Monday, April 08, 2013

Wednesday, April 03, 2013

An Entomologist's-Eye View of Predatory Liberalism

Just finished After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy. However, there must be a Volume 2, because he left out the promising part. Rather, his description of the nature of advanced liberalism leaves little reason for optimism.

Example?

"[T]he moment the germ of liberalism is introduced into the traditional body politic, that body is doomed to death. And its death leaves Power standing alone above the brittle shell of its defunct contents."

If you've ever wondered why the state behaves so stupidly, this is why. The state is not about intelligence but about power. Which is one reason why things get worse only a little more slowly when Republicans are in charge.

In a functioning democracy -- not merely a place where "voting" takes place -- there are centers of power distributed throughout the society. But "the state is at war with the intermediary institutions of society." "All command other than its own, that is what irks Power" (Williamson).

We certainly see it in Obama, what with his attacks on the Catholic Church, private enterprise, the Boy Scouts, marriage, the family, self-defense, educational choice, etc. In each case the goal is to crush a little area of power that has the effrontery to challenge the state.

Thus, "these characteristics are entirely expectable in a pseudophilosophy emanating from a moral and intellectual delusion that fatally misconstrues reality, which it almost violently denies even as it revolts against that reality. Power is required to defy the universe..."

It takes a whole lot of energy to deny and defy reality (which is one reason why mental illness is so taxing). This would explain why the left, in order to have any power at all, pretty much needs all power.

Which is why they are so offended by the existence of, say, talk radio or FOX News. How dare they defy the herd! Likewise, one conservative truth teller in the humanities department is a major headache for the left, as is a black person who has strayed from the ideological plantation.

In addition to destroying intermediate institutions, the left must create a different kind of human being. The whole scam collapses if they can't accomplish that, hence the totalitarian temptation that is never far from leftist thought: "liberalism depends on a certain kind of human being, a type it must either create or extend, if necessary by eliminating uncooperative types" (ibid).

This is because "Liberalism is inspired by faith in a specific view of human nature to which it is irrationally wedded, a view that requires closing certain lines of enquiry on the assumption that they are beyond debate."

How, you ask, is this different from, say, the Inquisition? First, the Inquisition wasn't only an aberration, but perfectly contrary to Christian ethics. Conversely, inquisitorial tactics are essential to leftism.

Moreover, the Christian Inquisition only resulted in -- what, 5,000 deaths? whereas leftism murdered 100 million or so just in the 20th century. And this doesn't take into account the unintentional deaths resulting from, for example, the banning of DDT or the breakdown of the black family.

"Liberalism for this reason should be recognized as a new religion, a system of moral absolutes based on a denial that moral truth is knowable, which consists of nothing less than the deification of man" (ibid.)

No, it is not "ironic" that those who supposedly deify man also murder him in the tens of millions. Rather, predictable, for "Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God, another who believes he is a god" (Davila).

Leftism is ultimately an assault on the very civilizational foundations that gave birth to it. Thus the special animus for Christianity:

"The Left hates Christianity and its satellite institutions because they represent metaphysical reality, which leftists have always despised, denied, and labored tirelessly to overthrow, for the purpose of supplanting it with a synthetic version of their own construction."

The resulting spiritually and intellectually enfeebled mass men are "fit for nothing but socialism." But the state prefers such a "mass undifferentiated man because he is easier to govern." Like shoveling around bags of wet cement.

Now that I think about it, contemporary liberalism features two main types, the agitated and excitable hysteric-activist and the LoFo slugs who are manipulated by them.

Marriage -- or the sacralization of the male-female union -- is the foundation of civilization, so the left's attack on it is utterly predictable.

Someone -- I think Mark Steyn -- mentioned that the same people who have spent the last 40 years telling us that marriage is either a meaningless piece of paper or an oppressive institution now want to buy into it.

This will work out as well as their infiltration into the educational system (or into anything else, for that matter; they can't even run the Post Office, but they're qualified to redefine man). Only an omnipotent state can presume to invent marriage instead of simply recognizing it.

But progressivism continues to progress -- or metastasize, rather -- so now we are stuck with "America's first ideological president," fully equipped "with his pseudo-intellectualism and suprapolitical vision."

Such "ideological thinking" is "an infallible sign of the hopelessly immature political mind." Among other things, it "induces a false spiritualism far more damaging and dangerous than materialism itself."

Indeed, "Civilization and ideology are mutually exclusive things" (ibid).

Tuesday, April 02, 2013

Your Inside is Out when Your Outside is In

It seems to me that the world is a landscape of psychopneumatic attractors. I mean this literally, because this is literally how we experience the world. Things grab us, right? Unless you're kind of braindead, in which case maybe only journalism and other bodily functions grab you.

So, different things grab different people -- it takes all kinds to make a world, and vice versa. What is indeed so surprising is how specific the attractors can be. It is by no means obvious why the world should be built in this way. But it is strictly impossible to understand this absolutely vital phenomenon within the standard scientific paradigm.

And when I say "absolutely vital," I'm again being literal, because in a certain way, this attraction is our whole life. This thing moves us. That thing leaves us cold. This person excites. That person bores. This writer expands. That one contracts. Etc.

For example, when I think of the four great "B"s of large scale orchestral music -- Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Barry -- I have to say, I truly only "get" Barry. The others are too vulgar for me. More generally -- as you all know by now -- everything Bob does has got to be funky. Obvious when you think about it, but why?

Alexander gives the example of a particular painting. The painting attracts us. Thus, there is a relatedness that occurs between you and the painting. What is the nature of this mysterious "between?"

In the past I have discussed this in terms of "links" -- e.g., of love (L), or hate (H), or knowledge (K) -- but what are the links made of? And how did they get here?

Let's say we're particularly attracted to the blue hill in the painting. Alexander suggests that we "do not, I think, experience the bit of blue as if it were your self."

Rather, "you experience something stretching between yourself and the blue hill, something that seems to mobilize your self, stretch it out toward the bit of blue, connect with it."

Again, it's a relationship, in which the painting reaches out to us, and vice versa: "stretching between you and the blue hill, something comes into existence."

And it's not just our everyday, mundane self that is tickled. Rather, "It is as if the eternal you, the eternal part of you, your eternal self, is somehow being mobilized..."

Whatever the case may be, that's exactly what it feels like. And no theory that ignores such a central feature of our existence can be adequate. Several aphorisms come to mind:

Any theory is false that seeks to characterize as delusion what one day affected us nobly.

There is evidence that disappears along with those who deserve to perceive it.

We have reached such an extreme of ineptitude that we only believe to be real what would persist if the arts were abolished.

Each of these aphorisms goes to the idea that our (constant) experience not only doesn't deceive us, but mirrors the very structure of reality.

Yesterday we spoke of how experiences within this space -- which Winnicott called the "transitional space" -- incarnate or potentiate the substance of our being, as we assimilate them. From the article:

"Winnicott related the concept of transitional object to a more general one, transitional phenomena, which he considered to be the basis of science, religion and all of culture. Transitional objects and phenomena, he said, are neither subjective nor objective but partake of both" (emphasis mine).

Here is how Grotstein describes it: "Where Winnicott truly surpasses is in his delineation of potential or transitional space, the domain of the intermediate, the area sacred to [ortho]paradox." It "seems to correspond to the metaphor of a post-natal umbilicus, the imaginary yet concrete experienced connection between mother and infant..."

"One can picture this connection as a Moebius Strip of connected disconnectedness or of a 'Siamese twinship' in which there are two heads connected to one body. In one perspective they are invisibly connected; in another they are separate."

In the past I have in fact used the Moebius Strip or the Klein Bottle as models of reality. Why is that? Because in each case the object conveys the paradoxical idea that the inside is the outside, and the outside is the inside. This way one can preserve unity -- each object has only one side -- and yet duality -- each has two sides.

It seems to me that it is the same with the cosmos, which is why the subject is in the object, and vice versa. Yes, the Klein Bottle is a metaphor, but it is only a metaphor because metaphor is possible. And metaphor is only possible because the Cosmos is something like a Klein Bottle, in which interior and exterior, subject and object, are reflections of the same underlying reality. (BTW, it also explains why parables not only work but may be unsurpassed in their ability to link worlds.)

Posts will be shorter and shallower until this remodel business is over.... "

Monday, April 01, 2013

If You're Bored, You're Wrong

Very little time today. Chaos reigns, what with Easter vacation going on and the remodel about to commence.

I know. Tragedy. Progress in theology will be set back for at least another 24 hours.

If the world is a reflection of the Creator, then we shouldn't be surprised that it is neither a radical One -- a featureless monad -- nor a disorganized mess of a Many. Rather, we should expect to see wholeness everywhere we look.

A typical case would be DNA, each part of which contains all of the information necessary to create the whole.

More generally, we see that wholeness -- which is a state of irreducible interior relatedness of part and whole -- appears in a different way at each level of the cosmic hierarchy. On the plane of physics, for example, we see it in the phenomenon of nonlocality; in biology, the ecosystem; in man, intersubjectivity; in spirit, the Trinity.

By the way, I was pleased to discover an analogue of the Trinity in Judaism. In his excellent The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning, Rabbi Sacks writes of how in Genesis God is initially called Elohim, "a noun meaning roughly the totality of forces operating in the universe." Exterior and impersonal, as it were.

However, a little later he is called Hashem, which might be understood as "the transcendental reality of interpersonal relations," which is how and why "our experience of God mirrors our experience of other people."

The deeper point is that we are not related to the world in some superficial manner, like two objects placed side by side. That is exterior relationship. In contrast, interior relationship is an intrinsic connection, more in manner of how the parts of our body relate.

But there again, that is only a biological analogy. On the psychological -- i.e., cognitive and emotional -- planes, it means that there is a kind of endlessly extended space between any two subjects. It is obviously the case between two human beings, in which you can spend your whole life exploring and deepening that space with just one other person.

But it is also true with the non-human world, which is why there is no end to any discipline. There is no conceivable end to physics, for the same reason we'll never run out of poems or melodies.

Rather, we are assured a kind of endless harvest for the very reason that we are not God. Or, to be perfectly accurate, because 1) God is, and 2) because we are not him. You might say that this formula results in a burning bush that can never be consumed, or in a hidden source of nourishment that prevents us from ever going hungry.

For Alexander it means that "the character of this relatedness is not invented or concocted in our minds, but actual." It is the prior condition of everything.

Furthermore, the relation is always personal, but not in the impossibly atomistic manner of subreal modern science, but rather, in the retrofuturistic manner I have discussed over the previous 2,500 or so posts.

It can hardly be overemphasized that this is entirely consistent with the way we experience the world. It is not an abstraction. Rather, the problem is that, over the course of a lifetime of indoctrination, we superimpose a psychopneumatic grid of scientistic abstractions over the world, and then wonder why it has lost its savor.

Here is a hint: if you are ever bored, you are wrong. And I mean this ontologically, where there is no word for boredom. Rather, you should call it what it is: deadness, the deadness that results inevitably from being a closed system.

It is a truism that a closed system is dead, and that we die when we are no longer an open system. What is not generally understood is that openness is the prior condition, and deadness the secondary condition.

We cannot create life. Rather, we can only live or encounter it. We can, however, "create" death, so to speak. Once you recognize this, you experience signs of life -- and of death -- everywhere. You see how the left has managed to create a culture of death, or why television has all the life of a stagnant pond.

Again, Alexander is simply taking these ideas seriously and drawing out their implications in his chosen field of architecture. Thus, he writes of how it is only in connection with deeply "living things that I am fully real."

However, this life is coming from both ends of the relation, and is a mutually reinforcing and deepening spiral. He writes of how this relatedness "is the most fundamental, most vivid way in which I exist as a human being" (italics in original).

Under such naturally supernatural conditions we experience ourselves as we "truly are," that is, "a creature which is undivided and a part of everything: a small extension of a greater and infinite self."

I think this intense bond between man and cosmos accounts for the erotics of being, in which our lives consist of a kind of journey whereby (in the words of Christopher Bollas we discover our idiom, our unique soulstench, our fingerprint with no hands. We find our(prior)self through attraction to the various cultural objects, experiences, and persons we need in order to actualize it.

Well, the man with the sledgehammer is here, and it's challenging enough to do this when the walls aren't tumbling down around me. But if you search "Bollas" on the blog, you'll probably find a lot more on this subject of using the cosmos to discover yourself. Or is it the cosmos deploying you to articulate itself?

Friday, March 29, 2013

Mozart Denied Tenure for Teaching Dangerous Doctrine that Most Music is Pretty Lame

Flip. Flip. Flip.

Just flipping through The Luminous Ground to see if there's anything we need to discuss.

Here -- something about the primacy of SLACK in the Timeless Way of building.

I just looked it up, and the first answer claims that building one of those timeless cathedrals took between 25 and 600 years, proving once again that timelessness takes time.

By way of comparison, starting next week we'll be doing some major remodeling around here that will take just a couple of weeks or so. Imagine if I said to the contractor, "hey, just take all the time you need to get it right. If I -- or my grandchildren, for that matter -- don't live to see it, that's okay. God will see it."

So, think of the thousands of artists and craftsmen who worked on those things, but who never lived to see the finished product. Then again, they must have "seen" it in some sense, or they wouldn't have known how to proceed.

Anyway, Alexander writes of "the matter of pace. The essence of these works, made in a devotional atmosphere, was that the maker had time..." Actually, what he had was a timelessness that empowered him "to see wholeness and to act accordingly."

You can't see wholeness when you're being rushed. Rather, the window of time-dilation closes up, and we are exholed from the inspiraling goround of Slack. It's the same with the Timeless Way of Blogging.

For this reason, Alexander feels that the mystico-religious setting nurtured "the conditions for the perception and creation of buildings which were profoundly connected to the human self."

But again, the nature of the self and the nature of reality are one and the same thing -- or converge on the same thing, anyway -- so Alexander is suggesting that it is literally true that these works reflect the actual nature of the universe.

Which reminds me. Liberals love diversity, right? And Alexander taught at one of the most liberal universities on the planet, Cal State Berkeley. So they welcomed his ideas, right?

Well, maybe after he lawyered up. In the acknowledgements at the end of the book, he thanks his attorney, who "spent seven years helping me solve (through the protection of my first amendment rights) the nearly disastrous political problems which occurred at the University of California."

The tolerant faculty there "did their best to prevent the teaching of this material and to close my mouth..." But he expresses gratitude for their "unrelenting hostility" over some twenty years, because it confirmed in his mind that he must be on to something. Liberals only attack what they fear.

This explains why these liberals -- who express fawning admiration for such monsters as a Castro, a Chavez, an Arafat -- would regard a single architect as such a threat. It must be because he is not a relativist, but rather, someone who believes there are right and wrong ways to build.

Just as the left doesn't hate evil, but hates those who hate evil, they also hate people who hate falsehood and ugliness. Or in short, "God is the impediment to modern man" (Don Colacho's Aphorisms).

Reminds me of another A by DC: "All truths converge on the one truth, but the routes have been barricaded." And nowhere are they more heavily barricaded than in a liberal fascist university.

Back to the flipping. I remember another aphorism by Don Colacho to the effect that "the honest philosophy does not pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery."

The mystery is O. In truth we cannot circumscribe it, since it always circumscribes us. Alexander describes it as the "something" that "lies in me and beyond me." One can only live a full life -- or be alive, really -- to the extent that one circumnavelgazes or strikes an ombilical chord with this Mystery:

"[T]he essential point concerns the existence of some realm, or some entity, variously referred to as the Void, the great Self, maha-Atman, God, the Friend," such that "human life approaches its clear meaning when, and only when, a person makes contact" with it.

This is an example of the kind of "naturally supernatural" religion that can be easily proved just by paying close attention to our subjective responses to things, as halfbaked in yeasterday's loaf.

Alexander cites the example of Mozart, who "had a clear and unshakeable faith in God as a real and definite thing." His music was "written in the context of this concrete and sublime faith." Did that make it worse? If he were in the music department at UC Berkeley, would they have persecuted him for making the atonalists sound bad?

Nah. They'd probably get him for using racist and sexist stereotypes in his operas.

If we inquire as to why most modern works fail to achieve this deeper meaning, one obvious reason is that they do not try. Our secular flatland is governed by an entirely different set of values that often comes down to a meaningless "originality" for the purpose of ego inflation and other valueless prizes.

Didn't get very far today, but the Window of Slack just closed, so we're out of timelessness.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Turning Faint Signals into Cosmic Vibes

The redemption of reality is the function of the imagination. --Don Colacho's Aphorisms

So: human beings are constantly attending and responding to a spectrum of information that is somehow "embedded" in the cosmos and "radiates" outward.

Conversely, a mere animal attends only to things that have a direct bearing on survival or pleasure. A dog, for example, will just fall asleep if there are no walks or no food in the offing.

In my opinion, this capacity of ours is rooted in developmental psychology, specifically, the vicissitudes of attachment in the neurologically incomplete infant. As a result of this, our very being is intersubjective right down to the ground.

Of course, this still begs the question of how intersubjectivity could get into the cosmos to begin with. In my view, it is because ultimate reality is irreducibly trinitarian. We are members of one another because this is a reflection of the interior economy of the Godhead.

I think Alexander errs in attempting to hitch his empirical / phenomenological findings to a scientific metaphysic. I can see that by the fourth volume he begins to slip in the G-word, but it is almost in an apologetic way.

Nor does he do so in the context of any actual theology, just in a vague sort of mystical way. I'm not necessarily criticizing him, because there was a time that I might have attempted the same thing, i.e., to toss out religion and tradition but retain God (or at least the experience of this thing people have historically called "God").

The bottom line is that Alexander is often speaking of God -- or better, O -- without seeming to realize it.

For example, he describes the feeling he is looking for in an effective design: "It is some ultimate, beyond experience. When I reach for it, I try to find -- I can partly feel -- the illumination of existence, a glimpse of that ultimate. It is always the same thing at root. Yet, of course, it takes an infinite variety of forms."

This is O, as it undergoes transformation from eternity to time. Or, just say "transformation in O."

He even speaks of how the most sublime examples of what he is talking about have occurred in a mystico-religious context, but he doesn't seem to put one and one and one together -- as if there is no transhuman input (↓) going on, and that, say, the designers of Chartres just had really good taste.

Similarly, he speaks of encountering the "I" "in a work of art, or a work of nature, which makes one feel related to it." This "I" is none other than the personal / intersubjective nature of existence, as alluded to above.

We all recognize it, for the simple reason that we are persons. It is nothing that anyone needs to "prove," because the experience of it is as constant as it is unavoidable. It is never not happening, unless one is autistic, blunted, or soul-damaged in some other way.

Nevertheless, there are obviously degrees of sensitivity to it. But in any event, atheism is not something anyone can ever experience. Rather, it is a mental abstraction that can only be imagined, never lived.

What Alexander has attempted to do in his life and work -- and I'll let others decide whether he has succeeded -- is to "amplify" the sense of personhood that is provoked in these architectural encounters with O. In this regard, I don't think he's doing anything different from an expert or connoisseur in any field. It certainly pertains to the religious matters we discuss here.

I spoke of this in the book, for example, with respect to the symbol (), which stands for the sympathetic resonance that occurs between us and a more evolved human fleshlight. This resonance "amplifies" our own signal, and as we grow spiritually, we are better able to receive the signal.

In other words, the communication is occurring all the time. The limiting factor is our capacity to receive it. Alexander wants to amplify our ability to receive and create beauty.

I'm just flipping through the book page by page, so this post may be a bit disorganized.

On page 8, Alexander mentions one of his key findings, that "it is in the nature of matter, that it is soaked through with self or 'I.'"

I agree entirely, but he seems to think he can better articulate this via science than religious metaphysics. I disagree. Science is posterior to metaphysics, and I think he's falling into the very trap he decries by trying to subordinate his ideas to science.

For example, you wouldn't say God is nonlocal because the quantum world is. Rather, vice versa: the world is nonlocal because God is. Likewise, we don't say that God must be love because human beings are capable of love. Rather, we love because God does.

Alexander wants to heal the "bifurcation of nature" (into the object/subject duality) that occurred with the scientific revolution, but you don't do that by trying to force science into being something it isn't. Rather, you do so by putting everything in its proper place in the scheme of things. Obviously, science is not, and can never be, at the top.

Little time this morning. We'll leave you with another aphorism or three by Don Colacho, a cosmotherapist who finally gets me:

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

The natural and supernatural are not overlapping planes, but intertwined threads. And

The scientific proposition presents an abrupt alternative: understanding it or not understanding it. The philosophical proposition, however, is susceptible to growing insight. Finally, the religious proposition is a vertical ascent that allows one to see the same landscape from different altitudes.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Will You Please Hold For Mother Nature?

Proofs for the existence of God abound for those who do not need them. --Don Colacho's Aphorisms

Yesterday we discussed the Astonishing Hypothesis, which, it turns out, isn't so astonishing after all. Rather, it is the first principle and final consequence of scientism -- just a typical tall tale of tenured tautology.

I hate to belabor the point -- or anything else, for that matter -- but if the hypothesis is "true" then it can't be, because there is no way for us to escape the closed loop of our genetic programming. "Knowing" itself would take on an entirely different cast, because so-called knowledge would reduce to mental masturbation, i.e., the meaningless friction of neurons rubbing together.

It reminds me of a comedy bit I once heard on the radio. A man called a company about some sort of issue, and the operator put him on hold. We then hear some grunting and straining on the caller's part, and he's once again speaking to the operator. She says, "How did you get here? I just put you on hold."

"I fought my way out of hold. Now please connect me to the manager."

It goes back and forth like this, with the operator putting him back on hold and the caller struggling his way out again.

So, according to the astonishing hypothesis, Darwin has put all of us on hold. Forever. We cannot speak to the manager of this place, nor can we even get a human being on the line.

What I don't understand is how Darwin got through. How was he able to fight his way out of hold, and speak directly to Mother Nature? Is it because he's some sort of god or something? Is he magically exempt from the implications of his own theory? I guess so.

That would actually qualify as astonishing, if a single human being somehow embodied the word of God and shared it with the rest of us. But who would believe that?

You may recall my post of two days ago, Putting the Cosmos on the Couch. If not, consider yourself reminded.

In it I mentioned the evolution of psychoanalysis, from a one-person psychology to a two-person psychology. I'll try to avoid the pedantry, but by the 1940s, leading theorists began to reconceptualize the mind, and regard it as thoroughly intersubjective. In turn, this had revolutionary implications for the treatment of mental illness.

It all revolves around the concept of "counter-transference." Most of you are probably familiar with the term "transference." In the old, pre-intersubjective days, the analyst was supposed to be a "blank slate" for the patient to project his unconscious fantasies on. That's transference.

The key point is that any emotional reaction or involvement on the part of the analyst was considered a bad thing, analogous to contamination in a lab experiment. Indeed, just think of so-called "climate science." The problem with it is that its practitioners so contaminate their models and findings with subjective preferences and biases, that the science is less than worthless, i.e., harmful.

But again, the mind is not an object, so it cannot be treated as such. Not only is it a system, but an open system with interior relations to other human beings. This is what makes possible such things as love, or communication, or reading of facial expressions.

Bottom line: with the change in perspective toward intersubjectivity, counter-transference was no longer considered a "contamination," but a form of unconscious intersubjective communication. As soon as you think about it, you realize that it's a kind of truism. In any human-to-human contact, we are witness to all sorts of moment-to-moment reactions, a kind of interpersonal stream of consciousness, as it were.

Thus, nowadays a properly trained psychoanalysis doesn't dismiss his counter-transference, but uses it as primary data about the patient. Two things to bear in mind: first, the counter-transference occurs at multiple levels, from the very primitive on up.

To put it another way, a very primitive patient (i.e., one with a lot of primitive developmental issues) will evoke primitive reactions on the part of the analyst. These reactions may appear in the form of images, spontaneously recalled dream fragments, past experiences, anything.

The second point is that one doesn't just take the counter-transferential reactions at face value. Rather, one examines them in a detached way, to see how they relate to everything else about the analytic situation. For example, sometimes they are telling you about the patient, but other times they might only be telling you about yourself, and you have to try to discern the difference.

I hope this isn't getting too pedantic, but think of an everyday situation between a couple. Or just me, even. I come home from work. I felt pretty good all day, but as soon as I walk in the door, I sense a Vague Foreboding. Not necessarily a Nameless Dread, but some sort of distinct change in the emotional weather pattern.

What's going on here? Is it her? Or is it me? It seems like her, but let's not jump to conclusions. Then I'll really make a mess of things. Maybe it's something I said last night, or maybe she's just having a bad day that has nothing to do with me. Maybe I need her to be a certain way, and she's not being that way, so unconsciously I'm getting angry.

Etc. You know how it goes.

All of the above blather about counter-transference is just prelude to something I wanted to address in The Nature of Order. The way my mind works -- or doesn't work, depending on your counter-transference -- is that I'm always seeing connections in things. And what I'm seeing here is that Alexander has essentially developed a sophisticated theory of counter-transference, not just vis-a-vis our unconscious reactions to architecture, but toward the whole cosmos.

Jumping ahead a bit, you might say that, just as psychoanalysis evolved from a one-person to a two-person psychology, Alexander does the same thing with existence itself. Therefore, if Alexander is correct -- which he is -- our constant stream of interior reactions to the world is a source of objective data about the world. Yes, it is also "subjective," in that we are obviously subjects. Nevertheless, the information is objective and verifiable.

Let's go back to the question of whether or not we are forever on hold. If we are, then we have no access to valid information about the nature of reality. But if somehow -- mirabile dictu -- we are in touch with Mother, then we aren't just restricted to scientific truths, but to all sorts of interesting information.

For example, Alexander would maintain that when we look at, say, Yosemite Valley, and we exclaim to ourselves, My, what breathtaking beauty!, the beauty is a fact, not an opinion. I mean, who says it's ugly? Indeed, there is more inter-rater reliability for such an opinion than there is for most scientific questions.

Out of time. To be continued. But I'll leave you with the coonsolation prize of a couple of aphorisms of DC:

"Intuition" is the perception of the invisible, just as "perception" is the intuition of the visible. And

The subjective is what is perceived by one subject. The objective is is what is perceived by all subjects.

All normal subjects, anyway. Obama, for example, is objectively creepy. Those who disagree need therapy.

*****

Beautiful or ugly or just meh?

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

You Can't Have Your Crick and Eat it Too

The problem of pseudo-significance is strange: What do we believe we say when we say what signifies nothing? --Don Colacho's Aphorisms

About 20 years ago Francis Crick -- whom we mentioned in yesterday's post -- published a book called The Astonishing Hypothesis, to much acclaim by his benaughted coreligionists. The banal hypothesis goes like this:

"A person's mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them."

Two things. First, could I buy some pot from you? Second, a scientific hypothesis isn't just anything, but analogous to a legal argument, in which you state the conclusion and proceed to demonstrate why it is true.

But how could one ever demonstrate the truth of such a comically Astigmatic Hypothesis? (See #2.) It reminds me of that crack by Haldane:

"For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true." And if the mind can arrive at truth, then there is no reason to believe the mind is reducible to atoms, molecules, and nerve cells.

Besides, there's nothing astonishing about a human being dressing up his conclusions as arguments, his prejudices as principles. A little irony, please. Human beings engage in this fallacy all the time. BFD. We've all been to college. We know the secular drill.

On second thought, I think Crick needs some stronger pot. Or at least something to get him out of his pneumacognitive rut. Fifty years is a long time between ideas. But if the rut is genetically determined, there is no way out. Man is then reduced to a broken record, condemned to repeat the same foolish things over and over, with no contact with reality and a Nobel Prize to prove it.

I know. Astonishing. Like this aphorism by Don Colacho: "Nearly every idea is an overdrawn check that circulates until it is presented for payment." I dare you to try to convert Crick's rubber check into real money. The teller at the First Bank of Perennial Truth will just laugh at you.

I have an even more astonishing hypothesis. It actually consists of a dense network of hypotheses, each supporting the others. Furthermore, if the hypothesis is untrue, then it "unexplains" so much about the world, that reality becomes completely absurd and unintelligible. Symbolically, it reduces to O or Ø.

In plain English, the hypothesis goes like this: man is created in the image of the Absolute. This being the case, it explains how and why we, of all people -- middling relativities that we are -- nevertheless have access to a transcendent and unchanging realm of love, truth, beauty, virtue, and much more -- to everything, in fact. For to paraphrase Aristotle, "the soul is all it knows," and nothing exists that cannot be potentially known.

It reminds me of a remark by Arthur Koestler, that "The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use."

Crick and other victims of scientism especially prove the latter half of Koestler's hypothesis, for "The world is explicable from man, but man is not explicable from the world" (DC). In short, as it pertains to truth, you can't have your Crick and eat it too.

Here is an even more astonishing hypothesis, which follows from the first: ultimate reality isn't just personal, but a person (for there is no other way to have the former unless it is via the latter).

Well, there is one other way: scientistic magic. For one can only explain the higher from the lower via magic, or voodoo metaphysics. Conversely, every time the higher makes an ingression into the lower, it is a miracle, not magic.

In other words, pretty much everything is a miracle -- i.e., an instance of vertical causation -- although there are, of course, degrees of miraculousness, and with them, degrees of astonishment.

All of this leads to yet another hypothesis, this one articulated by Don Colacho: "That which is not a person is not finally anything." Do you see why?

Examining our web of hypotheses, we find another: "Love is the act that transforms its object from a thing into a person." And coming full circle (I'm paraphrasing DC here), "to love a person is to discover the reason God created him."

Put -- or pull, rather -- it all together, and what do we have? Ultimate reality is a cosmic area rug of "loving personhood." Can we prove that? Yes we can. At least to the extent that such things can be "proved." Demonstrated or lived is more like it, for this pertains to the realm of being per se, with the knowledge flowing from that.

Hmm. I never got to my main topic, which is Alexander's truly astonishing hypothesis about the personal nature of reality, and how we may tune into its frequency. Now, he's probably got some good pot. But we'll have to wait until tomorrow's post to inhale.

We'll end with a little rejoycing:

--Ore you astoneaged, jute you?

--Oye am thonthorstruck, thing mud.

(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs in this allaphbed!

Monday, March 25, 2013

Putting the Cosmos on the Couch

Is the world crazy? Or is it just you?

And if it is crazy, how could we ever know?

I'm just thinking of this essay by Roger Kimball, What Philistinism Looks Like.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

Ironic? No, not ironic. Predictable, rather. For it is written: when religion dies, it is simply replaced by something that is not religion. As a result, it doesn't really die at all, but simply takes a new and perverse form. In our day and age, the most common forms are leftism, AGW, and scientism.

Please bear in mind that these human foibles do not actually become religions, which is to say, become religions, any more than, say, a transexual actually becomes an opposite member of the contradictory gender. Rather, it is only in make believe that a man can become a woman, two men can marry, or science (and political) fiction can become a religion.

This is not to say that a real religion cannot become pathological. But a false religion is intrinsically pathological, with none of the benefits of true religion.

A case in point is this very naughty witch Thomas Nagel, who, in the words of Kimball, is the recipient of "we-now-cast-you-into-outer-darkness treatment" by his inquisitorial peers.

Yes, "the orthodox high priests of the neo-Darwinian consensus -- chaps like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins -- have read Nagel out of the fraternity of OK people for daring to question the tenets of their faith" (ibid.). You will have noticed that this is not even a parody of the Catholic faith.

Which is unfortunate, because baptized pagans such as John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Chris Matthews, and the entire Kennedy gang should be excommunicated for their open contempt of Church doctrine. To paraphrase Taranto, there's a very easy way to protest the Church. It's called becoming a Protestant.

Kimball highlights E.O. Wilson's unwise crack to the effect that "an organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA." Really? I dare him -- and the rest of the Darwinist faithful -- to have the courage of his convictions, and act on that belief. Come to think of it, that would be a very efficient way for all Darwinists to receive Darwin awards. Problem solved.

But wait a minute. Why would DNA have any convictions at all, and why should we care?

I know. The whole thing's crazy. But so is Islamism. Just because something is a fantasy, it hardly means it has no real world consequences. Hitler, for example, had some fantasies about Jews. Obama has some fantasies about economics. (I am Godwin, so I'm exempt.)

Kimball cites another wisecrock by Francis "rhymes with" Crick -- you may recall that DNA discovered him about 60 years ago, hanging around the lab -- who claimed that "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons."

Excuse me, but how the fuck do you know that? I mean, if we're just a meaningless side effect of buzzing nerve cells, then isn't it true that we couldn't even know we don't know shit?

I don't get it. Why this hatred of our humanness? It very much reminds me of the pathology of liberalism, whereby the liberal is too broadminded to take his own side in a dispute. Muslims want to murder our children? Why, they must have done something to deserve it. Oh, but don't smoke cigarettes in the same zip code as a child. Might harm them.

I'm going to assume you've read the whole piece by Kimball, but there's one more passage I need to highlight:

"The idea the Cricks and Dennetts and Dawkinses of the world wish us to take on board is that really, at bottom, our experience of ourselves and the world counts for nothing. That flowering crab apple outside your window, for example, is not really a beautiful celebration of spring, but merely an agglomeration of biological processes."

This is indeed key. I just finished reading 1,000 or so pages of text that directly refutes this crazy view of the world. I'm speaking, of course, of Alexander, who certainly has no religious agenda -- or at least, like me, didn't start out with one. Rather, he was ineluctably led in that direction by the facts of existence.

What facts are those?

That's an entirely fair question: what is a fact? It is a fact that my body is a flittering pattern of subatomic activity.

Okay.

It is a fact that the sky is blue.

Wrong.

There is no such thing as blue. What we experience as this thing you call blue is just an illusion produced by light striking the retina at a certain frequency.

Again, if you actually attempt to live in this bizarre way, you are either crazy or will soon be certifiably tenured.

I need to switch gears for a moment, but I'll try to be brief. Psychoanalysis is my racket. I mean, it's what I was actually trained in, for what it's worth. As we all know, this discipline was discovered -- or invented, if you prefer -- by Freud back in 1899. This was at the height of 19th century positivism, at a time when aberrations like determinism, reductionism, and atheism -- in short, naive materialism -- actually seemed philosophically plausible.

Being that Freud was very much a geist of that particular zeit, he conceptualized the mind in wholly mechanistic / deterministic / reductionist terms. The mind was treated as an object, which is again not even ironic, because the one thing in the world that is most certainly not an object is the subject, but whatever. Science!

These pseudo-scientific assumptions prevailed until the 1940s, when a few psychoanalytic heretics made a startling discovery: the mind is not an object, and cannot be treated as one. Rather, the mind is intersubjective, which means that we are subjectively entangled with one another. No man is an island, and all that.

But it turns out that the cosmos too is intersubjective, which is why it speaks to us of so many realities on so many levels, not just of scientific truths but aesthetic beauties and ethical values (not to mention scientific beauties, aesthetic values, and ethical truths).

I'm running short on time, and I probably shouldn't rush this along too quickly. To be continued...

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Bob and Christopher's Excellent Adventure

The question is, does reality limit reason, or does man will his own truth? To put it another way, is reason the conformity of mind to world, or is "reality" just the imposition of mind onto an otherwise unknowable world (which reduces truth to will)?

Once again we're back at the crossroads of the Kantian bifurcation of mind and world, between the knowable phenomena and the supposedly unknowable noumenon, whatever that is. Alexander's whole project involves undoing or transcending this bifurcation, because it leads to intellectual and aesthetic chaos and arbitrariness -- from the antihuman misosophies of the left to the ugly buildings of our cities, and everything in between.

Alexander endeavors to resolve this split by positing a metaphysic in which "objective reality 'out there' and our personal reality 'in here' are thoroughly connected." I couldn't agree more, and as a matter of fact, my very first published paper in 1991 was on just this subject.

Really, Bob? Yes, I think so. But it's been 22 years. Better verify that claim.

Let's see. Each moment -- both objectively and subjectively -- is "a translation, or unfolding, of a primordial and multidimensional reality into the more familiar three-dimensions-plus-time modality." Looked at this way, the world is a sort perpetual movement from infinite to finite, or, as we prefer to say, from O to (n).

David Bohm -- whose work in physics links Alexander's to mine -- would say that each moment of time is a projection from the total nonlocal implicate order into a local explicate order, so that "any describable event, object, entity, etc., is an abstraction from an unknown and undefinable totality of flowing movement" (Bohm).

Yeah, I still think that, only more so. For Bohm, "the explicate order of the world of experience unfolds and displays the implicate." The latter "can be thought of as a ground beyond time, a totality out of which each moment is projected into the explicate order."

But it is a circular movement, one I have symbolized (↓↑). Of course, I'm talking about the spiritual world while Bohm is talking about the physical world, but the important point is that it's the same pattern:

"For every moment of time that is projected out into the explicate order there would be another movement in which that moment would be injected or 'introjected' back into the implicate order" (Bohm).

"This whole process -- forms ceaselessly emerging and then being reabsorbed -- accounts for the influence of past forms on present ones, and also allows for the emergence of new creative forms" (ibid.).

In other words, reality is not a linear machine, but again, a kind of perpetual flow of the implicate ground into familiar reality, and then back (and this is strikingly similar to Eckhart's description of the Ground; you could say that we're all -- Bohm, Eckhart, Alexander, and I -- in the same Attractor, just describing it from our own vantage points).

Some human beings, for a variety of reasons, have a compromised ability to "read out" O, the implicate order. This makes them very boring and very predictable. Lifeless. No spark. But good accountants.

Others have no stable explicate order. They can be live wires: charismatic. Life o' the party. Good actors. Just don't rely on them. And whatever you do, don't get involved in an intimate relationship with one of them. It will be fun while the fun lasts, but then hell while the hell lasts. I still have the occasional nightmare...

Alexander is at pains to point out that, in order to understand his approach, one must allow oneself to engage in a totally different kind of thinking in which we are directly connected to the world, in an unmediated way.

The world is constantly speaking to us, most especially in aesthetic terms. All day long we see a constant stream of things that evoke various feelings that are a reliable indicator of the degree of "life" or wholeness present.

Here is what I wrote about that mode back in 1991. But before getting to that, the main idea is that, instead of (k) --> O -- in which we simply project our own preconceptions onto the world -- we must enter a state of O --> (n), in which we constantly listen to subtle messages of the world.

Anyway, here's what I wrote: "Just as the physical universe of stars and galaxies is but a mere 'ripple' on the surface of the holomovement, conventional 'thought' or 'intellect' [read: (k)] is a static, constricted, and limited form of consciousness." It is "basically mechanical in its order of operation, dealing as it does with the already known."

In contrast, the O --> (n) mode is analogous to "the continuous and dynamic unfolding of the implicate order," giving access to the "freshly minted moment" (Bohm) and the "ever-moving and self-renewing present" (ibid.). Children are there most of the time, which is why it is so refleshing to be around them.

This is not to suggest that (k) doesn't have its uses. Of course it does. However, "unless there are also profoundly experiential transformations in O, evolution will only occur in (k)," fostering "a sterile evolution of the intellect bearing no relationship to the deeper self." You know. Infertile eggheads. Ideologues. Tenure.

You might say that the circle of (k) can never contain the sphere of O. Which is why, to paraphrase Ted, strange things are always afoot at the Circle K, if only you pay attention to the weirdness...

Well, I got a late start and now I'm due back in the explicate order. To be continued, pending the slightest expression of interest.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Hell in Three Easy Steps

In order for the regressive leftist project to succeed, it had to undo and transform the existing system, rooted as it was in a fruitful and progressive synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem, or Reason and Revelation, Truth and Being.

For Benedict, there have been three stages, or waves, in the modern project of "dehellenization." Each wave represents the antithesis of a particular truth.

For example, in Aquinas' understanding, "man is not properly human but superhuman" -- which parallels Schuon's observation that man is "naturally supernatural."

To express it orthoparadoxically, man either transcends himself or sinks beneath himself. To remain a mere (biological) man is to fail to become (a spiritually realized) one. Man is a means to an end he doesn't create, but rather, discovers. Which is sort of the *whole point* of existence.

In reality this is just an empirical observation, because it isn't even possible to talk about man -- or any other universal, for that matter -- without touching the transcendent world.

Man has a proper end, which is the same as saying he is created. Conversely, if he isn't created, then there can be no purpose whatsoever to existence, and the left is correct: everything is just an absurd contingency (except the left, which magically exempts itself from its own absurdity).

Thus, a key principle of the modern project is "an adamant refusal on the part of man... to acknowledge anything that [isn't] exclusively human."

But nothing can be explained without reference to something outside or beyond it, which means that the first principle of the left is man's absolute stupidity. (Ah. That explains a lot.)

For this reason it is but a single step from relativism to barbarism, or from low information to Democrat, or from ignorance to tenure.

Likewise, for Aristotle it was a truism that man does not create man to be what he is. Rather, we are as we find ourselves: we have a nature, and we did not confer this nature upon ourselves.

Here again, the left promulgates the contradictory thesis, which ends in the various pneumapathologies of existentialism, which elevate existence over essence.

For those of you living in Rio Linda, this means that a boy can be a girl, a woman can be a radical feminist, my aunt can be a trolley car, and a man can marry a man. If there is no nature, nor is there any order.

In the March 11 National Review there's an article by Ramesh Ponnuru on the previous two Popes, JPII and BXVI. In it he notes that both men

"asserted that reason is capable of apprehending not only instrumental truths (how to achieve given ends) but also sapiential truths (what our ends should be). They insisted on both the reasonableness of faith and the need for faith in reason."

Let's look at this notion. Modernity has no issue with the idea that reason may apprehend instrumental truths and find out how things "work."

For example, a biologist can dissect a body to try to figure out how life works. But no biologist -- or no one else, for that matter -- can tell you why you are alive, any more than taking apart a watch will disclose the nature of time.

But is it really possible for a human being to sever the Is from the Ought in this abstract manner? For example, every proper scientist knows he oughtta publish the truth, and not just make up some shite for an end that is less than truth, e.g., wealth, or fame, or an academy award. But enough about climate science.

Thus, it's really contradictory to insist that man can know only instrumental but not sapiential truths, for the insistence that science should seek truth is itself sapiential -- and therefore transnatural -- to the core. Way it is. And more importantly, way it ought to be.

But once means are separated from ends, Is from Ought, man is exiled from reality. He no longer has "access to the whole."

This is an interesting variation on our fallenness, which leaves us wounded but not dead. However, the modern project completes the work of the Fall, and renders the wound absolutely fatal.

You might say that a reduction of the world to the categories disclosed by the scientific method -- i.e., scientism -- "closes off the very being that is worth reasoning about."

As a result, we know everything about nothing but nothing about everything. Or as Petey says, ignorance of the Absolute seals man's absolute ignorance.

However, on the positive side -- for the left, anyway -- this is an excellent way to create passive slaves.

Running late -- to be continued.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Crusade My Ass

I'd like to go back to that word "rapprochement" that we were discussing last week, specifically, to the rapprochement of mind and nature. Until the appearance of man -- and not just genetic Homo bigbrain, but self-conscious man firing on all psychopneumatic cylinders -- mind and nature were "fused," so to speak, so no rapprochement was necessary. Only after man discovers his separation -- which is the same as his Adamic uniqueness and alone-liness -- is a rapprochement necessary.

For millennia, religion was the principle means of this rapprochement -- of harmonizing man and cosmos. But with the scientific revolution, a principle of separation was established, i.e., the infamous mind-matter dualism. What this implies is that our separation -- our exile from nature -- isn't accidental, but essential.

In this view, religion, instead of being rooted in the essential (i.e., the unity of things), is itself rendered accidental, i.e., just a weird contingency of anthropology. In snort, religion is consigned to history, whereas science is elevated to a kind of timeless and transhistorical realm.

In fact, for the lofo left, science is the only human endeavor that slips through the net of historicism and transcends their own self-imposed relativism. But this is really just the same old pagan religion in a new zeitguise, this one called scientism.

In other words, we still have the same need of a rapprochement of mind and nature. Indeed, this is just about the first thought a normal human being entertains, and is even the basis of thought: "Hey, there's all that stuff out there. And here's me in here. How do the two relate?" Scientism just dismisses the latter observation (of the interior subject), which is no rapprochement at all, for it's like calling divorce a form of marriage or blindness a form of sight.

Even if you get away with the linguistic theft, no fertility or vision will result. Subjective and objective aren't just separated, but the Object has obtained a restraining order barring the Subject from coming within a hundred yards. But obviously you cannot eliminate the subject from the cosmos. Rather, you can only pretend to have done so.

So, just as in developmental psychology, there are mature and immature forms of rapprochement. Again, in psychoanalytic parlance, rapprochement involves a kind of dance of separation from, and re-union with, the mother. To put it mildly -- because it means that psychologists will never run out of patients -- "Disruptions in the fundamental process of separation-individuation can result in a disturbance in the ability to maintain a reliable sense of individual identity in adulthood."

As mentioned last week, Benedict uses that same term -- rapprochement -- to describe how Christianity was uniquely able to reconcile reason and revelation -- or Athens and Jerusalem -- into a complex but harmonious unity that benefitted and deepened both partners:

"The inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history" (Benedict). This forged a unique European identity which was instrumental in turning back the tide of Islam, which very nearly succeeded in conquering Europe and sealing a caliphate worse then death (but let us not speak too soon).

Schall suggests that "it was precisely the success of the Muslim armies in former Roman Empire territories that finally turned Europe in on itself to develop its own separate culture." Crusades my ass. Who allows barbarians to plunder their empire without putting up a fight?

Oh, right. Liberals.

Now, in Islam there is one truth, and it's called the Koran. That was easy! Likewise, for scientism there is one "truth," and it's in nature. Both approaches are inherently defective, and leave gaping holes in the whole.

By way of contrast, Schall notes that "In Christianity, any thought of a 'two truth' theory," that "a truth of reason can contradict a truth of revelation, is excluded as inherently heterodox." Yes, the result may be a stubborn orthoparadox, but nevertheless, we must insist upon that rapprochement of mind and nature.

Er, why? Well, just for starters, "Christian revelation does not allow it to imagine that Christ did not actually exist." In other words, not only does the world reliably reveal truth, but even ultimate truth. Nor can the mind -- or philosophy -- deny "the existence of what does in fact exist or our ability to know reality through the powers inherent in us." This represents a HUGE difference from both Islamic voluntarism and leftist materialism.

However, as in developmental psychology, rapprochement is a never-ending process. We never stop needing other people, but at the same time, this is not a static situation but a dynamic process. A marriage, for example, is constantly growing in depth and "higher unity," so to speak.

Just so, the historical event of rapprochement (of reason and revelation) is not a one-tome deal. It's not as if, say, Thomas took care of it, so we don't have to think about it any more. Rather, "the 'event,'" writes Schall, "once put into existence, is still going on."

Why is this? Primarily because no one else can reconcile your own subject to the world, not to mention the fact that "one's own uniqueness is itself a part of the meaning of universal humanity." Secondarily, new information about the world is always coming in, and needs to be woven into the unity -- say, quantum physics, or chaos theory, or natural selection.

All of this goes against the multiculturalism and relativism of the left, because it implies a universal path for mankind. It not only explains why Europe is dying, but why "Europe's own intellectual crisis is a spiritual crisis for the rest of the world. For other countries to flourish properly, they too need to be what they potentially are." The "inner rapprochement" discussed in this post is "universal and not simply European."

This is an ironic twist on the leftist cliche of being a "citizen of the world," for the only legal path to world citizenship -- in an actually meaningful sense -- is via the timeless principles of modern conservatism. Crusade my ass. The only viable human future will revolve around the "American trinity" of liberty, e pluribus unum, and In God We Trust (or of ordered liberty, of a philosophico-scientific rapprochement of mind and nature, and of one cosmos under God).

To be continued....

Monday, March 18, 2013

Word War I

Well, I don't really have time for a proper post. Enough time for a good title, however. It reflects the fact that we really are in a three-sided war, with clowns to the left of us and jihadists to the right. But I'll have to get into more detail tomorrow. Meanwhile, in this post you will mainly learn what an incomplete post composed in about 15 minutes looks like.

Continuing with Friday's post on God's will and secondary causes, Schall points out that in normative Islam, "no objective distinction can exist between the right and wrong that Allah cannot change at will." In other words, rather than discovering objective moral truth, "All we have to do is find out whether he wills it or not." There is only the duality of authority <--> will/obedience instead of truth <--> intellect/knowledge.

Thus, Islam and Leftism are situated at either extreme of true morality, but they share the essential feature of being entirely subjective and arbitrary. This also makes them childish, because they are so wrapped up in will rather than reason.

In any event, "without logos, no reason remains for finding any distinction between right and wrong" (ibid.). In most of the Islamic world, "No academic space exists in which to examine the truth of a claim." Instead, there is "only violence in enforcing its stated and unexamined position" (ibid.).

But here again, this resembles the American university, minus the explicit violence: Schall notes "Islam has little place within it for a reasonable discussion of the truth of its own tenets." By way of compensation, both Islam and the Left simply persecute those who do have the temerity to examine their tenets, or who deviate from them. Neither has any real openness to the fulness of reality. It's the same inner pathology, just a different form.

In the Christian tradition, the cosmos is intrinsically meaningful, since it is created by God and infused with his logos. Therefore, everything that exists is truth, qua its existence.

In other words, you might say that with creation, God "doesn't deceive us," so to speak: "the world was not created before the Word, which was itself uncreated. The origin of the world is, in fact, Word" (and I believe that in Judaism one could substitute Torah for word).

For Schall, "the internal order of the cosmos presupposes the internal order within the Godhead." Obedience to God is obedience to Truth, but this Truth is not something totally apart from the Truth-logos that infuses creation.

But for the left, there can be no intrinsic truth in existence, while for Islam the truth of existence is entirely extrinsic and known exclusively to God. Both approches render existence as we find it in the herebelow absurd. (I might add that I am not discussing Islam as it is "supposed to be" or as it could be, merely as it is understood and practiced in predominantly Muslim countries, so blame them, not me. Prager's Still the Last Best Hope is very good on this point.)

Again, for us, word and being are inseparably conjoined. Not only does knowledge infuse being, but again, existence itself is a kind of truth: to exist is to exist as truth and to therefore be intelligible; or, to put it inversely, nothing intrinsically false can exist, for this would be an absurdity. Something can become false -- mostly human beings and their kooky ideas -- but this is to deviate from their prior truth. My word is my bond. Or His, rather.

Friday, March 15, 2013

There is No God but Godlessness, and Obama is His Prophet

Truth is hierarchical and symphonic, which implies both One (i.e., one symphony) and many (i.e., a multitude of instruments and individual parts -- motifs, melodies, counter-melodies, etc.).

In contrast -- to paraphrase one of my favorite aphorisms of Don Colacho -- leveling is the barbarian's substitute for order. Which is why -- to paraphrase another aphorism -- in order to understand leftism, a vocabulary of ten words is sufficient.

In other words, relativism is another word for leveling, which is why leftist is another word for barbarian, and barbarism the end result of leftism.

What is the uni-versity? Or rather, what was the university? For starters, it was a way to cure our barbarism by elevating the intellect and perfecting the soul.

"The university," writes Schall, "grew out of the structure of the medieval Church." Thus, for example -- and it is not my intention to induce vomiting -- the dean of a university is analogous to the pope, while the professors represent a priesthood of knowledge and truth, for the purpose of both forming and saving young souls.

This is still the case, except that when one's first principle is relativism, then one's pope is actually an anti-pope whose main task is to enforce leveling so as to ensure barbarism. Which is why universities are secular seminaries whose tenured apes churn out so many well-programmed chimps.

Best popetweet I've heard so far: Francis has been linked to an anti-Marxist organization -- the Catholic Church.

"Unless some objective criterion of truth is available and acknowledged, unless some reality in fact exists, freedom means little" (Schall). Why is that? Because to insist that "my freedom" consists of "my truth" (and vice versa) is to again collapse the hierarchical space in which truth is sought. In other words, it eliminates any meaningful vector to our cognitive and psychospiritual lives, so there is no direction om.

It is no different than if we could somehow eliminate desire from the soul. If there is nothing to desire, then there is no reason to so much as move. This is typical of Major Depression, a central feature of which is anhedonia, or loss of pleasure. In the absence of a sense of pleasure, the world goes "flat," and the person literally doesn't know which way to turn, since it doesn't matter. Since nothing induces pleasure, why bother?

The resultant apathy and withdrawal can culminate in a kind of interior implosion analogous to a black hole. All because the psychic hierarchy has collapsed in on itself.

I am not being polemical when I say that the identical thing occurs in various cognitive pathologies of the left. The left talks about "academic freedom," but in the absence of transcendent truth this is just whistling past the slaveyard. In reality it is quite literally academic slavery, for one is beholden to something less than truth -- whims, inclinations, intellectual fashions, career advancement, political correctness, etc.

What is the point of knowing if it is not to know truth? If we don't know truth, then what is knowledge? Freedom unbound from its proper object reduces to mere will -- just as, say, sex unbound from its proper object is nothing but a selfish impulse.

Indeed, a good wanking definition of "perversion" is any impulse detached from its proper object, whether we are talking about sex, intelligence, art, religion, politics, etc. Just as there are sexual perversions, there are artistic perversions, perversions of justice, perversions of philosophy, etc.

Among other things, God is Logos-Word-Reason, which is why he is intelligible (not in total, of course, but within the forms of our sensibility), and indeed why there is both intelligence and intelligibility in the cosmos, the one mirroring the other. Schall (actually, Benedict, on whose lecture he is commenting) contrasts this with Islam, which has no such conception.

Rather, the latter "implies a Godhead whose power is not in principle limited even by the principle of contradiction, the principle that governs reason.... Any such restriction would be seen as a denial of the omnipotence of God" (and you will have noticed that this is the same aberration that afflicts certain Christian fundamentalists).

It seems that normative Islam (not, say, the esoteric Sufism of Schuon) is not addressed to our reason, but rather, to our will: "This position affirms God is not Himself bound by His own truth. It would limit His glory to impose any restrictions, even of contradiction. The effect of this view is to eliminate any secondary causality which would attribute to non-divine things an inherent order" (ibid., emphasis mine).

Now, what is this beautiful order of secondary causes but the cosmic hierarchy? Yes, God is at the top, but this doesn't negate all of the intermediate levels, any more than our own free will negates the relative autonomy of the atoms, molecules, cells, and organs that constitute us. The One doesn't negate the many, any more than the One reduces to the many. Or, just say transcendence and immanence, the latter a consequence of the former.

But Islam eliminates secondary causes, and insists that everything that happens is directly caused by God. Therefore, there is no reason to study the world, because God does what he wills, with no guarantee of reason, law, predictability, or consistency: "His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality."

Things couldn't have developed more differently in Christendom, as the logos wended its way through history, resulting in such benefits as science, natural law, and the preciousness of the individual. As such, Allah, "in the Christian view, cannot be reasonable. Indeed, he cannot be God.... Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's name." No offense, but simple as. The two positions are irreconcilable.

(And this is not to imply that God never does things we cannot comprehend, nor that everything in God is comprehensible in human terms; rather, we're just refracting the mirroraculous analogy between macrocosmos-God and microcosmos-man.)

So: "if God is understood to be only power or a will that transcends reason, then reason is subservient to will." That's right: fascism by another name.

And now you understand the alliance between Islamists and the Left, because their ways of thinking are so similar. In his lecture, Benedict discusses the three stages of what he calls the "dehellenization" of the West, which, as you have no doubt noticed, results in a creeping hellification of culture, hell being defined as any place where Reason is impotent. You know, like the New York Times editorial board, or the womyn's studies department of a major university.

More on the deep connection between Islam and the Left as we continue....

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Dreams of Reason and Nightmares of History

Hey, this book on Pope Benedict's Regensburg Lecture is pretty good.

Wait! Don't go away! It's not as dry as it sounds. Far from it. Rather, it provides something like a Master Key to understanding our whole civilizational decline, from Moses/Socrates/Jesus to Obama/Biden/Reid.

But before getting to that, a brief comment about the surprising architectural skills of the Dreamer. Now that Alexander has schooled me on what to look for, I can't help but noticing what a marvelous architect I am.

In your dreams!

Yes, in my dreams. I already conceded that.

The question is, how can this be? I don't have any architectural training, and probably not even good taste. Not so my Dreamer, who has an unerring sense of what goes where (unless he's just being ironic or trying to make a point).

Last night, for example, I somehow got through security and wandered into the most beautifully constructed high-end country club. Here words fail, since I'm not an architect or an interior decorator or a Lileks, so I am reduced to such feeble adjectives as "cool!" or "awesome!"

The thing is, I've noticed the phenomenon before, but I always marked it down to more of a literary/narrative/cinematic skill. But now I see that this cannot be the case, since it takes more than just glibness or a good eye to produce these fabulous sets (which are not copies of anything I've ever actually seen in awakeworld). Now that I know what to look for, I see that my Dreamer knows all about the 15 fundamental properties of life as elucidated by Alexander, e.g., strong centers, gradation, echoes, local symmetries, good shape, etc.

I have a feeling the dream might have been provoked by watching the popification on TV yesterday. Again, now that I know what to look for, I was noticing how the beautiful architecture in Vatican City manifests so many of the Fifteen Fundamental Properties.

Now, it may seem like a trivial observation to say that the Dreamer has "good taste" in architecture, but the implications are actually quite profound. For it suggests that, just as man doesn't invent logic but discovers it to be woven into the very fabric of his being, it also turns out that Good Taste isn't just subjective, but rather, that an aesthetic sense is also built into the f. of our b.

And this is indeed Alexander's point: that aesthetic reality is just as objective and as real as material reality. In fact, the two can only be artificially separated, because nature herself effortlessly tosses out beautiful objects, just as does the Dreamer.

Odd, but nature rarely makes ugly things. Rather, almost all of the ugliness in the world comes from man. Only man could makes a place as ugly and lifeless as, say, Lancaster, CA, or MSNBC. But the California desert itself -- unmolested by man -- has a kind of austere beauty thingy going for it.

Now, what does all of this have to do with Benedict's Regensburg Lecture, whatever that was? The LoFo world, if it remembers it at all, will have remembered it for accurately describing the problems of Islam, thereby earning the condemnation of the same LoFo world (which is led by the mullah-terror & nasty-old-leftist complex).

Alert readers will recall last Tuesday's post, wherein I mentioned the term "rapprochement." Now, how many times a year does one hear that word? And yet, I'm reading The Regensburg Lecture yesterday, and it must have turned up a dozen times. In the words of Beavis, this means something, numb nuts.

Remember what I said about my use of the term, which is intended in both its colloquial and human developmental senses? But my ultimate point was again to suggest that man begins his journey fused with nature, just as the infant starts out fused with the (m)other. Our separation from nature culminates in the scientific revolution, whereby we are able to study nature in a wholly objective, abstract, and quantitative way. But now it is time for a rapprochement of mind and nature, which is one of the themes of my book, of this blog, and of Alexander's whole approach.

It is also the theme of the Regensburg Lecture, but by now I'm accustomed to these dense synchronicities.

To preview where this post is headed, Benedict locates the ground of western civilization in a unique synthesis of revelation and (upper case R) Reason, which was achieved by the Bible being filtered through the Greek mind. This observation itself isn't new, i.e., the Athens-Jerusalem matrix.

What is apparently new is Benedict's suggestion that this syntheses, this "Greek turn" was providential, not just some random occurrence. Fascinatingly, he supports this through recourse to Paul's Dreamer, who tells him (see Acts 16:9) DON'T GO TO ASIA, but rather, MACEDONIA IS REALLY NICE THIS TIME OF YEAR!

Could it be that the whole of western civilization hinges on a dream?

Western civilization begins with the vision of a rapprochement of God and Reason. As we proceed, we will appreciate just how different this is from the dreams of the left and of Islam, for in each case, no such rapprochement is possible.

Islam, for example has a strictly voluntarist theology (which is really no theology -- i.e., theo-logos -- at all), rooted in God's will, not his logos (Reason). This can be appreciated with reference to the differences between "Israel," which means wrestle with God, and "Islam," which means submit to Allah. In Islam no wrestling is allowed, except with others, who had better submit on pain of violence and death.

Likewise, for the leftist there can be no rapprochement of Reason and Revelation, since the latter is just a dream (heh). But as soon as you think about it, you realize that this is no different than Islam, for which there also can be no rapprochement of knowing and being. In both cases, there is no Logos/Reason lighting up the world from within.

As a result, all that is left is submission, either to Allah, or sharia, or the caliphate, or political correctness, or Obamacare, or the tyranny of relativism, whatever. What is not permitted is liberty in its classic sense, predicated on the individual's access to the Truth of Things. Authoritarianism to follow.

Example.

To be continued...

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Wholeness, Happiness, Order, and Discrimination

Recognizing this life in things is equivalent to saying, "The universe is made of person-stuff. I always thought it was made of machine-stuff, but now I see that it is not." --Christopher Alexander

The whole thing reminds me of Eckhart's key principle of the Ground: Alexander speaks of how "the structure we call wholeness is connected with a ground where matter becomes personal..." This is why nature so obviously "speaks" to us, both in terms of feeling and of thought, art and science, beauty and truth. If we take this comm-unication seriously, the implications are endless.

For example, this is why language is even possible, because the person-stuff of the universe is interiorly related and therefore capable of encoding and transmission from one body or region to another. Our ability to see the beauty or apprehend the deep structure of the world represents one cidence of of the same coin-. It is to receive the memO and be in the lOʘp.

For this reason, we now understand how and why scientists are guided by feeling and artists by science. In other words, a scientist wouldn't even know what to investigate in the absence of a feeling that reduces the infinite field of phenomena to something "interesting," something that attracts his attention.

As it so happens, not too long ago I evaluated a former research scientist who had developed a dementia. It was still in its incipient stages, so he was well aware of how it had robbed him of his ability to perceive the deeper significance in things.

It reminds me again of a hybrid SACD, which has a standard CD encoded on the surface and the SACD layer encoded below that. Only an SACD player is able to reach beyond the surface and retrieve the denser, high-def information at the center. My research scientist was like this: his laser could no longer penetrate below the surface.

There is something analogous to this phenomenon in any discipline, from art, to science, to literature and religion, the difference being that there aren't just two levels to reality (i.e., CD and SACD), but an inexhaustible number. There is no end to the depth, but this depth extends in both directions, into the object and into the subject, which, in the end, are complementary aspects of one another.

In other words: we can only see the depth in things to the extent to which we have become deep. As I've said before, depth is a very real feature of the cosmos, not something merely "subjective." In many ways, it's the whole point, isn't it? It's certainly the point of this blog. And of this life, for that matter. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be a cosmic surface dweller. I know I was there, but I can no longer remember what it felt like.

Schall raises the same point in this book I'm reading -- or at least I'm seeing obvious links. For example: "The Catholic [you could also say Raccoon] soul is not a divided soul. What is characteristically Catholic is the mind that pays full attention to the truths of reason and revelation on the basis of the truth that they both belong to a coherent whole."

More: "The 'wholeness' of all things to be known, something that fascinated a Plato, an Aristotle, an Aquinas, a Dante, cannot leave anything out and still claim to be concerned with the full scope of mind.... Philosophy is the quest for knowledge of the whole, a quest that, in principle, cannot omit any claim to the truth of things and still claim to be open to all things."

Thus, any form of bonehead atheism or vulgar scientism is a philosophical non-starter, because each has closed itself to the living ground (both "outside" and "inside").

Dennis Prager makes a similar point in his Still the Best Hope, which should be required reading for all human beings struggling to cure themselves of the liberal plague. He writes of how

"It is difficult to overstate the depth of the differences between the Judeo-Christian view of the world and that of its opponents on the Left. In addition to such basic issues as objective versus subjective morality, it involves the question of whether there is order to the world" (emphasis mine, and bear in mind that Alexander's quadrilogy is called The Nature of Order).

Now, as Alexander explains, order is intrinsically related to life, to wholeness, to depth, and to happiness (I would prefer a slightly more spiritually inflected term such as ananda-bliss, beatitude, or slack). And as Prager points out, "Basic to the biblical worldview is the proposition that God made order out of chaos -- order expressed largely through separation and distinction."

Indeed, what is order but distinction? And what is thinking but discrimination and synthesis? And what is chaos but indiscriminate blending?

Now, we all know that the religious are happier than the irreligious, conservatives happier than liberals. Might this have something to do with the unregenerate muddleheadedness of the latter?

Prager discusses the most obvious distinctions that the left denies, thereby engendering chaos and fueling unhappiness, such as good and evil, God and man, man and woman, holy and profane, human and animal, and great and poor art.

Denying these distinctions has devastating material, psychological, and spiritual consequences for both the individual and the society. At the very least, it creates unhappy people, and unhappy people are responsible for most of the world's problems. Happy people don't become activists, utopians, and ideologues. But to deny the nature of human order is to defeat the order of human nature. Which is the quintessence of soph-defeating beehivior.

Thus, "Almost all disorders of private or public life somehow begin in the souls of an educated elite..." And these elites are shielded from the devastating consequences of their noxious ideas by such things as tenure, jerrymandering, and wealth (the most wealthy counties in the country are the most liberal).

"A wise man," writes Schall, "knows how to find the order in things."

Bottom line: Everything that exists is an orderly circle that flows from and returns to the ground, Alpha to Omega. And some circles are deeper and more expansive than others. A stone is a smaller circle than a plant.

Likewise, your life is a circle, the difference being that this is the only circle that isn't simply "given." Yours needn't be a little jerk circle. Rather, it has some free play, some slack. How wide will you make it? And how deep is the order? Or how depthless, rather?

For the name of this depthlessness is God.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Taking Reality Personally while Championing the Bobvious

Over the years, I've made any number of references to the trinitarian structure of reality. Actually, "structure" isn't quite the right word, because structure implies parts. In my view, it would be more orthoparadoxically correct to call it a trinitarian substance, which features an irreducible interiority and intersubjectivity (each a reflection of the other).

I've now completed volume one of The Nature of Order, and there are several places where Alexander essentially expresses the same idea, although not in any Christian context. Rather, his approach is entirely empirical and phenomenological: he's just observing and describing how things truly and objectively appear in our subjective experience. His metaphysics is posterior to the experience.

The first half of the book shows how and why "degrees of life" are present in space (i.e., space itself is inseparable from life), and how we are able to objectively perceive these levels of intensity. In the second half he shows how the presence of life is inseparable from the question of personhood. Indeed, chapter seven is called The Personal Nature of Order.

Thus, as it turns out -- and again, this is based first on observation, not any kind of apriorism -- "living structure is at once both structural and personal."

As applied to philosophy and metaphysics, this is his key idea, as it furnishes the means to "bridge the gap that Whitehead called 'the bifurcation of nature.' It unites the objective and the subjective," and ultimately, science and person, physics and poetry, thinking and feeling. Yes, instead of mythopoetic you might call it mathopoetic.

Jumping ahead a bit, the first thought that occurred to me in reading this chapter is that this is all foretold in scripture. In particular, I'm thinking of Proverbs 8, where it suggests that reality is ultimately composed of -- not just by or with -- "God's wisdom," so to speak:

The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way,

Before His works of old.

I have been established from everlasting,

From the beginning, before there was ever an earth.

When there were no depths I was brought forth,

When there were no fountains abounding with water.

Before the mountains were settled,

Before the hills, I was brought forth;

While as yet He had not made the earth or the fields,

Or the primal dust of the world.

When He prepared the heavens, I was there,

When He drew a circle on the face of the deep,

When He established the clouds above,

When He strengthened the fountains of the deep,

When He assigned to the sea its limit,

So that the waters would not transgress His command,

When He marked out the foundations of the earth,

Then I was beside Him as a master craftsman.

All of this establishes the personal nature of the divine wisdom that infuses the cosmos, lighting it from within. This light can be seen scientifically or aesthetically, for it is the same Light. To paraphrase Schuon, truth is analogous to the light, while beauty is analogous to the warmth that naturally radiates from it.

In this next passage we see how "blessings" flow from human perception of this wisdom:

And I was daily His delight,

Rejoicing always before Him,

Rejoicing in His inhabited world,

And my delight was with the sons of men.

“Now therefore, listen to me, my children,

For blessed are those who keep my ways.

Hear instruction and be wise,

And do not disdain it.

Blessed is the man who listens to me,

Watching daily at my gates,

Waiting at the posts of my doors.

For whoever finds me finds life,

And obtains favor from the Lord;

But he who sins against me wrongs his own soul;

All those who hate me love death.”

Whoever sees this wisdom finds life. Others find death, which isn't surprising, for if you begin with the premise that the world is fundamentally dead, then any life you happen to find will just be an anomalous accident. It won't tell you anything important or fundamental about the cosmos, much less about the nature of man -- despite the fact that man is uniquely able to perceive the degrees of life implicit in the cosmos.

Speaking of "implicit," it's interesting how we spend our lives rediscovering the same thing over and over. I suppose I first made this discovery back in 1985, and I've been making it ever since, although expressing it in different languages, e.g., the languages of physics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, metaphysics, theology, music, etc.

Gnote: I regard diverse disciplines as "languages," fundamentally no different than the various languages of human groups. Thus, just as one can express the identical truth in French, English, or German, one can express the same truth in physics, psychology, and religion.

And indeed, in order to express the fullness of truth, one must see it from all of these angles; it is as if truth is the white light that passes through the human prism, and comes out the other side in the form of different colors, i.e., disciplines.

A long time ago, I decided that what we call a "genius" is a person who uses this or that discipline or idiom to express a primordial truth. Depending upon his gift, the genius can accomplish it with a pen or pun or piano or paintbrush.

My personal discovery involved seeing a spontaneous connection between the metaphysics implicit in modern physics and the metapsychology implicit in modern psychoanalysis. This discovery suggested that either the cosmos is built like a person, or persons are built like the cosmos. Or that both of these statements are true.

So now you know why my dissertation had the ponderous title of Psychoanalysis, Postmodern Physics, and the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution: Toward a Rapprochement of Mind and Nature. Today I wouldn't use the loaded word "postmodern," but I didn't intend it in the obnoxious sense. "Post-Newtonian" or "post-Cartesian" would be more accurate. But the "rapprochement of mind and nature" is precisely what Alexander is up to.

And my use of the term rapprochement had a double meaning, intended in both the colloquial and psychoanalytic senses. Ultimately, what I meant is that, just as the baby must separate from the mother in order to relate in a more mature manner, it seems that human beings had to first separate from Mother Nature -- this being the scientific revolution -- in order to relate to her in a more mature manner -- this being the "new physics" of Alexander (or of anyone else who sees the underlying truth from whatever discipline).

I know! Too much me. Nevertheless, tucked away in my dissertation is a little speech I had to deliver upon receiving an award for the thing in 1988 (I've mentioned it before, but that was Long Ago). The speech could have been written by Alexander:

"This dissertation is really a reflection of my own personal obsession, which happens to be the relationship between the mind -- that is, the subjective internal world -- and the objective physical universe.... In the three hundred years since the onset of the scientific revolution, science has gradually come to regard everything in the universe -- including ourselves -- as mere machines....

Blah blah yada yada, "What is so interesting is that these patterns of process seem to be woven into the very fabric of the universe, cutting across and repeating at all the various levels we study -- including human mental development."

I mean seriously folks, this sounds like straight up Alexander, although it's only me again: "The appearance of life itself forces us to reconsider all of the reductionistic schemes and artificial boundaries we have invented to divide various domains such as mind and matter, animate and inanimate, physics and psychology.

"The great physicist Werner Heisenberg said that The same forces that have created nature in all her forms, are responsible for the structure of our soul, and likewise for our capacity to think.... With our new understanding, we can truly say that the development of the cosmos culminates in an unbroken fashion with the thought of man."

So, to say "One Cosmos" or "One Cosmos Under God" is just the same old sane old, from Proverbs to bobswords.

For Alexander -- and I agree with him entirely -- it means that we are at "the threshold of a new kind of objectivity," i.e., a higher synthesis of objectivity with what we usually consign to subjectivity in order to dismiss it, and thereby save the scientistic appearances.

But in dismissing the latter we are 1) devaluing the human knower, thereby undercutting the basis of all our knowledge, 2) chucking the most interesting and even astonishing fact in all of creation, and 3) ignoring an impossibly rich source of data about reality, not just in terms of content, but vis-a-vis the human form as such (in other words, the human form itself -- before we have even thought anything -- reveals important truths about the nature of reality).

Getting late. Gotta get some work done....

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