The Sorts of Liberalism Are Attempted Implementations of Nominalism

If as nominalism supposes there are no objective universals, then there are no objective truths. Then there is no objective reality. There being no objective reality, there can then be no way that one man might understand or speak of reality more truthfully than another. So there can be no such thing as authority. Authority then is ipso facto null, and wherever asserted, is false and unjust. If authority is unjust per se, then justice might be possible only under conditions of anarchy, wherein each man rules his own life absolutely, and is free to make up his mind and shape his acts in whatever way he pleases.

Nominalism carried into practice then is liberalism: the thoroughgoing rejection of authority.

There are many sorts of liberalism: political, economic, grammatical, theological, liturgical, legal, sexual, aesthetic, gastronomical, cultural, architectural, academic, and so forth. All of them are subjects of discussion here, and at other orthospherean sites. All of them have in common the rejection of all authority other than the authority that imposes upon all men the requirement that they reject authority.

The project of authoritatively imposing the rejection of authority is of course incoherent. That doesn’t stop liberals from propagating liberalism. But it does stop liberalism from ever working.

Jesus Is In His Person the Only Possible Mundane Fulfillment of the Law

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

Matthew 5:17-18

Jesus is the Logos. So is he himself, in his very Body, the Law.

The Law is infinite in its ramifications; it is the infinite Logos, and the Logos is the eternal knowledge and actualization of the perfectly coherent – NB, “perfect” means “complete” – infinite Gödelian stack of logical calculi, which alone suffices to that establishment of the totality of Truth, upon which any lesser portion of the Truth depends for its derivative truth, and so for its being, its factuality, and thus its salience to creatures, ergo its efficacy. Then only an infinite being might comprehend the Law, or enact it. And only by enacting it could it be fulfilled, or for that matter suasively Lawful; i.e., only were it actualized could it be Law in the first place; for only thus could it be a real character of an actual entity; only as actual and real could it be apprehensible to other actualities, or influential in their development. So, only the Logos himself can be the Law; and, so, Nomos is implicit in and entailed by Logos.

To know the Law perfectly is to be the Law. But of all men only Jesus knows the Law perfectly, or can therefore be it, effect it and thus forthward embody it. Only Jesus can fulfill the Law. For, only Jesus *is* the Law.

Philosophical Skeleton Keys: Archetypes, Forms, & Angels

Ockham comes in for a lot of criticism around these parts, the poor honest earnest man. And not unrightly, perhaps, given his (largely innocent and inadvertent) role in the incipience of the prevalent modern nominalism that has gutted the West (he was not really much of a nominalist, as we think of nominalism these days). But in most things he was on target (this is true of all heretics, scoundrels, sinners, and fools (or else they’d die before they could do much damage, understood by their contemporaries as mere silly kooks)). Most of all, he was right in respect to his famous Razor, which more than any of his other immense contributions to human thought will surely warrant his everlasting renown – his status, shared with only five or six other philosophers, as a household name (at least among those who consider themselves somewhat educated). Even men who know nothing else whatever of epistemology or philosophy of science have some notion of Ockham’s Razor. His Principle of Parsimony is perhaps the most important operational, practical principle of thought (the Principle of Sufficient Reason, e.g., is by contrast ontological; or again e.g., the Principle of Noncontradiction is logical; and so forth). It is the whole basis of American Pragmatism, which is to say, of the philosophy of science universally presupposed in the practice of professional scientists. It is followed in its pragmatic importance – opinions differ about their proper order – by the Principle of Elegance (the more beautiful theory is more likely to be true) and the Principle of Adequacy (theories must adequate to the entirety of their proper domain). I would add also the Principle of Serendipity – as I here now decide to name it, not knowing how other thinkers might have done so: the principle, i.e., that a true theory is likely to explain more things, and they unsuspected things, than we had looked for it to explain – things that, i.e., are outside its (expected) proper domain (huge swathes of mathematics, e.g., turn out to exemplify the Principle of Serendipity).

Ockham, then, God Bless him: All else equal, that theory is best which is simplest – which postulates the fewest types of concrete entities.

So then: what about the Platonic Forms? Ockham’s Razor – a native, chthonic tendency in my thinking from infancy – bugged me about them from the first moment I read of them. What the heck are they? Are they a different sort of thing than the things of this world? What’s the Platonic Realm, for Heaven’s sake? Where is it? How does it interact with our own? If it does interact with our own, then isn’t it really integral with our own? If so, then what sets the Forms apart from their contingent instantiations here below? What does eternity have to do with creaturity?

Self-Hatred & Radical Autonomy: an Interpretation of Thordaddy

[Thordaddy is one of our most loyal and prolific commenters. Most of the comments he has submitted have not appeared here, on account of his customary horrific abuse of English syntax, diction, and prosody. Most of them are simply incomprehensible. They have not therefore passed the threshold set by the criteria of our comments policy. Nevertheless, Thordaddy has some terrific insights, which over the course of years of earnest effort to understand him, I have at length come to appreciate. Thus, this post. All thanks to Thordaddy for his honest persistence. Now, if only he could school himself to write like a Christian …][Thordaddy: for the love of Christ, don’t get cocky: write like a Christian, for God’s sake. Your comments to this post will not otherwise see the light of day.][And, also: God bless you for your earnest loyal persistence.]

Self-hatred comes along with the vicious radical autonomy of modernism (that Thordaddy has so emphatically noticed to us all) as a package deal. If you are radically autonomous, then you alone are capable of fixing your own life, and so you are alone responsible for so doing. There is then no one to help you. You alone are alone at fault. Your fault is intrinsic, given along with your radical ontological autonomy, and therefore incorrigible – at least by you. Your fault is your own decision.

Naturally then you hate yourself for it (every man knows in his heart that he is responsible for himself; there is no escape whatever from this knowledge). But one cannot hate oneself and live; so your self-hatred is directed instead upon some Other, a wicked and as suspiciously odd therefore ostensibly blameworthy scapegoat, who works well enough as a halfway credible field for the projection of your own most despised characteristics. The scapegoat allows you to feel for a few moments – those of his holocaust – that you yourself are blameless in your predicaments; that it is all his fault, and that with his death, his ostracism or bewilderment, your faults likewise die; so that you are then free of responsibility, ergo of guilt, or shame, or blame – ritually pure and unimpeachable.

I.e., free. Radically autonomous.

Inequality Before the Law is Natural & Proper to Man

Men are not equal. Some are therefore rightly more authoritative, more influential, and more important than others. The law ought to recognize this reality – and it does. The question is not whether it does recognize this reality, then, but whether it does so justly.

Nations are Ontological Reals

Wholes are real, or else they are not worth talking about at all, as not existing in the first place. On materialism, there are no wholes: no persons, no molecules, not even any Rutherfordian atoms or protons.

So then, on materialism, most human discourse is – as pertaining to entities that do not truly exist, being therefore inapposite to things as they really are – simply not worth doing; is, rather, inapt, and so likely injurious.

But if materialism is false – as, being a notion of entities that under its own account do not actually exist, it must necessarily be – then wholes are real. Some of them, anyway. The trick is to discern which apparent wholes are entities in their own right, and which are only our own heuristics.

Liberal Sexuality Cannot Work, & So Tends to Traditional Marriage

Traditional sexual morality can be stated in a single sentence, that covers all the wrinkles: any sex whatever outside of marriage is utterly proscribed. Thus the only sort of sex that is traditionally permissible must transpire between man and wife.

The Sexual Left Devours Itself

The Great Sex Harassment Witch Hunt of 2017 is mostly hitting liberals. It is leaving conservatives largely unscathed (at least so far). Why should this be?

Marriage as an Ontological Real

By training and habit, we moderns think of marriage as a mere and adventitious arrangement of pre-existent and utterly independent entities. We think of it therefore as merely conventional, and so as subsistent completely in the continued agreement of its constituent members, the husband and wife, and so by either of them ever and completely severable, thus eliminable, without appreciable rupture or wound to the goodness inherent in the causal order. We think of it as a deal, and nothing more – as if deals were nothing. We think of marriage, that is to say, as not truly real. We think of it as a social and legal fiction.

In this, we err. It is not so. For, deals are real. And they really impose themselves upon us, so shaping our acts. They *oblige* us. Who has not felt this?

Profane Hierarchies are Bound to Work Evil

A hierarchy that is not consecrated and thus ordered in all its parts to the vision of the Good vouchsafed by the common cult is as likely to work good as is a broken clock to display the correct time. A profane institution is finally, and thus fundamentally, and thus thoroughly misdirected away from the proper mundane end of all human acts: the achievement, maintenance, repair and restoration of that proper harmony among and within things under and toward heaven, in virtue of which alone is there any health, prosperity, propagation, contentment, wisdom.