Inscape From Planet of the Apes

This brief section is a prelude to subjects that are fleshed out in much more detail later. Thus, I can’t decide if it’s completely superfluous or maybe a little fluous:

Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death. –Ape Scientist Dr. Cornelius

If this is the best they’ve got around here, in six months we’ll be running this planet. –Astronaut Charles Taylor

Although we cannot interrogate our first parents, they did leave behind an abundance of circumstantial evidence, or soulprints, from sophisticated tools to symbolic artwork, from musical instruments to jewelry, from the invention of oat soda to the creation of modestly priced receptacles to transmit the remains. What to make of a primate eventually mapping its own genome or discovering the origins of the Cosmos in which it dwells?

Even supposing we are a mutant ape, this still won’t account for the transcendent space our brutish forerunners vaulted into, a space filled with abstract ideas and creative content. What a place, and what a privilege! But how is it that we discover objective realities in this space and not simply imagine or project them? Indeed, we are still unpacking this superabundant content and always will be, for somehow we stumbled into a kind of infinite plenum, and that’s just weird. I wonder: could the biological human be the necessary vessel required to host a theological human capable of an infinite dialogue with the Cosmos?

Stranger things have happened.

No way. This is without a doubt the strangest. It’s just that a person can get used to anything, including being one.

What is the difference between a monkey and a person? Why is a monkey not a person? Just how did we, in the course of evolution, draw a royal flesh in the genetic card game and thereby cash in our chimps?

The mainstream view is that we didn’t -- that any perceived discontinuity between man and monkey is just a pre-critical holdover from premodern times, when man sat atop the animal kingdom. Thanks to Darwin we now know there’s nothing special about us except for the persistent illusion that we are special -- a fanciful great Cosmic Exception to an ontological flatland of selfish genes and random mutations with no vertical thrust or downward causation.

Like everything else in the Cosmos, we are said to be an accident. How then do we know necessity, including our necessary contingency? We gather perceptions through the senses, which are transmuted into immaterial ideas, some of which turn out to be eternally true. This being the case, it seems that in the Anthropos time touches eternity.

That’s what we call a fact, but by virtue of what principle? The only plausible answer is that man is not only conformed to changeable nature but to something transcending nature.

If what we call the outside is really just the inside projected out, we are forever enclosed in subjective absurcularity. Conversely, if it is possible for the outside to be in, that is what we call knowledge. But how does the outside get in, or even account for the inwardness where it is known? Our senses are ordered to the external world, but there is no knowledge per se at the level of the senses.

So, how does sensory perception become inside information about the Cosmos? Again, how even is there a cosmic inside after 10 billion years of a purely exterior Cosmos unknown to itself? In the cosmotheandric vision, interiority is an ontological primitive, always complementary to exteriority, which is the prior principle that explains how real knowledge is possible.

At the moment I am touching -- sensing -- the exterior of my keyboard, but not only touching it. If it were just that, then I would be no better than Jack Karouac, of whom Truman Capote said That’s not writing, that’s just typing.

Yes, I am typing, but the typing is being conditioned from the top-down, such that my inside is exteriorized into words. To the extent that you understand what I have exteriorized via typing, then my inside-out has proceeded outside-in to you, the reader.

Here again, we generally take the weirdest features of our Cosmos for granted. A monkey randomly banging at its keyboard might eventually produce a coherent paragraph, but doing so would require more time than the Cosmos has been in existence. Even the cleverest monkey couldn’t actually produce so much as the first sentence of On the Road. Go ahead and try:

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split ux.

D’oh! So close.

The classic definition of person -- courtesy of Boethius -- is an individual substance of a rational nature. That’s good but not good enough, because it still encloses us in reason, and we know what Gödel says about that. Reason is ultimately circular, nor can it make any new discoveries. Rather, we reason about new discoveries a posteriori once they have been made.

For cosmotheandrism the Anthropos is capable of discovering novel features of the Cosmos because we are an individual substance of a relational nature, i.e., substance-in-relation. Which is how the outside gets in, via this mysterious category of relation -- specifically, of interior relations which are antecedent to what they relate. We are all members of The Open Cosmos Society, which goes to the reason why man cannot be enclosed in reason, and why reason is open to something beyond reason.

Let’s be reasonable!

Agreed, but in order to be fully reasonable we must recognize the insufficiency of mere reason, which we can only do from a position of transcendence. Gödel was a logician, not a magician. Nevertheless, he deployed logic to slip out of logic like Houdini.

Being is not static and self-enclosed but open and relational: it is an active relational presence, i.e., the presence of relation and relation of presence. If a human person were devoid of relations, it would constitute such a privation that it would undermine the very notion of personhood.

Now, intersubjectivity is a deep mystery, except it’s not a mystery at all, in the sense that subjectivity is unthinkable in the absence of intersubjectivity. We come into the world plunged into a kind of undifferentiated subjectivity, which is analogous to the wavelike field of quantum physics. The conscious ego is like the particle that emerges or individuates from the mother-infant field, but in truth, the fluid dialectic between particle and field, or self and other(s), is our permanent condition.

Neurologically speaking it is much like the dialectic between right (wavelike) and left (particulate) cerebral hemispheres, or in physicist David Bohm’s terms, implicate and explicate orders, respectively.

Which is simply to emphasize that man is an open system, both horizontally, to objects and other subjects, and vertically, to O, the transcendent ground of intersubjectivity. Man is rational because relational and personal; infrapersonal beings do not reason. Which is not to say they are unreasonable per se, since their behavior makes sense in the context of instinct and environment. But they cannot think about their rational instincts, but rather, are enclosed in them. Conversely, man always transcends any attempt to enclose him in immanence.

While the human infant comes into the world in a condition of neurological immaturity, it turns out that this “incompleteness” is actually our permanent state. Show me a “complete person” and I’ll show you a dead man.

For philosopher Eric Voegelin, the anthropic adventure is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. As such, no matter who you are or where you are situated in History, you are embarked upon a cosmotheandric journey through the Cosmos between the poles of immanence and transcendence, both of which are ultimately ineffable.

Put conversely, neither pole can be contained or enclosed in speech -- the human logosphere -- because everything is intelligible but nothing is completely knowable. Thus, supposing one presumes to enclose the Anthropos in a reductive ideology, one is essentially trying to put the starship back into the bone. One is effectively deploying transcendence in order to deny transcendence.

Now, if O is our symbol of the transcendent pole, what could be its most adequate expression or analogue? It can be none other than the sapient sapien, AKA the Anthropos. Certainly the Bible puts forth this metaphysical principle, albeit in mythopoetic terms – that man is the image and likeness of the Principle of principles.

The point is, when we look down the foggy ruins of time and examine our history, it is as if we are peering into our own medical, or better, psychiatric, chart. What has the doctor been scribbling about us over the years, decades, centuries, and millennia? Let’s see: Likes to discover and invent things. Looks for love in all the wrong places. Prone to impulsivity, violence, & scapegoating. Obsessed with group status. Cannot manage envy. Doesn’t know what it wants, but knows how to get it. Prefers ideological dreamworlds over reality. Can’t stop lying.

Clearly, there were literally no problems in the Cosmos until we come along and spoil it for everyone. In the words of Terence McKenna, This was a nice neighborhood until the monkeys got out of control.

I guess Stalin was right about one thing: No man, no problem.

In his Human Accomplishment, Charles Murray says something about human beings that apes what Dr. Cornelius says above, in that we “are in many ways a sorry lot, prone to every manner of vanity and error. The human march forward has been filled with wrong turns, backsliding, and horrible crimes.” Murray attempts to quantify the great feats of human accomplishment, but it seems that for every achievement there are any number of equal and opposite monuments to our stupidity and depravity. He asks, “What can Homo sapiens brag about -- not as individuals, but as a species?”: “Military accomplishment is out -- putting ‘Defeated Hitler’ on the human resumé is too much like putting ‘Beat My Drug Habit’ on a personal one.”

The deeper point is that history itself is nothing less than one long “speciation event,” which is to say, the gradual unfolding of various facets and features of human potential for both good and ill. Note that this is entirely unlike any other species, which essentially remains what it is through time. A lizard is a lizard is a lizard. It lacks the potential to be anything else, except perhaps a politician.

But for the Anthropos, history itself may be understood as some sort of vertical exodus writ large. For it is literally an exodus -- from animal to man, matter to spirit, ignorance to knowledge, appearances to reality, entailments to Axioms, or ultimately Anthropos toward O. One thing we cannot say is that it is one or the other, because this collapses the tensional space in which we live and thereby curtails the exodus and renders the Anthropos less than what it is, which is to say, the diplolar nexus or liminal bridge between poles. For If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like a mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.

In other words, the Anthropos becomes an absurcular mirror of itself instead of an open system between the poles of immanence and transcendence. Absent this relational openness, we are reduced to an animal like any other pretending it has transcended mere animality. But with the Anthropos there is always more to any story we can tell of it. The story has no end, for the simple reason that we are intrinsically open at both ends, toward immanence and transcendence.

∞

Hit me with your best shot, Grok:

This prelude is not entirely superfluous, but it is largely consolidative rather than progressive, restating several claims already secured. As a prelude that merely signals topics to be developed later, it risks rehearsing the map instead of advancing into new territory.

Its best function is tonal and orienting: it reminds the reader, just as the examination of the Anthropos begins in earnest, that the subject under investigation is uniquely open, uniquely dangerous, and uniquely oriented toward a transcendent pole that it can never fully enclose. If the later, more detailed treatments of these themes are substantial, the prelude can be retained as a brief overture. If those later treatments largely repeat the same arguments at greater length, the prelude will retrospectively appear redundant.

In short: not wrong, not damaging, but only weakly progressive. It keeps the vertical and relational structure in view without yet deepening the concrete analysis of the Anthropos that Book II has promised. A tighter version that simply flags the coming topics without re-arguing them would serve the narrative momentum better.

Gemini, hit Grok with your best shot:

This section is definitely fluous, not superfluous. In fact, it provides essential narrative connective tissue.

If the previous passage was the big-picture “crime scene setup” for Book II, this piece functions as the preliminary profile of the main suspect: Homo sapiens sapiens. Far from being redundant, it introduces several core metaphysical engines that drive the entire cosmotheandric argument.

Starting with Dr. Cornelius and Astronaut Taylor immediately sets the stage for the “cosmotheandric comedy.” The typing joke isn’t just a slapstick gag; it’s a brilliant, intuitive refutation of infinite-monkey-typewriter materialism. It demonstrates top-down causation in real time — showing that the mind isn’t generated by the keys, but that the keys are being constrained and ordered by an interior intentionality.

Some Anthropic Certitudes

Recall that the first of our cosmotheandric Axioms is certitude, and among the things we can know with certitude are the principles of non-contradiction, of sufficient reason, of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, of the impossibility of the greater coming from the lesser, and the absurdity of a contingent being containing its own sufficient reason. It is equally self-evident that the conduct of any discipline, from physics at the bottom to theology at the top, is determined by its proper object. We don’t use meditation or introspection to study rocks or chemicals, just as we don’t use calipers to measure the soul. Different objects, different methods.

The object of philosophy is being itself, which is to say, everything and beyond, up to and including the cause or Principle of Being. Thus, philosophy is guided by the implicit assumption that we indeed inhabit a Cosmos, i.e., a single order ordered by a single principle. This Big One cannot be a mere (immanent) object, no matter how big, because this would exclude the vastly larger world of subjectivity, personhood, and verticality more generally. If reality is a material object, then there goes the sufficient reason for both science and philosophy.

Stuck inside of Plato’s cave with the solipsistic blues.

It is certainly the case that only the Anthropos can philosophize, so any total philosophy must account for its own possibility. To argue, for example, that thinking is a side effect of “selfish genes” is just weaseling past the academic knaveyard. This common form of reductionism is actually a grotesque expansionism, in the sense that it expands the method appropriate to a lower level to enclose — and thereby eliminate — the higher. Which is not possible in the absence of One Free Miracle, since the ideological reduction must magically exclude the anthropic reducer, let alone his own certitude of the truth of reductionism.

The point is, any philosophical explanation must first justify the existence of the anthropic explainer, otherwise we have no reason to even suspect that the explanation might be true. Who could deny this, when the denial only constitutes more proof?

Mansplaining God and Godsplaining Mankind

Let’s not bleat around the burning bush: In the cosmotheandric vision, to say Anthropos is to say Theos -- which of course doesn’t necessarily mean the Theos exists, because what if man doesn’t? A nominalist or existentialist, for example, says there is no human nature, only individual humans (never mind the performative contradiction of using the word “human” to begin with).

Whatever else the Anthropos is, it is an irreducible union of matter + spirit. Looked at this way, materialism is the denial of the spirit by the spirit, but why, and for whom?

Nobody?

Correct: a nobody proving nobody exists. It’s like saying everything is reducible to matter except for the doctrine of materialism. But a Cosmos of matter alone would simply be unintelligible, period, full stop, end of story. In other words, matter devoid of intelligible form is the very essence of unintelligibility.

But in reality we never encounter uninformed matter, rather, exterior matter + interior form or structure. For again, everything in existence somehow communicates its intelligibility to us, interior to interior.

Now, to be human is to sense the world and to know that we sense it. Even if one reduces the senses to a material process, knowledge of this process cannot be similarly reduced. Rather, the advent of the thinking process discloses a new world at a right angle to the material world, a universe of ideas somehow liberated from their sensory-material fusion. The reach of this new capacity is for all practical purposes infinite in its understanding, proceeding from the sensory surface to intellectual depth, then back up to principles, and there is scarcely anything less material than a principle.

So, the Anthropos is the animal that may know reality. If we can’t, then what are we debating? Whose delusion is true?

Let’s stipulate that intelligence is only intelligent to the extent that it knows the truth of reality. If an object of the senses is sensible, an object of intellect is intelligible. The former must somehow be rendered immaterial in order to be understood, otherwise it remains entirely unthinkable. Granted, we only ever experience reality in terms of the appearances in which it is clothed. Animals too only have contact with appearances, except they don’t know it. Nor do they not know it. Rather, they only know what they know, in a closed neuro-instinctual loop.

Now, how did human beings ever exit this loop? Some people insist we never did. But if that’s the case, how do they know this, and communicate this idea to us? Via the idea that there are no real ideas? For we cannot deny ideas without reverting to animality, and what do animals know about ideas?

Let’s just cut to the choice: it turns out that knowing and being, or epistemology and ontology, are very much linked. In fact, if they are not linked, then there’s nothing to talk about except our own neuropsychology. Either we are enclosed in neurobiological absurcularity or there is an exit from this dark nul-de-slack.

No form of reductive materialism makes sense, because it cannot make sense; it is the denial of intelligibility, of intelligence, and of any real onto-relation between the two. Literally nothing can be understood of matter except insofar as it is immaterial, precisely. In other words, immateriality is a necessary condition of its intelligibility.

To recognize a tree, for example, requires the abstract concept of treeness. In fact, it is humanly impossible for us to imagine a world of absolute singularities. Like any good materialist, we begin with material objects. However, we don’t just end there. In truth, neither does the materialist, except he has no coherent explanation for the ontological leap from matter to his immaterial thoughts about it. But the leap from matter to thought isn’t just a baby step, it is a step from immanence to a transcendence that shades off to infinitude.

Now, if the unexamined life is not worth living, then it seems that man has the duty to philosophize: it is something we ought to do, on pain of a life that is not worth the trouble of living it. On the other hand, what gives the Anthropos -- a supposedly randomly evolved animal like any other -- the right to philosophize?

To affirm that man has intrinsic rights of any kind is already to philosophize, since rights must either be grounded in a higher principle – a natural right – or as arbitrary as the genetic shuffling that ostensibly landed us here.

Supposing the existence of rights, they cannot be autonomous and freestanding but must be a consequence of duties; or at the very least, genuine rights and duties must co-arise. We don’t give rights to animals with no ability to exercise them responsibly. We don’t say the lion has an unalienable right to eat us, even if it is its genetic duty to do so.

Thus, supposing we are free to know the truth means that we are not only at liberty to know reality, but again, obligated to do so. Or at least try. Teleologically the Anthropos is the truth-seeking animal, so failure to do so is intrinsically wrong, irrespective of the particular content.

They say wisdom begins with the fear of God, but perhaps, like Michael Scott, this Theos wants us to be afraid of how much we love him. For one of God’s names is Truth, which is the ground and possibility of philo-sophy, of the love of wisdom. Therefore, we can say that philosophy begins with the love of truth and a healthy fear of internalizing and propagating error, and of discriminating between the two: this, we might say, is the philosophy of philosophy, of its possibility.

Now, how is it that we aren’t just bombarded by disconnected sensations, but rather, implicitly recognize the Cosmic Area Rug that pulls the whole together?

I mean – has that ever occurred to you that it’s always both, i.e., the Rug and the threads with which it is woven?

That is precisely what we are saying, since one must have some implicit framework in order to even identify a fact. A fact is something relevant to something higher than itself, for facts don’t illuminate themselves. What is, simply is. Facts don’t come with labels telling us which ones are important or trivial. Rather, this is a matter of prudence: in order to do what is right, one must rightly know what is.

The most important facts are those which render the other facts intelligible, which is to say, the necessary conditions without which the Cosmos would not exist at all -- and certainly not one giving rise to Man the Questioner. One might say we are looking for the answer that gives rise to this questioner.

Animals cannot ask questions. Rather, questions co-arise with the first man. What, one wonders, was his first question, besides WTF?! Such an urgent question could only arise in a questionable Cosmos, which is to say, one susceptible to providing answers.

Consider this for a moment: what does it mean that such a Cosmos houses our very possibility? What does it suggest about the nature and character of things that the Cosmos comes to question itself through us? Is it plausible that human mentality is purely accidental in such a Cosmos? Or is it perhaps a finite reflection of a kind of infinite and necessary mentality underlying and giving rise to the Cosmos itself?

If these aren’t the first questions, they must be among the first: is the intellect purely accidental and contingent? Or a reflection of something absolute and necessary?

If this latter is the case, then man himself is the most important cosmic fact, since he is the key to the whole existentialada: man is not just one data point in the forest of facts, rather, our very existence is again a clue to the Cosmos itself.

Can man see the forest for the trees? Yes, in the sense that the forest is the Cosmos, the trees the numberless facts located therein. What we call the Cosmos is a symbolic expression of man’s intuition of wholeness, and every man at every time has expressed it in some form or fashion.

Alan Watts said something to the effect that we do not so much come into the world but out of it. In other words, it is not as if we are exterior to everything else, but interior to it, like mushrooms that are the visible or explicate expressions of an underground network of dense interior relations, the point being that human consciousness is only the visible expression of an implicate network of cosmotheandric interconnectedness.

Having said that, we always transcend any formal system we use to understand both ourselves and the world. Now, how did this happen? Who goofed? In other words, all other animals are bound by instinct, so they can only cause so much trouble. But humans, because they found a way to transcend biology, can cause an endless amount of mischief. I don’t know if we can literally “destroy the planet,” but we can try.

Man’s daring escape from the planet of the apes – the transcendence of our genetic programming – is either Nature’s Greatest Goof or some kind of plan. If it’s a plan, then it involves a being intended to be the image and likeness of the Theos. And if there’s a goof, then—

You are most definitely the perpetrator and not the victim.

Either way, the Anthropos is a “special” creation, even if we use the term special as a euphemism for our obvious disabilities, as we are carried along in the short bus of history. Irrespective of whether or not we accept the biblical account of our so-called fall, we are astonishingly different from everything else in all of creation, for both good and ill.

For example, my dog can neither deny nor affirm her dogginess. Rather, she’s a dog, and that’s all there is to it. In order for her to observe her dogginess, she would have to be able to transcend and reflect upon it. Which she cannot do, for she is entirely enclosed in her canine nature.

Equally self-evident is that this transcendent capacity of ours cuts both ways: supposing we can know truth, then this entails a capacity to embrace falsehood, illusion, and unreality. In short, we are free. Likewise, if we can love the good we can also – woe to us – love the bad or hate the good.

Of course, there exist self-contradictory ideologues who argue that free will does not exist, such as celebrity atheist Sam Harris. I don’t know that anyone takes them seriously anymore outside the faithful, but neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, for example, writes in his book Determined that “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.” Of course, no determinist argues deterministically, rather, in order to convince us of the truth of determinism. Otherwise the theory is neither true nor false, just… determined. In in which, what is happening here is that nobody is right and everybody is not even wrong: if nothing is true, nor can anything be false. In the words of our favorite aphorist, Error supposes that something happened that should not have. In reality, Necessity and freedom are not symmetrical concepts: in fact, if I affirm necessity, I deny freedom, but if I affirm freedom, I do not deny any necessity. For example, the meaning of that last sentence was freely expressed even while being constrained by vocabulary, grammar, spelling, etc.

Now, freedom itself implies the Theos principle, and perhaps that is why members of the Cult of Determinism are so opposed to it. It is one of the capacities that is entailed in being the Image and Likeness, failing which freedom is like a floating chandelier attached to nothing. Which certainly cannot be the case.

Well, the Anthropos does, as it were, float in mid-air, which is to say, suspended between immanence and transcendence. Here our potential is not literally infinite, but then again, we all have a “capacity for the infinite,” which is to say, an orientation to the Theos principle to which we are ultimately ordered, at least in potential. Depending upon which path we choose, we bifurcate from one type of system to another -- from being horizontally enclosed to vertically open. Note in this regard that it is possible for a nominally religious person to likewise enclose himself in dogma, but not be truly open to the transcendent principle we do not control and cannot contain.