Pantheistic Tri-personalism

Our subject -- Life itself -- has provoked flashbacks to Book One of Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order, The Phenomenon of Life. 

These aren't exactly memories, rather, memories of memories, in that I know we discussed it but I can't recall the details. I was going to reread the book today, but why not just review the previous posts and hope they aren't trashbacks?

No, that's not false modesty, because I feel as if anything I've said in the past I can say better today. Or more clearly. Or at least will be lower on the Wince Meter.

Clearly Alexander is our kind of architect: the subtitle of the book is An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. Hmm, architecture and cosmology. Isn't that the bailiwick of the Freemasons -- one of our rival secret organizations? 

Alexander only uses architecture as a kind of focal point to discuss everything under the sun.

Speaking of the Masons, maybe like this:

I am quite sure Alexander would agree with the Aphorist that

Modern architecture knows how to erect industrial sheds but cannot manage to construct a palace or a temple.

And that

The preferred materials of modern architecture age like a prostitute.

Although this might be taking it too far:

Compared to a Romanesque church, everything else, without question, is more or less commonplace.

Along these lines, an amazon reviewer writes that

Alexander begins by asking the question, why is contemporary architecture so terrible? In the 20th century we have passed through a unique period, one in which architecture as a discipline has been in a state that is almost unimaginably bad. I find myself musing on this question as I sit in the waiting room at a doctor's office, park my car in a garage, or go though airport security. How did we end up with a built environment that actively degrades our lives? 

Does it have to be this way? Throughout history, cultures have established methods of architecture that enrich the human experience. He posits that this has been caused by a loss of the ability and desire to discern aliveness....

Alexander establishes that aliveness is a property of space and matter, not only of biological organisms. Next, he establishes that aliveness exists on a spectrum: anything can be more or less alive. In the built environment, we have agency to influence where something -- a door nob, and window, a room, a village, a region -- falls on this spectrum.

So how do we discern aliveness? After decades of experimentation, Alexander has found that it is an objective property. A basic tenet is the question, "which of these things, manifestations, etc. brings me more aliveness?"

According to the ubiquitous Professor Backflap:

Alexander describes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life, and establishes this understanding of living structures as an intellectual basis for a new architecture.

He identifies fifteen geometric properties which tend to accompany the presence of life in nature, and also in the buildings and cities we make. These properties are seen over and over in nature and in the cities and streets of the past, but they have almost disappeared in the impersonal developments and buildings of the last hundred years.

This book shows that living structures depend on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.

Seems to me that Alexander is tackling the same questions as Rosen, only under cover of architecture. But instead of illustrating his thesis with lots of bullet-proof mathematical equations, he illustrates it with lots of... illustrations. Could these constitute left brain / right brain demonstrations of the same fundamental truth?

Let's grow out on a limb and say Yes. 

Beauty is important, but maybe it's actually far more important than we realize. At the very least, Alexander's work explains exactly why beauty is so important, because it is as if Life is one of its attributes or entailments. 

I am an unabashed pantheist. It's just that I'm not only a pantheist. In a footnote, Alexander suggests that "all space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some degree of life in it" and that things are more or less alive according to their "structure and arrangement." More than once I've looked at a tree and pondered whether we are equally alive. I love trees, but the answer is no. 

In the same footnote Alexander claims that reality is personal, and now we're talkin', because that's one of my Ultimate Suspicions. He writes that "all matter/space has some degree of 'self' in it," and that "some aspect of the personal... infuses all matter/space."

I've never given it a name, but let's call it pantheistic tri-personalism. Until something snappier occurs to me.

I am now flipping through the book, and will pause when something does something to something in me.

Very few people realize, I think, how much the present confusion which exists in the field of architecture is wound up with our conception of the universe.

To which I can only add hoo boy, because this apples to any and every field. In other words, a stupid conception of the cosmos poisons everything. Didn't Thomas warn us that a small error in the beginning leads to a great one at the end? And that The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold?

Well, in this case we're talking about a massive error In The Beginning, in which case it must be multiplied at least a googlefold.

A great many metaphysical questions of great consequence are binary in nature, for example, the world is either created or not created, and you have to pick one. Of course, we ought to pick the more likely one, or at least the less unlikely, which is why I choose the former. 

Likewise, the universe is either personal or impersonal, but if it's the latter, then you've got a lot of explaining to do, but with no one here to explain it.

This post has probably gone on too long already, but I think I'll continue flipping and blogging tomorrow. Meanwhile, aphorisms:

The existence of a work of art demonstrates that the world has meaning. Even if it does not say what that meaning is.

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.

Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

Matter and Life: Frozen Music and Flowing Architecture

Yeah, I'd better put MOTT aside for the moment -- just for the moment -- and begin blogging on The Nature of Order, or else I'll never catch up with myself. I'm already several hundred pages into the latter, and if I don't write contemporaneously, a lot of stuff just gets lost in the sea of consciousness.

First of all, I want to thank the person who read my book and alerted me to a possible connection between Alexander's approach and mine. I venture pretty far afield in my psychopneumatic peregrinations, but I don't think my wood've ever drifted into the frozen sea of architecture -- even though Alexander only uses architecture as a kind of focal point to discuss everything under the sun.

You might say that we have the same deep-structural approach to reality, even when we are sailing entirely different vessels on the surface. Twin brothers of different motherships.

Alexander has been building his ark since the 1960s, but the Nature of Order is said to be his magnum opus, the culmination of decades of attempting to feel his way into an entirely new way of looking at the world. From the ubiquitous Professor Backflap:

"Alexander describes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life, and establishes this understanding of living structures as an intellectual basis for a new architecture.

"He identifies fifteen geometric properties which tend to accompany the presence of life in nature, and also in the buildings and cities we make. These properties are seen over and over in nature and in the cities and streets of the past, but they have almost disappeared in the impersonal developments and buildings of the last hundred years.

"This book shows that living structures depend on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being."

Before reading the book, I wondered if he was just deepaking the chopra, but this is not the case. This is a very serious attempt to describe and draw out the implications of a deeper metaphysic that ultimately unifies the objective and subjective worlds that have been sundered from one another ever since the scientific revolution.

Interesting that in building my own little dinghy -- in particular, Book II, Biogenesis -- I searched everywhere for something like Alexander's buoyant approach. It's very much like what we discussed in yesterday's post: I had a preconceptual thingy of what I was looking for, but it had no content. D'oh! It was just a faith that somewhere there had to exist the concept to fill in the preconception, or the content to fill out the archetype. Frankly, I would have settled for some good BS to fill in the BSer.

The closest I came by far was Robert Rosen's Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life and Essays on Life Itself (neither of which is recommended to the casual mariner). Thus far I see no indication that Alexander knows about Rosen, but I think he'll be pleasantly surprised if he ever does meet him on the high seas. The description of Life Itself could have very well been written by Alexander:

"Why are living things alive? As a theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen saw this as the most fundamental of all questions -- and yet it had never been answered satisfactorily by science. The answers to this question would allow humanity to make an enormous leap forward in our understanding of the principles at work in our world."

That is a Critical Point: not only does science have no idea what Life is, but it will never find out using the tools at its disposal, which necessarily reduce Life to something else the moment the scientist ponders it. Rather, an entirely different approach to the world is needed if we are to understand Life Itself, i.e., to see the business of Life in all its glorious Isness. Herr Backflap:

"For centuries, it was believed that the only scientific approach to the question 'What is life?' must proceed from the Cartesian metaphor (organism as machine). Classical approaches in science, which also borrow heavily from Newtonian mechanics, are based on a process called 'reductionism.' The thinking was that we can better learn about an intricate, complicated system (like an organism) if we take it apart, study the components, and then reconstruct the system-thereby gaining an understanding of the whole."

"However, Rosen argues that reductionism does not work in biology and ignores the complexity of organisms. Life Itself, a landmark work, represents the scientific and intellectual journey that led Rosen to question reductionism and develop new scientific approaches to understanding the nature of life. Ultimately, Rosen proposes an answer to the original question about the causal basis of life in organisms. He asserts that renouncing the mechanistic and reductionistic paradigm does not mean abandoning science. Instead, Rosen offers an alternate paradigm for science that takes into account the relational impacts of organization in natural systems and is based on organized matter rather than on particulate matter alone."

It turns out that in order to understand Life, we really have to situate it in a cosmos capable of sustaining Life. Note that this is not quite the same as the intelligent design approach (nor of the Anthropic Principle), because the key issue -- or "ultimate primitive" -- isn't information but wholeness.

Without the prior wholeness, all the information in the world won't get you from matter to Life -- nor, for that matter, will it get you from Life to Mind, Mind to Spirit, or Spirit to God. In a way, the ID folks are laboring under the same paradigm that limits and stymies conventional Darwinism. The problem is the Cartesianism, whether it appears in the form of Darwinism or ID.

A thoughtful amazon reviewer of Life Itself says this:

"Although many influential scientists claim -- and most members of general public believe -- that all of reality can 'in principle' be expressed as the dynamics of its constitutive elements (atoms, genes, neurons), some have intuitively felt that this reductive tenet is wrong, that life and the human mind are more complex phenomena. Critics of reductionism have pointed to Kurt Goedel's 1931 'incompleteness theorem' (which shows that in any axiomatic formulation of, say, number theory there will be true theorems that cannot be established) as a contrary example, but this paradigm-shattering result has been largely ignored the scientific community, which has blithely persisted in its reductive beliefs."

I can probably save myself some time if I playgiarize with a reviewer of The Nature of Order. Let's see if I can find one who speaks for me.... Here, close enough:

"The essence of [Alexander's] view is this: the universe is not made of 'things,' but of patterns, of complex, interactive geometries. Furthermore, this way of understanding the world can unlock marvelous secrets of nature, and perhaps even make possible a renaissance of human-scale design and technology....

"[T]here are emerging echoes of this worldview across the sciences, in quantum physics, in biology, in the mathematics of complexity and elsewhere. Theorists and philosophers throughout the twentieth century have noted the gradual shift of the scientific worldview away from objects and toward processes, described by Whitehead, Bergson and many others. Alexander... takes it a step further, arguing that we are on the verge of supplanting the Cartesian model altogether, and embarking on a revolutionary new phase in the understanding of the geometry of nature."

Here is where I think Alexander's intuition converges with mine: "he argues that life does not 'emerge' from the complex interactions of an essentially dead universe, but rather manifests itself, in greater or lesser degrees, in geometric order. For Alexander, the universe is alive in its very geometrical essence, and we ourselves are an inextricable part of that life. This is a 'hard' scientific world view which is completely without opposition to questions of 'meaning' or 'value', 'life' or 'spirit.'"

That's another key point: in re-unifying subjective and objective, Alexander also shows how meaning and value are built into the cosmos. Things we think of as "subjective" are actually as objective as can be, including beauty, which is his main focus.

Here is what we said in One Cosmos, and I think you'll psi the psymilarity: "Life is not an anomalous refugee from the laws of physics, enjoying a brief triumph over the grinding, ineluctable necessity of entropy, but an intrinsic, exuberant expression of the type of universe we happen to inhabit."

Yes, please save your "woo-hoos" for the end of the post.

And "consciousness is not an accidental intruder that arrives late to the cosmic manifestival, but an interior, subjective landscape that may be followed forward and back, like Ariadne's thread, to reveal the transcendent mystery of our existence.... To borrow a hackneyed phrase, 'it takes a cosmos' to raise up a conscious being, and vice versa."

Elsewhere we wrote that "all death is local. Unlike Life, which must be a nonlocal, immanent spiritual principle of the cosmos, there can be no metaphysical principle called 'death.' Rather, there are only cadavers and corpses, strictly local areas where Life is no longer concentrated and outwardly visible at the moment."

Or, if you prefer the supersillyus version in an overused pompyrous font of nonsense: And the weird light shines in the dark, but the dorks don't comprehend it. For truly, the weirdness was spread all through the world, and yet, the world basically kept behaving as if this were just your ordinary, standard-issue cosmos.

Mozart Denied Tenure for Teaching Dangerous Doctrine that Most Music is Pretty Lame

Flip. Flip. Flip.

Just flipping through The Luminous Ground to see if there's anything we need to discuss.

Here -- something about the primacy of SLACK in the Timeless Way of building.

I just looked it up, and the first answer claims that building one of those timeless cathedrals took between 25 and 600 years, proving once again that timelessness takes time.

By way of comparison, starting next week we'll be doing some major remodeling around here that will take just a couple of weeks or so. Imagine if I said to the contractor, "hey, just take all the time you need to get it right. If I -- or my grandchildren, for that matter -- don't live to see it, that's okay. God will see it."

So, think of the thousands of artists and craftsmen who worked on those things, but who never lived to see the finished product. Then again, they must have "seen" it in some sense, or they wouldn't have known how to proceed.

Anyway, Alexander writes of "the matter of pace. The essence of these works, made in a devotional atmosphere, was that the maker had time..." Actually, what he had was a timelessness that empowered him "to see wholeness and to act accordingly."

You can't see wholeness when you're being rushed. Rather, the window of time-dilation closes up, and we are exholed from the inspiraling goround of Slack. It's the same with the Timeless Way of Blogging.

For this reason, Alexander feels that the mystico-religious setting nurtured "the conditions for the perception and creation of buildings which were profoundly connected to the human self."

But again, the nature of the self and the nature of reality are one and the same thing -- or converge on the same thing, anyway -- so Alexander is suggesting that it is literally true that these works reflect the actual nature of the universe.

Which reminds me. Liberals love diversity, right? And Alexander taught at one of the most liberal universities on the planet, Cal State Berkeley. So they welcomed his ideas, right?

Well, maybe after he lawyered up. In the acknowledgements at the end of the book, he thanks his attorney, who "spent seven years helping me solve (through the protection of my first amendment rights) the nearly disastrous political problems which occurred at the University of California."

The tolerant faculty there "did their best to prevent the teaching of this material and to close my mouth..." But he expresses gratitude for their "unrelenting hostility" over some twenty years, because it confirmed in his mind that he must be on to something. Liberals only attack what they fear.

This explains why these liberals -- who express fawning admiration for such monsters as a Castro, a Chavez, an Arafat -- would regard a single architect as such a threat. It must be because he is not a relativist, but rather, someone who believes there are right and wrong ways to build.

Just as the left doesn't hate evil, but hates those who hate evil, they also hate people who hate falsehood and ugliness. Or in short, "God is the impediment to modern man" (Don Colacho's Aphorisms).

Reminds me of another A by DC: "All truths converge on the one truth, but the routes have been barricaded." And nowhere are they more heavily barricaded than in a liberal fascist university.

Back to the flipping. I remember another aphorism by Don Colacho to the effect that "the honest philosophy does not pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery."

The mystery is O. In truth we cannot circumscribe it, since it always circumscribes us. Alexander describes it as the "something" that "lies in me and beyond me." One can only live a full life -- or be alive, really -- to the extent that one circumnavelgazes or strikes an ombilical chord with this Mystery:

"[T]he essential point concerns the existence of some realm, or some entity, variously referred to as the Void, the great Self, maha-Atman, God, the Friend," such that "human life approaches its clear meaning when, and only when, a person makes contact" with it.

This is an example of the kind of "naturally supernatural" religion that can be easily proved just by paying close attention to our subjective responses to things, as halfbaked in yeasterday's loaf.

Alexander cites the example of Mozart, who "had a clear and unshakeable faith in God as a real and definite thing." His music was "written in the context of this concrete and sublime faith." Did that make it worse? If he were in the music department at UC Berkeley, would they have persecuted him for making the atonalists sound bad?

Nah. They'd probably get him for using racist and sexist stereotypes in his operas.

If we inquire as to why most modern works fail to achieve this deeper meaning, one obvious reason is that they do not try. Our secular flatland is governed by an entirely different set of values that often comes down to a meaningless "originality" for the purpose of ego inflation and other valueless prizes.

Didn't get very far today, but the Window of Slack just closed, so we're out of timelessness.

Turning Faint Signals into Cosmic Vibes

The redemption of reality is the function of the imagination. --Don Colacho's Aphorisms

So: human beings are constantly attending and responding to a spectrum of information that is somehow "embedded" in the cosmos and "radiates" outward.

Conversely, a mere animal attends only to things that have a direct bearing on survival or pleasure. A dog, for example, will just fall asleep if there are no walks or no food in the offing.

In my opinion, this capacity of ours is rooted in developmental psychology, specifically, the vicissitudes of attachment in the neurologically incomplete infant. As a result of this, our very being is intersubjective right down to the ground.

Of course, this still begs the question of how intersubjectivity could get into the cosmos to begin with. In my view, it is because ultimate reality is irreducibly trinitarian. We are members of one another because this is a reflection of the interior economy of the Godhead.

I think Alexander errs in attempting to hitch his empirical / phenomenological findings to a scientific metaphysic. I can see that by the fourth volume he begins to slip in the G-word, but it is almost in an apologetic way.

Nor does he do so in the context of any actual theology, just in a vague sort of mystical way. I'm not necessarily criticizing him, because there was a time that I might have attempted the same thing, i.e., to toss out religion and tradition but retain God (or at least the experience of this thing people have historically called "God").

The bottom line is that Alexander is often speaking of God -- or better, O -- without seeming to realize it.

For example, he describes the feeling he is looking for in an effective design: "It is some ultimate, beyond experience. When I reach for it, I try to find -- I can partly feel -- the illumination of existence, a glimpse of that ultimate. It is always the same thing at root. Yet, of course, it takes an infinite variety of forms."

This is O, as it undergoes transformation from eternity to time. Or, just say "transformation in O."

He even speaks of how the most sublime examples of what he is talking about have occurred in a mystico-religious context, but he doesn't seem to put one and one and one together -- as if there is no transhuman input (↓) going on, and that, say, the designers of Chartres just had really good taste.

Similarly, he speaks of encountering the "I" "in a work of art, or a work of nature, which makes one feel related to it." This "I" is none other than the personal / intersubjective nature of existence, as alluded to above.

We all recognize it, for the simple reason that we are persons. It is nothing that anyone needs to "prove," because the experience of it is as constant as it is unavoidable. It is never not happening, unless one is autistic, blunted, or soul-damaged in some other way.

Nevertheless, there are obviously degrees of sensitivity to it. But in any event, atheism is not something anyone can ever experience. Rather, it is a mental abstraction that can only be imagined, never lived.

What Alexander has attempted to do in his life and work -- and I'll let others decide whether he has succeeded -- is to "amplify" the sense of personhood that is provoked in these architectural encounters with O. In this regard, I don't think he's doing anything different from an expert or connoisseur in any field. It certainly pertains to the religious matters we discuss here.

I spoke of this in the book, for example, with respect to the symbol (≈), which stands for the sympathetic resonance that occurs between us and a more evolved human fleshlight. This resonance "amplifies" our own signal, and as we grow spiritually, we are better able to receive the signal.

In other words, the communication is occurring all the time. The limiting factor is our capacity to receive it. Alexander wants to amplify our ability to receive and create beauty.

I'm just flipping through the book page by page, so this post may be a bit disorganized.

On page 8, Alexander mentions one of his key findings, that "it is in the nature of matter, that it is soaked through with self or 'I.'"

I agree entirely, but he seems to think he can better articulate this via science than religious metaphysics. I disagree. Science is posterior to metaphysics, and I think he's falling into the very trap he decries by trying to subordinate his ideas to science.

For example, you wouldn't say God is nonlocal because the quantum world is. Rather, vice versa: the world is nonlocal because God is. Likewise, we don't say that God must be love because human beings are capable of love. Rather, we love because God does.

Alexander wants to heal the "bifurcation of nature" (into the object/subject duality) that occurred with the scientific revolution, but you don't do that by trying to force science into being something it isn't. Rather, you do so by putting everything in its proper place in the scheme of things. Obviously, science is not, and can never be, at the top.

Little time this morning. We'll leave you with another aphorism or three by Don Colacho, a cosmotherapist who finally gets me:

If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors. And

The natural and supernatural are not overlapping planes, but intertwined threads. And

The scientific proposition presents an abrupt alternative: understanding it or not understanding it. The philosophical proposition, however, is susceptible to growing insight. Finally, the religious proposition is a vertical ascent that allows one to see the same landscape from different altitudes.

Bob and Christopher's Excellent Adventure

The question is, does reality limit reason, or does man will his own truth? To put it another way, is reason the conformity of mind to world, or is "reality" just the imposition of mind onto an otherwise unknowable world (which reduces truth to will)?

Once again we're back at the crossroads of the Kantian bifurcation of mind and world, between the knowable phenomena and the supposedly unknowable noumenon, whatever that is. Alexander's whole project involves undoing or transcending this bifurcation, because it leads to intellectual and aesthetic chaos and arbitrariness -- from the antihuman misosophies of the left to the ugly buildings of our cities, and everything in between.

Alexander endeavors to resolve this split by positing a metaphysic in which "objective reality 'out there' and our personal reality 'in here' are thoroughly connected." I couldn't agree more, and as a matter of fact, my very first published paper in 1991 was on just this subject.

Really, Bob? Yes, I think so. But it's been 22 years. Better verify that claim.

Let's see. Each moment -- both objectively and subjectively -- is "a translation, or unfolding, of a primordial and multidimensional reality into the more familiar three-dimensions-plus-time modality." Looked at this way, the world is a sort perpetual movement from infinite to finite, or, as we prefer to say, from O to (n).

David Bohm -- whose work in physics links Alexander's to mine -- would say that each moment of time is a projection from the total nonlocal implicate order into a local explicate order, so that "any describable event, object, entity, etc., is an abstraction from an unknown and undefinable totality of flowing movement" (Bohm).

Yeah, I still think that, only more so. For Bohm, "the explicate order of the world of experience unfolds and displays the implicate." The latter "can be thought of as a ground beyond time, a totality out of which each moment is projected into the explicate order."

But it is a circular movement, one I have symbolized (↓↑). Of course, I'm talking about the spiritual world while Bohm is talking about the physical world, but the important point is that it's the same pattern:

"For every moment of time that is projected out into the explicate order there would be another movement in which that moment would be injected or 'introjected' back into the implicate order" (Bohm).

"This whole process -- forms ceaselessly emerging and then being reabsorbed -- accounts for the influence of past forms on present ones, and also allows for the emergence of new creative forms" (ibid.).

In other words, reality is not a linear machine, but again, a kind of perpetual flow of the implicate ground into familiar reality, and then back (and this is strikingly similar to Eckhart's description of the Ground; you could say that we're all -- Bohm, Eckhart, Alexander, and I -- in the same Attractor, just describing it from our own vantage points).

Some human beings, for a variety of reasons, have a compromised ability to "read out" O, the implicate order. This makes them very boring and very predictable. Lifeless. No spark. But good accountants.

Others have no stable explicate order. They can be live wires: charismatic. Life o' the party. Good actors. Just don't rely on them. And whatever you do, don't get involved in an intimate relationship with one of them. It will be fun while the fun lasts, but then hell while the hell lasts. I still have the occasional nightmare...

Alexander is at pains to point out that, in order to understand his approach, one must allow oneself to engage in a totally different kind of thinking in which we are directly connected to the world, in an unmediated way.

The world is constantly speaking to us, most especially in aesthetic terms. All day long we see a constant stream of things that evoke various feelings that are a reliable indicator of the degree of "life" or wholeness present.

Here is what I wrote about that mode back in 1991. But before getting to that, the main idea is that, instead of (k) --> O -- in which we simply project our own preconceptions onto the world -- we must enter a state of O --> (n), in which we constantly listen to subtle messages of the world.

Anyway, here's what I wrote: "Just as the physical universe of stars and galaxies is but a mere 'ripple' on the surface of the holomovement, conventional 'thought' or 'intellect' [read: (k)] is a static, constricted, and limited form of consciousness." It is "basically mechanical in its order of operation, dealing as it does with the already known."

In contrast, the O --> (n) mode is analogous to "the continuous and dynamic unfolding of the implicate order," giving access to the "freshly minted moment" (Bohm) and the "ever-moving and self-renewing present" (ibid.). Children are there most of the time, which is why it is so refleshing to be around them.

This is not to suggest that (k) doesn't have its uses. Of course it does. However, "unless there are also profoundly experiential transformations in O, evolution will only occur in (k)," fostering "a sterile evolution of the intellect bearing no relationship to the deeper self." You know. Infertile eggheads. Ideologues. Tenure.

You might say that the circle of (k) can never contain the sphere of O. Which is why, to paraphrase Ted, strange things are always afoot at the Circle K, if only you pay attention to the weirdness...

Well, I got a late start and now I'm due back in the explicate order. To be continued, pending the slightest expression of interest.

Taking Reality Personally while Championing the Bobvious

Over the years, I've made any number of references to the trinitarian structure of reality. Actually, "structure" isn't quite the right word, because structure implies parts. In my view, it would be more orthoparadoxically correct to call it a trinitarian substance, which features an irreducible interiority and intersubjectivity (each a reflection of the other).

I've now completed volume one of The Nature of Order, and there are several places where Alexander essentially expresses the same idea, although not in any Christian context. Rather, his approach is entirely empirical and phenomenological: he's just observing and describing how things truly and objectively appear in our subjective experience. His metaphysics is posterior to the experience.

The first half of the book shows how and why "degrees of life" are present in space (i.e., space itself is inseparable from life), and how we are able to objectively perceive these levels of intensity. In the second half he shows how the presence of life is inseparable from the question of personhood. Indeed, chapter seven is called The Personal Nature of Order.

Thus, as it turns out -- and again, this is based first on observation, not any kind of apriorism -- "living structure is at once both structural and personal."

As applied to philosophy and metaphysics, this is his key idea, as it furnishes the means to "bridge the gap that Whitehead called 'the bifurcation of nature.' It unites the objective and the subjective," and ultimately, science and person, physics and poetry, thinking and feeling. Yes, instead of mythopoetic you might call it mathopoetic.

Jumping ahead a bit, the first thought that occurred to me in reading this chapter is that this is all foretold in scripture. In particular, I'm thinking of Proverbs 8, where it suggests that reality is ultimately composed of -- not just by or with -- "God's wisdom," so to speak:

The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way,

Before His works of old.

I have been established from everlasting,

From the beginning, before there was ever an earth.

When there were no depths I was brought forth,

When there were no fountains abounding with water.

Before the mountains were settled,

Before the hills, I was brought forth;

While as yet He had not made the earth or the fields,

Or the primal dust of the world.

When He prepared the heavens, I was there,

When He drew a circle on the face of the deep,

When He established the clouds above,

When He strengthened the fountains of the deep,

When He assigned to the sea its limit,

So that the waters would not transgress His command,

When He marked out the foundations of the earth,

Then I was beside Him as a master craftsman.

All of this establishes the personal nature of the divine wisdom that infuses the cosmos, lighting it from within. This light can be seen scientifically or aesthetically, for it is the same Light. To paraphrase Schuon, truth is analogous to the light, while beauty is analogous to the warmth that naturally radiates from it.

In this next passage we see how "blessings" flow from human perception of this wisdom:

And I was daily His delight,

Rejoicing always before Him,

Rejoicing in His inhabited world,

And my delight was with the sons of men.

“Now therefore, listen to me, my children,

For blessed are those who keep my ways.

Hear instruction and be wise,

And do not disdain it.

Blessed is the man who listens to me,

Watching daily at my gates,

Waiting at the posts of my doors.

For whoever finds me finds life,

And obtains favor from the Lord;

But he who sins against me wrongs his own soul;

All those who hate me love death.”

Whoever sees this wisdom finds life. Others find death, which isn't surprising, for if you begin with the premise that the world is fundamentally dead, then any life you happen to find will just be an anomalous accident. It won't tell you anything important or fundamental about the cosmos, much less about the nature of man -- despite the fact that man is uniquely able to perceive the degrees of life implicit in the cosmos.

Speaking of "implicit," it's interesting how we spend our lives rediscovering the same thing over and over. I suppose I first made this discovery back in 1985, and I've been making it ever since, although expressing it in different languages, e.g., the languages of physics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, metaphysics, theology, music, etc.

Gnote: I regard diverse disciplines as "languages," fundamentally no different than the various languages of human groups. Thus, just as one can express the identical truth in French, English, or German, one can express the same truth in physics, psychology, and religion.

And indeed, in order to express the fullness of truth, one must see it from all of these angles; it is as if truth is the white light that passes through the human prism, and comes out the other side in the form of different colors, i.e., disciplines.

A long time ago, I decided that what we call a "genius" is a person who uses this or that discipline or idiom to express a primordial truth. Depending upon his gift, the genius can accomplish it with a pen or pun or piano or paintbrush.

My personal discovery involved seeing a spontaneous connection between the metaphysics implicit in modern physics and the metapsychology implicit in modern psychoanalysis. This discovery suggested that either the cosmos is built like a person, or persons are built like the cosmos. Or that both of these statements are true.

So now you know why my dissertation had the ponderous title of Psychoanalysis, Postmodern Physics, and the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution: Toward a Rapprochement of Mind and Nature. Today I wouldn't use the loaded word "postmodern," but I didn't intend it in the obnoxious sense. "Post-Newtonian" or "post-Cartesian" would be more accurate. But the "rapprochement of mind and nature" is precisely what Alexander is up to.

And my use of the term rapprochement had a double meaning, intended in both the colloquial and psychoanalytic senses. Ultimately, what I meant is that, just as the baby must separate from the mother in order to relate in a more mature manner, it seems that human beings had to first separate from Mother Nature -- this being the scientific revolution -- in order to relate to her in a more mature manner -- this being the "new physics" of Alexander (or of anyone else who sees the underlying truth from whatever discipline).

I know! Too much me. Nevertheless, tucked away in my dissertation is a little speech I had to deliver upon receiving an award for the thing in 1988 (I've mentioned it before, but that was Long Ago). The speech could have been written by Alexander:

"This dissertation is really a reflection of my own personal obsession, which happens to be the relationship between the mind -- that is, the subjective internal world -- and the objective physical universe.... In the three hundred years since the onset of the scientific revolution, science has gradually come to regard everything in the universe -- including ourselves -- as mere machines....

Blah blah yada yada, "What is so interesting is that these patterns of process seem to be woven into the very fabric of the universe, cutting across and repeating at all the various levels we study -- including human mental development."

I mean seriously folks, this sounds like straight up Alexander, although it's only me again: "The appearance of life itself forces us to reconsider all of the reductionistic schemes and artificial boundaries we have invented to divide various domains such as mind and matter, animate and inanimate, physics and psychology.

"The great physicist Werner Heisenberg said that The same forces that have created nature in all her forms, are responsible for the structure of our soul, and likewise for our capacity to think.... With our new understanding, we can truly say that the development of the cosmos culminates in an unbroken fashion with the thought of man."

So, to say "One Cosmos" or "One Cosmos Under God" is just the same old sane old, from Proverbs to bobswords.

For Alexander -- and I agree with him entirely -- it means that we are at "the threshold of a new kind of objectivity," i.e., a higher synthesis of objectivity with what we usually consign to subjectivity in order to dismiss it, and thereby save the scientistic appearances.

But in dismissing the latter we are 1) devaluing the human knower, thereby undercutting the basis of all our knowledge, 2) chucking the most interesting and even astonishing fact in all of creation, and 3) ignoring an impossibly rich source of data about reality, not just in terms of content, but vis-a-vis the human form as such (in other words, the human form itself -- before we have even thought anything -- reveals important truths about the nature of reality).

Getting late. Gotta get some work done....

Dreams of Reason and Nightmares of History

Hey, this book on Pope Benedict's Regensburg Lecture is pretty good.

Wait! Don't go away! It's not as dry as it sounds. Far from it. Rather, it provides something like a Master Key to understanding our whole civilizational decline, from Moses/Socrates/Jesus to Obama/Biden/Reid.

But before getting to that, a brief comment about the surprising architectural skills of the Dreamer. Now that Alexander has schooled me on what to look for, I can't help but noticing what a marvelous architect I am.

In your dreams!

Yes, in my dreams. I already conceded that.

The question is, how can this be? I don't have any architectural training, and probably not even good taste. Not so my Dreamer, who has an unerring sense of what goes where (unless he's just being ironic or trying to make a point).

Last night, for example, I somehow got through security and wandered into the most beautifully constructed high-end country club. Here words fail, since I'm not an architect or an interior decorator or a Lileks, so I am reduced to such feeble adjectives as "cool!" or "awesome!"

The thing is, I've noticed the phenomenon before, but I always marked it down to more of a literary/narrative/cinematic skill. But now I see that this cannot be the case, since it takes more than just glibness or a good eye to produce these fabulous sets (which are not copies of anything I've ever actually seen in awakeworld). Now that I know what to look for, I see that my Dreamer knows all about the 15 fundamental properties of life as elucidated by Alexander, e.g., strong centers, gradation, echoes, local symmetries, good shape, etc.

I have a feeling the dream might have been provoked by watching the popification on TV yesterday. Again, now that I know what to look for, I was noticing how the beautiful architecture in Vatican City manifests so many of the Fifteen Fundamental Properties.

Now, it may seem like a trivial observation to say that the Dreamer has "good taste" in architecture, but the implications are actually quite profound. For it suggests that, just as man doesn't invent logic but discovers it to be woven into the very fabric of his being, it also turns out that Good Taste isn't just subjective, but rather, that an aesthetic sense is also built into the f. of our b.

And this is indeed Alexander's point: that aesthetic reality is just as objective and as real as material reality. In fact, the two can only be artificially separated, because nature herself effortlessly tosses out beautiful objects, just as does the Dreamer.

Odd, but nature rarely makes ugly things. Rather, almost all of the ugliness in the world comes from man. Only man could makes a place as ugly and lifeless as, say, Lancaster, CA, or MSNBC. But the California desert itself -- unmolested by man -- has a kind of austere beauty thingy going for it.

Now, what does all of this have to do with Benedict's Regensburg Lecture, whatever that was? The LoFo world, if it remembers it at all, will have remembered it for accurately describing the problems of Islam, thereby earning the condemnation of the same LoFo world (which is led by the mullah-terror & nasty-old-leftist complex).

Alert readers will recall last Tuesday's post, wherein I mentioned the term "rapprochement." Now, how many times a year does one hear that word? And yet, I'm reading The Regensburg Lecture yesterday, and it must have turned up a dozen times. In the words of Beavis, this means something, numb nuts.

Remember what I said about my use of the term, which is intended in both its colloquial and human developmental senses? But my ultimate point was again to suggest that man begins his journey fused with nature, just as the infant starts out fused with the (m)other. Our separation from nature culminates in the scientific revolution, whereby we are able to study nature in a wholly objective, abstract, and quantitative way. But now it is time for a rapprochement of mind and nature, which is one of the themes of my book, of this blog, and of Alexander's whole approach.

It is also the theme of the Regensburg Lecture, but by now I'm accustomed to these dense synchronicities.

To preview where this post is headed, Benedict locates the ground of western civilization in a unique synthesis of revelation and (upper case R) Reason, which was achieved by the Bible being filtered through the Greek mind. This observation itself isn't new, i.e., the Athens-Jerusalem matrix.

What is apparently new is Benedict's suggestion that this syntheses, this "Greek turn" was providential, not just some random occurrence. Fascinatingly, he supports this through recourse to Paul's Dreamer, who tells him (see Acts 16:9) DON'T GO TO ASIA, but rather, MACEDONIA IS REALLY NICE THIS TIME OF YEAR!

Could it be that the whole of western civilization hinges on a dream?

Western civilization begins with the vision of a rapprochement of God and Reason. As we proceed, we will appreciate just how different this is from the dreams of the left and of Islam, for in each case, no such rapprochement is possible.

Islam, for example has a strictly voluntarist theology (which is really no theology -- i.e., theo-logos -- at all), rooted in God's will, not his logos (Reason). This can be appreciated with reference to the differences between "Israel," which means wrestle with God, and "Islam," which means submit to Allah. In Islam no wrestling is allowed, except with others, who had better submit on pain of violence and death.

Likewise, for the leftist there can be no rapprochement of Reason and Revelation, since the latter is just a dream (heh). But as soon as you think about it, you realize that this is no different than Islam, for which there also can be no rapprochement of knowing and being. In both cases, there is no Logos/Reason lighting up the world from within.

As a result, all that is left is submission, either to Allah, or sharia, or the caliphate, or political correctness, or Obamacare, or the tyranny of relativism, whatever. What is not permitted is liberty in its classic sense, predicated on the individual's access to the Truth of Things. Authoritarianism to follow.

Example.

To be continued...

Wholeness, Happiness, Order, and Discrimination

Recognizing this life in things is equivalent to saying, "The universe is made of person-stuff. I always thought it was made of machine-stuff, but now I see that it is not." --Christopher Alexander

The whole thing reminds me of Eckhart's key principle of the Ground: Alexander speaks of how "the structure we call wholeness is connected with a ground where matter becomes personal..." This is why nature so obviously "speaks" to us, both in terms of feeling and of thought, art and science, beauty and truth. If we take this comm-unication seriously, the implications are endless.

For example, this is why language is even possible, because the person-stuff of the universe is interiorly related and therefore capable of encoding and transmission from one body or region to another. Our ability to see the beauty or apprehend the deep structure of the world represents one cidence of of the same coin-. It is to receive the memO and be in the lOʘp.

For this reason, we now understand how and why scientists are guided by feeling and artists by science. In other words, a scientist wouldn't even know what to investigate in the absence of a feeling that reduces the infinite field of phenomena to something "interesting," something that attracts his attention.

As it so happens, not too long ago I evaluated a former research scientist who had developed a dementia. It was still in its incipient stages, so he was well aware of how it had robbed him of his ability to perceive the deeper significance in things.

It reminds me again of a hybrid SACD, which has a standard CD encoded on the surface and the SACD layer encoded below that. Only an SACD player is able to reach beyond the surface and retrieve the denser, high-def information at the center. My research scientist was like this: his laser could no longer penetrate below the surface.

There is something analogous to this phenomenon in any discipline, from art, to science, to literature and religion, the difference being that there aren't just two levels to reality (i.e., CD and SACD), but an inexhaustible number. There is no end to the depth, but this depth extends in both directions, into the object and into the subject, which, in the end, are complementary aspects of one another.

In other words: we can only see the depth in things to the extent to which we have become deep. As I've said before, depth is a very real feature of the cosmos, not something merely "subjective." In many ways, it's the whole point, isn't it? It's certainly the point of this blog. And of this life, for that matter. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be a cosmic surface dweller. I know I was there, but I can no longer remember what it felt like.

Schall raises the same point in this book I'm reading -- or at least I'm seeing obvious links. For example: "The Catholic [you could also say Raccoon] soul is not a divided soul. What is characteristically Catholic is the mind that pays full attention to the truths of reason and revelation on the basis of the truth that they both belong to a coherent whole."

More: "The 'wholeness' of all things to be known, something that fascinated a Plato, an Aristotle, an Aquinas, a Dante, cannot leave anything out and still claim to be concerned with the full scope of mind.... Philosophy is the quest for knowledge of the whole, a quest that, in principle, cannot omit any claim to the truth of things and still claim to be open to all things."

Thus, any form of bonehead atheism or vulgar scientism is a philosophical non-starter, because each has closed itself to the living ground (both "outside" and "inside").

Dennis Prager makes a similar point in his Still the Best Hope, which should be required reading for all human beings struggling to cure themselves of the liberal plague. He writes of how

"It is difficult to overstate the depth of the differences between the Judeo-Christian view of the world and that of its opponents on the Left. In addition to such basic issues as objective versus subjective morality, it involves the question of whether there is order to the world" (emphasis mine, and bear in mind that Alexander's quadrilogy is called The Nature of Order).

Now, as Alexander explains, order is intrinsically related to life, to wholeness, to depth, and to happiness (I would prefer a slightly more spiritually inflected term such as ananda-bliss, beatitude, or slack). And as Prager points out, "Basic to the biblical worldview is the proposition that God made order out of chaos -- order expressed largely through separation and distinction."

Indeed, what is order but distinction? And what is thinking but discrimination and synthesis? And what is chaos but indiscriminate blending?

Now, we all know that the religious are happier than the irreligious, conservatives happier than liberals. Might this have something to do with the unregenerate muddleheadedness of the latter?

Prager discusses the most obvious distinctions that the left denies, thereby engendering chaos and fueling unhappiness, such as good and evil, God and man, man and woman, holy and profane, human and animal, and great and poor art.

Denying these distinctions has devastating material, psychological, and spiritual consequences for both the individual and the society. At the very least, it creates unhappy people, and unhappy people are responsible for most of the world's problems. Happy people don't become activists, utopians, and ideologues. But to deny the nature of human order is to defeat the order of human nature. Which is the quintessence of soph-defeating beehivior.

Thus, "Almost all disorders of private or public life somehow begin in the souls of an educated elite..." And these elites are shielded from the devastating consequences of their noxious ideas by such things as tenure, jerrymandering, and wealth (the most wealthy counties in the country are the most liberal).

"A wise man," writes Schall, "knows how to find the order in things."

Bottom line: Everything that exists is an orderly circle that flows from and returns to the ground, Alpha to Omega. And some circles are deeper and more expansive than others. A stone is a smaller circle than a plant.

Likewise, your life is a circle, the difference being that this is the only circle that isn't simply "given." Yours needn't be a little jerk circle. Rather, it has some free play, some slack. How wide will you make it? And how deep is the order? Or how depthless, rather?

For the name of this depthlessness is God.

Will You Please Hold For Mother Nature?

Proofs for the existence of God abound for those who do not need them. --Don Colacho's Aphorisms

Yesterday we discussed the Astonishing Hypothesis, which, it turns out, isn't so astonishing after all. Rather, it is the first principle and final consequence of scientism -- just a typical tall tale of tenured tautology.

I hate to belabor the point -- or anything else, for that matter -- but if the hypothesis is "true" then it can't be, because there is no way for us to escape the closed loop of our genetic programming. "Knowing" itself would take on an entirely different cast, because so-called knowledge would reduce to mental masturbation, i.e., the meaningless friction of neurons rubbing together.

It reminds me of a comedy bit I once heard on the radio. A man called a company about some sort of issue, and the operator put him on hold. We then hear some grunting and straining on the caller's part, and he's once again speaking to the operator. She says, "How did you get here? I just put you on hold."

"I fought my way out of hold. Now please connect me to the manager."

It goes back and forth like this, with the operator putting him back on hold and the caller struggling his way out again.

So, according to the astonishing hypothesis, Darwin has put all of us on hold. Forever. We cannot speak to the manager of this place, nor can we even get a human being on the line.

What I don't understand is how Darwin got through. How was he able to fight his way out of hold, and speak directly to Mother Nature? Is it because he's some sort of god or something? Is he magically exempt from the implications of his own theory? I guess so.

That would actually qualify as astonishing, if a single human being somehow embodied the word of God and shared it with the rest of us. But who would believe that?

You may recall my post of two days ago, Putting the Cosmos on the Couch. If not, consider yourself reminded.

In it I mentioned the evolution of psychoanalysis, from a one-person psychology to a two-person psychology. I'll try to avoid the pedantry, but by the 1940s, leading theorists began to reconceptualize the mind, and regard it as thoroughly intersubjective. In turn, this had revolutionary implications for the treatment of mental illness.

It all revolves around the concept of "counter-transference." Most of you are probably familiar with the term "transference." In the old, pre-intersubjective days, the analyst was supposed to be a "blank slate" for the patient to project his unconscious fantasies on. That's transference.

The key point is that any emotional reaction or involvement on the part of the analyst was considered a bad thing, analogous to contamination in a lab experiment. Indeed, just think of so-called "climate science." The problem with it is that its practitioners so contaminate their models and findings with subjective preferences and biases, that the science is less than worthless, i.e., harmful.

But again, the mind is not an object, so it cannot be treated as such. Not only is it a system, but an open system with interior relations to other human beings. This is what makes possible such things as love, or communication, or reading of facial expressions.

Bottom line: with the change in perspective toward intersubjectivity, counter-transference was no longer considered a "contamination," but a form of unconscious intersubjective communication. As soon as you think about it, you realize that it's a kind of truism. In any human-to-human contact, we are witness to all sorts of moment-to-moment reactions, a kind of interpersonal stream of consciousness, as it were.

Thus, nowadays a properly trained psychoanalysis doesn't dismiss his counter-transference, but uses it as primary data about the patient. Two things to bear in mind: first, the counter-transference occurs at multiple levels, from the very primitive on up.

To put it another way, a very primitive patient (i.e., one with a lot of primitive developmental issues) will evoke primitive reactions on the part of the analyst. These reactions may appear in the form of images, spontaneously recalled dream fragments, past experiences, anything.

The second point is that one doesn't just take the counter-transferential reactions at face value. Rather, one examines them in a detached way, to see how they relate to everything else about the analytic situation. For example, sometimes they are telling you about the patient, but other times they might only be telling you about yourself, and you have to try to discern the difference.

I hope this isn't getting too pedantic, but think of an everyday situation between a couple. Or just me, even. I come home from work. I felt pretty good all day, but as soon as I walk in the door, I sense a Vague Foreboding. Not necessarily a Nameless Dread, but some sort of distinct change in the emotional weather pattern.

What's going on here? Is it her? Or is it me? It seems like her, but let's not jump to conclusions. Then I'll really make a mess of things. Maybe it's something I said last night, or maybe she's just having a bad day that has nothing to do with me. Maybe I need her to be a certain way, and she's not being that way, so unconsciously I'm getting angry.

Etc. You know how it goes.

All of the above blather about counter-transference is just prelude to something I wanted to address in The Nature of Order. The way my mind works -- or doesn't work, depending on your counter-transference -- is that I'm always seeing connections in things. And what I'm seeing here is that Alexander has essentially developed a sophisticated theory of counter-transference, not just vis-a-vis our unconscious reactions to architecture, but toward the whole cosmos.

Jumping ahead a bit, you might say that, just as psychoanalysis evolved from a one-person to a two-person psychology, Alexander does the same thing with existence itself. Therefore, if Alexander is correct -- which he is -- our constant stream of interior reactions to the world is a source of objective data about the world. Yes, it is also "subjective," in that we are obviously subjects. Nevertheless, the information is objective and verifiable.

Let's go back to the question of whether or not we are forever on hold. If we are, then we have no access to valid information about the nature of reality. But if somehow -- mirabile dictu -- we are in touch with Mother, then we aren't just restricted to scientific truths, but to all sorts of interesting information.

For example, Alexander would maintain that when we look at, say, Yosemite Valley, and we exclaim to ourselves, My, what breathtaking beauty!, the beauty is a fact, not an opinion. I mean, who says it's ugly? Indeed, there is more inter-rater reliability for such an opinion than there is for most scientific questions.

Out of time. To be continued. But I'll leave you with the coonsolation prize of a couple of aphorisms of DC:

"Intuition" is the perception of the invisible, just as "perception" is the intuition of the visible. And

The subjective is what is perceived by one subject. The objective is is what is perceived by all subjects.

All normal subjects, anyway. Obama, for example, is objectively creepy. Those who disagree need therapy.

*****

Beautiful or ugly or just meh?

How Did I Get Here?

By which I mean I AM, which is to say an interior locus of personal subjectivity. 

What must the universe be like in order for there to exist a conscious being asking what the universe must be like in order to have given rise to him? 

If you ponder the number of variables that have to go right, it approaches infinitude, from the basic laws of physics, to the nature of stars, to character of our galaxy, to the location of the planet, to the emergence of life, to the supposedly unguided adventure of DNA, culminating in the appearance of a neurologically immature primate, AKA the helpless baby who can internalize language and culture while his brain is developing -- in other words, an intersubjective being not bound by instinct but open to being.

And that only scratches the surface of a cursory glance at a perfunctory review of the tip of the iceberg of the variables involved in the appearance of a self-conscious rational animal. 

As I outlined in the book, the helpless baby is indeed the fulcrum of human development, a portal through which humanness emerges. It is necessary condition, or condition without which we couldn't be here. 

Note that the Incarnation fully acknowledges this, in the sense that God doesn't just pick some lucky grown-up to inhabit, but must go through the entire developmental process of becoming human, because there is no other way to become human.

This is now well understood by neuropsychology. It's been awhile since I read anything on the subject, so I've been getting up to speed with a book called The Brain: The Story of You. Which is really the story of I, at least insofar as neuroscience can illuminate the subject. 

Nevertheless, even the most detailed neuroscientific account can only illuminate the objective factors that permit subjectivity, while remaining silent on the nature of subjectivity itself -- much as how natural selection can help to explain the evolution of life but not its origins or essential nature. 

In a section called Born Unfinished, Eagleman writes that

At birth we are helpless. We spend about a year unable to walk, about two more before we can articulate full thoughts, and many more years unable to fend for ourselves. We are totally dependent on those around us for our survival.  

Is there anything more useless than a baby? And not just useless, but a great burden to even keep alive. 

Dolphins, for instance, are born swimming; giraffes learn to stand within hours; a baby zebra can run within forty-five minutes of birth. Across the animal kingdom, our cousins are strikingly independent soon after they're born.

How did man escape the circle of instinct, of neurologically imprinted and preordained patterns of behavior? Nor can other animals survive outside the narrow niche to which they are adapted, which is why we don't see polar bears in Los Angeles or snakes in the arctic. 

In contrast, humans are able to thrive in many different environments, from the frozen tundra to the high mountains to bustling urban centers. 

How? All because "the human brain is born remarkably unfinished":

Instead of arriving with everything wired up -- let's call it "hardwired" -- a human brain allows itself to be shaped by the details of life experience. This leads to long periods of helplessness as the young brain slowly molds to its environment. It's "livewired."

And even then, the brain isn't just molded to its external environment. Rather, -- and this is key -- it must be adapted to other minds, which is to say, the "interior environment" of intersubjectivity. Infants raised without this intimate connection to other subjects are left with permanent disabilities, because certain experiences must occur when the infant brain is so open and unformed:

Without an environment with emotional care and cognitive stimulation, the human brain cannot develop normally. 

Still, this intersubjective environment goes only to the necessary conditions of the human subject. What is its sufficient condition, the condition with which humanness is possible? Is subjectivity reducible to anything less than itself? Is it even conceivable that a material object -- a three pound hunk of meat called the brain -- could conjure subjectivity?

The so-called hard problem.

Yes, but maybe the problem is hard because some people just don't like the solution, which has to do with the ontological priority of mind. We've written before of how early man tended to "mentalize" everything, whereas modern man defaults in the opposite direction, "objectivizing" everything: for the former the cosmos is a crystallization of spirit, while for the latter spirit is a side effect of matter.

In The Phenomenon of Life, Jonas writes of how "When man first began to interpret the nature of things -- and this he did when he began to be man -- life was to him everywhere, and being the same as being alive" (emphasis mine).

Thus, "Animism was the widespread expression of this stage.... Soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all things. Bare matter -- that is, truly inanimate, 'dead' matter, was yet to be discovered -- as indeed its concept, so familiar to us, is anything but obvious."

Is it obvious that things aren't "alive," or imbued with a kind of life? I suspect this is partly a matter of left-brain capture of the right, in that it is through the RCH that we are in touch with the holistic and organismic nature of a nature that speaks to us of its transcendent life, truth, and beauty. There are aphorisms for this, too many to list:

Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

True, but how?

From an aesthetic experience one returns as if from a sighting of numinous footprints.

The laws of biology do not have sufficiently delicate fingers to fashion the beauty of a face. 

When their religious depth disappears, things are reduced to a surface without thickness, where nothing shows through. 

The natural and supernatural are not overlapping planes, but intertwined threads.

Scraping the painting, we do not find the meaning of the picture, only a blank and mute canvas. Equally, it is not in scratching about in nature that we will find its sense.  

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance.

Imagination is the capacity to perceive through the senses the attributes of the object that the senses do not perceive.

Things are not mute. They merely select their listeners. 

Let's go back to the first one, that things -- objects -- are not mute at all, but incredibly chatty. I am reminded of Christopher Alexander's The Phenomenon of Life, in which he speaks of our "loss of the ability and desire to discern aliveness" in things. According to an amazon reviewer, 

Alexander establishes that aliveness is a property of space and matter, not only of biological organisms. Next, he establishes that aliveness exists on a spectrum: anything can be more or less alive....  

So how do we discern aliveness? After decades of experimentation, Alexander has found that it is an objective property. A basic tenet is the question, "which of these things, manifestations, etc. brings me more aliveness?"

Why do some objects radiate life?

Alexander describes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life, and establishes this understanding of living structures as an intellectual basis for a new architecture....

This book shows that living structures depend on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.

This sounds remarkably similar in structure to the intersubjectivity of the human self that is forged in infancy. This same intersubjectivity is what allows is to discern the life in things, not to mention the light; or to see what is beyond sight, hear what is beyond sound, touch what is beyond the surface, etc. If we couldn't do these things, we would scarcely be deserving of the title human.

Here is Gemini's description of the image it could not create this morning due to "technical issues":

The image I intended to generate was a visual representation of the concepts in your post. It depicted a child at the center of a natural landscape. Glowing threads of light extended from the child's head to connect with other people and with the rocks, trees, and animals around them, all of which subtly radiated an inner light. 

The child represents the "unfinished" and "livewired" human, whose subjectivity is forged through intersubjectivity. 

The threads of light symbolize the deep connections to other minds that are necessary for consciousness to develop. 

The radiating aliveness of the trees, rocks, and animals visually conveys the idea that matter is not mute but is imbued with an objective quality of life that the human mind is uniquely capable of perceiving.

The image was intended to show that human consciousness is not an isolated phenomenon, but is an integral and connected part of a living universe.

Understanding Seeking Faith

Lonergan promises to reveal “a transcendental method, that is, a basic pattern of operations employed in every cognitional enterprise.” In other words, what we actually do when we know something or anything or everything. And what we know when we're doing it  

I’m in! However, I’d rather just use his thoughts as a springboard for my own reflections. Self-involved megalomaniacs are like that. But in my defense, I’m old enough to have my own opinions, and lazy enough to not want to slog through this book again.

I should say at the top that I don’t really see anything here that’s not expressed more clearly and succinctly in Polanyi, although he is nowhere acknowledged. Seems their vertical paths never crossed.

Mmmmm, gnostalgia. I just grabbed a volume of Polanyi from the shelf to check the index for any signs of Lonergan, but what grabbed my attention were the many frantic notes to myself about the discoveries therein. 

Mind you, I first read this book (Meaning) when I didn’t know anything about anything, but when my mind had just become activated and was hangry for Truth. The notes tell a story in themselves. At least to a self-involved megalomaniac.

For example, this note to myself could be straight out of Lonergan: The act of understanding is more important than what is understood. Boom, there it is. 

Or this: The technique is the content. So, Lonergan’s idea of the Method of method is a geist that's been in my zeits for a long time. Further examination of the pages reveals preoccupations that have never stopped occupying me.  

Which brings to mind another preoccupation: the idea that the journey of the soul involves the discovery of itself via encounters with the objects that reveal it. 

This sounds a bit tautological, but it’s actually the opposite, for this is the way we exit the closed world of mere instinct-bound animality and enter a higher and deeper, transcendental world that will reveal ourselves to ourselves. Paradoxically, the outside reveals the inside.

Which, of course, isn’t a paradox at all, unless you’ve made it one due to a faulty preconceived metaphysic you’ve brought to the game. In reality, the outside can only reveal the inside because it has an inside of its own. This is known as its “intelligibility,” but there is much more to intelligibility than merely the scientific or quantitative kind. 

Rather, the world is full of qualities, and woe to the man who misses out on them, whether due to ignorance, tenure, autism, poor taste, or just inattention. Let’s bring in our house Aphorist:

Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

Which we do mean literally, a subject we have discussed in past in reference to the works of Christopher Alexander, especially the four volume Nature of Order (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Christopher+Alexander+the+Nature+of+Order&i=stripbooks&crid=1A9TOPGKWDQVS&sprefix=christopher+alexander+the+nature+of+order%2Cstripbooks%2C151&ref=nb_sb_noss_1).

Thus,

Things are not mute. They merely select their listeners.

So, what things have selected you? I won't bore you with my list, rather, with the previous 4,000 posts about it. But so long as they are freely chosen, these are the very things that reveal ourselves to ourselves, so be careful what you choose to choose you, because

Each one sees in the world what he deserves to see.

Having said this, not all of the things that select us come preassembled. Rather, some assembly is usually required on our part, and this is where things get tricksy, since this involves an irreducible confluence of subjectivity and objectivity, even though -- paradoxically -- this is the only path to objective truth. There is no other, i.e., no “view from nowhere” that can eliminate the subject, let alone illuminate it.

Which reminds me of an idea for a post I had the other day, the notion of a “political view from nowhere.” On the one hand, there can be no such thing in politics, since politics is inherently factional, combative, and dynamic. 

But on the other hand, there is no becoming in the absence of Being (change my mind), so the superficial combat of politics must rest upon certain enduring principles, or it reduces to power — i.e., to a totalitarian leftism for everyone, good and hard.

I was discussing this yesterday with the boy, who has lately taken a great interest in politics. These are obviously interesting times, and yet, he doesn’t regard this as a curse, rather, an exciting substitute for the day-to-day masculine soap opera of baseball season.

Although he is temperamentally sane (AKA conservative), he also knows that to be ignorant of the other side of the argument is to be ignorant of both.

But how does one choose? I told him that one needs to think things through until one arrives at Rock, i.e., those things that are true and cannot not be true. All thought is for the purpose of arriving at Rock, and until one does so, one will be plunged into obscurity and ambivalence.

Or in other words, one will be locked up in Plato’s cave, looking the wrong way. Those are shadows of rock, not the rock that makes them!

This was followed by a discussion of mineralogy, i.e., the various types of rock which aren’t going anywhere so long as humans remain human and don’t all fall into progressive tyranny. At any rate,

As long as we do not arrive at religious categories, our explanations are not founded upon rock.

This doesn’t necessarily mean a religion, rather, just what it says: religious categories. They say that for most people, religion is “faith seeking understanding.” However, for the pneumatic Raccoon it’s actually the other way around, i.e., understanding seeking faith. 

That is to say, we begin at the other end, with intellectual certitude regarding those timeless truths, but then pray for the faith to “be,” or incarnate them, so to speak (what we call incargnosis). 

For on the one hand, our soul has “selected” them, but come to find out it is we who have been selected by someone who seems to know us intimately, or at least has been reading our mail. But who could believe such a thing? I don’t know, but

What is difficult is not to believe in God, but to believe that we are important to Him.

Therefore,

If we believe in God we should not say, "I believe in God," but rather, "God believes in me."

So, have faith in God’s faith, not ours. His rock beats our scissors.

Understanding Seeking Faith

Lonergan promises to reveal “a transcendental method, that is, a basic pattern of operations employed in every cognitional enterprise.” In other words, what we actually do when we know something or anything or everything. And what we know when we're doing it  

I’m in! However, I’d rather just use his thoughts as a springboard for my own reflections. Self-involved megalomaniacs are like that. But in my defense, I’m old enough to have my own opinions, and lazy enough to not want to slog through this book again.

I should say at the top that I don’t really see anything here that’s not expressed more clearly and succinctly in Polanyi, although he is nowhere acknowledged. Seems their vertical paths never crossed.

Mmmmm, gnostalgia. I just grabbed a volume of Polanyi from the shelf to check the index for any signs of Lonergan, but what grabbed my attention were the many frantic notes to myself about the discoveries therein. 

Mind you, I first read this book (Meaning) when I didn’t know anything about anything, but when my mind had just become activated and was hangry for Truth. The notes tell a story in themselves. At least to a self-involved megalomaniac.

For example, this note to myself could be straight out of Lonergan: The act of understanding is more important than what is understood. Boom, there it is. 

Or this: The technique is the content. So, Lonergan’s idea of the Method of method is a geist that's been in my zeits for a long time. Further examination of the pages reveals preoccupations that have never stopped occupying me.  

Which brings to mind another preoccupation: the idea that the journey of the soul involves the discovery of itself via encounters with the objects that reveal it. 

This sounds a bit tautological, but it’s actually the opposite, for this is the way we exit the closed world of mere instinct-bound animality and enter a higher and deeper, transcendental world that will reveal ourselves to ourselves. Paradoxically, the outside reveals the inside.

Which, of course, isn’t a paradox at all, unless you’ve made it one due to a faulty preconceived metaphysic you’ve brought to the game. In reality, the outside can only reveal the inside because it has an inside of its own. This is known as its “intelligibility,” but there is much more to intelligibility than merely the scientific or quantitative kind. 

Rather, the world is full of qualities, and woe to the man who misses out on them, whether due to ignorance, tenure, autism, poor taste, or just inattention. Let’s bring in our house Aphorist:

Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

Which we do mean literally, a subject we have discussed in past in reference to the works of Christopher Alexander, especially the four volume Nature of Order (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Christopher+Alexander+the+Nature+of+Order&i=stripbooks&crid=1A9TOPGKWDQVS&sprefix=christopher+alexander+the+nature+of+order%2Cstripbooks%2C151&ref=nb_sb_noss_1).

Thus,

Things are not mute. They merely select their listeners.

So, what things have selected you? I won't bore you with my list, rather, with the previous 4,000 posts about it. But so long as they are freely chosen, these are the very things that reveal ourselves to ourselves, so be careful what you choose to choose you, because

Each one sees in the world what he deserves to see.

Having said this, not all of the things that select us come preassembled. Rather, some assembly is usually required on our part, and this is where things get tricksy, since this involves an irreducible confluence of subjectivity and objectivity, even though -- paradoxically -- this is the only path to objective truth. There is no other, i.e., no “view from nowhere” that can eliminate the subject, let alone illuminate it.

Which reminds me of an idea for a post I had the other day, the notion of a “political view from nowhere.” On the one hand, there can be no such thing in politics, since politics is inherently factional, combative, and dynamic. 

But on the other hand, there is no becoming in the absence of Being (change my mind), so the superficial combat of politics must rest upon certain enduring principles, or it reduces to power — i.e., to a totalitarian leftism for everyone, good and hard.

I was discussing this yesterday with the boy, who has lately taken a great interest in politics. These are obviously interesting times, and yet, he doesn’t regard this as a curse, rather, an exciting substitute for the day-to-day masculine soap opera of baseball season.

Although he is temperamentally sane (AKA conservative), he also knows that to be ignorant of the other side of the argument is to be ignorant of both.

But how does one choose? I told him that one needs to think things through until one arrives at Rock, i.e., those things that are true and cannot not be true. All thought is for the purpose of arriving at Rock, and until one does so, one will be plunged into obscurity and ambivalence.

Or in other words, one will be locked up in Plato’s cave, looking the wrong way. Those are shadows of rock, not the rock that makes them!

This was followed by a discussion of mineralogy, i.e., the various types of rock which aren’t going anywhere so long as humans remain human and don’t all fall into progressive tyranny. At any rate,

As long as we do not arrive at religious categories, our explanations are not founded upon rock.

This doesn’t necessarily mean a religion, rather, just what it says: religious categories. They say that for most people, religion is “faith seeking understanding.” However, for the pneumatic Raccoon it’s actually the other way around, i.e., understanding seeking faith. 

That is to say, we begin at the other end, with intellectual certitude regarding those timeless truths, but then pray for the faith to “be,” or incarnate them, so to speak (what we call incargnosis). 

For on the one hand, our soul has “selected” them, but come to find out it is we who have been selected by someone who seems to know us intimately, or at least has been reading our mail. But who could believe such a thing? I don’t know, but

What is difficult is not to believe in God, but to believe that we are important to Him.

Therefore,

If we believe in God we should not say, "I believe in God," but rather, "God believes in me."

So, have faith in God’s faith, not ours. His rock beats our scissors.