Abracadabra

According to the Hebrew Bible, God made the world with words.... The Aramaic for "I create as I speak" is avara k'davara or, in magician's language, abracadabra. Not only are words the instrument of creation, in Judaism they are the primary reality itself. --Lawrence Kushner 

Ah ha. A cosmos made of language. That would explain a great deal -- in particular, it would shed additional obscurity on yesterday's post on the ins, outs, and what-have-yous of analogy, for an analogy is always between this and that word.

Now, a word is a form, and a form is a kind of word. In this context, it is noteworthy that Before the Beginning, when the Creator begins to begin, it is in the context of a void, which is to say, a complete absence of form. There are no words. Literally! 

It is also dark, which one would expect it to be with no words to light up the place. Think of, say, the world of Helen Keller before she made that infinite leap from the sensation of wetness to the concept of ¡water! That right there is an analogue of the moment man became man and left animality below.

To be perfectly accurate, we never left animality entirely. We are not angels. But that was the moment a link was established between. 

Yes, between, full stop. Between what? It almost doesn't matter, or, on the other hand, perhaps nothing matters more. 

I'm thinking of Voegelin's concept of the metaxy, which is the "in between" state where humans live, where we have always lived, and where we will always live. This space is humanness itself, hence its place of honor atop the comment box:

The quest, thus, has no external "object," but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable.

Some things will never change. Here is an exact definition of metaxy:

Between. Plato's symbol representing the experience of human existence as "between" lower and upper poles: man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on. Equivalent to the symbol of "participation in being" (Webb).

"Between lower and upper poles" -- or in other words, within the space of verticality. With this firmly and clearly in mind, now you understand why we would never stoop to argue with someone who cannot or will not acknowledge something as soph-evident as our nonlocal verticality. 

By the way, this isn't just understood conceptually, or at least it shouldn't be. Rather, it is perceived by the intellect. Indeed, it is among the first things seen by the intellect upon opening its third eye on thinksgiving morn. 

With regard to verticality, you could say that man is suspended between animality and divinity; or -- and, rather -- time and eternity, spirit and matter, one and many, appearance and reality, angels above and demons below, etc.

Analogously, think of the space that is opened up with the local appearance of biological life in the cosmos. The other day, my son was inquiring as to why mosquitos exist. I think it's because this is a full-employment biosphere, or in other words, the very existence of a biosphere implies that every nook & cranny must be filled. 

Likewise our vertical world, filled as it is with so many crooks & loonies: it takes all kinds to make a pneumosphere. Alas, they will always be with us.

In the beginning we must begin with something that cannot be doubted, about which error is impossible, which presupposes no prior truth(s), and denial of which leads to absurdity. We're talking about the Truth by which truth is even possible. Thus, we're talking about necessary truth.

Which is kind of a trick, because a good working definition of truth is that which must be: 2 + 2 not only equals 4, but must equal 4. Certitude. 

Certitude! I'll let Schuon, with his limber mind, tie up the many strands unraveled in this post, emphases mine:

[P]hilosophy -- the “love of wisdom” -- is the science of all the fundamental principles; this science operates with intuition, which “perceives,” and not with reason alone, which “concludes.” 

Subjectively speaking, the essence of philosophy is certitude; for the moderns, on the contrary, the essence of philosophy is doubt: philosophy is supposed to reason without any premise, as if this condition were not itself a preconceived idea; this is the classical contradiction of all relativism. Everything is doubted except for doubt.

There is indeed "a source of certitude that transcends the mental mechanism, and this source -- the only one there is -- is the pure Intellect, or Intelligence as such." 

The intellect knows through its very substance all that is capable of being known and, like the blood flowing through even the tiniest arteries of the body, it traverses all the egos of which the universe is woven and opens out “vertically” on the Infinite (ibid.)

If anything is certain, it means that certitude is possible in principle. And what is the principle of certitude? Yes, God, the one thing of which -- of Whom -- we can be certain. For it is written:

If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago (Dávila).

In the spirit of shorter posts, I think I'll stop. Besides, 

God is the guest of silence.

Words and ears. Abracadabra! 

Abracadabra

According to the Hebrew Bible, God made the world with words.... The Aramaic for "I create as I speak" is avara k'davara or, in magician's language, abracadabra. Not only are words the instrument of creation, in Judaism they are the primary reality itself. --Lawrence Kushner 

Ah ha. A cosmos made of language. That would explain a great deal -- in particular, it would shed additional obscurity on yesterday's post on the ins, outs, and what-have-yous of analogy, for an analogy is always between this and that word.

Now, a word is a form, and a form is a kind of word. In this context, it is noteworthy that Before the Beginning, when the Creator begins to begin, it is in the context of a void, which is to say, a complete absence of form. There are no words. Literally! 

It is also dark, which one would expect it to be with no words to light up the place. Think of, say, the world of Helen Keller before she made that infinite leap from the sensation of wetness to the concept of ¡water! That right there is an analogue of the moment man became man and left animality below.

To be perfectly accurate, we never left animality entirely. We are not angels. But that was the moment a link was established between. 

Yes, between, full stop. Between what? It almost doesn't matter, or, on the other hand, perhaps nothing matters more. 

I'm thinking of Voegelin's concept of the metaxy, which is the "in between" state where humans live, where we have always lived, and where we will always live. This space is humanness itself, hence its place of honor atop the comment box:

The quest, thus, has no external "object," but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable.

Some things will never change. Here is an exact definition of metaxy:

Between. Plato's symbol representing the experience of human existence as "between" lower and upper poles: man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on. Equivalent to the symbol of "participation in being" (Webb).

"Between lower and upper poles" -- or in other words, within the space of verticality. With this firmly and clearly in mind, now you understand why we would never stoop to argue with someone who cannot or will not acknowledge something as soph-evident as our nonlocal verticality. 

By the way, this isn't just understood conceptually, or at least it shouldn't be. Rather, it is perceived by the intellect. Indeed, it is among the first things seen by the intellect upon opening its third eye on thinksgiving morn. 

With regard to verticality, you could say that man is suspended between animality and divinity; or -- and, rather -- time and eternity, spirit and matter, one and many, appearance and reality, angels above and demons below, etc.

Analogously, think of the space that is opened up with the local appearance of biological life in the cosmos. The other day, my son was inquiring as to why mosquitos exist. I think it's because this is a full-employment biosphere, or in other words, the very existence of a biosphere implies that every nook & cranny must be filled. 

Likewise our vertical world, filled as it is with so many crooks & loonies: it takes all kinds to make a pneumosphere. Alas, they will always be with us.

In the beginning we must begin with something that cannot be doubted, about which error is impossible, which presupposes no prior truth(s), and denial of which leads to absurdity. We're talking about the Truth by which truth is even possible. Thus, we're talking about necessary truth.

Which is kind of a trick, because a good working definition of truth is that which must be: 2 + 2 not only equals 4, but must equal 4. Certitude. 

Certitude! I'll let Schuon, with his limber mind, tie up the many strands unraveled in this post, emphases mine:

[P]hilosophy -- the “love of wisdom” -- is the science of all the fundamental principles; this science operates with intuition, which “perceives,” and not with reason alone, which “concludes.” 

Subjectively speaking, the essence of philosophy is certitude; for the moderns, on the contrary, the essence of philosophy is doubt: philosophy is supposed to reason without any premise, as if this condition were not itself a preconceived idea; this is the classical contradiction of all relativism. Everything is doubted except for doubt.

There is indeed "a source of certitude that transcends the mental mechanism, and this source -- the only one there is -- is the pure Intellect, or Intelligence as such." 

The intellect knows through its very substance all that is capable of being known and, like the blood flowing through even the tiniest arteries of the body, it traverses all the egos of which the universe is woven and opens out “vertically” on the Infinite (ibid.)

If anything is certain, it means that certitude is possible in principle. And what is the principle of certitude? Yes, God, the one thing of which -- of Whom -- we can be certain. For it is written:

If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago (Dávila).

In the spirit of shorter posts, I think I'll stop. Besides, 

God is the guest of silence.

Words and ears. Abracadabra! 

What is Analogous to Analogy?

I suppose everything has its analogue in God, even analogy itself, being that the Son is -- so to speak-- analogous to the Father: 

exteriorization within God forms the ontological ground of possibility for the analogous exteriorization of a finite world, as well as for the exteriorization of God that we refer to as the Incarnation (emphasis mine).

Chapp adds that 

The concept of personhood, developed primarily to describe the relational hypostases within the Trinity and now applied analogously to describe spiritual creatures, allows us to overcome the autonomy/heteronomy impasse in our concept of freedom.

In other words, human persons (qua persons) are simultaneously free and subject to a higher authority. 

This is the ontological basis of our freedom to know truth and to choose the good. It is what gives a direction to both thought and action; it is why "progress" can even exist, and why "progressivism" is the denial of its real possibility (for in the horizontal flatland of the left, there can be no direction that isn't either arbitrary or rooted in the will to power).

Consider the many times Jesus makes reference to doing the will of the Father, and doing so freely: on the one hand, Not My will but Yours; on the other, No one takes its from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord.

This complementarity goes to the Ultimate Anthropology, the highest and deepest principle and context of human personhood. Thus, 

If human freedom is made in the image and likeness of this relational, Trinitarian God, then it can only come to itself by going out of itself and drawing close to the divine freedom in a dialogical relationship of love (Chapp).

A post or two ago we spoke of approaching God's "immutability" in an analogous manner, and the same can be said of his "timelessness." For in reality,

there exists within God something for which our creaturely experience of spatiality and duration are analogies. The exteriorization of the interiority of the Trinitarian hypostases demands that we posit the event-like quality of these relations... (ibid., emphasis mine).

That's exactly what I thought, but I never heard anyone but Petey express it this way. Hartshorne does, but in a manner that denies immutability and instead places process and becoming at the foundation of things. 

This is a metaphysical non-starter, because a cosmos of pure becoming equates to an eternal absence of identity. If this were true, then boys really could be girls, homosexuals really could marry, math really could be racist, and Biden's 2 trillion dollar giveaway to liberal parasites really could cost their host nothing.

This is not to deny or devalue becoming, merely to situate it in the proper context. In fact, 

the becoming of creatures in their relations with worldly others is an image and likeness of the event-like quality of the Trinitarian relations (ibid.).

Moreover, "We are able to call God 'other' precisely because of the distance and relationally within God himself" (ibid.). 

In short -- and this is important -- we now have a principle that explains how it is possible for anything other than God to actually exist. Put conversely, any conceptualization of God as a radical monad cannot explain -- and generally must deny -- human freedom as a limit on divine omnipotence. But this "limit" is -- analogously -- within the Godhead itself.

We're almost out of time, so we'll end with this:

The Father is, from all eternity, nothing more than the act of generating the Son in self-donation, while the Son is nothing more than the act of letting oneself be generated. Hence, the Son is the ground of possibility for all extra-divine "allowing oneself to be." The coming of the creaturely realm is therefore the finite analogue of the intra-trinitarian act of begetting the Son (ibid.).

Exactly. Abiding in God may look passive, but it's actually quite time-consuming. It takes all day to get nothing done.

What is Analogous to Analogy?

I suppose everything has its analogue in God, even analogy itself, being that the Son is -- so to speak-- analogous to the Father: 

exteriorization within God forms the ontological ground of possibility for the analogous exteriorization of a finite world, as well as for the exteriorization of God that we refer to as the Incarnation (emphasis mine).

Chapp adds that 

The concept of personhood, developed primarily to describe the relational hypostases within the Trinity and now applied analogously to describe spiritual creatures, allows us to overcome the autonomy/heteronomy impasse in our concept of freedom.

In other words, human persons (qua persons) are simultaneously free and subject to a higher authority. 

This is the ontological basis of our freedom to know truth and to choose the good. It is what gives a direction to both thought and action; it is why "progress" can even exist, and why "progressivism" is the denial of its real possibility (for in the horizontal flatland of the left, there can be no direction that isn't either arbitrary or rooted in the will to power).

Consider the many times Jesus makes reference to doing the will of the Father, and doing so freely: on the one hand, Not My will but Yours; on the other, No one takes its from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord.

This complementarity goes to the Ultimate Anthropology, the highest and deepest principle and context of human personhood. Thus, 

If human freedom is made in the image and likeness of this relational, Trinitarian God, then it can only come to itself by going out of itself and drawing close to the divine freedom in a dialogical relationship of love (Chapp).

A post or two ago we spoke of approaching God's "immutability" in an analogous manner, and the same can be said of his "timelessness." For in reality,

there exists within God something for which our creaturely experience of spatiality and duration are analogies. The exteriorization of the interiority of the Trinitarian hypostases demands that we posit the event-like quality of these relations... (ibid., emphasis mine).

That's exactly what I thought, but I never heard anyone but Petey express it this way. Hartshorne does, but in a manner that denies immutability and instead places process and becoming at the foundation of things. 

This is a metaphysical non-starter, because a cosmos of pure becoming equates to an eternal absence of identity. If this were true, then boys really could be girls, homosexuals really could marry, math really could be racist, and Biden's 2 trillion dollar giveaway to liberal parasites really could cost their host nothing.

This is not to deny or devalue becoming, merely to situate it in the proper context. In fact, 

the becoming of creatures in their relations with worldly others is an image and likeness of the event-like quality of the Trinitarian relations (ibid.).

Moreover, "We are able to call God 'other' precisely because of the distance and relationally within God himself" (ibid.). 

In short -- and this is important -- we now have a principle that explains how it is possible for anything other than God to actually exist. Put conversely, any conceptualization of God as a radical monad cannot explain -- and generally must deny -- human freedom as a limit on divine omnipotence. But this "limit" is -- analogously -- within the Godhead itself.

We're almost out of time, so we'll end with this:

The Father is, from all eternity, nothing more than the act of generating the Son in self-donation, while the Son is nothing more than the act of letting oneself be generated. Hence, the Son is the ground of possibility for all extra-divine "allowing oneself to be." The coming of the creaturely realm is therefore the finite analogue of the intra-trinitarian act of begetting the Son (ibid.).

Exactly. Abiding in God may look passive, but it's actually quite time-consuming. It takes all day to get nothing done.

Keep the Change

Let's zig over to Chapp's The God of Covenant and Creation, which we were discussing the post before last. Specifically, we pretty much agreed that divine immutability must be understood analogically -- like anything else we say of God, otherwise we will be led astray. 

Which is equally true of any idea about anything. Concepts help us to understand the object in question, but they aren't the object itself. Rather, they are the intelligible part of the object. (There are more elegant and official ways of saying that, but you get the point.)  

In this regard, Thomistic common sense occupies a nuanced third position between a naive and precritical realism on the one hand, and a Kantian phenomenalism on the other. The latter is the basis for the widespread barbarism that "perception is reality," AKA the absolute relativism of my truth, my lived experience, and other pathologies of the left. As if the cosmos starts and stops at their convenience!   

Everything, no matter how intelligible, is always partly unintelligible, which is precisely why our knowledge of things proceeds more deeply in an asymptotic manner. At the top of the asymptote is God himself; or, God is the origin of the infinite asymptotic ray(s) emanating from Celestial Central. Grab any one of them and ride it back to the top! Or, stop arbitrarily and call it a deity.

Come to think of it, these nonlocal rays form the warp of the cosmic area rug, while the circles around the center are the weft. As we've explained before, this is why the cosmos is both continuous and discontinuous: the rays account for the continuity, the concentric  circles for the discontinuity. 

If not for the rays, we could never, under any circumstances, pull the cosmos together via its timeless and universal principles. Rather, we would necessarily be reduced to nihilism, permanently banished to wanderment in blunderville.

But let's refocus! In last Saturday's post we made a passing comment about the principle by which the Incarnation is possible. Chapp agrees with our longstanding stand that it must be located in nature of the Trinity itself:

the sovereignty of God manifests itself in self-abandonment rather than a holding on to a static and univocal nature.... This exteriorization within God forms the ontological ground of possibility for the analogous exteriorization of a finite world, as well as for the exteriorization of God that we refer to as the Incarnation (emphasis mine).

In other words, the principle of both Creation and Incarnation is God-the-Father's own "prior" "exteriorization" of the Son-Logos. Except there's no "prior," rather, only this immutably continuous (so to speak) engendering.

This is why it's so misleading to say God is immutable and leave it at that, for the Trinity provides a way to understand such diverse things as relativity, change, time, contingency, multiplicity, human freedom, etc. -- you know, all those otherwise impenetrable and annoying things into which we are plunged.

It's a big deal, for it not only means "there exists within God something for which our creaturely experience of spatiality and duration are analogies," but that "the becoming of creatures in their relations with worldly others is an image and likeness of the event-like quality of the Trinitarian relations."

Again, we're trying to shorten the posts, so let's call a lid on this one.

Keep the Change

Let's zig over to Chapp's The God of Covenant and Creation, which we were discussing the post before last. Specifically, we pretty much agreed that divine immutability must be understood analogically -- like anything else we say of God, otherwise we will be led astray. 

Which is equally true of any idea about anything. Concepts help us to understand the object in question, but they aren't the object itself. Rather, they are the intelligible part of the object. (There are more elegant and official ways of saying that, but you get the point.)  

In this regard, Thomistic common sense occupies a nuanced third position between a naive and precritical realism on the one hand, and a Kantian phenomenalism on the other. The latter is the basis for the widespread barbarism that "perception is reality," AKA the absolute relativism of my truth, my lived experience, and other pathologies of the left. As if the cosmos starts and stops at their convenience!   

Everything, no matter how intelligible, is always partly unintelligible, which is precisely why our knowledge of things proceeds more deeply in an asymptotic manner. At the top of the asymptote is God himself; or, God is the origin of the infinite asymptotic ray(s) emanating from Celestial Central. Grab any one of them and ride it back to the top! Or, stop arbitrarily and call it a deity.

Come to think of it, these nonlocal rays form the warp of the cosmic area rug, while the circles around the center are the weft. As we've explained before, this is why the cosmos is both continuous and discontinuous: the rays account for the continuity, the concentric  circles for the discontinuity. 

If not for the rays, we could never, under any circumstances, pull the cosmos together via its timeless and universal principles. Rather, we would necessarily be reduced to nihilism, permanently banished to wanderment in blunderville.

But let's refocus! In last Saturday's post we made a passing comment about the principle by which the Incarnation is possible. Chapp agrees with our longstanding stand that it must be located in nature of the Trinity itself:

the sovereignty of God manifests itself in self-abandonment rather than a holding on to a static and univocal nature.... This exteriorization within God forms the ontological ground of possibility for the analogous exteriorization of a finite world, as well as for the exteriorization of God that we refer to as the Incarnation (emphasis mine).

In other words, the principle of both Creation and Incarnation is God-the-Father's own "prior" "exteriorization" of the Son-Logos. Except there's no "prior," rather, only this immutably continuous (so to speak) engendering.

This is why it's so misleading to say God is immutable and leave it at that, for the Trinity provides a way to understand such diverse things as relativity, change, time, contingency, multiplicity, human freedom, etc. -- you know, all those otherwise impenetrable and annoying things into which we are plunged.

It's a big deal, for it not only means "there exists within God something for which our creaturely experience of spatiality and duration are analogies," but that "the becoming of creatures in their relations with worldly others is an image and likeness of the event-like quality of the Trinitarian relations."

Again, we're trying to shorten the posts, so let's call a lid on this one.

Love -- and Truth -- at First Glance

Truly truly, one of the reasons we do not respond to trollbait is that Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time (NGD). To respond or even read them is to participate in the very stupidity one wishes to avoid. 

The only exception to the rule would involve a genuine argument over principles, but this is what the leftist scrupulously avoids, because to clarify his principles is to reveal their absurdity. 

Along these lines, a reader alerted me a helpful article called How Metaphysics Can Fix This American Mess, which is a somewhat unfortunate title, being that one of the most important metaphysical principles is the understanding that -- in the words of the Aphorist -- To be a conservative is to understand that man is a problem without a human solution.  (https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2021/10/how-metaphysics-can-fix-this-american-mess-john-horvat.html?utm_source=The+Imaginative+Conservative+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5c9a2bb4e1-Weekly+Newsletter_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6c8d563f42-5c9a2bb4e1-132498265&mc_cid=5c9a2bb4e1&mc_eid=4e99f8940d)

In short, one's metaphysic must in some form or fashion acknowledge our primordial catastrophe and our inability to save ourselves, otherwise we fall into a destructive promethean pride no less baleful than its sickular cousin. Obviously, a big part of metaphysics is knowing what man is and where he fits into the total cosmic scheme.  

Nor does anything in metaphysics -- i.e., on this side of heaven -- spare us the final leap of faith. To pretend man can live without faith leads to the implicit faith that man is a god, and we all know where that leads.

Moreover, metaphysics is abstract while life is concretely lived, such that one's metaphysical understanding must pass from vague to distinct to realized to lived to transmitted and back.

Consider the subject of this post: is it possible to adequately transmit what one hasn't realized and lived? You might counter that what Bob has realized is stupid or trivial, but you can't deny I've realized it and that I am thereby fully qualified to teach my brand of cosmic stupidity.

Now, while there is only one possible straight line between two points, an infinite number of lines can pass through a single point. At the moment I'm resting in the latter, meaning this post can take off in any number of directions and I have to pick one. Well, I don't literally have to, but if I don't limit myself, the post will never end.

So let's pick a line that's fresh in my mind, the last chapter of Garrigou-Lagrange's Thomistic Common Sense, called The Intellect's First Glance and Contemplation. It begins with the Padre noting the existence of a certain resemblance  

between the child's first intellectual glance and the simple contemplation experienced by the old man who has discovered the true meaning and value of life after the trials and disillusions that time brings in order to prepare us for eternity.

What G-L means by that first intellectual glance is the spontaneous understanding that the object of the intellect is being. Not to say this is consciously and distinctly realized or explicated, only that we vaguely apprehend the intelligible being of sensible things; the rest is commentary, no matter how deeply we subsequently penetrate into being

For "without the intellect's first glance on intelligible reality, all human, scientific, and philosophical knowledge would be impossible." Or better, "profound scientific knowledge, accompanied with humility, leads us to return to our primitive view of the whole of things seen from on high..."

Conversely, "in place of the primitive simplicity of an already-elevated glance, one finds the supposedly-learned complexity of a knowledge that in fact slides downward into decay.... If our life is not elevated to the heights of our thought, then the latter does not delay in descending to the level of our life."

And yet, it can cost close to 100k a year for the privilege of immersing oneself in this decay.

We all know the cliche that religion is for the intelligent-but-humble and ordinary-but-lofty souls, whereas it is beyond the reach of typical midwits of the politico-academic-media complex. Similarly, "A little science thus takes away the virtual richness of the first glance," but "much science brings one back to it." Or "much psychology" in my case. 

Once we are introduced as children to the intelligibility of being, we're off to the vertical races:

From this moment, the intellect seeks out something that surpasses the senses and imagination: the raisons d'être of things, their "why," their cause.... From this first contact with intelligible reality, our intellect grasps that the true is that which is and that a true judgment is is one that is conformed to reality.

Yes, common sense, but how uncommon -- and often illegal -- it has become in our day. As someone once said, political correctness is a war on noticing, especially commonsensical things such as boys = boys and girls = girls, or CRT = racist filth, or our president = demented crook. "Cancel culture" is just weaponized PC.

Which is understandable for reasons mentioned above: since these authoritarians cannot defend their principles without exposing their absurdity, they must harass, attack, cancel, and investigate those of us with common sense. 

Back to our common sense metaphysical principles. If one follows that first glance at intelligible being all the way up, one arrives at something like a Universal and Necessary Object -- or just call it UNO for short. 

If you're on the right track, the next thing you'll realize is that I am not that. Then again, I am not exactly not that either, depending upon how we look at it. For one thing, to realize it is to participate in it (or It in us, rather), and isn't that intriguing? This leads to a principle of Incarnation -- or a principle by which it is possible -- but we'll have to tackle that one in a subsequent post.

Penultimate bottomline for today: 

A beautiful life is a youthful thought realized in mature age. More beautiful still is the life that, up to its last breath, is the realization of a divine inspiration.

Bottom line goes to Sr. D:

A fulfilled life is one that after long years delivers to the grave an adolescent whom life did not corrupt.

At risk of sounding boastful, I have the adolescent part down. 

Love -- and Truth -- at First Glance

Truly truly, one of the reasons we do not respond to trollbait is that Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time (NGD). To respond or even read them is to participate in the very stupidity one wishes to avoid. 

The only exception to the rule would involve a genuine argument over principles, but this is what the leftist scrupulously avoids, because to clarify his principles is to reveal their absurdity. 

Along these lines, a reader alerted me a helpful article called How Metaphysics Can Fix This American Mess, which is a somewhat unfortunate title, being that one of the most important metaphysical principles is the understanding that -- in the words of the Aphorist -- To be a conservative is to understand that man is a problem without a human solution.  (https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2021/10/how-metaphysics-can-fix-this-american-mess-john-horvat.html?utm_source=The+Imaginative+Conservative+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5c9a2bb4e1-Weekly+Newsletter_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6c8d563f42-5c9a2bb4e1-132498265&mc_cid=5c9a2bb4e1&mc_eid=4e99f8940d)

In short, one's metaphysic must in some form or fashion acknowledge our primordial catastrophe and our inability to save ourselves, otherwise we fall into a destructive promethean pride no less baleful than its sickular cousin. Obviously, a big part of metaphysics is knowing what man is and where he fits into the total cosmic scheme.  

Nor does anything in metaphysics -- i.e., on this side of heaven -- spare us the final leap of faith. To pretend man can live without faith leads to the implicit faith that man is a god, and we all know where that leads.

Moreover, metaphysics is abstract while life is concretely lived, such that one's metaphysical understanding must pass from vague to distinct to realized to lived to transmitted and back.

Consider the subject of this post: is it possible to adequately transmit what one hasn't realized and lived? You might counter that what Bob has realized is stupid or trivial, but you can't deny I've realized it and that I am thereby fully qualified to teach my brand of cosmic stupidity.

Now, while there is only one possible straight line between two points, an infinite number of lines can pass through a single point. At the moment I'm resting in the latter, meaning this post can take off in any number of directions and I have to pick one. Well, I don't literally have to, but if I don't limit myself, the post will never end.

So let's pick a line that's fresh in my mind, the last chapter of Garrigou-Lagrange's Thomistic Common Sense, called The Intellect's First Glance and Contemplation. It begins with the Padre noting the existence of a certain resemblance  

between the child's first intellectual glance and the simple contemplation experienced by the old man who has discovered the true meaning and value of life after the trials and disillusions that time brings in order to prepare us for eternity.

What G-L means by that first intellectual glance is the spontaneous understanding that the object of the intellect is being. Not to say this is consciously and distinctly realized or explicated, only that we vaguely apprehend the intelligible being of sensible things; the rest is commentary, no matter how deeply we subsequently penetrate into being

For "without the intellect's first glance on intelligible reality, all human, scientific, and philosophical knowledge would be impossible." Or better, "profound scientific knowledge, accompanied with humility, leads us to return to our primitive view of the whole of things seen from on high..."

Conversely, "in place of the primitive simplicity of an already-elevated glance, one finds the supposedly-learned complexity of a knowledge that in fact slides downward into decay.... If our life is not elevated to the heights of our thought, then the latter does not delay in descending to the level of our life."

And yet, it can cost close to 100k a year for the privilege of immersing oneself in this decay.

We all know the cliche that religion is for the intelligent-but-humble and ordinary-but-lofty souls, whereas it is beyond the reach of typical midwits of the politico-academic-media complex. Similarly, "A little science thus takes away the virtual richness of the first glance," but "much science brings one back to it." Or "much psychology" in my case. 

Once we are introduced as children to the intelligibility of being, we're off to the vertical races:

From this moment, the intellect seeks out something that surpasses the senses and imagination: the raisons d'être of things, their "why," their cause.... From this first contact with intelligible reality, our intellect grasps that the true is that which is and that a true judgment is is one that is conformed to reality.

Yes, common sense, but how uncommon -- and often illegal -- it has become in our day. As someone once said, political correctness is a war on noticing, especially commonsensical things such as boys = boys and girls = girls, or CRT = racist filth, or our president = demented crook. "Cancel culture" is just weaponized PC.

Which is understandable for reasons mentioned above: since these authoritarians cannot defend their principles without exposing their absurdity, they must harass, attack, cancel, and investigate those of us with common sense. 

Back to our common sense metaphysical principles. If one follows that first glance at intelligible being all the way up, one arrives at something like a Universal and Necessary Object -- or just call it UNO for short. 

If you're on the right track, the next thing you'll realize is that I am not that. Then again, I am not exactly not that either, depending upon how we look at it. For one thing, to realize it is to participate in it (or It in us, rather), and isn't that intriguing? This leads to a principle of Incarnation -- or a principle by which it is possible -- but we'll have to tackle that one in a subsequent post.

Penultimate bottomline for today: 

A beautiful life is a youthful thought realized in mature age. More beautiful still is the life that, up to its last breath, is the realization of a divine inspiration.

Bottom line goes to Sr. D:

A fulfilled life is one that after long years delivers to the grave an adolescent whom life did not corrupt.

At risk of sounding boastful, I have the adolescent part down. 

Inspecting the Foundations of the Cosmos

We ended the previous post with something about a proposal to examine the foundations of our cosmic house, in order to better understand why the superstructure of Western Civilization is sliding off of it. What's going on? Is the problem termites? Mold? Bad plumbing? Holes in the roof? 

Did we build on sand, in which case the best foundation in the world won't help?  

And who is qualified to conduct the inspection? To do a proper job of it, one will first have to do a geological survey, venture down into the basement, climb up into the attic, etc., when most inspectors take only a superficial glance at the house itself, and assume their metaphysical assumptions are true enough to hold it up.  

They say our house is built on an alloy of Greek, Jewish, and Christian materials, which is true as far as it goes. But prior to this it's made of human nature, aspects of which are constrained by DNA (genetics being a necessary but not sufficient condition of humanness). 

Along these lines, I recently read a book by the theologian Larry Chapp called The God of Covenant and Creation: Scientific Naturalism and its Challenge to the Christian Faith. The first half is a little dry, but it picks up the pace in the second half, as indicated by the many times I have written YES in the margins.  

Let's review these enthusiastic YESes and try to make out the contours of the hyperdimensional object which evoked them.

A number of my YESes pertain to the so-called immutability of God. Now, this immutability has an undeniable appeal if we're going to build a civilization on top of it. Put conversely, how can one build on a process, a wave, a cloud of energy, a changeable opinion, man? 

However, as we know, anything we say about God -- or can say about God -- is strictly analogical. Thus, for example, we can say God is "good," when in actuality he is the ground of goodness itself; in other words, it's not a "trait," but rather, the substance.

But Chapp (via Balthasar) makes the subtle point -- and how stupid of me to not have thought of it! -- that we must also consider God's immutability in the same analogical way:

Why is it, asks Balthasar, that we rarely see warnings about the analogical nature of all language about God when we speak of God's immutability or self-possession as an Absolute Subject? 

In short, God is "immutable," so long as this is understood analogically. Pushed too far and taken too literally, God becomes as intelligent, living, and relatable as a rock. 

It is at this point that the YESes begin flying. For example, Chapp quotes one of our favorite celestial inspectors, Norris Clarke, who writes that

Given an infinitely good and loving personal being, it seems to me one can say it is inevitable that it will pour over in some way to share its goodness outside itself, though one cannot predict just how. 

This inevitability, or necessity if you will, is not an external compulsion or blind metaphysical force, but the very logic, the special logic of a loving nature, that will spontaneously pour over to share its goodness in some way... uncompelled by anything but love, yet inevitable, out of character for it not to happen.

Yes. That's exactly what I see. In the ultimate ground of being, "freedom and necessity come together in a transcendent synthesis, proper only to the nature of love" (ibid.). 

Except to say it can't literally be a synthesis, because this implies two separate strands that are united a posteriori, when they are really complementary aspects of their anterior unity, like justice/mercy, time/eternity, Father/Son, etc.

Much more to say, but we promised shorter posts and we're sticking to it.  

Inspecting the Foundations of the Cosmos

We ended the previous post with something about a proposal to examine the foundations of our cosmic house, in order to better understand why the superstructure of Western Civilization is sliding off of it. What's going on? Is the problem termites? Mold? Bad plumbing? Holes in the roof? 

Did we build on sand, in which case the best foundation in the world won't help?  

And who is qualified to conduct the inspection? To do a proper job of it, one will first have to do a geological survey, venture down into the basement, climb up into the attic, etc., when most inspectors take only a superficial glance at the house itself, and assume their metaphysical assumptions are true enough to hold it up.  

They say our house is built on an alloy of Greek, Jewish, and Christian materials, which is true as far as it goes. But prior to this it's made of human nature, aspects of which are constrained by DNA (genetics being a necessary but not sufficient condition of humanness). 

Along these lines, I recently read a book by the theologian Larry Chapp called The God of Covenant and Creation: Scientific Naturalism and its Challenge to the Christian Faith. The first half is a little dry, but it picks up the pace in the second half, as indicated by the many times I have written YES in the margins.  

Let's review these enthusiastic YESes and try to make out the contours of the hyperdimensional object which evoked them.

A number of my YESes pertain to the so-called immutability of God. Now, this immutability has an undeniable appeal if we're going to build a civilization on top of it. Put conversely, how can one build on a process, a wave, a cloud of energy, a changeable opinion, man? 

However, as we know, anything we say about God -- or can say about God -- is strictly analogical. Thus, for example, we can say God is "good," when in actuality he is the ground of goodness itself; in other words, it's not a "trait," but rather, the substance.

But Chapp (via Balthasar) makes the subtle point -- and how stupid of me to not have thought of it! -- that we must also consider God's immutability in the same analogical way:

Why is it, asks Balthasar, that we rarely see warnings about the analogical nature of all language about God when we speak of God's immutability or self-possession as an Absolute Subject? 

In short, God is "immutable," so long as this is understood analogically. Pushed too far and taken too literally, God becomes as intelligent, living, and relatable as a rock. 

It is at this point that the YESes begin flying. For example, Chapp quotes one of our favorite celestial inspectors, Norris Clarke, who writes that

Given an infinitely good and loving personal being, it seems to me one can say it is inevitable that it will pour over in some way to share its goodness outside itself, though one cannot predict just how. 

This inevitability, or necessity if you will, is not an external compulsion or blind metaphysical force, but the very logic, the special logic of a loving nature, that will spontaneously pour over to share its goodness in some way... uncompelled by anything but love, yet inevitable, out of character for it not to happen.

Yes. That's exactly what I see. In the ultimate ground of being, "freedom and necessity come together in a transcendent synthesis, proper only to the nature of love" (ibid.). 

Except to say it can't literally be a synthesis, because this implies two separate strands that are united a posteriori, when they are really complementary aspects of their anterior unity, like justice/mercy, time/eternity, Father/Son, etc.

Much more to say, but we promised shorter posts and we're sticking to it.  

Orphans, Bastards, and Snippets

As promised -- or threatened -- more fragments of unfinished and abandoned posts:

There exists no scientific theory -- nor can there exist any such theory -- capable of explaining the presence of free will. Which is not really surprising, since one can say the same of subjectivity itself. The famous "hard problem of consciousness" is only hard from the perspective of materialism, in which case it is quite literally impossible. 

However, consciousness isn't contingent, rather, necessary. Once that little metamuddle is unmuddled, the hard problem is, What motivates a person to use consciousness in order to deny consciousness? That's more than a waste of time, for it is a waste of timelessness.

I remember back in the day reading book called The Taboo of Subjectivity by Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace, which cites the truism that, "strictly speaking," "there is no scientific evidence even for the existence of consciousness." That's what you call soph-evident, for reasons we needn't re-re-re-peat. What's more important are the cosmic implications, which are not only many, but ultimately even One.

More self-evident truth:

All the direct evidence we have consists of nonscientific, first-person accounts of being conscious. 

He cites the International Dictionary of Psychology, where it says of consciousness that (as of 2000) 

it is impossible specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.  

For example, that sentence. But in reality, many things worth reading have been written about it, for example, this post.

I don't remember much else about the book except that it confirmed what was already obvious to me: that consciousness is one of those things that cannot be explained by reducing it to something less. Rather, it can only be understood on its own terms -- or, to be perfectly accurate, by seeing it as an entailment of its own sufficient reason. Put conversely, the material world is entirely insufficient to even begin to account for it. There can be no greater category error than pretending otherwise.  

For me the matter was settled after going through the works of Alfred North Whitehead. But guess what?, Bob whispered creepily. I was only attracted to Whitehead because I already believed what he had to say about the matter. I just needed some big-name philosophical back-up, being that I was just a retail clerk at the time, and not yet a properly credentialed idiot.  

***    

Once free will is denied, one is no longer free to accept or reject the very theory that would deny it: it is neither falsifiable nor truifiable. In short, the denial of free will is not even unscientific. 

This goes to the necessary metacosmic relationship between Truth and Freedom, in that if we aren't free to know truth, then neither one -- truth nor freedom -- can exist. If truth is determined, then there is no exit from the closed circle of causation. 

The upshot is that the existence of freedom is one of the air holes in the Matrix. But it's more than that, for it is also a lifeline from and to God, possibly the most consequential ontological spiral of them all. 

As such, freedom is the sufficient cause of the left, albeit in an assbackward and reactionary manner, for each of their policies exists to thwart and vitiate freedom, whether freedom of speech, freedom to be born, freedom of self-defense, freedom of assembly, freedom of exchange, freedom from state indoctrination, etc. 

****

You've heard of micro- and macroeconomics. But these are situated below cosmo- or meta-economics, for it turns out that economics is grounded in a priori principles, meaning that on Mount Sinai they were handed down directly from God to Mises.

But let's begin at the Beginning, AKA Genesis. 

Now, in "paradise" -- in the Garden of Eden -- there is no economics and no possibility of economics. This isn't just because paradise is fun and economics dismal; rather, it is because the basis of economics is scarcity, and there's no scarcity in paradise. Simple as. If there's scarcity, you know you're not in heaven -- or that Pete Buttigieg is away on pretendity leave.   

And what is scarcity? The moment you think about it, you realize there's no such thing until human beings arrive on the scene, for scarcity is a function of desire. Animals have drives but they obviously don't have conscious desires.

For example, when our Great Dane wakes up in the morning she likes to bask in the sun. She prefers to do so on her comfy pad, but she can't form a connection between the sun over here and the pad over there in the shade. She'll stand in the sun until I drag the pad over, at which point she'll plop onto it.

There's probably a dog somewhere who has sense enough to drag a pad into the sun, but you get the point: dogs don't sit around wishing things were otherwise. Only human beings do that, nor do they ever stop doing it, and this is both a gift and a curse. We are always wishing things were different, which is the motive power for getting anything done. But even when things are perfect, we want more.

The other night I watched a Larry David episode in which he's in a waiting room with a beautiful view of the city. He asks the receptionist how long it took for her to take it for granted: "About a day and a half."

Me? I don't accomplish much because I'm pretty content the way things are. That makes me unusual, I guess, but it's the end result of a lot of wishing I didn't have to waste so much time wishing things were different. 

Rather, long ago I decided to conduct an experiment: why not be the guy who's content with the way things are, rather than exerting so much time and energy wishing they were otherwise? In other words, focus on the end rather than the means. In fact, just skip the latter altogether and get to the point. Just Be, and be done with it.

I know what you're thinkingt: Bob, you're just turning a defect into a virtue. You have no real skills or abilities, but you're just intelligent enough to realize that if you exerted more effort to be successful, you'd be revealed as the failure you are.

Perhaps, but one must nevertheless try! Now that I'm reflecting on this subject, I'm recalling those 12 years I spent working in a supermarket between 1976 and 1988, more often than not on the graveyard shift, which suited me perfectly because of the absence of authority. Every night was like having a substitute teacher in charge of the classroom.  

Anyway, during my ten minute breaks I'd spend 45 minutes or so flipping through magazines. I was especially influenced by People magazine, because it always featured stories about this or that famous and wealthy celebrity who was miserable: either their lives were caught up in addiction and scandal, or they were just out of rehab and rebuilding their lives and careers. 

In short, People was full of people who had gotten what they wanted -- fame, success, money -- but it had backfired; or, they were trying to do it all over again, but this time get it right by focusing on the things they should have valued all along, such as children, home, God, etc.  

Anyway, Mises, according to Prof. Wiki, conceived economic laws "as akin to geometric or mathematical  axioms: fixed, unchanging, objective and discernible through logical reasoning without the use of any empirical evidence." 

Every science has an object to which it is ordered, for example, physics to the material world, biology to the living organism, psychology to the human mind, etc. Religion is in one sense ordered to God or the Absolute, but that's really another way of saying it's ordered to "everything," since everything is God and God is everything -- and more.

This "science of Ultimate Reality," writes Nasr, is

attainable through intellect and not reason, of an essentially suprahuman character and including in its fullness the whole of man's being.

Bob, we know you are a mighty, mighty man, but suprahuman? Really? Sure, so long as everyone else is too:

to be human is to seek to be suprahuman. Man can in fact be defined as the being created to transcend himself and to seek the Transcendent as such. 

Circling back to where we started, if certain fundamental realities cannot be reduced to anything less, it is because their principle must be at the other end, i.e., "above." These things can never be defined from below, nor can they be contained by language, although, at the same time, language can nevertheless communicate directly some of their essence. This is an aspect of grace, which isn't God, but neither is it not God -- as the light streaming in my window isn't the sun, but not not the sun either.

Along these lines, there exist forms that communicate the formless, and exist to do so. Nevertheless, many folks misunderstand their function and reduce them to their form. Which is idolatry.

Well, now that we are caught up with these old bastards, we can move on to the next subject, which will  involve examining the foundation of the cosmos in order to better understand why the superstructure of Western Civilization is sliding off of it.

Orphans, Bastards, and Snippets

As promised -- or threatened -- more fragments of unfinished and abandoned posts:

There exists no scientific theory -- nor can there exist any such theory -- capable of explaining the presence of free will. Which is not really surprising, since one can say the same of subjectivity itself. The famous "hard problem of consciousness" is only hard from the perspective of materialism, in which case it is quite literally impossible. 

However, consciousness isn't contingent, rather, necessary. Once that little metamuddle is unmuddled, the hard problem is, What motivates a person to use consciousness in order to deny consciousness? That's more than a waste of time, for it is a waste of timelessness.

I remember back in the day reading book called The Taboo of Subjectivity by Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace, which cites the truism that, "strictly speaking," "there is no scientific evidence even for the existence of consciousness." That's what you call soph-evident, for reasons we needn't re-re-re-peat. What's more important are the cosmic implications, which are not only many, but ultimately even One.

More self-evident truth:

All the direct evidence we have consists of nonscientific, first-person accounts of being conscious. 

He cites the International Dictionary of Psychology, where it says of consciousness that (as of 2000) 

it is impossible specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.  

For example, that sentence. But in reality, many things worth reading have been written about it, for example, this post.

I don't remember much else about the book except that it confirmed what was already obvious to me: that consciousness is one of those things that cannot be explained by reducing it to something less. Rather, it can only be understood on its own terms -- or, to be perfectly accurate, by seeing it as an entailment of its own sufficient reason. Put conversely, the material world is entirely insufficient to even begin to account for it. There can be no greater category error than pretending otherwise.  

For me the matter was settled after going through the works of Alfred North Whitehead. But guess what?, Bob whispered creepily. I was only attracted to Whitehead because I already believed what he had to say about the matter. I just needed some big-name philosophical back-up, being that I was just a retail clerk at the time, and not yet a properly credentialed idiot.  

***    

Once free will is denied, one is no longer free to accept or reject the very theory that would deny it: it is neither falsifiable nor truifiable. In short, the denial of free will is not even unscientific. 

This goes to the necessary metacosmic relationship between Truth and Freedom, in that if we aren't free to know truth, then neither one -- truth nor freedom -- can exist. If truth is determined, then there is no exit from the closed circle of causation. 

The upshot is that the existence of freedom is one of the air holes in the Matrix. But it's more than that, for it is also a lifeline from and to God, possibly the most consequential ontological spiral of them all. 

As such, freedom is the sufficient cause of the left, albeit in an assbackward and reactionary manner, for each of their policies exists to thwart and vitiate freedom, whether freedom of speech, freedom to be born, freedom of self-defense, freedom of assembly, freedom of exchange, freedom from state indoctrination, etc. 

****

You've heard of micro- and macroeconomics. But these are situated below cosmo- or meta-economics, for it turns out that economics is grounded in a priori principles, meaning that on Mount Sinai they were handed down directly from God to Mises.

But let's begin at the Beginning, AKA Genesis. 

Now, in "paradise" -- in the Garden of Eden -- there is no economics and no possibility of economics. This isn't just because paradise is fun and economics dismal; rather, it is because the basis of economics is scarcity, and there's no scarcity in paradise. Simple as. If there's scarcity, you know you're not in heaven -- or that Pete Buttigieg is away on pretendity leave.   

And what is scarcity? The moment you think about it, you realize there's no such thing until human beings arrive on the scene, for scarcity is a function of desire. Animals have drives but they obviously don't have conscious desires.

For example, when our Great Dane wakes up in the morning she likes to bask in the sun. She prefers to do so on her comfy pad, but she can't form a connection between the sun over here and the pad over there in the shade. She'll stand in the sun until I drag the pad over, at which point she'll plop onto it.

There's probably a dog somewhere who has sense enough to drag a pad into the sun, but you get the point: dogs don't sit around wishing things were otherwise. Only human beings do that, nor do they ever stop doing it, and this is both a gift and a curse. We are always wishing things were different, which is the motive power for getting anything done. But even when things are perfect, we want more.

The other night I watched a Larry David episode in which he's in a waiting room with a beautiful view of the city. He asks the receptionist how long it took for her to take it for granted: "About a day and a half."

Me? I don't accomplish much because I'm pretty content the way things are. That makes me unusual, I guess, but it's the end result of a lot of wishing I didn't have to waste so much time wishing things were different. 

Rather, long ago I decided to conduct an experiment: why not be the guy who's content with the way things are, rather than exerting so much time and energy wishing they were otherwise? In other words, focus on the end rather than the means. In fact, just skip the latter altogether and get to the point. Just Be, and be done with it.

I know what you're thinkingt: Bob, you're just turning a defect into a virtue. You have no real skills or abilities, but you're just intelligent enough to realize that if you exerted more effort to be successful, you'd be revealed as the failure you are.

Perhaps, but one must nevertheless try! Now that I'm reflecting on this subject, I'm recalling those 12 years I spent working in a supermarket between 1976 and 1988, more often than not on the graveyard shift, which suited me perfectly because of the absence of authority. Every night was like having a substitute teacher in charge of the classroom.  

Anyway, during my ten minute breaks I'd spend 45 minutes or so flipping through magazines. I was especially influenced by People magazine, because it always featured stories about this or that famous and wealthy celebrity who was miserable: either their lives were caught up in addiction and scandal, or they were just out of rehab and rebuilding their lives and careers. 

In short, People was full of people who had gotten what they wanted -- fame, success, money -- but it had backfired; or, they were trying to do it all over again, but this time get it right by focusing on the things they should have valued all along, such as children, home, God, etc.  

Anyway, Mises, according to Prof. Wiki, conceived economic laws "as akin to geometric or mathematical  axioms: fixed, unchanging, objective and discernible through logical reasoning without the use of any empirical evidence." 

Every science has an object to which it is ordered, for example, physics to the material world, biology to the living organism, psychology to the human mind, etc. Religion is in one sense ordered to God or the Absolute, but that's really another way of saying it's ordered to "everything," since everything is God and God is everything -- and more.

This "science of Ultimate Reality," writes Nasr, is

attainable through intellect and not reason, of an essentially suprahuman character and including in its fullness the whole of man's being.

Bob, we know you are a mighty, mighty man, but suprahuman? Really? Sure, so long as everyone else is too:

to be human is to seek to be suprahuman. Man can in fact be defined as the being created to transcend himself and to seek the Transcendent as such. 

Circling back to where we started, if certain fundamental realities cannot be reduced to anything less, it is because their principle must be at the other end, i.e., "above." These things can never be defined from below, nor can they be contained by language, although, at the same time, language can nevertheless communicate directly some of their essence. This is an aspect of grace, which isn't God, but neither is it not God -- as the light streaming in my window isn't the sun, but not not the sun either.

Along these lines, there exist forms that communicate the formless, and exist to do so. Nevertheless, many folks misunderstand their function and reduce them to their form. Which is idolatry.

Well, now that we are caught up with these old bastards, we can move on to the next subject, which will  involve examining the foundation of the cosmos in order to better understand why the superstructure of Western Civilization is sliding off of it.

Abandoning My Post

Just because I haven't been posting lately, it doesn't mean I haven't been writing posts. It's just that I haven't been finishing them. This morning I will try to finish them, or at least recover what seems postable, and flush the rest.

Here's one from two or three weeks ago, when we went through a libertarian phase. Not libertarian in the usual sense of the word, but in the deeper context of trying -- as usual -- to figure out how this particular cosmos works. It obviously works, or we wouldn't be here. But the deeper reasons are on the metaphysical, not merely physical, plane.  

Now, a key component of the cosmos is indeed liberty, which can under no circumstances be understood or even conceptualized "from the bottom up"; nor, for the same reason, can the top be reduced to the bottom without eliminating precisely what needs to be explained. If we aren't free to explain our freedom, then no explanation of anything is possible.

This is a two-way, hierarchical cosmos, and that's all there is to it. Empiricists and positivists deny one end, while idealists and many religionists deny the other, but both approaches result in an impoverished cosmos unfit for, and indeed uninhabitable by, man.

In certain emergencies or embarrassing situations I like to say to myself I'm not here and this isn't happening. But I would never dream of elevating this to a metaphysic! Rather, I'm only a situational Buddhist. 

Longtime readers will recognize this as our usual approach to things: instead of beginning with, say, physics or chemistry, and trying to figure out how these can make the ontological leap to man, we begin with the most undeniable fact of all -- in my case, me -- and try to figure out what sort of cosmos must exist in order for such an unlikely fact to even be possible, let alone actual. (And we won't even get into the actualizing process, which adds another layer to the mystery of the human subject -- i.e., in what kind of orthoparadoxical cosmos is it possible to become who one is?).

Not surprisingly, it turns out that I am only possible in a very peculiar universe -- and not just because I myself am peculiar. In the grander scheme of things, everyone is peculiar, which is to say, unique, and how is this possible? In other words, what is the principle of unique personhood, its sufficient reason? 

There is no such principle in, say, physics, in which things that appear diverse on the surface are reduced to (explained by) a handful of simple laws. But persons are characterized by their unrepeatable uniqueness; we might say that there's only one to a customer, notwithstanding the occasional case of multiple personality disorder on the one hand, or hivemind progressive conformist on the other.

In physics nothing is unique; rather, every event is fully reducible to more general laws. Now, it is true that humans are constrained by "human nature," otherwise we wouldn't have the word "human." And yet, the human being simultaneously belongs to a species while at the same time truly being his own species -- an oxymoronical "species of one."

So yes, not only are you weird, but I would go so far as to say that if you are not weird, then you're doing it wrong. 

Nor am I talking about merely posing as a weirdo in order to get attention, nor the tiresome contemporary plague of mental illness masquerading as uniqueness. Such persons are easily lumped into their diagnostic category, which is the opposite of uniqueness. Paranoid conspiracy theorists are a dime a dozen. Or maybe you've never watched MSNBC.

Naturally, this goes to the cosmic heresy of "identity" politics, which is the systematic denial of human identity. For to reduce identity to some superficial group characteristic is to deny one's human identity, precisely. Al Sharpton, or Joy Reid, or Barack Obama, are just professional black people -- serious jokes but not serious persons.

If you are a feminist, for example, you are just a cliché, not a proper three-dimensional person (i.e., biological, psychological, and spiritual). Moreover, you are no doubt identifying with the superficial feminist cliché in order to deny some pain associated with your deeper personhood. After all, being a feminist, stupid and shallow as it is, is much easier than becoming who you actually are. 

Oh, by the way, I just figured out why I'm not finishing these posts. It's due to our newfound absence of time constraints brought about by retirement. Back when I was gainfully employed, I had to wrap things up in order reenter the Conspiracy. Now I can just blah-blah-blog all day if I want to, like a song that goes on forever. The medium is the message, and now the medium is timelessness unbound instead of the bounds of temporality. 

This implies that I need to set an artificial limit to my writing, like stopping at 10:30, even if 

Abandoning My Post

Just because I haven't been posting lately, it doesn't mean I haven't been writing posts. It's just that I haven't been finishing them. This morning I will try to finish them, or at least recover what seems postable, and flush the rest.

Here's one from two or three weeks ago, when we went through a libertarian phase. Not libertarian in the usual sense of the word, but in the deeper context of trying -- as usual -- to figure out how this particular cosmos works. It obviously works, or we wouldn't be here. But the deeper reasons are on the metaphysical, not merely physical, plane.  

Now, a key component of the cosmos is indeed liberty, which can under no circumstances be understood or even conceptualized "from the bottom up"; nor, for the same reason, can the top be reduced to the bottom without eliminating precisely what needs to be explained. If we aren't free to explain our freedom, then no explanation of anything is possible.

This is a two-way, hierarchical cosmos, and that's all there is to it. Empiricists and positivists deny one end, while idealists and many religionists deny the other, but both approaches result in an impoverished cosmos unfit for, and indeed uninhabitable by, man.

In certain emergencies or embarrassing situations I like to say to myself I'm not here and this isn't happening. But I would never dream of elevating this to a metaphysic! Rather, I'm only a situational Buddhist. 

Longtime readers will recognize this as our usual approach to things: instead of beginning with, say, physics or chemistry, and trying to figure out how these can make the ontological leap to man, we begin with the most undeniable fact of all -- in my case, me -- and try to figure out what sort of cosmos must exist in order for such an unlikely fact to even be possible, let alone actual. (And we won't even get into the actualizing process, which adds another layer to the mystery of the human subject -- i.e., in what kind of orthoparadoxical cosmos is it possible to become who one is?).

Not surprisingly, it turns out that I am only possible in a very peculiar universe -- and not just because I myself am peculiar. In the grander scheme of things, everyone is peculiar, which is to say, unique, and how is this possible? In other words, what is the principle of unique personhood, its sufficient reason? 

There is no such principle in, say, physics, in which things that appear diverse on the surface are reduced to (explained by) a handful of simple laws. But persons are characterized by their unrepeatable uniqueness; we might say that there's only one to a customer, notwithstanding the occasional case of multiple personality disorder on the one hand, or hivemind progressive conformist on the other.

In physics nothing is unique; rather, every event is fully reducible to more general laws. Now, it is true that humans are constrained by "human nature," otherwise we wouldn't have the word "human." And yet, the human being simultaneously belongs to a species while at the same time truly being his own species -- an oxymoronical "species of one."

So yes, not only are you weird, but I would go so far as to say that if you are not weird, then you're doing it wrong. 

Nor am I talking about merely posing as a weirdo in order to get attention, nor the tiresome contemporary plague of mental illness masquerading as uniqueness. Such persons are easily lumped into their diagnostic category, which is the opposite of uniqueness. Paranoid conspiracy theorists are a dime a dozen. Or maybe you've never watched MSNBC.

Naturally, this goes to the cosmic heresy of "identity" politics, which is the systematic denial of human identity. For to reduce identity to some superficial group characteristic is to deny one's human identity, precisely. Al Sharpton, or Joy Reid, or Barack Obama, are just professional black people -- serious jokes but not serious persons.

If you are a feminist, for example, you are just a cliché, not a proper three-dimensional person (i.e., biological, psychological, and spiritual). Moreover, you are no doubt identifying with the superficial feminist cliché in order to deny some pain associated with your deeper personhood. After all, being a feminist, stupid and shallow as it is, is much easier than becoming who you actually are. 

Oh, by the way, I just figured out why I'm not finishing these posts. It's due to our newfound absence of time constraints brought about by retirement. Back when I was gainfully employed, I had to wrap things up in order reenter the Conspiracy. Now I can just blah-blah-blog all day if I want to, like a song that goes on forever. The medium is the message, and now the medium is timelessness unbound instead of the bounds of temporality. 

This implies that I need to set an artificial limit to my writing, like stopping at 10:30, even if 

Hope, Change, and Superiority

Continuing with the previous post, we were discussing the Moldbuggian concept of the Cathedral, which we call the progressive Matrix https://americandigest.org/long-read-of-the-week-a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral-by-curtis-yarvin-aka-moldbug/#more-27032. But first, an embarrassing confession.

Even back when I was a liberal I was always looking for systemic unity and conceptual integration -- in other words, I wanted to understand how facts and ideas that appear unrelated on a lower level are unified at a higher and deeper level. 

Nothing wrong with that, because it's simply what thinking is and does, whether in science or the humanities -- or in pseudoscience and the subhumanities. As always, the question isn't whether the mind seeks unity and integration, but whether the integration is true -- whether it conforms to the Permanent Real.

Pick any entree from the progressive kookbook and you will immediately notice that it offers a kind of unity -- a pseudo-unity to be sure, but unity just the same. For again: all humans, by virtue of being human, seek unity, and the very progress of human thought can be seen as a ceaseless struggle between good and functional unity -- AKA progress -- and regressive and dysfunctional unity. 

It's not a matter of left and right, but rather, up and down. Truth, or necessary being, is up, its entailments and contingencies down. Unless you are a postmodern progressive, in which case contingency is at the top and bottom. Which reduces to power.

An allied problem is that in the contemporary west there are waaaaay too many thinkers, or people who presume to think. These latter are indeed presumptuous, and with good reason, for to say intellectual is to say pride. The self-regard of these mediocretins is off the charts, but Humility knows what comes next. 

Just as there is the true guffah-HA! experience, there are any number of counterfeit ones. How to tell the difference? The false version excludes in order to unify; as such, it functions more to eliminate the ambiguity of reality than to unify the psyche at a higher level. At the same time, it takes no notice of anomalies. In short, it is not bothered by the cognitive dissonance that troubles a normal person.

For example, in response to the shock of the 2016 election, Democrats identified a unified theory that explained everything: President Trump is a Russian agent! It is no coincidence that these same people have embraced the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. 

More generally, you will have noticed that the conspiracy-prone can easily flit from one theory to another. The form scarcely matters, because it's the function that counts, and the function is to organize an otherwise disordered, chaotic, and anxiety-ridden mind. For it is not the healthy who need a doctorate in gender studies or queer theory, but the sick. 

Take a feminist. Please. Back in my day, such women would enter psychotherapy in order to figure out why they were so miserable. Before that they would just get married and have children. Problem solved. 

But feminism -- or any ideology for that matter -- allows one to politicize the human condition, and why not? Promise a facile solution to an insoluble problem, and you've got a lifetime Democrat.

Life is hard -- full of pain, loss, conflict, compromise. Adopting an ideology accomplishes two things: it 1) locates an easy enemy to explain one's unhappiness, while 2) offering hope that the unhappiness will be eliminated in the future once the enemy is vanquished. In short, it allows one to externalize pain in the present while promising a cure in the future.

Hope and Change. Give the prophet Obama credit: he abstracted the deeper form of any and all ideology and promised it to his supporters, who consisted of -- not coincidentally -- the over- and undereducated, AKA Lowfo and Nofo voters, those most susceptible to promises of false Slack. Just like today's promise, it will pay for itself!

Anyway, the embarrassing part is that, back when I was a liberal, I wanted to figure out the "real reason" why conservatives could believe such clearly stupid and even evil nonsense.  

Looking back on it, I realize that my liberal beliefs were completely unexamined, in part because they existed not on an epistemological plane, but rather, on a moral one. In other words, they were all about virtue signaling: I am better than you, for I care about women, children, immigrants, native Americans, blacks, gays, labor unions, trannies, you name it. I care. I am smarter than you, and I have an advanced degree to prove it.

Mother was right: I am a good man.