The Society of God

Let's review: because ultimate reality is personal substance-in-relation, it is also the "absolute relative." 

This latter appears to be a contradiction, because the Absolute is precisely what is not relative. How then can relativity be absolute? In response to which we say: how could it not be?  

In the Bible, the first clue of this absolute relativity is in Genesis 1, where God creates man "in Our image, according to Our likeness." Some say this is a misreading of the passage, but I say, if the clue fits, wear it. 

This is followed immediately by "male and female He created them," which implies (in my opinion) that the intrinsic relationality of God is at once mirrored in the irreducible relationality of male and female. 

Just as God is not a solitary monad, nor are human beings exteriorly related, atomistic units. Rather, like God, we are a deeper and dynamic unity of interpersonal intersubjectivity.

Alternatively, we could begin at our end, in that we know that a solitary and isolated human being could never attain to humanness. Supposing then that we are in the image of the ultimate principle, then the latter must share this primordial and irreducible characteristic.

I'm just flipping through a book by Charles Hartshorne called The Divine Relativity, and while I have problems with his theology as a whole, on this we agree, for example, that 

A personal God is one who has social relations, really has them, and thus is constituted by relationships and hence is relative -- in a sense not provided for by the traditional doctrine of a divine Substance wholly nonrelative toward the world, though allegedly containing loving relations between the "persons" of the Trinity.

As we've said on many occasions, I don't see why God would go to all the trouble of revealing the Trinity to us unless it truly revolutionizes our default metaphysical setting of God as absolute and unrelated Oneness, and instead reveals something totally unexpected and counter-intuitive about the nature of ultimate reality.

Just my hunch. 

What is a person if not a being qualified and conditioned by social relations, relations to other persons? And what is God if not the supreme case of personality? 

What if "sociality" becomes more intense as we ascend the vertical hierarchy? Then "God, if social, is eminently and supremely so," the last (and first) word in social relations. If this be the case, then God's immutability is transposed to a different and higher key, to the immutable mutability (so to speak) of eternal substance-in-relation. Which again seems paradoxical, but let's try anyway.

For Hartshorne, the Absolute is not something more than God, rather, something less. This is in contrast to, say, Schuon's view that the Absolute is prior, and that the diverse revelations symbolically express this Absoluteness a posteriori. But for Harshorne,

The Absolute is God with something left out of account. God is more than his absolute character.... I am arguing that the absolute is, rather, an abstract feature of the inclusive and supreme reality which is precisely the personal God.

Here again, Schuon would say that the personal God is but the "confessional face" of what is ultimately impersonal and "beyond-being." It is a way for us to relate to God, even though, in the ultimate sense, it is more for our convenience than going to God's ultimate nature, which is supra-personal.

Eh, I don't buy it. What if we turn things around and see the relative as inclusive of the absolute, rather than vice versa? Is this possible? Harthorne thinks so: "Maximizing relativity as well as absoluteness in God enables us to conceive him as supreme person." Conversely, 

If God be in all aspects absolute, then literally it is "all the same" to him, a matter of utter indifference, whether we do this or do that, whether we live or die, whether we joy or suffer. This is precisely not to be personal in any sense relevant to religion or ethics (emphasis mine).

Here again, "it is the divine Person that contains the Absolute, not vice versa," for "God merely as absolute is nonactual; God as personal is at least actual." 

A wholly absolute God is power divorced from responsiveness or sensitivity.... A wholly absolute God is totally beyond human tragedy, and his power operates uninfluenced by human freedom...

"A wholly absolute supreme being is a contradiction in terms," since it would imply that "relativity is as truly good as nonrelativity," but we say relativity and responsiveness are perfections, and eminently so in God. Likewise, a closed and unrelated human being is as inconceivable as a closed and unrelated God, and for the same reason. 

Again, just my opinion. But you will notice a comment by Robert Barron in the sidebar:

No, the perfect, unchanging God of whom Thomas speaks must be a gyroscope of energy and activity and at the same time a stable rock.

A fine example of orthoparadox.

The World is Rated X

Let's think this through: man is an animal, but then again, the meta-animal, or animal + (x). Alternatively, we could say that the animal is human - (x). Now, what is (x)? 

In our age of stupidity there is no (x). Rather, Darwinian orthodoxy maintains that there is an absolute continuity between animal and man, but even Darwin had his doubts:

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.

Good news/bad news for Chuck: the good news is that the convictions of man's mind are of indeed of value and trustworthy (at least in potential). The bad news is that this trustworthiness invalidates his theory, which can in no way account for the new properties -- (x) -- intrinsic to human nature. 

It's still a good theory as far as it goes, but it doesn't go to (x), which requires an altogether different theory or principle to account for it. This principle is expressed by the Aphorist with his usual astringency:

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book.

This being the case, Darwin is a magician, albeit one who has horrid doubts about the existence of magic. 

But he's really like an other stage magician who knows his magic isn't real, rather, a sleight of hand enabled by distracting the audience. In order for Darwinian magic to succeed, the magician must essentially trick the audience from looking at (x). 

Conversely, to debunk the trick, we merely have to show that (x) was there all along: that the card was up his sleeve or the rabbit already in the hat.  

So, what is (x)? Whatever else it is, it includes the innate ability to know essences: by knowing essences man gains access to both universals and the universe. After all, no one has or will ever perceive the universe; rather, it is the ultimate -- or penultimate -- abstraction, i.e., the interiorly ordered totality of the Cosmos.  

An animal's perception is incapable of reaching the universal essence of things, and precisely for this reason is the animal bound and limited to a small and specific sector of reality (Pieper). 

But our mysterious (not magical!)

ability to recognize the intrinsic nature of things provides a perspective from which the all-including totality of the world as a whole becomes accessible and discernible (Pieper). 

In the words of Thomas, "Because the spiritual soul can grasp universal essences, it possesses a potential unto infinity." 

This being the case, then (x) must be an immaterial soul ordered to immaterial essences, which is to say, the truth of being, which in turn extends to infinity. And we're back to Schuon's unavoidable conclusion:

One of the keys to understanding our true nature and our ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world are never proportionate to the actual range of our intelligence. Our intelligence is made for the Absolute, or else it is nothing

In the same book (Echoes of Perennial Wisdom) he utters many similar pithy wisecracks, for example, 

The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute.

Man is made for what he is able to conceive; the very ideas of absoluteness and transcendence prove both his spiritual nature and the supra-terrestrial character of his destiny. 

So, another aspect of (x) is consciousness of the transcendent Absolute. Which I say is the very ground of the ability to think. This consciousness is either explicit or implicit (i.e., subconscious), but truly truly, in its absence we can't say a damn thing about reality, nor can we know of the Cosmos. 

We just have to accept the reality of (x), irrespective of how pleasant the implications, for example, that "All things are true" and that "they are known and knowable to the human mind."

this is a statement not only about the essential structure of all things but about their "intrinsic openness..., which causes all things to be and to be translucent, making them real and therefore knowable (Pieper).

Surprisingly, the Cosmos is open at both ends -- in the things that constitute reality, and the intellect's ability to know them. This is a supremely strange situation, but there it is: "the human mind, by its very nature, is ordered toward the totality of all that exists."

If not, to hell with it, for we are indeed enclosed in animality and worse, i.e., in the tenebrous bowels of tenure. To be "subhuman" is not to be a mere animal, rather, something far worse: it is to sink beneath humanness into a kind of unnatural and totally avoidable darkness. Nevertheless, here we are.

I want to say that (x) is also a kind of light that gives access to the light that lights up the Cosmos from the inside-out. In other words, it radiates from the interior of things to our interior. Pieper agrees:

the mind's inborn ability to "reach the whole" is actuated already in each single instance of cognition; for the light that makes any individual object intelligible is the same light that permeates the universe. 

 CONCLUSION:

Never will man be able to comprehend fully -- that is, know totally and perfectly -- the inner nature of things.

This is to say, we can know a great deal about anything and everything, but we can never know everything about a single thing, because we are not angels, much less God: in the words of Thomas,

Our cognitive power is so imperfect that not even the nature of one single gnat was ever entirely understood by any philosopher [or scientist].

But this does not imply that our knowledge is nothing. Rather, it's a pretty big deal, for "any cognitive effort will indeed always be a positive advance" -- ironically, a progressive evolution -- "but only like a step on a longer journey."

Man, therefore, is by nature someone who always, and ever anew, can reach for higher perfection, someone endowed with limitless potentials.... Yet those potentials, the moment they become real, already point to to new horizons that point beyond (Pieper).   

With apologies to Marvin Gaye:

Nor are we "lonely lovers," philosophically speaking -- because otherness and relationality are built in -- but that's a different song.

Open for Isness

Man is the great exception to animal nature, being that he is not limited to the senses and enclosed in instinct. Now, how to account for this aberration, and does it make him superior to the beasts, or in a way more pathetic?

As we have been saying in recent posts, man is -- somehow -- open to the world, to the whole of being, but is this openness a purely negative thing, like freedom in the absence of a telos or intelligence in the absence of truth? 

If so, then the existentialists are correct -- just as freedom equates to nothingness, so too does our "openness" reduce to a cosmic fluke with no sufficient reason. 

Pieper touches on this possibility in Living the Truth, citing a certain philosopher who

misinterprets man's openness to the world as an expression, even a consequence, of man's organic imperfection and a "lack of specific natural means" and so as a "basically negative reality."

This is something I touched on in my own way in the Book. Supposing there is a natural explanation for our freedom and openness, why should it be that the resultant "space" isn't empty, but rather, is full of objective values -- of truth, beauty, goodness, language, creativity, ideals, etc.?

Why do we discover things in this space, and not simply imagine them? 

Well, I suppose that's a question for those sub-philosophers who insist that the open intellect is not ordered to objective realities, but rather, enclosed in its own structures and categories. Such thinking essentially deploys transcendence in order to deny transcendence. 

Rather than being a mistake or a fluke, Thomas maintains that "The spiritual soul is the most perfect soul of all," and that, "being able to know the essences of things, [it] possesses a potency unto the infinite." 

Other animals are constrained by "specific instinctive attitudes or with specific endowments for defense or protection," which may make man look comparatively bereft. But in place of the specific, we specialize in  generality, so to speak, for

man is naturally endowed with reason and furnished with hands, which together are the ultimate tools of all tools, allowing man to fashion instruments of any kind and for an infinity of purposes.

Again, the point is that this human space isn't empty but filled with interesting stuff -- essences, universals, transcendentals, logic, mathematics, beauty, science, history, necessary metaphysical truths, et al. What a place, and what a privilege!

Nor does it ever run short of interesting stuff, which is another feature of this space. Rather than just wanting to know what we need in order to survive and reproduce, we want to know it all. We have an unlimited desire to know everything there is to know about everything there is, or in other words, are ordered to the infinite object, O.

We all know there is a "biosphere," and underneath this a subatomic field of energy vibrations. But what is above these two? Teilhard de Chardin called it the "noosphere," which is again not "invented" by man but discovered. Or better yet, a kind of "co-creation" that takes place between immanence and transcendence, a la Voegelin or Polanyi.

Other animals live in an "environment" to which they are adapted. What is man's environment? Reduced to an animal environment the human being would scarcely be human, because there would be no way to actualize his infinite potential. For

It is not merely the "totality of all things" but equally the "nature of things" that constitutes the realm of the mind. We are able to reach -- which does not mean comprehend -- the essence of things, and because of this we find ourselves empowered to attain the totality of things as well (Pieper).

Otherwise, truly truly, to hell with it.

One of the keys to understanding our true nature and our ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world are never proportionate to the actual range of our intelligence. Our intelligence is made for the Absolute, or else it is nothing (Schuon).

So, pick one: God or radical absurdity.

The Tension Goes All the Way Up

Objects don't relate to subjects in the same way as do subjects to objects, but this is not to say that objects don't relate to subjects at all, otherwise they would be unintelligible. Between knower and known there is a relationship -- of truth -- and

the spirit-based self, the highest form of being..., must have the most comprehensive domain of relatedness: the universe of all existing things (Pieper).

We are related to everything, which is to say to being itself. Existing things are related to us in terms of their intelligibility, whether potential or actual: "the human mind is ordered toward the totality of all that exists" (Pieper), and according to Thomas,

Spirit-endowed beings possess a higher affinity to the whole of reality than other beings. Every spiritual substance namely, in a certain sense, is all in all, insofar as it is able, through its cognitive power, to comprehend all there is.

Well, good. At the very least this gives us something to do: to comprehend all there is to know about all there is. It is in the soul's nature to be 

directed toward universal knowledge. In this manner is it possible for the perfection of the entire world to be present in one single being.

Nobody's perfect, but  

the highest perfection attainable for the soul would be reached when the soul comprehends the entire order of the universe and its principles...

This is "the ultimate end of man." Bob is a man. Therefore, this is the ultimate end of Bob. 

D'oh! There's a catch: this "will be realized in the beatific vision," which is apparently unavailable this side of the grave.  

Then again, "beings endowed with cognitive ability somehow resemble God himself," which I suppose is why it's so easy to pretend to godhood. It seems that we are forever situated in Voegelin's tension between immanence and transcendence, but this is by no means a static situation, rather, it constitutes nothing less then the dynamism -- the very life -- of the mind.

And now that I'm thinking about it, any dissipative (i.e., process) structure requires a polarized tension in order to go on being. 

An ancient thought (from grad school) pops into my noggin, about how our brains contain billions of electrochemical neurons that -- help me out here Professor Wiki -- "have intrinsic electroresponsive properties like intrinsic transmembrane voltage oscillator patterns," meaning that they ceaselessly charge and discharge electrical energy.

This is one of those things that I simultaneously understand and don't understand at all, like how computers work. I mean, I understand the words, but WTF? The point is that life itself is tension and release, while death is release from the tension. And the TENSION isn't just present horizontally but vertically, as characterized by Voegelin:

A condition of tending toward a goal. Voegelin uses the term especially to refer to what he calls the "tension of existence," the fundamental experience of longing for transcendental fulfillment, the Beyond, the summum bonum (Webb).

This latter for Thomas being the beatific vision. But whatever we call this ultimate telos, it accounts for the TENSION which proceeds all the way up. Unless you just give up and disembark at some provincial bus stop along the way. 

What is the ground of this tension? Must be in the Trinity, i.e., in the tensional energy (so to speak) between the Persons. They say this energy is none other than the LOVE which "powers" it (so to speak), but this is above my praygrade. Still, it makes sense to me, or at least I can't think of anything that makes more sense of our exceedingly strange cosmic situation.

We can express it via our annoying pneumaticons, what with the vertical tension between O and (¶), the space between them being where intellection (n) occurs.

The animal is adapted to a specific environment and so also limited by it; man's environment, in contrast, is the totality of all that exists, so that man, by his nature, is... oriented to "the world" (Pieper).

Or, in the words of Thomas, "The spiritual soul, being able to know the essences of things, possesses a potency unto the infinite." And this potency is none other than the TENSION between finitude and Infinitude, the many and the One, time and Eternity, the relative and the Absolute, etc.

I Can Relate, or There's a Little Interiority in Everything

So, to lift off from where we left off: 

All reality is actually or potentially mind-related, inasmuch as its intrinsic essence is actually or potentially incorporated into the knowing mind (Pieper).

If reality is mind-related, then the mind is reality-related, in a kind of inspiraling mutual indwelling. There's a little bit of mind in everything, or as Thomas says, "The essence even of a lifeless thing has life in God's mind."  

All that exists, because it exists, is ordered to a knowing mind.... This means: not only is the eye sun-related, the sun as well is eye-related; all that has being is mind-related in its most intrinsic core. Mind and being are interconnected (Pieper).

Weird, but what's the alternative? An intellect that doesn't know being, or that "knows" only non-being? Doesn't work for me. "Rather, it is part of a thing's essence to be intelligible; that is, to be ordered... toward a knowing mind"-- as in how speech is ordered to the ear, or message to recipient.  

Things are not mute. They merely select their listeners.  

Moreover,

Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

Reminds me of what Schuon calls the "metaphysical transparency" of being, but perhaps translucency might be closer to the mark, for as Thomas says, "The reality of a thing, in a way, is itself its light."

Does this mean reality is a giant vertical murmurandom? "Reality in itself is oriented toward man's perceiving mind," and "moreover, the human mind in turn is ordered toward the realm of existing things." 

This "intrinsic correlation between mind and reality always precedes any actual cognition." It is an explicit or implicit axiom of the very possibility of thought, am I wrong?!  

If our mind were not by its nature already in touch with reality, it would never be able to reach reality at all.

As proven by all post-Kantian philosophy, for anyone can sever the mind from reality, but no one can reunite them if they aren't united to begin with. I can think I am all day long, but the solipsistic subject can never cross the bridge back to It Is unless the bridge is already there in the thinking. 

Or in other words, thinking is the very link between I Am and It Is, for "truth is the conformity of an object to its idea," and "conformity of being and knowledge is called 'true.'" 

But I want to get back to this whole question of relatedness, of a relational cosmos, because that's the key. It's a tricksy concept, because it's not something you can ever know from the outside, rather, only from the inside. Therefore, there is an intimate... relationship between interiority and relationality. 

the concept of transcendental truth affirms the relatedness of every being to the inner core of another being, the knowing mind... 

And 

It is essential for any genuine relationship to originate from an inside and extend toward an outside. The pebble in a brook, in itself, does not "relate" to its surroundings... 

Rather, we relate to it because we have an interior that can know the attenuated interiority of the pebble, which is its knowability -- its intelligibility -- precisely. Thus,  

The higher the form of intrinsic existence, the more developed becomes the relatedness with reality, also the more profound and comprehensive becomes the sphere of this relatedness: namely, the world.

So, I can relate to every it:

The world of the spirit-endowed self, a person's "I," spans the totality of all that is; the world of the spirit is the universe of being.

I'll say it only once: the cosmos has an interiority complex, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it but endlessly relate to it, interior to interior, intelligence to intelligibility.

The Truth of Being and the Dream of Existence

That's what it comes down to: a binary choice, except in choosing the latter, it immediately fragments into 8.1 billion opinionated dreamers competing for top dogma. 

I'm just flipping through a book by Josef Pieper called Living the Truth, which is -- in my opinion -- about nothing less than waking from the modern dream and the postmodern nightmare:

With the expression, "All that exists is true," Western philosophy for almost two millennia intended to make a statement not only about reality as such but no less about the nature of man.

The statement is this: that being is intelligible to the intellect, and that truth is the conformity of the latter to the former. This is the "principle of the truth of all things." 

It was once uncontroversial to affirm that "all that is real, is true." It meant that we started with the reality of being rather than with the content of the mind.

But Enlightenment thinkers "despised and eliminated the principle of ontological truth, together with metaphysical ontology as such," making them "among the first to reject the principle of the truth of all things" and to "even deny that it expresses anything meaningful at all."

Which means that there is no truth in things, and that supposing there were, we could never know it. Rather, we are sealed off from the thing itself, and therefore enclosed in our opinions and dreams about what's going on with them, i.e., with reality.

Pieper quotes Spinoza to the effect that "Altogether in the wrong are those who consider truth to be a property of being," but here again, to say that truth is not a property of being is to say that there is no truth. 

Likewise, "Kant explicitly denies truth to be a property of reality as such." He sought to "discredit once and for all the basic concepts of traditional ontology," and boy did he succeed. 

Except to say that there's no failure like success, in that it has successfully redounded to an "abyss separating the intellectual giants of the High Middle Ages from the pedantic philosophical systematists of the Enlightenment," and here we are.

With the jettisoning of ontology came the rejection of the very principles of thought, among which are non-contradiction, sufficient reason, and of rationality itself: "The opposite of transcendental truth would be a dream mistaken for reality. A string of dreams would be a fairy tale world." 

And what is the contemporary multiversity but a fairy tale world of academic division, fragmentation, and disunity, detached in principle from the one thing that could integrate them, AKA being? Pieper quotes the philosopher Christian Wolff, who speaks for me:

The truth that is called "transcendental" and is conceived as inherent in reality as such... is the ordered structure governing existing things.... a dream, in contrast, means inconsistency in the transformation of things. The truth implies order, the dream disorder.

Reject the truth of being, and the world dissolves "into a fairy tale, the equivalent of a dream." Now, I have nothing against dreams, I just don't want to be ruled by them, which is to say, enclosed in the dream of dreamers with more power than I have, i.e., people with the power to impose their kooky dreams on the restavus. 

We've mentioned before that one of the primordial divisions between contemporary leftism and conservative liberalism is this question of contact with reality -- the transcendental reality of Permanent Things. 

Russell Kirk, for example, writes that "conservatives generally believe that there exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society." But this presupposes a nonlocal order -- the order of being -- in which the good, true, and beautiful converge.

It's never too late to admit that we took the wrong fork in the road, and to make a u-turn back to the reality from which we diverged, as articulated by Thomas:

All existing things, namely, all real objects outside the soul, possess something intrinsic that allows us to call them true.

I personally made the u-turn a couple of decades ago, and I highly commend it, because it gives us the best of both worlds:

In created things there is truth on two levels: in the things themselves, and in the perceiving mind. 

In other words, we get to save reality, with the salvation of our minds tossed in for free: again, an infinitely intelligible world of being, intelligible to an equally infinite intellect, and how convenient is that!  

"'All things are true' means that they are oriented toward a knowing self." Thus "every being, as being, stands in relation to a knowing mind." This is fundamentally a relational cosmos, such that

"To be," therefore, means the same as "to be oriented toward a knowing mind."

"No existing being is without such relational orientation," and "this relationship is actualized in the process of mental perception or intellection." Otherwise you're just dreaming a dream detached from being, and you can't argue with a dreamer, rather, you can only try to wake them up. 

Anti-Academia and its Bitter Mutants

I'm old enough to remember when college was useless but fun instead of noxious and soul-deadening. Pieper is old enough to remember when -- try not to laugh -- academia could be defined as a "zone of truth"

deliberately set aside in the midst of society, a hedged-in space to house the autonomous engagement with reality, in which people can inquire into, discuss, and assert the truth of things without let or hindrance...

This ought to be 

a domain expressly shielded from any conceivable attempts to use it as a means to achieve certain ends, and in which all concerns irrelevant to its true purpose, whether collective or personal, whether of political, economic or ideological import, must keep silent.

How's that working out? And what happened? How is it that we've landed in a total inversion of Pieper's normative description, such that our elite universities stubbornly inhabit and inculcate a (in my words) zone of illusion, 

a hedged-in space to nurture the disengagement from reality, or engagement with unreality, in which people can affirm their truth, and celebrate their intersectional victimhood without let or hindrance; a domain expressly deployed to achieve certain collective, personal, political, economic, and ideological ends, in fact, any end short of the disinterested pursuit of truth.

And here we are, with normal people asking: Remind me, what is a university education good for? Detached from its proper telos -- which is to say, truth -- it cannot be good for anything but mischief. 

man's chief nourishment is truth.... anyone who wishes to live a truly human life must feed on truth. Society too lives on the public availability, the public manifestation of truth (Pieper). 

So, if the mind is not metabolizing truth it must metabolize something less, and in so doing become something other than it is. 

It's why these students don't just have "different beliefs," but rather -- as one look at them reveals -- are different, full stop, for they are like a subspecies that has devolved and veered away from proper humanness. They are missing something, with something else in its place. 

This being the case, we have a real problem, since it only takes a couple generations of these warped deviants and bitter mutants to displace the restavus. How do we de-Stalinize a whole generation that we've systematically Stalinized? 

I can't decide whether these people require cult deprogramming or exorcism, but why take chances?

The Divorce of Mind from Being

Change my mind:

The disease afflicting the modern world is in the first place a disease of the mind; it began in the mind, it has now attacked the roots of the mind (Jacques Maritain).

So, it is an autoimmune disorder, i.e., the mind attacking its own substance, or, in a word, college.

There are many ways to conceptualize the disease, and numerous historical epochs where we could situate its outbreak, but it really comes down to Genesis 3 All Over Again, i.e. to the rupture of human intelligence from the source of intelligence. The modern divorce of mind from being -- filed by Descartes and granted by Kant -- is just the most influential version.

Thus the mind is no longer docile -- AKA open -- to reality:

Indocile to the object, to God, to being, the mind becomes also and to the same extent indocile to all human authority, a rebel against all tradition and spiritual continuity.

Vertical closure is followed by horizontal closure, and the result is idiocy in its original meaning, a "private person" cut off from rational discourse. The inevitable consequence on the vertical plane is

that by losing its docility to human teaching and its docility also to the object, the mind in our time has proceeded in the direction of an absolutely brutal hardening and a progressive weakening of reason...

On the horizontal plane, the consequence is  

that the most profound and at the same time most human bonds of social life must have simultaneously become by an unavoidable consequence gradually loosened and undone. 

I call that a pretty good guess for 1931. 

I like what he says about the simultaneous hardening and weakening of reason, which again has to do with a self-enclosed rationality detached from its proper object. It is at once a hardened fortress against transcendent realities, but then dissolves "every object of speculation in a great fluid jelly called Becoming or Evolution." Modern thought is indeed pillar of gelatin.  

Now, "If the mind is not saved, nothing will be saved," and "nothing below the level of the mind can remedy this disease." 

Can reason save us? No, not if it is not conscious of its intrinsic limits: it cannot "look for its standard in itself and in the face of the mysteries below," rather, must be ordered to the free-flowing transcendent mystery above.

Play us out, Nicolás:

Philosophy has as its object above all to prevent the follies of the day from blocking the windows and walling up the doors.

The honest philosophy does not pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery.

When the authentic mystery is eclipsed, humanity becomes drunk on imbecilic mysteries. 

Humility is the epistemological condition of specific perceptions. 

The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.  

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book.

Workin' for the Cosmos

Just flipping through a book by Maritain on St. Thomas called The Angelic Doctor, and found many timelessly timely passages, for example,

The unity of a culture is determined in the first place and above all by a certain common philosophical structure, a certain metaphysical and moral attitude, a certain scale of values, in a word, a certain common conception of the universe, of man and human life, of which social, linguistic and juridical structures are, so to speak, the embodiment. 

Ultimately, the disunity we are seeing on our streets and college campuses is a result of inhabiting different and irreconcilable universes. Nor is there a "two universe solution," since there is by definition only one. Problem is,

The drama of Western culture consists in the fact that its stock of common metaphysics has been reduced to an utterly inadequate minimum...

That was written in 1931. We have since sunk beneath the minimum. And yet, there is always further to sink. But for Maritain, our task is to think "of the world and the present moment in light of eternal truths," which was one of the guiding purposes of the blog back in 2005 -- to interpret the "news" in light of the "eternals," or the transient under the aspect of the permanent. 

The good news is,

The greater grow the powers of illusion, the more lovers of truth will feel drawn towards the vast light of that wisdom... 

Thomism

does not want to destroy but to purify modern speculation and to integrate all the truth that has been discovered since the time of St. Thomas. It is an essentially synthetic and assimilative philosophy...

Same here, because a man needs a hobby. As for Thomas, he pretty much had one hobby and "a single ambition: to discern and to demonstrate primary Truth." "He had only one thing to do and he did it well."  

Maritain asks, "What are the conditions on which this lost unity can be recovered, not as it once was, for time is irreversible, but reconstituted once more in new forms?" Problem is, we live in an age of crude materialism, and matter is the very principle of separation. Nor can man

find his unity in himself; he finds it outside himself, above himself. It was his determination to be self-sufficient which ruined him. He will find himself again only by becoming attached to his first principle and to the order transcending it. Pure subjectivity, like pure materiality, disperses.

Which checks out. Oddly, contemporary culture is simultaneously materialist and subjectivist, which is a true triumph of stupidity, since matter is incapable of subjectivity and subjectivity is immaterial. Oh well.

There is no greater delusion than to seek in immanentism the reconciliation of man with himself.  

It's a vertical zombie culture, that's what it is. What is a vertical zombie? I don't know, but this is close enough: 

that pitiful product which goes by the name of modern man, a being cut off from all his ontological roots and transcendental objects, who, because he sought to find his centre in himself, has become... merely a wolf howling in despair towards eternity.... 

Their cosmically pathological ideas  

are dead: though they may still encumber us for a long time, like cadaverous products, they are finished.  

In a flatland cosmos, in which transcendence has been immanentized, the zombie wolves are reduced to howling at race, class, gender, and Jews.

Western civilization "can now save itself only by working for the whole universe." Which is an interesting way of putting it: "Whom do you work for, Bob?" "Nobody in particular, just the cosmos." It says as much at the top of the blog:

THE COSMOS IS OUR SCHOOL, THE INTELLECT OUR FACULTY, TRUTH THE FIRST PRINCIPAL

In case it's not obvious, "principal" has a double meaning, since the first principle is the meta-cosmic Person. 

Secondhand Inspiration

While waiting around for inspiration and coherence to return, I thought I might yoink some fresh aphorisms I don't recall having previously purloined.

Lately I've been experiencing a lot of regret:

When we read a writer who has no talent, simply because he deals with an interesting subject, we always regret it.

Three aphorisms that are implicitly Gödelian: 

Rationalism is reason that forgets its assumptions.

Reason is an act of the spirit that analyzes a previous spiritual act. 

Reason does not beget, but educates what was begotten.

The color of victimhood:

The Marxist historian throws a uniform-colored coat of varnish on the polychrome tints of history.

Why dialogue is impossible:

Between the cultured man and the progressive any dialogue is soon extinguished. The first is silent in the face of such vulgarity, the second in the face of such “obscurantism.”

 Indifference? How about hostility:

Violence is not enough to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference to the particular values that founded it.

Identity politics:

The individual ego believes itself absolved when it is compressed into a collective ego. 

The individual declares himself a member of some collective entity, with the aim of demanding in its name what he is ashamed to claim in his own name.

Used to be

Civilization is all that the university cannot teach.

Nowadays barbarism is all it can teach. 

The Aphorist says that

Mathematics is the poetry of the identity principle.

Which makes me think that revelation is poetry of metaphysics.

What happens when left brain ideology suppresses right brain contact with reality?

He who adopts a system stops perceiving the truths that are within his reach.

Biden and Pelosi:

For the leftist Catholic, Catholicism is the great sin of the Catholic.

I can't help it if I'm built this way:

Even our favorite ideas soon bore us if we do not hear them expressed with irony, with grace and with beauty.

And with brevity.

True:

In clumsy hands theology becomes the art of making mystery ridiculous.

 As ridiculous as atheism. 

WHO Cut the Light

Yesterday's post asked Who cut the light?! Today we shall identify WHO took the light out of the Enlightenment, and it wasn't just Enlightenment thinkers. 

Rather, the roots extend back to certain medieval philosophical trends, especially nominalism. The whole catastrophe is described in the book Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times, which we will be plagiarizing with this morning.

In many ways it mirrors the thesis of Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences -- nominalism being one of the most consequential ideas ever, since it drives a wedge between reality and our ideas of reality, the latter reduced to mere names, such that reality is no longer intelligible. You can trace a straight line from this to postmodern nihilism.

In a certain sense, Platonism is simply what philosophy is, i.e., the effort to apprehend the enduring reality beneath, behind, or above the flux of contingency and change. As Schuon puts it, "all the speculations of Plato or Socrates converge upon a vision which transcends the perception of appearances and which opens on to the Essence of things." 

For Plato, "philosophy is the knowledge of the Immutable and of the Ideas" (ibid.), and what's the Big Idea? The Good, which diffuses its light into the world of appearances. If not, then to hell with it, because philosophy is doomed from the start. Truly truly, it reduces to anti-philosophy -- to misosophy or philodoxy (love of opinion) -- masquerading as philosophy:

This stance does not think that Meaning and Reason are there in Reality; rather, it holds that all meaning and reasoning and all reality beliefs are human constructions..., rather than defensible claims concerning how things ultimately are (Tyson).

In contrast, the Christian Platonist "holds that the unseen God really is the present source and ongoing ground of all created reality," and that "the qualities of beauty, goodness, and truth, wherever they are in some measure discovered, are divine revelations of real meaning that give the world in which we live its value and purpose."

To this outlook intangible qualities are more basic than any temporal expression of truth, and true meaning... is reflected partially in the human mind rather then generated there. To this outlook there is more to reality than simply what meets the eye. Here reality exceeds that which can be discretely quantified, mathematically modeled, or logically demonstrated. 

And why not? Gödel himself was a "committed Platonist," and

According to Gödel's own Platonist understanding of his proof, it shows us that our minds, in knowing mathematics, are escaping the limitations of man-made systems, grasping the independent truths of abstract reality (Goldstein). 

You know what? I'm feeling a bit scattered this morning, plus we've been down this path so many times before that there's no need to do so again. Rather, I'll just pull some excerpts from past posts that pretty much summarize the argument:

Exactly what was this "nominalist revolution"? To make a long story short, it simply has to do with the question of the reality of transcendentals, or universals. For realists such as Aquinas, universals were ultimately real, while for the nominalist insurgency, they were considered mere names (immediately you see the seeds of deconstruction, which attacks universals -- and therefore Truth -- with a neo-barbaric vengeance).

Seems like a mundane enough academic squabble, doesn't it? Well, no. This is the wedge that plunges right down the center of Christendom, and cleaves Western man to this day.

Now, the God of the scholastics could be approached with reason. This being the case, the divine realm was ordered, hierarchical, and subject to man's comprehension (up to a point). But the nominalists swept this entire order aside, which had the perhaps unintended consequence of radically changing the character of God.

For one of the implications of nominalism is that God cannot be approached rationally, since this is to compromise his divine omnipotence. God can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to such an extent that he actually becomes far more distant and fearsome -- an object of pure awe instead of understanding.

*****

Secular humanists follow in the wake of the late medieval nominalists who convinced themselves that the principial realm of transcendental truth was words only, and that only concrete material things were ultimately real. This ousted them from the transcendent and created the split that continues to this day between realists and materialists. 

In turn, this split is very much at the basis of mundane politics, as conservatism may be defined as that philosophy which sees the world as the instantiation of "permanent things," or archetypal ideas that are not subject to change. We do not judge or measure them, because they judge and take the measure of us. We are either evolving toward, or away, from what we are in our deepest nature.

But because the left has exiled itself from human reality, it can never understand the simple truth that the world is disordered because souls are. And then in its ontic backasswardness, it tries to order souls by changing the world, and is always surprised when disordered souls re-exert themselves and spoil their beautiful plans. To paraphrase Eliot, they are always dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, which is to say, a rightly ordered soul (since souls don't exist for them anyway).

*****

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

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

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

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

Occam was also "a theological voluntarist who believed that if God had wanted to, he could have become incarnate as a donkey or an ox, or even as both a donkey and a man at the same time."

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

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

 Barron writes of how the turn away from realism redounds to

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

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

Who Cut the Light?!

If, as Derrida says, there is nothing beyond the text, then language is a closed system that can never get beyond itself to the reality it is supposed to map: "language is hereby made into a closed, immanent totality, a 'prison-house' from which there is no escape" (Betz). Worse yet, such an approach denies

any point of contact with the substances we could call "real" or any "things" that would "match up" with our words for them....

 This means that

language has no outside, no beginning or end, no ultimate significance, and nothing is ultimately communicated through it. It is, in a word, pointless -- pointless dissemination without the possibility of any real communion or redeeming communication...

There is no "living presence" to speech, rather, "It must in a sense be dead." If this is true, then we are in quite a fix. Is there any way out of the darkness? 

Schuon writes that "man is not a closed system, although he can try to be so." In the Foreword to his last book, The Transfiguration of Man, he affirms that 

In reality, man is as if suspended between animality and divinity; now modern thought -- be it philosophical or scientific -- admits only animality, practically speaking.

Concur. Such a partial and fragmented image of man fails "to take account of his true nature, which transcends the earthly, and lacking which he would have no reason for being."  

As Hamann predicted vis-a-vis the Enlightenment,

Quite paradoxically, the cult of reason ended in that sub-rationalism -- or "esoterism of stupidity" -- that is existentialism in all its forms (Schuon).

Nevertheless, here we are: "On the whole, modern philosophy is the codification of an acquired infirmity; the intellectual atrophy of man marked by the 'fall,'" into "a hypertrophy of practical intelligence" and "the psychosis of 'civilization' and of 'progress.'" 

A reminder that leftism in all its ghastly forms is the institutionalization of man's fall.

Hmm. How do we put the Light back into the Enlightenment? I suppose by first acknowledging the ontological darkness in which it enclosed us. It tried to replace the divine Light with the human, but this is to sever the manifestation from the principle, the effect from its cause.

Just as our eyes are conformed to physical light, the Intellect not only has access to the higher Light, but is of the same substance as that Light. It is "At once mirror of the supra-sensible and itself a supernatural ray of light" (Schuon). Here it is

necessary to distinguish between a "created Intellect" and an "uncreated Intellect," the latter being the divine Light and the former the reflection of this Light at the center of Existence.

Whatever the case, it seems to me that Light is another irreducible, in that it is always here, and cannot be reduced to something less. In Genesis 1 the Creator's first act is the creation of light, and its division from darkness. 

This is paralleled in John, what with the light shining in the darkness, and the reference to John the Baptist bearing witness to the light, to "the true Light which gives light to every man who comes into the world."  In contrast to what was said above about the deadness of language enclosed in itself, John says that in the Word is "the life, and the life was the light of men." 

According to Bina & Ziarani, "Mental faculties are reflections of a deep-seated, limitless source -- but on a limited plane." However, "because it takes its light from that limitless source, it is able to point to its own limitation, and also to its limitless source." In short, we are able to use the light of reason to reason about the limits of reason: it is

precisely because man's mental faculties take their light from a limitless source within him that he cannot be confined to mechanistic systematizations.

In short, to say "that reason is the sole criterion of truth... is not rationally provable." As we know from our Gödel, "no sufficiently logical system can prove itself true from within itself, that is, by logical argument" (ibid.).

This reminds me of the question asked by Stephen Hawking: granting a lawful universe, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" Which in turn reminds me of an Aphorism:

The world is a system of equations that stir winds of poetry.

The Enlightenment essentially confined us to Plato's cave, to a world of appearances with no access to the Light. But for Thomas, "The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing else than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light," and "the interior light of the mind is the principal cause of knowledge."

But we have to be open to the Light: "The highest perfection of human life consists in the mind of man being open to God" -- who is the Light and the Life, as per what John says above.

A Few Words About Words

Language.

there is no philosophy without it, inasmuch as it lies at the basis of all thought; on the other hand, philosophers will be seduced by it as long as they have not inquired into its mysterious origin and appreciated the ways one can be deceived by it (Betz).

In Genesis, God lets Adam name the animals. Presumably Adam did not name them Steve, Gary, Fred, ad nauseam, but rather, lion, monkey, bird, etc. 

In other words, Adam was not a nominalist, rather, was capable of seeing universals and essences -- immateriality and transcendence -- from the get-go. Conversely, Eve is given a proper name, going to her human individuality and personhood.

But then, in the very next chapter, our furbears are sure enough seduced and deceived by language -- by the words of the serpent. And here we are.

So, language cuts both ways: without it one cannot tell the truth, but nor can one lie -- including to oneself.

In short, language can both deceive and reveal; it can turn philosophers into fools and fishermen into saints.

For Hamann, Kant is one of those philosophers-turned-fools as a result of his misuse of language. Hamann was one of the first readers of the Critique of Pure Reason, and its first critic. Or meta-critic, rather. (The chapter we're looking at and trying to wrestle to the ground is called Hamann's Metacritique of Kant: Deconstructing the Transcendental Dream.) And deconstruct it he does, only 200 years before deconstruction was a thing.

Hamann's Metacritique "has a strong claim to be the starting point of post-Kantian philosophy."

"What is crucial in Kantianism," writes Schuon, is 

the 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.

For Hamann, "the problems attending Kant's Critique ultimately stem from a misunderstanding of language." Ultimately, "language is never merely language; it is also a revelation." 

In short, language, whatever else it reveals, is already a revelation: it is always meta- in relation to its own immanent activities. Nor can we be enclosed in language without violating what language is -- which is to say, open to what transcends it. 

Hamann begins with the question of "how is the ability to think possible?," which "is the primary question Kant leaves unanswered." This is because language "is prior to reason": 

Not only does the entire ability to think rest upon language... but language is also the center of the misunderstanding of reason with itself... 

Again, it cuts both ways: the bad way repeats "the logic of the Fall," because "it separates things that in no way can be separated. Things without relations, and relations without things." 

Yesterday we spoke of irreducibles, language being one of them. But so too is relation irreducible, especially the relation between word and an extramental reality that includes immaterial essences. Otherwise we're back to giving each cow a particular name instead of seeing universal cowness.

Hamann ultimately grounds language in "the hypostatic union of the Incarnate Logos," and why not? If it didn't exist, we would have to invent something like it in order to account for the marvelous properties of language, which again is a spontaneous union of concept and thing, or intellect and intelligibility. "Here one is presented with a clear alternative": 

Is language a Gnostic "prison-house" in which thought is trapped because it cannot get outside the infinite regress of signification to some definitive "transcendental signified"?

Or

a sacramental medium of divine self-communication, whose infinite regress is an image of God's own infinity and whose metaphorical richness is a foretaste of divine plenitude?

I'm going with #2, being that the infinitude of language is conformed to the infinitude of the "transcendental signified," or what we call O.

Hamann's metacritque is meant ultimately to save reason from theoretical suicide, i.e., from nihilistic auto-destruction...

And how is that working out?

either one capitulates to postmodernity, which can save neither reason, nor meaning, nor morality, nor even... the substance of the phenomena themselves; or one admits the possibility of illumination from another source..., not in the form of auto-illumination..., but as a gift that flows down from above, from "the Father of lights."

Here again, I'm going with door #2, not wall #1. And for a postmodern thinker such as Derrida it is literally a wall, for "there is nothing outside the text," which 

ultimately signifies a "closed system of signs, which only refer to other signs without ever meeting up with [a] referent." 

"Language is hereby made into a closed, immanent totality, a 'prison-house' from which there is no escape." It is 

to deny any point of contact with "substances," that we would call "real" or any "things" that would "match up with our words for them."

It comes down to illumination or nihilism: "either language inspired by the Holy Ghost in response to the Logos, or language inspired by Nothing at all." The Enlightenment pretended to invent the light by which it sees, but it was present way before we arrived on the scene.

The Irreducibles

Irrespective of the content, how is philosophy even possible? What facts on the ground and principles in the clouds presuppose and justify its existence?

Perhaps you say it is not possible. However, supposing I understand your non-philosophy, one still requires a philosophy to account for the communication of meaning from one person to another.

So, it seems that one of our irreducibles is subject-to-subject communication of meaning. According to Stanley Jaki,

for all their differences, philosophers are at one in a crucial and fundamental respect, be they skeptics, dogmatists, realists, idealists, rationalists, empiricists, positivists, phenomenologists, deconstructionists, materialists, or what not.

How so?

They all use tangible means for the delivery of their respective messages. The means may be the spoken word, a clay tablet, a scroll, a parchment, a codex, a broadsheet, a book, an email projected on the monitor..., but it has to be a means, that is, something tangible.

"If philosophers are logical" -- admittedly a big if -- then

their strictly primary concern should be about the extent to which their particular philosophy justifies the use of any such means, indeed its very reality and all the consequences, both numerous and momentous, that follow from this. 

Supposing it is not justified, or is (more likely) simply taken for granted, then

the philosopher will be guilty of a sleight of hand, however sophisticated. He will have to bring in the back door the very objects the use of which his starting point has failed to justify.

But let's be real(ist): "The use of means, of any means, obligates the philosopher to recognize the objective truth" of such means. Nor can this truth 

be evaded, let alone refuted, because the refutation itself is an act of communication, an implicit falling back on objective means whereby alone can other philosophers be reached.

Thus,

the first duty of a philosopher is to endorse the reality of the book (or the physical reality of discourse) which is the means making his message available.

I HEREBY ENDORSE THE PHYSICAL REALITY OF THE MEANS OF INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION. 

So, here is a seeming irreducible without which one cannot take the first step into philosophy. But how is it here, and can it be further reduced to a deeper principle? 

In Christian metaphysics it can be, because what is the immanent Trinity but an endless communication to, and reception of, the Word? And supposing we are in the image and likeness of this interpersonal goround, well, there you are: just what one would expect.

Waiting for the Miracle or Something

That's it: no more posts until further gnosis, or until there is a spontaneous eruption of aggravated logorrhea. I don't want to write just for the sake of writing. Rather, one must respect the rhythm of inspiration, which has its own annoying logic. It doesn't start and stop at our convenience.

There are never too many writers, only too many people who write.  

And we don't want to sink into the latter category. 

Human activity has its technical side and its miraculous side. In the former, a certain act produces a predictable result; in the latter, the effect is not commensurate with its cause. The technical procedure is effectively constant, whereas there are no rules for writing noble verse.

I won't say I'm waiting for a miracle, let alone noble verse. Rather, I'll settle for an interesting book. Part of the problem is a run of uninspiring books that just haven't been blogworthy. I have a couple of promising ones arriving later in the week, but we'll see. Meanwhile, enjoy the slack. 

Language is a Battlefield

Apologies for this meandering post.

Just flipping through After Enlightenment in search of the seed of a post, and this sentence stands out: "if language is lost to secularism, everything is lost." 

A Bold Statement -- everything? -- but I vaguely recall many posts on the idea that language is indeed a battlefield and that it is a quintessentially spiritual battle. It is nothing less than spiritual warfare, with one side pretending to enclose spirit in language, the other side engaged with spirit per se, i.e., a vertically open system, open to what transcends human speech -- especially reality.

What is man without language? But what is language if it is but a closed and self-referential system that does not make contact with the Real?

The Aphorist writes that 

It is not the ideas that I look for in the intelligent book, but rather the air that one breathes there.

Agreed, but what kind of air is this, and why do lesser books result in spiritual asphyxiation? In the case of the latter, 

Reading makes the fool more foolish. 

Say Yes to drugs:

Reading is the unsurpassed drug because it allows us to escape not only the mediocrity of our lives but even more so the mediocrity of our souls.  

For Hamann, "the origin of language is not human or divine," rather, "at once human and divine." In the final analysis "the mystery of language is fundamentally a Christological mystery": "language is revelatory, to the point that one can say, 'No word, no world.'" It "mysteriously touches upon all things: it is the point of contact between things divine and human."

It seems that language itself is already a revelation, over and apart from what it reveals. For Hamann,

language was everything: it is what miraculously reveals the world, and... equally miraculously, God reveals himself.

"Contra postmodernity, far from being an immanent totality or function of the will to power, it is the 'tabernacle' and 'chariot-throne" of the Holy Spirit."

Which is again one more way of saying that it cannot be enclosed in immanence without betraying itself and sinking into a deformation of the soul, into one of the varieties of pneumopathology. 

Like Universal Existence, which is its prototype, language encloses us ontologically in the truth, whether we wish it or not: before all words, its all-embracing meaning is "Be"; it is Divine in its essence. "In the beginning was the Word” (Schuon).

And 

All expression is of necessity relative, but language is nonetheless capable of conveying the quality of absoluteness which has to be conveyed; expression contains all, like a seed; it opens all, like a master-key...

According to Pieper, "By its very nature, speech points toward something which is not speech. What is it then? It is reality!" In an essay called The Abuse of Language and the Abuse of Power, he writes that

It is above all in the word that human existence comes to pass. And thus if the word decays, humanity itself cannot fail to be affected, cannot fail to be harmed. 

For speech has a two-fold function and therefore a potential two-fold dysfunction, "the corruption of the link between the word and reality, and the corruption of the word as communication." Thus,

Speech which emancipates itself from the norm of (real) things, at the same time necessarily becomes speech without a partner.

Postmodernity is nothing less -- because there could be nothing less -- than speech about nothing addressed to nobody. "The moment a person"

deliberately ceases to govern his words with a view to stating the reality of things, he automatically ceases to communicate anything. For language becomes communication the moment it expresses a link to reality, and by the same token it ceases to be communication the moment this link is destroyed.

And truly truly, tenure takes care of the rest. It's the Devils's Bargain, for "when words lose contact with reality, they become an instrument of power." Lose your soul and gain the world

When one person ceases to speak to another in the artless and spontaneous manner which characterizes genuine conversation, and begins to consciously manipulate his words, expressly ceasing to concern himself with the truth -- when, in other words, his concern is something other than the truth -- he has, in reality, from that point on ceased to regard the other person as a partner in a conversation. He has ceased to respect him as a human person. Thus, strictly speaking, from that point on all conversation, all dialogue, all mutual exchange of words, comes to an end! 

No wonder it is impossible to have a rational conversation with these people, for language is turned against itself before it even speaks. And

Once the word, as employed by the communications media, has, as a matter of principle, been rendered neutral to the norm of truth, it is, by its very nature, a ready-made tool just waiting to be picked up by 'the powers that be' and 'employed' for violent or despotic ends.

Fake news leads to real violence -- for example, with the BLM riots or the anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas violence of our elite universities.

Entirely predictable, in that "the abuse of language by the communications media could actually be diagnosed as a symptom of the despotism to come, while the virus [was] still in its latent stages."

Once again we see that -- as was to be expected -- the fate of society and the fate of the word are inseparable. A relationship founded on violence... corresponds to the most pernicious destruction of the link to things as they are.

Those Who Do Not Escape History are Doomed to Progress

I'm well into the book -- After Enlightenment -- but it's a bit repetitive, so I'm not sure there's enough new material with which to build a post. But for us there is only the hammering & yammering. Whether it results in a habitable structure is down to forces beyond our control.  

For Hamann, "history is a revelation of something more than reason and therefore requires more than reason, namely, faith... as the sine qua non of its interpretation" (Betz). Again, it is only reasonable to appeal to the supra-rational -- which is not the irrational. Which calls to mind Aphorisms:

Nothing is explainable outside of history, but history is not enough to explain anything. 

For 

Real history exceeds what merely happened. 

But whatever it is,  

History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination.

So, apparently it has either a trans-rational meaning or it is the A.F. alluded to by the Aphorist. Disappointed?

The promises of life disappoint no one but the one who believes they are fulfilled here. 

Hamann suggests that history is "a sealed book, a concealed witness, a riddle that will not be solved unless we plow with another heifer than our reason." What heifer might this be, and how do we yoke it?

More concretely, the choice is between a multi-dimensional Christian understanding of history... and a uni-dimensional secular view of history, which has no fulfillment but the social and technological progress that every subsequent moment supposedly brings....

In short, the choice is between a Christian view of history as a kind of unfinished divine poem, whose meaning can be grasped only in part, and a secular view of history as a series of discrete moments which, having no part to play in any larger poem or unfolding drama, expressing nothing but the banality of "progress as such" (Betz).

Really? A binary forced choice? Sources can confirm that

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god.

History is not cleared of its miasmas except in the brief periods in which Christian winds blow.

Suffice it to say, those winds aren't blowing at the moment -- local gusts notwithstanding -- thus the farcical abomination of our politico-cultural miasma. 

He who does not smell sulphur in the modern world has no sense of smell. 

And certainly no taste. Or vision, for that matter. Let those with ears hear! There is

a worldly way of knowing, which merely "puffs up" and redounds to the glory of the knowing subject, and a higher, Socratic-Christian way of knowing [which] glories ironically in weakness and limitations, whereby the intellect is made receptive of divine light and wisdom. Herein, not in any proud rationalism, lies the true path to enlightenment. 

I'll buy that. Here again, it is a matter of being a vertically open system, open to what transcends history, to its nonlocal source. For if we were actually confined to history, we could never know it. Am I wrong? We are in history but surely we are not of it? 

Who wants to be enclosed in history, with no possibility of ingress or escape?

whereas the way of rational autonomy popularized by the Enlightenment is ultimately dead and unenlightened, the way foreshadowed by Socratic ignorance and fulfilled in Christian humility is fruitful because it is alive to the illuminating presence of the Holy Spirit (Betz).

Otherwise to hell with it. Literally, for

Hell is any place from which God is absent.

Or, put conversely,

Hell is the place where man finds all his projects realized. 

Hamann is not against reason, rather, "against only a puritanical form of secular rationality, summed up in the phrase 'pure reason,' that hypocritically presumes to do without faith." 

apart from faith, reason itself and the entire enterprise of human knowledge is ultimately defenseless against skepticism and nihilism (Betz).

A reminder that 

Man calls "absurd" what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence.

I like to think of faith in the broadest sense imarginable as openness to the transcendent object, O.   

And that

God is the guest of silence.

 Of a silent openness, or of an open silence.

Shedding Meta-Light on the Enlightenment

So, this Hamann fellow, despite all the never before seen light illuminating reality for the first time,

prophesied that the Enlightenment, theoretically unable to support itself, being based on illusions regarding its own rationality, would end in nihilism.

Which would have made him unpopular, supposing he cared about popularity: "he realized that his own writings were perhaps too difficult to be worth publishing," and "never wrote for the public anyway, except ironically, having written for individual readers who 'knew how to swim.'" 

Which of course reminds me of Dávila. For example, his first book 

remained virtually unknown because only 100 copies were printed and these were presented as gifts to his friends.... [He] made no attempts to make his writings widely known. Only by way of German (and later Italian as well as French and Polish) translation beginning in the late eighties did Dávila's ideas begin to be read among poets and philosophers.

There is still no authorized English translation of the Aphorisms. Which is fine by me. Some things are better when they're hot.

Kierkegaard was a big fan, calling Hamann "the greatest humorist in Christendom," even "the greatest humorist in the world." All others are number two, or lower.

He was a bit of a slacker and gentleman loaffeur before his time: "With an encyclopedic curiosity, which he later equated with dissipation," and "given ample time for leisure, he indulged his intellectual curiosity to the point of gluttony, virtually bankrupting himself on books." 

Until he had a dramatic conversion experience in 1758, when, while reading his Bible, he gradually then suddenly "began to perceive that God was somehow speaking to him and that the same one who authored the Bible was the author of his life." He "discovered that Scripture was 'living and active'" and "that in some strange way it was also addressed to him."

Afterwards "he could not go back to laboring for 'the god of the world,'" but "now aimed to work for God." Which made him, "in worldly terms, useless." Or even more useless than before. 

Which was okay, because he thought the Enlighteners were the ones left in the dark: "What a Nothing, what a smoke, what a pestilent Nothing are [our days] in our eyes when reason counts them!," for "All is labyrinth, all disorder, if we wish to see by ourselves." 

The German idealism of his contemporaries "precisely shut out the world, so that one no longer encounters in it anything other than reason," which "might as well 'be nothing.'" 

The joke's on them: "Christian humor is the appropriate response to the fundamentally ludicrous nature of idolatry, however refined and 'rational' its permutations might be." 

Hamann indulges in irony because in his view Christianity not only commends irony, but is essentially ironic.... the entire economy of salvation could be said to be ironic -- even humorous -- to the extent that the "gods" of the world are "outwitted."

Concur: "The Christian needs irony in order to humiliate the devil." Which is why the Babylon Bee, in its ironic humiliation of the diabolic left, is doing God's work.  

For Hamann, Socrates is the great forerunner, for "the wise know that they know nothing. Such is the irony, the divine joke, at the origin of western philosophy." 

whereas the way of rational autonomy popularized by the Enlightenment is ultimately dead and unenlightened, the way foreshadowed by Socratic ignorance and fulfilled in Christian humility is fruitful because it is alive to the illuminating presence of the Holy Spirit.  

Ironically, the cultured despisers of Christianity "are in fact the modern-day heirs of those who killed" Socrates, so ha ha.

This is as far as I've gotten in the book, so, the end for now.