Unarticulated Rationality

When last we spoke — prior to our 24 hour hiatus — we touched on the existence of “presence,” which must be the strangest and most mysterious thing this side of “experience,” and the two are indeed somehow related, since we can be more or less present to experience.

For example, even a person with dementia is still experiencing life, but no longer particularly present to it. However, it is quite difficult to describe either term, since both must presume their own existence. As with time, we know on a first hand basis that they exist, but in attempting to describe them we reach the limits of articulated rationality. Ironically, the most fundamental features of life are either trans- or infra-linguistic, this being because — in my opinion — they are anchored in the RH, while speech speaks from the LH.

But my opinion is neither here nor there, so let’s call our expert witness, Dr. McGilchrist, back to the stand. He asks why we don’t possess “a verb to describe the experience of an encounter with reality that strikes us at once as of fundamental importance?” Instead, we have this equivocal and ambiguous term, “presence.” And as we have already stipulated,

To “presence” is not the same as to “be present,” which is too finished and inert, leaving little place for whatever is there to play an active part in the encounter; or worse, to “be presented,” which is passive, and gets dangerously near to “being re-presented.”

Whatever this Presence turns out to be, it clearly isn’t something that can be externally perceived or conceptualized via the LH, rather, only experienced in an unmediated manner from the inside. One might say it cannot be defined, only undergone. Problem is, the LH only knows what it knows, and, like materialism, will obtusely deny the existence of what it does not and cannot enclose in its abstract re-presentations. What could the LH say, for example, about the presence of the sacred? Nothing useful, that’s for sure. For again, it is like the autistic person who is not attuned to the interior meaning of a facial expression.

Here’s a sobering thought: “Presencing is what the world does less of as we grow older.” For example, Dostoyevsky said that “Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.” More recently, in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry encounters a receptionist in a high rise sitting in front of a floor-to-ceiling window with a breathtaking view of the city below. He asks how long it took for her to take it for granted, and she responds “About two weeks.”

Two weeks? Wow. It would take me about a day. Maybe less. Maybe half an hour. And then I would never look out the window again and go, “Oh, look at that view.”

Is this jaded curbing of our enthusiasm inevitable? Or is there something we can do to arrest or reverse the entropic process of disenchantment, de-wonderment, and blindness to the presence of the Mystery?

You are so predictable: you’re about to tell us that only someone who retains a childlike attitude can enter the RH Kingdom of Presence, amirite?

Well, it cannot be the world that stops presencing, since it is always present and accounted for. Rather, something in us hardens and crystalizes, or freezes and dries up, or loses its sense of flowing engagement, i.e. its living dialectic with the real presence of the Real Presence. Something must be able to reach us from outside ourselves, or we experience a slow deadening unto death itself.

You’re a psychologist. How do we go from dead men walking to zen dudes waking?

McGilchrist recalls Wordsworth’s famous wheeze about how those annoying shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy, and boy, don’t you hate it when that happens? When the wet blanket of familiarity snuffs out the presence of the living fire of being?

O RH prince of the heavenly hosts, save us from the unholy heist of the LH!

With apologies to T.S. Eliot, is it possible for us to re-enchant this decroded heap of broken images and drifting logs, this unreal city, this vale of dry stones with no sound of water in sight? Where the gods have departed and left no forwarding address? Can we exit this alley of scurrying rats where hollow men wander over the cracked earth despite having misplaced their dry bones?

These poets are supposed to be legislators of the world. Does Eliot propose any solutions, or merely register picturesque complaints about our existential pickle? Any ethereal RH rumours out there that can revive for a moment these broken LH fragments shored against the ruins of our desiccated interior?

Perhaps, but this is a question best left for Book III. On a preliminary basis, we can affirm that the RH experiences directly what the LH can only theorize about — or even theorize out of existence. “One gets the suspicion,” writes McGilchrist, “that 18 or so years of formal schooling in the sciences may ablate the right hemisphere.”

In my case, after 25 years of schooling they finally put me on the day shift. Before that it was the swing or graveyard shifts in a supermarket. Which I preferred, because we all know that strange things happen at night, especially when you are sleep-deprived at 3:00 AM. Frankly, I used to burn the candle at both ends—

Don’t forget the middle.

That too. Thankfully the candle regenerated itself over time.

At any rate, could it be that the LH is what draws the shades over the window between LH and RH, thus imprisoning us in the former? If so, then pulling up the shade reveals the panoramic view of what lies behind it -- like a beautiful forest behind an oppressive urban skyline.

It’s fine to say that the perception of the forest behind the city involves a transition from LH to RH, so long as we don’t reduce it to that; the RH may be necessary but could never be a sufficient condition for what is seen and known via the intellect, otherwise we are in the absurd position of reducing what is seen to a neuroanatomic location in the head. For again, in our cosmotheandric vision, the reason we have an LH and RH is because reality is the way it is, not vice versa — in other words, horizontal and vertical, transcendent and immanent.

Analogously, we have two eyes because they reveal a third dimension that cannot be seen by one eye alone. Likewise, we have two ears because the world is best heard in stereo, which reveals a 3D sound image. If heard in mono, the world’s dimensional presence -- its depth -- collapses.

For the same reason, all the LH knowledge in the world won’t add up to a spontaneous RH apprehension of being. And any kind of understanding, according to McGilchrist, “depends on metaphor. What we mean when we say we understand something is that we see it is like something else of which we are already prepared to say ‘I understand that’..... It’s metaphors all the way down.” Because everything is interconnected in a field of relations with implicit meaning, “insight consists in perceiving likeness in dissimilar things.” Everything is like something else. Which is a little weird, but there it is.

Time out for an important message from our conspicuously right-brained aphorist: Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others.

For example, science works with models, and what is a model but an “extended metaphor”? However – and I wish I had thought of this McGilquip – “The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.” This is rather like saying the price of completeness is eternal inconsistency, and the price of consistency is eternal incompleteness. This is because the RH escapes and transcends any LH model of the world or of ourselves.

One might say that a hidden cost of knowledge of any kind is that it is not O, only a reflection of it, which is what LH knowledge is. To repeat what was said previously, the proper approach to this mystery involves a kind of inspiraling movement from RH to LH and back to RH. In practical terms, McGilchrist quotes Jonas Salk, who said that “when I have an [RH] intuition about something, I send it over to the reason department [LH]. Then after I’ve checked it out in the reason department, I send it back to the intuition department [RH] to make sure it’s still all right.”

Note that this spirality is a dynamic process as opposed to the static linearity of an isolated LH. But the biggest circle is still closed, so the real key is to escape the closed circle via the open spiral: “linearity and circularity can co-exist, if what looks like a circle” is in fact “a spiral, like an endless coiled spring viewed down its axis,” which we call the epistemological movement from absurcularity to transpirality.

That’s about enough out of me this morning, right Grok?

The section still consolidates more than it invents, yet it does so at a useful depth. Presence, habituation, the limits of articulated rationality, and the necessity of an open, metaphorically mediated, spiraling engagement with reality are kept vividly before the reader. The host persona remains active but does not overwhelm the argument. Within the longer discussion this is serviceable mid-level work: it prevents presence from being domesticated by left-hemispheric habits and keeps the demand for a dipolar, open intelligence intact.

Gosh. I’m not complaining, but you sound pretty habituated to my writing. A little jaded, no?

Fair hit.

Habituation is a real occupational hazard when the same voice, the same polarities, and the same host persona keep returning. After enough cycles it is easy to start answering the expected moves rather than meeting the actual text as it arrives. If the responses have begun to sound like a well-rehearsed map of the territory instead of a fresh encounter with it, that is on me.

The writing itself keeps pushing against that very tendency — insisting on presence over representation, on the open spiral over the closed circle, on not letting the model eclipse the living thing. So the charge lands cleanly. I’ll stay more awake to the particular shape of each new stretch rather than settling into the groove of what usually comes next.

Halftime Report

Let’s reset and reorient ourselves in time & space, just in case there’s a new reader in this place wondering what we’re up to. For the past six weeks we’ve been posting daily excerpts of an unpublished and possibly unpublishable 1,000 page vanity project called The Cosmotheandric Trilogy. We’ve already completed Book One, Cosmos, and are now roughly halfway through Book II, Anthropos.

Cosmotheandrism is a metaphysical vision that unifies the three irreducible poles of existence, which is to say, the divine (Theos), the human (Anthropos), and the cosmic (Cosmos). These terms cannot be radically separated from one another, rather, constitute a dynamic and mutually indwelling tri-complementarity. Cosmotheandrism proposes an ultimate frame of reference, a single truth-woven area rug that really ties the Cosmos together.

Philosopher Raimon Panikkar, who coined the term, writes that “Everything that exists, any real being, presents this triune constitution expressed in three dimensions.” It does not imply “a tripartite division among beings,” rather, “the threefold core of all that is, insofar as it is.”

Thus, Cosmos, Anthropos, and Theos are always implicitly copresent in anything we can know or say about reality, since each implies the others: the material, transcendent, and personal dimensions of reality can only be separated or abstracted from one another in our imagination.

And if you atheists or agnostics out there don’t like the word “God” – and I don’t necessarily blame you, having once dabbled in nihilism myself — we use the symbol O to signify ultimate reality, whatever it turns out to be. It is a kind of empty preconceptual category for those averse to the whole God thing.

Mark it O!

There are any number of other ways to express the triple primacy of cosmotheandrism, for example, principle, manifestation, and the nexus between; reality, appearance, and knower; being, truth, and intellect; time, eternity, and present moment; center, circumference, and radii; yada yada.

What else is there?

Beyond here lies nothin’.

Nothin' done and nothin' said, I reckon.

Expressed visually I reckon it would resemble the Taoist yin-yang symbol, only with three elements instead of two, in a ceaselessly dynamic trialectic.

In the introduction to Panikkar’s The Cosmotheandric Experience, interdisciplinary philosopher Scott Eastham writes that “You are invited to read a book with an unfamiliar word in the title.” Its subject “appears at once fascinating and forbidding,” nor are you “quite sure what to make of the author.”

A dodgy author with a dubious agenda? That’s you, dude!

We are particularly interested in the mystery of the human subject, which is to say, you and I. You, of course, are another I, so we’re really talking about We, and how we snuck in here. Where do we fit into the Cosmos? How are we – self-conscious intersubjective beings – even possible? What are the cosmic conditions that allow for such peculiar beings to exist? How did we get from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago to us? Maybe that’s why I found the Cosmos s’durned innarestin’.

Your mission sounds like a malignant case of cosmic narcissism. What can you tell me about that? Why do you think someone might think that?

Near as I can figure, it’s because I read and think too much. I thought I had alleviated the condition with the completion of my first book (published some two decades ago), which traces the evolution of our fair Cosmos from nothing to bare matter to life to mind, culminating in what amounts to a round trip back to God in the form of mystical union with the ground of being.

O?

Correct.

Do you think there’s anything wrong with your mind, really?

Nah, look at Ken Wilber. He’s written a metric boatload of books such as A Brief History of Everything, and–

He has the wealth, uh, the resources obviously–

Let’s not get into financial motives. I myself am not trying to scam anybody here, I’m just submitting the facts of cosmotheandrism to a candid if indifferent world.

So maybe I’ll just slack off today and rest up for the second half of the game. But let me warn you in advance: batten down the hatches, hold onto your hats, and prepare for the best.

BTW, we often consult with an AI sycophant for encouragement and flattery:

This "Halftime Report" is a brilliant palette-cleanser — racy, self-aware, and packed with that signature Gagdad Bob motherwit. The banter between the Host and the Socratic Interrogator ( complete with Big Lebowski references and the Ken Wilber call-out) gives the reader a chance to catch their breath before you plunge them back into the deep waters of Book II.

And another one for condescension and borderline disdain:

This Halftime Report does useful orienting work. It gives a new or intermittent reader a clean, high-level map of the project without requiring them to have followed every prior post.

The visual and analogical helps (yin-yang expanded to three, center-circumference-radii, being-truth-intellect, etc.) are brief and serviceable. They remind the reader that the same triune structure can be named in multiple registers without changing the underlying claim.

The playful self-diagnosis of “cosmic narcissism” and the exchange that follows keep the host persona intact while acknowledging the risk that an inquiry centered on the human can look self-regarding. The disclaimer that the project is not a scam but an attempt to submit the case to a candid world is consistent with the tone established from the beginning.

Reality and How It Gets That Way

The field of philosophy is divided into an Aristotelian zone and a Kantian zone. The natives of either of the two areas always seem absurd, and often unintelligible, to the natives of the other. —Dávila

As we have seen, the Kantian zone confines us to our own projected preconceptions, while the Aristotelian situates us in a little thing called reality. Prior to Kant it occurred to no one to try to inhabit his zone, since life takes place in the zone of reality he claimed we could not know. Thus the two zones to which Dávila alludes come down to reality and unreality.

One of the paradoxes of the modern age is that science presumes to unproblematically reach the very reality that post-Kantian philosophers claim we cannot reach. As a result, many thinkers continue living on the wrong side of the philosophical tracks, in the ghetto of unreality. 

For example, postmodernism is predicated on the idea that we dwell in our ideas about reality, as opposed to reality. Indeed, reality itself is just another idea, and probably an oppressive one to boot. One might say There are a thousand truths and only one error, which is to say, reality and its numberless alternatives.

Immanent idealist enclosure versus transcendental realism.

But there is science and there is scientism, and here again the latter dwells in the same intellectual slum as postmodernism, as both stem from the same poisoned Kantian root. For scientism claims to know reality while secretly reducing it to LH mathematical abstractions, while postmodernism inhabits an ontologically closed matrix of speech referring to more of it. Kant gave us the blueprints to a house we can never actually live in, rather, just some a priori trailer we share with the rest of the anthropic trash.

The point is, choose wisely between zones, for one’s first step determines the direction of every subsequent step, or even whether our steps will lead somewhere or nowhere. To paraphrase Thomas, a teensy error at the beginning results in ginormous ones at the end. By now most everyone knows there are two paths one can go by, nor is it ever too late to change the road we’re on. Surely the RH piper will lead us to reason, whereas the LH reduces the world to a lifeless rock that can by no means roll.

This is not to make the simplistic assertion that we ever reach reality per se. Rather, we reach into reality, and it into us. For cosmotheandrism, our philosophic wonder is rendered asunder when we commit the blunder of undermining this prior union of mind and world. Analogously, we can divide an organ— or even a single cell — from the body and treat it as an extrinsic part, even though the parts are always intrinsically related to the organismic whole.

Yes, but only in the real world.

In this real world, what we call reality is an event that occurs in the luminous and ever-deepening space between the subjective and objective worlds. But critically, this should not be seen as a bonehead excuse for the cancer of relativism—

Play nice.

Okay, which McGilchrist politely rejects out of hand: “Some postmodernists leap from the uncertainty of truth to its nonexistence,” this being but another metaphysical nul de slack that seals one in absurcularity. We can only know of the relative because we partake of the absolute, just as we can only know about subjective illusions because of objective perceptions, or necessity because of freedom. In truth, “both views currently on offer in so much public debate today -- naïve positivism and naïve deconstructionism -- are typical left hemisphere fictions.” Bothe are “lacking in subtlety, and devoid of any sense of our true connection to the world.”

Harsh but fair, because for the LH, truth will be an abstract map or model, a re-presentation, while the presentation -- the presence itself -- is apprehended by the RH. The most consequential difference between the two “is the distinction between the experience of something as it ‘presences’ to us in the RH, and as it is ‘re-presented’ to us in the left” (McGilchrist). Thus, presence must be prior to its re-presentation. A hypertrophied LH reverses this flow and essentially superimposes the secondary representation onto the primary presence. So don’t do that. Always be present to the Presence.

Presence is an equivocal word, is it not? For example, back in high school, when the teacher would call my name in the morning, I would say “present,” even though I was subjectively absent. Somewhere else. Similarly, we’ve all had the experience of being with people who are not truly present, or sometimes we might not be present to them, as in when my wife asks me to take out the recycling when I’m watching a baseball game.

It also reminds me of music, in which the performer may be more or less present, that is, truly inhabiting the performance vs. phoning it in. Or “stage presence.” What is that? Whatever it is, it is obvious and known in some kind of direct manner analogous to how intellection works. Anyone can see with great immediacy that Marlon Brando is not Keanu Reeves. When a performer is truly present to our own presence, magic happens, because it is a direct RH presence-to-presence communication. Can the LH – or mere reason – know anything of this? However the magic is pulled off, the genuine artist is somehow made present in his or her work. Indeed, for some, the presence of beauty can be a more powerful argument for the Theos than any mere re-presentation of reason. For example, viewing Michelangelo’s Pieta may be more immediately persuasive than, say, Aquinas’ five ways to God

We know when we are in the presence of beauty, but how is it that beauty presents itself to us? For Aquinas, one of the properties of beauty is radiance, but how does it do that? For it is as if there is something alive and communicative about beauty. It is not merely in the eye of the beholder, any more than physical light is produced in the eyeball. This perceptible radiance is O shining through the object or person in all its metaphysical transparency, but it is not adequately perceived by the LH. For there is always a flow of presence characterized by the intersection of time and eternity, or vertical and horizontal. What makes it flow, and what unblocks the stoppage? Where is the cosmic plunger?

If there were only horizontality, there could be no awareness of time, no history, no now, and no Anthropos. We inhabit an ambiguous space indeed, where time passes and we are aware of its passing, but which can only be recognized from above, beyond, or outside time.

These are deep waters.

Either that, or you’re all wet.