In Defense of Hypostatic Logics & Dialectics: The Greatest Antinomy Ever Told
Our dialectic can remove those contradictions that come from applying contradictory predicates to the whole of a thing, when each of those predicates, instead, really only applies to one aspect or another of it.
For example, there exist antinomies that reflect – not flaws in our reasoning, but – among other things, the fact that some aspects of things really are determined (e.g. various potentialities) and others not (e.g. certain actualizations).
If so, perhaps there really are such things as Peirce’s pure chance & Lonergan’s emergent probabilities, even consistent with a putative transcendental determinism.
If so, perhaps there are aspects of our structure of reasoning that, even if a priori in terms of such potencies as would have been transcendentally determined per their primal origins, would represent billions of years of cosmic evolution (actualization). Those structures, then, in another sense, could hardly be more a posteriori!
Such antinomies, rather than arising from sterile, rationalistic abstractions, would be embodied in the sense that they model the contraries of objective reality, itself.
Perhaps those contraries, far from being “all in our heads,” were empirically “observed” by our phylogenetic predecessors?
Perhaps we inherited that so-called “a priori” knowledge in the myriad aspects of our many ineffable ways of knowing: Peirce’s abductive instinct & inference, Polanyi’s tacit dimension, Bohm’s implicate order, Maritain’s intuition of being & connaturality, Newman’s illative sense, Fries’ nonintuitive immediate knowledge and Lonergan’s unrestricted desire?
Perhaps our dialectics don’t engage reality’s antinomies to merely fabricate this or that conceptual unity out of a whole rationalistic cloth of abstractions?
Perhaps our dialectics discover the true conceptual unity of reality’s embodied antinomies by critically engaging its manifold & multiform contrarieties and then testing our competing fallibilistic hypotheses to discern how to properly apply this or that predicate to this or that part or whole?
Even when not yet falsifiable, whether due to temporary methodological constraints or some permanent ontological occulting, our seemingly equiplausible accounts can be fallibly adjudicated in terms of existential actionability, pragmatic contexts, internal coherence, external congruence, logical consistency, interdisciplinarian consilence, abductive facility, hypothetical fecundity, aesthetic admirability and other informal arguments that can be felicitously bundled with sufficient epistemic virtue.
Perhaps, then, our hypostatic logic is neither magical nor a convenient conjuration?
Perhaps the greatest antinomy ever told was the generation of I – thous and not merely ex Deo modes? mutually, bilaterally & symmetrically reciprocal, nonformal, personal powers and not just modally distinct gods?
And therefore as a Chalcedonian stranger to perichoretics give dialectics & hypostatic logics welcome. There are more embodied antinomies in heaven and earth, you know who you are, than are dreamt of in your sophiology.