Now that I’ve introduced the Introduction, it is time to put the cosmos into cosmotheandrism. Again, there are three books, Cosmos, Anthropos, and Theos, albeit with a little of each in all. Probably still too rambling, but we will soon get into details. Also, since this material is pretty basic -- especially for long-time readers -- the passage is relatively long. Posts will probably get shorter as we delve into deeper matters:
[T]here are some key aspects to the nature of our actual universe that are so exceptionally odd (though not always recognized as such) that if we do not indulge in what may appear to be outrageous flights of fantasy, we shall have no chance at all of coming to terms with what may well be an extraordinary fantastical-seeming underlying truth. –Roger Penrose
If a man should tell me that he could not talk about a subject without talking about the universe, I should at once admit that he was an honest man. –G.K. Chesterton
Without a doubt, metaphysics aims in the first place at the comprehension of the whole Universe, which extends from the Divine Order to terrestrial contingencies. –Frihjof Schuon
The scientific encyclopedia will grow indefinitely, but about the very nature of the universe it will never teach anything different from what its epistemological assumptions teach.–Dávila
In examining the cosmos, there is always the question of where to begin, and early on the question bifurcated into two possibilities: Is it a timeless and immutable One, or is it an endlessly becoming Many.
They say the definition of a philosopher is someone who disagrees with another philosopher. Well, this is where the second philosopher came along and disagreed with the first, for in one corner we have Heraclitus, who is high epopt of the All is Flux Club, the motto of which being One can never step twice into the same river, so any permanence is an illusion. Parmenides is the exalted mystic ruler of the rival gang, the All is One Society, for whom reality is unchanging, eternal, and indivisible, which renders change and multiplicity illusory. Then Pythagoras wanders into the bar and differs with both by shifting the focus from concrete matter to abstract mathematics. For him the structure of the cosmos is essentially numerical and harmonic.
I always like to hear about the oldtimers.
Concur. You gotta hand it to them. In a sense they are brothers under the skull, in that each begins their investigation with nothing but raw intelligence applied to sheer existence, with no fancy instruments, scientific journals, or philosophy departments. You can’t help but wonder how they would have operated in these times, what with critical philosophers advancing the idea that our ideas about reality aren’t even about reality, rather, about our minds. Which also don’t really exist.
Although these early cosmonauts came to different conclusions, they all assumed one thing: that reality can both be known by the intellect and reduced to a single principle, whether the one, the many, or the math. Of course, anyone can see that all three are correct: that the cosmos is simultaneously a unified one and diversified many, and brimming with a beautiful mathematical structure.
It’s just that the anthropos possesses two complememtary types of intelligence, a horizontal, analytical, dividing mind, and a vertical, holistic, and synthesizing one. However, this latter must take priority, insofar as the ultimate purpose of analysis is to synthesize. If science is a reduction of multiplicity to unity, then the final unity must be the same unity from which we began, only transformed by the spiraling journey back to itself.
English. Do you speak it?
In other words, knowledge is a unity of knower and known that proceeds from analysis to synthesis until reaching its final reunification, which is what physicists call the Theory of Everything but we call the Cosmic Area Rug.
To arrive where we started and know it for the first time?
Yes, because the cosmos itself is a unity-in-diversity, and its wholeness must be prior to its bifurcation into subject and object. We can drive out the wholeness with a pitchfork, but it will always rush back in through the walls, up through the floorboards, and down from the ceiling in any act of anthropic knowing.
Strictly speaking, science cannot prove the existence of a consistent and ordered totality, but must assume it to even get underway. This principle, known as the uniformity of nature, allows the scientist to conduct an experiment today and believe the results will hold true tomorrow, and that the laws of physics are constant across time and space. If the fundamental constants of the cosmos — for example, the speed of light — were subject to change, then both the scientific method and the cosmos itself would collapse. Therefore, the order of the cosmos is a precondition for science, not just a conclusion of it. One cannot step outside the cosmos – at least until Book III – so we can have no scientific basis to say it is a closed system. At the same time, science can never say why the cosmos is so exquisitely ordered, nor why this order is so suspiciously disclosed to the anthropic knower.
The wholeness of reality -- or of being -- is an antecedent and implicit experience. It cannot be deduced from any prior scientific principle, nor can one add up the parts and call it a cosmos. Rather, our logocentric cosmos is prior to anything we can say about it, otherwise we couldn’t say anything about anything, for words come from Word (as does life from Life, mind from Mind, spirit from Spirit). As Schindler describes it, this primordial experience “must be seen as open from the roots to the whole of reality, in terms not merely of the sum of things..., but also of the integrated relation among things that establishes them as an ordered whole and hence as a cosmos.”
A key consideration is that we don’t want to begin looking into this cosmos of ours in such a way that it excludes from the outset something that might come in handy later like, say, consciousness. But via a reductive reversal, the very science which only man can conceive presumes to enclose and explain man. Which is one of the themes of Frankenstein— a manmade creation who turns on the very fellow who created it.
But can we begin with consciousness? Descartes certainly thought so, and his mind-matter dualism helped push modernity out of the starting gate. The problem is, you can’t bloody well begin by severing knowing from being and then hope to get them back together in the end. That is impossible, so why begin with a principle of impossibility? Schuon speaks of a “defect of imagination” whereby “One tries to explain ‘horizontally’ that which is explainable only ‘in a vertical sense.’”
Here we see that postmodernity is an inevitable complication of modernity. Take the first step down that fork and you can stick it into your philosophy, because it is done, at least in helping to locate the Cosmic Area Rug. In the words of Schindler, “the very basis that Descartes sought to be able to distinguish dream from reality turns out itself to be a figment of the imagination.”
The cosmos is at once everything and more than everything, in the sense that it gives rise to anthropic knowers who transcend it in the act of knowing it. One might say that cosmos + anthropos is more than the cosmos alone, since the latter cannot be reduced to the former. However, we are obviously not extrinsic to the cosmos, like aliens who dropped in from some other dimension. Rather, we are intrinsically related to it as is, say, fruit to a tree. There is obviously a distinction between the two amidst an underlying unity. The same is true of our knowledge of the cosmos, which is a unity-in-distinction.
For Aristotle it takes two to be entangled in the act of knowing, which is to say, matter (hyle) and form (morphe), thus his eminently reasonable doctrine of hylomorphism. This is an example of a philosophical idea that few explicitly hold anymore but which which everyone implicitly believes, insofar as the material world is assumed to be intelligible. For the contrary notion that the cosmos is composed of formless matter is quite literally unthinkable. The problem is, when material and efficient causes exclude formal and final ones, quantity is placed over quality, which then reduces the world to a single kind of intelligibility. But quality is not just another quantity.
How so?
Well, students of Oriental philosophy know all about the yin-yang symbol–
Excuse me, but the preferred nomenclature is Asian or Pacific Islander philosophy.
Whatever the case may be, Lao Tse is not really the issue here, because it can be seen that yin is to yang as matter is to form, inward to outward, feminine to masculine, and various other dynamic and fruitful complementarities. Eliminate one pole of the complementary pair and you necessarily end up in a half-cosmos. Which is really no cosmos at all, for it is either an unintelligible blob or a grand idea confined to your noggin. You might say that any form of materialism is an edifice supported by a one-sided archway. The moment one tries to pass through it, it crashes down on our heads because it cannot bear the load of bull. Conversely, idealism cannot venture through the archway because there is nothing real on the other side.
So science presupposes an ordered and intelligible cosmos, and rightfully so, but scientism – which is essentially science pretending to be philosophy – dismisses the mystery of why science is possible and then insists that the only valid knowledge of the cosmos comes by way of science.
It’s their answer to everything!
Yes, and it is a leap of faith, only in this case a downward leap founded upon an unjustified assumption that science will eventually disclose the location of the Cosmic Area Rug, which is to say, all there is to know about all there is. In fact, any worldview is a view of the world that determines what can and cannot be seen. It is the very logic that determines both the questions we ask and answers we will receive.
Note that science itself is never true per se but only falsifiable, but scientism is not falsifiable, in that there is no scientific experiment that could test its metaphysical claims. Rather, it is simply assumed that any subjective Why reduces to an objective How, and more problematically, that the I Am vanishes into the It Is. No further questions please! Which is why Dávila says that The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.
Seriously, they should tattoo that onto their foreheads.
Nor could such a PE teacher masquerading as a philosopher even distinguish significant from insignificant questions or conclusions, since significance is a qualitative matter. To be sure, any good scientist knows when the numbers are significant, only the significance in the mind of the scientist is not reducible to a quantity. One might say that the moment of Eureka! is an experience upon discovering the formula, but not itself a formula. It ought to be a truism to say that no amount of math adds up to a mathematician, nor any amount of drugs to a pharmacist or dealer. Which brings to mind the eulogy of the great mathematician whose contributions to the field were said to have been incalculable.
ISWYDT.
Who could argue with that? “No they weren’t incalculable. His contributions amounted to 3.27 to the -22nd power, divided by pi.”
Along similar lines, theoretical biologist Robert Rosen wrote that in order to say what life is, “we must spend a great deal of time in understanding what life is not,” but “for the past three centuries, ideas of mechanism and machine have constituted the very essence of the adjective ‘scientific.’” Therefore, the rejection of mechanism “seems like a rejection of science itself.” Nevertheless, the numbers never add up to Life Itself, for the simple reason that qualitative is not just just poor quantitative, rather, the abstract quantitative is but a kind of impoverished qualitative.
But we live in strange times, for the ontology of scientism not only tosses out half the cosmos, but the better – which is to say higher -- half. What I mean is that Aristotle’s hylomorphism is necessarily a high-low morphism, in that form can only be explained in a top-down manner, since uninformed matter could never give to itself what it does not possess. In short, “There are such things as forms, and because there are, physics and chemistry do not have the monopoly on scientific truth – and still less on philosophical and theological truth” (Ward). Therefore, The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book.
As such – and we will have much more to say about this as we proceed – there appears to be a vertical axis in the cosmos which goes to form and matter and hence to intelligence and intelligibility. Coming back to the question at the top of where to begin, this is self-evidently what the cosmos must be like in order for the anthropos to know it and hence for science itself to be possible. Here we needn’t speculate about why this is the case, nor posit a Platonic realm where all the forms hang out, only that we can’t get anywhere in the cosmos in the absence of this mysterious yin-yangery of inward form and outward matter.
A cosmotheandric tree with its roots aloft and branches down below?
Well, even scientists vote with their feet, so we ought to watch what they do with science, not what they say about it. In general, people are much more alike in what they do than what they think or say.
A revealed preference for Aristotle?
Yes, supposing everyone behaves as if this is an intelligible cosmos that endlessly discloses itself to the intellect. The wholeness of the cosmos is ontologically prior to anything else we can say about it, and it is precisely because of its wholeness that we can say anything about it at all. In the mirrorcle of knowing, subject and object become one, but a unity of matter and mind must undergird this process. In reality there is just the one cosmotheandric world that reflects itself in the act of knowledge, and is that such a bad deal?
In his The One, The Three and the Many, Gunton speaks of “the modern crisis of culture -- its fragmentation and decline into subjectivism and relativism,” which you could say represents the triumph of Heraclitus, since everything is a mindless process going nowhere because it has no formal or final causes. Nevertheless, there are still many living members of the All Is One Society, which is to say, religious believers who posit an immutable God for whom there is no real change, because for him everything has already happened. Here again, this lands us in another half-cosmos that is really no cosmos at all because it is just a direct entailment of the Theos.
We won’t press the point here, but the immutable One might just be analogous to a rigid father at antipodes to an endlessly changing mother nature, so to speak. But we say the anthropos has a right to a cosmic mother and father, or yin and yang if you prefer. Our cosmic home becomes dysfunctional with either a tyrannical father or an overly permissive mother.
Alternatively, we can express it in purely metaphysical terms, such that change and changelessness are always dynamically related, for which reason a cosmos of pure change is unintelligible. In other words, if the cosmos were only change undergoing more of it, ours would be an utterly unintelligible chaosmos. But if it were a static One, then all our knowledge would be as illusory as change itself. In other words, as in neo-Platonism there would only be just One Big Thing to know, which is to say, the One. Nor could we be there to enjoy it, because we would be absorbed into it, which is precisely what happened to old Plotinus on a few occasions. As described in the Enneads, “He was no longer a seeker, but one with the object of his quest.” He may have found the Cosmic Area Rug, except he was no longer there to find it, for in such a state “there is no more a two; the viewer is one with the viewed; it was not a vision, but a unity.”
I am the Cosmic Area Rug, minus the I am. Is that the best we can do?
Again, some folks want to begin at the objective-sensory-empirical end, others at the subjective-conscious-intellectual end: materialists and idealists, Aristotelians and Platonists, existentialists and realists, theists and atheists, et al. But in this cosmic foxhole there are strictly speaking no “non-believers.” We all must believe in something, insofar as everyone begins with a foundational assumption about the nature of the cosmos based on our conjectures, hunches, guesstimates, suspicions, intuitions, preferences, prejudices, or delusions. Afterwards we retrofit a jerryrigged framework to rationalize our wild surmise.
In any case, where we begin plays an outsized role in determining where we will end: materialist assumptions will generate materialist conclusions, just as idealist, rationalist, or theistic assumptions have their own inevitable entailments. The problem with materialism is that it can never account for a mind capable of knowing the purported truth of materialism, just as a rationalist or idealist approach that confines knowledge to the head can never re-enter the world from which it has in principle vacated itself.
Baseball again.
Yes, because in order to reach first base – which is to say, reality – we must somehow arrive at knowledge of Principles (which we will capitalize when referring to necessary truths that cannot not be) while at the same time accounting for the Principle of knowledge itself, i.e., a justified capacity for knowing these fundamental truths. In other words, we are seeking knowledge of certitude backed by the certitude of knowledge: of what is certain and how we can know it with certitude. Therefore we are investigating two unavoidably related questions: What must the cosmos be like in order for the anthropos to know it? And what must the anthropos be like in order to know the cosmos? The former goes to ontology – what is – the latter to epistemology – how we know what is.
The anthropos is uniquely capable of conceiving and knowing necessity, including what philosopher Bernard Lonergan calls the “virtually unconditioned” (which is another way of saying conditioned necessity). This type of knowledge has certain conditions attached: for example, if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then we know with certitude that Socrates is mortal. Nevertheless, Socrates himself wasn’t necessary. Thus Lonergan goes on to say that human insight may be vulnerable or invulnerable; if it is the former, then the insight is conditional and susceptible to further questions, such as how the heck did Socrates get here to begin with?, whereas an invulnerable insight represents an end to all questioning: certitude, full stop.
So, how do we know an unconditional and invulnerable Principle when we’ve found one? For the simple reason that “it is not even possible to think it can be false” (Thomas). They are self-evident, meaning that they cannot be understood without being believed (in other words, supposing you understand them, your mind spontaneously assents to them). If or when we stumble upon such a Principle, then we ought to shut-up and stop looking for something beyond it, because we’ve not only found the Truth we’re looking for, but found what makes finding lesser truths possible. Such truths are neither contingent nor conditioned by anything less, rather, are unconditional. Indeed, they are the conditions of intelligible being. So, don’t be like one of those fellows Churchill described, “who occasionally stumble over the truth,” only to “pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
For Norris Clarke, the metaphysical quest involves “a search for the ultimate principles of intelligibility, the ultimate necessary conditions of possibility, of all the beings of our world of experience -- and, by the extension of the same principles, of all finite and changing beings, whether known to us or not.” These necessary Principles of Everything not only make sense of anything less, but without them nothing makes sense.
I’m in!
Here we don’t need to bring the Theos into the discussion, rather, just follow the evidence where it leads. If it eventually leads to a Theos, then we’ll just have to deal with the implications, no matter how pleasant. For Clarke the question is, “What does the world of my experience demand as its adequate sufficient reason, to render it adequately intelligible?”
Such a reason “requires a certain metaphysical insight into an exigency of reason beyond the merely logical, and a fundamental openness and commitment to the call of the intelligibility of being.” The anthropos is not only uniquely open to this intelligibility, but it is what defines us, in the sense that closing ourselves to this transcendence is frankly to become less than human. Or all too human if you prefer, i.e., Genesis 3 All Over Again.
In the cosmic stairway there are two paths we can go by, but in the long run they come down to the outer and the inner. The outer “begins with efficient causality to conclude that there must exist at least one self-sufficient being.” You know, all those classic proofs of God. But cosmotheandrism is partial to the inner path, through which “we rise directly to the discovery of the Infinite Fullness of being through the interior dynamism of the human person as knowing-willing subject oriented toward the Infinite by its very nature, as the only adequate goal that can fulfill its innate natural longing.”
This inside track to the Cosmic Area Rug is “rooted in an unrestricted inner dynamism of my intellect toward the limitless horizon of all being as intelligible.” This limitless intelligibility is not a dream, rather, an undeniable reality, for our “very nature as a human person is to be an ineradicable implicit drive toward the Infinite.”
Yes, but does this so-called object of infinite intelligibility exist?
Only if the cosmos itself is not absurd. In other words, either its limitless intelligibility is conditioned from above, or we are absurdly ordered to an object that is somehow infinitely intelligible yet without having any intelligible reason of its own. This is our basic option: a drive toward the limitless transcendent horizon of intelligible being, or a kind of intellectual death drive into a nihilism of pure immanence.
How is it possible that options exist at all, let alone this one?
That is a good question. It seems that freedom cannot be eliminated in a truth-bearing anthropos. If the prime directive is the acquisition of truth, then the anthropos must be free to accept or reject it, even if its rejection leads to absurdity.
An obvious example is the principle of non-contradiction (or identity)— that something is what it is. If something can simultaneously be what it is and what it isn’t, then that is the end of intelligibility and hence of intelligence. In cases of an Extreme Truth such as noncontradiction, we might say with Thomas that “Everything eternal is necessary,” for a necessary truth will be forever true under any conditions of existence. Mathematical and logical truths are of this nature, for it is impossible to imagine a cosmic scenario in which one and one won’t make two, or in which Gödel’s theorems will be false (much more on Gödel throughout).
But sometimes two plus two can be more than four, as in how the Beatles were far more than the sum of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. In other words, math cannot account for creative emergence, or qualities from quantities.
Then Yoko came along and the total somehow became less than its sum.
That is correct, sonic evidence of which being the inclusion of Revolution 9 on the White Album.
We’ll deal with creativity in due course. But if there are eternal truths then there must be eternal falsehoods, i.e. things that cannot possibly be the case. Thus we are compelled to toss them out of the game, for they result in severe truth decay as a result of poor mental hygiene.
