In order for the gene to be about the organism and the environment, it must possess an inherent relational quality that transcends its molecular structure. Otherwise the gene is but a string of molecules (a fact), not an intentional code (meaningful information). The code is what makes the gene inherently relational and teleological -- it is about building a genetic cake that is in turn about interacting with, and surviving in, the environment.
So here again (as discussed in Book I), the Anthropos is related to the Cosmos, but with a big difference. Lower animals are also related to the world, but only in an exterior sense. They have no access to the relational interiority of the Cosmos. Your Pomeranian can micturate on a tree, but it knows nothing about the concept of treeness, let alone the AKC papers that certify what breed it is. Conversely, the Anthropos is related to the interiority of things, beginning with the interior of other persons, which is how we are even having this weird conversation.
Absent this luminous interiority, the Cosmos would be darker than a black steer’s derriere on a moonless night. As Poincaré remarked with reference to the scientific pursuit and to human existence more generally, “Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.”
In Voegelin’s terms, this flash occurs in the space between the poles of immanence and transcendence, and here we are: The quest, thus, has no external ‘object,’ but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. Thus, there is a certain darkness and ineffability at both vertical ends, with the fleshlight of the Anthropos shining in between.
The bottom line is that the Anthropos cannot be a mere extension of the bio-physical realm, but is “categorically distinct from other species” (Spitzer). For example, we can teach sign language to a chimp, but the best the chimp can do is communicate via concrete, perceptual signs corresponding to, say, a banana. But it cannot abstract from this to the idea of “fruit,” nor relate one higher order concept to another, something you and I easily do, for we’re doing it right now.
Concepts are abstract enough, but what about relations between concepts? These are even more remote from any material content, nor can one get there from any experience of the perceptual world. Again, this gap is materially unbridgeable, for “how could we have ever learned those higher-order concepts from the perceptual world? It is clearly impossible” (ibid.). If this capacity weren’t already here, we could never have acquired it. The teacher’s pet simian might connect two words that are immediately adjacent to one another, but cannot relate more distant connections. The question is again whether the gap between animal and human is truly unbridgeable, i.e., an ontological distinction, or one that can be explained by natural selection?
∞
The aboutness of things goes to the fundamental, irreducible principle of relation (Axiom 4) that grounds the entire intelligibility of the Cosmos. This principle is the philosophical necessity that prevents all of reality from collapsing into material immanence. It is the very condition for the possibility of any meaningful knowledge. For the intellect to be truly about reality, there must be an inherent two-way link -- a relation -- between knower and known.
Conversely, in the absence of open relationality, the intellect is merely about its own thoughts, leading to the subjective closure of Kant & Co. Aboutness ensures that the intellect is a faculty ordered to Being itself, where the truth of a judgment is measured by the reality it is about, which is to say, What Is.
I realize that my summary dismissal of Kant will irritate real philosophers–
You’re not dealing with morons here.
Yes, but in my years of clinical practice the question of whether we can know reality frankly never came up. Rather, it was assumed that the person we call the patient was in some sense not in touch with the thing we call reality. But we can only be out of touch with reality because we can be in touch with it. I couldn’t very well tell the insurance adjuster that a delusional patient is making great philosophical progress in finally realizing that there is no way to distinguish his internal projections from external reality.
Later in this book we will explain in more detail how exactly to cut out the Kantian muddleman and know reality as it is. Which will not convince someone who is determined to believe otherwise, but that is not the purpose of this book. I’m not trying to scam anyone into anything, rather, talk about what anyone is already doing when they talk intelligibly to anyone about anything, including our genetic endowment.
For Pieper, “If our mind were not by its nature already in touch with reality, it would never be able to reach reality at all.” Which is exemplified by any dualistic philosophy, for anyone can sever the mind from reality, but no one can reunite them if they aren’t united to begin with. One can think I am all day long, but the solipsistic subject can never cross the bridge back to the extra-mental It Is unless the bridge is already there in the thinking. Or in other words, thinking is the very link between I Am and It Is.
Hey, solipsism isn’t so bad. I’m only surprised other people don’t believe it.
We can of course distinguish between sense and intellect, but never separate them without separating man from himself, i.e., dividing his holistic personhood. You could say we are a “part” of the Cosmos, but then again, the Anthropos as such is uniquely intertwined with the totality of being in such a way that it is given to us in the evolving space we inhabit between immanence and transcendence, or intellect and intelligibility. To the extent that the Anthropos is a “part,” it is only in the context of a deeper complementarity between part and whole, both horizontally and vertically.
∞
This is not some lazy goldbricking universe that doesn’t ever leave its own immanent basement, rather, a working Cosmos. The reason it works is because it is fundamentally all about aboutness, imbued with complementary relations such as intelligence and intelligibility, spirit and matter, form and substance, part and whole. However, this truth is often eclipsed by reified ideological systems that render their own truth impossible (or a miraculous exemption). Such an incoherent choice locks the mind into a closed system, effectively screening out its transcendent and relational properties.
But sometimes the most obvious truths are the most difficult to see, since they are the very means by which we see. Nevertheless, they are hidden in plain sight, only requiring a free, conscious alignment with the universal structure of relational being to comprehend them. Such truths are freely available to the intellect not as a reward for being unusually intelligent, but as the sufficient condition for Anthropic intelligence itself.
Walker Percy says something similar, speculating that there must be something like a “coupler,” which is to say, “an agent which couples,” for “If subject and predicate or name and thing are coupled, there is a coupler.” To even say “I think, therefore I am,” one must presuppose an implicit link -- a mysterious coupler -- between the two affirmations. Frankly, without the coupler we are stuck in a nominalism that uncouples subject from predicate or word from referent. In the case of nominalism, there is no common nature uniting things, and therefore no generalizations, so we really can’t say a thing about anything because there is no real link between them.
Percy cites the famous example of Helen Keller, who coupled the sensation of wetness with the sign for water. He refrains from speculating on the ontological status of the coupler, only that there is one. Certainly it cannot be reduced to any material, neurological substrate, for it is fundamentally immaterial.
Now, is the whole Cosmos pervaded by this coupling agent? Signs point to yes, because just try to imagine a Cosmos without it. Again, it is the ontological glue that binds everything from quantum fields to human communities to knower and known. Indeed, it is what makes the Cosmos a Cosmos, which is to say, a unified field of disparate phenomena. Nor could you and I be having this conversation without the intersubjective coupler between our minds.
Having said that, the coupler couples both ways, in that it is necessarily bound up with both freedom and alienation, the latter going to a state of existential uncoupling, in particular, from the transcendent pole. And because of the freedom to which Percy alludes, we can impose a coupling of things that aren’t actually coupled. For example, astrology falsely couples the movements of planets and stars with the fate of humans, and we know all about paranoiacs and their delusional conspiracy theories.
Human language is simultaneously constrained and yet infinite. Could this be because, unlike other animals, man is conformed to, or coupled with, the Infinite? When lower animals reach a state of homeostasis, they fall asleep. But for the Anthropos, this is when the trouble starts. Give him food and shelter, and he starts dreaming of alternative realities and living in a parallel looniverse. When its instincts are satisfied, the lower animal is “perfectly at home.” But for the Anthropos, it is as if he discovers This is not my beautiful house. Let’s make a better one, built on sand!
No animal in the wild is alienated, whereas it seems that the Anthropos cannot not be alienated from this world, at least to the extent that we are uncoupled from its transcendent source. It is why political dogooders are always trying to make things better, even if they make them worse, for they know not that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
Another consequence of the coupler is that the Anthropos is never finished, because we are coupled to an Infinitude that can never be contained within finitude. Percy cites the example of a sea anemone, which appears to be “perfectly at home,” for it is “neither more nor less, whereas a man can either be himself or not himself -- he doesn’t necessarily coincide with himself.” Thus – and this goes to G3AOA – the Anthropos “is the only alien creature, as far as we know, in the entire Cosmos,” in that we are only alienated creature, and what happened there? Why are we not at home in our only home? Why the restlessness, the neurosis, the mischief, the endless search for reality in all the wrong places? It seems that whatever we get, we quickly take it for granted and want more.
You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.
It must be because of our necessarily unsettled and ambiguous situation in the Great In Between, for once we transcend matter, where are we, unless we are coupled to O, with the source of transcendence?
Eh, that’s just the stress talking.
Maybe, but for Percy’s part, he demanded some answers, taking “it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less.”
O or bust!
Percy didn’t wait for permission, rather, “took it as an intolerable state of affairs to have found myself in this life and this age, which is a disaster by any calculation, without demanding a gift commensurate with the offense. So I demanded it.”
Is this really asking too much of the Theos? We have already suggested that the Anthropos is owed the courtesy of an explanation. It makes no sense to be given the gift of intellect only to leave us lost in the Cosmos. Rather, supposing the Theos exists, then he surely wants us to find our way home. But the Anthropos can only successfully find the Theos because the latter has already sent out a search party to find the man lost in the Cosmos. Again, the Theos makes housecalls, for which reason Einstein remarked that “The discovery of a fundamental verified law of nature is an inspiration of God.”
That some kind of joke?
No, to put it in colloquial terms, our Third Party is not just a “thing” but a kind of energy, a vertical descent which is the agent of coupling between us and the Great Beyondus. The transcendentally uncoupled I is necessarily lost in the Cosmos because of a misuse of the very freedom whose source is O. Which is the ultimate collapse of the Gap, since it uncouples Anthropos and Theos in a permanent way, even if we fail to see it.
Where is the Ground? Only in two possible places: below, in immanence; or above, in transcendence. Materialism or Platonism. We are the mysterious monkey in the middle. We cannot actually ever reach immanence until we’re dead, nor can we reach transcendence per se -- i.e., the place where all this truth and beauty come from.
So we live in the Tension, and it is no doubt tempting to want to make it go away by veering toward one pole or the other. Truly, it comes down to O or Ø, and everything else is, and must be, a disguise for one or the other. And one reason why we say that the vertical is prior to the horizontal is because it must be. For the converse could never be true -- that the vertical could arise from the horizontal, any more than information could come from strict chaos, quality from quantity, mind from matter, etc. Science does not understand how this could be the case, but this is simply a result of prejudice, not the nature of things. Abandon the scientistic prejudice, turn the Cosmos back right side up, and it all makes sense, even if we won’t yet know how and why it all makes sense until Book III.
So, history would indeed be heaping helping of baloney if not ordered to anything beyond itself. Or, in the words of our concise Colombian aphorist, History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination.
An abominable snow job?
Freedom and truth are indeed two sides of the same rug. The cosmotheandric choice is ours: limited animal intelligence or unlimited human spirit.
