The Irreducible Metacosmic Complementarity of Woo Hoo! <---> D'oh!

Commenter Randy made a point that is worth belaboring, that the whole of modern philosophy made a wrong turn in "placing epistemology before metaphysics." 

Certainly there is nothing wrong with a disinterested investigation of what knowledge is and how we can know it. But a little perspective, please. And let's not arbitrarily limit or close our minds before we even know what the mind is.

Unfortunately, that ship sailed on horseback out of the barn long ago, such that the situation is analogous to a Supreme Court decision that everyone is forced to obey even if it is unconstitutional -- most recently, granting congress the power to force citizens to purchase health insurance from a private company by pretending it's a tax.

Analogously, in presuming to limit what the mind may know, Kant engages in the Worst. Humblebrag. Ever. 

Who gave him the authority? It can't be reason, since no logical operation furnishes the premises of the operation, or, in a word, Gödel. 

But I don't think we needed to wait until 1929 to understand the soph-evident truth that any system devised by man contains axioms, assumptions, or principles that cannot be generated from within the system. We transcend both the physical world and any manmode ideology, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. We just have to learn to live with the good news.

Again, this doesn't mean our minds are literally unlimited, but it does raise the interesting paradox that whoever presumes to limit the mind has thereby transcended the limit, since he is presuming what lies on the other side.

Like anyone could even know that!

Thaaaat's right, Petey. 

Now, as alluded to yesterday, if one is going to engage in philosophy, one must begin somewhere. Come to think of it, I touched on this problem waaay back in the beginning of the Book, just after the explosive prose starts to cool down and become a bit intelligible. It's a little embarrassing to quote my former Bob, but it's a good introduction to where this post seems to be headed:

What the... How in God's... But why... Who would have thought... I mean, really... Where in the world do we begin? 

Little inside joke there that one reader actually got: the stammering was intended to be a tip o' the hat to HCE in Finnegans Wake. He is meant to symbolize every man and all mankind, and for some reason is afflicted by a stutter. The stutter seems to be related to an obscure crime that took place in some park at the beginning of time, and for which he is shadowed by a sense of guilt; Earwicker

is torn between shame and aggressive self-satisfaction, conscious of himself both as a bug [earwig] and as a man.... Worm before God and giant among men, he is a living, aching arena of cosmic dissonance, torturted by all the cuts and thrusts of guilt and conscience (Campbell & Robinson). 

Now, these brainiacs such as Descartes, Kant, and Hume like to pretend they're the first thinkers ever to be critical of thinking, but let's be real: it doesn't get more critical than original sin.  

B-back to B-Bob. He asks 

Do we have any right to assume that the universe is intelligible? If not, you can stop reading right now and do something else, something that actually has a purpose.

That last word has a footnote attached. It cautions us to 

Bear in mind, however, that if the universe has no purpose, then neither will anything you do instead of reading the book. Therefore, you might as well read the book.

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

Blah blah yada yada, 

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

And hey, 

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

I could go on, but that's a good enough set-up for the punchline Schuon is about to deliver in an essay I rereread yesterday, called Consequences Flowing from the Mystery of Subjectivity. 

I only bring it up because I agree with every last syllable of it, or in other words, he's not telling me something I don't know, rather, reminding me of something I've always known and can't help knowing.

The technical term is anamnesis. 

Whatever, and my term is common nonsense, because it is simultaneously transcendent and invisible while being the most experience-near bobservational experience I can imagine:

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

Boom: we've arrived at our First Principle, or even F-F-First... whatever, since it's not yet bifurcated into any distinct subject and object, rather, just IS. 

We might say Being Is, but that's already the first consequence. But in any event, this neither seals us in solipsism nor artificially encloses us in some Kantian membrain, but is simply the most objective description conceivable.

As we always say, much of revelation is but metaphysical poetry, or Cosmic Truth rendered via mythopoiesis, and it doesn't get more true than what truly amounts to the ULTIMATE humblebrag (or Good News / Bad News, Woo Hoo! / D'oh!), which is that 1) we are in the image and likeness of the Creator, BUT 2) are f-f-fallen or something, just like HCE. 

I'd like to continue with Schuon's essay, but I suspect that's enough stammering for one morning. And if it's all too complicated for you, here's a visual aid:

This is Nihilism, There are Rules!

Yesterday's post made the ridiculous connection between the suicide of Bud Light and the deicide of Nietzsche, but more problematically, promised to continue the discussion tomorrow. 

Well, tomorrow has arrived, so we face a crossroads: discretely change the subject, or double down?

I see that you too like to live dangerously.

Thaaaat's right, Petey, we get a thrill out of blogging without a net, a plan, a goal, or an audience. Having any one of these would render me self-conscious, and the latter in particular would freeze my fingers in their tracks, depriving them of all limberness.

So yeah, let's talk about that cabbage-eating son of a bitch.

Eberhard Anheuser? Or Adolphus Busch?

No, we're done with Budweiser. I was thinking of Nietzsche. How did he become so popular? What's the appeal?

Now, in order to answer that question, I have only to take a deep dive into my own past, for I myself once dabbled with nihilism.

This was back when I began dabbling with philosophy, and was so new to dabbling that I had no way of knowing that, whatever Nietzsche is, he is the antonym of "philosopher." This is not an insult to Nietzsche, rather, Nietzsche is an insult to philosophy. Not for nothing did he refer to himself as Das Hammer.  

Back in the day, the scope of my philosophical endeavors was roughly 6' by 6', which was the size of the philosophy department of B. Dalton Books. There you could find everything from Aristotle to Zarathustra, but I began my quest chronologically, not alphabetically, so naturally I began with the latter. 

That's quite enough gnostalgia, and besides, you've told some version of this story a million times. 

True, but maybe I have a different point this time. For example, supposing one wishes to dive into philosophy, exactly where does one begin? Every other discipline has an object of study: for biology, living organisms, for history, the past, for psychology, the mind, etc. What is the object of philosophy?

Today I would say Being. Back then I have no idea what I would have said. 

What is a philosopher? Defined literally, it is someone who disagrees with other philosophers. Again, being that I assumed philosophy progressed like (or perhaps with) science, a Nietzsche was superior, since he hammered everyone who came before, whereas Aristotle didn't know about Nietzsche, nor about modern science. 

The problem with nihilism is that it's a jealous god, and once you accept its premises, there are no longer any premises, and it doesn't matter anyway. Still, you can learn a lot from a strict nihilist, for what is a bad man but a good man's teacher?

Hunter Biden?

Now, every philosophy must have an object and a method. But guess what? Ironically, every philosopher deploys the identical method, which implies that they are actually dealing with the same object, even if they deny it. What do I mean by this?

Well, what is the one thing that Plato, Aquinas, and Nietzsche have in common? 

Not exactly lightweights?

Guess again.

They could all be found at B. Dalton Booksellers?

Yes, but more fundamentally, they all wrote. Now, why did they write? Why does anyone write? To communicate with others (or to deceive, but communicating a lie is still communication).

But why communicate? And more to the point, what is communication, and how is it even possible? In what sort of cosmos (for it must be a cosmos and not a chaosmos) is communication possible? It is between subjects, but what is a subject, and by virtue of what principle is the conscious subject possible?

Any philosophy short of Bob's philosophy simply assumes these things and gets on with the philosophizin'. Only Bob's philosophy begins with the eternal question: How in the wide world of sports is Bob even possible? 

And once you've sorted that one out, how is Bob communicating his thoughts to you at this moment, or even having thoughts? What's a thought? And since Bob would never lie to his readers, what is a true thought?

Now, every philosopher short of a consistent nihilist like Nietzsche spends his life unproblematically formulating and transmitting his thoughts to others. But that is not only a problem, it's pretty close to the first problem, for how are these things possible?

Nietzsche could never provide a coherent answer, for it would equate to the affirmation that This sentence has no meaning, so nihilism annihilates itself with its first utterance, assuming the utterance is true and is addressed to someone who understands it.

I get it.

God is Dead, Bud is Deader

In an article on the Drag Queen of Beers, the author properly and dispassionately characterizes the whole QWERTY+ movement as "an ideology built around a mental illness." One look at their cringey spokesfreak, Dylan Mulvaney, confirms the diagnosis. Nevertheless.

What does it all mean? Not vis-a-vis the stupid daily news cycle, but in the context of total reality, and for all time? That's why I'm here: to answer such questions, or at least circumnavelgaze them and bleat around the Busch. Let others describe the surface phenomena. We want to drill down to the noumenal center of this madness.

Now, to even call it madness presupposes normality, and with this we're off to the erasure of reality. For to say normality is to say form, or standard, prototype, norm, and ideal; it is a kind of "absolutism," since it posits an absolute telos to which the human being at once strives for and by which it may be measured. Failure exists, and it is failure to actualize the latent form.

Which we all fail to do as a condition of existence. You could call it sin, or you could call it "not being God." Prior to postmodern madness, pretty much everyone could agree that "there's an Absolute, and I'm not it." 

And it is madness -- literally -- because to remove the standard isn't just a passive negation, but rather, an active affirmation of.... anything and everything: no standard means no standard.

Except that everywhere and everywhen, man is man, so there is always a standard. Thus, for example, for the mentally ill, the mentally ill Dylan Mulvaney is an in-your-face standard of mental wellbeing. Not only is the image meant to flatter the abnormal (and perhaps more importantly, to signal virtue and status to the image makers), it's intended to insult the normal.

Message received. 

Standards are also enforced, and people are penalized or punished for failing to adhere to them.

Message received.

But again, let's widen this out and connect it with modern philosophy as such -- to Socrates' Children. We can't cover all the children, since there are 28 of them, and a handful are even normal, such as Norris Clarke and G.K. Chesterton. 

A few are just pernicious fools -- Comte and Dewey come to mind -- but five in particular stand out as truly malevolent. Indeed to call them merely mentally ill is to give them a kind of pass on their malevolence, as if they couldn't help being such assouls.

Nietzsche is patient zero of postmodernity, but he is at least entertaining, plus he took seriously the implications of the death of God. Killing the Absolute is not only a Big Deal, it's the biggest possible deal. 

Our small-minded contemporary atheists such as Dawkins and Harris imagine they're courageous truth-tellers, forgetting that they spout their nonsense from within a Christian civilization that still -- albeit barely -- values courage and truth. They're living on the fumes of Christian metaphysics but don't know it.  

But if you do manage to kill God, where does this leave you? Again, credit to Nietzsche for not drawing back from the abyss, and for having the courage of his lack of convictions. For as Kreeft implies, it's a bit like imagining what the solar system is like after the sun goes dark. What solar system? What light? What imagination?

A big part of the problem is the historical detachment of theology from philosophy, and philosophy from science. 

In reality, we live in a hierarchical cosmos that descends from Principle above to manifestation below, but the Protestant revolution shattered this unity, clearing the field for the reduction of intelligence to horizontal scientism. For the doctrine of total depravity equally means total stupidity, which is why this view of the world is much closer to retail Islam than it is to wholesoul Aquinas. 

Granted, most evangelicals deny the principles on which it is founded, and who could blame them? Free will exists, the world is intelligible to our reason, and we can grow toward -- or flee from -- the spiritual archetype alluded to above, AKA metacosmic normality.

It seems to me that Neitzsche is just the shadow of a Calvin, for both are equally absurd. In eliminating God, Neitzsche jettisons the logos, which is 

no less than "the nature of things" or "the order of being." Really, for Nietzsche, there is no being. There is only becoming. And there is no truth. There is only lying. Language and reason are inherently self-deceptive. Words are hypocritical masks painted on the face of the Will to Power.

Again, credit to Fred for following his convictions all the way to the insane asylum. Of course, today he'd be offered an endorsement deal for Budweiser, but here again, he would have had utter contempt for such an effort to co-opt and market the terrible truth that God is dead and that we have killed him.  

Short morning, so to be continued...

Think About What You'd Think About!

Think about what you'd think about if thinking were limited to the thinkers covered in this survey of modern thinkers, volume IV of Socrates' Children.

Socrates not only denies paternity, he demands a DNA test!

Petey, I reckon you know a lot about cyberspace. You ever come across anything like time travel? 'Cause sometimes I think I should have majored in philosophy. Back in '82, when I had all my brain cells, I'd have been a champion philosopher. No doubt. No doubt in my mind.

Granted, you have all the skills to be a modern philosopher: self-absorption, self-importance, solipsism, sanctimony, snobbery, superciliousness, and that's just some of the s-

Very funny. I suppose one of the most important points is that 1) all the thinking in the world only gets one so far in the absence of a certain "x-factor,"and that 2) in the end, this factor is more or less everything. 

Speaking of qualifications, in addition to intrinsic mental capacity or raw candle power, there is the good will (i.e., rigorous intellectual honesty) that is a necessary condition, while the sufficient condition is a vertilizing grace which is by definition extrinsic to oneself, and which requires its own qualifications, e.g., humility, surrender, and cooperation. 

You will have noticed that in our Age of Stupidity, "the intellect is atrophied to the point of being reduced to a mere virtuality" (Schuon). This is in contrast to pure intelligence of the intellect, which "immensely surpasses thought." 

But as far as I know, there is no acknowledgement of this elementary principle in the Land of Tenure, and one can well understand why, if you've heard the old story about the Professor's New Clothes. To put it another way, only when the tide of unreality goes out do you discover who's been philosophizing naked.

For example, biology is real, but is presently being obscured by a high tide of subrational gender ideology. This explains how Lia Thomas can swim in it. 

They say this whole postmodern fiasco starts with Descartes' little remark that I think, therefore I am. 

First of all, this gives waaaaay too much credit to philosophy, but there is truth in it, in the sense that this is one of the possibilities of human nature. If you add Descartes' methodical doubt of the self-evident to Kant's reduction of the world to our own subjective categories, that's more than enough to inspire centuries of mischief.

Here's how Schuon summarizes our situation:

all anti-intellectual philosophy falls into this trap: it claims, for example, that there is only the subjective and the relative, without taking account of the fact that this is an assertion which, as such, is valid only on condition that it is itself neither subjective nor relative, for otherwise there would no longer be any difference between correct perception and illusion, or between truth and error. 

.... if everything is relative -- in a sense which excludes all reflection of absoluteness in the world -- then the definition of relativity is equally relative, absolutely relative, and our definition has no meaning. Relativists of all kinds -- the "existentialist" and "vitalist" defenders of the infra-rational -- have then no excuse for their bad habits of thought. Those who would dig a grave for the intelligence do not escape this fatal contradiction.

By the way, I've looked into it, and the time machine is a piece of crap, it doesn't work.

What's the Big Idea?

File under bad news / good news:

Nothing is more dangerous for faith than to frequent the company of believers. The unbeliever restores our faith.

Okay, with this in mind, as mentioned in the previous post, I've been reading volume IV of Kreeft's 1,000+ page survey of philosophy, this one covering contemporary philosophers, mostly from the 20th century. 

It's the most depressing slog I've slogged through in I don't know how long. No wonder progressives are so unhappy. Who wouldn't be? It's like touring a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.

Hell is any place from which God is absent.

Yes, of course. And

Each one sees in the world only what he deserves to see.

Imagine smelling what the left sees! There's not a big enough state to undo that.

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

True, but must they punish us as well?

If the leftist is not persecuting, he feels persecuted.

Most of the guys covered in the book (they're all men) were miserable specimens of humanity, and about this, Nietzsche did get at least one Big Thing right -- that most philosophy is but an unwitting form of autobiography: "In the end one experiences only oneself." And 

I have come to realize what every great philosophy up to now has been: the personal confession of its originator, a type of involuntary and unaware memoirs. 

True enough, but speak for yoursoph, Fred. 

Moreover, there are great and small souls, not to mention vertically open and closed ones. If objectivity does not exist, then we're done here; likewise Truth. Why would you write one more word if there is neither truth nor objectivity? Just get on with the sacking and burning, the taxing and spending, i.e., the Will to Power.

Could it be that even Nietzsche didn't believe his own bullshit? Problem is the Nazis most certainly did. On the one hand you can't blame the thinker for what other people do with his thoughts, and besides, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint!

Our narrator mentions the truism that "Most philosophers have one Big Idea that is central to all their ample and diverse writing." 

This got me to wondering about my own a. and d. writings, and whether someone will someday come along and say, "Oh yes, Gagdad. Of course, everything he wrote was reducible to x. He just couldn't stop himself from writing about x in so many ways. Tedious, really."

Okay Mr. Future, but what is x? 

No, seriously. Because if I could figure that out, I could address it directly instead of being so elliptical.

Maybe there is no other way -- you know, orbiting the Mystery. 

Best I can do?

At least until the day you go full Thomas and the straw goes up in flames.

Call it the Joy of X, I guess.

The honest philosophy does not pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery.

I never explain, I only circum-scribe, i.e, speak in circles, is that it? Or is the scribe the circle?

False dichotomy.

A little more circumspect, please. Don't presume to circumscribe my circumlocutions!

Someone has to do it.

Let's get back to circumnavigating these atheistic scribes. 

It is easy to convert to a doctrine when we hear a defender of the opposite.

That's for sure.

Now, speaking of Big Ideas, what is the Big Idea of this book? That's kind of a trick question, since it covers 28 thinkers, each presumably with his own Big Idea. 

A last section covers five neo-Thomists, but excluding them, the majority are atheists. I don' know if the greatest ones are atheists, but certainly the loudest ones are.

And atheism is the biggest and loudest idea of the 20th and 21st centuries.

And now it all comes into focus: Implications of Godlessness. And it is at once depressing -- not to mention perverse, destructive, shallow, narrow-minded -- because

The death of God is a report given by the devil, who knows very well that the report is false.

And vis-a-vis Nietzsche and Sartre in particular,

Militant irreligion gradually transforms the one possessed into a simple imbecile convulsed by hatred.

But karma has a way of coming back and biting you in the ass:

Unbelief is not a sin but a punishment.

Arriving at God Via a Process of Illumination

Eh, just a short post because I'd rather write about something else.

The Divine Project. That's the name of this recently published book by Ratzinger, consisting of six lectures given in 1985 on the subject of "God the Creator and of man as this Creator's masterpiece." 

Masterpiece. Which leads directly to the question: Who goofed?  

Everybody everywhere every time? 

Which reminds me of the book I was reading yesterday called Socrates' Children by Peter Kreeft -- specifically, volume 4, covering "contemporary philosophers." In philosophy "contemporary" means the last couple hundred years, so it starts with Kierkrgaard. 

On the other hand, contemporary could mean anything after Plato. Or rather, Plato himself.  

Why, you may ask, am I reading such a basic survey? I can think of several reasons, but I won't burden you with them. One good reason is that these people are so obnoxious, or so shallow (albeit deeply shallow), or so tedious, or such poor writers, that I'd rather outsource the work to someone else.  

The most obnoxious is, of course, Nietzsche, who is pretty much the Don Rickles of philosophy. He even boasts of philosophizing "with a hammer," but in the end he turned out to be the anvil. 

Like the deconstructionists he inspired, if you take Nietzsche seriously, you can't possibly take him seriously. Unless you are fundamentally unserious, you hockey puck.

I remember reading him back when I literally knew nothing. I've mentioned before that when I began reading philosophy I started with recent ones like Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, Bergson, Russell, etc., on the assumption that philosophy progressed like science, so the most recent must be inherently superior. 

Yes, that is how stupid I was.

Aside from morbid curiosity, there is simply no reason to read Nietzsche as a philosopher after he blows off the will to truth -- AKA our innate epistemophilia, adequation to the real, and consciousness of the Absolute -- and asks Hey, why not rather untruth? 

I guess this appeals to an adolescent who knows nothing, because it instantly puts him on the same plane as the people who do know something. This is precisely how contemporary tenuroids are so superior to dullards like Shakespeare and Aquinas. 

Anyway, I thought I might go through these thinkers one by one and show their Big Mistake, i.e., exactly where they go off the rails. Through this process of elimination I would then show the truth of Christianity. Who is the Last Man Standing -- the One who laughs last? The answer may surprise you! 

I was even going to call it A Process of Illumination, but I'm already sick of the idea. Let the dead bury the tenured. 

Back to Ratzinger. The first lecture is called Image and Truth, and in reading it the thought occurred to me that we're back to right and left brain, respectively. 

Obviously, the OT in particular is quite provocative with images, for example, in Genesis, which no serious thinker ever took literally until modern unserious fundamentalism. "Since the beginning of Christianity,"

it was already, from a scientific point of view, more or less outdated. It embodied a different way of viewing the world from one that was common and accepted.

Definitely not an invalid way, just not a left-brained way. Rather, it is a kind of knowledge that renders "deeper, true realities accessible to man":

one has to distinguish between the form of presentation and the content being presented.... only this reality, that shines forth through the images, is truly enduring.   

Schuon often talks about how big-box religious retailers must speak to the common man and the average mentality, not to the metaphysician. But with a handful of principles, the metaphysician is easily able to unpack the timeless symbolism present in these narratives. 

"The danger confronting those of us who live in technological civilizations is that we have cut ourselves off from this primordial knowledge" due to the cerebral eclispe mentioned in yesterday's post. People are on the one hand "literate," but literally illiterate in the sense that they no longer know how to comprehend a symbolically resonant text. 

Today there is a dead body in the tomb. Tomorrow the tomb will be empty. Who died? Where is this tomb? 

Asked the deathbound, left-brained ego. 

The Perennial Pslackology

Last night I dreamt that I wrote, or was writing, a post called The Perennial Pslackology. So I guess dreams do come true, or at least we're about to find out.

What prompted this dream? I don't normally think about psychology any longer. Must be because last night I ordered a copy of McGilchrist's ginormous The Matter With Things, and he's a psychiatrist. 

I was skimming the preview on amazon, trying to determine whether any book is worth $85, and whether its entire thesis is beneath and behind us, or rather, if it might expand and complement our perspective. 

Almost everything and everyone has a narrower perspective than we do, so that's the concern. These Others may say things that are true on their own level and within a certain framework, but they take their framework for the framework. Which has been an understandable temptation ever since Genesis 3.

Speaking of which, yesterday I read a short book by Ratzinger called The Divine Project, containing some recently discovered lectures on the subject of creation, which is pretty much the largest conceivable subject. All other subjects are number two or lower, on the assumption that Creator and creation are not separately thinkable. After all, a Creator without creation is like a Father without a Son. Sad! 

The other reason I dreamt about psychology may be because I reread Norris Clarke's little book called Person and Being, one of our favorites. Now, it turns out that "person-and-being" is really just another way of saying "Creator-and-creation" (or creativity) and the relation between the two. 

And if there's one concept I retain from my former career as a psychologist, it's this principle of relation. Humanly speaking it is everything, for an "unrelated human" isn't one. It's not thinkable, whether we're talking about a baby born just now or the very first Homo who lifted his head and looked around 50,000 years ago and said WTF?!     

Problem is, "relation" is a tricksy concept, easy to over- or underlook, or to just assume. But it's not some accidental property, rather, absolutely essential, which -- in my opinion -- is precisely why God goes to all the trouble and expense of revealing it to us again this weekend. 

After all, any minimally sentient and curious primate (barring tenure) is able to arrive at the First Principle, the Unmoved Mover and Uncaused Cause. But to understand that this Being is irreducible substance-in-relation.... Well, this requires a little vertical assistance, AKA revelation, whether direct or indirect.

Coincidentally, Clarke quotes Ratzinger on the subject:

In the relational notion of person developed within the theology of the Trinity... lies concealed a revolution in man's view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid mode of reality (emphasis mine).

Perhaps you already understand just how revolutionary, but it's a rather big deal, and here is where I think McGilchrist can contribute, because relation is something apprehended via the right cerebral hemisphere. 

But modernity has resulted in a kind of cerebral eclipse, such that the left brain has become hypertrophied to the detriment of the right. Again, this is a simplistic way of conceptualizing it, but close enough for blogging.

Whatever the cause, this whole idea of substance-in-relation seems difficult for folks to grasp instead of being the most obvious thing. Once heard, it should ring every bell in your cabeza instead of eliciting the bovine stare.

The bottom line is that God is not substance, nor the relation between, but substance-in-relation. Once seen, it can never be unseen: "To be fully is to be substance-in-relation" (Clarke).

If you're the sentimental type you could even call this luv, but it is also knowledge and beauty, and even their very possibility. Each of these categories is an adeqation, which is why knowledge of anything is knowledge of and in God. Barring tenure, of course. 

It is also why, in the words of the Aphorist, 

Every genuine work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.

Think about Homo sapiens, who are (not is!) the image and likeness of the Principle. 

No, seriously, think about it. Or, if that's too hard, just look at that wall over there. Notice that the wall is related to you. But you are not related to the wall. Walls are not related to anything. They're just walls. Especially if they're tenured.

Relationality is not somehow accidental to the human condition, but absolutely essential: no relationality, no human, simple as. 

Nor is this merely "external relations," like billiard balls, or walls in the university. Rather, we're talking about interiority and irreducible intersubjectivity, which is just about the queerest thing imagineable in a heretofore "objective" universe. 

In other words, roughly 13.8 billion years of objects flying around and then boom, intersubjectivity.

You're damn right WTF?!

Put it this way: if you don't say WTF?!, you're just wrong, or possibly autistic. Or tenured, of course.

Do we even have time to dive into The Divine Project, or is that enough for one morning? 

Understood. We'll get to it tomorrow, unless the Dreamer has other ideas.

Like a River that Can't Find the Sea

Continuing our round trip of the cosmos, Thomas writes that

The whole of the divine work finds its culmination in the fact that man, the last creature created, returns to his source by a kind of circle, when through the work of the Incarnation he finds himself united to the very source of things.

As they say, first in the order of intention is last in the order of execution. 

Speaking of orders, Thomas casually places our ontological circularity in the order of "fact." And since it's a brute fact, I suppose it's up to us to trace the consequences. 

The first consequence that comes to mind is that we are all situated somewhere on the circle, whether or not we acknowledge the fact of the circle.

Thomas raises another point -- and implies another -- in that if Christ completes the circle, then the circle isn't a circle in the absence of Christ.  

Of course, much depends on what we mean by "Christ," for I have other sheep that are not of this fold.

One also thinks of St. Augustine's gag to the effect that That which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist, not forgetting the old wheeze that God becomes man that man might become God. 

Schuon also has some far-out thoughts about the metacosmic Christ, so to speak:

Christ is the Intellect of microcosms as well as that of the macrocosm. He is then the Intellect in us as well as the Intellect in the Universe and a fortiori in God; in this sense, it can be said that there is no truth nor wisdom that does not come from Christ, and this is evidently independent of all consideration of time and place. 

Evidently. 

And,  

Just as "the Light shines in the darkness; and the darkness did not comprehend it," so too the Intellect shines in the darkness of passions and illusions. 

I could bend those into a minimally orthodox interpretation, but the deeper point is that "Christ" is big, it's the cosmos that got small. 

In other words, a more expansive apprehension of the total cosmic ecology, or pneumosphere, brings with it a "larger" conception of God. Which still won't be large enough. Nor queer enough, of course.

Back to the circle, it seems that man can't help looking at life this way, even if life is reduced to a horizontal circle. I was thinking about this the other day, at the funeral for my aunt-in-law. She planned the whole thing out to the last detail -- she didn't want any surprises -- and chose an OB-GYN friend to be the master of ceremonies. 

I thought to myself, How ironic that a man who spends his days bringing people into the world is now ushering one out. 

As the body was lowered into the ground -- which man has been doing since he elbowed ahead of the animals -- I recalled that this is how primordial man conceptualized the circle, i.e., from-and-back to Mother Earth. 

Some people say that this was the point of those underground cave paintings -- as if one could descend into the womb of nature and ensure its fecundity by repopulating it with symbolic images. 

The question is, why don't modern climate cultists do the same thing by painting ice and snow on the walls? It would be just as effective as $6 gas in California.

History: if not for some kind of Christ-principle, where is it going, anyway? 

I don't see how it can be going anywhere but nowhere. To paraphrase Jobim again, we'd be running and searching for God like a river that can't find the sea.

And that would be SAD.

All Roads Lead To and From O

We're still pondering the ins & outs of having a complementary pair of cerebral hemispheres, and what this tells us about the cosmos. 

To put it analogously, left brain is to horizontal as is right to vertical -- this being the case however we construe the neurology. In other words, the important point is the two ways of knowing, and the two worlds they know, not their basis in brain anatomy. 

Conversely, angels don't need bilateral brains because they don't need brains at all. Rather, they penetrate directly to the essence without any need of mediation, so it is as if they have access to a form of knowing that combines left and right, or more likely, that our form(s) of knowing is the bifurcation of a prior unity. 

Indeed, if we proceed all the way up, there is a timeless unity of intellect, will, and everything else in a way we can't conceptualize, precisely because we know via the mediation of concepts. Help us out here, Thomas!

 "Angels"

possess perfect knowledge of intelligible truth, [and] have no need to advance from one thing to another, but apprehend the truth simply and without mental discussion.

End of discussion, for this is true whatever you call them and irrespective of whether or not they exist. We say this because once you understand what man is, and therefore who God is, you have posited a vertical hierarchy that necessitates these angelic links on pain of absurdity.

I am somebody.

Yes you are, minus the body.

I am nobody.

Correct: I am somebody. To be precise,

It seems that the soul does not differ from an angel except in its union with the body.... The body is not of the essence of the soul; but the soul by the nature of its essence can be united to a body, so that, properly speaking, not the soul alone, but the composite, is the species. 

And the very fact that the soul in a certain way requires the body for its operation, proves that the soul is endowed with a grade of intellectuality inferior to that of the angel, who is not united to a body.

Ha ha (Muntz).

Now, if man has prerogatives, they are all functions, so to speak, of the Prerogative, AKA the Prime Vertical Directive:

It is often argued, in a theological climate, that the human intellect is too weak to know God; now the reason for being of the intellect is precisely this knowledge, indirect and indicative in a certain respect, and direct and unitive in another (Schuon, emphasis mine). 

Left and right, rational and mystical, human and angelic, respectively. We only know about angelic intelligence because we partake of it in an analogous way. 

Now,

Each of the prerogatives of the human state, being in its own way a cosmos, comprises two poles, an active and a passive, or a dynamic and a static (ibid).

And we may trace this complementarity all the way up and into God, who is the "motionless mover," or the transcendent Center whose immanent Periphery is everywhere, or the Son who has been proceeding from the Father since timelessness out of mind. 

Thus, in our intelligence we see the "discernment and contemplation" or "analysis and synthesis" of what some folks attribute to left and right cerebral hemispheres, which is to reverse cause and effect, but that's okay. 

For again, if you want to travel with me all the way up to God, well, first of all, we're not going anywhere without Thomas, who holds that 

creation -- the emergence of creatures from God, the first principle -- finds its explanation in the fact that even in God there is an "emergence from the Principle," namely the procession of the Word from the Father (Torrell).

Damn right it's a circular argument:

Thomas's thought is itself profoundly impregnated with this circular vision of the world, to such an extent that he does not hesitate to say that "circular movement is the most perfect of all because it produces a return to the beginning. In order that the universe may attain to its final perfection, it must therefore return to its beginning" (ibid).

On the left (Aristotelian) hand, "all men by nature desire to know." On the right (bi-logical) hand, man is the only being "capable of a complete return to its source," AKA beautitude." All truths are emanations of the True, just as all goods are prolongations of the Good.

Help us out here, Thomas!

Although they find themselves in a dispersed state in all creation, these goods are gathered together in man, for he is a kind of horizon, the limit where bodily and spiritual nature meet (if I may be so bold).

Now, who is that spirals down the celestial firepole on wings of slack, seizes the wheel of the cosmic bus, and abides in a bewilderness adventure of higher nondoodling while careening right over the subjective horizon?

Being a kind of midpoint, he participates in both spiritual and temporal goods.... That is why when human nature was reunited with God through the mystery of the Incarnation, all the rivers of natural goods returned to their source

And all the roads end and begin in Celestial Central:

Whose New Testavus for the Restavus blows the locked doors of the empyrean off their rusty old hinges and sheds a beam of intense darkness on the world enigma? Who is the Biggest Fakir of the Vertical Church of God Knows What, channeling the roaring torrent of O into the feeble stream of cyberspace?

Talk about a short bus.

The Patterned Transrationality of the Trinity

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I'm reading this 400 page book on the Trinity called  Catholic Dogmatic Theology: A Synthesis, by Jean-Herve Nicolas.

I'm about three-fourths of the way through, and it is a good illustration of what happens when you try to analyze with the "left brain" what can really only be approached via the "right." 

(I put these in quotes for reasons alluded to yesterday, because any neurology is a function of ontology, AKA the real nature of things, which is to say, vertical & horizontal, celestial & terrestrial, transcendent & immanent, time & eternity, Hope & Crosby, boxers & briefs, et al.)

Two words: boxer briefs.

Correct you are, my discarnate friend. In short, we must never forget that the so-called complementarity principle applies to much more than wave-particle.

Wavicle.

Thaaat's right, Pedro. Thinking of the Godhead as a wavicle solves so many problems that truly, I want to slap my mama.

Say, can you do that for me? She hasn't been here for 30 years.

Sure, right after I kick Stalin in the nuts.

I don't usually prepare for a post, but last night I reviewed an essay by Norris Clarke called To Be Is to Be Substance-in-Relation, because this guy not only speaks for me, but is decidedly my kind of guy. Again, his approach solves so many theological conundrums with just a little tweak of the neuro-pneumatology. 

It also makes me wonder if the same idea is expressed differently in Bomford's The The Symmetry of God. Let us check, and even see if we might synthesize the two into a mega-complementarity. 

No index, so I'll have to flip. Ah, here we go: there's something on p. 128. Let's hope it fulfills expectations.

He notes that a raw description of the Trinity is "profoundly paradoxical," because how can one be three and vice versa? Anyone with a bare acquaintance with the everyday asymmetrical reasoning of Aristotle will rightly say, Nah brah, that is repugnant to logic.

Yes, but strange things are afoot in the Godhead, which calls for a strange logic:

Ontology failed to make rational what the doctrine of the Trinity asserted, that there could be absolutely and completely one, and yet be distinctly, also, three.  

Symmetric logic, however, has no difficulty with this problem whatever: indeed it is apt to impose such "amalgamations," even when the factual evidence denies it (emphasis mine).

What he means is that since humans by nature have access to a complementary form of logic, there will be a sense in which we cannot help seeing God in a trinitarian way (not necessarily literally, more on which later).

I was thinking last night that there are some additional conceptual tools that can help us penetrate the Trinity; we've mentioned complementarity and the bi-logic of symmetry + asymmetry, to which I would add intersubjectivity and fractal geometry. 

Regarding the former, note that in the immanent Trinity, 

Each person wholly indwells each other, and each is indwelt by each other. Thus between each pair within the Trinity the symmetric law of reflection is dominant, save only for "begetting" and "proceeding" [and begotten].

To say that each indwells the other is to say irreducible intersubjectivity. And to ask how God could be intersubjective is the wrong question, brah. 

Rather, how could he not be? For 1) human beings are irreducibly intersubjective or they are not human beings, 2) intersubjectivity is a perfection, not a privation, 3) man is the I. and L. of the Creator, so 4) this perfection must be eminently present in him.

As for the patterned transrationality of fractals, a thousand pictures are worth more than a single post, that last one even suggesting Incarnation or something (e.g., God's energies):

Waiting for the Rabbit to Come Out of the Book Hole

As I've said on many occasions, I suspect we are equipped with left and right cerebral hemispheres that process reality in different ways because they are essentially adequations to the horizontal and vertical, respectively. 

Just as math isn't a substitute for music, a well-oiled right brain knows things the left can't even dream of. 

For one thing, dreaming itself is a very right-brainish thing, in the sense that it is nonlinear and transtemporal: symmetrical logic is like the velvet moon that shares your pillow and watches while you sleep, where Aristotelian logic takes over as the morning sun slowly rises and kisses you awake.

If Serdio Mendes is correct.

Speaking of which, I still haven't gotten to The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. Maybe later this month when the amazon points come in. But it looks like McGilchrist spends 1,500 pages saying what I just said up there (https://www.amazon.com/Matter-Things-Brains-Delusions-Unmaking-ebook/dp/B09KY5B3QL/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&coliid=IBYHAUGI60FY9&colid=1M0Z9KRTC1IB&qid=&sr=).

Like anyone could know that without reading the book.

Fair enough. Besides, if I'm going to spend $75 on a book, it had better tell me something I don't know. 

It is impossible to imagine Schuon writing a 1,500 page book. The man was concise, partly because he never abused the reader by "thinking out loud." 

Rather, everything was thought through beforehand: analyzed, synthesized, and even aestheticized, since he was always mindful that the manner of expression must reflect the loftiness of the subject matter.  

Also, importantly, although he never wrote in the first person, you had better believe that everything he says is filtered through the first person, i.e., rooted in experience. Now, one can say his experiences are delusory or deceptive -- as is true of any mystical experience -- but you can't say he didn't undergo them.

Which then comes down to trust, or rather, to the eternal question: This guy -- is this my kind of guy? This is a question one must always ask, from, say, Christ at one end to Bob at the other. I am frankly surprised that I am anyone's kind of guy, and I could prove the point if I had a site meter. 

Anyway, everything we've said so far was provoked by the following passage:

The human being, when defined or described according to the principle of duality, is divided into an outward man and an inward man; one being sensorial-cerebral and terrestrial, and the other intellective-cardiac and celestial (Schuon). 

Again "left and right brain" are just crude ways of talking about this. To put it another way, our neurological layout is a necessary but not sufficient condition for undergoing vertical (intellective-cardiac, or celelestial/vertical) perception and experience.

Importantly, both modes require training. And you could say that a religious practice is this vertical training, precisely, very much like aesthetic training. 

For example, one doesn't write a song in computer code with the left brain, or Bill Gates would be an artist or holy man instead of a wholly cretinous man.

Speaking of which, there's an amusing passage in Neil Young's autobiography in which he reflects on the question of where songs come from and how to catch one. Turns out it's much like trying to capture a post, although mine are not chemically aided, caffeine notwithstanding:

I have not written one song since I stopped smoking weed in January 2011, so we are currently in the midst of a great chemical experiment.

I haven't smoked pot since one time in November 1999, and before that in 1982, and neither experience was anything to write om about. 

When I write a song, it starts with a feeling. I can hear something in my head or feel it in my heart. It may be that I just picked up the guitar and mindlessly started playing. That's the way a lot of songs begin. When you do that, you are not thinking. Thinking is the worst thing for writing a song. So you just start playing and something new comes out.

Now, "Where does it come from?" Correct: the same place a post comes from:

Who cares? Just keep it and go with it. That's what I do. I never judge it. I believe it. It came as a gift when I picked up my musical instrument. The chords and melody just appeared. Now is not the time for interrogation or analysis. Now is the time to get to know the song, not change it before you even get to know it.

Common courtesy. It's very much an "other," isn't it? And yet, we would have no access to this other absent the experiential mode of encountering it: "It is like a wild animal, a living thing. Be careful not to scare it away."

Shhh. Quiet.

Songs are like rabbits and they like to come out of their holes when you're not looking, so if you stand there waiting they will just burrow down and come out somewhere far away, a new place where you can't see them. So I feel like I am standing over a song hole. That will never result in success.

Same. If I stare over a post hole, nothing will happen, or rather, just a boring and predictable post. Only if I turn off my mind and surrender to the void will I surprise myself, or rather, something (O)ther will surprise me.  

This explains why I get overwhelmed when I think about the book hole, for it's much like trying to wrangle the world's largest rabbit and bring it back from a dream, and that may require something stronger than caffeine.

Anybody ever fool around with nicotine pouches? Tucker speaks highly of them, and I suspect they contribute to the outbursts of giggling on air.