Homo verbosius

That’s you dude!

Which is why the post breaks off in mid-argument. I am not a literary sadist:

Just as one cannot speak of consciousness without being conscious, or of life without being alive, one cannot speak of language without speaking.

Hard truths! (/sarc)

You would be surprised at how much can go wrong with a philosophy if one does not begin with the self-evident.

For language is prima facie evidence of transcendence, the very means through which we may explore scientific, philosophical, spiritual, and metaphysical concepts that go beyond the tangible. Some may argue that language is simply an artifact of natural selection, but here again, if this is true, it is false, since such a statement transcends biology and neurology.

Language does not explain transcendence, rather presumes it. Animals are capable of using signs, but only the Anthropos enters this immaterial dimension of meaning, which is hardly reducible to genetics, animal instinct, or concrete behaviors. Nevertheless, the metaphysic of scientism presumes a continuity between animal and human. However, as linguist Noam Chomsky has observed, “It’s about as likely that an ape will prove to have language ability as that there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for human beings to teach them to fly.”

While we can train a chimp to use words, it can only deploy them in an atomistic way, unconnected to the whole network of language and from other minds. For us, each word is connected to all the others, in a way reminiscent of how each subatomic particle is nonlocally related to all the others in the quantum field. Language is thoroughly entangled with itself, in that words are related to other words, and their meaning can shift and evolve based on its context and usage — much like how the properties of a quantum particle will change depending on its interaction with other particles. Like the subatomic world, language is a field of interior relations open at the top.

The possibility of language presupposes a lot of things, perhaps the most important being intersubjectivity. Language cannot create intersubjectivity, but is impossible in its absence. Language doesn’t merely presuppose intersubjectivity, it also serves as a powerful tool to deepen it. By providing a shared framework of symbols and meanings, language allows us to engage in the communication of abstractions transcending the immediate and tangible.

Language also presupposes the complementarity between Absolute and Infinite, for we (English speakers) are at once constrained by the finite 26 letters of the alphabet with which we have invented approximately 500,000 words so far. The list is finite but always growing, and I’m doing my part to invent new ones. Now, imagine trying to assemble a “dictionary of sentences.” This would be an impossible task, for nearly everything we say has never been said before in the same way.

The point is, like the Cosmos it mirrors, language is both finite and unbounded. Every time we speak a unique sentence, we are participating in continuous creation: we are taking the finite potential of the alphabet and actualizing never-before-heard specifications of it.

Speech has a two-fold function and therefore a potential two-fold dysfunction. The first dysfunction is a corruption or denial of the link between language and reality or word and thing, which means that reality is no longer accessible or intelligible. The second dysfunction occurs between persons, colloquially known as “lying,” but the real problem, whether witting or unwitting, is the communication of unreality instead of reality.

So if the first dysfunction makes us incapable of knowing reality, the second one causes us to distort or miscommunicate its nature. Obviously there can be no philosophy in the absence of language, but we must always be wary of its capacity to deceive, for as Wittgenstein says, “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language,” and the battle never ends.

A quagmire.

Or a draw at best.

In Genesis, God lets Adam name the animals. Presumably Adam did not name them Jeffrey, Walter, Donnie, ad nauseam, but rather, lion, monkey, bird, etc. In other words, Adam was not a nominalist, rather, was capable of intuiting universals and essences -- immateriality and transcendence -- from the get-go.

Nevertheless, language obviously cuts both ways: without it one cannot tell the truth, but nor can one lie without it -- including to oneself. It can both veil and unveil, such that the Anthropos can be a genius, a knave, or an idiot, and everything in between. The best I can do is try not to be an idiot, which means using language properly, and not abusing it or you.

If communication is irreducible, it is because so too is relation, in this case the relation between word and an extramental reality that includes immaterial essences. Otherwise we’re back to giving each cow a first name instead of seeing universal cowness. Is language a wall or a window? A closed prison or an open door? It can be a prison, but it is always locked from the inside.

Prudence dictates that we should not declare our independence from reality for light and transient causes such as reading a book by Derrida. He claims there is nothing beyond the text, so language is indeed a closed system that can never get beyond itself to the reality it is supposed to map. This constitutes a life term of solitary confinement in a Cosmos we can never actually reach. Language is divorced from any real world referent, and therefore has “no ultimate significance, and nothing is ultimately communicated through it. It is, in a word, pointless -- pointless dissemination without the possibility of any real communion or redeeming communication…” (Betz).

Is there any way out of the darkness? Schuon writes that “man is not a closed system, although he can try to be so.” However, “In reality, man is as if suspended between animality and divinity; now modern thought -- be it philosophical or scientific -- admits only animality, practically speaking.”

How do we put the Light back into the Enlightenment that landed us in this darkness? I suggest we do so by first acknowledging this ontological darkness, which essentially tries to replace the divine Light with the human, but this is to sever the manifestation from the Principle, the effect from its cause.

Just as our eyes are conformed to physical light, the Intellect not only has access to this higher Light, but is of the same substance as that Light. It is “At once mirror of the supra-sensible and itself a supernatural ray of light” (Schuon). Here it is “necessary to distinguish between a ‘created Intellect’ and an ‘uncreated Intellect,’ the latter being the divine Light and the former the reflection of this Light at the center of Existence.”

This central Light is nothing less than the rays of the Theos into the Anthropos, or as John puts it “the true Light which gives light to every man who comes into the world.” In contrast to what was said above about the deadness of language enclosed in itself, John says that in the Logos is “the life, and the life was the light of men.”

According to Bina & Ziarani, “Mental faculties are reflections of a deep-seated, limitless source -- but on a limited plane.” However, “because it takes its light from that limitless source, it is able to point to its own limitation, and also to its limitless source.” In short, we are able to use the light of reason to reason about the limits of reason, and it is “precisely because man’s mental faculties take their light from a limitless source within him that he cannot be confined to mechanistic systematizations” (ibid.).

In short, to say “that reason is the sole criterion of truth... is not rationally provable,” for as we know from our Gödel, “no sufficiently logical system can prove itself true from within itself, that is, by logical argument” (ibid.).

The Enlightenment essentially confined us to Plato’s cave, to a world of appearances with no access to the Light. But for Aquinas, “The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing else than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light,” and “the interior light of the mind is the principal cause of knowledge.”

In a certain sense, Platonism is simply what philosophy is, i.e., the effort to apprehend the enduring reality beneath, behind, or above the flux of contingency and change. As Schuon puts it, “all the speculations of Plato or Socrates converge upon a vision which transcends the perception of appearances and which opens on to the Essence of things.”

Gödel himself was a “committed Platonist,” and according to his “own Platonist understanding of his proof, it shows us that our minds, in knowing mathematics, are escaping the limitations of man-made systems, grasping the independent truths of abstract reality” (Goldstein).

This In-Between existence is again our permanent condition: “Somehow we participate and must participate in both the temporal and the spiritual, if we are to live lives esteemed to be fit for human beings” (Webb). The choice is ours, even though there is really no choice, any more than we can choose to ignore gravity. We can, but not really, for the person who denies reality is nevertheless subject to it.

“Surely,” says Hart, “ you must grasp that language is the very epitome of top-down causation,” for reasons touched on above vis-à-vis Polanyi. And what is at the top? You don’t have to (yet) say Theos, but certainly it involves vertical openness to the transcendent pole of our existential tension.

Whatever the case may be, the “entire substance” of language “lies beyond the physical altogether” (ibid.). As we have said, as per Robert Rosen, it is semantics that conditions syntax from above: “meaning depends wholly upon the irreducibly higher level of symbolic thought,” such that “the top-down causality of the semantic level determines the physical ordering that embodies it…” (Hart).

Sounds like we’re gonna need a bigger science -- or at least a bigger philosophy of science.

Correct: in order to be complete, the science of Cosmos requires the meta-science of the Anthropos. The Anthropos is again proof that nature is supra-natural, since we are the ones who transcend nature in both positing, knowing, and communicating it. We are always bound by those two horizons we can never reach: immanence dissolves into a micromist of indeterminate potential with a tendency to exist, while transcendence points to the macromystery of indeterminate creative potential that cannot not exist.

Might want to clarify that gusty mush of mystagoguery.

This might be the appropriate time to recall the purpose of the symbol O, which functions as a placeholder for the ultimately unknowable but infinitely intelligible pole of transcendence. It is simultaneously the ground of all understanding while surpassing all categories thereof. In a brazen act of anticipatory plagiarism, Bernard Lonergan alludes to the “natural orientation of the mind toward that infinite horizon of being as intelligible truth.” This Great Attractor accounts for our ineradicable epistemophilia, the asymptotic quest for the truth we are forever approaching. So ravenous is our appetite for truth that we may settle for the junk food of ideology or Quantum Hogwash just to fill our empty heads with something to chew on and to furnish us with readymade opinions to inflict on the innocent and gullible.

To be continued…

The section successfully keeps language inside the cosmotheandric framework rather than treating it as a later human invention imposed on a mute cosmos. The analogies to quantum entanglement and nonlocality are apt: both language and the quantum field are presented as fields of interior relations open at the top. The critique of closed linguistic systems (Derrida) and closed biological systems (strict continuity with animal signaling) is consistent with the earlier critiques of closed physical systems.

What remains provisional — and appropriately so given the break — is the precise metaphysical status of the “uncreated Intellect” / divine Light and its relation to the human intellect. The section asserts participation without yet fully specifying the mode of that participation; that development is deferred, as expected, toward Book II and especially Book III.

The argument continues to advance without losing internal coherence. Language has been relocated from a potential embarrassment for reductionism into positive evidence for the book’s vertical, relational, and logospheric claims. The mid-argument break is clean enough; the next movement can pick up either the further analysis of intentionality or the concrete implications for the Anthropos.

The Bridge of the Logosphere

It is quite difficult to stick to the 1,000 word limit. I feel like I was just getting started:

One lesson to be learned from our brief visit to the subatomic world is that reality is always a critique of our models of reality. For example, Newton had a map of reality, but the reality of quantum physics demonstrated the inadequacy of the map. Part of the incomprehensibility of quantum physics has to do with the persistence of trying to understand it in terms of the old dualistic map. But if we reframe it in terms of the cosmotheandric map, then its reality fits right in there, what with its intrinsic relationality, openness, verticality, complementarity, et al. If ultimate reality is substance-in-relation, then we should not be confounded if this is mirrored in the microworld. Nor should we be surprised that the Anthropos is entangled with the Cosmos at every level of the vertical spectrum, from top to bottom. Rather, our map assumes as much.

Really, it is again just a matter of turning the Cosmos back right-side up. We can only pretend to eliminate verticality from the Cosmos, because the first result of doing so is to eliminate the Anthropos, not excluding the physicist who, like the restavus, exists in the corporeal world, and who measures and makes pronouncements on the subcorporeal. But what if the subcorporeal is dependent upon the corporeal? Or, at the very least, instead of viewing one as reducible to the other, why not regard them as complementary? After all, we never see one without the other. And as we know by now, in any such complementarity one of the poles must be ontologically prior, in this case the vertical, for no amount of horizontality could ever give rise to verticality, whereas the converse is eminently possible in an open Cosmos that features both bottom-up and top-down causation.

Analogously, letters don’t spontaneously organize themselves into words, or words into sentences. Nor can we deduce grammar from words, rather grammar operates at a higher level in order to organize words and sentences. And above grammar is meaning, because one can utter a perfectly grammatically correct sentence that is devoid of meaning, such as the famous “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” So grammar is one thing, meaning another. The point is, as expressed by Robert Rosen, semantics (i.e., meaning) can never be reduced to syntax (or grammatical order). Likewise, the meaning of the Cosmos cannot be reduced to its mathematical grammar and syntax.

Any mathematical statement is indeed a form of syntax, because it is just another language. But just because it is syntactically correct doesn’t render it meaningful, 26 dimensional string theory being a quintessential case. The latter is actually a desperate attempt to force quantum physics to make the sense it doesn’t make on its own.

To circle back to the top of this section, the reason for the spate of new age books of quantum (fill-in-the-blank) is precisely because the authors invert the Cosmos and imagine that the bottom end is the top, such that the weirdness of the quantum realm is more real than our corporeal world, when again, it is the shadow of this one, not its ground or principle. If the lower is the principle of the higher, then no wonder it is such a fount of metaphysical bullshit.

A Logospheric Bridge Made of Speech

Intellect is the satellite of the Deity. --Archytas

Now, the history of the Cosmos is a sequential unfolding of its potential, which has in principle been implicitly present since the beginning of time. Obviously this included the potential to give rise to self-conscious beings who can know about this potential. Indeed, so fine-tuned is this anthropic potential that one might even suspect that it is necessary for the Cosmos to give rise to observers. Remember, reality is a critique of our models, so the reality of the Anthropos is a critique of any model that pretends to eliminate the Anthropos from the map. It is the mother of all performative contradictions, which is to say, diction that runs contra to itself.

Suffice it to say that we won’t get anywhere without a principle of possibility, which is to say, indeterminacy, woven into the Cosmos. Absent this principle, then all is necessity, and you are either a religious Calvinist or a scientistic one: it doesn’t matter if you say it is all God or all matter, for either view squeezes the Anthropos out of the picture.

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an I.

That is true: there are philosophies that eliminate the philosopher, but why would you do that? For the Anthropos is the thin membrane, or bridge, between nothing and everything. The open Cosmos points beyond itself to a metacosmic origin, ground, and telos, which in turn points down to its creative entailments below.

In our cosmotheandric vision, the Anthropos is a living suspension bridge stretched between two infinitudes, a transcendent horizon above and an immanent one below. From our end the bridge is built of language, and language is only possible in a Cosmos that is already interiorly related. It is ordered to both poles of existence, but most especially the transcendent, insofar as 95% of speech is about something abstract, immaterial, and transcendent. It is also relevant that 95% of our mind is either unconscious or supraconscious. The Freudian model of an iceberg with an egoic 5% at the top is true as far as it goes, except to say that the unseen berg extends both above and below. Trying to eliminate transcendence from one’s vocabulary would consign one to animality, since we would be exiled from contact with those realities that distinguish us from the beasts, or from anything higher than daytime TV.

You might think this section would be more appropriate for Book II, the Anthropos, but it seems the Cosmos is made of language and that we merely ride piggyback on it. Again, if this place isn’t already a logosphere, we could never make it into one by emitting a bunch of animal noises. As described by Leinhart, in the absence of the prior mutual entanglement of subject and object, “language would not exist at all.” Rather, language may be analogized to a Möbius strip “in which inside and outside form a continuum.”

Metaphor, for example, “depends on the mutual indwelling of word in word, and of world in word.... if words indwell words, and if things and words are mutually indwelling, then metaphor is not imposed from outside but a revelation of the character of language, the intimate interpenetration of one word by others.” Thus language itself is already a revelation before it reveals anything else. Not for nothing is it said that in the beginning was the Word. If the Cosmos were wordless, then there would be no words, period.

The question arises as to why the Cosmos is anything other than the immutable Big Noun of Parmenides, or how there can be anything other than the One. The latter is easy to understand. It is not the problem; rather, we are.

But we also know that the Cosmos is the Big Verb of Heraclitus, always on the move. Nor can we leave out the qualitative adjectives that modify Big Noun, not to mention the adverbs that attach to Big Verb. And let us not forget the most underrated but consequential of all: Big Preposition, without which we could be linked to neither Big Noun nor Big Verb. It should be clear at this point that if we can know this about that, it is thanks to the prior aboutness of things, otherwise nothing could be about anything.

Aboutness is at once mysterious and self-evident, because it is an immaterial but nevertheless real relation between objects and other objects (e.g., nonlocality and complex dynamic systems), objects and subjects (intelligibility and depth), or subjects and other subjects (empathy and communication). There are clearly immaterial links between Anthropos and Cosmos, hence the beauty and intelligibility of the latter, but cosmotheandrism posits an equally necessary link between Anthropos and Theos, the latter going by various names in various traditions such as spirit, divine spark, atman, nous, logos, shechinah, shakti, prana, inner light, chi, slack, et al. I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ the spirit is blown’ around out there, tryin’ to offer a little vertical assistance to the restavus sinners.

Yes, but is it true?

If you’re asking me, the answer is no, I don’t believe in it, rather, only rely upon it, whatever you want to call it, much like any other person who has no idea where inspiration comes from, only that it in-spires. We have already touched on this vis-à-vis the source of music, and here is another considered opinion from a venerable authority, Keith Richards: “I don’t write songs. They come to me and I just pass them on. I’m just an antenna, a receiver. There is only one song, and it’s been playing since the beginning of time. We just happen to catch a few bars of it now and then.”

The note is eternal, I hear it, it sees me.

Who said that?

Correct. Pete Townshend.

Well, it is the same with language. It is a special thing, because only it has the capacity to bridge the intelligence and intelligibility of this world. Think of how the Cosmos itself seems to be held together by various mathematical equations, math being just a highly abstract language.

The literal meaning of the word “symbol” is to “throw together” or across, as if words join together two disparate things. But before human speech is the not-so-simple matter of pointing, for words merely appropriate this prior capacity for one thing to refer to another.. Raymond Tallis’s Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence is about this seemingly mundane reality of pointing, which is not only much more consequential than we realize, but in many ways goes to the essence of what the Anthropos is, for it touches on our irreducible intersubjectivity. What really defines the uniqueness of human subjectivity is its aboutness or “intentionality.” If you get my point, it is because you have gotten what the point is about. Which, of course, adverts to the triune structure of communication, which involves one mind successfully transmitting to a second mind the truth of a third thing.

Even leaving language to the side, the simple act of pointing already points to the realities of intentionality and intersubjectivity. When you get the point, it is as if there were a line of transmission running from my mind, through my eyes and down my arms, into the keyboard and toward its terminal point in your head. This is something no other animal can do, and is a metaphor for every transmission of knowledge. This paragraph is not only pointed directly at the inside of your head, but the words and letters themselves are instances of pointing: letters point to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, etc. You won’t get my point by pointing back to the letters of which the point is composed. Those are just pointers, and it is that to which they point that counts.

The point is, language is our “passport out of nature.” Other animals are enclosed in their nature, but our anthropic nature includes an intentionality constituting “a uniquely human breach in the solitude of sentient creatures” that “takes us decisively out of our solitary, transient bodies, subject to the laws of nature” (Tallis). One might say we are always outside and beyond ourselves, for the simple reason that this is a mirror of the very structure of being.

Well, don’t point! It can’t be known.

We can’t look at it?

No, that’s it, you’ve seen enough of that one.

Perhaps for now, but we’ll circle back to this point in Books II and III.

[That last passage is an example of a reference — in this case to Spinal Tap — no one will get. For your convenience, many such self-referential jokes have been eliminated from the text.]

Two points remain under-developed at this stage, which is appropriate given that the full treatment of the Anthropos is deferred:

1. The precise character of the “principle of possibility/indeterminacy” that prevents pure necessity (whether Calvinist or materialist) from eliminating the Anthropos still needs sharper metaphysical specification.

2. The assertion that 95 % of speech concerns the abstract/immaterial, and that the unconscious/supraconscious extends both above and below the ego, is suggestive but will require more evidence when the focus shifts fully to the human subject.

Overall the section advances the narrative without losing coherence. Quantum physics has been relocated inside the vertical hierarchy rather than left as an unassimilated residue. Language and aboutness are now on the table as further evidence that the Cosmos is ordered to intelligence from the start. The bridge metaphor for the Anthropos is well-placed and sets up Book II cleanly.

The argument continues to hold together. The critical work against reductionism and dualism remains strong; the constructive claims about logospheric structure and aboutness as primitive are coherent within the system and await fuller development.