When Intellectuals Attack

If the cosmos is intelligible, then I say we should go the whole hog: that is, if we can understand anything, there's no principle barring us from knowing everything. Come, Icarus! To the sun, and beyond!

Yes, not so fast. There is a difference in principle between anything and everything, because the former occurs within the cosmos, whereas the latter presupposes an extra-cosmic view that only God could possess (we do not say "gods," because pagan deities were always understood to be inhabitants of the cosmos, not the radically transcendent creator of it).

Genesis 3 presents a timeless -- AKA eternally true -- cautionary tale about indulging in any Godlike intellectual pretensions. Rule One for would-be thinkers: don't be an irritating Gnosis-all!

Speaking of which, the last page of Johnson's Intellectuals has a good summary of what's wrong with these babeling kleptomaniacs, who can't help themselves from trying to steal fire from the gods, and who don't know their place in the cosmic scheme of things:

One of the principle lessons of our tragic [20th] century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is -- beware intellectuals.

Note that he doesn't say to beware intelligence, which would constitute an endorsement of stupidity. There is, however, a way for intelligence -- no matter how intelligent -- to go off the rails and transmogrify to evil.

Now, how could intelligence ever become so naughty? Well, this is one of the threads that runs through Voegelin's entire corpus. We'll get to him in a moment, but allow PaJo to finish his point and his book:

Not only should [intellectuals] be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.

Is it any wonder that the great majority of these boneless brainiacs want us to give up the second amendment? It's our last line of defense against the implementation of their homicidal ideas. And why do they all think alike, anyway? If they're such free thinkers, why are universities the least intellectually diverse places on earth?

intellectuals, far from being highly individualistic and non-conformist people, follow certain regular patterns.... Taken as a group, they are often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value (ibid.).

Ah ha. This is indeed a key point, because, while they imagine they are fearlessly seeking truth wherever it may lead, they are actually fearfully seeking approval -- and avoiding disapproval -- whatever the cost (paid in the coin of intellectual honesty and integrity).

The same pattern is seen in our mainstream media. How is it that they can, in unison, systematically unsee what is by far the most consequential political scandal in the nation's history? Is it a conspiracy?

I don't think so, any more than fish conspire to avoid dry land. We'll return to this idea as well. Johnson is almost finished. The instinct to spontaneously assemble into an intellectual cirque du jerk (pardon the French)

is what makes them, en masse, so dangerous, for it enables them to create climates of opinion [i.e., the water in which they swim] and prevailing orthodoxies, which themselves often generate irrational and destructive courses of action.

A lone intellectual, like a single madman, can only cause so much damage. But when a swarm of them takes over an institution, then we have a problem, because it causes the institution to become a madhouse.

This is how the university has become the Looniversity Bin, and how the deep state has become a political and judicial insane assoulum (Judge Sullivan, presiding over the Flynn case, is just an Adam Schiff in robes, while the impeachment showed Schiff to be a hanging judge disguised a legislator). What can we do about it?

Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.

Now, we've had our share of intelligent presidents, but only a handful of true intellectuals. Among modern presidents I can think of only two: Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama, two of the most dangerous and destructive in our history.

By way of transition, I want to switch gears for a moment and touch very briefly on A Very Brief History of Eternity, as it shares some commonality with Voegelin. For one of Voegelin's central points is that the normative condition of mankind is to live in tension with a transcendent reality that can never be reached but must never be forgotten.

I won't presume to speak for Voegelin, but I would say that human beings necessarily live in a dynamic space between now and eternity; indeed, the passage of time occurs within this space, and in a sense, is what time "is."

To put it another way, eternity and the present moment are as two ends of a single transcendent reality to which human beings have unique access. Animals, for example, more or less live in an "eternal now," but have no conception of eternity.

But the human now stretches forth to eternity, thus illuminating a space of history, creativity, progress, etc. And as Eire describes it, "when we lose eternity as a horizon we can end up with totalitarian, materialistic nightmares."

I agree, but would omit the "can," because materialism -- or any other ismolatry -- forecloses the proper human space and seals us in a matrix of soul-dead journalism, authoritarian tenure, and ideological fantasy. Conversely, the "paradoxical conjoining of the eternal with the temporal," writes Eire, is "the very essence" of Christian metaphysics.

The bad news: we're just about out of time. The good news: I invented a new word: episteleology. It means that temporal knowledge occurs -- and can only occur -- because it is in dynamic tension with the transcendent absolute.

How Not to Be a Human Being

I'm warning you ahead of time that I'm not happy with this post, but I'm trying to tame a bucking corpus, and it's not easy. I keep getting thrown, but this isn't my first rodeo. We'll subdue this beast yet... Besides, it's only blogging, so there's no time to properly edit or polish.

What Voegelin spent his life trying to describe is either 1) among the most important discoveries of mankind, or 2) the trivial preoccupations of an eccentric thinker with too much time and intellect. Really, it comes down to whether he is describing objective reality or it's just, like, his opinion, man. I think Voegelin would agree that if it's not the former, then his work is indeed pointless.

What was he attempting? Oh, not much. Only "a new analysis of reality" and "a new science of human affairs"; a "universally significant philosophy of history" that isn't just an ideological projection (i.e., historicism) but reflects the order of the soul in its dynamic tension with existence.

In a postmodern world of spiritual decay and intellectual rot, we are unaccustomed to an approach to human affairs that claims to be both objective and normative, or Is and Ought. Indeed, Voegelin would say that postmodernism itself is literally a disease -- AKA pneumapathology -- more on which as we proceed.

I've mentioned before that one of my favorite subjects in grad school was psychopathology. In the late 1980s it was still possible to affirm that there is a way humans are supposed to be, and that deviations from this norm comprise the essence of pathology, no different from any other organ system. But the left ruins everything, and psychology is one of the most important disciplines to ruin if its diabolical (i.e., anti-divine and therefore anti-human) project is to succeed.

In other words, the left must redefine human nature -- or, more to the point, define it out of existence. And if there is no human nature, then there can be no objective psychopathology. With no telos, sickness and health have no objective basis at all. There is no principle defining them, which leads to a radical individualism -- each man his own species, so to speak, so out the window go the natural law and natural rights that underpin our tradition of classical liberalism.

Nevertheless, human nature exists, so its denial leads to inevitable problems. If a man thinks he is a woman, that's a problem. For him. You can solve the man's problem by pretending it is possible for men to be women, but this only leads to deeper and more widespread cultural and political pathologies and absurdities.

Imagine, say, a thief arguing that he was born greedy and that it is natural for him to steal. In order to accommodate him, we change our laws so that people who identify as thieves are considered a normal variant.

Or, how about pedophiles? Polygamists? Note that we're not arguing that people who are confused about their sexual identity are "bad people." Rather, we are talking about the consequences of calling abnormality normal, or unreality real. Either there exist timelessly true objective standards rooted in human nature, or there are no standards. The left wants it both ways: there are no standards, and the raw power to enforce them.

For Voegelin, philosophy isn't just tenured bloviating, or error on a grandiose scale, or an endless argument leading from nothing to nowhere, but "a form of existence-in-truth." Not "my" truth, but truth itself, which isn't just the only truth worth knowing, but the very definition of truth (in other words, "my truth" is no truth at all). Thus, "the only way to challenge effectively a defective view of history is to provide an alternative that is philosophically sound."

So, just as there exists psychopathology, there are are cognitive and spiritual pathologies. These pathologies are a necessary consequence of spiritual, philosophical, anthropological, and political reality.

Wait -- political reality? You have to be a Constitutional Scholar to understand there's no such thing. In the words of Obama, implicit "in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or 'ism,' any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course..."

The usual straw man, false dichotomy, and overall lazy thinking. In contrast to this foolish approach, Voegelin's "primary commitment" was "to serve truth," wherever it may lead. Obama is typical of an academic mentality that isn't just wrong, but truly deviant. Voegelin contended (way before it was completely obvious) that such "massive illiteracy" -- masquerading as its opposite -- "pervades the educated stratum of society."

One of Voegelin's surprising bottom-line takes is that "the essence of modernity is the the growth of Gnosticism." Which very much reminds me of something Johnson says in his highly insultaining Intellectuals.

To back up a bit, to acknowledge the reality of human nature is to affirm the undeniable religiosity of man. Later we'll get into exactly what we mean by "religiosity," but it can never be eradicated, only denied and transformed. Along these lines, this introductory passage by Johnson is worth pondering:

Over the past two hundred years the influence of intellectuals has grown steadily. Indeed, the rise of the secular intellectual has been a key factor in shaping the modern world.

In one sense this is a wholly new phenomenon. Not so fast! For "the decline of clerical power" merely created a vacuum into which the secular intellectual leapt, and this rascal "was just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs." Yes, here comes the new clergy, same as the old clergy, only much worse. This pretentious assoul

proclaimed, from the start, a special devotion to the interests of humanity and an evangelical duty to advance them by his teaching. He brought to this self-appointed task a far more radical approach than his clerical predecessors.

"The collective wisdom of the past, the legacy of tradition, the prescriptive codes of ancestral experience" might be "selectively followed or wholly rejected entirely as his own good sense might decide.... men arose to assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and cure them with their own unaided intellects," whereby "the fundamental habits of human beings could be transformed for the better." No longer "servants and interpreters of the gods," they were substitutes for them.

Yes, magnanimous philanthropes such as Rousseau, Marx, Lenin, Mao, et al. But for Voegelin, Marx, for example, isn't just wrong, rather, the quintessence of a spiritually diseased approach to the world, not just unphilosophical but antiphilosophical, revealing a deep and abiding hatred of reality (and of mankind):

The Marxian spiritual disease... consists in the self-divinization and self-salvation of man; an intramundane logos of human consciousness is substituted for the transcendental logos.

Such an approach must "be understood as the revolt of immanent consciousness against the spiritual order of the world. This is the core Marxian idea." At its root "we find the spiritual disease, the Gnostic revolt.... Marx is demonically closed against transcendental reality.... His spiritual impotence leaves no way open but derailment into Gnostic activism," a "characteristic combination of spiritual impotence with a mundane lust for power."

But "one cannot deny God and retain reason. Spiritual impotence destroys the order of the soul," leaving man "locked in the prison of his particular existence."

Marx essentially imagined he'd discovered a loophole in Genesis 3: he "knew that he was a god creating a world. He did not want to be a creature."

To be continued...

I Don't Have the Time... or Space or Intelligence

Ever since my mind unexpectedly came on line in my mid-20s, I've been... haunted is too strong a word... Pestered? Shadowed? Annoyed?

At any rate, there has always been the simultaneous presence of a sense of a hint of an inking that my mind just isn't capacious enough for what I'm trying to do. There's not enough space: you can't fit two gallons of truth into a one gallon cranium.

Either that, or there's not enough raw candlepower: like I'm trying to light the cosmos with solar when I need petroleum or nuclear. I realize I'm not smart enough for the task, but no one else is attempting it, so what am I supposed to do? Ignore it?

Yes, my reach exceeds my grasp, but perhaps this is just an objective description of the human situation. In other words, God is the only person(s) whose reach and grasp are identical.

Would things have turned out differently had my brain been functional back when I was in school?

No, I don't think so. If that had been the case, then I would have simply absorbed all the wrong things. Instead of being filled with a benign nothing, my head would have been cluttered with all the malignant sophistries that dominate the culture: liberal orthodoxy, politico-scientistic religiosity, tenured mythologies, etc. I'd have been sealed in a demonically closed reality tunnel, and perhaps even become an enforcer or gatekeeper of the matrix, as are our media-academic goons.

But then, I also wasted a lot of time wading through so much BS along the way. I've obviously read a great deal, but with no one to guide me, it has been an inefficient and zigzag course. I had to swim upstream for a couple of decades before even spying the source. My son will never have to do that. Rather, I can help him cut straight to the chase: ignore all that, focus on this.

If I had to sum things up at this juncture, my go-to sources would be few. But I always leave one out: Voegelin. He is as important as any, and yet, I've never really taken him on board as an ongoing touchstone -- as I have, for example, Schuon or Dávila -- folks that find their way into nearly every post.

Why is this? Well, for one thing, as alluded to above, I don't have sufficient headspace. He's just so sprawling. If one attempted to master his corpus alone, it would take one's whole thinking life. You'd have to become a Voegelin specialist, which is the opposite of my loose and lazy cosmic generalism. My ideal is Dávila: to be as brief as possible, with a dash of humor or insultainment thrown in. Sharp as a knife, but also twist it a little. With lemon juice.

I don't pretend to be scholar. What am I then? I suppose you'd have to tell me, but I would say, visionary humorist, or metaphysical comedian, or mystic adventure guide, or theological entertainer... Some combination of grave seriousness and utter frivolousness. Sober intoxication.

So anyway, I've been reading a book called The Voegelinian Revolution, which is blowing my mind all over again -- as Voegelin always does. And because he blows my mind, I've never been able to fully wrap it around him. I can't cut him down to size and properly digest him.

But I can try. If ever someone were in need of popularization, it's Voegelin. As with Schuon, even the secondary literature is too serious and forbidding, so followers end up speaking only to one another. He needs a jester. A vulgarian. An interpreter with a clown nose.

But the other thing -- along with insufficient memory and intelligence -- is that there's never enough time. So we'll try to tackle the book tomorrow...

God Can't be Known; Rather He is Only Infinitely Knowable

Most things we seek to obtain are for the sake of something else: for example, we eat in order to survive. But why do we want to survive? I don't know. Must be for its own sake. It's like happiness that way; no one ever asks himself why on earth he wishes to be happy. Rather, happiness (in the Aristoteleological sense) is the point of it all.

Now, anything below the realm of metaphysics -- you'll excuse me, but I'm thinking this through for the first time -- must be for the sake of something else. For example, right now I'm typing. Why? Don't laugh, but I can't think of any other reason but to seek and communicate wisdom. Okay. Why do that? I don't know. Must be for its own sake.

It's certainly not for any of the usual suspects: money, fame, power, status, the fine Colombian, the Cuervo Gold, etc.

In an essay called Mystery and Philosophy, Pieper makes the subtle point that

wisdom cannot be the property of man for the very reason that it is sought after for its own sake; what we can fully possess cannot satisfy us as something sought after for its own sake; the only wisdom that is sought after for its own sake is the kind that man is not able to have as a possession.

In short, -- in reference to why I'm doing this -- I am seeking something I can never possess, and trying to communicate something I don't have. There's a name for that: a fool's errand, or wild nous chase.

"Philosophical questioning," writes Pieper, "aims at comprehending, at ultimate knowledge." However,

not only do we not possess such knowledge, but we are even, on principle, incapable of possessing it, and therefore we will also not possess it in the future.

Okay then. We've never had it, we don't have it, and we'll never get it. Anything else before we wrap this up? Have we learned nothing in 15 years of blogging? What were we hoping to find, anyway? And how can such a vacuous exercise result in so much writing about it? That's a lot of posts, but 3,423 x 0 is still 0.

Yes, but O is not 0. Big Infinite difference!

Imagine if we could gather together all the poets, painters, and musicians, and tell them, "look, you've been at this for 50,000 years, but I don't see that you're any closer to possessing Beauty. Now, go out there and bring back Beauty once and for all!"

Ah, but the pursuit of beauty is another one of those activities that is for its own sake. What Pieper says of wisdom can be equally applied to it: beauty sought after for its own sake can never be possessed. One can try, but it is a sort of category error, for it is nothing less than the attempt to contain infinitude wihin finitude (or transcendence in immanence).

Of which I am guilty, with an explanation, or at least rationalization. I am an audiophile and collector, or, if you want to cut to the chase, you could say that I don't have a hobby, rather, my hobby has me. Well, first of all, a man needs a hobby. Second, I see what I'm doing. I see right through myself -- occasionally -- so a I don't pretend it has any end, or that I can cure the habit by indulging in it. I'll never have everything I want, if only because I want to want. It's pretty harmless, at least compared to cocaine.

As is the blog. It also goes nowhere, with no hope of ever arriving there. If a final Answer were attainable, this would imply that

the thing is known to the full extent that it is knowable in itself. In other words: the adequate answer to the philosophical question would have to be an answer which exhausts the subject, a statement in which the knowability of the object in question is exhausted to such an extent that nothing purely knowable remains but only the known (Pieper).

In the end, O = O. But we are not O. This is why God can never be known: because he is only infinitely knowable.

Thus the claim to have found the "formula of the world" is without hesitation to be called unphilosophical. It is of the essence of philosophy that it cannot be a "closed system" -- "closed" in the sense that the essential reality of the world could be adequately mirrored in it....

The deeper one's positive knowledge of the structure of the world the more one becomes clear that reality is a mystery. The reason for inexhaustibility is that the world is creature, i.e., that it has its origin in God's incomprehensible, creative knowledge (ibid.).

Simultaneously clear and obscure; Joyce called it clearobscure, a pun on the intermingling of shadow and light in chiarascuro (clear-dark). So I hope that was sufficiently obscure. I sometimes have a tendency to be too clear.

Is There Such a Thing as a Non-Christian Philosophy?

Don't look at me. That's the title of an essay by by Josef Pieper. Is he serious? Or just trolling?

Well, supposing one is a Christian, then there obviously can be no non-Christian philosophy, for what is a philosophy that excludes the most important facts and principles of existence? That's not philosophy, rather, the opposite: love of ignorance. It is also idolatry.

A genuine philosophy must begin with an acknowledgment of its own impossibility -- or in other words, that we are not God. Otherwise, one is essentially claiming that "There is no God, and I am him." But if there is no God, then only he could know it, for it requires godlike vision to make such a categorical claim.

"Philosophizing," writes Pieper, "means asking what is the meaning of all that we call 'life' or 'reality' or simply this 'totality.'" And if you imagine you're actually capable of fully comprehending the meaning of life-reality-totality, then -- well, you're not God, but you certainly think you are.

Which is a real danger. It is a danger because the only possible stance toward infinite reality is a humble openness that can never be fulfilled from side of finitude. We can only form a loving relationship with the object of philosophy.

Only? Only?! What a dangerous and dismissive little word! You're telling me we can only form a dynamic and fruitful relationship with the living ground of being? I'll take it.

What's the alternative? Only idolatry.

I suppose philosophy was ruined when it became a mere academic discipline. A degree in mathematics or engineering is one thing, but to be a credentialed philosopher is to not know what philosophy is. Or, a person who is only a philosopher isn't even that. Likewise an "academic theologian," because one cannot think about God without thinking in -- or better, with -- God. There can be no such thing as "impersonal" theology, any more than there could exist an "impersonal psychology" or "empirical logic."

Pieper:

a person cannot be called wise, but at most he can be called one who lovingly seeks wisdom.... The essential philosophical question is about the search for a wisdom which -- in principle -- we can never "have" as a possession as long as we are in our present condition of bodily existence.

So, the first philosophical question is whether philosophy is even possible. Yes, so long as it is understood as loving-relation as opposed to a one-sided possession. The latter is strictly impossible. Crowning it with a PhD is like covering a dungheap with snow (to borrow an analogy from Martin Luther which he used in a very different context).

Even God doesn't "possess" wisdom; or at least he is never possessive, in that he -- literally -- never stops giving it away. According to Christian metaphysics, the very essence of God is the loving generation of wisdom in the Son; there is nothing prior to this inspiraling dance of perichoresis or circumincession. In a roundabout way, God is only the perpetual gift of wisdom.

Which is only the whole point. Or at least a Big Hint. In America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, Reilly quotes Justin Martyr:

The Logos is the preexistent, absolute, personal Reason and Christ is the embodiment of it, the Logos incarnate. Whatever is rational is Christian. And whatever is Christian is rational.

Which answers the question posed in the title of this post. "Christianity," says Reilly, "contains an invitation to reason because God's rationality guarantees reason's integrity." For backup, he calls in James Schall, who writes that "What is revealed does not demand the denial of intellect, but fosters it."

For "If God is Logos, reason and revelation are not at an impasse." And any so-called philosophy "that a priori excludes the possibility of revelation is a philosophy that is not true to itself. On its own terms, philosophy must remain open to revelation" (Reilly).

Me? I think the philosophizing intellect is already a revelation. You might say it is the "first revelation," in that it is a necessary condition to receive the others. No intellect, no problem. But with intellect, life is an endless problem.

If you want to see it that way. Instead of problem, I would say mystery-adventure-love story. If that's not the form of your life, then you do indeed have a problem. But only a problem.

Whaddya Know?

I mean really. What do we know? What can we know with absolute certitude?

Hmm. The title of this post smells familiar. Haven't we belabored this point before?

Yes. It's been eight years though, and perhaps in the meantime human nature has undergone a fundamental change, such that there are permanent truths we can know today that we couldn't know then. I'd better skim the post. You needn't bother -- if I find anything worthwhile, I'll drag it up. Be right back...

It seems to me that everything hinges upon whether or not man may know. If we cannot know, then our whole pretentious house of cards collapses, and we are reduced to competing forms of nihilism, or survival of the frivolous. But if we can know, then...

To approach this question is truly to begin at the beginning, because no other questions can be answered until we establish the fact that questions are answerable -- i.e., that man may possess true knowledge of himself and of the world.

Indeed, some thinkers believe we must go even further back, and first establish the existence of the world. For example, this is what Kant does, and concludes that it doesn't exist. That being the case, we cannot know anything about it. The end.

That's an exaggeration, but only an uncharitable one. The point is that Kant placed a dark line between What Is and What We May Know About It, which ultimately results in an unbridgeable chasm between being and knowing.

Right. You can't know a little bit about the unknowable -- even that it's unknowable. I mean, that's a yuge claim. And more than a little presumptuous, for it is saying a great deal to say that ultimate truth consists in not knowing it. Well, you may be lost at sea, but that doesn't prove dry land doesn't exist, does it?

Our dry land consists of self-evident truths. How do we know when we've found one? I would say when denial of it entails absurd or monstrous consequences. It reminds me of something Chesterton said of the "thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped."

One such thought is that our thoughts do not disclose reality and that truth is therefore inaccessible to human beings: come for the absurdity, stay for the monstrosity. Literally, because once you enter such an epistemological hellworld, there is no rational exit: mandatory stupidity, no exceptions.

Since truth is the conformity of mind to reality, the very notion of truth is poisoned at the root. Thought and Thing go through an ugly divorce, and Thing gets to keep all the real properties to herself, since you Kant take 'em with you. Man becomes closed upon himself, and tenure takes care of the rest.

The whole thing can be boiled down even further, which is why I developed my irritating system of unsaturated pneumaticons. For truly, it all comes down to O and/or Ø, does it not?

Speaking of boiling things down further... I'm tempted to go off on an important tangent that would derail this post. I'll try to be brief. I'm reading an interesting book called America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, in which the author doesn't just trace the intellectual roots of the founding, but drills all the way down to the very foundation of the cosmos, similar (but different) to what we do around here.

Who else uses "cosmos" and "America" in the same sentence? Well, the founders did so implicitly in justifying our existence on the basis of its conformity with the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God. This makes their efforts "cosmic in scope. It is a drama across time" (Arnn, in Reilly). It is transhistorical before it is historical, because it begins at the end: with universal truths and immutable human nature.

Speaking of beginnings,

"Every metaphysics that is not measured by the mystery of what is, but by the state of positive science at such and such an instant, is false from the beginning" (Maritain)....

Let us stipulate that man may know. But what does this mean, to know? What is happening when we know something? The answer isn't obvious -- at least not anymore -- but for Maritain it is an irreducibly spiritual event through and through. For

"There is a vigorous correspondance between knowledge and immateriality. A being is known to being to the extent that it is immaterial."

And with that we're back to where this post started, in an essay by Josef Pieper called On the Desire for Certainty.

Certainty is good. But is there something better -- or at least prior to it? Yes. Call it trust. Or faith. One way or the other(s), there's no way to avoid this leap. Of course, faith in oneself is wholly unwarranted, but nor is faith in God warranted if we can't trust our faith in his faith in us. It's a spiral, or spiration.

I suppose the bottom line for today is that either we are enclosed in the circle or there is an exit from it. The rest is commentary, more than half of which is absurd. And eventually monstrous.

Genuine and Fake Uselessness

The "perfect idea," says Brennan, "would be one which, from the depths of its utter simplicity, would picture the whole schema of cosmic reality in a single act of understanding."

This idea would also be perfectly useless. The other day, a troll asked what we think we are doing with our life -- what is our purpose, what do we hope to accomplish, what is our mission, etc. Well, we do not wish to brag, but our goal is to be as utterly useless as the perfectly useless Idea toward which we are being attracted.

Yes, the ultimate humble brag.

Now, metaphysics is the last word in uselessness, or at least the last human word before one leaps into the translinguistic void. According to Pieper, metaphysical knowledge

refers to knowledge concerned with the whole of reality, with the structure of the world as a whole.... It is the application of our knowing faculties -- from deep within our spirit -- to the totality of all that is, to the meaning and foundation of all reality in toto: i.e., the application of the mind to its complete and undiminished object.

Commenting on another post, the same troll referenced above confessed that, "I don't get it. The intelligence of man is potentially total? So what is total intelligence? To know everything? And how is this totality explained by a transcendent reality? I'm not making the connection."

There is a deep connection between the perfect idea and our ultimately futile attempt to know and describe it: they are equally pointless.

"This kind of knowledge," writes Pieper, "is what Aristotle says is the only free kind." And by "free," he means "non-practical," in contrast to practical knowledge aimed at achieving an end.

I have a friend who is a contractor. He can do pretty much anything. He could build a guesthouse in the backyard made out of junk sitting in my garage. He might be the most useful person I know. In other words, we are polar opposites. For

the kind of knowledge which deals with the ultimate foundation of the world is supposed to not "serve" a purpose.

Rather, it is "not even possible or thinkable to put it to any use: 'it alone is there for its own sake.'"

And this means it is free: no strings of purposefulness attached. Like the human person and other ultimate goods, it can never be a means to an end. You might say it is "sabbath knowledge," when we stand back from the whole existentialada and just enjoy the handiwork.

Having said that, we can never quite get there. Try as we might, we can never become perfectly useless:

[T]he knowledge that focuses on the totality of the world, purely for the sake of knowing and to that extent free -- this knowledge cannot possibly be achieved by man; he never fully grasps it; it is therefore not something that man possesses without limitation, since as a human being he himself is subject to many kinds of necessities.... One would have to say that only God can achieve this knowledge completely....

So, only God can be perfectly useless, for he is the ultimate "for his own sake." Then again, the very essence of God is for the sake of the other: God is substance-in-relation, such that the Father makes himself useful by giving himself to the Son, and vice versa. This cannot be for the sake of something else; it is not as if the Father has an ulterior agenda or secret payoff in so pouring himself into the Son.

It must be the same with creation. If creation is an icon of trinitarian love, then it too can have no practical purpose, rather, a wholly impractical one.... What am I trying to say? Perhaps this:

First, however much man is a practical being who needs to use the things of the world to meet his requirements for living, he does not acquire his real riches through technical subordination of the forces of nature but through the purely theoretical knowledge of reality.

The existence of man is all the richer the more deeply he has access to reality and the more it is opened up to him. Through his knowledge he achieves the purest realization of his being, so that even his ultimate perfection and fulfillment consist in knowledge...

And we're back to paragraph one, the Perfect -- and perfectly useless -- Idea.

Anaxagoras expresses it his own way when, in answer to the question, "Why were you born?" he says: "To look at the sun, the moon and the sky" -- by which he would not have meant the physical heavenly bodies but the construction of the world as a whole (Pieper).

A final point: science is obviously practical. But to the extent that it transforms to scientism, it tries to be as useless as metaphysics, but only renders itself soulless and nihilistic, which is another thing entirely. It is a pseudo-uselessness, a nothing masquerading as everything. It doesn't release the intellect into freedom, but rather, eliminates freedom at the root.

Pieper ends with a crack by Boethius: The human soul is necessarily at its freest when it remains in contemplation of the divine spirit.

O <--> (k) Boomer

I'd like to wrap up our discussion of Thomistic Psychology so we can move on to the next subject, whatever it is. Much of this material isn't new per se. In fact, it's straight out of the Raccoon playbook, except I arrived at it in a circuitous and nonlinear manner, just scratching my intuitchin' and following my whimful thinking wherever it loiters. Given our very different approaches, it's rather striking that we somehow ended up in the same place, more or less.

The intellect of man has nothing to start with, yet it is potentially a whole creation. It reaches out and conquers the world by the process of becoming the world (Brennan).

Turns out that knowing and being are very much linked; in fact, if they're not, then there's nothing to talk about but our own neuropsychology. One could express the relation of knowledge to being with a very simple formula: O <--> (k).

The philosophistry of materialism makes no sense, because it cannot make sense; it is literally the denial of intelligibility, of intelligence, and of any real relation between them:

the singular does not resist understanding because it is singular, but because it is material, since nothing is understood except immaterially (emphasis mine).

A single tree, for example, isn't understood as a tree, because doing so requires the abstract concept of treeness. "The essences of corporeal things are opaque rather than translucent, so far as our ability to understand them is concerned."

In fact, it is impossible for us to imagine such a world of absolute singularities, because we would be reduced -- literally -- to psychosis. The psychotic person lives in a world of terrifying novelty, with every object in each moment de-linked, so to speak, from the others; one exits meaningful history and enters a catastrophic collidescope from which there's no escape from the constant collisions.

Ogden describes it well: "symbol and symbolized are emotionally indistinguishable since there is no interpreting self to mediate between" them. "Thoughts and feelings" become "palpable objects and forces that appear, disappear, contaminate, transform, destroy, rescue, etc." Such a person

may shake his head to get rid of tormenting feelings, may literally put his thoughts into a letter and send the letter to the person who should hold these thoughts, or may request x-rays in order to be able to see the things inside of him that are driving him crazy.

Or, he may put his disturbing thoughts and feelings into President Trump, which solves one problem only to create another: the unenending torment of Orange Man Bad! Not only is this story as old as politics, but the raison d'etre of vulgar politics. The founders saw and recognized this, and hoped to create a system that would neutralize it.

But right away political philosophy devolved into faction, and here we are. Beneath the conviction that politics can solve one's problems is the fantasy that politics is responsible for one's problems. So, hating President Trump is every bit as sensible as putting one's sins into an animal and killing it. It even works. For awhile, at which point a new sacrifice is necessary. This is why the News Cycle was invented by the Aztec. See Bailie for details.

Note that the process is "psychotic," even though we don't label it as such. But clearly, a different sort of logic is at play when we enact such an unconscious political phantasy. Come to think of it, The Symmetry of God explains the basis of the process in both health and illness.

For there is a healthy basis for such confusion of symbol and symbolized, for example, in the experience of art. In appreciating drama, one must "lose one's mind" and give oneself over to the imaginary world. This constitutes the healthy use of a power that becomes unhinged and autonomous in various states of pathology.

For example, what is a conspiracy theory but an imaginary drama into which one projects oneself? I've been binge-watching The Man in the High Castle, but its alternative world is no more bizarre than Rachel Maddow's long-running soap opera, The Russian Operative in the White House, which I occasionally cringe-watch.

Back to Brennan (Robert, not John). Like the materialist, we begin with material objects. However, we don't end there (in truth, neither does the materialist, except he has no principle to explain how he gets from first base -- sensation -- to second -- abstraction). An angelic intelligence requires no object, but can proceed straight to the essence. But we aren't angels, although some people come close. Not for nothing is Aquinas called the "angelic doctor." Schuon too seems to fly in that gossamer plane, right at the threshold between the local and nonlocal.

But for the restavus earthbound dirtclods, our knowledge "is not central but radial knowledge. It proceeds inward from without, and reaches the center only by starting from the periphery. It apprehends the essences of sensible things, not in themselves, but in the symbols which these essences manifest to the senses."

In fact, I think this might constitute a fork in the road between Thomas and Frithjof, because, if I am not mistaken, Schuon believes the True Metaphysician has access to the principial world of a priori truth. There are permanent truths we can know directly and infallibly, and indeed, we have a right to these truths (along with an obligation to know and live from them). Let me see if I can dig up a suitable passage.

It is indispensable to know at the outset that there are truths inherent in the human spirit that are as if buried in the "depths of the heart," which means that they are contained as potentialities or virtualities in the pure Intellect: these are the principial and archetypal truths, those which prefigure and determine all the others (Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism).

I suppose I'm partial to the Schuonian view, while also maintaining a healthy respect for the Gnostic temptation: the Tower of Babel, the Promethean usurpation of divinity, the idea that we can build our own stairway to heaven. That always ends badly, although it can be lucrative while it lasts. Humility is the thing. If it doesn't vary directly with knowledge, then you're doing it wrong. Certain truths have moral and characterological prerequisites, which is why we don't toss our pearls before trolls or give what is holy to the Dems.

For Schuon, not all knowledge is from the periphery to the center. I will speak only for myself, and say that it must be a two way street, or better, an inspirling circularity between God's descent and our ascent, bearing in mind that the latter is strictly impossible in the absence of the former. It is in this context that I would understand the following passage:

if there were no pure Intellect -- the intuitive and infallible faculty of the immanent Spirit -- neither would there be reason, for the miracle of reasoning can be explained and justified only by the miracle of intellection. Animals can have no reason because they are incapable of conceiving the Absolute; in other words, if man possesses reason, together with language, it is because he has access in principle to the suprarational vision of the Real and consequently to metaphysical certitude.

So, the intelligence of man is potentially total, "and this totality is explained only by a transcendent reality to which the intelligence is proportioned."

Boom.

O <--> (k) boomer.

On the Space Between Appearances & Reality, Time & History, Subject & Object

The following mess is what results if I disable the filter and just let it rip, without thinking about whether it makes any sense to the reader.

I'm going to start with a quote from Thomistic Psychology, which provoked the whole fiasco:

Subject and object must in some manner be related if we are not to lose our grip on reality. Related they certainly are.... But separated, too, they must be, if existence in the intentional order is different from existence in the real order.

On the one hand, everything is what it is. On the other, nothing is what it appears to be. There is reality; and there are appearances. However, we only ever experience the former in terms of the latter. Animals too only have contact with appearances, except they don't know it. Nor do they not know it. Rather, they only know what they know, in a closed neuro-instinctual loop.

How did human beings ever exit this loop? Some people insist we never did. If that's the case, how do they communicate the idea to us?

In any event, it seems -- no, it is the case -- that there is a kind of breach or crack in the cosmos, and that this crack is everything. We can't deny it without reverting to animality, but nor can we ever fill it without exiting humanness from the other end. Supposing we manage to escape, we don't become better than human, rather, like a human only worse. This is, for example, what ideologues do, i.e., imagine a world unfit for humans.

Now, this crack in the cosmic egg is both spatial and temporal. This latter is what we call "history," and here again, it's not something we can ever stop, or from which we can ever disembark. Except when we can, in which case we are also plunged into a world in which everything is what it is -- the world alluded to in paragraph one, prior to the real world where nothing is what it appears to be.

That real human world is full of irony, not to mention humor, ambiguity, and play. Which is why ideologues are never funny, and why late night comedy has become so unfunny. You can't be an ideologue and a comedian at the same time. In North Korea you can't make fun of Kim Jong Un, nor in Iran ridicule the mullahs.

You might think things are different here in the U.S., since our late night ideologues constantly ridicule the president and his supporters. But they aren't permitted to laugh at or even point out the absurdity of figures such as Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Joe Biden, Jerry Nadler, Al Gore, etc.

Back to history. There is the historical stream into which we are born, and our own personal/developmental history situated within it: wheels within wheels. Let's call the first (H), the second (h). Now, one of the most fascinating things about (H) is how easily it can be distorted by (h) due to emotional, cognitive, and spiritual pathologies of various kinds.

I was reminded of this when bashing out the previous post, with reference to a book called The Matrix of the Mind, which I read back in grad school in 1987 or so. It made a big impression on me at the time, but I wonder how it squares with my current, more traditional approach to things? Can it be translated to my current language?

Recall from the previous post that the defense mechanisms of splitting and projection are rooted in an imaginary distancing of the self from a feared or despised intrapsychic object or feeling state. Ogden writes that "splitting creates a state of mind in which there is no 'in between.' A plane has two faces and two faces only; an observer can never see both sides at once."

So, in this polarized state of mind, it is as if half the world disappears; or, as if we were to look at the moon and forget it has a dark side we can't see. Again, it is reduced to the world of mere Is, as we withdraw from the second world in which we understand that nothing is what it appears to be.

Example. Let's say you have a patient with borderline personality disorder -- or a coworker, spouse, or other relative. "When a borderline patient feels angry and disappointed by the therapist, he feels that he has now discovered the truth.... History is completely rewritten.... There is an assault on the emotional history of the object relationship. The present is projected backward and forward, thus creating a static, eternal, non reflective present."

This especially happens when the mind is overcome by primitive hatred. I'll spare you the tedium, but I could cite hundreds of examples of how Trump Derangement causes its victim to distort past and future by projecting the explosive hatred forward and back.

Okay, one example: Ms. Ocrazio says the U.S. is a brutal, barbarian society for the vast majority of working-class Americans. How did she find herself in this parallel universe? Clearly, she didn't think her way there. So, what was the mode of travel? Easy: uncontainable rage exploding out from the moment into the past and future -- like a frustrated three year old who suddenly hates his parents, now and forever.

They say history was discovered by the Jews, and I think I know why. It's because they formed an ongoing relationship with the one transcendent God, whether or not they were frustrated, angry, disappointed, etc. Of course, the OT documents the struggle to maintain the relationship instead of running to another god at the first sign of trouble. In short, in order to enter history, humans had to stop splitting off their various emotional states and projecting them into imaginary gods for comfort and safety.

The same process occurs, by the way, in Christianity. Think of the day after the Crucifixion. How does one reconcile the idea that the Kingdom of God is at hand and that Jesus is the messiah, when the messiah has just endured a brutal death at the hands of the state? It would be very easy to split, both literally and figuratively, as did the two figures the resurrected Jesus encounters on the road to Emmaus.

Among other things, they must have been discussing What That Was All About -- how they had been taken in by the excitement surrounding this charismatic figure, only to have all hope dashed. But Jesus proceeds to give a discourse on all the various scriptures concerning himself, and then,

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight.

At that point, the travelers heal the split, and this integration allows them to return not just to history, but to a deeper time that touches on the meaning and vector of (H) itself. Again, their momentary grief and despair are integrated into a much higher unity -- a reflection of how the ancient Jews, beginning with Abraham, did the same thing (for example, reconciling the demanded sacrifice of Isaac with a loving deity; it would have been easy to simply flee such a request and run away from God).

When Your Mind Needs a Sewer

An object of the senses must somehow be rendered immaterial in order to be understood, otherwise it remains entirely preconceptual and unthinkable; nor, for that matter, can one sense be combined with another unless it takes place in an immaterial space that transcends matter. Again, a wholly material world wouldn't even be unintelligible, because an absence of intelligibility implies an intelligibility that is unthinkable in such a world.

So, how does the intelligibility get in here? And the intelligence to know and understand it? And what about the "space" in which these occur? The soul is incorporeal, which means that it takes up no space at all. Or so we have heard from the wise. If that's the case, then why is my head always so crowded?

These are such basic questions -- in fact, among the first questions the human being asks once he has located food, shelter, and beer.

Recall too that ears know nothing of light, as eyes know nothing of sound (at least without a little help from a psychoactive friend). And yet, the senses are effortlessly integrated within the higher space of our minds.

Except when they aren't. I'm thinking in particular of more serious forms of mental illness, a hallmark of which is the dis-integration of the senses and fragmentation of identity.

It's been awhile since we discussed how this intrapsychic process works, but it is no doubt relevant in these unusual times, when so many people are stressed as a result of an "invisible enemy." This is practically an invitation to a mental breakdown for those vulnerable to one. As they say, adversity introduces a man to himself.

More problematically, it may introduce a man to split-off parts of himself, which are projected into the external world. The person then reacts to this menacing and persecutory world with fear and anxiety, but it's preferable to having the feared object inside one's head.

I sometimes check in on CNN or MSNBC in order to take the emotional temperature of the progressive psyche. At the moment it's COVID-19 hysteria 24/7, but it wasn't that long ago when it was Russia hysteria 24/7. Well, I've traced the fear, and it's coming from inside their heads:

What we call "splitting"

is analogous to the chick's unlearned response to the perception of the hawk's wing pattern. The chick's reaction is to flee and not attack the hawk (unless cornered), i.e., to separate itself from the danger. I understand splitting to be a similarly biologically determined mode of managing danger (Ogden).

Sounds like a bit of a stretch, but what's a chick supposed to do when the hawk is inside her head? What would Rachel Maddow do without President Trump? "Primitive psychological defenses" such as splitting and projection are "built upon the biologically determined effort to create safety by distancing the endangered from the endangering":

Projection, for example, can be understood as an effort in phantasy to remove an internal danger by locating the danger outside of oneself, i.e., separating oneself from it as if it were located in another (ibid.).

So, when I check in on the MSM, it's to find out what they're projecting and into whom they're projecting it. Actually, the former changes, while the latter is always the same: the dreaded Orange Man, Eater of Left Wing Projections.

In my lifetime, nothing and no one has been the receptacle of so much left wing projection as has our current president. Interestingly, there is a psychoanalytic term of art for such an object. It will no doubt make you chuckle until you think about it and realize how apt it is. In order for projection to occur,

there must be a conception of a container into which the projection can be sent. In other words, there must be an object which has depth so as to be able to contain the projection.... Klein's conception of the toilet breast corresponds to this entity (Grotstein).

Maybe this sounds crazy -- and it is -- but Klein didn't just make it up. For example, the Aztec had a goddess known as Tlazōlteōtl, the "eater of filth," a transparent psychic projection who functioned to purify people of their guilt: "Sins were symbolized by dirt. Her dirt-eating symbolized the ingestion of the sin, and in doing so purified it."

Orange Man Bad is the means by which our Bluefolk -- journalists, entertainers, the tenured -- imagine they purify themselves of what the rest of us can see is so obviously wrong with them.

What? Of course there are aphorisms:

The sewers of history sometimes overflow, as in our time.

When handling today’s events, the future historian will have to wear gloves (Dávila).

Nietzsche too:

The soul must have its chosen sewers to carry away it ordure.

God is a Rock but He Also Rolls

Pithy and precise: "The object of sense is a sensible, and the object of intellect is an intelligible" (Brennan).

The surface of my laptop is sensible, but I am deploying my fingers to both seek and describe an intelligible object. At the moment I'm not in contact with this object, nor am I yet in its orbit, but I have faith that I will be, since it's happened so many times before. For those keeping score at home, this is post #3,416.

Before I commenced to blogging, it was more as if I were attempting to force intelligibles into existence as opposed to merely discovering them. In the argot of sports, you should let the game come to you. Then again, I suppose a sort of apprenticeship is necessary, otherwise one will have no medium of discovery or expression.

Analogously, I could sit down at the piano and use my fingers to discover a musical intelligible, but the object wouldn't be very deep or complex. Once one masters an instrument, then one may use it to discover music and snatch a tune from the ether.

A musical object exists in time, whereas a spiritual object... Here we come to a difference between the Judeo-Christian stream and all others, because our object is indeed deployed in time; or, to be perfectly accurate, it is simultaneously in and out of time. This, they say, is one of the scandals of Christianity, since it can never be reduced to any abstract formulation.

Why not? Well, ultimately because the ultimate object is a person, and what is a person but a process, a narrative, a relation, a being in time?

In my view, our concept of God had first to be purged of all movement and change before we could understand how to properly apply these categories to him -- similar to how the Trinity could only be revealed once man had been purged of polytheism.

Thus, just as God's threeness can and must be understood in the context of a strict monotheism just so, his "change" must be understood in the context of a strict changelessness. Otherwise we will be imagining something less than God: an idol.

Along these lines, Bishop Barron writes that

Thomas denies of God the changeableness characteristic of creatures, that is to say, a development from nonbeing to being.

But I would argue that this denial by no means implies other types of movement cannot be ascribed to God, viz., those changes that entail not imperfection but perfection, fullness of being.

Cooncur 100%. Being that we are the Image & Likeness, I suspect that most everything essential in human nature -- e.g., love, reason, beauty, goodness, etc. -- must have some analogue in God, however distant.

For example, man can "create," even though, strictly speaking, only God creates. Analogously, could it be that only God changes? This will no doubt sound theologically Messed Up if we don't explain what we mean.

"As a perfection" -- and insofar as it is a perfection -- change "should be rigorously affirmed of [God]. Similarly, the mutability in a beautiful song or an elaborate dance, the changeableness of a lively and vivacious personality -- such perfections are ascribable to the unchanging God of Thomas Aquinas."

Yes, God is a rock, but

utterly unlike the Rock of Gibralter, which is a being at an extremely primitive level of existence. No, the perfect, unchanging God of whom Thomas speaks must be a gyroscope of energy and activity and at the same time a stable rock.

Not either/or but both/and, and then some, a unique object which includes and transcends such binaries. Our gyroscopic God is

a blending of qualities that seem mutually exclusive in creatures. In the words of the mystic theologian pseudo-Dionysius, God must be both great and small, both changing and unchanging, both high and low.... the immutable God, defended by Thomas, is no Aristotelian principle, no uncaring force, but indeed is the God disclosed in Jesus Christ as ungraspable perfection.

Now, this ungraspable subject/object "is the magnet luring the universe into the future." And this post to its conclusion.

May the Best Delusion Win

You don't say:

The conflict between passion and reason makes up a major portion of the drama of [man's] existence on earth; and when the struggle is over, passion very often emerges the victor. This is the sad epic of humanity from the beginning (Brennan).

Frankly, I think this understates the power of reason to mess things up just as badly as passion. For as Chesterton said, "A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason." One can go off the shallow end just as easily as the deep end.

The problem is that reason, in order to get off the ground, must begin with an appeal to self-evidence. However, most people hide the evidence and proceed with the reason anyway.

An example of this occurred the other day. As you know, we homeschool our son -- not just because of the Chinese virus but because of the far more dangerous and deadly progressive virus that has devastated California. Because of this pandemic of idiocy, it isn't safe to have contact with any state-mediated institution.

Anyway, he was watching some kind of science video that happened to be narrated by planetarium director Neil Dyson. I forget why, but I reassured my son that whatever Dyson says about science is probably sound, even though he is probably in error when he strays from his lane and opines on anything unrelated to whatever it is he actually knows about. He is as superficial and conventional as one would expect of someone whom the MSM has anointed a Pundit.

But I don't actually know that much about him, only that he is a figure of fun amongst people I respect. So I consulted with Prof. Wiki, who confirms that Dyson regards philosophy as "useless" and is "unconvinced by any claims anyone has ever made about the existence or the power of a divine force operating in the universe."

Now, why would anyone care what a science popularizer believes about anything unrelated to his role of ratifying the Conventional Wisdom? No doubt because he is an effective apostle of the left's naive religiosity and simplistic philosophy, plus he's a Scientist of Color, so there are bonus points for virtue signaling (which is of course not his fault).

Like a Bill Nye or Carl Sagan, his opinions pose no threat to the progressive agenda and worldview. He can be trusted not to go near the science of IQ, or the absence of science of transgenderism, nor point out the wild inaccuracy of the global warming models. He's safe. He won't poke his head out of the Matrix.

Timeout for timelessness:

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

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

--He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary (Dávila).

The following paragraph describes what the philosophistry of the flatlander excludes, nor it does this expanded view limit science one iota -- rather, it places it in the context of a far grander vision, one worthy of the human station:

[W]ith the advent of the thinking process, a completely new world is opened up to us: a universe of ideas and volitions, an immaterial expanse of creativeness, a region liberated from the palpabilities of sense....

Because it can overreach the restrictions of matter and rid itself of all time-space dimensions, it is truly infinite in its potentialities of understanding, a microcosmos which, by its ability to know and become the universe, is actually the universe (Brennan).

IS the universe -- not in the manner of perception-is-reality, but rather, because to exist is to be intelligible. And

The highest type of living activity consists in the intellectual grasping of reality. This penetrative power of mind presupposes that what is real is by that very fact intelligible, otherwise it has no title to reality (Brennan).

This paragraph adverts to one of our first principles, but it is hardly arbitrary or indefensible, rather self-evident. For either the mind can penetrate beneath the ever shifting surface of things to the intelligible reality beneath, or it can't. And if it can't, then scientific knowledge isn't possible, let alone anything that transcends or grounds science.

Without knowledge of essences and universals, we would be like animals, confined to sensory data about our surface contact with matter. "Knowledge," such as it is, would be reduced to prescientific rumors, gossip, anecdotes, and single instances. Generalization and induction would not exist because they could not exist. Nor could deduction exist, because there would be no principles or axioms from which to do so. It would be a subhuman world, precisely, with no possibility of escape or inscape.

It is quite obvious that the senses do not capture the inner meaning of things. They are in surface contact, so to speak, with their objects; and the best they can do is to register the accidental or phenomenal qualities of matter.

Nor could they ever know these qualities as accidental or phenomenal, because these latter can only be understood in contrast to the necessary and noumenal. As freedom is knowledge of necessity, reality is understanding of appearances (because they can only be understood as appearances from the perspective of a higher or deeper view). The intellect

plunges beneath the surface and grasps the very thing which holds all phenomenal qualities together. The senses exist in a sort of perpetual twilight.... Intellect, by contrast, moves in the clear atmosphere of immaterial knowledge.

A man who is only a man isn't even that, for

Man alone, of all earthly creatures, exhibits a complete emergence from the conditions of subjectivism that make the animal's knowledge concrete and particular and restricted to the tangible realities of sense.

Bottom line: man is the animal that may know reality. If not, then what are we debating? Whose delusion is more powerful?

Love is the Answer!!! Unless it's the Problem

A small but important point: "no sensitive power can reflect upon itself" (Brennan.) In other words, our five senses don't know they're sensing; they cannot reflect upon themselves. Rather, their knowledge is limited to that which they sense, which is always something material.

Nor can one sense know what any other sense is up to. Eyes know nothing about sound, as ears know nothing about light. To understand that the bluebird is chirping is an immaterial synthesis of sensory information, not reducible to mere sense.

I remember back in high school, a rumor made the rounds that it was possible to do homework in one's sleep. Apparently, all that mattered was that the soundwaves of the lecture enter one's ears. Being that I detested school from the depths of my being, this was an attractive proposition. Why doesn't it work? Mainly because learning can only take place in the depths of one's b. It doesn't take place on the surface of the senses.

Analogously, I always listen to music when going to sleep. Upon awakening I can remember the last song I heard before falling asleep, often even the point in the middle of a song. Obviously the music continued playing and entered my ears. Or did it? Music is only synthesized in a human mind. It isn't merely sensed, although the sense of hearing is obviously required in order to apprehend the music. So the senses are involved, but converting the sensory vibrations into music is pure nonsense. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

Along these lines, Brennan writes that

The basic reason why sense is unable to make a complete return upon itself is the material texture of its being. A faculty that is able to reflect upon itself is necessarily devoid of all matter; and so its object is not limited like that of the senses.

That's a bold claim in these tenured times: that the most quintessential human power is devoid of ALL matter. After all, we live in a dark and materialist age in which nothing can be devoid of all matter except, of course, the doctrine of materialism. But in order to be a proper materialist, one must believe both that everything is reducible to matter and that nothing outside or beyond matter can have any real existence.

However, as we already said (in the previous post) A universe of matter alone would be simply unintelligible, period, full stop, end of story. Matter devoid of form is the "essence" of unintelligibility, if there could be such a thing. But there can be no such thing, except conceptually, for we never encounter uninformed matter. You could say that "matter" (or what Thomists call prime matter) is analogous to the placeholder 0 in math. In order for 0 to be something, it requires another digit. Otherwise nothing is nothing.

Now, to be human is to know that we sense and to understand that we know, and both of these powers are immaterial. How can this be? By virtue of what principle can an immaterial entity exist in a material cosmos? Well, math surely exists, and it is obviously immaterial. No one ever saw pi, or the square root of two, or Obama's college GPA. Yes, but math is objective. We're talking about the human subject. What's that about?

Not to run ahead of ourselves, but there is no such thing as an object in the absence of a subject. These two categories aren't just existential complementarities but ontologically irreducible to anything else, all the way down to the goround of being. Thanks to important advances in theology, man was able to move beyond the wild or tame speculations of pre-Christian metaphysicians, even while maintaining our sizable lead over post-Christian cranks and malcontents.

That probably sounds like a gag, but theology advances no less than does science. This obviously doesn't imply that the object of theology evolves, which would be absurd. Rather, our understanding deepens; to be precise, it can proceed forward, toward the Godhead, or back, in the direction of soul dead materialism or braindead atheism.

Philosophy, theology, and science are different activities, and let no Raccoon suggest it isn't helpful to distinguish them. However, we don't leave it at that. Rather, we distinguish in order to unite, in part because the distinctions are in the subject, not the object; and even the practice of science is always in the direction of deeper principles that unite disparate facts.

Put another way, realty is one, while our approaches to it are diverse. If one forgets this, then one will inevitably "evolve backward" and elevate something less than God to God, in order to make the unsettling diversity go away.

Put it this way: ether one acknowledges God or one conflates and confuses the non- or anti-God with God. Which is why idolatry is such an intrinsic error. Intellectual sin is probably worse than the other kind, because it can injure so many more people. You could say that a single crime of passion may be a tragedy, while the crimes of ideology are a statistic.

Speaking of which, Brennan notes that

When we sift the matter down, it will be found that love is at the root of every passion. It is, in a sense, the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, of all the movements of our appetites.

Another bold statement, but the first thing one must understand is that love itself is neither here nor there. Rather, there is disordered love and rightly ordered love.

A quintessential example of the former is the left's cliché that we shouldn't discriminate against others based on WHO THEY LOVE!!! (sic). Taken on its own terms, it means that love has no proper object or order. Which is precisely analogous to insisting that knowledge has no object or order. Which is to say that truth not only doesn't exist, but is an impossibility.

Which is to say: anarchy, chaos, and nihilism.

Or maybe you haven't noticed.

Strange Neighborhood

Let's stipulate that man is without question the most interesting and important fact in all of creation. If you can't stipulate to this, then you haven't yet begun to think.

I say this because thinking isn't just anything. Rather, it is ordered to reality, and exists for that reason. And unless you are a bit dim or just plain tenured, you will notice -- for starters -- that man qua man is the only creature that inhabits two very different worlds.

Indeed, man effortlessly reconciles these worlds in his own being. There are various theories of how this can be so, but they're just theories. Irrespective of your little theory, the fact remains that there is a material reality and an immaterial reality. Modern sophisticates like to reduce the latter to the former, while unsophisticated retro-Platonists such as Deepak prefer it the other way around -- i.e., "consciousness" is all.

But neither of these approaches fits the case. They're just two sides of the same sophistry aimed at making the problem go away instead of confronting it head on in all its strangeness: that we are embodied and we are ensouled, and although we can distinguish these, they are "not two." The body isn't analogous to an empty vessel into which an immaterial soul is inserted, nor is the soul a material entity or side effect of physics and chemistry. In reality,

man stands on the fringe of two universes: one, the world of matter and material dimensions; the other, the world of spirit, which has neither length, nor breadth, nor weight, nor any other tangible property (Brennan).

What a queer neighborhood! On the one hand, man shares the same zip code as animals, plants, minerals, atoms, and quarks. Yet, man is also "neighbor to the angels. Truly, he is a denizen of two worlds, a horizon and a meeting place. Though angelic by his intelligence, yet he is not a pure spirit; though sensitive and passionate by his brute powers, yet he is not entirely material" (ibid.).

The question isn't that this is the case, but how it is the case: by virtue of what principle(s) can such a strange situation obtain?

We mentioned a few post back that people naturally wonder how a divine nature and a human nature can coexist in the same person. Nevertheless, it is equally puzzling how animal nature and human nature can coexist in the same person, which is to say, in all of us, in varying proportions.

This is probably going to be a non-linear post, since I'm just flipping from page to page. Or perhaps we should put a positive spin on it and say it will be a holographic post, such that each part will reflect the whole.

At any rate, Brennan -- writing back in 1941, before it would have been controversial -- makes the surprising claim that the growing baby is never, nor can it ever be, "inside" the mother. As soon as you think about it, you'll understand why:

Man's body may be likened to a cylindrical mass of of matter, perforated by several tracts or cavities that open to the outside world.

For example, there is the alimentary tract, the respiratory tract, the urinary tract, the uterine tract. This being the case, there are obviously "two surfaces to the human body: an outside surface covered by skin; and an inside surface covered by mucosae."

So, just because something is "in" your stomach it doesn't mean it is in your body per se. Rather, digestion is the process of absorbing and transforming it into the body, precisely. And the most complete scientific account of this process will never explain how an it -- food -- is transformed into I -- the person.

It's an everyday analogue to the mystery of life itself -- of how, with the appearance of life, existence becomes experience. By virtue of what principle? And is this related to the principle of how two natures can coexist in one person?

Not to get ahead of ourselves, but Yes.

Back to the growing baby. If we want to be literal about it, the fetus is never inside the mother's body; rather, only in contact with the inside surface. If you want a baby to be literally inside your body, you'll have to eat one.

Speaking of outside and inside -- or interior and exterior -- Brennan makes the point that "certain requirements are demanded of the object if it is to be known, that is, if it is to be united with the subject."

In other words, waaaaaay before we can claim to know anything about any thing, there must be a principle by virtue of which such knowledge is even possible. What is this principle?

Here again, I suspect it will ultimately be related to the two mentioned above. But if we're going to know something -- anything -- the knowing subject and knowable object must share something in common. What sort of something? Well,

a certain degree of immateriality is a primary requisite. A universe of matter alone would be simply unintelligible.

Now, what renders matter knowable? Its form, which is the intelligibility that may be known by intelligence, both of which are obviously immaterial. So, man dwells in a haunted neighborhood, with invisible ghosts of intelligibility running around everywhere.

Boo!

Occam's Hammer & the Disintegration of Reality

Oh, hello. What am I doing? Just flipping through Thomistic Psychology, looking for a post. Or rather, groping around for the Idea that organizes all the passages I've highlighted.

That right there could be the idea: that man isn't just uniquely capable of abstraction, but then abstracting his abstractions into a meta-abstraction. This is why metaphysics isn't just possible but necessary. It is necessary because it is what we inevitably do. Therefore, we might as well do it well. But first we have to recognize we're doing it, which most thinkers refuse to do, especially for the past, oh, 700 years or so.

Why do the beast and blighted of modernity refuse to admit they are metaphysicians? Well, there are a number of reasons, some of which are almost coherent.

As to when it all started, Richard Weaver, in his consequential Ideas Have Consequences, blames the triumph of nominalism over realism, or Occam over Thomas, way back in the 14th century. According to Prof. Wiki, Occam is considered "the father of modern epistemology" by many modern idiots

because of his strongly argued position that only individuals exist, rather than supra-individual universals, essences, or forms, and that universals are the products of abstraction from individuals by the human mind and have no extra-mental existence.

So lacking in self-awareness was this Occam fellow that he didn't even realize that the philosophy of nominalism is itself an abstraction.

Imagine a fish who denies the existence of water becoming the most important thinker among fish. That's what happened to man: despite being founded on an overt denial of reality, this denial became the new foundation of western thought (or anti-thought, if you want to be literal).

Not coincidently, this is precisely when religion and theology went off the rails of reality, for Occam was also "a theological voluntarist who believed that if God had wanted to, he could have become incarnate as a donkey or an ox, or even as both a donkey and a man at the same time."

He is closer to Islamic than Christian metaphysics, because he is one of those folks who would say that God doesn't command certain things because they are right and good, but that they are right and good because God commands them. If God commanded abortion, or theft, or idolatry, then these would be good instead of immoral. There is no natural law written on our hearts, because abstract universals can't exist, and besides, we're so wrecked by original sin that we can't think straight anyway.

Oddly enough, just two days ago I ran across the same analysis in Barron's The Priority of Christ, except he's much more polite about it. He writes of how Occam's kooky voluntarism renders both God and man "self-contained, capricious, absolute, and finally irrational."

And of course, "Both Martin Luther and John Calvin were formed according to the principles of late-medieval nominalism," leading them to propound a foundational principle that makes God look more like a monster than a savior, in that he arbitrarily creates people only in order to damn them, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Which, among other difficulties, flies in the face of the principle that everything God creates is good.

Now, modern secularism is a lot of things, but it isn't un-Christian. Rather, it is anti-Christian, and could only have arisen in a thoroughly Christianized culture that denies its own ground, starting with Occam. I don't want to spend much more time on this subject, because this post is supposed to be about psychology, not the history of ideas, but Barron writes of how the turn away from realism redounds to

a not very convincing form of Christianity and the opponent to whom it naturally gave rise. Modernity and decadent Christianity are enemies in one sense, but in another sense, they are deeply connected to one another and mirror one another. In most of the disputes between Christianity and modernity, we have advocates of the prerogative of the voluntarist God facing down advocates of the voluntarist self (emphasis mine).

In short, the human world is reduced to will vs. will, and may the most ruthless win. The infinitely wider, deeper, and richer world of human intelligence and divine intelligibility is reduced to will and the power to enforce it.

This is precisely why Thomistic psychology was tossed aside in favor of modern superstition. If you want a perfect example of the insane and irrational advocacy of the voluntarist self, look no further than the website of the American Psychological Association, which tells us that "A psychological state is considered a mental disorder only if it causes significant distress or disability."

If this is the case, then there's nothing wrong with a contented pedophile, a fulfilled psychopath, or successful terrorist. Who are we to judge? In a post-realist world there can be no objective right or wrong. Man has no reason for being -- no telos -- so it no longer matters if you do bad, so long as you feel good about it.

If everything is a function of will -- or is Just Your Opinion, Man -- then naturally we can not only choose a gender but invent one, and we have no basis on which to object.

For these individuals, the significant problem is finding affordable resources, such as counseling, hormone therapy, medical procedures and the social support necessary to freely express their gender identity and minimize discrimination. Many other obstacles may lead to distress, including a lack of acceptance within society, direct or indirect experiences with discrimination, or assault. These experiences may lead many transgender people to suffer with anxiety, depression or related disorders at higher rates than nontransgender persons.

There's no such thing as right or wrong, except it's wrong to judge someone's gender delusion. But what if doing so causes me no distress?

I can't even. Well, I could, but I need to get some work done.

Ovary Towers and Spiritual Testes

Is it possible that thinkers who lived 700 or even 2400 years ago had a better understanding of psychology than do our present practitioners? Sure, Aristotle and Thomas were wrong about some things, but never this wrong:

A review of dozens of studies found that men and women are basically alike when it comes to personality, thinking ability and leadership. The differences that do exist may reflect social expectations, not biology. Despite this evidence, the media continue to spread the idea that the sexes are fundamentally different -- with real-life consequences (from the APA website).

A review of Charles Murray's Human Diversity explains why this is so much agenda-driven magical thinking, because our sexual complementarity persists all the way down to the furthest reaches of the biosphere. And up to pneumosphere, for that matter. Here is how one Thomistic psychologist describes it:

physical propagation cannot be separated from higher conscious phenomena in the total scheme of life. It colors and intensifies the mental and spiritual achievements of the individual (Brennan).

For example -- better sit down, or don't wander far from your fainting couch -- "Testes and ovaries possess functions of an overwhelming import for the sexes."

These intrinsically patriarchal and sexist organs "impress male and female characteristics on all the tissues of the human body and give to human behavior the peculiar intensities by which the sexes are differentiated." Indeed, "Every cell of the human body bears the stamp of its respective gender."

To imagine otherwise is to succumb to a naively woohoo "angelism," one of two dysfunctional forms of dualism, the other being materialism. Testosterone, for example, "engenders masculine characteristics at their best," such as aggression in the service of a higher good.

However, in and of itself -- i.e., isolated from personality and character -- it is neither here nor there, for it may also contribute to masculine traits at their worst, such as brutality and callousness (as may too little testosterone, as amply demonstrated by the annoying existence of male feminists, AKA toxic unmasculinity).

Brennan also has a good description of toxic femininity -- AKA feminism -- pointing to "feminine characters at their worst" such as "instability, emotionalism, and vacillation." These three traits are among the most important prerequisites for majoring in Women's Studies. There are also physical requirements, but we won't get into those.

With these preliminary insults out of the way, I think I'll just flip through the book and discuss some of the passages I found most noteworthy.

Incidentally, not all of this is new to me. However, up to this point I'd picked things up on a piecemeal basis by my exposure to Schuon, Pieper, Robert Spitzer, Peter Kreeft, and others. But this is the first time I've ever read a single comprehensive book on the subject of Thomistic psychology. So now I finally have an area rug to pull all these loose ends together in a more systematic way.

But unfortunately, I have a videoconference coming up shortly, so I have to stop now. Apologies for the brief post, but at least you have something to look forward too.

Here's a little preview, under the heading of The Peak of Cosmic Perfection:

Man is a person. When we have said this much about him, we have paid him the highest possible tribute that can be given to a cosmic creature. He is, so to speak, the top rung on the ladder of corporeal substances. He is the most perfect being composed of matter and form. The reason he is most perfect, of course, is that his form is most perfect. His soul is a rational thing. It is gifted with the properties of intellect and will.

Intellect and will are ordered to the true and good, respectively. As we proceed, we shall find out how and why this is so -- in other words, by virtue of what principle and toward what end.

Gentlemen! You Can't Study the Soul Here -- This is the Psychology Department!

I missed my calling. If I had only known psychology was this interesting, I would have studied it in graduate school instead of...

Just what did I study, anyway? Both -- Thomistic and non-Thomistic -- are called "psychology," but only one of them even acknowledges the soul (psyche), let alone illuminates it in depth and with precision. Which is ironic, because my focus in grad school was on psychoanalysis, which calls itself depth psychology.

Now, deep -- that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about psychology that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. But then again, maybe that's why I found the field s'durned innarestin'.

In any event, "deep" isn't necessarily synonymous with profound. One can be deeply confused, or maybe you don't pay attention to the liberal media. For it is written: Confused ideas and murky ponds seem deep (Dávila).

Moreover, Profundity is not in what is said, but in the level from which it is said. At the same time, The depth of an idea depends on the capacity of the listener.

Putting these three together, we see that there is a true and false depth, and that depth not only transmits a content, but is a kind of form, such that that depth must call out to depth, so to speak.

While this may at first sound novel -- or, worse yet, original -- it is actually quite mundane and experience-near. There are credentialed morons who know more about quantum physics than we ever will, and smelly Walmart shoppers who know more about the soul than the physicist will ever even suspect. Which is why there is infinitely more wisdom at a single Trump rally than in the entire Harvard faculty lounge. For

Great stupidities do not come from the people. They have seduced intelligent men first.

Indeed, if you've spent any time in college, you know that A high I.Q. is indicative of distinguished mediocrity, and that The learned fool has a wider field to practice his folly. The institution of tenure is a way to transform idiocy into a permanent instead of temporary condition.

Now, back when I was in graduate school, I began to have my suspicions, although who was I to question the basis of an entire discipline? Nevertheless, I couldn't help noticing two things: first, that a discipline is defined by its object, and that psychology didn't have one. For example, one of the first courses will acquaint you with all the major theorists and theories of psychology. But if psychology is a thing, there shouldn't be wildly divergent opinions about the nature of its object.

Analogously, if you study physics, you don't begin with a survey of all the various disputed and discarded theories about the nature of physical reality. Rather, a mature discipline converges on a unity of both object and method.

But someone who approaches psychology in this way will probably be called fascist, or authoritarian, or medieval. At the very least, one will be told that's just, like, your opinion, man (or other preferred gender).

For example, just try uttering a banal truth such as "homosexuality is objectively disordered." That's not an insult. Rather, just a logical entailment of the deeper principles of biology. I myself am objectively disordered, because I have diabetes. It's an inconvenience, but not an insult. A dead pancreas is a lot of things, but I don't pretend it's normal.

So, the first thing I noticed was that psychology was and is pre-paradigmatic. It's not so much that the theories disagreed with one another, but that there was no agreement as to the object of psychology. Is it behavior? The brain? The mind? The unconscious? Attachment? Affect? Neurobiology? Neurochemistry? At least we can agree: it's not the soul, because there is no such thing.

What about morality? Is this totally subjective, or is there objective good and evil? Does human development have a telos, or do we make it up as we go along? Is there such a thing as human nature, or do we define ourselves by our own choices? Do we even have choices, i.e., is there such a thing as free will? If so, what is it and how did it get here? By virtue of what principle can freedom even exist?

Etc. The second thing I noticed is that there is no objective way to choose one of these 238 theories to guide one's life -- and the life of one's patient. So, on what basis do we choose? It occurred to me that we choose based on "what works for me." Being that clinical psychology isn't just a discipline of study but a "healing art," one will pick the one through which one was "healed."

Healed of what? Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's just call it "pain," which covers a lot of territory.

We're almost out of time. But as usual, I see that Dávila was here before me. For as he observes,

The great imbecilic explanations of human behavior adequately explain the one who adopts them.

Ah ha. This explains a great deal, not just with respect to psychological theories, but vis-a-vis every theory that pretends to be comprehensive. (I believe Nietzsche said something to the effect that philosophy is just autobiography in disguise.) It explains why feminists are feminists, why Marxists are Marxists, why atheists are atheists, critical race theorists are critical race theorists, ad nauseam. The theories explain them, but not us. And yet, so many of them want to force us to live under their theories, when all we ask is to be permitted to live in reality.

To be continued...