The Nature of Reality…
Perceiving Minds and Objects – The Contingent Being of Man and the Necessary Being of God
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”…
— George Berkeley
“Where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality”…
— John Searle
The question — “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” — poised by 18th Century Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkley goes to the core of the current Metacrisis.
“Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth”…
— Ayn Rand
A crisis of Theology as Modern Western Civilisation increasingly distances itself from its Theological Foundation.
“The very idea of Europe… … is founded on the tradition of Logos”…
– Augusto del Noce
“In short, there was a tidal wave of nominalism. Descartes was a nominalist. Locke and all his following, Berkeley, Hartley, Hume, and even Reid, were nominalists. Leibniz was an extreme nominalist, and Rémusat who has lately made an attempt to repair the edifice of Leibnizian monadology, does so by cutting away every part which leans at all toward realism. Kant was a nominalist; although his philosophy would have been rendered compacter, more consistent, and stronger if its author had taken up realism, as he certainly would have done if he had read Scotus. Hegel was a nominalist of realistic yearnings. I might continue the list much further. Thus, in one word, all modern philosophy of every sect has been nominalistic” …
– Charles Sanders Peirce
A crisis of Metaphysics as Transcendental Metaphysics and Realism was increasingly being dismissed.
“There is an eternal and unchangeable order of truths and values, which we can come into contact with using intellectual intuition”…
— Augusto del Noce
Was there a Reality independent of the Conscious Self – Ego and the Contingent Being of Man?
“ “Real” is a word invented in the thirteenth century to signify having Properties, i.e. characters sufficing to identify their subject, and possessing these whether they be anywise attributed to it by any single man or group of men, or not”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
“Metaphysics is the science of reality” …
— Charles Sanders Peirce
Hence, the endemic embracement of the metaphysics of Nominalism and Theology of Marxism.
Was the Necessary Being of God viewed through the prism of a vertical form of metaphysics (realism — universal mental concepts formed via abstraction from individual things) the ultimate source of a Conscious Reality? A perspective that is the foundation of eternal truths which determine all other Contingent Beings?
“Man possesses in himself an agent [i.e., reason] whose essence is divine, and this agent and the power [i.e. the Logos] that eternally shapes and organizes the world are ontologically, or at least in their principle, one and the same; hence reason’s aptitude at knowing the world”…
– Augusto del Noce
Was the Conscious Self—Ego viewed through the prism of a horizontal form of metaphysics (nominalism — particulars) a contingent aspect of a higher order Conscious Reality? A perspective that reflects the Contingent Nature of Man’s Being?
“European civilisation rose on the principle of a world of universal and eternal truths, in which all men participate — on the principle of the Logos, in other words”…
— Augusto del Noce
