Naming the Nameless and Doing the Reality Dance (11.14.11)
I'm currently reading this book on T.S. Eliot, and I see that he came to Christianity in a similar manner: head first. I suppose that the vast majority of people who convert to Christianity do so either for emotional reasons (which I am not criticizing) or because it just "feels right." Obviously, it operates on levels that are both deeper and higher then the ego, so there is no reason that the average person should be able to articulate these reasons, any more than they could articulate the physics of riding a bicycle. Rather, they just do it. And enjoy the experience. If you have a mediocre mind, your thoughts will just get in the way anyway. Leave it to the professionals.
But it's always interesting when a genius such as Eliot goes through the same process. And it's also disconcerting for the Adversary and his mediocre minions. How could one of the two or three greatest men of letters of the 20th century embrace this primitive nonsense? But as Kirk points out, Christianity has always been a scandal.
It's like the tao: if these spiritual autistics didn't laugh at it, it wouldn't be the tao. You can see how our scientistic jester never stops banging his head against his own self-imposed wall, seemingly incapable of understanding that everyone here has not only heard his arguments, but probably once believed them. But we then discovered something more adequate, and moved on. And in. And up. For our jester to imagine that he, of all people, can tell us something we don't already know about the horizontal Waste Land is either immature or breathtakingly ignorant.
In Eliot's case, he wrote extensively about the subject, both in his poetry and prose. For example, "Most people suppose that some people, because they enjoy the luxury of Christian sentiments and the excitement of Christian ritual, swallow or pretend to swallow incredible dogma. For some the process is exactly opposite. Rational assent may arrive late, intellectual conviction may come slowly, but they come inevitably without violence to honesty and nature. To put the sentiments in order is a later and an immensely difficult task: intellectual freedom is earlier and easier than complete spiritual freedom."
You could say that it's all about restoring / With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem / The time. Redeem / The unread vision in the higher dream / While jewelled unicorns draw by the guilded hearse (Eliot).
Enough with the gilded hearse of scientism. Back to the Hermit's higher dream. When we left off yesterday, we were explaining how he reconciles the three great philosophical antinomies within his own being, the first one being idealism <---> realism (although naturalism would have perhaps have been a less confusing word than realism, since idealism is also known as philosophical realism in scholastic philosophy -- i.e., the notion that the platonic archetypes are more real than the material reality which is their instantiation).
The next antinomy is realism <---> nominalism, and here UF does mean the type of realism just mentioned, that is, the school of thought "which attributes objective reality to general notions that are now usually designated as 'abstract' but which medieval philosophy designated universalia ('universals')." In contrast, the current of thought "which denies the objective reality of universals and which admits reality only in 'particulars' is that of nominalism."
As UF notes, a realist in this sense is an extreme idealist, e.g., Plato. For Plato, the idea, say, of boxer briefs, is more real than the pair I am now wearing. But for the nominalist, these so-called objective ideas are nothing more than words which have no independent reality. You can see where this route 666 leads: more or less directly to deconstruction, multiculturalism, moral relativism,"positive liberties," "gay marriage," etc., the whole catastrophe.
For example, any remotely spiritually attuned person recognizes that marriage is a sacred union between a man and a woman. It is a real archetype. Therefore, to promulgate the fantasy that members of the same sex can live in a state of marriage is a kind of violent assault on reality. It's not funny. It is mean spirited, offensive, and cretinous. If you cannot see that, then you, my friend, are a barbarian. I am not being insulting, merely descriptive. There's just no other word for someone who conflates reality with what it reveals of itself to the animal senses and to cold logic isolated from any guiding wisdom.
The irony is that any scientist who actually takes the trouble to think deeply is a philosophical realist. There is no great mathematician who is not an explicit or implicit Platonist. For example, G. H. Hardy, in his A Mathematician's Apology, wrote that "It would be difficult now to find an educated man quite insensitive to the aesthetic appeal of mathematics.... A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas." Who could argue with that proposition but an innumerate illiterate, or atheistic doubledunce?
If we consider the whole of creation -- i.e., the cosmos.... Wait, let's stop right there: the idea of the cosmos. For that is what it is: an idea. No one has ever seen the cosmos. But it's wrong to say we just "assume" it exists. Rather, we know in our bones that it exists -- that is, the strict totality of all reality, the Absolute. There is no part of reality that exists independently of this Absolute. The interior wholeness that we see at every level of reality is simply a fractal reflection, or distant echo, of this Absolute. It is what accounts for the organicism of organisms, the nonlocality of locality, the unity of the human subject, and the inner coherence of science. Each is a horizontal reflection of the other and a vertical reflection of the O-ther.
The realist (i.e., idealist) says that "the general is anterior to the particular" (deduction). The nominalist says that "the particular is anterior to the general" (induction).
Here again, we see how this plays out at the local level, with disastrous consequences. For example, for the leftist, the collective is more real than the individual man, which is why it is fine to steal from Joe the Plumber and give his hard earned money to Joe the Deadbeat. But the founders of our country knew that the individual was real and that this individuality was rooted in his liberty, which is the means by which we become real. It is the idea of liberty which is ultimately real, and which creates the possibility of real individuals (in other words, without liberty, our ideal "created" self will not be able to actualize).
But for Obama, it is only in the concrete particular that liberty is real, i.e, "positive liberty." In other words, liberty is not real unless the government somehow gives it to you in the form of cash and other valuable prizes. You might say that negative liberty preserves the ideal reality of liberty.
For the nominalist, "truth, beauty and goodness do not exist for it as objective realities, and are only a matter of taste," that great leveler of the hierarchical cosmos. People who "attack links" are always nominalists. You cannot argue with them, because their first cognitive act is to dismantle the very cognitive scaffolding that makes higher thought possible, e.g., the Jesus Seminarians. They first deconstruct the higher edifice of the Bible, and then Jesus comes out the other end a Marxist community organizer.
In truth, we clearly need both, i.e., realism and nominalism: "We cannot dispense with realism if we attach any value to the existence of objective truth (science) and trans-subjective truth (religion)."
How to resolve this question? It's easy, at least if you were lucky enough to be born in Christendom: "The 'problem' of universals was resolved in the spiritual history of mankind by the fact of the Incarnation, where the fundamental universal of the world -- the Logos -- became Jesus Christ, who is the fundamental particular of the world."
Here, the universal of universals, the very principle of intelligibility, the Logos, became the particular of particulars, the very prototype of the personality, Jesus Christ.
This is why for the Raccoon, spiritual knowledge is embodied knowledge, or it is no knowledge at all.
And the weird light shines in the dark, but the dorks don't comprehend it. --Petey
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is... --Eliot