It just occurred to me that your tag line is a great description of faith. Faith is the ability to see the unseen and believe the unprovable although the dictionary describes it more as fidelity.
"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." — Hebrews 11:1, KJVThe Latin word fides carries two intimately related meanings: faith and trust.
Dear MNR, what dictionary did you consult, that defines faith as "fidelity?" Notice how faith so defined logically refers to the state of the believer; in what he believes is left completely out of the picture. Presumably, it could be anything — though historically, traditionally, the universal belief of mankind has been in God (or gods, allowing for more primitive experiences of the Divine).
And thus the other cognate meaning of fides, "trust," can never come into the picture.
Here it seems the full meaning of fides has been flattened down — "reduced" — to the "horizonal" extension only. The "vertical" extension — the line of meaning — has been utterly expunged.
If this is so, then I don't like your dictionary very much. :^) Try the On-line Oxford English Dictionary.... It gives etymologies, or the histories of words. It lets you see exactly what the history-killing left progressives who want to rule us would like us to forget....
The idea of horizontal/vertical extension was brought to my attention by Matchett-PI. He sourced to Gagdad Bob, pseudonym of Dr. Robert Godwin, an American philosopher, clinical psychologist and former atheist. I so admire his work!
The horizonal/vertical so strongly brings to mind T.S. Eliot's verse, that
Man stands at the intersection of time and timelessness...."Time" here stands for the horizontal extension of man; "timelessness," the vertical.
My tagline is from another great English poet, William Blake, which, to me, further validate's Gagdad Bob's point: What we see "with" the eye plays out on the horizontal; to see "through" the eye, the vertical is necessary.
Fact lies along the horizontal; but meaning can only be found along the vertical....
One final thought. We've been all over "final cause" on this thread. Robert Rosen was my main cite (after Aristotle himself). He pointed out that the four Aristotelian causal categories were not all unfolding in the same timeframe. That is, there is a "temporal anomaly" between the first three causes — the formal, the material, and the efficient — and the final cause.
I think the horizontal/vertical "model" applies very well here: The first three causes unfold horizontally (and irreversibly) in time. But the final cause is not to be found on that line. It can only be understood in terms of "vertical extension" relative to the horizontal one.
Or so it appears to me FWIW
Thank you ever so much, dear Mind-numbed Robot, for your excellent essay/post!
And thank you, dear Matchett-PI, for introducing me to Gagdad Bob, and for pinging me to his extraordinary essays!