The Journey Home

Picking up where we left off, if our Cosmos

were totally unconscious there would be no way for it to complete its return to God in the Great Circle of Being as we shall see in a moment when dealing with the universe as Journey (Clarke). 

That moment has arrived. All aboard! 

Not to go woo woo on you right away, but as I said in the Book -- and I meant it -- if the Cosmos is conscious anywhere it is conscious everywhere, due its part-whole, or holo-fractal organization. That's not the Norco talking, because I ran out. I mean it in a very literal way, but let me first defer to another authority:

The order of the parts of the universe to each other exists in virtue of the order of the whole universe to God (Thomas).

Argument from authority is a logical fallacy.

That's true, unless what the authority says can be independently verified. Nobody's perfect, but

The source of every imperfect thing lies necessarily in one perfect being (ibid).

And

The complete perfection of the universe demands that there should be created natures which return to God (ibid).

Assumes facts not in evidence, i.e., God. 

Okay, let's leave God out of it for now, and put it this way: 

Intellect is the first author and mover of the universe.... Hence the last end of the universe must necessarily be the good of the intellect. This, however, is truth. Hence truth must be the last end of the whole universe (ibid.).  

Still sounds circular to me.

Precisely, bearing in mind that this is the only alternative to a radical absurcularity, or cosmic nul de slack. It's either one or the other:

The creature is vanity in so far as it comes from nothingness, but not in so far as it comes from God (ibid).

And if we came from nothingness we could never know it. Turns out that -- because of the holofractality referenced above -- the intellect is "naturally capable of knowing everything that exists," and 

every intellectual being is in a certain manner all things, in so far as it is able to comprehend all being by the power of its understanding (ibid.). 

Conversely,

This ordering of the intellect to infinity would be vain and senseless if there were no infinite object of knowledge (ibid.).

But there is an infinite object of knowledge: O. Which is why we aren't plunged into the darkness of vanity and senselessness:

The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing else than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light in which the eternal ideas are contained (ibid.). 

Which is why I find the cosmos s'durned innarestin' -- the way the whole human comedy keeps perpetuatin' itself down through the generations.... Aw, look at me, I'm ramblin' again. Let's get back to Clarke. He says that

our -- and any -- universe turns out to be a radically personalized one, in its source, its meaning, and its destiny.

Any universe? 

The person is ultimately the key to why there is anything at all and not rather nothing.

And again, an isolated person is not, and could not be, a person: "the notion of person itself necessarily turns out to be interpersonal. There is no 'I' without a 'Thou,' and hence a 'We.'" 

So the real mystery is intersubjectivity. How did it get here, and by virtue of what principle? One possibility is that Christianity is true, for the existence of God "as a Triune Personal Being, or "a Three in One" 

sheds immense light on the very nature of being and person. For it reveals that the Supreme Being... must be interpersonal, a Personal 'We,' rather than a solitary, utterly simple, and nonrelational One. No wonder, then, that human personality also is intrinsically interpersonal, since it us such a lofty image of the divine perfection.

Unless you have a better idea. Or a more comprehensive vision, one that leaves nothing out, in particular, the interpersonal personality which is the very lens through which we see this and any other vision. In this vision there is first an exodus,

or journey outward of all created being from its Infinite Source, the emanation of the Many from the One.... But no sooner has the outgoing journey begun than it pivots upon itself and starts back on a journey home again to its Source, drawn by the pull of the Good in each being.

Bearing in mind that the Good of the intellect is Truth. To repeat what Thomas says above, 

the last end of the universe must necessarily be the good of the intellect. This, however, is truth. Hence truth must be the last end of the whole universe.

Or as Clarke puts it,

the exodus and the return, the leaving home and the returning thereto, the way out and the way back, are a journey motif woven into the very ontological structure of every being and thus of the universe itself as a whole.

Man is the mediator, the "bridge builder"

standing in the midst of the material universe, arising out of it as a synthesis of matter and spirit, a microcosm imaging the whole in himself, and with the capacity through his intellect and will to understand the whole process, the entire journey and its meaning...

That's pretty much the vision of my divine cosmody, and I'm sticking to it: badda-bing, badda-BANG!

the Big Bang Theory of the origin of the material universe now reveals that the entire cosmos from the first fiery moment of its origin to the present is enveloped in a single great unified journey. Physics and metaphysics here reinforce each other. And the spiritual journey of each one of us becomes a microcosm of the larger journey.

Someone ought to write a book.

Person, Light, and Presence

To reset: we've been talking about an autobiographical essay by Norris Clarke, in which he discusses six themes that "have dominated my metaphysical reflection over the last 50 years" and "are central in my philosophical vision of the universe." We've saved the last for last, which is 

the person, or the universe as radically personalized, from and for persons as the supreme value in the universe.

You know the drill: last in execution is first in intention, all other metacosmic intentions being #2 or lower. Persons are not only open to the purpose of the cosmos, they are that purpose. But only if understood in a certain way, since the wrong way leads to cosmic narcissism, solipsism, nihilism, and even progressivism, which, you might say, is the sum of all metaphysical heresies and misguided intentions. 

By the way, I don't have any idea what Clarke is about to say, having not read the book in many years. But since we think alike, I trust that we'll get a post out of it.

He starts with Thomas' claim that the person is "that which is most perfect in all of nature," but of course this is mostly in the form of potential. Other animals are limited by the potential to fulfill their genetic program, but the span of human potential is vertically unlimited at both ends, from saint to psychopath, or from wisdom to tenure.

While tracking down the source of that quote, I found some other relevant observations by the T-man, for example, 

The further a being is distant from that which is Being itself, namely God, the nearer it is to nothingness. But the nearer a being stands to God, the further away it is from nothingness. 

Which goes to the vertical spectrum in which man qua man is always -- and cannot not be -- situated. This means that if we could travel back in time and track down the first man... 

Well first of all, for reasons we'll probably get into later, it would have to be the first men, since a radically individual person is a cosmic impossibility, a metaphysical nonstarter. Supposing such a being, how would he go about ushering the other men into the vertical world of the very intersubjectivity that defines man? 

It would be exactly like, say, trying to teach language to an ape. No matter how hard you try, the ape will still be enclosed in a slightly larger apehood. I won't belabor the point, but you will have noticed that God says, and I quote, Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, which is what I would call a Pretty Big Hint about our nature. 

Moreover, male and female he created them, which implies that otherness and relation are built into the human cake. Just like inside God's own cake. 

In the later version, God literally fashions woman from man, which I take as a mythopoetic way of saying that they share the same substance -- or substance-in-relation, as we will later elaborate. Horizontally speaking, man refers to woman, and vice versa, each being a vertical prolongation of God's own interior relationality.

The classic definition of man is the "rational animal," but prior to this he must be the relational animal, otherwise he could never be reasonable, since reason would be unrelated to the world or to anything else. Reasoning is always about. 

Here's another good one by Thomas, going to the telos of creation (and why #6 is really #1, as per the above):

The highest step in the whole process of generation of creatures is the human soul, towards which matter tends as its ultimate form.... Man is therefore the end [i.e., telos] of all generation (emphasis mine).

Here again, matter is first in execution, but only a materialist would say that it is the end of things. There are things higher than matter, otherwise to hell with it. Turns out

it is possible for the perfection of the whole universe to have its existence in one single being.... the ultimate perfection to which the soul can attain is that in it is reflected the whole order of the universe and its causes.

It seems that the existence of a single Perfect Man is the whole durn point of the Cosmos, or of what this is all leading up to. Let's hold that thought in abeyance and get back to Clarke. He asks "What is so special about the person that situates it at the apex of the order of being," hmm?

We can't just say the Bible says so, because the Bible is not self-authenticating. Rather, for us, it must be true by virtue of the standards of truth. 

Of course, it reveals certain truths that we could not know in the absence of their revelation to us, but once known, they make a heckuva lot of sense, which in turn tends to authenticate the text, or in other words, how could such primitive people know such timeless truths about human nature without a little vertical assistance?

What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?

Exactly what powers distinguish us from the beasts and nihilists? I would say two things -- not the two you're thinking of, but rather, Truth and the Freedom to know it. 

Now, I believe in natural selection as much as the next ape, but it can in no way account for its own truth and our freedom to know it. And this truth-freedom reduces to the immaterial intellect, which obviously cannot be explained by any material process. 

Here again, intellect is related to the world, but with a big difference. Lower animals are also related to the world, but only in an exterior sense. They cannot know interiors, that is, essences. My dog can pee on a tree, but knows nothing about the concept of treeness. 

Conversely, man is related to the interiority of things, beginning with the interior of other people, AKA intersubjectivity. It's how we are even having this conversation.

The luminous presence of human interiority. Absent this interiority, there would be no place for the light to shine. In Voegelin's terms, the light shines in the space between the poles of immanence and transcendence, and here we are. 

But what is the source of this mysterious light that bathes the intellect? Rabbi Leonard says There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in," but that makes it sound like an accident, when it's really Voegelin's metaxy, 

the experience of human existence as "between" lower and upper poles: man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on.

For Clarke,

Personal being is nothing but being itself, freed from the limits of material modes of existence that hold it down in the darkness of un-self-conscious lack of self-presence, being itself allowed now to take on the full dimensions of what it is meant to be... 

The alternative -- your choice -- is what Voegelin calls scotosis, i.e., "Darkening, turning toward darkness. Voluntary ignorance," or the "eclipse of reality."

How to escape this self-inflicted blindness? Periagoge, 

Turning around, conversion. Plato's term for the cognitive and moral reorientation toward the True and the Good as such (Webb). 

Through such a metaphysical metanoia, we are, in Clarke's words, able 

to realize the full "nature" of being as presence, tending toward the ideal fullness, found only in God, of total luminous presence.... To be without restrictions, therefore, necessarily means to be personal.

That seems like a jump. Could you say a little more? 

[T]he unrestricted dynamism of the mind is a mystery of light, of super-personal being, rather than the darkness of infra-personal being.

Go on.

Not only must the ultimate Source of the universe be personalized being..., the rest of the universe derives from personal being.... for the universe to make full sense it would have to include personal created beings within it -- in a word, it would have to be for persons.

Put conversely, 

What could possibly be the point of a created universe entirely plunged in the darkness of unconsciousness, unable to know or appreciate that it is there at all? 

Hmm? It reminds me of Voegelin's QUESTION, which is his term for 

the tension of existence in its aspect as a questioning unrest seeking not simply particular truth, but still more the transcendental pole of truth as such: "not just any question but the quest concerning the mysterious ground of all being" (Webb). 

Truly truly, this puts the quest into the question, or the deustination into the journey, for if the Cosmos

were totally unconscious there would be no way for it to complete its return to God in the Great Circle of Being as we shall see in a moment when dealing with the universe as Journey. 

That's way over 1,000 words already, so that moment will have to await the next post.

Where the Action Is

Yesterday we discussed the first two of six themes of the Cosmic Symphony, 1) the unrestricted dynamism of the mind toward being, and 2) existence as an act of presence. 

Put these two together and we see a complementarity between the intellect's unrestricted desire to know the world, and the world's equally unrestricted intelligibility, which reduces to a luminous space of experience, and how convenient is that! 

We already have it on authority -- Voegelin's -- that EXPERIENCE as such is a "'luminous perspective' within the process of reality," and that's good enough for me. But we'll shed further light on the Subject of Experience in next post.  

Next up is what Clarke calls participation but I would call the holo-fractal structure of being. 

For example, he describes how "the immanent One in many is also a many from a transcendent One," or in other words, this is a weblike cosmos in which everything participates both in and with everything else, both horizontally and (because) vertically. 

Or, you could say that this is an interiorly related cosmos, but whence this mysterious interiority? I mean, here we are, experiencing the inside of the Cosmos. Here again, we'll save the definitive answer for next post. But don't worry, there's still lots to cover and uncover in this one.  

As to the horizontal worldwide web, we don't have to deepak the chopra to know that "An instant of time, without duration, is an imaginative logical construction," and that "each duration of time mirrors itself in all temporal durations" (Whitehead). Same with space:

In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatiotemporal standpoint mirrors the world (ibid.). 

I could cite many similar passages from The Book of the Same Name, for example, "If the whole did not participate and serve as the ground for the existence of the parts, the parts would not exist," and

Simply put, the classical assumption that the collection of parts constitutes the whole has proven invalid. We now know that the properties of parts can only be understood in terms of the dynamics of the whole, and that what we call a "part" is a pattern in the inseparable web of relations.

Back to Clarke, "Thus the whole universe appears as a vast participation system, a One in many which is also a many from One," and why not? "To be is to be together," such that "Togetherness and community are woven into the very stuff of all being, as being."

Again, convenient if we want to think about reality: "For if psyche mirrors nature and nature mirrors psyche," then "either can illuminate the other," and we're back to that mysterious Light to which we alluded at the end of the previous post. 

What is the source of all this luminosity? Why aren't we in the dark, or rather, how does experience become the sensorium of transcendental light? How many beings does it take to create an existential light bulb?

Good question. I'm gonna guess three, but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

Supposing two mirrors facing each other, we still require light in order to see anything in them. We'll hold that question in reserve and move on to the next theme, which Clarke calls Action, which strikes me as similar to our second theme, which was the idea of Existence as the Act of Presence.  

Action refers to 

the activity by which the various centers of existential energy in the universe pour over into self-expression and self-communication with each other. 

Without it -- inconveniently -- "all we would have would be a collection of isolated beings" bound up within themselves, "with no connections or communication with others, and hence no way of knowing them." A total eclipse of O, so No philosophy for you!

Every being would be plunged in total silence and darkness... a total "black hole," so to speak....

It is action alone that enables beings to come out of their isolation, connect with each other, influence each other, and communicate to each other. 

Indeed,

It is action that truly allows there to be a universe, that is, a turning of all towards oneness, togetherness.  

So, that's a relief: to even say Cosmos is to have assumed a great deal. Clarke says a great deal more about it, but you get the point. We'll move on to our next theme of the Cosmic Symphony, which is The Good, which -- surprise surprise -- is also "woven into the very fabric of being itself," just as God said all those years ago. 

It seems that there is an Ought built into the nature of things, which is conformity to the Good: "Being and value are inseparable," in that action is "dynamically drawn or magnetized by the good." 

Why, he's talking about Celestial Central, AKA the Great Attractor! And here again, I thought I was the only one. 

The last -- and for me, most important -- theme is The Person. We are going to save this for a separate post, because it is the principle that unifies all the others, and without which there wouldn't be any others. Truly truly, it is the very ground of being -- why you are and I am and we are.

The Cosmic Symphony and How to Hear It

In an autobiographical essay called Fifty Years of Metaphysical Reflections, Clarke asks whether there is "something like a metaphysical bent of mind." Were we just born this way? If not, how did we get bent? 

To be sure, "not everyone has the aptitude or the inner attraction to become a self-propelling, self-motivated metaphysician." What are the seemingly inborn characteristics of such an autotelic personality? One is

A passion for unity, for seeing how the universe and all things in it fit together as a whole, a meaningful whole, a longing for integration of thought and life based on the integration of reality itself.

I have that longing. I didn't always have it, or rather, it began as a kind of (mustard?) seed that eventually got out of hand. 

It reminds me of a giant pine tree that began growing on the side of my house some thirty years ago. I didn't plant it, but just left it alone, and now it's too big to remove. Or at least too expensive. 

A second predisposition is a sense -- the sneaking suspicion -- that there exists

some kind of overall hidden harmony of the universe, which could be picked up and possibly spelled out if one listened carefully enough.

Like a musical sense which not everyone possesses, at least to the same degree:

I felt there was something great going on under the surface of things, some kind of hidden music, some harmony of all things that I could not quite hear but somehow knew was there and longed to lay hold of it in my consciousness. 

Same. Nietzsche too heard it, even while denying the composer:

The philosopher seeks to hear the echoes of the World Symphony and reproject it into concepts.

Clarke goes on to list six main themes of what what we shall call the Cosmic Symphony, beginning with The Unrestricted Dynamism of the Mind toward Being, by which he means 

the deep natural drive of the human mind to lay hold of intellectually and understand as far as possible the entire order of being, all there is to know about all there is. This drive knows no limits short of the total understanding of all being, both in depth and in breadth [i.e., vertically and horizontally].

This requires a great deal of continuing education for which there is no fixed syllabus, since it involves both anything and everything. 

Frankly I can't keep up, because it involves assignments in physics, biology, anthropology, psychology, history, economics, politics, theology, and more. 

Since I can never catch up, I'm always looking for shortcuts, some way to reduce the sprawl to something manageable via unitary and unifying, cross-disciplinary concepts, more on these as we proceed.

Obviously nobody could never master a single one of these disciplines, let alone all of them:

as soon as we reach the limits of the thing in question..., the mind naturally rebounds beyond to something more. And so on and on until we reach the totality of all being. The natural correlative of the human mind is being itself in all its fullness. 

O.

No, literally: we come to realize that the intellect as such is the inverse image of this "totality of all being." In the book, I symbolize this relation as [(¶) (⇆) (⇅) (O)]. That's what you call the visual representation of a unifying meta-concept.

At our end (¶) is the unrestricted desire to know, which corresponds to "the intrinsic intelligibility of being," or O. 

Thus there is openness at both ends: we are open to O, while O is open to being known. The noumena is not closed, a la Kant, but "open, in principle, to being known"; "Mind is for being, and reciprocally being is for mind." Otherwise to hell with it. We're just wasting our timelessness. 

To deny it [O] explicitly us to cut the nerve of any intellectual inquiry, since every inquiry presupposes, at least implicitly, that there is something there to be understood... 

The second great theme of our Cosmic Symphony is that Being itself is the act of Being, so -- in my words -- it is as if every existent is a fractal expression of this initial act of Being. 

This means that every real being, in virtue of its in-dwelling act of existence, has the power to express itself, relate itself to the rest of the universe, communicate its own existential energy to other beings. 

Not only is this a talking universe, it never shuts up, in that it is endlessly intelligible to intelligence, at every level. 

Looked at this way, knowledge is the bond or union between intellect and thing. The existence of any thing is itself "a kind of light" which "shines forth to other things." Finite beings "are not the source of their own existence," or in other words, "they are not 'the light itself." 

Rather, there is a kind of two-way Light that illuminates both things and the intellect that knows them. 

Two themes down, four more to go.

Critique of Pure Criticism

For a guy who thought it was impossible to know the thing itself, Kant sure went to a lot of trouble trying to make sure people understood his thing itself. 

After the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason he "felt it to be generally misunderstood," so he dumbed it down with a smaller and more accessible volume, the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science. At the same time, he revised the Critique, "still struggling to not to be misunderstood" (Magee). 

That right there is what you call ironic: if everything outside our minds conforms to our a priori ways of knowing it, then how can Kant make an exception for how we receive his work? Wouldn't it too just slide into our own preconceptual categories? He should rightly expect to be misunderstood, as proof of his theory.

I didn't come up with that critique of the Critique. Rather, I was flipping through a book by Norris Clarke called Explorations In Metaphysics, in which he explores this contradiction. 

Kant is very much the doorway into modernity and worse, so we need to go back and close that door and nail it shut if we want to get back on the right track. He is widely regarded as "the outstanding figure to have emerged in the subject since the ancient Greeks" (Magee), so we have no choice but to debunk him, good and hard.

I wonder what Schuon thought about Kant's bunkum? He calls it 

a gratuitous reaction against all that lies beyond the reach of reason; it voices, therefore, a priori an instinctive revolt against truths which are rationally ungraspable and which are considered annoying on account of this very inaccessibility. All the rest is nothing but dialectical scaffolding, ingenious or “brilliant” if one wishes, but contrary to truth.

Moreover, it is an

altogether “irrational” desire to limit intelligence; this results in a dehumanization of the intelligence and opens the door to all the inhuman aberrations of our century. In short, if to be man means the possibility of transcending oneself intellectually, Kantianism is the negation of all that is essentially and integrally human.

Anti-humanism masquerading as humanism; or a humanism that ushers in the infrahuman. And of course, in all of creation, only a human can fail to be what he is. Put another way, God and human are an endlessly fruitful cosmic complementarity. 

In Voegelin's terms, man qua man is always situated in the dynamic space between immanence and transcendence, whereas for Kant, the Transcendent Real is inaccessible to us. This is philosophical progress? Rather, it is the end of philosophy, as it blows up the bridge between intellect and reality.

Kant's "basic thesis" is "that the human mind projects its own forms onto reality rather than receiving them from reality" (Clarke). The essence of his so-called Copernican revolution in thought is that "it is our thinking that gives form to the world rather than the world that gives form to our thought."

You will have noticed that every ideology has a special exemption for the person who promulgates it. For example, consciousness is a function of class, except for Marx. Or, thinking is just a rationalization of the id, except for Freud. Or again, no one can know the thing itself, except for Kant's thing: he

quite obviously and without question takes for granted the existence of other persons like himself and just as real as himself..., and can receive and send, basically intact, intelligible messages from and to each other (Clarke).

Otherwise, why be so irritated at those of us who receive and reject the message? 

In fact, he became quite indignant when other philosophers did not get his message straight but misinterpreted it...

But of course we do understand communications from other people, because man as such is the intersubjective being, an intersubjectivity that arises in the transitional space between mother and infant. Of course, he knew nothing about developmental psychology. Still, perhaps it would have helped if he had had a child. 

But "nowhere in his works does he ever discuss how it is possible to know other human beings as real," and who are "able to receive from each other intelligible messages" -- "in a word, how information can be successfully communicated at all."

This reminds me of what Stanley Jaki said about the philosopher having to reach first base before pretending to get to second or third, much less make it all the way home. Kant nowhere explains how he got to first base, or in other words,

there is not a word in Kant as to how interpersonal dialogue is possible at all; it is simply taken for granted as the implicit framework of all his writing (Clarke).

Some critique! On the one hand he "insists that we cannot know any thing-in-itself as real outside of the field of our own subjective experience," but  

in the experience of an authentic successful interpersonal dialogue, it is impossible for him or anyone else to believe sincerely that the other is not equally as real as his own self and equally interacting with him... 

If "we inform the world, rather than the world informing us," why so irritated? Nevertheless, he "was indignant when others did not, he thought, get his message straight."

Now, we not only believe that interpersonal communication is possible, but that the Cosmos itself is a network of intelligible speech -- "a vast system of interactive communicating centers, with ourselves as privileged self-conscious centers in the midst of it all." Both Being as such and every particular being is "self-communicative." 

Don't look at what Kant says, rather, what he does, especially the very first thing he does, and which presupposes the rest: 

Whenever a philosopher offers the kind of message which is philosophy, it must contain, at the very minimum, a justification of the means used to convey the message to beings no less real than the author himself (Jaki).

Deny this, and the philosopher "will have to bring in through the back door the very objects the use of which his starting point failed to justify."  

This truth cannot be evaded, let alone refuted, because the refutation itself is an act of communication, an implicit falling back on objective means whereby alone other philosophers can be reached (ibid.).

An objective means of communication, like a book or something: "the first duty of a philosopher is to endorse the reality of the book (or the physical reality of a discourse) which is the means making his message available" (ibid.).

So the only flaw, as I see it, in Kant's reasoning, is that if it is true it is false, and besides, no one could know it.

A Heaping Helping of Nothing for Nobody

Different objects require different methods: if your only tool is a material hammer, then you can never hit the immaterial nail. 

As such, it is unscientific to pretend to contemplate what it would be unphilosophical not to contemplate. Contemplation is a method, but its object is not reducible to the object(s) of science, even while subsuming them.

Nevertheless, scientism is the Philosophy of the Hammer:

it ignores, not only the degrees of reality and the fact of our imprisonment in the sensory world, but also... the gushing forth of our world from an invisible and fulgurant Reality, and its reabsorption into the dark light of this same Reality (Schuon).

Fulgurant: amazingly impressive; suggestive of the flashing of lightning. This impressive flash of lightning tracks with what we hammered home a couple of posts ago vis-a-vis the Great Circle of Being:

In the emergence of creatures from their first source is revealed a kind of circular movement, in which all things return, as to their end, back to the very place from which they had their origin in the first place (Thomas).

Schuon adds that "All of the Real lies in the Invisible," meaning that the most crippling kind of blindness sees only visible surfaces and superficial appearances. Rationalism is scarcely better, as its eyes see only backward, to what is inside the head subsequently projected outward: 

by wanting to exhaust all the knowable by thought alone, one ends by no longer knowing how to think at all.

More generally,  

By a curious and inevitable backlash, the abuse of intelligence is always accompanied by some inconsequentiality and some blindness (Schuon).

This is not to say that reason has no place in the scheme of things, only to recognize its limits:

a rationalist can be right on the level of observations and experiences; man is not a closed system, although he can try to be (ibid.).

Why is man not a closed system? Indeed, how did we ever transcend selfless instinct and selfish genes to become vertically open to the Real? To say that this defies Darwin was said even by Darwin:

with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.

He's not wrong:

Supposing Darwinism is true, how could Darwin know it without being a great exception to Darwinism? 

Must be because the Cosmos itself is an open system, which in turn is a reflection or vestige of the ultimate open system, which is to say, the trinitarian Godhead in which the Son is always open to the Father and vice versa. But this is getting ahead of our post.

We've said before that modern progressivism is the institutionalization of man's fall, which encloses him in immanence, precisely.

On the whole, modern philosophy is the codification of an acquired infirmity: the intellectual atrophy of man marked by the “fall” entails a hypertrophy of practical intelligence, whence in the final analysis the explosion of the physical sciences and the appearance of pseudo-sciences such as psychology and sociology (Schuon).

Imagine going to all the time and trouble of acquiring a Ph.D. in one of these pseudo-sciences.

D'oh! 

Thankfully, I've been able to recover from that and move on to the discovery my own higher uselessness: the actual philosopher

will not fit naively into the functioning of the workaday routine; he... will not be "fit" for this world; he as well will look at things differently from those who primarily are dominated by the pursuit of practical purposes...

Philosophy by its nature is a free endeavor, and for this reason it serves no one and nothing (Pieper). 

One Cosmos, serving nothing and nobody for 18 years!

Survival of the fitless?

Yes, but man as such is a cosmic misfit, is he not? How is it that we can explain most everything but ourselves, nor can we fit into any manmade scheme without procrustean amputations?

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will not have explained anything. 

Just how do we explain the explainer in the absence of the openness alluded to above? Science discovers -- or presupposes rather -- a rational world of intelligible law. But

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.  

So, science illuminates the Mystery even to the nth degree without ever eliminating it. And even then,

Being only falsifiable, a scientific thesis is never certain but is merely current. 

On the other hand,

We believe in many things in which we do not believe we believe.

First and foremost of which must be O, in which we can only pretend not to believe. Is it even possible to engage in science without presupposing it? 

Bear in mind that when we say O, we are referring to, among other things, the world's infinite intelligibility-to-intelligence, or to the "actually infinite Plenitude of Being" in which "all other beings participate yet of which they are but imperfect images." 

This is the "unifying center and source" which "confers magnificent intelligibility on the natural dynamism of my mind and the whole intellectual life arising out of it" (Clarke). 

Turns out we "cannot deny the existence of God without asserting a whole raft of beliefs about the nature of the world" (Lennox). I suppose we'll see if this raft floats in the next post.

Philosophy² or The Philosophy of Philosophy

Happy Easter everybody, but I have other things on my mind, and perhaps in some strange way we can find a connection between them. I was going to take the day off, but I'm getting so accustomed to posting on a daily basis that failing to do so would feel like not brushing my teeth, and what kind of freedom is that? Freedom for bacteria.

Speaking of freedom and truth decay, on the one hand man has the duty to philosophize, the unexamined life being not worth the trouble of living it. On the other, what even gives man -- a randomly evolved animal -- the right to philosophize? 

To affirm that man has rights of any kind is already philosophy, since rights must either be grounded in principle or as arbitrary as the genetic shuffling that supposedly landed us here.   

As we've said before, rights cannot be autonomous and freestanding but must be a consequence of duties; or at the very least, genuine rights and duties must co-arise. We don't give rights to animals with no ability to exercise them responsibly. We don't say the lion has an unalienable right to eat us, even if it is his genetic duty to do so. 

If we say that animals have rights -- and they do -- what we really mean is that humans have a certain obligation to animals. Take man out of the equation and nature has no rights. There is no Ought in nature, only the ruthless Is, bloody in tooth and claw. Man qua man co-arises with the Ought, AKA ethics. No man, no Ought (or Ought Not).

Today, it turns out, is Transgender Day of Visibility, a new holy day. On this solemn occasion we ought -- it is our duty -- to

celebrate the lives and contributions of trans people, while also drawing attention to the poverty, discrimination, and violence the community faces.

I already celebrate discrimination, but I draw the line at violence. 

I see your point, Petey, in that to philosophize is to discriminate, precisely. This being the case, it seems that today is a celebration of the virtue of anti-philosophical indiscrimination, or rather -- since it emanates from the state -- a threat to be indiscriminate, or else. 

To discriminate is to notice differences and behave accordingly -- for example, to avoid eye contact and run in the opposite direction. This is not the type of discrimination in which the state wishes us to engage. Rather, it wants us to indiscriminately celebrate those sad individuals who are unable to discriminate the sex to which they belong. That's a tall order, but orders are orders.

Supposing transgendered folks have rights, what are their corresponding duties? One might be the duty not to indoctrinate innocent children into their own sexual confusion, but that is an example of what we are supposed to celebrate.

For our ancient contemporaries, philosophy implies "moral conformity to wisdom: only he is wise, sophos, who lives wisely" (Schuon). Obviously this involves discrimination between wisdom and its unwise alternatives. Is it wise to indoctrinate children into any ideology? Here the exercise of rudimentary wisdom makes you a deplorable bigot. 

Ironically, the discriminate "lover of wisdom" is revealed to be an indiscriminate hater. How did we get here? 

the most “advanced” of the modernists seek to demolish the very principles of reasoning, but this is simply fantasy..., for man is condemned to reason as soon as he uses language, unless he wishes to demonstrate nothing at all. In any case, one cannot demonstrate the impossibility of demonstrating anything, if words are still to have any meaning (Schuon).

Condemned to reason. No wonder the modernists wish to be liberated from it!

The term “misosopher” or "enemy of wisdom” applies to "those thinkers who undermine the very foundations of truth and intelligence." It begins with "'criticism' and ends with subjectivisms, relativisms, existentialisms..., psychologisms and biologisms of every kind" (ibid.), each an indiscriminate and arbitrary subversion of the very possibility of philosophy.

In the opinion of all profane thinkers, philosophy means to think “freely,” as far as possible without presuppositions, which precisely is impossible..., since true freedom coincides with truth...

To say that freedom coincides with truth means that we are not only at liberty to know reality, but again, obligated to do so. Or at least try. Teleologically man is the truth-seeking animal, so failure to do so is intrinsically wrong, irrespective of the particular content.

They say wisdom begins with the fear of God, but this fear must be the consequence of a prior love. Now, one of God's names is Truth, which is the ground and possibility of philo-sophy, the love of wisdom. 

Therefore, we can say that philosophy begins with the love of truth and a healthy fear of internalizing and propagating error, and of discriminating between the two: this is the philosophy of philosophy. Which is why

To philosophize and to "study philosophy" are two different things; one can possibly even hinder the other (Pieper).

That's for sure: many if not most philosophies undermine the very possibility of philosophy as such, including a "philosophy of transgenderism."

I understand the philosophical quest as an existential experience centered in the core of the human mind, a spontaneous, urgent, inescapable stirring of a person's innermost life (ibid.). 

What is the corresponding object of this search? It is the totality of things both vertical and horizontal, not excluding the nature of the strange being who philosophizes. What kind of being is this? 

Today's other celebration -- Easter -- furnishes a clue, which comes down to the eternal conformity of Son to Father. The Son is even the wisdom of the Father, or so we have heard from the wise. 

Maybe we should call it a National Day of Unsurpassable Irony. 

To be continued...

God Aims Straight with Mostly Crooked Arrows

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that the theologian W. Norris Clarke often takes positions that reflect what I think, but thought I was the only one.  

I'm just flipping through the remainder of The Philosophical Approach to God, and here is an example that goes to the problem of omnipotence which most Christians don't seem to find problematic, but really bugs me. Doesn't mean I'm right, only that I am bugged. 

Clarke suggests that God really and truly gives us "a share in his own power" -- the mysterious power of free will -- such that we "determine the use to which this power is put, even to use it against the express conditional will of God (= sin)."

This "free self-limitation of God's exercise of His own unlimited power" solves at least two of my big problems, 1) the otherwise inexplicable but self-evident existence of free will, and 2) of God's responsibility for literally everything, including evil. 

There are Christians who will say that anything that happens is a result of God's Plan, but -- no offense -- some plan. Why blame him for our own stupid dreams and schemes?  

The point is that God can still have a plan, but that he has given man the power to mess up the plan. The following extended passage is another example of my thoughts in Clarke's words: "All that an orthodox Christian"

must hold today with respect to predestination is that God determines the general set of goals He wishes to achieve, the goals at which He aims the universe, and knows that in general He will be able to achieve by his suasive power, but does not determine ahead of time in detail whether or how each particular creature will achieve its share or not in this overall goal.

I can live with that. Problem solved. I am no longer bugged. The Cosmos is not a pre-written classical composition, rather, jazz, baby:

Divine providence unfolds by constant instantaneous "improvisation" of the divine mind and will -- from His always contemporaneous eternal now -- precisely to fit the actual ongoing activities, especially the free ones, of the creaturely players in the world drama.

Couldn't have said it better. As suggested a few post back, the immanent Trinity is much like a jazz trio, and why not? If the Father knows exactly what the Son will play, what's the point? 

God does not "foresee," from His point of view, anything: He only sees what is going on, and acts accordingly. In a word, predestination does not and should not imply total predetermination. It leaves a large dose of indetermination, to be made determinate -- not ahead of time, independently, but only contemporaneous with the actual ongoing development of the world.

Otherwise it's not jazz, it's a cosmic muzak that could be produced by a machine. But God is no more a machine than is man, and for the same reason. 

Back to Gödel for a moment, he proved that, whatever our minds are, they cannot be machines, i.e., formal system reducible to mathematical knowledge. We cannot be "thinking machines":

the mind, being in fact "alive," can always go one better than any formal, ossified, dead system can. Thanks to Gödel's theorem, the mind always has the last word (in Goldstein).

A trinitarian metaphysic has certain extremely important entailments, otherwise -- truly truly -- why bother? If it's just a radical monism in disguise, then Christianity has added nothing fundamentally new to our understanding of how God rolls.

Another thing that bugs me -- as you know -- is how this squares with the radical immutability of God. The next chapter addresses this problem, which again, doesn't seem problematic to most Christians. 

In this chapter Clarke critiques Whitehead's process philosophy, which I agree goes too far in the other direction, equating God with pure change, so to speak: as the old gag goes, ask a process philosopher if God exists, and the answer is Yes, but not yet. 

That can't be right, so how to reconcile change and changelessness?

[O]ur metaphysics of God must certainly allow us to say that in some real and genuine way God is affected positively by what we do.

After all, if we can receive love and knowledge and God can't, this would seem to imply that we have a perfection that God lacks. Clarke suggests that

God's "receiving" from us, being delighted at our response to His love, is really His original delight in sharing with us in His eternal Now His own original power of loving and infinite goodness which has come back to him in return.

Is it going Too Far to say that "God is not only the universe's great Giver, but also thereby its great Appreciator, its great Receiver?" 

This was essentially Hartshorne's position -- that God is both ultimate cause and ultimate effect. Curiously, he doesn't ground this in the Trinity, but the first thing that occurs to me is that the Son is a kind of eternal and "ultimate effect" (and relation) of the Father. 

Is this wrong? Is this sort of thing frowned upon? Because I have another book by Clarke called The One and the Many, and it says that God

might be said -- in an at first perhaps shocking, but to me illuminating metaphor -- to be the Great Jazz Player, improvising creatively as history unfolds.... 

The complete script of our lives is not written anywhere ahead of time, before it happens, but only as it actually happens, by God and ourselves working it out together in our actual ongoing now's.

Problem solved. In another essay, he writes the following, which is pretty much my favorite meta-idea:

God as the ultimate One now appears as both the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, at once the Source and the Goal of the restless dynamism of all of nature, of all finite beings.  

The structure of this "total journey" is "in the form of a circle," the Great Circle of Being, whereby

In the emergence of creatures from their first source is revealed a kind of circular movement, in which all things return, as to their end, back to the very place from which they had their origin in the first place (Thomas, in Clarke).  

Having said that, the completion of the Great circle still "needs a mediator that can take it up into itself and somehow carry it back Home with itself," AKA the accomplice -- or straight arrow, as it were -- alluded to in yesterday's post. Indeed, one who will even go to hell and back in order to complete the circle.

The Escape from Mathematics into the Divine Economy

To repeat: either Ø or O. If the latter, then

somewhere hidden within this unlimited horizon of being there exists an actually infinite Plenitude of Being [O], in which all other beings participate yet of which they are but imperfect images (Clarke).

Or in the words of of the mystic Angelus Silesius, "The abyss in me calls out to the abyss in God." This means that the ironist Nietzsche is ironically² correct: "If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

Boo! 

Celestial Central on the line: "The existence of this Infinite Center of being"

now gives full intelligibility to the horizon of being itself, as its unifying center and source, and also confers magnificent intelligibility on the natural dynamism of my mind and the whole intellectual life arising out of it (Clarke).

Woo hoo! Who says there's no such thing as a free launch? 

This at once launches us in a new direction, no longer along merely horizontal lines at the same level of things, but a vertical ascent toward qualitatively ever-higher and richer realities.  

Very Gödelian, in that we "comprehend and leap beyond any finite or series of finites" (Clarke). Ans as Gödel said, "It was something to be expected that sooner or later my proof will be made useful for religion." Indeed, it turns out that

our minds, in knowing mathematics, are escaping the limitations of man-made systems, grasping the independent truths of abstract reality....

[O]ne can't do any mathematics at all, not even basic arithmetic, without referring implicitly to the infinite.... There remains something -- always -- that eludes capture in a formal system.... (Goldstein).

Well, good. We won't press the point, because either you get it or you don't. The alternative is an "existential absurdity"

ordered ineluctably toward a simply non-existent goal, magnetized, so to speak, by the abyss of nothingness, of what is not and can never be (Clarke).

But "an existing human dynamism without goal would be unintelligible" -- like having eyes in the absence of light or ears with nothing to hear. Let those with ears hear, and let those with an intellect be conformed to O,

which confers upon it [the intellect] total and magnificent meaningfulness and opens out before it a destiny filled with inexhaustible light (ibid.).

We use the symbol (¶) to stand for "human thought as oriented toward Infinite Being," or the "condition of possibility of all our thinking" (ibid.).

Nevertheless, "Man is the being who can affirm or deny his own rationality," and it says so in Genesis 3. Ultimately,   

Man is an embodied affirmation of the Infinite.

Or the denial thereof. Our choice. The bottom line is that 

Every knower knows God implicitly in anything it knows (Thomas).  

Supposing you know what knowledge is, i..e,. metaknow in the manner of Gödel: 

our minds, whatever they are, cannot be digital computers.... even in our most technical, rule-bound thinking -- that is, mathematics -- we are engaging in truth-discovering processes that can't be reduced to the mechanical procedures programmed into computers....

[O]ur minds, in knowing mathematics, are escaping the limitations of man-made systems, grasping the independent truths of abstract reality (Goldstein). 

Knowing extreme reality requires extreme seeking. Or at least seeking off the groomed trails in the Valley of Tenure. More like cross country seeking: 

A journey is indeed needed to find a God who appears to be absent at first in the order of explicit conceptual knowledge. But it is a journey within, into the depths of my own self, to discover the treasure always present but hidden at first from the clouded vision of my sense-bound eyes (Clarke). 

Again, there is O, and there is its inverse image, so to speak, in man -- like "an image of the divine infinity in silhouette," or

an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less.

As if 

God had broken the coin of His infinity in two, holding on to the positive side Himself and giving us the negative side, then launching us into the world of finites with the mission to search until we have matched our half-coin with His.

Mission accompliced.

That's a good point, Petey: is it possible to accomplish this divine mission without the accomplice of the Son? 

Maybe it's the Norco talking, but, extending the analogy, the Incarnation is God emptying his bank account and giving us the whole treasure through whom we can cash in our chimps to the First Bank of Eternity. Otherwise, the numbers can never add up.

Is There a Father in the House?

Bob, you can't talk that way and expect to have any readers.

What -- Father reality, Mother intellect, and all that? I can back that up, you know.

No doubt, but must you?

To repeat what was said at the end of yesterday's post, the mind and reality are female and male respectively, in a union that gives birth to the concept or "word." Continuing with the same book, The Universe as Journey, Clarke writes that

It is because of my belief in this "nuptial relationship" between the mind and reality that I feel such antipathy toward the epistemology of Immanuel Kant.

Not only was Kant a confirmed old bachelor, but he very much wants the restavus to live as infertile eggheads:

Rather than allowing reality to reveal itself to the human mind by actively informing it, the Kantian mind is more like an aggressive all-male activist, actively imposing its own prefabricated a priori forms on the disordered raw material of the sense manifold coming in.

A Kantsplainer, that's what he is, forcing reality to conform to his own preconceptions about it. Ideology as such -- e.g., feminism -- is always a very bad man. 

[I]t seems to me that the feminine model of the mind as mother enshrines a much deeper and more accurate insight into the fundamental relationship between the mind and reality than the Kantian masculine model.

Agreed, but I'll bet we could deduce this on purely metaphysical grounds, since Male and Female are (or symbolize) a primordial metacosmic complementarity that will inevitably pop & mom up in some form or fashion, nor can we have one without the other. We can't have two fathers, nor one allone, the Son being the "passive other" in relation to the Father. 

There are also levels and angles, such that, looked at another way, the world can be feminine, i.e., Maya or Prakriti, the Purusha being the detached observer of the eternal Dance of Appearances.

If we're in the mood to deepak the chopra, we could also say that wave is feminine and particle masculine, and here again the one is always implicit in, and irreducible to, the other. Even Jesus had a mother, and this mother is now the Church, but that's a different rabbit hole.  

Let's move on to another book by Norris Clarke, The Philosophical Approach to God. Clarke is one of the top five Theologians Who Speak to Me, such that reading him is like hearing myself think. 

Example.

As we reflect on the activities of our intellectual knowing power, we come to recognize it as an inexhaustible dynamism of inquiry, ever searching to lay hold more deeply and widely on the universe of reality.

This drive is infinite, bearing in mind that infinitude as such is the feminine pole of the Absolute-Infinite complementarity alluded to above. In other words, Absolute and Infinite are the first and last words of the Male-Female complementarity.

It is impossible to restrict [the Intellect's] horizon of inquiry to any limited area of reality, to any goal short of all that there is to know about all that there is.

Any finite resting place always reveals more beyond: "This process continues indefinitely in ever-expanding and ever deepening circles," and I say that the ontological goround of this epistemological circle is located in the Trinity, precisely, in which the Son eternally knows the Father, and is the Father's eternal knowledge-Word.

From our end of the metacosmic dance, "the mind must have a dynamic a priori orientation, an aptitude or affinity, for all that is, for the totality of being." Indeed, nothing could be as experience-near as the experience of this infinite horizon of Being. The question is the nature of this Being at the other end of our experience. 

Is it only we who pursue It? Or does It pursue us, so to speak? This goes to what I call the Divine Attractor, which always and everywhere exerts a kind of vertical-gravitational -- or teleological -- pull on us: It "naturally attracts or draws it to [I]tself," such that we always have

a dim, obscure, implicit, but nonetheless real awareness of this goal as drawing it [the intellect].... the mind has, from its first conscious movement from emptiness toward fulfillment, a kind of implicit, pre-conceptual, anticipatory grasp or foretaste of being as the encompassing horizon and goal of all its inquiries.

So, Kant is correct about our pre-conceptual awareness of reality. It's just that he needs a bigger pre-concept, this being nothing less than O. Here is another example of Bob's thoughts in Clarke's words:

The entire mental life of man consists in gradually filling in this at first conceptually empty and indeterminate but limitless horizon of being with increasingly determinate conceptual comprehension, as we step by step come to know one part of this totality after another.

My life in a notshall: every shall of truth revealing the next not over the infinite horizon of being. Any attempt to limit or enclose the latter is, well, a very anti-Gödelian thing to do. We really have only two choices: either 

the mind is doomed to endless rebounding from one finite to another, with no final satisfactory or unqualified fulfillment ever attainable, or even possible. Our restless, unquenchable search has no actually existing final goal.

A "living absurdity," like two empty mirrors reflecting one one another and enclosing us in a vain tautolontology -- or like two hysterical sisters with no man in the house. 

OR, 

somewhere hidden within this unlimited horizon of being there exists an actually infinite Plenitude of Being [O], in which all other beings participate yet of which they are but imperfect images.

This Being -- O -- is

the adequate, totally fulfilling goal of the dynamism of our minds, matching superabundantly the inexhaustible abyss of our own capacity and desire to know: one abyss, a negative ["female"] one, calling out to another, a positive ["male"] one.

Now we still have two mirrors, only like the eternal reflection of the Father in the Son. A few posts back we suggested that the very notion of adequation or conformity to the Real is anchored in the principle of the Trinity, which, you might say, is the eternal conformity of Son to Father. And we in turn are images of of the Father's image.  

Maybe a good place to pause and reflect.

Mother Intellect and Father Reality

Since the Cosmos has a beginning and an end, does this make it a journey? Certainly it's a story that can only be revealed in time. 

Act one: Existence!, an exquisitely fine-tuned big bang chock full of implicit information. Act two: Life!, the emergence of self-organizing and interiorly related dissipative structures. Act three, Man, or rational, self-aware, and intersubjective beings, AKA persons. Act four: ??????

It depends on your metaphysic. Jews came up with the Messiah principle, the appearance of the one who, in its most expansive sense, would explain what just happened over the previous 13.8 billion years. Other concepts that go to act four are redemption, salvation, metanoia, enlightenment, liberation, apocalypse, and, of course, Christ, or Christ consciousness.

Until the appearance of act four, man qua man lives in the tension between immanence and transcendence. For the Christian, act four has already happened. In other words, the eschatological fulfillment has occurred with the appearance of the Messiah. Nevertheless, time goes on.

That is to say, the play continues even though the end has been given to us. At this point perhaps I should consult Balthasar's five volume Theodrama for details, but I'd like to keep it simple. This is blogging. 

 Religious history ascends to a point from which it descends.

Except in so doing, the cosmos is transformed into something it wasn't before. It undergoes a substantial change, a change we cannot see or even anticipate until it occurs (just as the radical novelties of Life and Person could not be anticipated by what came before). 

These two (Life and Person) are inexplicable until the telos -- act four -- reveals what they were all about. Otherwise we are in the dark. We can know all about living things and human beings, but nothing at all about the mystery of Life Itself or the Miracle of Intersubjectivity.

Only because the cosmos is not a deterministic or closed system was it possible for the emergence of open systems, i.e., Life. Life always exists on the boundary between order and chaos, and man too exists on the boundary between immanence and transcendence or of time and eternity. 

Or, as Life is a horizontally open system, man is both horizontally and vertically open. Unless we ourselves default to closure, which is Voegelin's term

for the mode of existence in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental. 

For me, "religious practice" in the broadest sense is simply the formal engagement with, and maintenance of, this openness to the transcendent pole of existence. An equivalent word for the denial of this existential reality is eclipse, i.e., 

the voluntary, perverse closure of consciousness against reality; a state that may become habitual and unconscious but never entirely free from the pressure of reality and the anxiety produced by the attempt to evade it.

Just as there are psychological defense mechanisms, this amounts to a vertical or pneumatic defense mechanism to deny transcendence. Looked at this way, materialism is not so much an ideology as a diagnosis, or what Voegelin calls a deformation, 

the destruction of the order of the soul, which should be "formed" by the love of the transcendental perfection inherent in the fundamental tension of existence. 

Such a deformation leads to deculturation, and here we are. This is the Gnostic rebellion (against reality), which involves the claim to

absolute cognitive mastery of reality.... As a religious or quasi-religious movement, gnosticism may take transcendentalizing or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism).

Default to the transcendental pole takes the form of idealism, which the Aphorist calls an embarrassed theology.  

One way or the other, such individuals are living in a second reality, "a fictitious world imagined as true by a person using it to mask and thereby 'eclipse' genuine reality." 

Back to the open system of intersubjective personhood, it again dances along the boundary or horizon "between the known world and that which remains beyond it and consequently mysterious," or what we call O.

In a book called The Universe As Journey, Clarke characterizes it as "the journey of all being from the One and back to the One," similar to Dávila's description above. 

What drives this journey? For example, lower animals journey from life to death without ever thinking about it. What makes our journey any different?

I want to say the engagement with O, or in Clarke's words,

the deep natural drive of the human mind to lay hold of intellectually and understand as far as possible the entire order of being, all there is to know about all there is.

In the past I have compared our lives to a camera, which takes in a small amount of light with which to "develop" the photograph. Likewise, what is life but a darkroom in which we take the small amount of light given to us in order to develop our pneumagraph of the whole?

We can discover this unrestricted drive within ourselves if we reflect carefully on the life of our minds. 

Like any other drive, this one has an object, which is "the totality of all being. The natural correlative of the human mind is being itself in all its fullness." In other words,

Matching this natural drive of the mind toward being... is the complementary aptitude or openness of all being to be known, otherwise known as the intrinsic intelligibility of being, all being.

Turns out that neither the intellect nor being are closed, rather, open to one another in a kind of eternal con-versation or flowing together. Am I wrong?

Mind is for being, and reciprocally being is for mind.

For. 

Here again, this little word signifies relation. Indeed, Maritain goes so far as to call it a nuptial relation, "a natural marriage made in heaven, so to speak, where each partner completes the other," and isn't that sweet?

the human mind is analogously like the female, the mother; reality is like the father.... The mind, fecundated, informed, by reality, then actively responds, pours its own spiritual life into what it receives, gestates, then gives birth to the mental "word" or concept, which in turn flows over into the verbal word expressed to others. 

A lot in there to unpack, as they say. He and She, i.e., Reality and Intellect, and baby makes Three.

Metaposting

We're still between books, so it's up to Dávila to inspire us again.

The only claim that I have is not having written a linear book, but a concentric book.

Okay then, how about a nonlinear but concentric post about posting? A metapost?

If laws of history existed, their discovery would abrogate them.

Lookin' at you, Karl.

The tacit presuppositions of any science are more important than its teachings. 

Our friend Socrates says the unexamined life is not worth living. Our friend Nicolás does him one better, observing that

Observing life is too interesting for one to waste time in living it.

That's a meta-aphorism that reminds me of Gödel's meta-logic. 

Come to think of it, I am interested in meta-anything, from -physics to -economics to -politics to -history and -religion. 

Even back in grad school I was drawn to metapsychology, or to the principles that must underlie the very possibility of psychology.

Metaquestions about any field, say about science or mathematics or the law, are not normally questions that are contained in the field itself; they are not, respectively, scientific or mathematical or legal (Rebecca Goldstein). 

But Gödel's theorems "are spectacular exceptions to this general rule," for

They are at once mathematical and metamathematical. They have all the rigor of something that is a priori proved, and yet they establish a metaconclusion. It is as if someone has painted a picture that manages to answer the basic questions of aesthetics....

It is extraordinary that a mathematical result should have anything at all to say about the nature of mathematical truth in general (ibid.).

Nevertheless, here we are, in the metaworld illuminated by Gödel's metalight which shines on us all. 

If the universe is a system, there cannot be evidence to the contrary. 

Unless of course we know it is a system, in which case our knowledge transcends the system. 

Every system is a centaur: half man, half beast.

Famously, Christianity is not a system, much less an ideology, but a Person. Which should prevent it from devolving into a system. Nevertheless, there is the ubiquitous human temptation to enclose it in one. You know the type.

Visitors to a palace who admire only the latrines.

And 

The most noble things are debased when certain beings admire them

Which is why

Every Christian has been directly responsible for the hardening of some unbeliever's heart. 

It reminds me of the sudden emergence of the hectoring Christ is King crowd, for it is possible to say something true without saying it because it is true, rather, for stupid, spiteful, or uncharitable reasons. And if I have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. Suffice it to say, Nick Fuentes is not our kind of Christian.

A person is a metaperson. It is what defines personhood, precisely. To deny this is to asphyxiate the soul, which only breathes in the metaspace of transcendence.

What is unintelligible is the region where finally the soul breathes.

Bearing in mind that 

An adequate theology would be unintelligible to us.

 One can't help noticing that 

The most customary form of suicide in our time consists in firing a bullet into the soul.

True, but why do they want to murder the restavus? 

Just as the person is a metaperson, reason is transrational. Nevertheless, 

Today man limits himself to being a rational animal, that is to say, an inventor of practical rules at the service of his animal nature.

Thus,

When I hear the word “reason” being solemnly pronounced, I always get ready to listen to a sentence without meaning.

You Will Have Noticed that 

The modern tragedy is not the tragedy of reason vanquished, but of reason triumphant.

Everyone, it seems, has a piece of the puzzle, but my hobby is working on the metabook about the metacosmos.

In the specialist the most refined ideas about pieces of the universe cohabit with the most abject clichés about the universe itself.

A book about books? We used to have one that functioned as such. Allan Bloom observed that "In the United States,"

the Bible was the only common culture, one that united the simple and the sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and -- as the very model for a vision of the whole of things...

But with its decreasing influence, "the very idea of such a total book is disappearing," and "without the book even the idea of the whole is lost." We've tossed out our metabook about metareality, and are now stuck in the infra-reality of the left. More books than ever, but about nothing.

I, like any foolish Man of Today, once had no interest in the Bible, except to scorn it.

No one scorns the foolishness of yesterday as much as the fool of today does.

But 

When what an intelligent man likes seems uninteresting to us, we pay attention.

I kept bumping into such intelligent men whom it was impossible for me to scorn.

Ideas tyrannize the man who has few.

Those terrible simplifiers with one idea tyrannize the restavus.

The Perennial Ideology

Everything that can be reduced to a system ends up in the hands of fools. --Dávila

As often as not the title comes to me before the post. This one is apparently in reference to the perennial philosophy (and religion), the school of thought to which folks like Schuon, Guenon, and Cooomaraswamy belong. For Schuon,

Strictly speaking, there is but one sole philosophy, the Sophia Perennis; it is also -- envisaged in its integrality -- the only religion.

The latter is "the primordial, universal and underlying religion," which comes down to "discernment between the Real and the illusory, or between the Permanent and the impermanent," the practice of which involves an "attachment to the Permanent or to the Real."

Now, the Permanent and the Real are precisely what postmodernism denies, or in other words, it affirms sophistry, Gnosticism, and post-Christian neo-barbarism. And here we are. 

Schuon would say that an orthodox religion represents a more or less adequate expression of this a priori and universal one. 

I don't disagree -- after all, there is only one Cosmos and one human nature. But what is the the content of this perennial religion? For Schuon, Vedanta is the most adequate expression of it, whereas I am a Trinitarian man, and both can't be true, at least not without some tweaking. Recall Augustine's crack that

that which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist; from the beginning of the human race until the time when Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed began to be called Christianity.

One way or another, religion conveys an implicit metaphysic that is more or less adequate to the full range of reality. For example, we recently published a post on The Metaphysics of Jesus, which claimed that

one should not be a Christian for any other reason than its truth. Or at least Christianity should be truer than any alternative -- meaning that it should simultaneously explain more than any other metaphysic on offer, without unexplaining anything important.

For us, a Trinitarian metaphysic accounts for a lot of things that the non-Trinitarian must yada yada over, in particular, relation, which turns out to be irreducible to anything less. 

Conversely, a radical monist framework is static, immutable, impersonal, and unrelated. As we've suggested before, this is a Greek import that cannot be easily reconciled with a Trinitarian metaphysic.

For Schuon, the first principle is Beyond-Being. But Guess What? It is actually related to Being. He would say that Being is an emanation of Beyond-Being, but we say the Relation between them is the indispensable Thing.

If we're in an adventurous mood, we might even say that Father and Son is a way of speaking of Beyond-Being and Being, respectively -- or generative Source and engendered Word, Origination and Procession, Begetter and Begotten. This originating Source never stops speaking the Word it has always spoken, which speaks to their eternal relation. 

God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.

From, through, and begotten are all relations, which is why we say that ultimate reality is neither substance nor relation, but substance-in-relation. Am I wrong?

But the title of this post is The Perennial Ideology, so let's deal with that. The first thing that occurs to me is Genesis 3 All Over again, or, in the words of the Aphorist,

The radical error -- the deification of man -- does not have its origin in history. Fallen man is the permanent possibility of committing the error.

Yesterday we mentioned Chesterton's Orthodoxy, which puts some flesh on this bony assertion. Where Dávila is a man of few words, Chesterton is a man of many, although liberally sprinkled with aphoristic nuggets such as

Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.

As mentioned in the previous post,  

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

We also alluded to Gödel's Theorems, which prove that a logical system can be consistent or complete, but not both. Similarly, Chesterton writes of how   

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory.

However, 

his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large.

 Along these lines,

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.... 

the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way (emphasis mine).

Put another way, 

The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle.... He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea.... He is without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity.

This is "the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense," for example, vis a vis materialism:

As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. 

He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world.

Recall what the Aphorist says about one truth and countless errors, each of the latter a philosophical non-starter founded upon principles that reduce to absurdity -- for example, the denial of free will: 

It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will.

More generally,  

The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad; he begins to think at the wrong end.

This latter being the human -- or all too human -- end instead of the divine one; or Ø instead of O. Do this long enough, and everyone is living in darkness and tenure: 

one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.

 Another non-starter is evolutionism, or metaphysical Darwinism:

Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism.

This is self-evident: a strictly consistent Darwinism can never even account for the truth of Darwinism, for  

it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought.

This attack on the intellect comes down to a systematic violation of the three rules of thought: the principles of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle. It reminds me of the gag that the worse your logic, the more *interesting* the consequences to which it gives rise.

And we live in interesting times.  

the most characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of suicidal mania (Chesterton).