Doubt of Doubt and Certitude of Certitude

Brief recrapitulation: if there is exists a way upward & inward to a post-disenchanted Cosmos, then we had better get the RH off the disabled list or at least into rehab. For only with its bat in the lineup will a religious vocabulary be meaningful. The latter is what we cosmothandrians call a grammar of infinitutude for which verticality and transcendence are as real as the immanence and horizontality apprehended by the LH. We ended with the proposition that the Cosmic Area Rug is woven of Absolute and Infinite, or Necessity and Possibility, which are mirrored herebelow in the LH and RH, respectively.

∞

Certitude of Certitude: How Can We Be Sure In a World That’s Constantly Changing?

Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles. —Dávila

What do we know? And what can we know with absolute certitude? To approach this question is to return to the beginning and know it for the first and last time, because no other questions can be answered until we first establish the fact that questions are answerable — i.e., that our shaky witness — the Anthropos — may possess true knowledge of himself and of the world.

Kant, as we have seen, placed an untraversable boundary between What Is and What We May Know About It, which ultimately results in an unbridgeable chasm between being and knowing — like an intrusive sign blocking out the scenery and breakin’ our minds.

Nevertheless, Kant’s epistemological toe slipped a little over the line, because you can’t know a wee bit about the unknowable — even that it is unknowable. You may be lost at sea, but that doesn’t prove that dry land doesn’t exist. If we cannot know the truth of reality, then our entire pretentious house of canards collapses, reducing us to competing forms of nihilism and survival of the frivolous.

That’s an exaggeration—

Yes, but only an uncharitable one. The point is that all human beings — as human beings — start with the pre-philosophical and pre-scientific conviction that Of course there’s a real world, doofus. WTF are you talking about? Man is uniquely instructed by O, which is why the rigorous discipline of Truth is a transfiguring and purifying process.

Hello, noumenon!

Our dry land consists of self-evident truths.

How do we know when we’ve found one?

When denial of it entails absurd or monstrous consequences repugnant to reason. It is reminiscent of what Chesterton says of the “thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” The inaccessibility of truth is #1 on the Index of Forbidden Ideas, all others being #2 or lower in our metaphysical flawchart.

One such thought is that our thoughts do not disclose reality and that truth is therefore unavailable to human beings. Since truth, in order to be true, must be the dynamic — not static, as we shall see — conformity of mind to being, the very notion of truth is poisoned at the root. Thought and Thing go through a nasty divorce, and Thing gets to keep all the real properties, since you Kant take ‘em with you. The Anthropos thus becomes closed within himself, and we’re done here.

Let us stipulate that man is a knower. But what does this mean, to know? What is happening when we know something? The answer is not obvious — at least not anymore — but for Maritain it is an irreducibly spiritual event through and through. For “There is a vigorous correspondence between knowledge and immateriality. A being is known to being to the extent that it is immaterial.”

Seriously, the immaterial mind is as different from material matter as anything we could possibly conceive. But as we have seen, even matter is conceived by the mind, so it’s not that easy to reduce the conceiver to the conception. If matter is but an appearance that corresponds to sensation, how could it have given rise to an immaterial reflection of the material sensation?

∞

At the top of our cosmotheandric vision are the necessary principles that do not rely upon any other principles, and presuppose no prior truth. They constitute the pre-flight checklist for the intellect before it attempts the vertical ascent. These propositions are in us by nature (i.e., they are self-evident), nor can we deny them without falling into absurdity -- for example, beginning with the soph-defeating principle that “there is no truth,” which is false if true, thus violating the principle of noncontradiction.

Now, could everything be an illusion or projection of our own subjectivity? No, because then we would have the absolute certitude that everything is an illusion, and whence this certitude? How did it, of all things, get into the Cosmos? There is just no way to get around the Absolute, even if we absolutely deny it. For it turns out that we believe in a number of things we don’t believe we believe, and maybe even don’t want to believe.

Unbelievable!

∞

Is it asking too much to be given a reliable map out of our trackless bewilderness? All men look for it, it’s just that most either pretend to have found it or just give up early for an untroubled life of sensory pleasure and ideological distraction.

Supposing our Axiom 7 — that the Anthropos is a reflection of the ultimate principle — then any Theos worthy of the title would naturally want us to know what the flip is going on here. This is not some kind of deadbeat deity who has no interest in rearing his children. Why otherwise would he give us an intellect, not to mention other vertical courtesies such as an endlessly intelligible Cosmos? If we are theomorphic, then the intellect isn’t just a biological accident to help us find ripe fruit and attractive daughters of men, rather, a vertical gift designed specifically to enable a fruitful rendezvous with terrestrial being.

Every sense has its object: surfaces for touch, color for the eyes, sound for ears, taste for the tongue. Likewise, being is the object of the intellect, as intelligibility to intelligence. Science, of course, assumes that reality is intelligible and that the human intellect has unique access to it, and that is certainly the right attitude.

Bina and Ziarani begin with the question, “how do we know if anything is true?” Notice that the question presupposes the existence of the very thing it wants to prove, truth. Is there any way around this faith in truth?

We could say, for example, that the truth is logical, but who says logic is absolutely true? Certainly not Gödel, since logic is ultimately tautological — premises in, conclusion out — nor is our selection of premises dictated by any logical operation. Logic cannot discover anything but what it presupposes, and besides, how does logic get here, and how is it that the Anthropos has unique access to it? There’s no dodging it: “before we can begin to look for the criterion of truth, we have to ascertain that there is such a thing as truth.” For “unless one accepts that there is indeed such a thing, nothing holds: remove truth, and everything collapses” (ibid.). The Cosmic Area Rug is either forever lost or torn asunder.

Not only must one “assume that there is such a thing as truth before one presents any reasoning,” but one must also assume that it can be symbolically formulated and communicated to other minds, and this further presumes a Cosmos so peculiar that it again looks as if it is ordered to the Anthropos, and vice versa.

In considering our few-in-number but great-in-reach principles that explain what in the world is going on with the world, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the intellect is “essentially relative to intelligible being, as sight is to color. In this way, the intellect is not enclosed within itself but, rather, is opened to the entire domain of intelligible reality” (Garrigou-Lagrange). This at once covers several of our Axioms, e.g., openness, relationality, and intersubjectivity.

Now, you’d think this would be uncontroversial, since its denial immediately results in the destruction of “every form of truth,”

indeed even every form of opinion [man], all the degrees of probability, and all those of error. No longer would there be any difference between a great error and a small one. Consequently, we would also in this way be led to suppress every form of desire and action. Thus, we would not only be faced with the death of the intellect but, moreover, with the death of action in all its domains (ibid.).

In other words, we couldn’t even be wrong, and who wants that?

All knowledge comes down to the binary question of Is or Is Not. But if the very first act of knowledge is to sever its link to what Is — AKA reality — then the mind is forever enclosed in its own knowledge of other knowledge, never of reality.

Better pause here—

The book doesn’t stop and start at your convenience!

Yes it does, otherwise we’ll be here all day.

Cosmic Bums & Achievers

Since this is a serialized book and no longer a blog per se, it might be helpful to begin with a one paragraph top line summary of yesterday’s bottom line, in order to provide context and continuity. If you read yesterday’s post, you are free to skip it:

McGilchrist suggests that our spontaneous intuitions of God are a function of the RH, since it is the hemisphere that “brings us closer to the truth than the left.” He further agrees with Bob — as do few others in this world — that the word “God” is unavoidably problematic, so in order to properly glish the unglishable, we require a translinguistic placeholder to avoid LH idolatry. He concludes that what we really need “is a word unlike any other, not defined in terms of anything else: a sort of un-word.” Axiom 10 of cosmotheandrism proposes the unword O in order to git ‘er done.

                                                         ∞

The sacred mountain, seat of the Gods, is not to be found in space even though it is visible and tangible. —Frithjof Schuon

In other words, first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is, in what amounts to the endless LH—> RH —> LH cycle we’ve already discussed a time or two.

In order to say “God,” we have already in a sense captured God. But no one can presume to capture O, which for Jews is the unsayable YHVH, or designated in the East by terms such as Tao or Nirguna Brahman, each of these being translinguistic experiences of O that shatter or repel speech. So, don’t confuse the cataphatic LH map with the apophatic RH territory. Note again that we don’t want to simply bar the LH from theologizing, rather, to acknowledge its complementary but ultimately junior role in this vertical endeavor.

As to the ineffability of O, McGilchrist agrees that “there is almost certainly more here than we have words for, or can expect ever to understand using [LH] reason alone. Such an expectation itself would be irrational.” This doesn’t actually just apply to O, rather, to everything, because Gödel said so: uppercase Reason in the fullest sense has direct intellection of what transcends lowercase reason.

In other words, the realm of vertical intellection cannot be reduced to any LH map. McGilchrist suggests that “The proper response to this realisation is not argument, but awe.” And the Anthropos is — I am at any rate — awe-ware of “a deep gravitational pull towards something ineffable, that, if we can just for once get beyond words and reasons, is a matter of experience,” this being the Great Attractor, which is — wait for it — a coming attraction in Book III.

McGilchrist does not pretend to be a theologian, so he traces our cerebral asymmetry back to nematodes near the bottom of the biosphere, but what if such creatures are actually fractals of a divine logosphere reflected herebelow in neurology? Think of how, in the words of McGilchrist, “The LH aims to narrow things down to a certainty, while the RH opens them up into possibility.” Here we are merely suggesting that LH necessity and RH possibility might be anchored in the Divine Mind, and why not? It’s either that or nematodes.

You just have to outsmart, as it were, the LH, because it tends not to stay in its epistemological lane. Rather, it is very much beset by the neurocosmic Dunning-Krugery referenced above, whereby “it has no sense of the limits of its own understanding.” Rather, “It operates inside a framework, within which all questions are referred back, and all answers form part of a reassuringly familiar schema; if they don’t they are simply pronounced nonsense.”

This can redound to a closed loop, so anything outside the loop is nonexistent or imaginary. It doesn’t have an appropriately humble meta-view of itself, nor does it “see the bounds of its own world view; in order to do that, it would have to see there is something beyond the bounds — and that is something it cannot do.”

Or, cannot do in the absence of its complementary hemisphere.

Now, McGilchrist’s description may or may not be “neurologically true,” but it is true in every other respect, so it might as well be. Humans are forever confining themselves to their own ideological matrices. It has been a permanent temptation since Genesis 3.

The properly anthropic habitat must be a place where both left and right brains are at home. Because it is not as if one can ever actually eliminate the latter, rather, it will return in some form, whether spiritually frivolous or ideologically toxic.

Memo to the universe: You’re not all that.

Nevertheless, we cannot return to the enchanted world of prelapsarian man, but is there a way forward to a post-disenchanted Cosmos? Such a Cosmos would be one in which a religious vocabulary — or what we call a grammar of infinitude — is full of genuine meaning, one in which verticality and transcendence are as real as — actually, more real than — immanence and horizontality.

∞

At the end of the deity, Either God or chance; all other terms are disguises for one or the other.

But chance produces nothing and explains nothing. Rather, chance has no causal power, but is merely the probability of something happening for other reasons. It is not an entity or substance, nor does it have any power to cause anything to happen. Supposing I flip a coin 100 times, I’m telling you there’s a chance it will come up heads each time. But what are the chances that such an unlikely outcome is a result of chance?

Likewise, there is no chance that chance is a sufficient explanation of being, mind, life, or anything else, for this is just a measure of our ignorance of real causes.

Yes, but isn’t O too just another name for your ignorance?

No, it adverts to the very principle, ground, and possibility of intellect, intelligibility, meaning, and truth, or the transcendent horizon of total intelligibility toward which Anthropic knowers are ordered.

We will wind down this lengthy foray into neurocosmology with the following, as we have already ventured too far into material more appropriate for Book III. O functions precisely as McGilchrist’s unword, for

if we have no word, something at the core of existence disappears from our shared world of awareness; yet if we have a word, we will come to imagine we have grasped the nature of the divine, pinned it down and delimited it, even though by the very nature of the divine this is something that can never be achieved.

In other words, there are certain weighty areas of life whereby achievement constitutes a failure to achieve.

∞

One last question before moving on from neurocosmology: might our ultimate Principle itself have a left and right brain?

Of course not. It is necessarily trans-material.

True, but could there be a kind of bilateral or maybe even trilateral asymmetry in O reflected herebelow?

We’ve already discussed how Absolute and Infinite are ultimate complementarities (Axiom 2), and how this dynamism implies the necessity of possibility. Moreover, “creation” and “possibility” must be two words for the same principle. Schuon goes so far as to suggest that Creator and creation — or O and its infinite entailments — are “coeternal,” which may sound a tad off key until you realize that what he really means is simply the tautology that it is in the nature of a Creator to create. So, “cosmic and coeternal manifestation is necessary because God is necessary, whereas ‘creation is free because it is not ‘the manifestation’ but ‘a manifestation’” (emphasis mine).

The perfections of both Absolute necessity and Infinite freedom must be copresent in our Theos Principle, even though, from the Anthropic standpoint, it is impossible for us to harmonize them, since necessity would seem to be the opposite of freedom. But in the Theos, necessity does not imply constraint, nor freedom arbitrariness.

For our purposes it is enough to know that the Cosmic Area Rug is woven of Absolute and Infinite, which are mirrored herebelow in the form of necessity and freedom, respectively. Absolute and Infinite are very much analogous to LH and RH, only as applied to divinity, for the LH is a little like Absolute Necessity, and RH a bit like Infinite Possibility.

So, we formally reject the scientistic magician’s rulebook that tries to build its tower of babble from the bricks with which it is composed. Instead, we posit One Big Miracle: an eternally subsistent, conscious, and creative principle (O). Everything else is a logical and luminous consequence of this prior source, or in the words of Norris Clarke, “Mind is for being, and reciprocally being is for mind.” Conversely, the problem with materialism is that the bums who propose it can never make ends meet, because the dumb material end can never reach the immaterial intelligent end.

The bums will always lose, do you hear me? THE BUMS WILL ALWAYS—

Yes, we hear you.

Vertical Paradoxes and Free Miracles

Continuing where we left off, we were discussing the orthoparadox—

I’m already sick of that word.

Fair enough. What is important is the concept, whatever we call it. We could say vertical paradox, i.e., something that appears absurd or contradictory on the surface but is resolved with recourse to a higher level. Assuming Axioms 2 (primordial complementarity), 3 (openness), and 5 (verticality), then the paradoxes disappear.

In the previous post we spoke of the Anthropos as a paradoxical species of unique instances. But in realty everything partakes of this antinomy, except to say that it reaches its highest expression in man. For example, every rock is unique, but in a trivial sense compared to the way human beings differ from one another. Uniqueness is to generality as is individual to category or substance to form. What a thing actually is is not the same as the category to which it belongs. For example, our Great Dane is different from our four previous Danes.

Even the hairs on your head are counted, but they’re still hairs.

An important distinction between Danes and humans is that we are aware of such categorical distinctions. McGilchrist writes of how for children, “the excitement lies in discovering that not everything is unique, but that there are general categories giving shape to the world: ‘Bunny!,’ ‘Doggie!; This gives pattern to experience.” But as jaded adults we may default to these abstract categories, such that “we have to make an effort in the opposite direction: the excitement comes only when we recover the uniqueness of what it is we contemplate.”

Does this not require a heroic dose of LSD?

Not necessarily. For example, if we go on vacation to an unfamiliar locale, part of the charm is in experiencing the uniqueness of things anew. Novelty is always here, but LH capture prevents us from experiencing it. Thus, for example, “the real, experienced presence of the mountains and lakes as a child was overwhelming -- they were, in our terms, present ‘in their very essence’ to him, awe-inspiring and unique; when as an adult he could see them only as re-presented, now become the essential Mountain and the essential Lake.”

But in reality, supposing both hemispheres are fully functioning, difference and sameness -- like the One and the Many -- “constantly interpenetrate one another and give life to one another.” In spiritual health – which is to say, wholeness – both hemispheres should be dialectically involved with one another. However, if forced to choose, it is far more impoverishing to have a hypoactive or decommissioned RH, but it’s a little like choosing between sight and hearing when health and wholeness mean possessing both.

Nor is there a Sightworld radically separate from Soundworld, rather, a single world with sights and sounds: the five senses are integrated by a higher one called (in scholastic terms) common sense; likewise, we might say that RH and LH are unified in a higher synthesis that discloses the world as it is, or at least closer to what it is with one hemisphere offline. We are always relative to the Absolute, the latter being uniqueness as such — mirrored, by the way, in our one unique Cosmos.

But you needn’t think long about the Absolute to understand that it is of necessity Infinite, i.e., unbound, and admitting of no limitation or final determination. Where the Absolute excludes nothing, the Infinite includes everything, and yes, these are subtly different – as different as LH and RH, respectively, for LH is again to Absolute as RH is to Infinite.

If LH and RH are ultimately ordered to Absolute and Infinite, we are getting close to the end of what we can say of them, AKA ultimacy (Axiom 6). It remains for us to explicate the details and implications, which is more of a task for Book III. For now, let us affirm that the Anthropos is aware of “a deep gravitational pull towards something ineffable, that, if we just for once get beyond words and reasons, is a matter of experience,” for it is “something outside our conceptual grasp, but nonetheless present to us through intimations that come to us from a whole range of unfathomable experiences we call ‘spiritual.’”

That’s a little weird.

Agreed, but is it weird enough?

The Cosmoneurology of the Great Attractor

McGilchrist follows philosophy as far as it goes, which is to say that “ultimately there must just be an uncaused cause, or an ungrounded ground…” For the “brute emergence of Being from non-Being is either the miracle of all miracles or a straight impossibility.” One might say that it is either necessary or impossible. But since it happened, we can rule out the latter.

The problem is how to characterize this gratuitous miracle.

What exactly is a miracle? Whatever else it is, our competitors will no doubt say it constitutes unchecked aggression toward the known laws of nature.

Those creeps can roll!

Now, even the existence of laws of nature violates the known laws of nature, being that there is no law that can explain how they got here: Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery. Moreover, if the Cosmos were eternal, it would have long since reached entropic heat death, so it would scarcely be a Cosmos.

Just as no one knows what O is, nor does anyone know what matter is. Regarding the latter, it seems the more we know, the less we know. As was previously said regarding Aristotle’s hylomorphism, it remains the case that no one has ever seen uninformed matter, rather, only “elements of the world to which we attribute the quality, within our consciousness, of being material....” And McGilchrist sounds very much like Schopenhauer in affirming that “Materialism derives the only thing we undeniably know, the concreteness of experience, from an unknown abstraction: matter.” Schopenhauer likened the materialist to a person who attempts to build a house starting with the roof. For by trying to derive mind from matter, the materialist forgets he has deployed the mind to conceive of matter in the first place.

Oopsie.

In order to explain the mind, materialism’s star witness is physics, which, under cross examination turns hostile, for “the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself.” As for the origins and nature of consciousness, the Cosmic Judge has ruled that physics has no relevant testimony to offer. “If you’re not clear on this limitation, you have no idea what physics is,” and certainly not what consciousness is.

People who claim to be materialists presumably do so because it is less weird and miraculous than theism. However, it turns out that it is not nearly weird enough but certainly more miraculous.

Recall that there are two ways of going about this: there is the ascending approach that proceeds from the senses to the Principle, and the descending approach that begins with the Principle and deduces consequences and entailments therefrom. Analysis and synthesis: the former is an LH specialty, the latter an RH one.

Now, although we can tackle the Cosmos from either end -- top or bottom -- the fact remains that, to quote Cap’n Obvious, reality is one. This suggests that there is only one miracle, the rest being consequences of it. It makes no sense to situate the miracle at the bottom, because, supposing we do, it’s not going to be enough; rather, we will need a multitude of subsequent miracles.

For example, the first miracle will be that there is something instead of nothing. We say “miracle,” because we simply have to assume it as first principle. But then, after a few billion years of so-called matter just doing what it must, it suddenly comes to life. How did this happen? Another miracle, I suppose. Okay, but then rational souls appear on the cosmic stage. What explains this miracle?

Nothing explains it. It’s a miracle!

What about the principle of parsimony -- the one that says we shouldn’t multiply hypotheses, let alone miracles? Cosmotheandrism has a better idea: why not clean up this mess of gratuitous miracles by reducing them to just one big one -- one that is, say, eternally subsistent in the form of Absolute and Infinite? Moreover, it is alive, conscious, intelligent, and free. It is one, true, beautiful, creative, open, and intrinsically related, which is to say, irreducible substance-in-relation. It is what we call the nothing-everything of O: nothing because it is beyond containment, everything because it contains everything.

Better yet, it’s not even a mystery in the magical sense of the word, rather, a necessary principle that renders the others intelligible. One might call it a “necessary mystery,” which is precisely what O is intended to symbolize: an ultimate reality that necessarily is, even if we necessarily cannot say exactly what it is. Which goes to what McGilchrist writes of the word God, which has become so “obfuscated and overlaid with so many unhelpful accretions in the West that it is not surprising that people recoil from this idol.” In other words, if we are not careful, it is very easy for the Anthropos to make God into a graven image of O, which we might say is the ultimate LH heist.

For if McGilchrist is correct, “a disposition toward God is largely dependent on the right hemisphere, the hemisphere we already know brings us closer to the truth than the left.” But as to the ineffable something toward which we are pulled, McGilchrist agrees that “if we are to say anything about it, we still need some sort of placeholder, within language, for all those aspects of Being that defy direct expression, but which we sense are greater than the reality which language is apt to describe, almost certainly greater than whatever the human mind can comprehend.” He adds that what we really need “is a word unlike any other, not defined in terms of anything else: a sort of un-word.”

O!

You are correct, sir: O undermines — or overminds, rather — the problem of LH idolatry.