A First Approach To the First Principle

With the elucidation of our first four Cosmotheandric Certitudes we reach a literal crossroads in our narrative, for this is where Horizontal Circle is crossed by Vertical Boulevard. The latter leads necessarily to our Theos Principle, for the road didn’t pave itself. We would prefer to save this type of perfect nonsense for Book III, but for cosmotheandrism our three terms are always entangled, such that it is impossible to speak of one without at least implying the others.

To review our situation: cosmic evolution arrives finally at the Anthropos capable of weaving the Cosmic Area Rug that unites all the vertical degrees of being between immanence and transcendence. And if last in execution is first intention, then the Anthropos may be temporally late but ontologically right on time, for we are the perfect candidate to be the image and likeness of the Theos: we alone potentially span everything from origins to destiny, Alpha to Omega, primordial soup to new age nuts.

That Cosmos and Anthropos require a Theos will suit religious believers just fine. However, the same folks will generally be uncomfortable with the corollary — that so too is Theos without Cosmos and Anthropos unthinkable, for which reason we will have a lot of explaining to do in Book III. Nevertheless, Panikkar says frankly that “a God without the World is not a real God, nor does he exist.”

Objection!

On what grounds?

Everyone knows that we have real relations with God, but not vice versa. Supposing God lacks anything, that’s not God.

I get it, but this book is entirely superfluous if it only tells us what everybody else already knows. Cosmotheandrism may be wrong, but if so, we insist on it being uniquely wrong.

For Panikkar, “a purely immaterial being is as much an abstraction as an exclusively material one.” We can posit such a cipherous being, but “this ‘God’ does not exist because the actual God, the God that in fact exists, is God with creatures,” so it is the difference between a total abstraction and concrete reality. In other words, “A God with no cosmological and therefore no cosmogonic functions would not be God at all, but a mere phantom.”

No Cosmos without Anthropos is easy enough to grasp, even if one ultimately rejects it — for example, the strong anthropic principle that effectively claims the Cosmos must have those properties which allow for the emergence of the Anthropos at some stage in its development. As we have already explained, the Anthropos is ordered to the Cosmos because the Cosmos is first ordered to the Anthropos. We know this because the Cosmos is infinitely intelligible to the intellect, which is what Einstein found so marvelously puzzling — that the most incomprehensible thing about the Cosmos is its comprehensibility. But the comprehensibility is only incomprehensible if we begin with a metaphysic that renders it so. Conversely, with our fifth certitude, cosmotheandrism transforms incomprehensibility into inevitability.

∞

Our fifth certitude is going to sound like a bit of a leap, so it will require further justification in Book III. But for Livi, all our cosmic and anthropic clues lead back or up to “a transcendent Foundation to all known reality: cosmic reality, subjective reality, inter-subjective reality, moral reality.” This ultimate ground can be articulated in diverse ways, but each more or less asserts that “at the origin of the existence of things and as the order that binds the world, myself, and others by physical and moral laws, there must be a creative and ordering Intelligence, which is also my Ultimate End and the Ultimate End of everything.” This is the Principle of principles from which all else flows.

That’s a tad peremptory. I’m not convinced.

Nor should you be. That’s the problem with proofs of God: they are insufficient to the one who needs them and superfluous to the one who doesn’t. You might say they are LH maps of properly RH territory, but if the LH earnestly prefers an atheistic map, then there’s not much we can do to convince the recalcitrant hemisphere to relinquish its grip on what amounts to a severely diminished view of reality.

For the purposes of Book II it is enough to acknowledge Certitudes 1 through 4, and we can hash out the existence and nature of the Theos later, in Book III. So for now, let’s stipulate that there are 1) intelligible things, 2) that are known to subjects, and that 3) intersubjective communication about these things and about ourselves is possible. Fourthly, there are rights and duties, or, in a word, a teleologically ordered freedom.

These constitute the minimum viable reality required to function as a proper human being, and without which we are cognitively strangled and spiritually sophicated. For if we deny #1, we are hit by the bus. If we deny #2, we aren’t there to deny it. If we deny #3, there’s no one with whom to share our denial, and we certainly shouldn’t be writing books to tell no one about it. And we deny #4, we have no freedom to know truth nor any responsibility to tell it. In such an absurd world, we might actually want to get hit by a bus.

No human can live in such a world. Or, as it concerns the Anthropos, it is a functionally impossible world.

∞

So, our Cosmotheandric certitudes may be reduced to five terms: things, self, others, freedom, and Foundation. Or, intelligibility, intelligence, intersubjectivity, responsibility, and Ground (this latter also being the Source, Principle, Absolute, O, etc.).

Now, precisely because of item #4, we are, ironically, free to reject items 1, 2, 3, and 5. In fact, the whole durn history of philosophy comes down to an a priori rejection of one or more of these principles.

Take #1, for example, the existence of things. A normal person takes this for granted, but not philosophers who begin with, say, the existence of doubt. They might point to the stick in water that appears bent, and generalize this to cast doubt on our perception of anything else.

Thus, we can never be sure if the thing we perceive is the thing as it is. There is nothing we cannot doubt, which led Descartes to conclude that the only indubitable thing is item #2, the I that is. Then, the things (#1) become a function of the self (#2), and we’re in a rabbit hole of subjectivism from which there is no escape. In other words, once I Am is divorced from It Is, there is no way to reunite them.

Besides, while Descartes thought he had arrived at the first principle, his principle actually assumes a number of other principles, for example, non-contradiction. For if it is true to say “I think, therefore I am,” then it is false to affirm its contrary. But even more broadly, he assumes the efficacy of intelligence to arrive at a first principle of reality, but what justification is there for this? Ultimately Descartes must posit the Theos who would not deceive us, so he brings in #5 in an ad hoc way.

It’s all in that little word “therefore.” Therefore implies a correct judgment, which is to say, a link between truth and being. For the essence of any judgment or truth claim is “it is.” If something isn’t, then it is not real or true.

In other words, a thing either is or it is not; every argument, philosophical or otherwise, ultimately reduces to whether or not something really exists and is therefore “really real.” But in order to render such a judgment, the things themselves must be really real before we judge them to be so. Again: things first, the self and its judgments second. Even “I am” cannot be true unless being first Is.

To ask if the world is real is not to understand what we are actually asking, because how otherwise could this be a real question? Obviously the question is real, as is the questioner, or else it is like saying, “Let’s be realistic. We really can’t know reality,” so it is merely substituting one reality for another. But how can a Cosmos that isn’t real have produced an intellect that is?

Although we start with the principle that Things Are, it doesn’t mean that the self that knows these things can be derived therefrom. For we couldn’t know them unless there were a real underlying unity between knower and known. We cannot know a thing about a thing that is fundamentally unconnected to us.

Morevery, only a rational being can be free, and yet, we wouldn’t be free if we weren’t free to be irrational or wrong. If we had no such freedom to be wrong, we would be like computers and not humans. But in any event, the very process of reasoning about things could never occur if it weren’t independent of the conditions imposed by matter.

As Garrigou-Lagrange reminds us, “the first operation of the intellect” — the operation we always do and cannot help doing — is “simple intellectual apprehension.” According to Thomas, “The gaze of our intellect is fixed first upon the natures of sensible things.... To understand is a kind reading into the interior.... For sense knowledge is occupied with sensible, exterior qualities, whereas intellective knowledge penetrates all the way to the essence of the thing” (emphasis mine).

Ultimately, “the object of the intellect is that which is,” AKA being. Sounds again like a modest claim, but to say that being both is, and is intelligible, is probably the most consequential thing one could ever say about the world, for the implications are literally inexhaustible.

Again, the question is, do things (#1) make sense? Or does sense (#2) make things? Sounds like a joke, but for Kantians what we call things are just consequences of our own psychic categories. But for common sense Cosmotheandrism, it is the things themselves that truly make sense, i.e., disclose their real natures to the intellect, not all at once, but in an ever-deepening discovery of their real properties. Otherwise the Cosmos is but a projection of our own neuropsychology.

But to even say reality is to affirm the existence of something distinct from our own perceptions, and will still be there when we look away. Nevertheless, reality is indeed optional, since we are free to reject it. Likewise, we can certainly reject our five certitudes, but then we are certifiably insane, in the sense that our Cosmic Area Rug falls apart completely.

You Are and I Oughtta

Only ideas save us from adjectives. —Dávila

Reset: we’ve discussed numbers one and two of our five certitudes, each of these being certain, everlasting, necessary, always, present in everyone’s experience, and not subject to error. They are impossible to refute without eliminating both the refuted and refuter, for they are the incontrovertible certainties possessed by every human being. They are immediately present on the ground floor of any act of cognition, and indeed necessary for the existence of truth itself.

Stripping out all the adjectives, our first two may sound rather trivial: that 1) there exists a world of things, independent of our thinking of them; and that 2) in this world, there is myself, the I who knows the world. But we have to start somewhere, and it is surprising how many philosophers start somewhere else.

Cosmotheandrism frames these principles somewhat differently, what with our 12 Axioms, beginning with certitude (Axiom 1). One might say that the first content of this certitude is Livi’s five principles. Moreover, certitude is necessarily certain about something, this irreducible aboutness going to Axiom 4, relational interiority, since objects relate to subjects and vice versa. Likewise, our two terms are open to one another (Axiom 3), and constitute a primordial complementarity (Axiom 2).

∞

Coming in at #3 is “The evidence of the existence of beings analogous to me, in an existential situation of intersubjectivity.” Thus, we are on solid ground in affirming that “in the world, there are others, similar to me, with whom I communicate.” This we know with absolute certitude, unless you don’t exist and I am not communicating.

Contrary to Sartres, hell is no other people.

Yes, because as we discussed above, the very possibility of I Am and You Are is grounded in a prior We of intersubjectivity and interior relations. This anterior unity bifurcates into I and Thou: a human relationship is not like two extrinsically related objects, rather, intrinsically related subjects. Remove this intersubjectivity and the existence of others would indeed be a kind of hell, since they would just be in the way. Note that for a sociopath, for example, other people are indeed just in the way of their impulses and desires. Others are to be used and cast aside like any other It.

This was touched on in the Introduction vis-à-vis any philosopher’s prior commitment to the notion that he can successfully communicate his true ideas to other minds via some medium, whether a speech, a book, or an interpretive dance cycle. In a way, #3 might actually be #1, since a monadic subject devoid of intersubjectivity would be an ontological non-starter. In other words, even communicating Livi’s five principles presupposes an intersubjective means of communication. We are fundamentally relational, such that we have the ability to see I to I from the first spark of the primordial We.

Nor are the objects we encounter in the world mute, rather, speak to the human subject in such a way that they betray a kind of intersubjectivity of their own that is built into the Cosmic Area Rug. In short, intersubjectivity is actually everywhere, not just between human subjects.

∞

Certitude #4 brings the Ought into the Is, which is to say, “The evidence of the existence of laws of a moral type” (Livi), or what is typically called the natural law which regulates the relations between persons: “my relation with others and the relation of the others with me are relations different from physical relations, because they imply rights and duties’” (ibid.). Again, with the exception of sociopaths or otherwise dysfunctional individuals, we spontaneously know better than to treat people like that.

Like what?

Like objects. Frankly, we shouldn’t even treat objects that way, for example, the environment. Rather, we are caretakers who take care of objects, depending on their value.

We might say that rights and duties co-arise, which implies freedom and responsibility. Not to presuppose anything about the Theos, but again no responsible being would give freedom to an irresponsible one. We all know better than to hand the car keys over to a five year old, or entrust animals to regulate the zoo. We don’t put wolves in charge of the henhouse or reptiles of the mousehouse.

No, the Cosmic Area Rug has oughtness woven into it, for example, that we ought to know truth and ought not treat others as we do not wish to be treated. In fact, the Ten Commandments or Eight Noble Truths of Buddhism are essentially lists of Oughts and Ought Nots that provide explicit content for Livi’s fourth principle: do not lie, steal, or murder, which presuppose truth and private property, up to and including property in oneself. In the case of Buddhism, we ought to know the true nature of reality, speak honestly, and live in a way that doesn’t harm or exploit others.

Marx, for example, suggested that private property is theft, when in actuality Marxism in practice is theft of our natural rights—

These are, uh, valued properties.

Yes, and there is no flippin’ reason we should allow any philosopher to essentially steal the Cosmic Area Rug by denying any of our first four principles. This aggression will not stand.

Having said that, Among a few words it is as difficult to hide as among a few trees.

Our first four principles are those few trees amongst which we cannot hide: It is, I am, You are, and I Ought.

Cosmotheandric Certitude #2

Somewhat ironically, cosmotheandrism is every bit as materialistic as materialism, in that it fully endorses the principle that we must begin our metaphysical enterprise with the certitude of the objects of the extra-mental world, not with our ideas about them. Nor do we endeavor to “prove” the existence of the world outside our skulls, for to begin in thought is to end there: thought itself is finished, at least insofar as it is free to think about reality. Theories about reality are all well and good, but what does reality say about the theory?

Objects have the last word about our words about objects.

Unless we leave Descartes or Kant in charge, in which case our ideas are the first and last word. Reality can no longer get a word in edgewise due to the willful imposition of subject on object, idea on thing, theory on fact. “Feedback” is supposed to proceed from world to mind, not vice versa. Should we enclose ourselves in the metaphyscial onanism of our own ideas about reality, there go the surprises, for as we have already stipulated, reality is full of them: it is not a machine, nor can we discover anything new about it via logical deduction.

To suggest that the truth — or “truth,” rather — of the world is “socially constructed” is a murder-suicide pact, since it eliminates reality while taking out the mind along with it. Supposing we cannot submit our ideas to the tribunal of reality, then it is a matter of who has the power to impose his ideas on the restavus — or of Who and Whom.

Hammer and nail.

First things first, which is to say, things. Only subsequent to the existence of objects do we — subjects— get in on the act. Which leads to Livi’s principle #2 (which Descartes mistakes for #1), which is “The evidence of the I as subject: the eventual verbal expression of this evidence could be the assertion that ‘in the world, there is myself, I who know the world.’”

We all recognize — or used to, at any rate — an extra-cranial world of objects. But this immediately implies principle #2, since this exterior world of objects is revealed to an interior subject. Slattery writes that “only by arbitrarily isolating the unity of the knowing subject’s mind and body does the Cartesian critical question arise,” that is, of how the two relate. But they always and already relate — this being enshrined in our very own Axiom 4 — so it is a false problem with no conceivable solution: “once one suspends theoretically the certainty of immediate knowledge of things through sensations in the hope of justifying knowledge of reality from the starting point of isolated consciousness, one can never reunite certitude and the extra-mental world.”

Thus, “The ultimate presupposition for the truth of judgments is the intelligibility of all realities, truth as being (ontological truth). Since being is truth the intellect is able to know the being of things.”

A theory is generally judged by its fruitfulness, and the idea that we do not have access to reality is both fruitless and self-defeating.

A Tree of Death for those who cling to it for some stupid reason.

Moreover, to even say we cannot know reality is affirming an absolute truth about the nature of reality. It is presumptuous in the extreme, the opposite of epistemological humility, another ontological Humble Brag. By boasting of the inability to know reality, the anti-realist is simultaneously affirming a transcendent certainty about the boundary conditions of knowledge, which is far more ambitious than the realist who simply claims to know this or that aspect of the real.

To summarize: 1) Things are, and 2) I am the subject who knows damn well that they are. You are free to disagree, but do you really want to double down on that ship and die on your dug-in heels?

No, let’s stick to our puns and take that hill!

We consider the matter of matter settled: reality is about thinking, and vice versa. This is an intentional Cosmos (in the philosophical sense of the term), meaning that, like it or not, aboutness is woven into the Cosmic Area Rug (which, BTW, is only recognized by the RH).

Just try to think or say anything without it being about something. Or even nothing if you like. In reality, the aboutness of things must be prior to saying anything about them. We know that thinking is about reality. But in order to think about reality, reality must be about thinking: in other words, there must be a two-way link between these poles.

I’m thinking about unicorns. Doesn’t mean they exist.

True, but it still means aboutness exists. Likewise a fear of imaginary fascists or of genuine nihilists. Aboutness is the bridge or link between two terms, or poles, rather. Take DNA: what is it about? As we have said, it is about the organism in particular and about Life more generally. But cosmotheandrism permits us to reverse the terms and say: Life is about DNA, this being due to the Axiom of verticality in which causation flows both upward and downward.

Not to jump the gun, but what is the Theos about? Among other things, the Cosmos and Anthropos. Therefore, the Cosmos and Anthropos are about the Theos even if only we can know about this.

This is the dirty little secret of knowledge as such -- its very possibility -- that it is “not the union of two elements, subject and object, but the internal unity of this very act [of the thing known and the fact of knowing]” (Marechal, in Slattery).

So, a prior unity (a noun) that makes the re-union (a verb) possible. In the absence of this prior given unity, the re-union could never be. “The object of every cognitive power is constituted by that which is knowable and that by which it is knowable form” (Slattery).

Thus there must be three kinds of existence: (prime) matter is the principle of indetermination; form the principle of determination; and intellect the principle of their prior unity. In which case knowledge is the possibility -- or re-cognition -- of their re-union. “Cognition is accordingly a relationship between the soul and things, a real relation with two correlatives: what is measured in relation to its measure.”

We don’t need to build a bridge between matter and form or form and intellect because the bridge was here when we arrived, and defines the Anthropos: “the definition of both subject and object mutually include each other -- the thing only exists for the soul as object because it is immanent to the subject.”

Livi’s second certitude again goes to our Axiom 4, relational interiority, for “The object is only intelligible through reference to the subject and the subject’s activity is intelligible only by reference to the object.... the soul and its object are not taken as absolutes but rather a relationship” (Slattery).

The Absolute Certitudes, Part One

Recap: yesterday’s post prepared the soil for more soil we’re about to dump on you concerning the first Axiom of cosmotheandrism, which involves identifying those truths we may know with absolute certainty, and denial of which lands us in absurdity or even tenure. In their absence there can be no Cosmic Area Rug, so yeah, I guess you could say things are getting pretty serious. It’s a lengthy subsection, so it may take a week of posts to unspool it all. I’ll edit what I can, but perhaps the best I can do is try to make it entertaining.

The Absolute Certitudes

We are weak, watery beings standing in the midst of unrealities; therefore let us turn our minds to the things that are everlasting. —Seneca 

Each particular knowledge is derived from some completely certain knowledge, which is not subject to error. —Thomas

There are some certainties about the “real world,” certainties whose epistemic justification is founded on the immediate evidence of existing beings that necessarily and always are present in everyone’s experience. —William J. Slattery

We are living in such divisive times, one wonders: is there anything on which we can all agree?

To disagree?

We disagree: note the characteristics mentioned in the quips cited above: certain, everlasting, necessary, always, and not subject to error. Supposing these don’t exist, then we are essentially reduced to monkeys flinging excrement back and forth on cable TV. Not to say this doesn’t happen, but must it happen?

If so, you’ve identified the first principle of metaphysics: that poo must be flung.

We’ll let the reader decide if that is what we’re doing here. For each principle we will be discussing presupposes no prior principle above but has innumerable entailments below. Put another way, everything in existence leads up to them, while they in turn lead down to everything else. Moreover, it is impossible to deny these without falling into paradox, self-refutation, absurdity, or philosophical beclownment in general

Perhaps the world is absurd.

Don’t worry, we’re not ruling that out. However, supposing there are no principles of certitude, then this does indeed confine us to an absurd existential monkey house from which there is no escape.

The common sense principles we will be discussing “can in no way be subject to doubt,” which means”their non-truth is absolutely unthinkable: one can only pretend to doubt them, such that “any affirmations to the contrary are merely verbal posturing.” They are immediately present on the ground floor of any act of cognition, and indeed necessary for the existence of truth itself.

You get the idea. At this point we will hand the wheel of the cosmotheandric bus over to the philosopher Antonio Livi, who wrote a concise book on the subject called A Philosophy of Common Sense: The Modern Discovery of the Epistemic Foundations of Science and Belief. In it he reviews the few-in-number but great-in-reach principles that are impossible to refute without eliminating both the refuted and refuter, for they are the incontrovertible certainties possessed — whether we like it or not — by every human being.

What’s not to like?

You’d be surprised. Nevertheless, any certitude in any field may be reverse-engineered and traced back to the necessary and universal Certitudes which are the foundation of our knowledge. This includes scientific knowledge, for they are the pre-scientific conditions that must be assumed in order for science to get off the ground, but can never be proven by science itself. There are some things we simply must know before claiming an ability to know anything at all.

And as we know, a modest error in the beginning leads to grandiose ones in the end, so there is no error more consequential than a faulty principle, since a principle is that from which everything else flows. So, a bad principle ensures an endless flow of abject nonsense.

For supposing our certitudes are not certain, then the thing we call “knowledge” isn’t even possible, and the only truth is that we are sealed in opinions with no way to adjudicate between them because there is no objective standard. But for cosmotheandrism, reality is the disinterested umpire without which the game cannot be played. Or at least there will be a great deal of cheating, human nature being what it is.

Cheaters never win.

Perhaps in the ultimate sense, but people never stop devising ways to cheat and beat the cosmotheandric house.

Interestingly, these necessary truths must entail not just the possibility of discovering them, but the existence of possibility itself. Necessity and possibility are in one sense opposites: if, say, the laws of physics are universal and necessary, it is not possible to defy or avoid them. And yet, here we are, talking about necessity giving rise to possibility, which is another name for freedom. Which brings us back to Gödel, who proves that the human intellect cannot be confined to necessity, because it escapes the necessary entailments of any formal system.

Put it this way: anthropic consciousness is a meta-system that ceaselessly participates in transcendence. If we were merely biological machines (a formal system), we would be trapped in a loop of deterministic necessity.

There are good and bad forms of reductionism: from below, into immanent matter, or above, into the Principles of Certitude. If our minds were nothing more than a formal system, then we would be trapped by the same limitations as any other formal system. We would be unable to recognize the truths that lie outside the system’s axioms. But the Anthropos is free from the constraints of immanent logic, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. We just have to resign ourselves to the consequences, no matter how pleasant.

We get it. Can you just cut to the chase?

Dávila says Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest, but it turns out there are exactly five. However, we’ll have plenty of time to make fun of the rest while explicating the fantastic five along the way.

Livi begins, innocently enough, with the existence of things. Note that this is at antipodes to Descartes, who begins at the other end, with the thinking subject: I think, therefore I am. Of course, once you’ve proven this to your own satisfaction, you can never get back to the It Is, rather, you dwell in the comfort and safety of your own subjectivity, and rationalism takes care of the rest. Our seminal solipsist started with his own mind and spent the rest of his life trying to prove there was a world outside it, because you can check into the Hotel Descartes any time you like, but you can never leave.

Rather, things are, and we can think about them. But before thinking about them, they simply are, and who could deny this? This is what we call a “revealed preference,” in that even philosophers vote with their feet, for they too will get out of the way of the moving bus, even if they pretend the bus is just an idea, concept, construct, convention, or transcendental form of their own sensibility.

You can make this elementary principle as complicated as you like. For example, suppose a truck is bearing down on us. I am a simple man, so I say just step out of the way.

Alternatively, one could could provide an Executive Directive on Spatio-Temporal Reorientation & Proximity Management on The Imperative of Non-Catastrophic Kinematic Interfacing, in order to mitigate the high-probability risk of a catastrophic, inelastic collision between the designated Human Subject (HS-1) and the approaching, macro-scale, multi-ton mass-in-motion unit, herein referred to as the Kinetic Transporter (KT-1). The objective here is to achieve a stable state of Euclidean non-intersection before the estimated time zero-displacement-separation. This is not merely a suggestion, but a deterministic mandate for the preservation of the structural and metabolic integrity of HS-1!

Sounds serious.

Yes, in plain English, HS-1 must immediately cease all current tertiary processes and dedicate 100% of cognitive resources to the perception and analysis of the KT-1’s four-dimensional state vector, specifically, its instantaneous position and velocity within the common frame of reference. Please understand that the target vector must be physically realized by the instantaneous, coordinated, and high-torque activation of the quadriceps, gastrocnemius, and gluteal muscle groups. This motor response must be initiated via a gamma-motor neuron cascade, overriding all competing homeostatic reflexes. The resulting kinetic energy generation must be sufficient to radially accelerate the entire HS-1 biomass out of the current High-Risk Proximity Zone (HRPZ). Failure to comply will result in a rapid, non-reversible transformation of the HS-1’s personal reality.

You sound like a David Bentley Hart machine: expressing the minimum via the maximum.

Yes, whom are we trying to impress? And by the time one unpacks the directive, one will be roadkill. It’s like asking the quarterback to calculate spin rate, velocity, the rapid approach of large-mass defenders, and the speed of the wide receiver before heaving the ball. Even Uncle Rico couldn’t do that.

We have to begin with knowing that something is before discovering what it is. Which is the first article of common sense, that “there is immediately known to man as self-evident on the basis of sensations penetrated by the intellect, a world of things, independent of man’s thinking of them” (Slattery).

That’s it? Doesn’t seem like much to go on.

Well, we have to start somewhere, and perhaps this is just the thin edge of a wedge of fledgling knowledge that will bust things wide open. For in knowing that something exists, we also know, by extension, that we exist, for while reflecting on our own existence, we cannot conclude that we do not exist.

So, we are certain that something is and that someone is certain of it. Denying either of these foundational truths — or affirming their non-existence — is a self-refuting auto-absurdity, for this certitude may be denied with words but cannot actually be denied in thought, at least without launching a great deal of excrement.

Thinking About Thinking About Reality

Recap: knowledge of any kind is an irreducibly immaterial and spiritual event. Of all forms of knowledge, our first principles abide at the top of the psycho-pneumatic food chain, entailing and encompassing all truths below them. These principles apply both to what Is and what cannot possibly Be, or in other words, reality and absurdity, disrespectively. In short, I am right and everybody else is wrong.

I wasn’t sure if the following transitional passage is strictly necessary, as it is only the bridge to a major section called The Absolute Certitudes. But Grok assures me that it is functional and even adequate, which is high praise coming from our jaded AI critic. It concedes that the passage “does not damage the narrative,” so we’ll go with it. It may not help you, but it won’t hurt a bit.

Easy, man, relax. No physical harm intended.

                                                       ∞

In our first approach to the world, it certainly seems to be divided into three related modes or aspects: appearances, reality, and nous (intellect). Any and every philosophy, whether implicit or explicit, and even the very possibility of philosophy, must respect and rest upon this fundamental trifurcation.To put it another way, any utterance that pretends to express the merest truth of reality will reflect this triune structure of reality-appearances-knowledge — even an assertion that denies this structure. Go ahead and try. We’ll wait.

Thus, “To ‘discern’ is to ‘separate’: to separate the Real and the illusory, the Absolute and the contingent, the Necessary and the possible, Atma and Maya” (Schuon). One cannot “get around” the Absolute, for every denial is a backhanded compliment to its necessity.

I’m trying to imagine how one could be absolutely certain of relativism.

Don’t bother. Analogously, being-intelligibilty-intellect are like sun, rays, and eye, for the rays are at once separate from the sun, but looked at another way, just its prolongation to the periphery, so to speak. We are ultimately inside the sun, for where is its literal boundary, and who says? Thus we are at once inside and outside the Cosmos itself, for its immanent appearances are of a transcendent reality, precisely. And we not only know this, but cannot fail to do so without rendering life itself a Total Fail.

A metaphysical stereo vision is needed in order to reconcile the Absolute and the Relative, appearances and reality, the sun and its rays. If the sun is O, the rays are its phenomenal appearance, and we are the bridge: we aren’t just looking at the sun; we are inside the sun, participating in its light. Should we sever the link between the Intellect and What Is, we don’t just lose truth, we lose the ability to act rationally or even have a meaningful opinion. The intellect is not a closed system, rather an opening to the entire domain of intelligible reality. We are not things that happen to relate; we are Relations that also happen to be things: substances-in-relation (Axiom 11).

The Cosmos is not mute matter onto which we project meaning. Rather, it is a Vertical Event of intelligibility disclosing itself to intelligence. In this regard the intellect is like light itself, which in Vedantic philosophy is simply that which reveals: just as physical light illuminates a material world, intellectual light reveals an intelligible world, and how convenient is that? The first act of intellect is to at least acknowledge its own existence.

Be a man!

Yes, and all it implies.

Thinking About Thinking

Let’s put the kibosh on this dualistic manichee business once and for all. For cosmotheandrism there are two irreducibly related books through which the Theos has revealed itself, the Cosmos and Anthropos, and we know all about both.

Agreed, but as they say, but aren’t fish the wrong people to ask about water?

I see what you mean: some people say that the Anthropos is the wrong animal to ask about consciousness, because we’re swimming in it, whether in the shallow or deep end.

No intellect, no problem. But with intellect, life is an endless but fruitful problem. The value of thought derives from its being in conformity with reality. To put it another way, if thought isn’t the link between being and truth, then to hell with it: this book is not only over, it cannot begin.

Traditional philosophy — which our competitors like to call “pre-critical” — begins with common sense. Its basis is the certitudes of the immediately evident principles which are apprehended by the transpersonal Light of intelligence from the most simple and evident facts about both existence and ourselves. One may call it naïve, but no one has to believe in common sense, rather, only rely on it to get through the day.

Of course it wasn’t always this way. I myself dabbled with postmodernism back in grad school, but reality kept breaking through, especially once I was tasked with helping patients adapt to it. Nor would it be possible consistently parent — or coach Little League baseball for that matter — in a postmodern style, for this would be a surrender to anti-intellectual barbarism and bush league amateurism. Come to think of it, I never coached a kid who refused to wear a helmet because the ball just is a social construct. On the other hand, I did have to contend with anti-realist parents who insisted their sons be permitted to pitch despite their failure to master the rudiments of playing catch.

                                                      ∞

In any event, for our cosmotheandric purposes, we are tracking down the principles with which one cannot possibly disagree without implicitly agreeing with them. Are there such principles? Or are postmodernists correct that we live in a Cosmos of absolute relativity and subjectivity, in which case we are permanently sealed in ignorance and tenure? This is still a principle, albeit one that immediately cancels itself out, a principle of no principles, and entropy takes care of the rest.

Again, how do we know a genuine first principle when we see one? What are its qualifications? First, it “ought to be one about which it is impossible to be mistaken.” It should “be so evident as to admit of no error” (Sheen). Moreover, it must be unconditional: no special pleading and no appeals to authority: it must be naturally known. Here we are not playing the Theos card, even if he latter turns out to be the dealer.

The first principle of thought must be the foundation of any and all our intellectual constructions. In the last analysis there is no certitude of any kind unless it can be resolved back to the first principles of being. Only on condition that the first principles are firm and stable will the conclusions drawn from them be unassailable, and the nearer our conclusions are to the first principles the more certain our knowledge must be.

What instinct is to the animal, intellect is to man. And for Thomas Aquinas, “Our intellect in understanding is extended to infinity.” This appears self-evident, for there is no limit to what we may know: “the intellect is therefore naturally capable of knowing everything that exists.” While we cannot actually reach the limits of knowledge, this is not to say there is no knowledge of the Limitless, or of O.

Note that the concrete sensible isn’t even a “fact” until there exists an intelligence to regard it as one. A dog or chimp does not dwell in a world of disinterested facts, nor is it possible to “evolve” into the human world, again, because we’re not talking about a continuous line but a discontinuous leap in being. There is no line that leads from touch or sight to the concept of pi, or to the theory of relativity, or to the self-evident truths that once undergirded our political system.

This is by no means to deny the fact of evolution. Indeed, it is to render the fact of evolution intelligible. To imagine evolution “explains” human intelligence isn’t superstitious, rather, it is substitious, since it is we who explain evolution. It begs the biggest question of all, which is how the intellect transcends the mere shuffling of material genes. No sense organ is aware of itself or of its operation. The eye neither sees itself, nor does it see what it sees. But the intellect is aware of itself and of its act of knowing.

Here again, if one believes this capacity of ours is a miracle brought about on the sixth day of creation, it is closer to the necessary truth than the person who believes it miraculously came about as a result of immanent matter somehow transcending itself. This latter doesn’t explain anything, i.e. how transcendence appears in an immanent world — how objects become subjects, how the outside gets in, how mere existence becomes experience.

Doubt of Doubt and Certitude of Certitude

Brief recrapitulation: if there is exists a way upward & inward to a post-disenchanted Cosmos, then we had better get the RH off the disabled list or at least into rehab. For only with its bat in the lineup will a religious vocabulary be meaningful. The latter is what we cosmothandrians call a grammar of infinitutude for which verticality and transcendence are as real as the immanence and horizontality apprehended by the LH. We ended with the proposition that the Cosmic Area Rug is woven of Absolute and Infinite, or Necessity and Possibility, which are mirrored herebelow in the LH and RH, respectively.

∞

Certitude of Certitude: How Can We Be Sure In a World That’s Constantly Changing?

Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles. —Dávila

What do we know? And what can we know with absolute certitude? To approach this question is to return to the beginning and know it for the first and last time, because no other questions can be answered until we first establish the fact that questions are answerable — i.e., that our shaky witness — the Anthropos — may possess true knowledge of himself and of the world.

Kant, as we have seen, placed an untraversable boundary between What Is and What We May Know About It, which ultimately results in an unbridgeable chasm between being and knowing — like an intrusive sign blocking out the scenery and breakin’ our minds.

Nevertheless, Kant’s epistemological toe slipped a little over the line, because you can’t know a wee bit about the unknowable — even that it is unknowable. You may be lost at sea, but that doesn’t prove that dry land doesn’t exist. If we cannot know the truth of reality, then our entire pretentious house of canards collapses, reducing us to competing forms of nihilism and survival of the frivolous.

That’s an exaggeration—

Yes, but only an uncharitable one. The point is that all human beings — as human beings — start with the pre-philosophical and pre-scientific conviction that Of course there’s a real world, doofus. WTF are you talking about? Man is uniquely instructed by O, which is why the rigorous discipline of Truth is a transfiguring and purifying process.

Hello, noumenon!

Our dry land consists of self-evident truths.

How do we know when we’ve found one?

When denial of it entails absurd or monstrous consequences repugnant to reason. It is reminiscent of what Chesterton says of the “thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” The inaccessibility of truth is #1 on the Index of Forbidden Ideas, all others being #2 or lower in our metaphysical flawchart.

One such thought is that our thoughts do not disclose reality and that truth is therefore unavailable to human beings. Since truth, in order to be true, must be the dynamic — not static, as we shall see — conformity of mind to being, the very notion of truth is poisoned at the root. Thought and Thing go through a nasty divorce, and Thing gets to keep all the real properties, since you Kant take ‘em with you. The Anthropos thus becomes closed within himself, and we’re done here.

Let us stipulate that man is a knower. But what does this mean, to know? What is happening when we know something? The answer is not obvious — at least not anymore — but for Maritain it is an irreducibly spiritual event through and through. For “There is a vigorous correspondence between knowledge and immateriality. A being is known to being to the extent that it is immaterial.”

Seriously, the immaterial mind is as different from material matter as anything we could possibly conceive. But as we have seen, even matter is conceived by the mind, so it’s not that easy to reduce the conceiver to the conception. If matter is but an appearance that corresponds to sensation, how could it have given rise to an immaterial reflection of the material sensation?

∞

At the top of our cosmotheandric vision are the necessary principles that do not rely upon any other principles, and presuppose no prior truth. They constitute the pre-flight checklist for the intellect before it attempts the vertical ascent. These propositions are in us by nature (i.e., they are self-evident), nor can we deny them without falling into absurdity -- for example, beginning with the soph-defeating principle that “there is no truth,” which is false if true, thus violating the principle of noncontradiction.

Now, could everything be an illusion or projection of our own subjectivity? No, because then we would have the absolute certitude that everything is an illusion, and whence this certitude? How did it, of all things, get into the Cosmos? There is just no way to get around the Absolute, even if we absolutely deny it. For it turns out that we believe in a number of things we don’t believe we believe, and maybe even don’t want to believe.

Unbelievable!

∞

Is it asking too much to be given a reliable map out of our trackless bewilderness? All men look for it, it’s just that most either pretend to have found it or just give up early for an untroubled life of sensory pleasure and ideological distraction.

Supposing our Axiom 7 — that the Anthropos is a reflection of the ultimate principle — then any Theos worthy of the title would naturally want us to know what the flip is going on here. This is not some kind of deadbeat deity who has no interest in rearing his children. Why otherwise would he give us an intellect, not to mention other vertical courtesies such as an endlessly intelligible Cosmos? If we are theomorphic, then the intellect isn’t just a biological accident to help us find ripe fruit and attractive daughters of men, rather, a vertical gift designed specifically to enable a fruitful rendezvous with terrestrial being.

Every sense has its object: surfaces for touch, color for the eyes, sound for ears, taste for the tongue. Likewise, being is the object of the intellect, as intelligibility to intelligence. Science, of course, assumes that reality is intelligible and that the human intellect has unique access to it, and that is certainly the right attitude.

Bina and Ziarani begin with the question, “how do we know if anything is true?” Notice that the question presupposes the existence of the very thing it wants to prove, truth. Is there any way around this faith in truth?

We could say, for example, that the truth is logical, but who says logic is absolutely true? Certainly not Gödel, since logic is ultimately tautological — premises in, conclusion out — nor is our selection of premises dictated by any logical operation. Logic cannot discover anything but what it presupposes, and besides, how does logic get here, and how is it that the Anthropos has unique access to it? There’s no dodging it: “before we can begin to look for the criterion of truth, we have to ascertain that there is such a thing as truth.” For “unless one accepts that there is indeed such a thing, nothing holds: remove truth, and everything collapses” (ibid.). The Cosmic Area Rug is either forever lost or torn asunder.

Not only must one “assume that there is such a thing as truth before one presents any reasoning,” but one must also assume that it can be symbolically formulated and communicated to other minds, and this further presumes a Cosmos so peculiar that it again looks as if it is ordered to the Anthropos, and vice versa.

In considering our few-in-number but great-in-reach principles that explain what in the world is going on with the world, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the intellect is “essentially relative to intelligible being, as sight is to color. In this way, the intellect is not enclosed within itself but, rather, is opened to the entire domain of intelligible reality” (Garrigou-Lagrange). This at once covers several of our Axioms, e.g., openness, relationality, and intersubjectivity.

Now, you’d think this would be uncontroversial, since its denial immediately results in the destruction of “every form of truth,”

indeed even every form of opinion [man], all the degrees of probability, and all those of error. No longer would there be any difference between a great error and a small one. Consequently, we would also in this way be led to suppress every form of desire and action. Thus, we would not only be faced with the death of the intellect but, moreover, with the death of action in all its domains (ibid.).

In other words, we couldn’t even be wrong, and who wants that?

All knowledge comes down to the binary question of Is or Is Not. But if the very first act of knowledge is to sever its link to what Is — AKA reality — then the mind is forever enclosed in its own knowledge of other knowledge, never of reality.

Better pause here—

The book doesn’t stop and start at your convenience!

Yes it does, otherwise we’ll be here all day.

Cosmic Bums & Achievers

Since this is a serialized book and no longer a blog per se, it might be helpful to begin with a one paragraph top line summary of yesterday’s bottom line, in order to provide context and continuity. If you read yesterday’s post, you are free to skip it:

McGilchrist suggests that our spontaneous intuitions of God are a function of the RH, since it is the hemisphere that “brings us closer to the truth than the left.” He further agrees with Bob — as do few others in this world — that the word “God” is unavoidably problematic, so in order to properly glish the unglishable, we require a translinguistic placeholder to avoid LH idolatry. He concludes that what we really need “is a word unlike any other, not defined in terms of anything else: a sort of un-word.” Axiom 10 of cosmotheandrism proposes the unword O in order to git ‘er done.

                                                         ∞

The sacred mountain, seat of the Gods, is not to be found in space even though it is visible and tangible. —Frithjof Schuon

In other words, first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is, in what amounts to the endless LH—> RH —> LH cycle we’ve already discussed a time or two.

In order to say “God,” we have already in a sense captured God. But no one can presume to capture O, which for Jews is the unsayable YHVH, or designated in the East by terms such as Tao or Nirguna Brahman, each of these being translinguistic experiences of O that shatter or repel speech. So, don’t confuse the cataphatic LH map with the apophatic RH territory. Note again that we don’t want to simply bar the LH from theologizing, rather, to acknowledge its complementary but ultimately junior role in this vertical endeavor.

As to the ineffability of O, McGilchrist agrees that “there is almost certainly more here than we have words for, or can expect ever to understand using [LH] reason alone. Such an expectation itself would be irrational.” This doesn’t actually just apply to O, rather, to everything, because Gödel said so: uppercase Reason in the fullest sense has direct intellection of what transcends lowercase reason.

In other words, the realm of vertical intellection cannot be reduced to any LH map. McGilchrist suggests that “The proper response to this realisation is not argument, but awe.” And the Anthropos is — I am at any rate — awe-ware of “a deep gravitational pull towards something ineffable, that, if we can just for once get beyond words and reasons, is a matter of experience,” this being the Great Attractor, which is — wait for it — a coming attraction in Book III.

McGilchrist does not pretend to be a theologian, so he traces our cerebral asymmetry back to nematodes near the bottom of the biosphere, but what if such creatures are actually fractals of a divine logosphere reflected herebelow in neurology? Think of how, in the words of McGilchrist, “The LH aims to narrow things down to a certainty, while the RH opens them up into possibility.” Here we are merely suggesting that LH necessity and RH possibility might be anchored in the Divine Mind, and why not? It’s either that or nematodes.

You just have to outsmart, as it were, the LH, because it tends not to stay in its epistemological lane. Rather, it is very much beset by the neurocosmic Dunning-Krugery referenced above, whereby “it has no sense of the limits of its own understanding.” Rather, “It operates inside a framework, within which all questions are referred back, and all answers form part of a reassuringly familiar schema; if they don’t they are simply pronounced nonsense.”

This can redound to a closed loop, so anything outside the loop is nonexistent or imaginary. It doesn’t have an appropriately humble meta-view of itself, nor does it “see the bounds of its own world view; in order to do that, it would have to see there is something beyond the bounds — and that is something it cannot do.”

Or, cannot do in the absence of its complementary hemisphere.

Now, McGilchrist’s description may or may not be “neurologically true,” but it is true in every other respect, so it might as well be. Humans are forever confining themselves to their own ideological matrices. It has been a permanent temptation since Genesis 3.

The properly anthropic habitat must be a place where both left and right brains are at home. Because it is not as if one can ever actually eliminate the latter, rather, it will return in some form, whether spiritually frivolous or ideologically toxic.

Memo to the universe: You’re not all that.

Nevertheless, we cannot return to the enchanted world of prelapsarian man, but is there a way forward to a post-disenchanted Cosmos? Such a Cosmos would be one in which a religious vocabulary — or what we call a grammar of infinitude — is full of genuine meaning, one in which verticality and transcendence are as real as — actually, more real than — immanence and horizontality.

∞

At the end of the deity, Either God or chance; all other terms are disguises for one or the other.

But chance produces nothing and explains nothing. Rather, chance has no causal power, but is merely the probability of something happening for other reasons. It is not an entity or substance, nor does it have any power to cause anything to happen. Supposing I flip a coin 100 times, I’m telling you there’s a chance it will come up heads each time. But what are the chances that such an unlikely outcome is a result of chance?

Likewise, there is no chance that chance is a sufficient explanation of being, mind, life, or anything else, for this is just a measure of our ignorance of real causes.

Yes, but isn’t O too just another name for your ignorance?

No, it adverts to the very principle, ground, and possibility of intellect, intelligibility, meaning, and truth, or the transcendent horizon of total intelligibility toward which Anthropic knowers are ordered.

We will wind down this lengthy foray into neurocosmology with the following, as we have already ventured too far into material more appropriate for Book III. O functions precisely as McGilchrist’s unword, for

if we have no word, something at the core of existence disappears from our shared world of awareness; yet if we have a word, we will come to imagine we have grasped the nature of the divine, pinned it down and delimited it, even though by the very nature of the divine this is something that can never be achieved.

In other words, there are certain weighty areas of life whereby achievement constitutes a failure to achieve.

∞

One last question before moving on from neurocosmology: might our ultimate Principle itself have a left and right brain?

Of course not. It is necessarily trans-material.

True, but could there be a kind of bilateral or maybe even trilateral asymmetry in O reflected herebelow?

We’ve already discussed how Absolute and Infinite are ultimate complementarities (Axiom 2), and how this dynamism implies the necessity of possibility. Moreover, “creation” and “possibility” must be two words for the same principle. Schuon goes so far as to suggest that Creator and creation — or O and its infinite entailments — are “coeternal,” which may sound a tad off key until you realize that what he really means is simply the tautology that it is in the nature of a Creator to create. So, “cosmic and coeternal manifestation is necessary because God is necessary, whereas ‘creation is free because it is not ‘the manifestation’ but ‘a manifestation’” (emphasis mine).

The perfections of both Absolute necessity and Infinite freedom must be copresent in our Theos Principle, even though, from the Anthropic standpoint, it is impossible for us to harmonize them, since necessity would seem to be the opposite of freedom. But in the Theos, necessity does not imply constraint, nor freedom arbitrariness.

For our purposes it is enough to know that the Cosmic Area Rug is woven of Absolute and Infinite, which are mirrored herebelow in the form of necessity and freedom, respectively. Absolute and Infinite are very much analogous to LH and RH, only as applied to divinity, for the LH is a little like Absolute Necessity, and RH a bit like Infinite Possibility.

So, we formally reject the scientistic magician’s rulebook that tries to build its tower of babble from the bricks with which it is composed. Instead, we posit One Big Miracle: an eternally subsistent, conscious, and creative principle (O). Everything else is a logical and luminous consequence of this prior source, or in the words of Norris Clarke, “Mind is for being, and reciprocally being is for mind.” Conversely, the problem with materialism is that the bums who propose it can never make ends meet, because the dumb material end can never reach the immaterial intelligent end.

The bums will always lose, do you hear me? THE BUMS WILL ALWAYS—

Yes, we hear you.