Truth Arises in the Space Between Object and Subject
"Reality," says Pieper, "is the basis for the good." Which implies that those who are systematically out of touch with reality can only achieve the good accidentally, if at all, like the Democrat party.
[T]ruth is the revelation of reality. Truth is the proclamation of being, says Hilary, and Augustine says, Truth is that which manifests what is.... All laws and moral principles may be reduced to reality.
Which of course presupposes we can know reality, which is precisely what postmodern progressives pretend we cannot do (speak for yourself!). Which is why their entire ideology may be reduced to unreality and therefore the bad, accidents notwithstanding.
I'm old enough to remember when the parties had disagreements over reality instead of whether reality exists, but unreality -- which slides into anti-reality -- is the very principle of multiculturalism, moral relativism, transgenderism, CRT, "my truth," et al.
Why is reality the basis of the good? Because if you don't know what is, you don't know what to do about it: action follows being, in that order, and "the good is that which is in accord with objective reality."
In my professional lifetime the American Psychological Association descended into the Anti-American Progressive Activists, and they declare that
A psychological state is considered a mental disorder only if it causes significant distress or disability.
Well, good. It causes me no distress, significant or otherwise, to say that people who imagine they are members of the opposite sex are objectively mentally ill.
Not so fast!
Many transgender people do not experience their gender as distressing or disabling, which implies that identifying as transgender does not constitute a mental disorder.
True,transgender people "suffer with anxiety, depression or related disorders at higher rates than nontransgender persons," but that'sourfault, i.e., those of us who believe they are mentally ill. If not for us, they'd be as normal as us. But wait -- we're not normal, since we believe they're abnormal. So confusing!
Confusing, and inevitably so, once we eliminate objective reality as the gold standard of truth. For truly truly, there is no other standard, and once the bridge to reality is burned, there's no getting back to it:
He who wishes to to know and do the good must turn his gaze upon the objective world of being. Not upon his own "ideas," not upon his "conscience," not upon "values," not upon arbitrarily established "ideals" and "models." He must turn away from his own act and fix his eyes upon reality (Pieper).
Anything less is necessarily misinformation, disinformation, or, in a word, false, which is a denial of what is the case, precisely.
Okay, but what is the case?
Just taking a wild guess here, but how about what is, period?
Yes, reality must be "the whole of being which is independent of thought," the objectivity of which is "antecedent to all cognition," in contrast to "that which is merely thought."
Works for me.
Both evil and the falsehood on which it depends represent an "'ontic' contradiction, a contradiction of being, something that opposes reality, that does not correspond to 'the thing.'" In short, it "does not reach the object," again, because the bridge to reality has been burned by journalistic and tenured arsonists. Only objectivity, which is to say, "fidelity to being," represents "the proper attitude of man."
For us, objectivity and subjectivity are complementary, but as is the case with all primal complementarities one must be prior, in this case objectivity.
We are always situated between the two -- or between immanence and transcendence -- but to deny the link between them plunges us into mere bonehead scientism at one end and aggravated subjectivism at the other.
This vertical space we inhabit is "both an abyss and a bridge," which is what makes crossing it such an adventure. Separating the two obliterates the luminous mystery of cognition and instead plunges us into mere absurdity. "It is this very relation of the intellect and the reality which constitutes the conceptual content of 'truth.'"
Truth is nothing else than the relation of identity between the mind and reality, a relation consisting in and accomplished in knowledge...
Our dynamic cognition "advances toward the essence of the thing" whereby it "reaches the object" and "attains the truth of real things." Otherwise to hell with it, because we cannot know the real truth or accomplish the objective good, for "The good is essentially dependent upon and interiorly penetrated by knowledge." Conversely,
all evil rests in some way upon an error, upon a supposed knowledge. He is good "who does the truth." "The good, then, presupposes the true."
That's about the size of it.