Coordinates of Existence

The following phrase popped into my head this morning: coordinates of existence. It must be the tip of a post, or at least of a Friday Ramble. Let's hope there is something beneath its provocative surface.

Clearly there are coordinates of existence, some of which are given and therefore absolute (at least relatively speaking), others manmade, conventional, and contingent. Often the former are expressed in terms of the latter -- in other words, different cultures have different ways of expressing the same underlying truths. More problematically, purely cultural coordinates are often conflated with ontological ones, which causes no end of mischief.

All normal people know that male and female, for example, constitute one of our given coordinates. This then expresses itself culturally in diverse ways. But note how the left takes a cultural stereotype and elevates it to a given. In other words, a man who imagines he is a woman is just identifying with a particular stereotype, the stereotype being contingent upon actual womanhood.

There are so many things wrong with this that one scarcely knows where to begin, but beneath it all is an absurd inversion of a given coordinate. It is no less absurd than exchanging north for south, or adult for child, or winter for summer. Some things just are. If they aren't, then neither are we. Literally, for we are no longer rooted in truth but in will (or worse, willfulness): I am what I want to be, which renders man an absurd tautology.

The ultimate coordinate is God -- or rather, the God <--> Man axis (and who is Christ but its fillfullment?).

Now, God is I AM. Our being is obviously contingent upon his ("God is, therefore we are"). But the false coordinate described above essentially identifies God as I WILL. Big. Difference. "I will, therefore I am" is bad mojo. Hitlerian, even.

Yes, there's an aphorism for that; maybe more than one. Note how each of these goes to the givenness of certain cOʘrdinates (all aphorisms are by the Aphorist, AKA Dávila). For example:

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

Again, so much mischief when we turn a complementarity into an opposition!

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

This reduces the vertical line to a point. Bad!

Today the individual rebels against inalterable human nature in order to refrain from amending his own correctable nature.

Here again, this reifies our opposition to God; really, it's just Genesis 3 All Over Again.

Modern man denies himself every metaphysical dimension and considers himself a mere object of science. But he screams when they exterminate him as such.

Exactly. Treat an atheist like the pointless agglomeration of matter that he is, and he won't like it. He might even scream that his "rights" are being violated. What rights?

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

That is a quite literal distillation of this post.

The Church’s function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld in the world.

The Church -- or the magisterium -- fleshes out (heh) the vertical axis. Does some of it pass over into the human margin? Yes, no doubt. There is no human without a culture. It's a question of whether the culture is in conformity with the nature of things, or in opposition to or rebellion against it.

Christianity does not deny the splendor of the world but encourages us to seek its origin, to ascend to its pure snow.

There is nothing wrong with being-in-the-world (hey, it's good enough for God). Without it, we couldn't bloody well be, could we? Just don't amputate the world from its cause, or elevate the world to its own cause. That's just stupid.

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

Big Time. It is a vision -- or prevision -- of the nonlocal coordinates.

He who does not believe in God can at least have the decency of not believing in himself.

Right? Why on earth would an atheist believe in atheism, of all things, or a leftist believe in leftism? That makes no sense. If God doesn't exist, then only He can know it. So if you're going to be nonsensical, go all the way, like Venezuela, or California.

Getting back to the thread we've been on, two poles of existence are freedom and necessity. According to Schuon,

Now in things, the two poles are always present, but with either the one or the other predominating; in possible things, it is the aspect of freedom which veils the aspect of necessity, whereas in actual things, it is the aspect of necessity which predominates...

It's like the Tao, isn't it?

It may be difficult for human reason to reconcile these two poles, and the temptation to deny them is[sssss] great; the difficulty is not, however, greater than in the case of the boundlessness of space or time, which we are obliged to accept even if it is impossible for us to imagine it.

Exactly. No one knows what time -- let alone eternity -- is, and yet we all know. Indeed, I know I'm out if it, which is to say, my freedom is shading off into necessity. For no one can deny the SlackWork axis.

By and For the Useless

We've been discussing certain fundamentals and even requirements of existence, such as necessity and contingency, absolute and infinite, being and beyond-being, possible and actual, divine and human. Our existence is always a tapestry woven of these complementaries, i.e., the elusive (or was it stolen?) but ever-present cosmic area rug.

Requirements of existence. In the last couple of decades -- mirroring the new atheist movement -- there have been any number of books on the numerical coincidences necessary for humanness to have emerged, both on the biological (intelligent design) and cosmological (the anthropic principle) planes. Each of these uses numbers, i.e., quantities, to deduce the impossibility of randomness or coincidence explaining our existence; therefore GOD.

Eh. You can't actually get from quantity to quality. Or, maybe it's just because I'm a wordman and not a numbergeek -- a logovert -- but why not begin with qualities, instead of pretending numbers can take us to ultimate reality? It's just a matter of determining which qualities are fundamental, and which are secondary and derivative.

By the way, numbers aren't completely futile in this area. For example, One. In a very real way, if you truly understand the meaning and implications of One, then you've not only proved the existence of God, but you are "in" God, so to speak. Certainly no other animal can understand, enter, or participate in oneness from the inside. (Which also proves that One has an exterior and interior; and that the former can never account for the latter.)

As alluded to above, two of our most important qualities are Being and Beyond-Being. Obviously these are not quantitative realities. At the same time, standard issue theology often gets bogged down in cosmic heteroparadox or absurdity because of the failure to distinguish between these two. Frankly, mosts religious folk don't seem to like the idea, since it seems to contradict, or interfere with, the Godness of God, which is fine. This blog isn't addressed to them.

Schuon lucidly breaks down the distinction between Beyond-Being and Being; the former

is "absolutely infinite" whereas the second [Being] is relatively so, which, while being tautological and even contradictory, is nevertheless a useful expression in a necessarily elliptical language; the gap between logic and transcendent truths permits the latter occasionally to override the former, although the converse is clearly excluded.

Check it out: he's essentially echoing exactly what was said above about quality and quantity: there is an inevitable gap between these two, but only from the bottom up. In other words, quantity cannot "reach up" to quality, whereas the converse is not only possible but necessary. Otherwise we wouldn't be here, let alone be here thinking about these qualitative realities.

You might also say that to conflate the conventional understanding of God with Beyond-Being is likewise "a useful expression in a necessarily elliptical language." Really, this goes to the time-honored distinction between apophatic and cataphatic theology. You can't go too far astray with the latter, even though -- somewhat like numbers -- it can only lead to the threshold of the unKnowable Godhead.

More clarity from Schuon:

If we set Beyond-Being aside, we are entitled to attribute Infinitude to Being; but if it is Beyond-Being that we are taking into consideration, then we shall say that the Infinite is in truth Beyond-Being, and that Being realizes this infinitude in relative mode, thereby opening the door to the outpouring of possibilities endlessly varied, thus inexhaustible.

Why is any of this important? Oh, no reason. Which is to say, the most important things are for their own sake -- human persons, for example. What is more useless than a baby? And yet, everyone short of a leftist knows babies are infinitely precious.

In another book by Schuon, I came across an intriguing and no doubt controversial claim, that "To understand a religion in depth, one must understand religion as such."

Here again, many religious folk will resist this idea, but it is "somewhat" inevitable (can anything be a little bit evitable?). For example, by what criteria does the Christian determine Christianity to be true? Protestants try to confine themselves to the letter of scripture, but still, someone has to decide what qualifies as scripture. Catholics will of course say the Church has determined what qualifies, but if you're following me, this leads either to an arbitrary stop or an infinite regress. Was man made for scripture or scripture for man? And how do we know, unless the truth is built into us?

I don't think it's useful for the average man to ask such questions, but again, this is a useless blog aimed at useless people.

Can we bring this discussion down a couple of notches, into more familiar territory? Sure, no problem. Let's turn to The Roots of Christian Mysticism, and see if we can come up with anything. I'm just going to thumb through and rely on providence.

"A life without eternity is unworthy of the name of life. Only eternal life is true" (St. Augustine).

"[T]heologians praise the divine Origin for having no name and yet possessing all names.... They declare, moreover, that this divine Origin is simultaneously at the heart of the universe and far beyond the sky, sun, stars, fire, water, wind, dew, cloud rock, stone, and in a word all that is and nothing that is" (Dionysus the Aeropagite).

O?

"The infinite is without doubt something of God, but not God himself, who is infinitely beyond even that" (Maximus the Confessor).

Infinitely beyond infinitude -- which is to say, the absolute infinitude of Beyond-Being contains the relative infinitude of Being.

"God's transcendence eludes even our very idea of transcendence. God transcends his own transcendence, so that he may not be lost in abstract nothingness, but may give of himself" (Clement).

Which "is why the Fathers also speak of God as inaccessible, of God beyond God, in terms of a springing forth, a creative and redemptive leap outside his essence, following the eternal movement of the divine energies, but also in order to communicate these to creatures..." (ibid).

O --> (↓). Being marches forth from Beyond-Being!

Good and Bad Nothingness

Something that exists or has happened is a realized possibility, meaning that it must have been possible in principle. Moreover, it must mean that possibility as such exists in principle -- or that there is a meta-cosmic "principle of possibility."

Unless you are a nominalist, in which case each thing is a unique fact expressing no principle. The problem with this point of view is that it renders thought impossible. On the plane of thought, everything depends upon seeing generalities and extracting principles and essences. Indeed, any word is a general category, otherwise we'd have to invent new words each time we spoke.

Speaking of which, I can't tell if this line of thought I've been pursuing is of general interest, or just a private preoccupation. It feels quite essential to me -- in other words, like we're drilling down to the essence of things -- but maybe it strikes you as peripheral. I don't know what to do about that. A little secret: the bus is more or less self-driving. Although I am technically behind the wheel, that's just in case of emergency. Otherwise, the bus goes where it wants to go.

The following strikes me as an ultimate pole of thought, beyond which it cannot go; it is a truth of which there can be no truer, except in an extra-cognitive mode such as mystical union:

Beyond-Being is absolute Necessity in itself, whereas Being is absolute Necessity in respect of the world, but not in respect of Beyond-Being. Beyond-Being... possesses the possible as an internal dimension and in virtue of its infinitude; at this level, the possible is precisely Being, or Relativity, Maya. We would say consequently that Being is not other than possibility; possibility necessary in itself, but contingent in its increasingly relative contents...

This formulation resolves a lot of issues I have with exoteric religion. For example, perhaps trinitarian thought is a way of thinking about the same reality -- a point of reference, as it were. In other words, you are always free to think about God as a kind of indistinct blob of absolutely transcendent omnipotence and omniscience.

Islam tends toward this view, i.e., There is no God but God, full stop. Judaism does too, except in the case of Kabbalah, which is like an interior map of divinity with all sorts of interesting points of reference -- including the Ein Sof corresponding to the absolute ground of Beyond-Being. It

is understood as God prior to his self-manifestation in the production of any spiritual realm.... Ein Sof may be translated as "unending", "(there is) no end", or infinity.... Of the Ein Sof, nothing ("Ein" ) can be grasped ("Sof" -- limitation).

This is one of the reasons why the bʘʘk begins the way it does, with the black page that is even prior to nothing: Beyond-Being is orthoparadoxically beyond nothing! (Or nothing is beyond it.)

For which I do have some venerable back-up, mainly in the person of Meister Eckhart, who made many similarly strange claims:

God the ineffable one has no name. The divine one is a negation of negations and a denial of denials. God is nothing. No thing. God is nothingness; and yet God is something. God is neither this thing nor that thing that we can express. God is a being beyond all being; God is a beingless being.

Hard to understand. Easy to misunderstand. Again, it comes down to making distinctions within God, but -- consistent with trinitarian thought -- not separations. And what is a distinct without separation but a complementarity?

Which is why I would suggest that Being is not like an emanation from Beyond-Being, but its complementary mode. Somewhat as in how the Father engenders the Son, each of whom is nevertheless eternal. Father and Son are quite complementary, in that you cannot have one without the other.

An alternative perspective would be to say that the Trinity as already a kind of crystallization out of Beyond-Being. Looked at this way, it reminds me of a stable pattern of currents that is a function of the entire ocean. Yes, we can make out the contours of the currents, but can never pretend they could exist separate from their oceanic matrix. Rather, they are the ocean.

Analogously, the human ego could never exist outside its unconscious matrix; or, local consciousness floats on a wider sea of consciousness-as-such. We all have a kind of trinitarian structure, in that each moment our thought is flowing out of an implicate order which is unknown to us.

Where does creativity come from? Who knows? All we know is that we will never run out of poems, melodies, paintings, gags. How can this be, unless we participate in Infinitude, AKA divine possibility?

Speaking of art, another key point: due to the nature of Possibility, it is possible for possibility to detach from its divine source, and thereby careen toward impossibility.

Again, Contingency must be grounded in Necessity, prolonging the latter in diverse ways, without veering into pure contingency. Pure contingency is none other than the tyranny of relativism, AKA the absurdity of postmodernity, which like nothing so much as a counterfeit nothingness, or bad nothing. There is the good nothing of total possibility, and the bad nothing of total absurdity.

On the Necessity of Possibility

What is the best way to know whether something is possible?

Well, if something exists, then it was possible for it to exist. Likewise, if something is happening, then it was possible for it to happen. But where or what is this possibility before it exists or happens? Or is this a meaningless question?

More problematically, if something doesn't exist or hasn't happened, how do we know it is possible? Not to immediately pivot to the political, but it seems to me that one of the consistent characteristics of the left is to wish for things that never were and (more problematically) cannot be. And not just wish; rather, to try to compel them through force (since there is no other way).

It reminds me of a famous line by Robert Kennedy. Liberals no doubt hear it as "idealistic," while to conservatives it just sounds fruity: Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.

I say it is a rare achievement to see things as they actually are, a rarer one still to understand why they are the way they are.

For example, why are human beings sexually dimorphic and complementary? That's an important question to answer before you begin dreaming up other possibilities that never were and cannot actually be. Likewise marriage: what is it? Or an unborn baby, in which case, who is it? Might want to answer that question before taking its life.

You might say that conservatism is preoccupied with what is necessary, i.e., those things that cannot not be, especially on the human plane. This presupposes that there is a human plane -- or station, or nature, or essence -- and that failure to conform to this transcendent order is the sine qua non of what we call "psychopathology," or mental illness. It is our yardstick for knowing when a human being has gone off the rails.

Conversely, leftism appears to be preoccupied with the possible, but not really; for -- at risk of sounding tautologous -- a possibility, in order to be one, must be possible. Some possibilities are impossible, for example, time travel, or switching sexes. These may be possible in theory, but are impossible in reality. So we need another term for impossible possibilities, besides "Democratic platform."

What about things that are, but needn't be? At least for humans, there exists a large realm of contingency, if only due to free will. In fact, if we deny free will, then it begins to look like there is no space between what can be and what must be -- i.e., between the necessary and contingent. Free will is first of all awareness of necessity. If not for necessity there could be no free will, rather, just unpredictable chaos, or "pure possibility."

Now in truth, necessity and possibility must be complementary; however, of the two, necessity must be prior, even though the one is humanly unthinkable in the absence of the other. Orthoparadoxically, possibility is ultimately necessary; it cannot work the other way around -- i.e., that necessity is only a possibility. If that were the case, then it wouldn't bloody well be necessary, would it?

The above pre-ramble was no doubt provoked by an essay of Schuon's called The Problem of Possibility (in From the Divine to the Human). It is a fine example of what I was driving at in the previous post, about the human ability to know What's Going On in the cosmos, deploying everyday language as opposed to math, physics, or some other special science.

The words (or concepts) "necessary" and "contingent" are quite necessary in order to understand our existential situation. They are irreducible, except in the sense mentioned above -- that possibility must flow from necessity. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that these two -- necessity and possibility -- are quite Real, except in different ways.

In what sense is the possible real? And is it as real as necessity? It's orthoparadoxical, or at least you can -- or must! -- look at it in two ways:

one may say that... what manifests itself is "real," and what can either manifest itself or not is simply "possible"; but in another respect, which erases this distinction, it is the possible which is real, manifestation being accidental or illusory...

This goes to the argument between Plato and Aristotle: what is more real, this local chair I'm sitting on, or its nonlocal archetype? The dual nature of Jesus is the final "answer" to this question, in that neither is more real than the other: we do not say that his human nature is just "maya," or "appearance" (one of the early heresies). Indeed, the whole point is that human contingency may now participate in metacosmic necessity.

Which of course goes to why science was stillborn in civilizations that regarded the world as pure appearance, which is to say, contingency. Rather, only the necessary was worth knowing, e.g., Brahman.

At any rate, if we trace these two rascals -- necessity and contingency -- all the way down -- or up -- to their root principles, we end up with the Absolute and the Infinite:

God is both absolute Necessity and infinite Possibility; in the first respect, He transcends everything that is merely possible, whereas, in the second respect, He is, not a given possibility of course, since He is absolutely necessary, but Possibility as such; this is to say, He is the Source of all that can be, or must needs be by relative necessity, therefore by participation in absolute Necessity. Possibility is potency at its root, and indetermination in its ever more far-reaching effects...

Which goes to a little problem I have with the traditional scholastic view, that God is "pure act" and therefore devoid of potency. I get what the doctrine is trying to say -- that God is unchanging and unchangeable, but still... It's like saying God is Absolute with no Infinite, which to me is no Absolute at all. Translighted to the human plane, it is like all necessity with no possibility, i.e., no free will.

More fundamentally, what does it mean to say that God is trinity? I say -- as it were - that the Son is the ever-realized (or real-izing) infinitude of the absolute Father, always and forever. Or something like that. The point is, it gives rise to a different vision from a static and absolute monad. That would bore even -- or especially! -- God.

Circular and Absurcular Humanism

I guess you could say I am preoccupied with What a Man Can Know -- not through any special science or particular culture, nor in any certain time in history, but in any time or place, just by virtue of being a human person.

For me, this knowledge would constitute genuine humanism, in contrast to the cosmic heresy known as "secular humanism." This latter imposter denies God in the effort to elevate man, and so devolves to a circular -- or absurcular -- humanism. Literally! For it is written:

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

But an Authentic humanism is built upon the discernment of human insufficiency. Otherwise we are trapped in a closed loop, or an ontological tautology.

Consider the following, which sounds cute or paradoxical, but is quite literal: Man is an animal that imagines itself to be Man.

In other words, remove God from the equation -- or deny the God/man complementarity -- and man is literally an animal, no better or worse than any other.

Maybe I'm just lazy. Or stupid. Otherwise, I'd go and get a Ph.D. in physics, which, if it doesn't yet have all the answers, someday will. It's just a matter of time. In other words, physics is the one and true faith, providing the kind of knowledge to which all other disciplines aspire.

Or, maybe it's just because I'm better at words than numbers that I nourish the delusion that, in the words of the Aphorist, Man is not educated through knowledge of things but through knowledge of man. And knowledge of man is unthinkable in the absence of knowledge of God.

In a purely horizontal universe, for example, aborting a baby is morally indistinguishable from kicking a rock. More generally, reality is reduced to an unrelieved and inescapable Is. Any Ought is pure fantasy. And any I is out of the question.

That's where physics leads. Because that's were physics starts. Again, this is the prison of circular humanism. Put it this way: is a human being without an Ought even thinkable? No, it is not. For in some sense, man is literally made of "oughtness," and we all know it. Man is an obligation that man often violates (Dávila).

How so? Well, everyone knows -- or used to know, anyway -- that we ought to know truth, i.e., distinguish between reality and appearances. It is why we have an intellect to begin with: to conform ourselves to reality, or knowledge with being.

Likewise, we ought to do good, which is to say, distinguish between good and evil. Imagine raising a child while systematically driving home the point that there are no such things as truth, virtue, and beauty. That's child abuse.

Now, imagine a liberal college campus where such destructive inanities are taught. That's adolescent abuse. Now, imagine paying a quarter of a million dollars to brainwash your child into believing he ought not pretend that any objective oughts exist. Rather, any and all oughts are just pretexts for blind power and unjust oppression.

That's not a university. It's certainly not a proper humanism. It's Monsters, Inc. Is it any wonder academia is so hostile to truth, sanity, and decency? Liberals in no way eliminate the Ought. Rather, they just replace the luminous and expansive God-given one with a squalid and petty manmade one.

Back to my main point. Not only do I believe man can know the truth of man, but I also happen to believe we are entitled to this knowledge.

Really, given what we have to put up with down here, it's not asking much, is it? Think about it from the other side. Would you go to the trouble of creating self-conscious beings, and then deny them the ability to know why they exist? That would be frankly sadistic. It would be as if the universe were a vast liberal campus -- an endless tapestry of grandiosity and bullshit. Life is hard enough. Impossibly hard if meaningless too.

There is a proper circular humanism, which takes place in the vertical space uniquely inhabited by man. I was reading about this just the other day, while looking up an unrelated factoid in The Orthodox Church. In it, Bishop Ware writes of how "The human being is a single, united whole; not only the human mind but the whole person was created in the image of God."

Moreover, it is as if "all creation is a gigantic Burning Bush, permeated but not consumed by the ineffable and wondrous fire of God's energies."

We can never know God's essence, any more than we can know the essence of any other person. But his energies are everywhere! "It is through these energies that God enters into a direct and immediate relationship with humankind. In relation to us humans, the divine energy is in fact nothing else than the grace of God..."

Ultimately, this circle of grace takes place between the divine transcendence and the divine immanence. Indeed, one might say the circle is composed of grace, and that it is for us to leap in and take part in it. For if it's good enough for God, it ought to be good enough for the alikes of us.

Homo Mirabilis

Which means the "human miracle," or, more to our point, that the human station itself is our most concrete evidence of the miraculous.

And what do we mean by miraculous? Broadly speaking, I would define the miraculous as any vertical ingression that in principle defies horizontal explanation. Horizontality goes into the miracle, but cannot be its sufficient reason.

For example, the brain is a necessary condition for our humanness, but clearly not sufficient, not just on an individual basis today, but as a species in the distant past.

This latter is discussed in the bʘʘk, in the context of the sudden explosion of humanness that occurs around 40,000 years ago. Mere horizontal evolution, we are told, doesn't work that way. And yet, there it is. Something occurs vertically, and I know what it was: a vertical ingression, AKA miracle.

It's very much like Michelangelo's depiction of the creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, only in the immaterial realm: as with any myth, it is a local representation of a nonlocal truth. Only when hominid nervous systems became sufficiently complex were they susceptible to the divine touch, or vertical ingression.

Another reason why we know this is the case is that what is true today must have been true then. Humans today routinely experience vertical ingressions of various kinds -- Joy Behar notwithstanding, -- so there is no reason to believe our furbears were denied this logospheric manna from heaven. Indeed, there is evidence that they tended to conflate it with other immaterial influences (which we also still do today, most notoriously in the Islamic world).

Speaking of Islamists, note the inverse possibility: of receiving vertical ingressions even while denying the existence of God. This is the structure of leftism, as outlined by Michael Polanyi some 75 years ago, and nothing has changed in the meantime: that "despite its rejection of transcendent reality, it exhibits a high degree of moral passion."

No kidding. But never conflate moral passion and morality, especially the objective kind! There is plenty of moral passion -- even hysteria -- on the left, little in the way of detached and objective morality -- even an overt denial that such a thing exists. As such, their subjective and relativistic moral passion "is not a mark of honor -- instead, it is a mark of dishonor," for "here we have moral passion without any moral judgment":

"Polanyi maintains that a 'moral inversion' has occurred." This ontologically rootless moral passion "now invokes any means, however grotesque and immoral, to satisfy its longings. Under this guise, moral passion serves rather than spurns the cause of fanaticism" (from the foreword of The Logic of Liberty).

Which is how it comes to pass that we are ruled not only by our intellectual inferiors, but moral inferiors as well, AKA the Swamp.

Say what you like about our swamp-dwelling elites, but they are never short of passion, no matter how misguided. When one avenue is blocked -- say, "Russian collision" -- they pick themselves up as if nothing happened, and move on to the next unhinged passion. What will it be today? That's really what the FakeNews comes down to. Give me a hard-bitten cynic any day over a passionate moralist of the left!

We are still on the subject of the Human Station, and what it all means. Clearly, it must in a way mean "everything" on pain of meaning nothing, precisely. As we've put it before, the world cannot be a little bit pregnant with meaning. And the ONLY conceivable way it can mean anything is for it to be a reflection of absoluteness. Absent this, we are indeed plunged into relativity, AKA permanent and ineradicable stupidity. Who doesn't see it?

A free society is animated by transcendent beliefs -- or beliefs anchored in transcendence -- or it isn't free. And freedom is the miracle par excellence, for it has no conceivable horizontal explanation, to such an extent that those who are wedded to a materialistic metaphysic have no choice but to deny its existence. But the integral cosmic man -- AKA Raccoon -- recognizes and says from himsoph: I am free, therefore God is. Conversely, the credo of the left ought to be: I think, therefore I shouldn't. For whenever they try to think, mischief -- from simple theft to genocide -- follows.

Time out for some illustrative aphorisms:

He who does not believe in God can at least have the decency of not believing in himself.

Yes, literally, because why on earth would a tenured ape take himself seriously?

Liberals can be divided into those who believe that wickedness is curable and those who deny that it exists.

And this division runs through the very heart of the liberal, who screams that only an evil conservative could believe in the fairy tale morality of good and evil. For truly, The progressive believes that everything soon turns obsolete except his ideas.

And passions. Condemnatory passions. Which is why, When the progressive condemns, every intelligent man must feel alluded to. Yes you, you deplorable racist sexist homophobic Islamophobic fundamentalist pig!

Enough with Homo diabolos. Back to Homo mirabilis. As usual, Schuon cuts through centuries of windbaggery, and right to the essence. What we call a miracle

has in itself nothing mysterious or problematical about it: the so-called natural laws of a lower degree of Existence can always be suspended through the intervention of a higher degree, whence the perfectly logical term “supernatural”: but this degree also has its laws, which means that the miracle is “natural” on the universal scale, while being “supernatural” on the earthly scale.

So, from the naturalistic perspective, the human person is a miracle. But from the perspective of the Divine Person? Eh, not so much.

The miraculous is that which is due to a direct, thus vertical intervention of a heavenly Power, and not to a horizontal progression of causality. If one extends the notion of “nature” to all that exists, miracles too are “natural,” but in that case words would become meaningless, as it would then be impossible to make the essential distinction between blind or unconscious causes and the supra-conscious Cause, the source of all consciousness and of all power. Scientists confuse the miraculous with the irrational and the arbitrary.

I wanted to throw in a discussion of what the Christian knows that the scientistic atheist does not and can never know, but we're out of time, so you'll have to think that through yourself. A hint: awareness of the Absolute, and the consequences flowing therefrom.

How to Fail at Humanness

The usual Friday ramble...

I have nothing concrete or practical to say about the recent school shooting. It does, however, remind me of something said in yesterday's post -- that alone among creatures, man may sink beneath himself and fall into a negative space of evil, absurdity, and nihilism: a creature no longer of God, but of what then?

This goes to the sufficient reasons for the human station, which are freedom, love, virtue, and truth: we are given freedom in order to conform ourselves to what is good, true, and beautiful.

If this is not the case, then to hell with it: the nihilist living in his negative space is no worse than the saint or scientist pursuing virtue and truth. We all just live our own peculiar way of being in error. In this context, to be an individual is to be uniquely as opposed to collectively wrong, since truth is inaccessible in any case.

At the same time, man can never attain his purpose alone. We are social animals before we are individuals, and the latter -- individuation -- is strictly impossible in the absence of the former.

This goes to the intersubjective and trinitarian nature of the human person, such that group and individual are always complementary and not opposed -- except in pathological situations, such as leftism, wherein the collective oppresses the individual, or libertarianism, in which the individual is an isolated monad abstracted from the group. Note that these two deviations are founded upon a systematic ignorance and denial of the human station.

Which, by the way, is why the natural family is the unit of human existence. It is the glue that binds people together, and consequently allows us to bond with people and groups outside the family. Strong and heathy families create strong and healthy individuals, at least most of the time. There's always a seemingly random, or at least unforeseeable, element in these matters.

But also, to paraphrase Dávila , sin "shuffles the cards." At any rate, if there were a pure cause-and-effect relationship between parental input and child output, we would be machines, not free beings.

President Trump is surely correct to call this a "mental health issue," but what can this mean in a culture that proudly transgresses all human norms and calls it freedom and progress? As said in yesterday's post, there is no progress beyond the human station: one can fail to actualize proper humanness, but no one can transcend it.

Which sounds arrogant -- as if humanness is a kind of perfection. Well, it is! But again, it is image, and it is up to us -- in freedom -- to move toward likeness. No conceivable anthropology can surpass this formulation. This is what is meant by the wisecrack that the only real failure and tragedy in life is "not to become a saint."

Why? Because this is the ultimate telos of our God-given freedom. Anything less "is to remain unactualized." Yes, almost all of us fail. But failure is only comprehensible in the light of possible success.

In this context, failure is a form of success, so long as it is aimed in the proper direction. In other words, man can improve in the trying, which is true of everything from science to sanctity. But in the absence of this telos, there is neither failure nor success, again, just the aimless drifting of cosmic flukes.

By the way, I would modify Bloy's crack somewhat, in order to allow for different types and destinies. Being that man is knowledge, sentiment, and will -- or truth, love, and virtue -- there is room enough for the sage as well as saint (not to mention artist or warrior or even merchant). Thus, if you are given the gift of intelligence and fail to actualize wisdom, then that is indeed a tragedy. Worse, it is tenure.

Precisely because man may conceive of the transcendent Absolute -- beyond which there can be no whicher -- he must be, as it were, immanent absoluteness; or again, a residue of absoluteness projected into time, space, and relativity.

Man cannot be intelligent "without an Intelligence 'in itself'" -- an Intelligence "which is both transcendent and immanent." This itself is a "quasi-fulgurating proof of the Omniscient, a proof almost too blindingly evident to be able to be formulated in words." Indeed, language is a shadow -- or better, image -- of the Logos, as is moon- to sunlight.

About the unsurpassable nature of the human station: "To say that man... is 'made in the Image of God'" is to say that human beings manifest "something absolute and for that very reason something unlimited and perfect" (Schuon).

Now, this kind of grandiose talk is liable to give a fellow a big head and lead to all sorts of mischief. But only if it is in the wrong metaphysical context.

For in a trinitarian context, our greatness is in our humility and self-giving: the meek, the poor in spirit, the pure in heart, are among those who gain entry to the vertical kingdom. These latter are receptive to God and thereby moving toward him, which is again the reason for the human station.

The animal, which can manifest perfections but not the Absolute, is like a closed door, as it were enclosed in its own perfection; whereas man is like an open door allowing him to escape his limits, which are those of the world rather than his own. --Schuon

Apology for Anthropology

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but when I resume blogging after a couple days away, it's like waking up and trying to resume a dream. Hard to do. In a way, every dream is its own little world. When it ends, that world is over -- even though a dream is rarely "complete."

Nor do we ever remember the beginning of any dream; rather, we're just there, after it has begun, and usually awaken before it can have any neat and tidy resolution. Which is more than a little like life itself, no? We may have snapshot memories from age five, or four, or three, and then the temporal cliff. We must take it on faith that we were conceived born, nursed, weaned, etc.

Nor can there be any "completeness" at the other end. Yes, we can reconcile ourselves to death, but human potential can never be exhausted in this life. If Mozart were alive, he'd still be cranking out symphonies. Edison would still be inventing.

Truly, a world comes into being with the cognitive development of each person. And each person is a fresh perspective on being -- like a pinhole in a lampshade, in which there is one central light and innumerable "openings" for it at the periphery.

You could take that more or less literally: that there a single Subject grounding our otherwise inexplicably diversified subjectivity. To express it pneumo-metrically, the cosmos has a center and a periphery, just as it has a beginning and end. The center is God (or O if you prefer), to whom everything is more or less peripheral -- like rays of light in relation to the central sun.

Along the way there are what we might call "stations." Imagine these as circles of varying sizes around the central point from which they radiate. What we perceive as "matter" is just such a circle, as is the realm of biology as such, the latter closer to the Center than the former.

In this context, man is in an ambiguous situation indeed. For exactly what is the human station, and how does it relate to the Center? That question has a number of answers, or at least can be approached from various angles. But if you ask the typical tenured drone to define the human station, he'll say: "Easy. There isn't one."

There isn't one (for the McTenured) because there is no cosmic center and no periphery. Rather, there is only periphery with no center (an impossible formulation). Truly, we are as parasites on existence, or barnacles on the ship of matter. But there is still a kind of "center," because man cannot not have one.

In other words, even the person who exiles man from any contact with the Center is nevertheless speaking from a center. Indeed, no coherent speech is possible in the absence of a center from which it proceeds. Otherwise it would be just random babbling.

The same sort of incurious dullard who reduces life to matter is likely to reduce person to biology. Thus, it's easy enough to critique reductionism, but you need to replace it with the proper metaphysic. Again, the reason why reductionism fails is because it denies the Center from the center.

Not the Center as such, but a reflection of the Center, which goes precisely to the human station; for what is man but the Center at the periphery? Or in other words, to say that man is in the image and likeness of the Creator, is to say that he is a temporal reflection of this eternal image.

Except to say that there is image and there is likeness, two very different things. Yes, we've discussed this in the past, but there may be some new riders on the bus. I can't see them unless they comment, but travelers must be getting on and off all the time. Unless I'm only losing riders, which I don't rule out.

Man is stationed at the periphery. However, life is a pilgrimage from periphery to Center. This Center is always available to us, since we are prolongations of it. To be precise, in one sense we are discontinuous with it -- think of the rings around the Center -- but in another sense continuous with it -- as in the rays proceeding from the Center.

Not only that, but man is uniquely able to move away from the Center; (ortho)paradoxically, he is "free" to fall past the outer periphery, into... what exactly?

Truly, this latter is a kind of "negative" space to which no other animal has access. Every other animal is enclosed in its archetype, with no freedom of vertical movement. Pigs don't think about becoming better pigs, nor can a pig sink beneath itself and become, say, Adam Schiff. But Adam Schiff can become a pig or even Pelosi, which reveals a central truth about the human station.

"Anthropology." I've studied a fair amount of it, but the whole discipline is rather peripheral to what is going on with anthropos. For it typically places man at the periphery of natural selection, which it regards as the true center of things. Psychobiology and evolutionary psychology are of this nature, ultimately using the mind to deny itself and leaving nothing standing but a blind and deracinated tenure.

There is of course a Christian anthropology, which is a whole different martyr. In my opinion it is the true anthropology, or a view of man from the Center, as opposed to a self-negating peripheral view. This true humanism opposes a false secular humanism which

forgets that once man abandons his prerogatives to matter, to machines, to quantitative knowledge, he ceases to be truly “human.” What is most totally human is what gives man the best chances for the hereafter, and this is what also most deeply corresponds to his nature (Schuon).

About our capacity to exit the human station through the back door, Schuon correctly notes that

human animality is situated beneath animality as such, for animals innocently follow their immanent law and thereby enjoy a certain natural and indirect contemplation of the Divine Prototype; whereas there is decadence, corruption and subversion when man voluntarily reduces himself to his animality.

Here Schuon outlines in more detail what characterizes the human station:

When we speak of man, what we have in mind first of all is human nature as such, that is, inasmuch as it is distinguished from animal nature. Specifically, human nature is made of centrality and totality, and hence of objectivity; objectivity being the capacity to step outside oneself, while centrality and totality are the capacity to conceive the Absolute.

So, man is uniquely able to understand his nature and transcend it. The human station itself cannot be transcended, in that we cannot become angels, let alone God. Nevertheless, whereas the angel -- like the animal -- is enclosed in its nature, man can transcend his, since it is in his nature to transcend. It's what we do.

Here is how Schuon describes it: "Man comes from God and he goes towards God," such that "his 'becoming' bears the imprint of a 'being'; he is that which he becomes, and becomes that which he is." Again, this is unique to the human station, and is the ground floor of the True Anthropology.

To be precise, the human station is characterized by "objectivity of intelligence: the capacity to see things as they are in themselves; next, objectivity of will, hence free will; and finally, objectivity of sentiment, or of soul if one prefers: the capacity for charity, disinterested love, compassion" (Schuon).

Obviously, of no other animal can it be said that it is on a mission or pilgrimage toward truth, love, and beauty! Bottom line for today:

Quite paradoxically, it is only in transcending himself that man reaches his proper level; and no less paradoxically, by refusing to transcend himself he sinks below the animals which -- by their form and mode of passive contemplatively -- participate adequately and innocently in a celestial archetype; in a certain respect, a noble animal is superior to a vile man.

Today's dream is over, if not ended per se.

In Search of the Missing Cosmic Trust Fund

We're all familiar with the mystery of dark matter, which only constitutes, oh, 84.5% of the total mass of the universe, but is nevertheless missing in action; combined with dark energy, 95.1% of mass-energy is unaccounted for.

In reality, dark matter is simply an epistemological placeholder; it is where the theory -- not the matter -- "goes dark," so to speak. Which is the case with all scientific theories, especially when they touch upon origins. In short, it is easy to conflate where reality begins and where one's theory ends. It's like refusing to leave the theater, because you want to find out what happens after the movie is over.

For it is written: Every beginning is an image of the Beginning; every end is an image of the End (Dávila), and these two -- Beginning and End -- are outside time. Thus, We call “origins” the limits of our science. If you only remember these, you will be less prone to confusing your model with what it is modeling.

One could as readily refer to consciousness as dark matter, on the presumption that we aren't yet able to reduce it to a material explanation, but eventually will be. Materialism is the god of secular gaps; but it reifies the gaps, since only wholeness can account for their transcendent unity.

(Incidentally, apropos of nothing -- or possibly everything -- it occurs to me that consciousness isn't so much dark matter as bright immateriality; and that if something appears dark to us, it is only in light of -- or relative to -- consciousness.)

In this regard, all forms of materialism, scientism, naturalism, etc., are merely postdated checks drawn against future (omniscient) explanations. It's a bit like a Ponzi scheme, in that the presumptive wealth is enabled by new investors, as the illusion of materialism is sustained by freshly indoctrinated graduates.

Have you ever tried to fill your swimming pool by pouring buckets of water from the shallow end to the deep end? Or maybe you didn't attend college.

At any rate, another missing reality is the organism. Yes, you can explain it in reductionistic terms, just as you can, as a commenter put it the other day, reduce Hamlet to a box of Scrabble letters. In which case, to be or not to be is simply a matter of correct spelling: being is just the ultimate spelling bee.

What am I buzzing on about? About chapter 6 of No God, No Science, called The Mystery of the Missing Organism. Yes, all of the above is the same old nous for senior Raccoons, but it's always nice to have some scholarly hollering and academic backup for my more visionary and prophetic stylings.

As Hanby explains, the unity of the organism "transcends and, thus, ontologically precedes the coordinated interaction of its parts as the principle and subject of their interaction, though the full manifestation of this unity in this coordinated interaction awaits the organism's historical development and maturation."

This passage highlights an important orthoparadox that makes sense of the whole human journey, indeed, of the human station: that man is always on the way to his own antecedent unity. Note that this is the inverse of what was said above about writing rubber checks against imaginary future wealth, because the wealth in this account is real.

For in this case, we are drawing against a kind of atemporal treasure -- an inheritance, as it were -- that is deployed in time; yes, an eternal Trust fund, which of course brings to mind the investment advice of Jesus:

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

"A transcendent order of being, form, and finality," writes Hanby, is intrinsic to the "identification of entities and to the intelligibility of history." He cites Ratzinger, who "regarded the reduction of being to history as perhaps the principal factor responsible for the eclipse of even the idea of truth."

Several aphorisms come to mind: for example, that Truth is in history, but history is not truth. For if historicism is the case -- if history is truth -- then no one could know it, because we must await the end of history to reveal it. Besides, if social and cultural phenomena are determined by history, then this must include the idea that social and cultural phenomena are determined by history, so the theory falls by its own hand.

But Real history exceeds what merely happened. Ho! History transcends mere history, in the same sense that the meaning of Hamlet transcends the letters used to compose it.

Are you -- your organism -- merely an epiphenomenal placeholder for an evolutionary process that will some day exhaustively explain you and eradicate all mystery? Are you the frozen sum of a litany of accidents? A soft robot animated by selfish genes?

Can't be. For if the Word isn't in the beginning, nothing can be written.

Nor can anything more be written until Thursday, since it's a busy week, at which point we will dig a little more deeply into this line of thought.

Drowning in Acid and Calling it Truth

In a recent video, Jordan Peterson uses the analogy of an iceberg to illustrate how people can appear to be standing on two different surfaces which are in reality united beneath the water.

I don't remember the context, but it reminded me of how liberals don't understand that they are standing on the same iceberg as conservatives. They don't see that the left is our mutual adversary. I am aware of only one prominent liberal who tries to point this out, Alan Dershowitz.

The progressive left is standing on an iceberg that shares nothing with the political philosophy of the American founding. Obviously, the Founders were classical liberals, whereas progressivism is fundamentally illiberal.

For example, no one should be surprised at their efforts to shut down free speech, or their attacks on religious freedom. On the conservative-liberal iceberg, these issues were settled long ago -- indeed, at the founding. On the American iceberg, freedom of speech is a natural right and self-evident truth. But on the progressive iceberg, there are no such things as natural rights or self-evident truths.

The progressive left always deploys lexicographical tactics in service of its ideological ends, perhaps the most prominent example being the conflation of liberalism and leftism, which are again at metaphysical antipodes.

Returning to our recent line of thought, you could say that our whole point is to show how Christianity and science are by no means standing on different icebergs. From a certain perspective they appear as two peaks separated by an expanse of water. But look beneath the surface, and damn! Same metaphysical berg. Not only that, but no other religious berg will cut ice for the scientific project, as explained by philosophers of science too numerous to mention.

Except for Whitehead, who may have been the first to notice. The following passage from Science and the Modern World is is copied from an amazon reviewer:

The greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement [is] the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this instinctive conviction... which is the motive power of research -- that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled.

How has this conviction been so vividly implanted on the European mind?... There seems to be but one source for its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, [such that] the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality....

In Asia, the conceptions of God were of a being who was either too arbitrary or too impersonal for such ideas to have much effect.... There was not the same confidence as in the intelligible rationality of a personal being.... My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.

So, science is an outcrop of the Christian iceberg. In the decades since Whitehead wrote that in the 1920s, his observations have gone from controversial to commonplace. To say unconscious derivative is to understand the relation between what is above and below the surface, the former derived from the latter.

Which also reminds me. In the early days of psychoanalysis -- and I suppose among the orthodox faithful to this day -- conscious/unconscious (or CS/UCS) was seen as a kind of vicious duality. But I came to understand them as a necessary and inevitable complementarity -- which is, incidentally, one reason why "artificial intelligence" will always remain so, for there is simply no way to model the UCS, nor its perpetual dialectical play with the CS. Even if we concede that the CS is somewhat analogous to a computer, the UCS definitely isn't, let alone the relationship between them.

This post is turning into the usual Friday ramble. So be it. I'm free associating, and you get what you pay for. But now I'm thinking of The Symmetry of God, which provides a useful way to think about what goes on above and below water. You might say that asymmetrical logic applies above the surface, whereas symmetrical logic rules below. Science is assymetrical, but is grounded in symmetry.

Example. Well, for me, perhaps the most consequential symmetry is that between man and God. If we we are in the image and likeness of the Creator, then that is literally a kind of symmetry. Analogously, my image in the mirror bears a symmetrical relationship to me, even if it is ultimately derivative, a "pale reflection" of the real thing, as it were.

But if there is symmetry between man and God, then that is saying a great deal. For example, it would explain our access to love, truth, and beauty, not to mention virtue, creativity, unity, objectivity, and more. Conversely, if there is no such symmetry, then there is no accounting for the gifts just mentioned. Indeed, they have no ground or even possibility. As such, they must be pointless illusions.

D'oh! You just melted the scientific iceberg with your metaphysical blowtorch.

Other symmetries. How about man and woman? That Eve is "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" is what you call a hint: above the surface they look like two different beings. Beneath the surface, oneflesh.

Or, heaven and earth, celestial and terrestrial, vertical and horizontal. These are not opposed, nor can the former ever be reduced to the latter. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. The counter-myth of the progressive iceberg is always My will be done, on earth because there is no heaven. Which soon enough brings about hell.

Daniel Dennett rightly calls Darwinism a "universal acid" that, as it were, melts all manmade icebergs. True enough. When "pushed to its logical conclusion," writes Hanby, it also -- necessarily -- "begins to dissolve the very subject and presupposition of Darwinian theory..." Is there an acid that eats itself last?

If you don't believe so, then you haven't been paying attention to this post, for if you acid-wash being with Darwinism, "intelligibility and truth must always be reducible, as a matter of principle, to the unintelligibility and untruth upon which they are premised." At which point you are plunged beneath the waves and drown, even if you're the last to know you've just committed cluelesside.

Religious thought does not go forward, like scientific thought, but rather goes deeper. --Dávila

Nothing Can't Explain Anything, Let Alone Everything

What ceases to be thought qualitatively so as to be thought quantitatively ceases to be thought significantly. --Dávila

Continuing with our vindication of plain language and its access to simple truth, I am reminded of a eulogy given for a distinguished mathematician: His contributions to our field are incalculable.

I'm not sure if the eulogist was being ironic, but in any event, he conveyed the truth outlined in yesterday's post, that quality cannot be reduced to quantity -- and conversely, that no amount of quantity adds up to quality.

Indeed, you can't even say, for example, that the cosmos is a big place without the quality of comparative smallness. You've no doubt noticed that astronomers such as Carl Sagan like to blather on about -- scientifically! -- the billions upon billions of stars, and the vastness of space. Well, maybe yes, maybe no. Compared to what? There's only one cosmos, and compared to its creator its actually pretty small, cozy even.

More troubling is the fact that they like to play up the vastness of space in order to cut man down to size. But this is a verbal trick rooted in a category error of epic proportions; for man may be physically smaller than the cosmos, but can nevertheless contain it. Who's fooling whom? What is more impressive, a dead cosmos or a living scientist? A cosmos that can host life, mind, and spirit, or one that can't?

You might say that the contributions of our cosmos to humanness are incalculable. Or, you can attempt the calculation, but will soon find yourself in the realm of the infinite. In other words, the statistical chance of persons emerging from the incalculable quantitative contingencies -- all the equations lining up -- is more or less zero. So on that basis alone -- i.e., quantity -- we need recourse to another explanation, which is to say, quality.

Now, notwithstanding what was just said above, sometimes quantities do have qualities. They just don't add up from below.

To take an obvious example, the threeness of the Trinity is not to be understood quantitatively but qualitatively -- as intersubjectivity, as an eternal relation of love. In fact, other primary numbers convey lessons of their own, especially the One, Two, Four, Seven, and Zero, the latter signifying both nothingness and infinitude.

The One, for example, has always stood for God, unity, the Absolute. Furthermore, that each subsequent number is just a multiple of One conveys the idea that God -- the principle of unity -- is in all subsequent quantities. Likewise, twoness is static duality unless reconciled in the living synthesis and harmony of the Three.

You might say that complementarities are downward projections of threeness, whereas dualities are always from below. Not only that, but one of Satan's favorite pastimes is reducing complementarities to dualities -- or, even worse, unities, for example, man and woman.

In other words, it is bad enough to render man and woman opposed to one another, worse yet to pretend they are the same. Feminists can't decide which of these they prefer, but neither comports with reality.

Here's an interesting claim in No God, No Science; either you get it or you don't, but it is true nonetheless: "the only universe in which natural selection could work was the universe Darwin inherited and then stole from the natural theologians." Why stole? Isn't that a bit inflammatory? Not at all, for it's like breaking into a house and stealing the jewels, and then burning it down with the family inside to eliminate the witnesses.

What are the jewels? Oh, little things like a rational cosmos that is uniquely intelligible to human beings, not to mention the prior existence of living organisms that inexplicably appear in a presumably dead cosmos.

A more subtle point is that Darwinism doesn't actually account for change, even while putting itself forth as the last word on the subject. To paraphrase Hanby, genes are abstracted from the teleological wholeness of the organism. According to natural selection, "change" is a consequence of random genetic mutations.

But notice that no entity has actually changed: we have one organism, then another. The first one hasn't "changed," nor has the second. They both simply are what they are. You could say "the species" has changed, but this is just the attempt to sneak an abstract essence or quality in through the back door.

In other words, we superimpose an imaginary backstory or line of continuity, when the whole operation has been discontinuous. But continuity can only come from the top. As I've put to before, if we can explain natural selection, then natural selection cannot explain us. Isn't this obvious?

From the perspective of natural selection, an organism is the sum of its accidental mutations. But from our perspective, "organicism" is a prior condition that is "localized," so to speak, in biological objects. Organisms are ultimately only possible because of the wholeness and interiority of the cosmos, itself a reflection of the unity of being. You cannot get from pure exteriority to interiority, or from existence to experience. Just ask a rock, which will give you an infinitely more honest answer than a materialist. A materialist is not as dumb as a rock. Rather, dumber.

Bottom line: the metaphysical Darwinian

is in the awkward position of affirming in practice what his theory would deny and denying in theory what what his practice affirms, of paradoxically failing to see what he cannot help but see, of presupposing the interiority and unity of living organisms, and yet being prohibited by his ontological commitments from rendering an account of them. Darwinian biology is predicated upon a denial of the obvious which, as obvious, will not be denied.

Ontological commitments. AKA faith -- or better, faith in faithlessness, which is a bit like Gödel in reverse. For with Gödel, we always know more than we can say, whereas Darwinism can't help saying more than it could possibly know.

But no Darwinian actually is one, because it is an impossible metaphysic. For it begins with a rejection of its own implicit cosmos (itself a metaphysical construct), and posits "a counterfactual world of inertial singulars indifferently related to each other." It then reconstructs "the whole as a mechanical aggregation of those singulars brought about by extrinsic pressures or forces," which only "empties reality of its interiority and deprives universals of any ontological foothold."

The Aphorist sums it up: As it is unable to explain that consciousness which creates it, science, when it finishes explaining everything, will not have explained anything.

I would put it this way: you can't get from zero to One. The One, however, radiates infinitely, ultimately tending toward zero without ever arriving there. Unless you count the tenured.

Science, Magic, Metaphysics

The question before the bus is whether we need math, or logic, or some special science in order to understand the totality of existence, or whether it is possible to do so with plain language that anyone short of end-stage tenure can understand.

Naturally I believe the latter, or I wouldn't have wasted the last twelve years blogging millions of words of plain unglish on the totality of existence. There is indeed a general (not special) science for understanding the whole of reality: metaphysics.

In turn, religion is metaphysics incarnated, so to speak; the former is to the latter as a particular language is to the deep structure of language common to all human beings. We'll come back to this idea later.

Neither math nor logic can get the job done, for reasons etched into the substance of reality by Gödel. Until his theorems are disproven -- and they cannot be -- logic's arms are not long enough to spar with God.

The reverse, however, is not true: God can certainly speak with logic, or better, speak logic. Which is why we can say that things are not true because they are logical, but logical because true. Math and logic can only "prove" tautologies. They are ultimately circular; we can of course expand the circle, but this hardly means we've left it behind. Like astronauts, we can leave the earth behind, but only by taking it (its atmosphere) with us.

Logic is always inside its own circle. In contrast, we are after knowledge from beyond or outside the circle. Is this even possible? No, better! It is necessary, or the circle couldn't exist to begin with. So, how do we exit or see beyond it?

In a word, faith, another subject to which we will return. But faith is form before it is content; and its form is submission and conformity to what transcends us. Which is just like any other object of knowledge, only this one outside the circle.

In other words, all knowledge, if it is knowledge, is adequation, and each science differs as to the objects and methods of adequation. You don't study biological objects with a particle accelerator, just as you don't study God with a microscope or women with feminism, for none of these tools or methods are adequate to the object of study.

Many fine Aphorisms anticipatorily plagiarize the points we have made above. Each of them is self-evidently true, such that if you don't understand them, it's your fault, not Davila's. The following maxims judge you, not vice versa, and thank God there are such maximal judges in the cosmos, for without them we would be ineluctably lost in spacetime without map, canoe, or compass. For example,

That which is incomprehensible increases with the growth of the intelligence. Again, we can surely expand the circle, but this only renders the border between the known and unknown that much longer -- comparable to a light surrounded by darkness. No terrestrial light can hold a candle to the sun above.

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions. This is just an informal way of saying Gödel! One needn't be a trained logician to see this truth directly. Don't forget: Gödel doesn't escape his own theorems: they aren't true because logical, but logical because true.

Whether we like it or not, Philosophy ultimately fails because one has to speak of the whole in the terms of its parts. Only (traditional) metaphysics and theology turn this around and speak of the parts in terms of the whole.

In other words, we begin with God, not end there as a result of some syllogism or equation. Not to say that proofs aren't helpful in terms of being points of reference, but that's all they are. The proofs can only take one to the threshold of what transcends them. Then you have to leap.

So, The honest philosophy does not pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery. This is a somewhat paradoxical formulation, for how does one "circumscribe" -- i.e., envelop or enclose -- a mystery that surpasses us? How does one contain that which contains us?

Good question! To which there are a number of answers, each a point of reference from the seen to the unseen. In other words, to paraphrase Paul, the things of this world point or refer to the world beyond; appearances point to their reality. Otherwise they are not appearances but reality itself. Which is what the materialist must believe.

Here are some primordial ideas that point to an answer: God incarnates in history, such that the author of history becomes a subject within it; Mary gives birth to her Father; the Church is the womb of holiness and sanctity. I'm sure there are others that I'm not thinking of at the moment.

Always remember that doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book. Any reductionistic science is obviously a linguistic rabbit bulled out of an asshat.

Many scientific words and concepts readily slide into magic, such as "evolution," "mind," and "rational." But To believe that science is enough is the most naïve of superstitions. And Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.

But In philosophy nothing is easier than to be consistent. Here again, Gödel's theorems tell us that a logical system can be consistent or complete, but not both. In short, a strict scientistic consistency must be purchased at the price of completeness. The only way out is up. Or better, down, for if God doesn't condescend to meet us, no amount of lifting ourselves by our own buddhastraps will take us to the toppermost of the poppermost.

Ha ha: Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest. Er, which ones? He doesn't say, but off the top of my head I would suggest the complementarities between Absolute and relative, man and God, group and individual, male and female, necessity and contingency, being and knowledge. Certainly on our side of the veil, these are as warp and weft to the tapestry of existence.

It's this simple: existence is an area rug woven of verticality and horizontality. But although these are complementary, verticality must obviously be prior, for the converse is impossible. It is for this reason that man is the one being uniquely inside and outside the circle. Like God.

How is Possibility Possible?

This note to myself last Friday seemed urgent at the time, but I haven't thought about it since, and now we have to figure out why it was so important, or at least compelling. It reminds me of what Polanyi says about the importance in science of seeing good problems. Mediocre scientists have all the answers, but gifted ones come up with the good questions.

When you think about it, the history of science is a chronicle of asking the right questions. For example, a big question in physics before Einstein came along had to do with the nature of the ether. But the theory of relativity proved that there was no such medium, and that space and its objects were each reflections of a deeper principle.

If I recall my Thomas Kuhn correctly, a scientific paradigm generates its own questions. At first the paradigm is fruitful, but eventually it generates questions that not only can't be answered, but are absurd or paradoxical. These latter let us know that the paradigm cannot be complete -- that it is simply a useful way to interrogate reality.

For example, the theory of the Big Bang is useful up to a point -- that point being the instant the Bang occurs. Asking what happened "before" the Big Bang lands one in absurdity, since time is said to be a function of the Big Bang. You might even say there's no such thing as a question prior to the Big Bang, so stop asking. Bu-- Shut up!

So, we know there must be more to it than what physics can say. Unless ultimate reality is indeed absurd, which makes no sense at all. Or rather, because it makes sense. In other words, if existence is absurd, man could never know it. Or anything else, for that matter.

Which converges with today's subject, which is the role of language in all of this. The central question before us -- before all men at all times -- is whether we can actually understand reality, or whether we're just making things up in order to conceal our bottomless ignorance.

Paradoxically, science wants to have it both ways: that we are the absolutely contingent residue of genetic copying errors, and yet, that we may know the truth of ourselves. Only one of these can be true. And that's the truth. So we know we're on to something.

The anemic myth we have been given to understand is essentially that man knew nothing -- or nothing but error -- prior to the Enlightenment and scientific revolution, and now we know it all; not all of the details, of course, but the Big Picture, which will never change. In other words, there is no possibility of "progress" beyond the idea that everything is reducible to transformations of matter, such that man is nothing and life ultimately meaningless.

I'm reading an excellent book called Deconstructing the Administrative State, which is unfortunately named, because the authors range much wider and deeper than the title suggests, such that the bureaucratic deep state is seen as the mere side effect of a much more fundamental turn into political darkness. The soft tyranny of the administrative state is what happens when progressivism displaces reality. And it's only soft so long as we don't resist -- which is why they pound the president so hard. He threatens their whole beautiful nightmare.

Make no mistake: children who attend government schools are indoctrinated into the myths of statism -- the myths that support statism -- from the earliest age. Hold on a moment -- This Bus Stops for Aphorisms:

Man is an animal that can be educated, provided he does not fall into the hands of progressive pedagogues. Therefore, The State imposes obligatory and free instruction, for making a stupid man still stupider at the public expense (Dávila).

Remember Socrates? Or better, Remember Socrates! He was murdered by the state for "refusing to recognise the gods acknowledged by the state, and importing strange divinities of his own; he is further guilty of corrupting the young."

As Jesus is our paradigmatic religious figure, Socrates is our paradigmatic philosopher. Socrates is a reminder that if you love wisdom the state will hate you, just as Jesus warned us that love of him will provoke the world's hatred. Strangely, loving truth places a target on one's back, a proposition to which Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro can attest. The truth is of course safe on liberal college campuses, so long as it is surrounded by a retinue of body guards.

Here are some of the founding -- and therefore enabling -- myths of the left. Paraphrasing from the book, they include the ideas that we inhabit a cosmos with no end or purpose, that everything within it is subject to constant change, that man is strictly continuous with nature, that he cannot transcend his genetic programming, that all values are culturally and historically conditioned, that there is no ultimate truth, and in any event no soul that could possibly know it.

Why is this incoherent jumble of myths so important? Because it provides metaphysical support for the political myths of the left: that man has no rights that exist prior to the state, that there are no self-evident truths (only relative ones), and that there are no limits to the size and scope of the state.

We're still dancing around the periphery of the main subject, which is language and reality. The question is, does plain, everyday language go deeper than any and all sciences put together? Does language transcend -- or subtend -- anything math can say about the world? What comes first, quantity or quality? And if the former, how can quality -- say, the beauty of a face, or a landscape, or even just a pure color -- be reduced to quantity?

This line of thought was provoked by an essay of Schuon's called The Problem of Possibility, although most any of his essays would serve as well, for his entire corpus consists of plain language about ultimate reality. There are no equations, no special terms, no academic bloviating, just complete clarity on his end and perfect understanding on mine.

Regarding the latter, this is not to imply that I possess perfect understanding of reality. Rather, what I mean is that when I understand something Schuon says about the nature of reality, the understanding penetrates so deeply that something inside clicks and is convinced that no deeper understanding is possible: that we have hit ontological sheetrock, as it were.

I'm quite sure that many people have this same experience in their religion; indeed, it is this experience that makes one religious, that converts us. Something clicks on a deep level, and that's that.

Let's talk about "the problem of possibility." Going back to paragraph one, is this a real problem, one worth pursuing, or is it just an illusion, or dead end, or pointless exercise? Does science even recognize this problem? And if science says it isn't a problem, then it isn't one.

Nevertheless, exactly how is possibility possible? Is it a thing? Or is everything necessary? More to the point, if everything is reducible to necessity, where does all the possibility come from, most pointedly, free will? For free will is essentially possibility.

Which is why scientism tries to make it go away be denying its possibility. A number of years ago we had a commenter who would get into arguments with us over the impossibility of free will. Well, he's absolutely right: within his paradigm, free will is indeed impossible. But since free will is self-evident, his paradigm is self-evidently wrong. And of course, he's just emblematic of metaphysical materialism and scientism: garbage in, tenure out.

As Schuon (self-evidently) explains, if something exists, then it was possible for it to do so. But if something is possible, it may or may not exist. So, where or what is this realm of possibility? For if things are possible, you need to account for how this is possible.

We'll continue down this rabbit hole Wednesday. Meanwhile, a few related aphorisms:

If determinism is real, if only that can happen which must happen, then error does not exist. Error supposes that something happened that should not have.

So, To admit the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.

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

I'll make it easy for: if you could be wrong about the absence of free will, then you are wrong.

What You See is What You Grok. Or Hallucinate.

A note to myself in the margin says "What you see is what you grok." I've never actually read Stranger in a Strange Land, so I only know the word on a second hand basis. According to Prof. Wiki it has to do with deep understanding -- so deep "that you merge with [the knowledge] and it merges with you":

It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science and it means as little to us as color does to a blind man.

From context, I always thought of it as analogous to Polanyi's tacit knowledge:

All knowing, no matter how formalised, relies upon commitments.... A knower does not stand apart from the universe, but participates personally within it. Our intellectual skills are driven by passionate commitments that motivate discovery and validation.... Tacit awareness connects us, albeit fallibly, with reality. It supplies us with the context within which our articulations have meaning.

So literally, what we see is what we grok, the purpose of this blog being to grok the entire cosmos from top to bottom, inside and out. Some people (and philosophies) grok very little, while others grok in a completely insane way that has no basis in reality. Regarding the latter, I'm thinking of Joe Kennedy's response to the the President's SOTU. Here is what "we see," according to Joe:

"Russia knee-deep in our democracy. An all-out war on environmental protection. A Justice Department rolling back civil rights by the day. Hatred and supremacy proudly marching in our streets."

In reality, only the last is more than a hallucination, but I don't think he's referring to Antifa or bitter witches marching on Washington. More:

"This administration isn’t just targeting the laws that protect us -- they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection. For them, dignity isn’t something you’re born with but something you measure."

True, dignity is not something conferred by the state if we manage to escape the abortionist. Rather, we're created with it. Big difference.

Other targets of this administration include "the gender of your spouse. The country of your birth. The color of your skin. The God of your prayers." Kennedy is a Catholic. Neither the God of his prayers nor conservatism attacks the gender of anyone's spouse, so long as it is a spouse and not some novel, logophobic redefinition imposed by the state.

In any event, either leftists actually believe these things -- i.e., they are hallucinating -- or they are just cynical lies for the purpose of manipulating their low watt base. I have always suspected a combination, with cynical manipulators at the top -- the One Percent -- and the mob simply taking directions from above. However, due to the nature of the conscience, which has a way of persecuting us for lying, many people at the top convince themselves that the lies are true.

For example, if you take a speech by Bill Clinton from 20 years ago, or Hillary Clinton from 10 years ago, they are among those who target the gender of your spouse and country of your birth. In other words, like most people, they defended traditional marriage and understood that it is bad for the country to import millions of uneducated and unskilled people from shithole countries. Were they lying then, or are they hallucinating now?

Wow. I hadn't actually heard Kennedy's talk and am reading the transcript for the first time. It's even worse than I thought. Let's stipulate that someone is hallucinating, either them or us. But as Scott Adams helpfully explains,

if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.

The question is, how do we know we aren't the ones who are hallucinating? Like so:

One sign of a good mass hysteria is that it sounds bonkers to anyone who is not experiencing it. Imagine your neighbor telling you he thinks the other neighbor is a witch. Or imagine someone saying the local daycare provider is a satanic temple in disguise. Or imagine someone telling you tulip bulbs are more valuable than gold. Crazy stuff.

Being that I am -- back off, man -- a clinical psychologist, this is my stock in trade. In other words, either the patient is somehow out of touch with reality, or I am. But I'm not the one paying the patient to talk to me, so there's that. However, how does that explain all these left wing psychologists? Easy. Change is hard. People would prefer to have their hallucinations confirmed and not confronted.

Ever noticed that Fridays tend to be rambly posts? It must be because I have more time to get lost in my thoughts. But Bob, it's Thursday. True, but until you just said that, I thought it was Friday. In any event, I have no pressing work to do, so I'm in the slack zone.

I want to try to wedge another point into this jumble, a brief aside in the biography of John Paul II that arrested my attention, that "the Holy Spirit can work his will by darkening as well as enlightening people's minds."

I'd never heard this before, but I grokked it right away. It makes total sense. However, it raises a new problem, which is to say, how to distinguish between a lie or hallucination on the one hand, and a Spirit-sponsored, providential endarkening of the mind on the other? I don't know that there is any surefire way, and perhaps we don't need to know, since we still need to confront the lie either way.

But now that I'm thinking about it, there is a kind of intoxicated lying that goes too far, and is too stupid to blame Satan. Satan is subtle. Sophisticated. For this reason, it is impossible for me to believe that he is the author of, for example, Joe Kennedy's fatuous hallucinatory blather.

Another point: hallucination is a term of art, and it is not necessarily helpful to conflate schizophrenic hallucination with whatever it is that leftists such as Kennedy engage in. Leftists may be out of touch with reality, but it doesn't mean they are hallucinating per se. What then?

Bion referred to the process as hallucinosis, or "transformations in hallucinosis," in contrast to "transformations in thought." The former occurs when emotionally-tinged mental content cannot be contained, which is to say, transformed into thought. Instead, it is projected (in what is called unconscious phantasy) into an external container. It creates a "domain of nonexistence," or a "mental world where what is nonexistent 'exists.'"

Moreover, it brings about a kind of "'freedom' that is really an enclosure and a restriction." It feels free, because, via this process, the person has indeed "freed" himself of the painful content. But the person is now persecuted by his own projected mental content.

Along these lines, another thought has been rattling around in my head for the last few days. That is, we all know about the left's incessant virtue signaling, which is done to conceal the signaler's lack thereof (for example, Hollywood predators who are the loudest feminists, or leftist professors who see everything in terms of race while accusing others of racism).

Perhaps even more problematic than virtue signaling is "intelligence signaling" (for lack of a better term). But now that you have the term, you will notice that so much of leftist hivethought is no more than a vacuous exercise in intelligence signaling. And like virtue signaling, it is motivated by its unconscious opposite, which is to say, intellectual insecurity, stupidity, and imitation.

Put conversely, intelligence signaling is a way for these vapid morons to fool themselves into thinking they are among the cognitive elite.

To be continued...

The Cosmic Eclipse

Here is how a man loses the cosmos, and then proceeds to become lost in it. Pay close attention:

First, reduce the world "from act to fact," which results in a flattened and opaque blandscape of "absolute things." In order to accomplish this reduction, one must "separate in thought what exists together in reality," thus granting "analysis priority over synthesis" and conferring metaphysical primacy to "the analytically abstracted parts of reality... over the wholes from which they were abstracted" (Hanby).

This is all done unconsciously, of course, or at least without due diligence. Indeed, no one would invest in this dodgy isness or proceed down this path if they thought about it beforehand or reflected upon it afterwards. If there is a metaphysical equivalent to the primordial D'oh! of Genesis 3, I'm thinking this must be it.

Consider the alternatives: either the cosmos is contingent or it is necessary. There is no in between, unless, as I believe, God extends a private sphere of contingency known as free will.

But if the cosmos is strictly necessary, it is impossible to explain how beings have escaped this necessity, from life on up to free will. Certainly there is no explanation of how science could conceivably arise -- of how subjects can even exist, let alone stand above and understand the objects of existence.

Nowadays, science operates as if it can accomplish this in any old cosmos -- or not even a cosmos as traditionally understood. However, its very existence implies a very specific sort of reality. If we could only recover or re-member that reality, it would be... a good start. At least we'd have a foundation we can all agree upon, like a Cosmic Constitution.

Which, when you think about it, is what the Founders had in mind, what with all the talk about Nature (meaning the essential nature of things), Nature's God (for there can be no essences without God), createdness (or contingency and dependence), self-evident truths, and the inalienable rights that flow from these. It's all of a piece, don't you know. Shatter the primordial unity, and none of it makes any sense or has a legacy to stand on.

Which I suppose is the point of the left, which itself starts with division rather than unity. As they say, diversity is our strength! In reality, without the prior unity, it is our weakness-unto-death. As we've discussed in the past, diabolos, or diabolical mischief, comes down to division, blending of hierarchy, and applying truths to the wrong level. Most fundamentally it is a lie; or, the Fundamental Lie.

Exactly what is the Fundamental Lie? It must be "this reduction of the single actuality of the cosmos to an aggregation" (Hanby), to a vast collection of private parts, to the metaphysical nul de slack of logical atomism.

I first ran into that term -- logical atomism -- in the works of an apparently little known philosopher, Errol Harris, for example, in a book called The Reality of Time. There he writes that change and diversity are "impossible apart from some permanent and unifying matrix within which they occur and of which they are the diverse accidents."

Conversely, a strict logical atomism "leads finally to sheer chaos" because it assumes a jumble of objects "excluding all order and system that might impose unity on the plurality." But -- and I think I yoinked this exact passage for the bʘʘk -- "What is intelligibly diverse must be unified and whole, and only what is whole and unified can be intelligibly diverse. At the same time, only what is diversified can be intelligibly one."

So, this is your cosmos: "a single unity" but "at the same time a unified diversity." Moreover, "the reality of time... establishes concurrently the reality of a whole which is nontemporal." That last crack veers into a somewhat different subject, but you can nevertheless see how it must be the case: time is indeed the moving image of eternity, as relativity is the shadow of the Absolute.

Literally. Allegorically speaking. Think, for example of Plato's famous cave, where the dancing shadows can only exist because of the absolute light shining from outside the cave. Science studies these shadows -- AKA appearances -- but then pretends the shadows can subsist without light! Which is a kind of madness. Metaphysical madness, anyway.

Note that these shadows are not "nothing." However, they are indeed made nothing if man detaches them from the light that produces them. Then we're lost in the (anti-) cosmos, as alluded to in paragraph one.

From another angle, we can start with the Absolute, which is necessary being. But it doesn't end there. For Schuon, "To say Absolute, is to say Infinite," for "Infinitude is an intrinsic aspect of the Absolute." It is a way of saying that God is good, such that it is in his nature to radiate this goodness. Therefore, in a way, he can't help creating. Christian orthodoxy holds that creation is a radically contingent and pure gift, which conveys an important truth.

Nevertheless, it only applies to this creation, not to the divine creativity per se, which is what God does, or better, is: In the beginning, God creates. Period. For it is always the beginning, if you look upon things vertically. From this perspective, absoluteness radiates infinitely, all the way down and into worlds of contingency and possibility. Looked at this way, possibility is necessary, so to speak, or we couldn't have a (our) world.

But every thing that exists, no matter how contingent, nevertheless shares in absoluteness, for the distance between existence and non-existence is infinite. In other words, to exist is participate in being, which is God's primordial and continuous act.

Only man's ignorance and presumption are vast enough to eclipse the One Cosmos. It takes a big man to render man so small, and vice versa.