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.