the profound relationship of man to God..."

Given my enthusiasm for abstract pneumaticons, we can say that sin exists in the space between O and (•); any number of things can occur in that space, including the thing we call sin. Indeed, sin is "an abuse of the freedom that God gives to created persons..."

We're again dancing around the subject. How did it get here? The account of the fall in Genesis 3 "affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man."

The other day we were speaking of how myth is at the threshold of history, or in the penumbra between history and prehistory.

It seems that something occurs in that dark space between the pure light of God and the reflected light of creation (I think it helps if we speak in the present tense, because Genesis is not about things that happened once upon a time, but which happen every time).

At the origin of history is a catastrophic choice (in the sense that it diverts us down a particular path). And Genesis is quite clear on the point that it has something to do with knowledge -- or "eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."

The exact nature of this tree is never spelled out, but the CCC says that it "symbolically evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust." There are certain "norms that govern the use of freedom."

Interestingly, freedom is presupposed. But freedom, in order to be free, must be situated -- like man himself -- in the "in between" space alluded to above. Deploying our trusty pneumaticons, the situation is really this: O <-> (•) <-> Ø (only in reality, that equation should be vertical instead of horizontal; the "fall" takes place in the more or less infinite space between O and Ø).

Note that to "prefer oneself to God" is to necessarily choose the descending arrow instead of the ascending one. Which is why egocentrism, which can appear relatively trivial on the surface, in actuality betrays a profound choice that is pregnant -- or stillborn, rather -- with ontological implications.

You know the rest of the official story. But this weekend I was thinking about it, and it occurred to me that Hayek would be an excellent witness for the prosecution. For although he was not a religious man, his most profound lesson touches on man's Fatal Conceit, i.e., of pretending to know what no man can know, thus plunging us into hell.

To put it another way, the most thorough expressions of hell on earth have been a direct consequence of eating from the economic tree of knowledge of good and evil -- or pretending that our good intentions will redound to good and moral results.

Looked at this way, we can see that Bernie Sanders is literally satanic. His promises certainly sound good on the surface, and I am even willing to concede that they come from a "moral" place.

Ah, but his whole program is founded on a pretense to knowledge that is strictly forbidden to man! And pretending to have this knowledge has been responsible for the most carnage in human history.

Thomas Sowell does an outstanding job of putting flesh on our pneumaticons in his classic A Conflict of Visions. He calls these two visions the Constrained and Unconstrained. Long story short, original sin, the fall of man, and eating from the wrong tree are all bound up with choosing the Unconstrained Vision.

I want to say "just read the book," then we'll talk about it. It's so rich with implications that nothing short of that will suffice. Plus I'm running out of time. But let me see if I can find some money quotes to show that I'm not completely goofy in trying to link theology and economic theory.

"In the constrained vision, any individual's own knowledge alone is grossly inadequate for social decision-making, and often even for his own personal decisions."

In short, don't eat from that tree, or untold disaster will ensue. Rather, progress is only possible because knowledge is infinitely dispersed among local agents and "even more vast numbers of those from generations past."

The judicial redefinition of marriage is about as profound an example of the unconstrained vision as one could conceive. For as long as man has been man, it is been his settled opinion that male and female are oriented to each other, and make no sense outside that ontological complementarity. But all it took was a single man in robes to reach out to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and send us on a downward course.

Not the first time a Kennedy has left the road and plunged into dark waters.

"Knowledge is thus the social experience of the many, as embodied in behavior, sentiments, and habits, rather than the specially articulated reason of the few, however talented or gifted those few might be" (Sowell).

But the unconstrained leader assumes "an authority which [can] safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it' (Adam Smith, ibid.).

Obama has the folly. And the presumption. And the authority.

The most dangerous stage in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man... refuses to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the power of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them. --F.A. Hayek

Like Father, Like Son, Like the Restavus

Doesn't seem to be much interest in our recent peregrinotions. Either that, or my appeal is becoming more selective.

What are we trying to do here, anyway? First and foremost we are aiming words at eternity for the fun of seeing what we can hit. That is our verticalisthenic exercise. But to paraphrase Schopenhauer, we are like an archer trying to hit a target that can't be seen. How do we know then when we've hit it?

Far be it from me to complain about having too much fun. However, I suppose it's even more fun when a reader says something like, "Ouch. I've been hit, dammit!" Otherwise it's less like archery and more like placing a message in a bottle and tossing it in the sea. Which I'll keep doing, if necessary. But it's a little like writing comedy. How do you know if something is funny if there's no one there to laugh?

When I say we are shooting arrows at the nonlocal target, what I really mean is that we are firing our eros into Celestial Central. "Every created spiritual intellect," writes Clarke, "is endowed... with a radical innate drive toward the whole of being, the unlimited horizon of being as intelligible."

Therefore, it is not accurate to say that man cannot understand God. True, we cannot understand God as he is in himsoph, but that's true of anything, from other persons to rocks. It's a banality. However, we can understand God "in the mode of man," so to speak.

To put it another way, we can understand all we really need to know about God. The rest is none of our isness.

Which is why we are all born with the drive to know God. We wouldn't have this bally drive if it had no object at the other end, any more than we would experience hunger in the absence of food. To express it in philosophical terms, God is the sufficient reason for our zeal to know Him.

"[T]here is in every spiritual intellect a natural drive to know God as Source, fullness of being, and final goal of all knowing..." (ibid.).

Note the operative word, natural. Knowing that we have this drive requires no supernatural revelation, for it is as natural as any other innate drive. In reality, like most things about man, it is "supernaturally natural," but the point is, it is an empirical fact, not some wooly spookulation.

Now, God is love, meaning that God is first and foremost a being of self-giving. That statement -- that God is luuuv -- used to repel me as being overly cloying and sentimental, but now I see it as completely objective and rational. It has great explanatory power; conversely, if God isn't love, then it unexplains mountains and valleys of evidence.

For example, "The fullness of personal development turns out to be a losing or letting go of oneself that is simultaneously and by that very fact a new finding of oneself at a deeper level" (ibid.).

Analogously, might we not say that the Father lets go infinitely of himself, only to find himself in the Son?

"Self-transcendence is thus of the very essence of all personal development at its highest.... Only by reaching beyond the human can we succeed in becoming fully human. To refuse to do so condemns us to fall short of the human itself. To be a human person fully means to self-transcend toward the Infinite" (ibid.).

It is as if -- in a manner of speaking -- only by reaching beyond God does God succeed in becoming fully God. This statement only makes total nonsense in a trinitarian Christian context.

"Since the person is not something added onto being from the outside, but is the highest perfection and most intense expression of existential being itself, the person takes on more intensely the whole dynamism of existence as expansive, self-communicating act..." (ibid.).

Like Father, like Son; like Creator, like creature.

To be fully a person consists in living out to the full the alternating rhythm of self-possession and openness to others, or... 'self-mastery for self-giving'; for it is in the spark that passes from one of these poles to the other and back again that lies the secret of all authentic personal growth, creativity, life, and love that make the living person the supreme manifestation and glory of being. --W. Norris Clarke

Perpetual Motion, Proof of God, and a Cure for Finitude

To be human is "to live on the edge, on the frontier of matter and spirit, time and eternity..." As such, it is to be an ontological I-AMphibian; we are freely able to choose "either direction, down toward matter or up toward spirit." Our "destiny is thus to journey through matter toward a fulfillment beyond matter" (Clarke).

Never mind that this is not something you will ever learn from the Conspiracy, for it is obviously not in their interest to highlight man's vertical freedom. More scandalous is the fact that one can be exposed to conventional religion without ever being shown the damn cosmic roadmap.

To the extent that we have free will, it is only explained with reference to its proper object, which we call O. Freedom itself is a good, but only -- obviously -- if it is oriented to the Good. Failing that, it is a dubious gift at best, analogous to knowledge without truth or creativity without beauty or "values" without virtue -- or, in a word, tenure.

"The human will," writes Clarke, "is necessarily oriented towards nothing less than the Infinite Good as its only adequate fulfillment..." But finite goods are a reflection or prolongation of the one Good, and there are an infinite number of pathways through them.

It reminds me of jazz: a solo is like a journey from this chord to that, but there are an infinite humber of melodic pathways one can take along the way.

Likewise, the human intellect "is naturally ordered, as to its adequate object, to the whole of being as intelligible." Nothing short of God fully satisfies, but this doesn't mean that sub-divine knowledge is worthless.

Rather, as St. Thomas quipped, "Every knower knows God implicitly in anything it knows." If this is not the case, then we can ultimately know nothing -- or nothing can actually be known.

Yes, we just proved the existence of God. Or, alternatively, the impossibility of proving anything, including this statement. Take your pick.

In the past I have referred to O as the Great Attractor. This was before I even knew that other folks characterized it in the same way, albeit in different terms.

For example, "we are magnetized, so to speak, by our very nature towards the Infinite Good, which draws us in our very depths" in its wake (Clarke). This is "the great hidden dynamo that energizes our whole lives, driving us on to ever new levels of growth and development, and refusing to let us be ultimately contented with any merely finite, especially material, goods."

Clarke makes an important point about the dynamo that energizes us. Any kind of energy is the result of a polarity; in this case, the polarity is between God and man. Being that he is infinite and we are finite... well, in addition to proving the existence of God, we have now proven the existence of perpetual motion.

What we call development takes place in the tension between these complementary extremes: "the spiral of self-development should ideally go on, alternating harmoniously between the two poles," which are really two streams of metacosmic energy, one going out and up, the other down and in. As such,

"the life of every human person unfolds as a journey of the spirit through an ever-developing spiral circulation between self-presence and active self-expressive presence," or "between inward-facing self-possession and outward-facing openness to the other" -- both horizontal others and the vertical Other.

Which is why those who give shall receive, those who are empty shall be filled, the last shall be first, the love you take is equal to the love you make, etc.

Again, the I is always a We, AKA substance-in-relation. How does it all end? "In a word, the final goal and perfection of the whole universe is, literally, the communion between persons, who in turn gather up the whole universe in their consciousness and love and thus lead it back to its Source."

So I guess we've also discovered a cure for finitude.

You're welcome.

[A]s we move more and more into the phase of vertical self-transcendence, putting off our self-centered consciousness to open up the Great Center and its transforming power, then a profound reversal in the movement of self-development takes place: it now flows primarily from above downwards, transforming us from above. --W. Norris Clarke

Science vs. Truth

Eh, too late to start a new post, too early to just give up.

Two posts back I ended with an aphorism by Dávila that not only deftly twists the knife into goofball popularizers such as Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, but into scientism in general.

You ask yourself: Bob, how are you able to so rapidly find an Aphorism to fit the O-->(k)sion?

Well, a few years ago I transcribed every single aphorism from a blog that published them, and then organized them into categories beginning with Art and Atheism, and ending with Wisdom and Writing.

"Scientism" is one of the categories, and assimilating the relevant aphorisms would be the equivalent of a PhD in the philosophy of science, or maybe even avoiding graduate school altogether.

Dávila tells us all we need to know about the subject -- often all we can know -- with a minimum of words and maximum of verve. Nor does he ever throw a straight fastball. Rather, like Mariano Rivera, every pitch has late movement.

Example.

Okay, "Whoever has understood a notion from the natural sciences has understood all that can be understood; whoever has understood a notion from the humanities has understood only what he can understand."

BAM!

That's a direct hit not only on scientific pseudo-intellectuals but on the typical postmodern humanities professor whose skill consists in projecting his own victimhood into any work of art -- or converting his personal unhappiness into a problem of politics.

Which goes to the next aphorism: "Where he is easy to refute, as in the natural sciences, the imbecile can be useful without being dangerous. Where he is difficult to refute, as in the humanities, the imbecile is dangerous without being useful."

Which is to say, unemployable.

Nevertheless, we should be forced to pay for the university indoctrination that has made him a dangerous, useless, and unemployable parasite.

Thankfully, the most devout atheist nourishes implicit religious sentiments that prevent him from being intellectually consistent and acting on his beliefs. In other words,

"What still protects man in our time is his natural incoherence. That is to say: his spontaneous horror before consequences implicit in principles he admires." Show me a metaphysical Darwinian with the courage of his convictions and I'll show you a Darwin Award winner.

"Nothing is more alarming than science in the hands of an ignoramus."

Global Warming in the hands of Obama.

You can only pretend to avoid faith:

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

If you truly understand that last one, you will realize what a willful fantasy world you've been living in.

Because in reality,

"Intelligence should battle without respite the sclerosis of its findings."

That last one is true because human intelligence is ordered to the tOtality, such that nothing short of this totality will satisfy it. Vulgar scientism just stops asking Why at an arbitrary point, and calls it a metaphysic (or pretends it is no metaphysic at all).

Truth courses through the descending arteries and ascending veins of the cosmos, and God is its beating heart. Unless you have suffered a metaphysical stroke or pneumocardial infarction.

Before, Beneath, and Beyond

Myth is at the horizon between history and prehistory. Yeah, that's a platitude, but the idea of "prehistory" is quite interesting in its own right. Other animals are not living in prehistory, so it's a stage only humans go through.

But what is it? Hard to say, since the distinction between history and prehistory is that the former is written while the latter isn't. This is just another way of saying that it's very difficult to know what (supposedly) went on in the evolutionary space between animality and humanness. Thus the space is filled with myth, but as we all know, myth does not equate to pure fiction or fantasy; rather, it is truth expressed via these modalities, i.e., in the form of a story.

Really, it's the same with your individual life, so perhaps we can take a cue from that. I don't know how far my earliest memory goes back -- perhaps three years old or so. And yet, we all know that important things happen between 0 and 3; in fact, between -9 mos and + 3 yrs. And something registered memories of what happened, even if the memories are implicit and not subject to conscious recall.

In The Platonic Myths, Pieper says that myths "are played out between 'here' and 'beyond,'" which means that they are primarily vertical where history proper is horizontal. Put another way, myth must be a horizontal narrative about a vertical reality, say, the genesis of the cosmos, the origins of a people, or the provenance of their customs.

Ultimately, all myths have to do with what is beyond or before or after profane time. In other words, myth transcends the conventional categories of past, present, and future, and ventures into the mystery of our origins, our present being, and our destiny, or the First & Last Things in general: the whole alphomega riverrun.

I wonder what Schuon says? "The notion of myth usually evokes a picture of traditional stories charged with a wealth of symbolism and more or less devoid of historical foundation; however, in defining myth one should not lay undue stress on this supposed lack of historical basis, for the function of myth is such that once it has been properly understood the question of historicity ceases to have any practical importance."

Pieper: "The [mythical] events take place outside the historical world that we can understand -- beyond the here and now. For this reason it is only possible to use the language of symbol..."

Again, we are trying to express the higher via the lower, i.e., metaphysical truths via sense images. For example, "because the 'heavenly realm' is beyond our experience we need to have it said, in various ways, what it 'resembles': a banquet, a wedding, a treasure buried in a field, a fishing net, a mustard seed," etc. (ibid.).

The deep past and distant future disclosed by myth are inaccessible in any other way. Again, Origins and Destiny are in principle beyond the limits of science, so don't even try. If you don't understand why science can never disclose these things, then you haven't thought very far or very deep.

Rather, however you manage to do it, the task is "to turn our gaze inwards to the source and origin of both the 'outer' universe of phenomena and of the 'inner' universe of consciousness, to find there the ever-present and eternal simultaneity of what here is seen as a flow of separate events in time; and above all, to fathom the ultimate mystery of our selfhood" (Sri Krishna Prem).

Apropos of Nothing, Pascal has something interesting to say: "it takes no less capacity to reach nothingness than the whole. In either case it takes an infinite capacity, and it seems to me that anyone who had understood the ultimate principles of things might also succeed in knowing infinity. One depends on the other, and one leads to the other. These extremes touch and join by going in opposite directions, and they meet in God and God alone."

"There is a dimension of reality," writes Pieper, "that is simply not attainable by our rational efforts." For the sake of coonvenience we call this unfathomable object O.

Now, "The human self remains always a 'known-unknown,' a mysterious abyss in which more remains unknown than known..." And "there is a kind of infinite or inexhaustible depth in our spirit, due to its openness to the Infinite [O], which cannot be plumbed by our explicit consciousness..." (Clarke).

I can't say it any more clearly than this: "We are drawn out of ourselves, called now to focus on the Great Center beyond us -- also within us, of course -- to take as our own center the One Center and Source of the whole universe, of all being and goodness, the Great Self..."

This is the "deep finality" built into the very nature of spiritual beings. "Thus there is a great double 'movement' [⇅] in the universe of actual being from the Source outward toward creation and from the Creation back to its Source" (ibid.).

This is none other than "the great circle of being, in the exodus of the Many from the One, and the return home again of the Many in the One." This is the rhythm of being, as if "the whole universe itself were one great rhythm of breathing in and breathing out."

A riddle: who is the being that infinitely transcends man?

Man!

Reality and Other Likely Stories

Continuing with our brief side trip into the nature of philosophy, Pieper writes that "science ends where it reaches its limit, whereas philosophy begins at this limit" precisely. You could say that science become scientism is a science oblivious to its proper limits. Down boy!

In fact, Stanley Jaki wrote a book on just this subject, called The Limits of a Limitless Science. Science "ceases to to be competent," for example, "whenever a proposition is such as to have no quantitative bearing." This is a key reason why "artificial intelligence" of the human type is an oxymoron.

Besides, so long as Gödel is in charge and his theorems remain the law of the land, no scientific theory contains proof of its own completeness and consistency.

And Life? "[L]ife itself still cannot be measured. Therefore, scientifically speaking, life does not exist" (Jaki). Nor can brain research answer the simple question: "What is that experience, called 'now,' which is at the very center of consciousness?" (ibid.). For that matter, how does the reality of free will get into the cosmos?

These are all examples of "limit questions," and in order for science to be a valid enterprise, it is important that it not pretend to answer them (or to simply make them go away by, for example, denying the reality of consciousness and free will).

I've mentioned in the past my intuition or suspicion or hunch that these Limit Questions are somehow related to one another. It's like the old gag about the blind men and the elephant, only this is the nonlocal object which we can only perceive by blinding our two local eyes and opening the third.

Do you get the idea? This one object, depending upon your angle of vision or which part of it you grab, is responsible for life, for consciousness, and for free will, not to mention little things like love, truth, creativity, and virtue. It comes into view at the limits of science; but really -- really now -- science must come into view at the limits of O, right? Scientism is just the blind man grabbing the tail or whatever and forgetting about the elephant in the womb.

Science certainly doesn't study "the universe," for "the universe as such" can never be "an object for science. Scientists cannot go outside the universe in order to observe the whole of it and thereby give to their knowledge of the universe that supreme scientific seal, which is observation with measurement" (Jaki).

Even so, we all intuitively believe 1) that there is this thing called the cosmos, i.e., the strict totality of interacting objects and events; and 2) that we can know it from the outside, i.e., that we can somehow transcend it.

For example, to the extent that the mathematical physicist believes his equations describe reality, those equations obviously transcend the reality they describe, so what explains them?

The old myths are still the best myths, in this case Plato's Cave, more on which below, if not today then tomorrow.

Okay, today. Science studies the walls of the cave, but the philosopher is interested in what lies beyond it. For starters, the cave clearly isn't enclosed on all sides; there is an opening. What is the nature of this opening?

Well, it seems to me that it is related to what was said above about limit questions: in human terms, this opening involves consciousness and freedom converging upon the good, true, and beautiful.

Or just say: I AM, the door.

In his little book on The Platonic Myths, Pieper asks whether it mightn't "be the case that the reality most relevant to man is not a 'set of facts' but is rather an 'event,' and that it accordingly cannot be grasped adequately in a thesis but only... in the representation of an action -- in other words, in a story?"

To be continued...

Nothing makes clearer the limits of science than the scientist's opinions about any topic that is not strictly related to his profession. --Don Colacho

Philosophy and "Philosophy"

We left off yesterday with a comment by Josef Pieper about the nature of genuine philosophy, which, more than any other subject, reveals our deiform nature, being that it requires conformity of our totality to the totality of What Is; nothing less has a chance of succeeding.

Again, no individual "branch of the sciences inquires about the world as a whole. But philosophy is concerned precisely with this -- with the totality in all its aspects" (Pieper). It's rather amazing that we can do it at all, being that we know up front that the goal is strictly impossible and that we can never possess or contain the Metacosmic Subject-Object.

Rather, to practice philo-sophy is to be a lover of truth and seeker after wisdom, such that one must be satisfied with the path -- the "Raccoon lifestyle" -- pointing toward the goal, as opposed to actually reaching it. People who imagine they have reached the goal -- such as Marx -- cause most of the problems in the world. He was hardly a lover of Sophia but a possessive and controlling a-hole.

I don't think anyone has said it more pithily than Professor Commentbox, who remarked that "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."

That's what it comes down to, but this luminous moment can be anything from a spark to a conflagration to a wet blanket, like your liberal professor.

Philosophy has no a priori formula or univocal perspective that "limits the openness of its gaze to this object" (Pieper).

Rather, it requires a kind of total receptivity; by way of analogy, instead of staring at a single star in the nighttime sky, you need to relax your vision such that the entire sky comes into view. Or better, it requires a dialectic between the two, the totality and the particular, a constant shifting of perspectives (which is really a kind of ontological metabolism, if you will).

Pieper takes his cue from Plato, whose "one worry is that nothing of the totality be left out, overlooked, concealed, kept quiet about, forgotten."

Misosophic scientism, for example, excises subjectivity at the outset and then wonders how this annoying and inexplicable phenomenon got in here!

But a Raccoon knows there can be no outside without an inside, no object without a subject, no horizontal without a vertical, and ultimately no man without God (however one defines the latter; the point is that man qua man is only comprehensible if regarded as complementary to O; if there is no God there is no man, just another liberal).

"Accordingly," writes Pieper, "it would be unphilosophical formally to exclude any achievable information about reality." If we're going to, for example, express an opinion on man, we need to include biology, anthropology, medicine, psychology, genetics, history, art, myth, religion, and anything else that isn't nailed to the floor.

All truth testifies to the One Truth -- like invisible light refracted through a prism to reveal a rainbow of individual color-disciplines; O is the white light and we are the prismhouse.

This has nothing to do with what the tenured call "philosophy." Any hope of real philosophy "capitulates at the very moment in which it sees itself as an academic subject or discipline" (Pieper). There can be no "final exam" in philosophy; or rather, the exam never ends. It's called your life. And the unexamined one is not worth living, since it is less than fully human.

That's a bit harsh. Let's just say that for the born philosopher the unexamined life isn't worth living. For the multitude, the examined life causes too much anxiety. (Pascal really eviscerates these oblivious folkers, but I don't want to get snidetracked.)

Note that in order to see, three things are required: an eye, an object, and the light to illuminate the latter and enter the former. As above, so below (and vice versa): "in exactly the same way, a divine light is required for the eye of the soul" to take in the nonlocal landscape. Again, this seeing is more diffuse and receptive, more right-brained than left, more holistic than analytic.

God is analogous to the sun. The sun illuminates everything, but if we try to stare directly into it we end up blinded. Thus -- and this is an important point -- many religious concepts are "that with which we look," so to speak, as opposed to being that which we stare at. Think, for example, of Genesis. If we take a nitwit lit-crit approach, don't be surprised if it starts to break down at the edges.

But if we deploy it as our nonlocal spooktacles with which to look, see how much comes into view! Thus, if I'm honest, I can't really say exactly why man is fallen. I mean, I have my ideas, but they tend not to speak to the head as powerfully as mythology speaks to the heart.

However, I can affirm with 100% certainty with Don Colacho that (paraphrasing from memory) There are two kinds of men: those who believe mankind is fallen, and idiots.

The philosopher does not demonstrate; he shows. He says nothing to someone who doesn't see. --Don Colacho

Liberalism is a Spiritual Abortifacient

Clarke has an excellent working definition of the unsaturated pneumaticon (↑): it is the

"innate, unrestricted drive of the human spirit... toward the Infinite Good," the "great hidden dynamo that energizes our whole lives, driving us to ever new levels of growth and development..." It is what makes us restless for nothing less than the ultimate rest.

So, it is an energy, but like any other energy, it cannot determine the use to which it will be put (e.g., gasoline can power your car or make a molotov cocktail).

Thus, while "this radical dynamism rooted in our spiritual nature" is "the dynamic a priori of the human spirit as such," it can be misused and misdirected into, say, ideology, which is just the modern version of idolatry; ideology is always ideolatry.

You really need a kind of dynamic... double-cross to capture our total situation, one that would combine these two movements: (⇅) and (⇆).

For one thing, although we are ordered to the Infinite Good, it seems that the creation is ordered to us; which is why, for starters, we are able to study and understand it so deeply. Because we are "spirit wedded to matter," we are indeed the microcosm, i.e., "a synthesis of the whole universe" (ibid.).

Thus we are not confined to the horizontal peregrinations of (⇆), but can rise "above the dispersion of space and time to live in the spiritual horizon of supra-material meaning and values" -- i.e., shoot our eros into the heart of the metacosmic source and "set [our] sights on the Infinite and the Eternal" (ibid.).

Therefore, we can -- so to speak -- raise science (⇆) up to God and place it in its proper context. Nothing short of this suffices, because a world of pure (⇆) would be ultimately incomprehensible and thoroughly pointless. Pure vanity.

For Pieper, this is the whole point of a Liberal Education:

"[E]ducation as the activity of educating means presenting the whole of reality to the gaze of the student and listener, giving access to the totality of the world and showing the multiplicity of what we encounter to be both one and whole."

But "How can I bring anything to anyone's gaze if I don't see it myself?" In short, nowadays a "liberal education" amounts to crashing into the impenetrable Wall of Tenure and calling it a road trip.

This is why religion will never "die out," because it -- however adequately or inadequately -- always addresses itself to the Whole.

"The decisive point" in a real education "is that the world as a whole comes into focus" (ibid.). Contrast this with the education of the typical SJW, which restricts this tOtality to a tiny keyhØle of perceived victimhood and persecution. Talk about looking through the wrong end of the telos-scope!

Compare this with the grandeur of a proper education: "the human mind, like every spiritual being, is by its very nature a receptacle for the whole of reality" (ibid.). This receptacle is a womb, and this living womb is the opposite of the left wing educational matrix that prevents the second birth.

Really, liberalism in general is a spiritual abortifacient. Until this is recognized, the fight over abortion per se will unfortunately be somewhat beside the point.

[I]t is always the case that there is, in truth, a strong longing for a grasp of the totality.... No branch of the sciences inquires about the world as a whole. But philosophy is concerned precisely with this -- with the totality in all its aspects. --Josef Pieper

I Was So Much Older Then

The nub of the gist of the crux of the master is that personhood "is not some special mode of being, added on from the outside, so to speak."

Rather, it is "nothing but the fullness of being itself, existence come into its own, allowed to be what it is by 'nature' when not restricted by the limitations proper to the material mode of being" (Clarke).

There is no reason to assume that what comes first in time is ontologically prior. We certainly don't do this with (other) organisms. (I believe Whitehead made the crack that biology is the study of the larger organisms while physics is the study of the smaller ones.)

Rather, for an organism, what comes last -- i.e., its mature state -- is the telos, the meaning, the summation of what comes before.

To paraphrase something I said in the book, who's to say whether this isn't what a ripe old cosmos looks like up close -- i.e., alive, conscious, and personal?

Personhood is simply the perfection of being. For what would being be like if it weren't in principle alive and conscious? It would not only be dead but incapable of life and mentation, like a vast liberal university campus from which we can never graduate.

"To be fully, without restriction, therefore, is to be personal" (ibid.). And personhood is characterized by a freely active and luminous self-presence that is ordered to the true, good and beautiful, the latter of which giving it its evolutionary movement in time.

Personhood is existence ratcheted up to the highest degree of intensity. In this regard the existentialists have it precisely backward, because existence is "like a person," not vice versa.

Each of us is a kind of window on and in existence: "thus any finite being is really a limited act of existence, existing now as a new whole distinct from all other real beings" (ibid.).

And God is "unlimited existence," or existence not limited by any particular essence; or, as they say, his essence is existence (he cannot not exist).

If we consider the whole existentialada, i.e., the nonlocal metacosmic hierarchy, man is the highest of material beings (woo hoo!) but the lowest of spiritual beings (d'oh!).

Your cosmic mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make your "way back to God by a journey through the material world, coming to know and work with the latter through the mediation of its multi-sensed body" (ibid.).

So, whatever else existence is, it's a ladder of personhood with degrees of intensity and rungs of cooncentration.

As we know, the soul doesn't "have" a body, nor does the body have a soul; rather, the soul is the form of the body. The two are complementary, but, as in the case of all complementarities, one must be prior, in this case, Mr. Soul. Thus,

"the soul must possess its own spiritual act of existence, transcending the body, which it then 'lends' to the body, so to speak, drawing the latter up into itself to participate in this higher mode of being as the necessary instrument for the soul's own journey of self-realization through the material cosmos..." (ibid.).

Just as we need an instrument in order to actually play music, we need a body in order to play the game existence to the end of the beginning. It is Not Dying, not to mention the Meaning of Within.

"Thus we are magnetized, so to speak, by our very nature toward the Infinite Good, which draws us in our very depths, at first spontaneously below the level of consciousness and freedom, but then slowly emerging into consciousness as we grow older" (Clarke).

Or younger, depending upon how you look at it.

Communing with Reality

So, ultimate reality is not characterized by substance -- as believed by materialists -- or by pure relation -- as maintained by Buddhists and some process philosophers -- but by the irreducible dynamic complementarity of substance-in-relation.

For as Clarke says, if we deny relation, then there is no way for the existent substance to manifest itself to other beings:

"There would be no way for anything else to know that it exists; it would make no difference at all to the rest of reality; practically speaking, it might just as well not be at all -- it would in fact be indistinguishable from non-being."

But we live in a totally interconnected cosmos in which everything is related to everything else, right down to the quantum level and back up to the metaphysical (i.e., Trinity). In short to be is to be related.

This first occurred to me in reading Whitehead, and it first occurred to Whitehead in the late 1910s, when he left mathematics for philosophy and began pondering the implications of recent discoveries in physics. I'm going to briefly hand the lectern over to Professor Wiki for a moment, while I search for a quote:

"In the notes of one his students for a 1927 class, Whitehead was quoted as saying: 'Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized.' In Whitehead's view, scientists and philosophers make metaphysical assumptions about how the universe works all the time, but such assumptions are not easily seen precisely because they remain unexamined and unquestioned."

Whitehead "argued that people need to continually re-imagine their basic assumptions about how the universe works if philosophy and science are to make any real progress, even if that progress remains permanently asymptotic. For this reason Whitehead regarded metaphysical investigations as essential to both good science and good philosophy.

"Perhaps foremost among what Whitehead considered faulty metaphysical assumptions was the Cartesian idea that reality is fundamentally constructed of bits of matter that exist totally independently of one another, which he rejected in favor of an event-based or 'process' ontology in which events are primary and are fundamentally interrelated and dependent on one another" (emphasis mine).

"He also argued that the most basic elements of reality can all be regarded as experiential, indeed that everything is constituted by its experience.... In this, he went against Descartes' separation of two different kinds of real existence, either exclusively material or else exclusively mental. Whitehead referred to his metaphysical system as 'philosophy of organism,' but it would become known more widely as 'process philosophy.'"

Back! Thank you, Professor. As you can see from what my colleague just said, there are several key principles, including the ideas that reality is organic, that subjectivity and experience are intrinsic to it, and that nothing is radically independent from anything else. While I am not a Whiteheadian per se, those are certainly three of my non-negotiable demands.

I never retrieved the quote I was looking for, but you get the picture. As Clarke says, "relationality is a primordial dimension of every real being, inseparable from its substantiality..."

What I would add is that this ontological openness applies both horizontally and vertically, i.e., with other local existents and with the very nonlocal source of local existence itself.

That would be another key Raccoon principle in addition to the three mentioned in the paragraph above. So we're up to four, including organicity, subjectivity, interdependence, and vertical/horizontal openness. Or really, one could reduce the four to organism, for every organism is characterized by subjectivity, dependence, and openness.

But in order for there to be organisms, we must ask the question: by virtue of what principle are organisms possible?

The most metaphysically simple and elegant answer is: Trinity. Without this principle, it is impossible to account for the most astonishing features of existence, up to and including the human mind.

If we try to look at it the other way around and begin with physics, well, physics has absolutely nothing interesting to say about Life or Mind, which operate at a right angle to it. Or, Life operates at a right angle, while Mind is like the "subjective angle" of Life, or Life turned toward the great interior horizon.

"All being," writes Clarke, has an "introverted" or "in-itself" dimension, and an "extroverted" or "towards-others" dimension. Or, as we say around here, man is truly I-AMphibious, or an I who is (like any other I) intrinsically related to a Thou (or to Thou-ness as such).

"To be, it turns out, means to-be-together. Being and community are inseparable." Communion is simply The Case: "Personal being, therefore, tends ultimately toward communion as its natural fulfillment" (ibid.).

And supernatural fulfillment: our "universal dynamism towards the Good turns into an innate implicit longing for personal union with the Infinite Good..." This whole cosmos is one "immense implicit aspiration towards the Divine."

That would be another Raccoon principle to add to the others.

Tripersonal Metacosmic Ecstasy and You

I'm rereading an excellent little book called Person and Being which traces the soph-evident fact of our own personhood up to ultimate reality -- the Trinity -- and back down again. I don't recall blogging about it, or at least not as much as I could have or should have.

I mean, it's a Big Idea, maybe the biggest of them all: that human personhood is the most adequate reflection of the ultimate principle of the cosmos. Of course it says so in the Bible, but Clarke makes no appeals to authority or scripture, rather to pure metaphysics.

To jump ahead a bit, the central idea is that substance is not ultimate, but nor is the pure relationality of, say, Buddhist metaphysics; rather, the irreducible reality is the complementarity of substance-in-relation: there is no substance that isn't in relation, and no relation that isn't between relatively autonomous existents.

Because substance is always in relation, it is always self-communicative. This accounts for the intelligibility of the world, in that everything that exists somehow gives itself over to our understanding.

Something that didn't do this would be simply nonexistent: to exist is to be known (at least in potential), and to be incapable of being known is to not exist.

Which puts an interesting twist on the idea of being known by God: God doesn't know us because we exist, but rather, we exist because God knows us.

Substantiality is the "in-itself" modality, whereas relationality is the "toward-others" aspect. Again, humans always have both, but only because God does. It's a very strange idea, but God has his own otherness built into him!

Which I think helps to explain why a lot of bad things happen down here. Let's say that everything, right down to the itsiest bitsy, is a fractal of the trinity.

This means that nothing is really under absolute control, because everything is always giving itself over to what is not itself (beginning with the Father wholly and unreservedly giving himself over to the Son).

That's true from the bottom -- say, vis-a-vis the unpredictability of quantum physics -- to the top, whereby fully functional human beings routinely give themselves over to relationships they do not control.

As they say, having a child is like having your heart running around loose in the world. Imagine how the Father felt!

All those liberal dreams of control are anti-trinitarian -- and therefore anti-reality -- to the core. They shouldn't call their predictable destructiveness "unanticipated consequences," but rather, inevitable catastrophes.

So: "self-expression through action is actually the whole point, the natural perfection or flowering of being itself, the goal of every presence in the universe" (Clarke). This "innate dynamism" is "in the very nature of actual being as such." The point is, human beings are not the Great Exception, but rather, the Highest Exemplar this side of God.

In other words, "the very nature of the Supreme Being itself -- even before its outflow into creation -- is an ecstatic process... of self-communicating love" (ibid.).

Within the Godhead there is both giver and receiver, in a movement which in turn "flows over freely in the finite self-communication that is creation. No wonder, then [as alluded to in paragraph four above], that self-communication is written into the very heart of all beings" (ibid.).

I've been pondering this for, I don't know, thirty years, and am in 100% agreement that the approach we are discussing represents "one of the few great fundamental insights in the history of metaphysics, without which no viable metaphysical vision of the universe can get off the ground."

In short, trinitarian personalism -- or tripersonalism -- is the First & Last Word.

Have you discovered the beginning and now are seeking the end? Where the beginning is, the end will be. Blessings on you who stand at the beginning. You will know the end and not taste death. --Gospel of Thomas

Conservatism = Enjoyment

So, acedia is at bottom a refusal to carry out the work of becoming oneself. It is both a cause and consequence of boredom, and boredom is a much more serious problem than people realize. It is the source of much liberal mischief and mayhem, since a person who isn't bored with his own life won't generally try to get his jollies by interfering with other people's lives.

In fact, experts say that the #1 cause of aggravated noodgery is boredom.

Acedia is associated with a "wandering unrest of the spirit" (Pieper). This is because the spiritual life draws us toward our center, such that the alternative is a flight to the periphery of ourselves; the acediacidal mooniac "has to make the vain attempt to break out of his own center -- for example, into restless work [or "activism"] for the sake of work," or "into the unquenchable curiosity for pure spectacle," or into the myriad ways "of abandoning oneself to the world" and ultimately avoiding onesoph.

This is the same unrest that drives one of those compulsive fallow travelers "from one part of the world to another." It also goes to "the endless talk that fills up everyday existence." Ever been to a house where the TV is on all the time, even though no one is watching it? More generally, it's becoming impossible to avoid the Screen, whether at the doctor's office, airport, gas pumps, etc. Why is that? I would say it's not even distraction; rather, distraction from distraction.

Which is again a capital sin. Acedia is full of possibilities, none of them good. It is as if the acediac "wishes that God had not given him this gift" -- i.e., the Adventure of Consciousness -- "but had 'left him in peace.'" He "does not want to attain the end which is really designed for him and is appropriate for him" (Pieper).

Interestingly, because acedia is misleadingly translated as "sloth," you wouldn't know that acedia and leisure are at antipodes. In other words, laziness has nothing to do with genuine Slack.

Many things in life legitimately serve other purposes, such as working in order to eat. But leisure involves activities -- or inactivities -- which serve no purpose outside themselves. Their value is intrinsic, not extrinsic. And all of the higher and laughty things in life are intrinsic, e.g., love, truth, beauty, humor, music, baseball, this blog, etc.

There is servitude and there is freedom, and only the intrinsic is truly free. This was originally the difference between the liberal and servile arts. Which is ironic, because today's unemployable liberal arts major has, of course, obtained a degree in a "useless" subject.

However, the degree is doubly useless, because it has neither extrinsic nor intrinsic value. Rather, it's just very expensive unalloyed bullshit -- a total waste. And it certainly doesn't contribute to personal liberation, rather, to the auto-oppression of liberal victim ideology.

Someone left a comment on yesterday's post adverting to the importance of ears over eyes, of hearing over seeing. Well, "Leisure is precisely that form of silence which is a presupposition for hearing something" (ibid.).

Like right now, I'm banging at the keys but I'm listening at the same time, for "Only the silent person is able to hear. Leisure is the attitude of purely receptive immersion of the self into reality; the soul's openness, to which alone are given the very great fulfilling insights that no [mere] 'intellectual work' can achieve" (ibid.).

Not so much cerebration as celebration. I think it was Russell Kirk who said that the essence of conservatism is enjoyment. It is enjoyment because it is rooted in the feast of the now which extends backward and forward, down and up, all the way into eternity. It is "to see the world as a whole and to celebrate it," to experience ourselves as "related to the totality of the world through a free activity" (Pieper).

And through such truly free activity we crown the creation which has only been groaning for this liberation for like 14 billion years...

Liberalism: The Lazy Man's Way to Hell

Continuing with our little exploration of the nature (and supernature) of selfhood, Pieper has a relevant chapter in his book Tradition as Challenge (meh, not really recommended), called The Hidden Nature of Hope and Despair. In it he discusses an important subject -- acedia -- that we maybe haven't blah-blah-blogged about as much as we should; a quick search finds it mentioned in only seven posts.

For Kierkegaard acedia is a kind of "despair from weakness" which, according to Pieper, "consists in man not daring to be himself, even explicitly not wanting to be himself. He refuses to be what he really is; he does not accept his own being."

Now, this usually occurs as a result a failure of one's being to be affirmed by one's parents. In other words, what begins with a perceived rejection (of the child's developing self) ends in a refusal (of one's being). The child internalizes this rejection, essentially foreclosing his true self before the world can re-traumatize him by rejecting it again. It's a pre-emptive auto-destruction.

Back in the 1970s, a brilliant and sensitive psychoanalytic theorist named Heinz Kohut elaborated a whole developmental theory based on this idea, called self psychology.

It's quite simple really (and also common freaking sense). In order to avoid various developmental catastrophes, the child most needs two things: a person to empathically mirror him and a person to idealize. With obvious overlap and exceptions, the former role often fell mostly to the mother, the latter to the father. Failure of either results in various forms of pathological narcissism and other psychological illnesses.

A normal person never loses the need for both types of relationships. And now that I think about it, it is easy to see how, for example, failure to have a proper ego ideal can result in acedia and developmental stasis. In other words, we always need exemplars to look up to and emulate. I can totally see this in my son. It began with me, but it has branched off into other similarly awesome heroic and virtuous self-objects (the technical term for these relations).

If you want to bring this down to a very concrete level, consider the failure of Obama's self-objects (his worthless mother and alcoholic, bigamist, and manslaughtering father), and how he found his ego ideals in disreputable types such as Frank Marshall Davis, Jeremiah Wright, Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers, and other lowlife demonoids.

You can't ask someone who has never known normality to understand why, say, we have different restrooms for boys and girls. And our culture is cranking out more and more narcissistically damaged and therefore fundamentally confused people, in my opinion (partly) because of widespread single parenthood and abandonment of children to daycare. How could this not have damaging psychological consequences?

As we've mentioned before, acedia has been poorly translated as sloth, which connotes laziness or lack of productivity. But what it really means is "that a person does not engage in working at his own self-realization, that he refuses to make the required contribution to his own truly human existence" (Pieper).

Again, it doesn't refer to exterior but interior work, i.e., "to the carrying out of [one's] personal being, a duty which we know -- without a word being spoken, yet unmistakably -- that we are required to perform" (ibid.). It's your cosmic duty! What did that fellow say? "The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint."

Failure to answer your telosphone is a Big Mistake, because it's God calling: there's a reason why acedia is a capital sin, because so many other sins flow out of it: "In sloth..., man resists the demand which comes with the dignity of his own status.... above all, he does not want to be that to which God has raised him -- a level of being far above what his purely human nature can achieve" (Pieper).

And the most catastrophic outcome occurs when the narcissistically wounded person props up his own damaged self as his ego ideal. This is why sin and madness flow from the Obama administration like a toxic stream from its swollen headwaters.

Why Liberalism Smells That Way

If there is no free will, then it would make no sense for human beings to have emotions such as guilt and regret, not to mention hope, responsibility, and merit.

If everything had to be the way it was, and will be the way it must be, then these realities aren't just superfluous but without foundation; philosophically we're simply eliminating one inexplicable reality -- free will -- at the cost of introducing several others. Deploying Occam's razor, we can cut away a lot of loose nonsense by simply accepting the perfect nonsense of free will.

Genesis realizes this at the outset with the focus on shame. If I'm not mistaken, this is the first recorded emotion in the Bible, and it stands as testimony to the reality of our freedom: presumably if Adam hadn't chosen to disobey, then he wouldn't have felt ashamed.

In fact, the existence of shame is full of implications, isn't it? There is no question that a shameless human being hardly qualifies as human. A shameless psychopath is (presumably) genetically human, and yet, his very existence is anti-human to the core; he is the mirror image of a proper human, i.e., a genuine monster.

The implication is that without a capacity for shame, we can't be free, and vice versa.

I wonder what Schuon has to say about the subject? "The purpose of freedom is to enable us to choose what we are in the depths of our heart. We are intrinsically free to the extent that we have a center which frees us: a center which, far from confining us, dilates us by offering us an inward space without limits and without shadows; and this Center is in the last analysis the only one there is."

What about Don Colacho? "Liberty is not an end, but a means. Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do with it when he attains it." And a warning: "Freedom intoxicates, as the license to be another."

Combining this with what Schuon says, we could affirm that freedom misused enables us to be someone other than who we are in the depths of our heart. It allows us to move in the direction of our true self, but also to inhabit the false self and erect the as-if personality: to be someone else (and therefore not be). (And the most common reason why a person chooses to be someone else is shame dysregulation, i.e., intolerance of shame.)

Here's another aphorism, this one on sin: "Nothing makes more evident the reality of sin than the stench of souls that deny its existence" (Don Colacho). Therefore, sin and misused freedom emit the same soul stench.

I might add that millions of people have rendered themselves insensate to this odor. We call them liberals. For various reasons, their pneumatic olfactory gland has become shriveled.

Along these lines, we have this passage from a seven year old Koon Klassic:

"As we know, certain persistent traits set the Raccoon apart from his peers, including a sense of essential Truth, a sense of the sacred, a sense of beauty, a sense of the eternal, a sense of grandeur (or dignity), a sense of mischief, a sense of soul-smell (or stench, depending on the case), a sense of the ridiculous, and a tendency toward ecstasy (often at inopportune moments)."

One more jab from Don Colacho: "Metaphysics is the olfactory nerve rather than the optical nerve." And from Petey: "Who you gonna believe, me or your lying nose?"

This biography of Russell Kirk has a chapter on Christian Humanism that has some helpful tips. For example, Kirk "saw liberalism as little more than a transitional stage between Christianity and totalitarianism. It corrupted everything while solving nothing, he believed."

Thus the purpose of Christian humanism is to humanize men, precisely, over and against the perpetual leftist project of dehumanizing them.

The properly humanized man "has received a training of mind and character that chastens and ennobles and emancipates. He is a man genuinely free; but free only because he obeys the ancient laws, the norms, which govern human nature.... He knows what it is to be a man -- to be truly and fully human. He knows what things a man is forbidden to do. He knows his rights and corresponding duties. He knows what to do with his leisure.... He knows that there is a law for man, and a law for the thing" (Kirk).

Just as with society, order is the source and foundation of personal freedom. The humanized and liberated man "seeks to preserve a society which allows men to attain manhood, rather than keeping them within bonds of perpetual childhood" (ibid.).

Conversely, the malodorous liberal seeks to enforce a repressive (and regressive) society which prevents men from attaining the rights and duties of manhood in exchange for the comforting bonds of perpetual childhood.

The St↺ry of ʘur Lives

The self must first be a vertical emanation, a spark of divinity that extends from G⧬d; and second, a horizontal line that persists through time. Visually it must look something like (↳).

However, it also has a telos that runs back to God, so the most compact way to write our autobiography would be 〇 ↓ ☞ ↑ ʘ.

Or perhaps just ↺.

If I had all day, I could toy with the meaning of other promising pneumaticons such as ⇥ (hitting a wall), ⇸ (breaking through the wall), ⇈ (sacramental marriage), ⇤ (regression), ↮ (stuck in the purgatorial middle), ⇝ (psychodrama), ⇢ (discontinuity), etc.

Anyway, "the self is the psychological or ontological thread that runs through our lives connecting the person I am today with the person I was yesterday, and again with the person I will be tomorrow" (Hill).

But before that is the vertical ingression, my favorite description of which comes from the Rabbi. Picture "a line drawn from above," "a continuous line of spiritual being, stretching from the general source of all the souls" down to ours. This is of course a line of Light with a little sparkler at the end. That spark in the dark would be you.

"The human soul, from its lowest to its highest levels, is a unique and single entity, even though it is multi-faceted. In its profoundest being, the soul of man is a part of the Divine and, in this respect, is a manifestation of God in the world" (ibid.).

Indeed, "only man, by virtue of his divine soul, has the potential, and some of the actual capacity, of God Himself" -- e.g., truth, reason, love, creativity, transcendence, freedom, slack, etc. But precisely because we are free, we have the capacity "to reach the utmost heights -- or to plumb the deepest hells" (ibid.).

"Every soul is thus a fragment of the divine light." I might add that it is a fractal of God, i.e., "a part containing something of the whole..." (ibid.).

This is why it takes all kinds to make a world; in other words, one unique individual reflects something of the absolute uniqueness of God, but we really need to add all of these singular persons together to get a sense of God's infinite uniqueness. Or in other other words, his creativity is literally inexhaustible.

But this is the ultimate source of man's value and dignity, that "The life of a person is something that has no possible substitute or exchange; nothing and no one can take its place" (ibid.).

Okay. What then do we do with this self? The "life line of the soul" is "the way of man's ascent to perfection; the more one rises, the closer one comes to the realization of the highest purpose of one's being" (ibid.). And of course we cannot do it without grace, even if we are one of those heroic do-it-yoursophers. Schuon has an interesting observation regarding the latter.

A grace-based approach such as Christianity relies on the easy yoke of surrender to nonlocal assistance. It is what you call other-powered. Conversely, the Buddhist exerts himself to eliminate everything that obscures ultimate reality, in particular, himself. Anyway, here is what Schuon says:

The “power of oneself" is "that of intelligence and of will seen from the point of view of the salvific capacity which they possess in principle," such that "man is freed thanks to his intelligence and by his own efforts..."

Conversely, "other power" "does not belong to us in any way," but "belongs to the 'Other' as its name indicates... in this context, man is saved by Grace, which does not however mean that he need not collaborate with this salvation by his receptivity and according to the modes that human nature allows or imposes on him."

Thus, in reality we must co-upperate with this Other Power. And at the same time, for Self Power to be fruitful, "it is necessary that such an effort be blessed by a celestial Power, hence a 'power of the Other.'”

So if you follow, it's the same Self-Other complementarity looked at from different angles. Thus on the one hand, Jesus' yoke is easy, but on the other, the road is difficult and the gate narrow. And the Buddha's approach is a grind, but there are helpful bodhisattvas everywhere.

Let's go back to our auto-pneumography, ↺. Steinsaltz suggests that "the sinner is punished by the closing of the circle, by being brought into contact with the domain of evil he creates" -- beginning in this life, but more importantly, continuing into the next.

I have a question. I am in some ways so different from the way I was 20 or 30 years ago, that oldBob, or my former Bob's, seem like different people. Although I remember some, if not all, of the things Bob did, I find it literally impossible to "enter" his person and understand what he was like. I have no idea what occupied his mind, what he talked about, what really motivated him.

This must go to the question of the Felicitous Death, or ontological discontinuity, we must all sopher along the way, but I'm just about out of time, so we'll pick up this cross tomorrow...

Condemned to Personhood

I have almost no time this morning, only enough to set a course and pull up anchor. But we won't be able to sail out until tomorrow.

I can't necessarily raccoommend After the Natural Law (a little too basic), but the chapter on The Classical Conception of the Person is a helpful review, plus it converges on what we've been discussing lately.

It begins with a quote from Kierkegaard to the effect that [T]o have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession made to man, but at the same time it is eternity's demand upon him.

Ooh. I suppose you could say that man -- at least in the Christian West -- is condemned to self- or personhood.

Yeah, the Creator has given us the priceless gift of a unique personality, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

Except develop it. In the East the idea is to extinguish it, and maybe that works for them. Hey, maybe it's even providential for those particular cultures.

But in the West, even if we are not Christians we have been conditioned by 2000 years of Christianity, so might as well get with the program.

According to Hill, when we talk about the reality of the self, we're talking about three main questions: whether the self is real and not just the side effect of something else that is more real or fundamental; whether it is active, i.e., a genuine cause of its own decisions and actions; and third, whether it is morally significant in a special way.

The thing is, everyone thinks and behaves as if the self is real, causal, and morally significant, even if they pretend otherwise.

Again, "For the self to be real -- for it to be more than [just] a way of speaking -- it must possess a unity of its own and persist through time. To say that the self is a unity is to say that human personality is not hopelessly fragmented, that there are not 'plural' selves, that there is some centralized locus of identity, decision making and action that serves to bind the person into a whole" (Hill).

"It is to say that there is an integrated foundation underlying the tensions we commonly experience between conflicting reasons, desires, and emotions. It is to point to a moral, psychological, and ontological center of gravity in the person -- that which gives us our identity and makes us responsible for our actions" (ibid).