The Lèse-Majestiést Man in L.A. County

Continuing with our theme of what God is really like when we get to know him (and vice versa), let’s veer back to that essay by Hans Jonas, A Concept of God After Auschwitz. 

Again, “Auschwitz" is just a synecdoche for the inconceivable suffering that goes on down here. It can even be a bit misleading, because the mere mathematical fact can obscure the existential fact that 6 million is equal to 1, or rather, that 6,000,000 x ∞ is still ∞, each of the 6,000,000 individuals being infinitely precious. 

One of the strangest characteristics of man is that he is a “species” of utterly unique and unrepeatable instances, which would seem to be a contradiction in terms. I, for example, am a human being, but I'm still waiting to meet someone who reminds me of me.

This is a bit of a side point, but the reason for this is our theomorphism. In other words, God is the principle of absolute uniqueness, or Uniqueness as such, and since we are in his image, we participate in this uniqueness. 

Moreover, a trinitarian metaphysic implies that our "reflected uniqueness" must be reflected within the Godhead (i.e., as Son to Father). At any rate, you might say we are “relatively unique” whereas only God is absolutely unique. 

We human beings are relative to each other, but ultimately to God. It is why the people who detach themselves from the Principle of Uniqueness tend to become such horizontal clones of each other, i.e., statistics, conformists, sheep, lemmings, the swarming anthill of NPCs. There are even Aphorisms for this:

For God there are only individuals.

Inversely, for the left there are only statistics, races, sexual preferences, etc. Or just say Identity Politics.

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.

The two poles are individual and God; the two antagonists are God and man.

As in mankind enclosed in progressive ideology. There is a circularity at work here, in that progressive ideology is indeed a sufficient explanation for the idiot who adopts it: feminism explain feminists, as queer theory explains queers and CRT explains the low IQ racists who are stupid enough to believe it.

Only for God are we irreplaceable.

That is indeed a bold statement, for it is easy enough for any intelligent person with sufficient curiosity to believe in God, but another thing to imagine he cares about us, of all people. 

Let’s try to rein Bob in and refocus on the essay. In it, Jonas sketches out his own myth of God and creation. I won’t say it’s as unhinged as my own huge mythunderstanding presented on pp. 6-17 of the bOOk. Still, my meta-myth is a kind of parallel looniverse to his, but let’s start with Jonas's and comment on it as we go along:

In the beginning, for unknowable reasons, the ground of being, or the Divine, chose to give itself over to the chance and risk and endless variety of becoming. And wholly so...

Several things can be said about this: first, that the beginning is always now, as in the vertical principles that uphold the cosmos in every moment (AKA continuous creation). Second, I’m not so sure the reasons are entirely unknowable, in the sense that, What does a Creator do all deity? Hmm. I know: create! 

You are correct, sir: creators gonna create. Perhaps we can best understand this with recourse to our own creativity, which is at once inexhaustible and a bit compulsive or addictive, so to speak. Not to attribute these latter to God, but if man can’t help himself from ceaseless creativity, what must God be like? He must toss out universes as readily as we do greeting cards and sitcoms.

Come to think of it… nah, never mind. Two words: Divine Sitcomedy. Unless its a Theodrama, in which case you deicide.  

Third, that word “becoming” can be a bit of a snare if we’re not careful. We love Whitehead, but we are not Whiteheadians, i.e., process philosophers in the literal sense. 

Rather, while being and becoming are always seen together -- i.e., they are complementary -- becoming must nevertheless be anchored in, or subordinate to, being. If not, then there is no avoiding a descent into the pantheistic absurdity of an “evolving God.” 

If we're going to talk about “change” in the Godhead -- and we are -- then we have to proceed very cautiously and respect the metaphysical guardrails. We’re not new age vulgarians. 

Back to Jonas’s whale of a myth: in giving itself over to creation and becoming, and

entering into the adventure of space and time, the deity held back nothing of itself: no uncommitted or unimpaired* part remained to direct, correct, and ultimately guarantee the devious working-out of its destiny in creation (*I frankly don't understand his use of that word).

A few comments. First, Jonas comes close here to the Christian concept of divine kenosis, which, in the words of Prof. Wiki, refers to "the 'self-emptying' of Jesus. The word is used in Philippians 2:7: '[Jesus] made himself nothing,’ or '[he] emptied himself.’”

There are more or less extreme versions of this, and I prefer the more extreme -- for example, the idea that this principle of kenosis extends all the way up and in, to the Father’s kenosis in engendering the Son, and the kenosis of Father and Son in breathing forth the Holy Spirit, or something. The point is, there’s a whole lotta kenosis going on up there.

We shall continue tomorrow. As usual, I never know the point at which I am overtaxing the reader. Just because I enjoy emptying my head, it doesn't imply that you should enjoy filling yours with my kenotic verbiage.

The Lèse-Majestiést Man in L.A. County

Continuing with our theme of what God is really like when we get to know him (and vice versa), let’s veer back to that essay by Hans Jonas, A Concept of God After Auschwitz. 

Again, “Auschwitz" is just a synecdoche for the inconceivable suffering that goes on down here. It can even be a bit misleading, because the mere mathematical fact can obscure the existential fact that 6 million is equal to 1, or rather, that 6,000,000 x ∞ is still ∞, each of the 6,000,000 individuals being infinitely precious. 

One of the strangest characteristics of man is that he is a “species” of utterly unique and unrepeatable instances, which would seem to be a contradiction in terms. I, for example, am a human being, but I'm still waiting to meet someone who reminds me of me.

This is a bit of a side point, but the reason for this is our theomorphism. In other words, God is the principle of absolute uniqueness, or Uniqueness as such, and since we are in his image, we participate in this uniqueness. 

Moreover, a trinitarian metaphysic implies that our "reflected uniqueness" must be reflected within the Godhead (i.e., as Son to Father). At any rate, you might say we are “relatively unique” whereas only God is absolutely unique. 

We human beings are relative to each other, but ultimately to God. It is why the people who detach themselves from the Principle of Uniqueness tend to become such horizontal clones of each other, i.e., statistics, conformists, sheep, lemmings, the swarming anthill of NPCs. There are even Aphorisms for this:

For God there are only individuals.

Inversely, for the left there are only statistics, races, sexual preferences, etc. Or just say Identity Politics.

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.

The two poles are individual and God; the two antagonists are God and man.

As in mankind enclosed in progressive ideology. There is a circularity at work here, in that progressive ideology is indeed a sufficient explanation for the idiot who adopts it: feminism explain feminists, as queer theory explains queers and CRT explains the low IQ racists who are stupid enough to believe it.

Only for God are we irreplaceable.

That is indeed a bold statement, for it is easy enough for any intelligent person with sufficient curiosity to believe in God, but another thing to imagine he cares about us, of all people. 

Let’s try to rein Bob in and refocus on the essay. In it, Jonas sketches out his own myth of God and creation. I won’t say it’s as unhinged as my own huge mythunderstanding presented on pp. 6-17 of the bOOk. Still, my meta-myth is a kind of parallel looniverse to his, but let’s start with Jonas's and comment on it as we go along:

In the beginning, for unknowable reasons, the ground of being, or the Divine, chose to give itself over to the chance and risk and endless variety of becoming. And wholly so...

Several things can be said about this: first, that the beginning is always now, as in the vertical principles that uphold the cosmos in every moment (AKA continuous creation). Second, I’m not so sure the reasons are entirely unknowable, in the sense that, What does a Creator do all deity? Hmm. I know: create! 

You are correct, sir: creators gonna create. Perhaps we can best understand this with recourse to our own creativity, which is at once inexhaustible and a bit compulsive or addictive, so to speak. Not to attribute these latter to God, but if man can’t help himself from ceaseless creativity, what must God be like? He must toss out universes as readily as we do greeting cards and sitcoms.

Come to think of it… nah, never mind. Two words: Divine Sitcomedy. Unless its a Theodrama, in which case you deicide.  

Third, that word “becoming” can be a bit of a snare if we’re not careful. We love Whitehead, but we are not Whiteheadians, i.e., process philosophers in the literal sense. 

Rather, while being and becoming are always seen together -- i.e., they are complementary -- becoming must nevertheless be anchored in, or subordinate to, being. If not, then there is no avoiding a descent into the pantheistic absurdity of an “evolving God.” 

If we're going to talk about “change” in the Godhead -- and we are -- then we have to proceed very cautiously and respect the metaphysical guardrails. We’re not new age vulgarians. 

Back to Jonas’s whale of a myth: in giving itself over to creation and becoming, and

entering into the adventure of space and time, the deity held back nothing of itself: no uncommitted or unimpaired* part remained to direct, correct, and ultimately guarantee the devious working-out of its destiny in creation (*I frankly don't understand his use of that word).

A few comments. First, Jonas comes close here to the Christian concept of divine kenosis, which, in the words of Prof. Wiki, refers to "the 'self-emptying' of Jesus. The word is used in Philippians 2:7: '[Jesus] made himself nothing,’ or '[he] emptied himself.’”

There are more or less extreme versions of this, and I prefer the more extreme -- for example, the idea that this principle of kenosis extends all the way up and in, to the Father’s kenosis in engendering the Son, and the kenosis of Father and Son in breathing forth the Holy Spirit, or something. The point is, there’s a whole lotta kenosis going on up there.

We shall continue tomorrow. As usual, I never know the point at which I am overtaxing the reader. Just because I enjoy emptying my head, it doesn't imply that you should enjoy filling yours with my kenotic verbiage.

Man: The Only Animal Obligated to Adapt to Himself

Whether we like it or not, we live surrounded by mysteries, which logically and existentially draw us toward transcendence. -- Schuon

"Haunted by transcendence," I suppose you could say. For if there is no transcendence there can be no hauntedness. In a pre-living cosmos there are no problems because there are no alternatives. And in a prehuman cosmos there can be no anxiety, no worry, no apprehension. Fear, yes, but it can't be like human fear, which lives in the imagination.

I remember (I think) Alan Watts using the example of a rabbit. To us the rabbit looks a bit ill-at-ease as it listens and looks around for predators. But from the standpoint of the rabbit, it might be analogous to a crosswalk with a flashing red light saying DON'T WALK DON'T WALK DON'T WALK or you'll get run over and killed! Yes, there is potential danger, but no one is freaking out about it.

But humans are always haunted by an Otherness which is built into us. You see it right away in prehistory, from the moment there is evidence of humanness. In the book I spookulated that this must have something to do with adapting to the strange new condition of "mindedness." One reason I say this is because man is still adapting to mindedness, so it must have been all the more baffling 50,000 or 100,000 years ago, when the space was all new -- or we were new to the space, rather.

One thing we have to make clear at the outset is that this space is ontologically real. Or at least that is our hypothesis. After all, if it isn't real -- i.e., just a kind of transient and meaningless blip amidst the flow of entropy -- then everything falls apart and human existence is indeed an absurd space between two infinite slabs of darkness. Could be. We don't want to exclude that possibility a priori. But then this really would be a haunted universe, or rather, man would be both the haunter and the haunted.

My belief -- similar to Ken Wilber -- is that there are different degrees and dimensions of reality. Everyone recognizes this, even if they don't admit it to themselves, for there is the material/empirical world, the rational/linguistic mental world, and the immaterial/contemplative spiritual world. In his book Eye to Eye, Wilber talks about the different "eyes" necessary to perceive these worlds, i.e., the eyes of flesh, reason, and contemplation, respectively. (And Corbin calls our multidimensional psycho-spiritual spatiality the imaginal realm.)

Animals have the eye of flesh, but the best among them have only attenuated versions of the higher two, and even then, mostly because of contact with humans (e.g., dogs). Higher primates have tried to teach sign language to the subprimes, but the latter can only get so far before they hit a ceiling. We might think of this as a literal ceiling, only an immaterial one. For humans there is no ceiling, as our space opens all the way out and up. It is what makes us human.

But since this space is infinite, perhaps you can appreciate how it can provoke a kind of agoraphobia, so to speak. Agoraphobia is fear of open spaces, just as claustrophobia is a fear of jolly fat men with white beards. No, wait, it is a fear of enclosed presences. All punning aside, both are pathological endeavors to manage psychic space, only projected outward. But why must space be managed at all?

Because it's haunted, that's why. There was a time -- a long time, meaning most of history -- when this was much more experience-near. Now we psychologize and medicalize the space. Instead of saying you're haunted by ghosts and goblins, we say you're haunted by global warming, or structural racism, or white privilege, or the patriarchy. These poor souls are just trying to manage their anxieties. But anxiety is just a word, whereas the ghosts are real.

The first book I ever read that discusses this subject was The Phenomenon of Life, by Hans Jonas. The first essay is called Life, Death, and the Body in the Theory of Being, and it goes exactly to this subject of adaptation to our haunted space. (I'm sure I have blogged on this before, somewhere in here.)

From previous posts; and I apologize in advance for the length, but I kept finding interesting stuff. Interesting to me, anyway:

"[I]t is in the dark stirrings of primeval organic substance that a principle of freedom shines forth for the first time within the vast necessity of the physical universe -- a principle foreign to suns, planets, and atoms.... [T]he first appearance of this principle in its bare, elementary object-form signifies the break-through of being to the indefinite range of possibilities which hence stretches to the farthest reaches of subjective life, and as a whole stands under the sign of 'freedom'.... even the transition from inanimate to animate substance, the first feat of matter's organizing itself for life, was actuated by a tendency in the depth of being toward the very modes of freedom to which this transition opened the gate" (Jonas).

"But already the simple observed facts sketch an image of nature which advances by successive explosions in the manner of a rocket... from the hands of its Creator [comes] the spiritual form of man to which nature has been destined and in which she is liberated. In this new order, evolution is pursued always in the very interior of humanity. Moreover, evolution which continues in humanity has taken on a different color.... We find ourselves from now on on a spiritual plane where plasticity is infinitely greater... (Charles DeKoninck).

Jonas writes that "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" (Jonas).

As Jonas argues in The Phenomenon of Life, the "discovery" of a non-living cosmos is a very late one. Rather, for primordial man, life was the general rule, death the exception, the very thing that Lucy and her astoneaged friends needed to 'splain.

It is only with modernity that this perspective is reversed, so that death becomes "the natural thing, life the problem." Now that the universe is regarded as a kind of lifeless machine, life becomes a huge conceptual problem, because it must somehow be explained in terms of the lifeless. Could this attitude be one of the metaphysical tributaries to the death culture of the radical secular left? Jonas implies as much: "Our thinking today is under the ontological dominance of death."

One doesn't have to read too many existentialist writers -- e.g., Sartre, Camus, Kafka -- before one realizes that they really do regard life in this deeply pessimystic way -- as a plague or prison with no exit, into which human insects are thrown upon birth, and from which we are then nauseatingly alienated once we realize this is indeed our fate. Just the other day, some profoundly sick feminists celebrated "abortion pride" day. Why not? If our life is just an absurd and meaningless prison house, then surely abortion is a mercy. Why not nip life in the bud?

Jonas was surely converging upon the same Raccoon attractor when he wrote, "Perhaps, rightly understood, man is after all the measure of all things -- not indeed through the legislation of his reason but through the exemplar of his psychophysiological totality which represents the maximum of concrete ontological completeness known to us: a completeness from which, reductively, the species of being may have to be determined by way of progressive subtraction down to the minimum of bare elementary matter."

That last crack comports perfectly with Schuon, who writes that "Man is made for what he is able to conceive; the very ideas of absoluteness and transcendence prove both his spiritual nature and the supra-terrestrial character of his destiny.... The paradox of the human condition is that nothing could be more contrary to us than the requirement to transcend ourselves, and yet nothing could be more essentially ourselves than the core of this requirement or the fruit of this self-overcoming."

And transcending oneself "is to remove the layer of ice or darkness that imprisons the true nature of man.... [O]nly the 'divine dimension' can satisfy the thirst for plenitude in our willing or our love" (in Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, his most aphoristically bite-sized work).

Indeed, you could even say that the cosmos overcomes itself in the form of man:

Man is upright and he is bipedal; upright because he spans all of the vertical degrees of being; bipedal because he has a foot in both realms, the worldly and the celestial, heaven and earth, slack and conspiracy. He is not a dead man walking to his own godless wake, but a live wire waking to his own walk with Wakan Tanka.

Imagine alien explorers discovering earth:

"Our explorers enter a cave, and on the walls they discern lines or other configurations that must have been produced artificially, that have no structural function, and that suggest a likeness to one or another of the living forms encountered outside." Even "the crudest and most childish drawing would be just as conclusive as the frescoes of Michelangelo."

Conclusive of what, exactly? Of a relation to ideas that have no direct bearing upon purely biological ends. Here is evidence of an exit from the world of mere life, and entrance to the world of mind.

Thus, "just as a footprint is a sign of the foot that made it," a picture is not a sign of the hand that made it but of the mind that conceived it -- and that abstracted some essence from the object before representing it. In order to depict the essence one must first perceive the essence. This implies the ability to distinguish form from substance or mind from matter.

Painting involves a transformation and preservation of essence from one plane to another. Obviously, no animal can do this. Rather, they confront only a world of objects. To the extent that they perceive interiors, it is only through invariant signs, not symbols -- and a sign is really closer to an exterior (like a stop sign, which doesn't reveal anything about the person who made it).

Now, to know the distinction between form and substance is to be capable of distinguishing between appearance and reality, or surface and depth. And as mentioned the other day, to know that appearances are deceptive is to know that truth exists, for truth is simply the splendor of the Real (just as beauty is the splendor of the true).

Clearly, in order to distinguish between appearance and reality, there must be a kind of "space" in between. This is the middle earthspace inhobbited by human consciousness. Just as animals live in a world of appearances, God is the being who lives in truth and reality -- or is not different from them. And the human station is in between these two, God and nature, the One and the many.

Note that in Genesis man is given the power to name the animals. As Jonas explains, "the giving of names to objects is here regarded as the first feat of the newly created man and as the first distinctively human act." It is a "step beyond creation," or liberation from being plunged solely into the world of matter. In order to name something, we must be above it, and be capable of perceiving the unity beneath the multiplicity (which is another way of saying the reality behind appearances).

As usual, quoting old posts takes as much time as building new ones.

This Morning I Am a Man!

"The first thing that should strike man" -- the Man in the title above -- "when he reflects on the nature of the Universe" is the incommensurability between "the miracle of intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity" and "material objects, whether a grain of sand or the sun, or any creature whatever as an object of the senses" (Schuon).

Okay, let's give it a try: let us reflect upon the nature of the Universe. Hmm...

Yup. Human intelligence does strike one as a miraculous irruption of subjectivity transcending anything that comes into its purview. It is the one thing we rely upon to explain any- and everything, and yet, is itself unexplained, or at least taken for granted. But it is the sine qua non of everything human -- which is close to being a tautology, because it suggests that humanness is necessary for humanness (or personhood for persons).

But something cannot furnish its own explanation. Rather, things have causes outside themselves. What is the sufficient cause of human intelligence? If it were simply caused by the material world, it is impossible to explain how it can have powers that so transcend materiality.

In other words, a cause cannot give to an effect something it does not possess. There is an incommensurability between an objective cause and a subjective effect: in short: how could objects give a subjectivity entirely foreign to their nature?

There aren't really too many plausible or even implausible answers to this question. For example, consciousness might be just an illusory side effect of brain activity. But what does it mean for one illusion -- the teacher -- to say this to another -- the student? It means nothing, nor can anything mean anything. Rather, meaning and truth are denied a priori.

More generally, the affirmation that existence is meaningless is pregnant with meaning (although its issue is stillborn). Nihilism is not actually belief in nothing, if only because there is someone who believes it. A true nihilist would have to be an animal, since animals have no beliefs, nor any belief that they have none.

For most of mankind's history this question didn't arise, because it was assumed -- whether explicitly or implicitly -- that consciousness was built into the nature of things. Think of it: as Schuon says in paragraph one, the first thing that strikes us is the mysterious presence of a human interior that transcends -- and penetrates -- everything it encounters.

Now, for early man, objects didn't come first, rather, the subject. In other words, what we call "objectivity" has only been slowly teased out of subjectivity. Prior to the so-called scientific revolution....

Indeed, what was this revolution but a kind of systematic method for segregating the two? Premodern science -- because of its default toward subjectivity -- saw too much of it in the objects of nature. Things did this or that because they intended to.

Speaking of Things I Read a Long Time Ago that Have Always Stuck With Me, there is an essay about this in Hans Jonas' The Phenomenon of Life, called Life, Death, and the Body in the Theory of Being. In it he observes that

"When man first began to interpret the things of nature -- and this he did when he began to be man [that same curious fellow in the title above] -- life was to him everywhere, and being the same as being alive." Who could blame him? To this day, all children go through this stage, until they learn that the world is safely dead and that consciousness has no meaning or even reality.

But maybe we can learn a thing or two from our distant furbears. For them, "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."

You might say that a strict objectivity is profoundly unnatural. Think of a "natural" diet. One reason it is beneficial is that it contains all sorts of nutrients -- even ones we don't know about -- that cannot be replaced or reproduced in an unnatural diet. We can put some vitamin C back into frozen orange juice, but we have no idea as to all that is actually in a real life orange.

Just so, is it possible for artificial men weaned on scientism to ever recover the full richness of their desiccated subjectivity? Well, they can try -- hence the cult of art and other modalities to recover and resurrect something of the great Cosmic Interior.

But "That the world is alive is really the most natural view, and largely supported by prima-facie evidence." Nor is there really any sharp boundary between what is alive and what isn't.

Rather, "most of what we know to be inanimate is so intimately intertwined with the dynamics of life that it seems to share its nature" (ibid.). Indeed, we see an attempted recovery of this cognitive modality in radical environmentalists -- in tree-hugging gaia worshipers.

The point is, modern man, in learning to view the world scientifically -- or only scientifically -- must first unlearn this more right brained, integral way of seeing things. "[P]rimitive panpsychism, in addition to answering powerful needs of the soul, was justified by the rules of inference and verification within the available range of experience..." (ibid.).

Now, if we turn the cosmos back right-side up, we see that "it is not our personal thought that preceded the world, it was -- or is -- absolute Consciousness, of which our thought is a distant reflection precisely" (Schuon). In short, our own consciousness proves that "in the beginning was the Spirit." Or in other words, only Consciousness can be the sufficient cause of consciousness, just as only the Logos can be the sufficient cause of human language.

There are Mysteries and there are Absurdities, and it is vital not to conflate the two. And "Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be" (ibid.).

It would frankly have to be a miracle. And not the good kind!

Nevertheless, "tons of intelligence" -- not to mention billions of dollars -- "are wasted to circumvent the essential while brilliantly proving the absurd" (ibid.).

Could the very essence of reality be the utter banality of scientism? Nah. "In the beginning was, not matter, but Spirit, which is the Alpha and Omega" (Schuon).

Modern thought which began with the Renaissance is placed in exactly the opposite theoretic situation. Death is the natural thing, life the problem.... Accordingly, it is the existence of life within a mechanical universe which now calls for an explanation, and the explanation has to be in terms of the lifeless. --Hans Jonas

Similarly, we might say that tenure is an explanation of mind by the mindless.

Have You Heard the One About the Snake & the Lass?

In our previous post we suggested that, for the right cerebral hemisphere, "understanding music is perceived as similar to knowing a person."

Turns out to be the same vis-à-vis language, which "is an extension of life" (whatever that is). Like most of the factoids emerging from split-brain research, it doesn't really require the research to understand the principle.

For example, McGilchrist quotes Wittgenstein, who said that "to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life" (whatever that is).

Yes, "whatever that is." This is a critical unThought to bear in mind, because "life" and "language" are absolutely coterminous. In other worlds, no pre-linguistic animal "knows" it is alive, or has any way of abstracting the thing we call "life" from the totality of its experience.

Nor is it likely that human beings would have the concept of life in the absence of the experience of its absence. We've discussed this in the past, but it was Hans Jonas who first brought this to our attention.

In his The Phenomenon of Life, Jonas writes that "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."

Now, in the absence of a vascular catastrophe, it is very hard for us to put the developmental truthpaste back into the tube, and revert to a wholly right-brained view of the world.

However, as we shall hear, I think Genesis 3 must have something to do with this epic transition -- arguably the biggest bang in the cosmos -- from the untroubled holism of right-brain living into the dualistic world of the left, i.e., the tree of bifurcated knowledge of good and evil.

While we're on the subject, I should mention another book we've discussed in the past, The Symmetry of God, by Rodney Bomford. I don't have time to review his ideas at the moment, but if you search his name on the blog, you will see that his application of symmetrical logic toward understanding the divine realm is completely compatible with the idea that this realm is mediated via the right brain.

Indeed, Matte Blanco's analysis of symmetrical and asymmetrical logic essentially defines the left and right brain views of the world.

Back to the orthoparadox that Life is prior to nonlife. Clearly, this is a quintessentially right-brained view of the world, which doesn't perceive the sharp outlines and abstractions of the left. It sees holistically, and who's to say its interpretation is wrong?

For example, modern science places a sharp temporal division in the cosmos, and tells us that on one side is dead matter, the other side "life" (whatever that is). Life wasn't present for the first five billion years or so of cosmic evolution, and then it suddenly pops up out of nowhere (BOO!).

But as we suggested in the Bʘʘ!k, who are we to assume this cosmos is fundamentally dead, or that biology isn't just the mature fruit of a sufficiently ripe old cosmic tree?

Speaking of trees, back to Eden. One of the lessons of Genesis 3 is that with the dominance of the left brain, Death is introduced to the cosmos.

D'oh!

But that's just the way it is. Once we enter the dualistic world of the left, "the riddle confronting man is death: it is the contradiction to the one intelligible, self-explaining, 'natural' condition.... To the extent that life is accepted as the primary state of things, death looms as the disturbing mystery" (Jonas).

Just so: the price of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is indeed death, just as God says.

Note that he says we will die if we eat from it, which is to say, assimilate it. Also, when the Torah uses the word "knowledge," it is not in the abstract way we understand the term. It has much more to do with intimate familiarity, as we've discussed in the past (e.g., Adam knew Eve, ooh la la!).

Now, Rabbi Sacks has an interesting take on this subject, in his highly raccoomended The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning. Alert to the whole left-right brain tissue, he notices some details in Genesis that had escaped me.

First of all, for prelapsarian man, God "speaks" in an unproblematic manner. In short, he is "heard" intuitively, which is much more of a right brain phenomenon.

But in Genesis 3:6, Eve can't help noticing that the forbidden tree is easy on the eyes, meaning that she has transitioned from ear to eye and right to left. Indeed, immediately thereafter we read that the eyes of both of them were opened. Adam and Eve suddenly see that they are naked, and -- just as in the developing child -- feel shame.

Then it's back to the ear: they once again hear God, only now, for the first time, Adam is frightened of him. Which reminds me of a Buddhist crack to the effect that where there are two, there is fear. (I'm also thinking of "no one sees my face and lives. But hears my voice? No problemo.")

But who is this serpent fellow, this snake in the lass? Hmm, maybe the corpus callosum that links the two hemispheres:

Postmodern Man: The Eunuch at Every Wedding, the Corpse at Every Birth

Schuon talks about the "metaphysical transparency" of the world -- the fact that something from the other side of being always "spills over" to our side.

Which only proves that human beings aren't solely on this side of the ontological divide, but have a foot in each realm. If this weren't true, then we would have no access at all to transcendental truth, beauty, or love. For surely, to know the truth of something is to know the truth of what isn't there in what appears to be. In other words, truth -- including scientific truth -- is the reality behind appearances. Ultimately it is the vertical in the horizontal.

Balthasar says what amounts to the same thing in describing the relationship between finite and infinite: "infinity truly becomes visible in its appearance as the excess that does not become visible; it is unveiled as what remains veiled; it is made known as the ineliminable mystery of being." Thus, "the truth of any being will always be infinitely richer and greater than the knower is capable of grasping."

Truth, love, beauty, mystery, unity -- these are all "excess" qualities that are left over after any "complete" materialistic account of the world.

Or, to put it another way, if one could somehow successfully undertake the cremation of these qualities, one will have only succeeded in placing man in a cosmic tomb and therefore painting onesoaf into a funereal coroner.

No. Man is upright and he is bipedal; upright because he spans all of the vertical degrees of being; bipedal because he has a foot in both realms, the worldly and the celestial, heaven and earth, slack and conspiracy. He is not a dead man walking to his own godless wake, but a live man waking to his own walk with God.

Now, speaking of waking, something exceedingly mysterious occurred in the cosmos and Cosmos when it segued 3.85 billion years ago from chapter one to chapter two -- that is, when it suddenly "came alive." I did my level best to capture this ontological mutation in pp. 55-65, but try as one might, it seems that words are never sufficient to convey the weirdness of it all.

In order to feel one's way into it this topic, it helps if one is somewhat "psychotic" within a context of sanity. That is, the psychotic person specifically cannot take for granted what others do. For him, every waking moment is a calamitous novelty. For jaded postmodern man, the world is "too dead." But for psychotic man, it is "too alive."

And yet, this is apparently how it was for premodern -- and especially prehistorical -- man. As Hans Jonas argues in The Phenomenon of Life, the "discovery" of a non-living cosmos is a very late one. Rather, for primordial man, life was the general rule, death the exception, the very thing that Lucy and her astoneaged friends needed to 'splain.

When "man became man," it coincided with the perception that life was "everywhere" (i.e., animism), and that "being" was synonymous with "being alive": "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." In fact, "that the world is alive is really the most natural view, and largely supported by prima-facie evidence" (Jonas).

This is especially true if one imagines the creepycrawly environmental surroundings in which early man evolved. Life was truly everywhere, and even what was outwardly "inanimate" was "so intimately interwined with the dynamics of life that it seem[ed] to share its nature." It could never have occurred to early man "that life might be a side issue in the universe, not its pervading rule."

Therefore, "to such an extent that life is accepted as the primary state of things, death looms as the disturbing mystery." Interestingly, "before there was wonder at the miracle of life, there was wonder about death and what it might mean" (ibid). In any event, since life was experienced as the reality, death had to either be unreality or else a part of the larger cosmic economy of life.

It is only with modernity that this perspective is reversed, so that death becomes "the natural thing, life the problem." Now that the universe is regarded as a kind of lifeless machine, life becomes a huge conceptual problem, because it must somehow be explained in terms of the lifeless. Could this attitude be one of the metaphysical tributaries to the death culture of the radical secular left? Jonas implies as much: "Our thinking today is under the ontological dominance of death."

I apologize. I'm just thinking out loud here, going wherever my mind leads. But if you think about funeral rites -- which obviously reach way back and down into man's essence, both historically and ontologically, the purpose they serve is to emphasize the continuity of life despite outward appearances. But in the upside-down cosmos of postmodernity, the real "funeral" would have to be for existence itself.

And one doesn't have to read too many existential writers -- e.g., Sartre, Camus, Kafka -- before one realizes that they really do regard life in this deeply pessimystic way -- as a plague or prison with no exit in which human insects are thrown upon birth, and from which we are then nauseatingly alienated once we realize that this is indeed our fate. Just the other day, some profoundly sick feminists celebrated "abortion pride" day. But why not? If our life is just an absurd and meaningless prison house, then surely abortion is a mercy. Why not nip it in the bud?

In my book, I attempted to restore man to his cosmic place, not by returning to premodernity (as fundamentalists attempt to do), but by sailing through modernity and postmodernity, into the world awaiting us beyond them. And what lies beyond them is located back at man's beginning, only now it is as if, from our privileged metahistorical vantage point, we can know the place for the first time.

Jonas was surely converging upon the same Raccoon attractor when he wrote, "Perhaps, rightly understood, man is after all the measure of all things -- not indeed through the legislation of his reason but through the exemplar of his psychophysiological totality which represents the maximum of concrete ontological completeness known to us: a completeness from which, reductively, the species of being may have to be determined by way of progressive subtraction down to the minimum of bare elementary matter."

The irony of this -- as alluded to by Balthasar above -- is that the scientistic "intelligibilty" of life is purchased at the price of a kind of ontological death, which surely includes death of the intellect to whom it was intelligible. In other words, there is a "way of knowing" that ultimately reduces to unintelligibility and death if faithful to its first cadaverous principles. But we already knew this, for it was first taught in paradise by the archetypal opposite of "upright bipedal" man, that is, the downright nopedal snake.

The animal represents a completely new fact that radically changes the situation of epistemology: the new object is now itself a subject. The revolution that this new fact brings with it is fraught with immense consequences (Theo-Logic: The Truth of the World).

We'll have to get further into some of those consequences tomorrow.

Cosmic Freedom and Inward Mobility

It's interesting that your "new year" follows on the heels of the cosmic renewal of Christmas. Since pagans lived in cyclical time, it was thought that one could actually have a fresh start with a new temporal cycle -- which is undoubtedly why we retain the atavism of "new year's resolutions" and why they usually don't work. As a psychotic patient of mine once said, "karma has a way of coming back and biting you in the ass."

The lesson of Christmas is that a much more radical intervention is necessary for fundamental change to occur, and that to change anything, we only have to change everything, i.e., repent, which simply means to "turn around" -- or do a I80 and revolve in order to resolve and evolve.

True, since Jesus was born in the spring, Christmas was grafted onto pagan winter festivals. However, this was not in order to imitate them, but to sanctify them -- to cleanse them of their pointless cyclicality and to introduce some linearity and teleology into the situation.

Once the implicit idea is promulgated that a single human life forms the axis of history and the center of the cosmos, then we are no longer half-conscious, quasi-animal beings embedded in the rhythms of nature, but awake to the irreversible, future-oriented nature of time and therefore life. We are aboard the cosmic telovator.

Yes, this does merge with our discussion of free will, for free will is an irreducibly spiritual faculty immaculately dropped from above into voidgin nature. You might say that free will is like the seed that makes our lives potentially fruitful. But like any seed, the proper conditions are required for it to grow and thrive.

And speaking of free will, a book we discussed a couple of days ago, Hans Jonas' The Phenomenon of Life, has a chapter on the subject that summarizes the absurdity of denying it. Not to beat a dead nag, but it's an important subject, since it is both a necessary and sufficient cause of our humanness -- in other words, a condition with which the soul -- and without which it cannot -- finds expression. In short, if there is a soul there is free will, and vice versa. They are two sides of the same coin.

Jonas adopts the same perspective we did in the book, of the "martian's eye view." Imagine explorers from another planet investigating the biosphere and trying to ascertain the presence of "men." What would be their criteria?

"Our explorers enter a cave, and on the walls they discern lines or other configurations that must have been produced artificially, that have no structural function, and that suggest a likeness to one or another of the living forms encountered outside." Even "the crudest and most childish drawing would be just as conclusive as the frescoes of Michelangelo."

Of what, exactly? Of a relation to ideas that have no direct bearing upon purely biological ends. Here is evidence of an exit from the world of mere life, and entrance to the world of mind.

Thus, "just as a footprint is a sign of the foot that made it," a picture is not a sign of the hand that made it but of the mind that conceived it -- and that abstracted some essence from the object before representing it. In order to depict the essence one must first perceive the essence. This implies the ability to distinguish form from substance or mind from matter.

Painting involves a transformation and preservation of essence from one medium to another. Obviously, no animal can do this. Rather, they confront only a world of objects. To the extent that they perceive interiors, it is only through invariant signs, not symbols -- and a sign is really closer to an exterior (like a stop sign, which doesn't reveal anything about the person who made it).

Now, to know the distinction between form and substance is to be capable of distinguishing between appearance and reality, or surface and depth. And as mentioned the other day, to know that appearances are deceptive is to know that truth exists, for truth is simply the splendor of the Real (just as beauty is the splendor of the true).

Clearly, in order to distinguish between appearance and reality, there must be a kind of "space" in between. This is the middle earthspace inhobbited by human consciousness. Just as animals live in a world of appearances, God is the being who lives in truth and reality -- or is not different from them. And the human station is in between these two, God and nature, the One and the many.

Note that in Genesis man is given the power to name the animals. As Jonas explains, "the giving of names to objects is here regarded as the first feat of the newly created man and as the first distinctively human act." It is a "step beyond creation," or liberation from being plunged solely into the world of matter. In order to name something, we must be above it, and be capable of perceiving the unity beneath the multiplicity (which is another way of saying the reality behind appearances).

As Bolton points out, there can be no such thing as absolute freedom on the human plane. Given what we have stated above, such an idea is metaphysically absurd, since freedom can only meaningfully exist within a context of restraint or limitation. To exercise freedom is to transcend limitation, not to abolish it or pretend it doesn't exist. It is to use limitation as a springboard to vault oneself "higher" or "deeper" into this thing we call reality -- just as a boat doesn't deny water but floats atop it.

For example, let's say we wish to be radically linguistically free. We will not advance our freedom by abolishing the limitations of alphabet and grammar, but rather, simply destroy our ability to speak meaningfully.

If you do manage to abolish alphabet and syntax, you will not be more free but less so, since you will have no freedom to move about within the higher dimensional semantic space that is disclosed by language, but built upon stable rules. At best, you will have a meaningless sort of horizontal freedom in which you are only at liberty to rant and gesture, like our trolls.

This is why, in order to properly speak the Raccoon language of Obonics, linguistic precision is so necessary. You will notice that when you pick up most any "new age" type book -- in fact, unfortunately, many conventional religious books as well -- the language conveniently goes wobbly just at that critical juncture when you most need it to go Bobbly.

These frauds use language in such a way that they make you feel as if the fault is within you, not them. Philosophers and academics pull the same cunning stunt all the time.

But if you truly understand something, then it shouldn't be difficult to find the words to convey that understanding to another, at least assuming adequate communication skills and good faith in the reader. (I might add that where the new agers use fuzzy language to conceal their ignorance, the conventionally religious often fall back on overly rigid and saturated formulas to cover over their lack of understanding.)

As Polanyi explained, true freedom results from a higher level exploiting the freedom left over by the boundary conditions of a lower level. This is why even a machine cannot be reduced to a machine.

Rather, in order to create a machine, we employ the boundary conditions of physics and chemistry to manufacture something with a purpose, say, an automobile engine. With the engine, we are free to travel from here to there, but only because of the stable and deterministic boundary conditions of physics and chemistry. Without them we'd be nowhere. And nobody.

Speaking of which, one of the reasons the Mohammedans are so unfree is that their metaphysics does not permit the existence of unvarying boundary conditions free from Allah's constant meddling.

In other words, instead of a rational universe that operates along the lines of fixed principles, they imagine that Allah is intervening "vertically" at every moment to directly cause everything. This is also why they are so fatalistic, which only undermines everything that religion is here to mitigate, which is to say, fate. The purpose of religion is to make us more free, not less free. Truth has a way of doing that.

(One is reminded of Obama's heavy-handed approach -- and FDR's before him -- to economics, which creates so much uncertainty in investors. He's like an economic Allah whose daily whim is the new law. Which is no law at all.)

Yes, as much as we might resent those middling relativities and sin-laws that cramp our style, we really can't do without them. Freedom can only exist in a cosmos with predictable boundary conditions with which to build upward and inward.

By the way -- and I suppose this isn't a peripheral point -- this is why it is so absurd to suggest that liberals are "pro-freedom." I mean, we already know this isn't true, what with speech codes, political correctness, racial quotas, confiscatory taxes, etc.

But these things only flow from the fact that liberalism is anti-freedom in principle, since it celebrates the elimination of all the time-tested boundary conditions -- i.e., spiritual values -- that have made Western civilization so extraordinarily successful in beating back the darkness and vaulting us into the Light.

Wisdom is Not Autism and Life is Not Death

Anything that is knowable conceals the unknowable mystery of its own knowability.

In other words, even the merest scrap of knowledge always points in two directions, or has an interior and exterior horizon. As we ascend the hierarchy of being, this division of interior and exterior becomes increasingly apparent. When we look at another person, we always know that there is an interior hidden from us -- by which we do not mean blood and guts, but interiority per se. For just as there is a dark side of the moon, there must somewhere exist an infinitesimal bright side of the moonbat.

There are exceptions to this rule. Most conspicuously, severely autistic people do not have access to the human interior, resulting in a bizarre world of arbitrary and unpredictable "human furniture." But autism, like most forms of mental illness, runs along a continuum. We all know people who are reliably "clueless" about human reality. One of them is a frequent commenter here. You may know him by his impregnable head of solid rock.

Importantly, our first and most enduring orientation to the world is via this human interiority. We do not start off "autistic" and only then enter the human interior. Rather -- and this is obvious both personally and historically -- the interior precedes the exterior.

Only very gradually has mankind evolved so as to disentangle mind from matter, so to speak, and view the world scientifically, which is to say, objectively. Science provides knowledge of exteriors. But this hardly means that real reality consists of exteriors only. Insisting otherwise constitutes a metaphysical boo-boo that is fundamental, pervasive, and naive in the extreme.

In reality, there can be no real separation between the poles of fact and value, quantity and quality, knowledge and mystery, known and unKnown. Yes, there can certainly be a methodological separation between them, but the scientistic mind makes the elementary error of confusing method and ontology -- which is very much analogous to the absurd belief that there just so happen to be no fishes smaller than one's net.

A net pulls up creatures of a certain size, and no smaller. Likewise, Newtonian physics captures "facts" of a certain size, while quantum theory catches even smaller ones. But one would have to be slightly autistic or severely tenured to imagine that we're even close to catching everything in the ocean.

And this is leaving aside the fact that scientists are part of the selfsame ocean they are attempting to explain. Which is why anyone who fails to assimilate Gödel's theorems into his metaphysic is just like Mickey Mouse's cheating girlfriend, Minnie. That's right: she was fucking Goofy.

As was Gödel, but that doesn't mean his logic was unsound. Indeed, it probably required a maladjusted person -- someone external to the consensus reality -- to recognize the real one, or at least rule out the false ones.

At any rate, "this insight gives us the means to resist any division of 'value' and 'being' into two different spheres. Such a division, we recognize, is not only untenable but is nothing less than a mortal blow to the mystery of being" (Balthasar).

Again, we have no problem whatsoever with methodological dualism. If I should ever have open heart surgery, I'm cool with the idea that my surgeon looks at the heart as a blood pump. Conversely, I wouldn't want to see a psychologist who regards the brain as a thought pump.

In his The Phenomenon of Life, Hans Jonas describes our primordial, interior relationship to the world. Given the fact that modernism exiles us from this interior world, while postmodernism imprisons us in a purely personal one, it is difficult to imagine the "enchanted" mentality of premodern man, when

"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 -- and indeed its concept, so familiar to us, is anything but obvious" (Jonas).

Again, we begin -- both individually and historically, or psychologically and anthropologically -- with the interior. It could not have been otherwise, for the same reason that we don't start off autistic, and then begin to deduce the presence of the human interior by studying the parts of a face: "Let's see, the lip is upturned and the skin around the eyes is crinkled. This must mean Mother is happy. Whatever that is."

Please bear in mind that we would be the last to argue for some kind of Rousseau-ian reenchantment of nature. Ironically, this is what the scientistic types end up doing when they aren't busy disenchanting the world with their unreal abstractions. The latter activity -- unleavened by any spiritual sensibility -- results in an unreal, desiccated world, and therefore a longing for some kind of connection to primoridial reality, untouched by the chilled hand of scientism.

I'm pretty sure this is how one ends up with the retrograde paganism -- i.e., Gaia worship -- concealed in the climate changers. It's what happens when the religious instinct is denied, only to return in morbid form (which indeed occurs in virtually any kind of doctrinaire leftism). (And please recall that we do not necessarily deny "climate change." We just don't make a religion of it.)

Jonas notes that what we call a philosophical "problem" is in essence "the collision between a comprehensive view (be it hypothesis or belief) and a particular fact which will not fit into it."

Now, one way to deal with such problems is to deny the existence of any facts outside one's belief system. For example, for the left, it is impossible that other valid economic theories might exist, therefore, those of us who hold another theory are in actuality terrorists.

The psychologist in me would not minimize the feelings and perceptions of the left. Rather, if the left were my patient, the first thing I would do is acknowledge the psychic reality of the Terror. There is surely terror going on, but let's not jump to conclusions about where it is emanating from. Let's just sit with it for awhile, explore it, find out where it leads, what it is connected to in your psyche.

"You mean their psyche, right Doc?"

No, my dear Mr. (or Ms.) Leftist. Let's forget about them for awhile, at least for the hour we're here together. This time is for you. Let's just talk about you and your thoughts and feelings, and leave the world out of it for the time being. Let's pretend the world is a kind of canvas you paint upon, or a dream you dream."

Anyway, for premodern man, Death is the great riddle, the great exception to the rule of Life. But "modern thought, which began with the Renaissance, is placed in exactly the opposite theoretic situation. Death is the natural thing, life the problem" (ibid.).

As a result, "it is the existence of life within a mechanical universe which now calls for an explanation, and the explanation has to be in terms of the lifeless.... That there is life at all, and how such a thing is possible in a world of mere matter, is now the problem posed to thought" (ibid.).

Again, bear in mind that we are not arguing for a romantic reversion to animism; rather, the orthoparadoxical Raccoon argument is for the transcendent position, i.e., the psychic Third that integrates the other two. As such, we also reject the philosophical stance of the dead and tenured, who insist upon a universal ontology which negates Life (to say nothing of Mind and Spirit) "by making it one of the possible variants of the lifeless" (ibid.) -- as if life is just a weird way of being dead.

You are, of course, free to believe this, so long as you refrain from treating others as lifeless objects to be manipulated by your wonderful policies.

But in believing this nonsense -- or onlysense, rather -- please understand what you are destroying. For "to reduce life to the lifeless is nothing else than to resolve the particular into the general, the complex into the simple, and the apparent exception into the accepted rule" (ibid).

This represents the polar opposite of what was elucidated in yesterday's post vis-a-vis the particular representing the ultimate, i.e., a person. Conversely, in the scientistic view, we only become truly ourselves when we are a corpse, no longer subject to this illusory hoax of nature called an "interior."

Thus, in the conclusion of Jonas, "Our thinking today is under the ontological dominance of death."

The bottom lyin' is that one cannot be upside-down without rendering oneself inside-out.

The Unfinished Animal

Here is the next subsection, which is probably more transitional than substantive, although I always try to at least make such passages amusing. Perhaps good enough for blogging, but I don’t know if it meets the standards of a book. Then again, since we are the unfinished — which is to say, transitional — animal, perhaps we can say that in the Cosmos it is transitions all the way down — and up:

So, the helpless baby is indeed the fulcrum of human development, a portal through which the Anthropos emerges. This vertical birth canal is a necessary condition, or condition without which we couldn’t be here enjoying – supposing you are enjoying it – this mind-to-mind transmission. 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.

Mind, brain, and relationships represent their own irreducible trinity, in that you can’t have one without the others. An isolated brain is just the hardware, while an enclosed self devoid of intersubjectivity isn’t really a self at all.

In The Brain: The Story of You, Eagleman – whom I did not intend to suggest is wrong about everything – writes of how “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.”

No offense to my son, but is there anything more functionally useless than a baby, especially under the precarious conditions in which we evolved? 

Children are our future. Unless we stop them now!

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 the Anthropos 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 North Hollywood or kangaroos in ‘Nam. “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.’”

Very free-spirited.

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 fragilities and emotional problems, because certain experiences must occur when the infant brain is so open and unformed. 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 slab of meat called the brain -- could conjure subjectivity?

The so-called hard problem.

Yes, but perhaps the problem is only hard because some people just don’t like the solution, which has to do with the ontological priority of relational interiority. Philosopher Hans Jonas, in The Phenomenon of Life, wrote 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 transcendent spirit, while for the latter spirit is an illusory side effect of immanent matter.

Jonas suggests that “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.” 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 really so obvious that things are not in some attenuated sense “alive,” or imbued with a kind of life? I suspect this is partly a matter of left-brain capture of the right (much more on which below), in that it is through the RH 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, for in the words of Dávila, Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

Indeed, the objects surrounding us are not mute at all, but incredibly chatty. In his identically titled The Phenomenon of Life, the architect Christopher Alexander – whom we met in Book I – speaks of our “loss of the ability and desire to discern aliveness” in things. In his view, what we call “aliveness” is again a primordial category of everything, not only of biological life. Moreover, this aliveness exists on a spectrum, such that things – and people – can be more or less alive. If we turn the Cosmos back right side up, then we might honestly say that Feelings are attributes of the object, as are sensations. This is another way of affirming that our recognition of beauty, for example, is an adequation, not just an opinion. Or that some things are literally interesting, others objectively boring and tedious. Everybody knows this, but they pretend it’s not objectively knowable.

But such things are knowable because of the intersubjectivity of a human self that is forged in infancy. This same intersubjectivity is what allows us 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. Rather, we would be confined to surfaces only, with no intuition of interesting and fruitful problems, and it should be self-evident that if there were no problems there would be no solutions. Science begins with the recognition of promising problems — or of problems that promise solutions, even when the problems are embedded in matter. Nevertheless, There are individuals who treat the universe with professorial smugness, or like a lunatic treats an idiot.

Near as I can tell you’re throwin’ rocks, but one can’t help noticing that you folks are also the irrational animal, the only ones capable of reason but who nevertheless think and behave in ways contrary to it. To put it mildly.

Dr. Zaius from Planet of the Apes agrees: “From the evidence, I believe [human] wisdom must walk hand and hand with his idiocy. His emotions must rule his brain. He must be a warlike creature who gives battle to everything around him, even himself.”

We touched on this problem in Book I, in that the cosmotheandric imperative, or Prime Directive, is to fully become who we already are in potential, one of these potentials being the attainment of Reason in the fullest sense of the word. To paraphrase Miles Davis, it takes a lot of practice to sound like yourself. Likewise, unlike hypothetical angelic intelligences, it takes awhile for us to become — or to start becoming, rather — ourselves. We are surely the only animal that can transcend ourselves, which we do even in knowing ourselves via self-consciousness.

Prepositions again.

Yes, relational links, for to be conscious of oneself means that the relationality of things applies even to our own interior. This verticality implies that we live in a two-way telovator, so we can both transcend and fall beneath ourselves. There can be no possibility of success without the possibility of failure to achieve it, even if failure can put us in the position of being lower than the lowest animal, for example, treating objects like women, and vice versa. It is not just a figure of speech to say that Hitler was infinitely worse than his dog Blondi.

Nazis. Nothing ever changes.

Yes, the all-too-human easily becomes the less-than-human, and for this reason only engagement with the supra-human renders us properly human. Metaphysics itself is a freewheeling conversation about things superior to the Anthropos, in the absence of which we couldn’t even be the Anthropos. If this isn’t yet fully clear, I can only promise to shed more obscurity on the subject as we proceed.

∞

The larger point of my story is this: that intelligence is one thing, communion and communication another. Even free speech itself would be meaningless in the absence of the freedom and willingness to listen and respond, or in short, to converse on a level playing field about truths that surpass both parties. It has been noted by wiser fellas than myself that the whole Western tradition is one Great and Endless Conversation, which makes it more of a dynamic partnership than a dry, onesided lecture.

But how is this two-way exploration of truth possible? In the West we call it the Logos, which connotes three terms, a rational subject, an intelligible object, and the connective tissue between mind, world, and other folks. So, there is a single rational-relational principle that makes reality a trialogue at the edge of the subjective horizon instead of a monologue in the void. The latter might be the unbridled expression of, say, Yoko Ono, but shrieking isn’t communication or conversation without our second and third terms. Even inanimate things express their intelligibility to us, but you can’t exactly talk back to them.

Perhaps that’s one reason why I am here.

Yes, supposing you take part in the conversation and don’t just vanish into wordless wonder behind the smoke rings of your spliff.

I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.

With regard to being reasonable, we must add an important Gödelean qualifier, in that we must deploy horizontal reason without imagining we can be limited thereby. Rather, the Anthropos is again the transcendent animal, if only because we elude any limited definition of what we are, but also because we are capable of transcendence as such in freely knowing what otherwise merely is. Thus, He who adopts a system stops perceiving the truths that are within his reach. If our hypothetical Theos is Infinitude full stop, then we are potentially infinite, in the sense that there is nothing we cannot potentially know, given enough time. However, the clock always runs out before we can know it all — except for those timeless truths we cannot fail to know discussed in Book I, including our twelve cosmotheandric axioms.

Gödel even thought that our infinite potential pointed to an afterlife, because first of all, he was deeply skeptical of the idea that the brain could have come about via natural selection. In fact, he considered it disprovable that a mechanical process could result in a brain, and more to the point, “what sense would there be in creating a being (man), which has such a wide realm of possibilities for its own development and for relationships to others, and then not allowing it to realize even a thousandth of those [possibilities]?” That would be as stupid as a contractor “laying, with the greatest effort and expense, the foundations for a house, and then letting it all go to seed again.”

Sounds like you don’t have much experience with contractors.