The Ecumenism of the Vertically Open System

There are two major sections left in Book II, but a note to myself indicates that this one needs more work because it may contain repetition. More charitably, perhaps it is a summary of the previous 40 posts, as we transition to Book III. Let’s find out; it is over 3,500 words, so I’ll break it in two or three:

Speaking of ontological shrinkage and metaphysical wrongthink, celebrity atheist Daniel Dennett came up with the metaphor of cranes and skyhooks to characterize naturalism and theism, respectively. According to his cosmic rules, skyhooks are not permitted, being that they posit a transcendent and immaterial intelligence that he dismisses as a gratuitous miracle.

Now, supposing we are limited to only One Free Miracle, cosmotheandrism chooses an intelligible universe mysteriously ordered to man’s intellect, including even Dennett’s. Moreover, the very existence of immanent cranes is already a miracle that cannot be explained without recourse to a transcendent skyhook — a vertical form or telos. In reality, crane and skyhook are complementary, another way of talking about the primordial and irreducible complementarity of immanence and transcendence.

To pretend that cranes are entirely self-sufficient is but another case of left-brain capture of the right — as if one can build a skylight out of floorboards, when the very act of building a crane requires a skyhook to hold the blueprint — i.e., the form — and without which the crane is a meaningless pile of metal on the ground. In the traditional view, last in the order of execution is first in the order of intention, which implies that the Why must be prior to the How. Cosmos and intellect are mysteriously ordered to one another, but why? Either for no reason at all, or for a reason that lies in the order of intention. Which implies that the Anthropos may be temporally last to arrive on the terrestrial scene, when in fact he is ontologically first — not an intracosmic afterthought but a extracosmic forethought.

The Omega is the Alpha?

That’s getting ahead of ourselves. But then again, man is always ahead of himself, having one foot in the ceaseless discovery and mapping of an ontologically prior transcendent dimension.

Indeed, what is a crane even for? There can be no horizontal answer to any Why question, for no amount of How adds up to a single Why. E no doubt equals MC squared, but why are there physical laws to begin with, to say nothing of physicists who discover and understand them?

But for Dennett, the skyhook concept is intended to ridicule the idea of intelligence grounded in a transcendent principle — or from what regular folks might call God. He contrasts this with earthbound cranes that are ultimately constructed out of immanent bits of matter.

But this arbitrarily restricted view only demonstrates how LH human intelligence may be extremely acute on the horizontal plane alone while rendering itself impotent on any level above it. For either the whole of reality is ordered to the totality of intelligence, or what are even pretending to talk about? Cages are for animals. Why escape the immanent zoo only to confine oneself to an intellectual museum full of dead artifacts?

At antipodes to the craniac perspective are skyhookers such as Wolfgang Smith, who writes that the Darwinism of our times — which is to say, the metaphysical kind — is “no longer science, properly so called, but proves to be, ultimately, a kind of religion: a counter-religion, to be exact.”

Fighting words. But if Darwinism is a faux-religion, it must have a secret skyhook of its own hidden away somewhere, i.e., the One Free Miracle that gets it off the absurcular goround.

Now, I don’t doubt the existence of cranes, but they are not self-explanatory. You could say they are built from the laws of physics, but this leads to two problems, first, the origin of those laws, and second, how these laws give rise to beings who transcend them.

Richard Dawkins, for example, writes of how human beings ought to develop a morality that is free of religion, but whence this “ought” in a deterministic world of selfish genes? There is no ought in natural selection, nor any freedom to conform to it. To even say that one morality is superior to another is to sneak in a vertical hierarchy that is forbidden by the principles of Darwinism.

He sounds just like a skyhooker with a heart of gold.

If a miracle is something that has no naturalistic explanation, then high on our list is the miracle of subjectivity in an otherwise objective universe; and if this weren’t miraculous enough, we have the human intelligence that somehow mirrors the intelligibility of the world. Which — agreed — we ought to engage in.

Is it reasonable to suppose that this immaterial intelligence was simply lifted by a material crane out of a monkey’s head? To believe this is to simply not know what intelligence is — which is to say, adequation to reality.

For cosmotheandrism man is always suspended between the crane and the skyhook, i.e., immanence and transcendence, or time and eternity, respectively. The human state abides precisely in the weird vertical tension between these poles, skyhook above, cranes below, out of which the Cosmic Area Rug is weird-woven.

Looked at this way, evolution is indeed a journey through time, but to recognize the journey is to already be partly outside of it — as Dawkins implicitly acknowledges with his immaterial preference for a morality that is higher than mere survival of the fittest.

Try as we might, we can never really domesticate this weirdness. Which is reminiscent of Haldane’s suspicion that The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. The full quote adds that

I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of [the universe], from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any [LH] philosophy.

Which is necessarily true, since being cannot be enclosed in anything from within being. Along these lines, Haldane made some similarly wise cracks:

Reality is the [LH] cage of those who lack [RH] imagination.

The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of [RH] wonder.

The advance of [LH] scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our [RH] inner life in it any less mysterious.

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms [or RH can be reduced to LH abstractions].

The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized [LH] world, while the real [RH] universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.

As the bracketed material indicates, the problem lies in the relentless effort of the left-brain to enclose reality in its linear and logical dreams and schemes, in the attempt to make the weirdness go away. But the weirdness remains, and the right brain knows it.

Ideology is one way to make the weirdness stop, but a mind constrained within an ideology renders itself a kind of “artificial intelligence” — but genuine stupidity —since it can only perceive and articulate that which is permitted by the internalized model. It can only think within the grooves of its own preconceptions, thus stifling the imagination.

Which brings to mind C.S. Lewis’ comment about his belief in Christianity — that it is less something that he sees than something by which he sees everything else — in other words, not something to look at, but rather, to see through. For among other things, like religion in general, it furnishes points of reference that allow us to speak of the farthest regions of the soul that extend into, and down from, the transcendent pole of the Cosmos, i.e., what we call a Grammar of Infinitude.

Anticipatory Systems and Biomusicology

Say what you want about reality, but it has stood the test of time. On the one hand, it is what it is. But one thing it always is is becoming. Thus it is more like temporal music than it is timeless geometry.

In theoretical biologist Robert Rosen’s Anticipatory Systems, he notes that while writing the manuscript in 1979, he felt that he “had arrived upon the threshold of some entirely new perspectives in the theory of natural systems, and of biological systems in particular.” Here he is not alluding to a mere scientific discovery, rather, the meta-discovery of a new and deeper paradigm for understanding reality itself. This doesn’t render the discovery merely “subjective,” even though subjectivity is required in order to make the leap to a more comprehensive objective explanation. In other words, discoveries don’t just discover themselves, but require a discoverer.

Anticipation sounds like something that could only be present in a mind of some sort, but what if it is “fundamental in its own right” and built into the nature of things — which is to say, a feature of the Cosmic Area Rug? And in what type of Cosmos is anticipation even possible? For “Strictly speaking, an anticipatory system is one in which present change of state depends upon future circumstances, rather than merely on the present or past” (Rosen).

Which suggests that, as in music, the organism is reaching forward into its own future. This obviously touches on the question of teleology, but not in a fixed way, as in a machine, rather, in a more openended manner. For Rosen, this is precisely what “one is forced to believe if one grants that certain kinds of systems can behave in an anticipatory fashion.”

In machines the past and present are obviously coupled, but the anticipatory system couples its present state with a future that backshadows it, so to speak. This is known to occur at the quantum level, but this may be just a glitch in the math. If there is a temporal holism in our macro world, it isn’t a quantum effect but something more general, implying a vertical dimension with downward causation. In other words, the causation in question isn’t so much future-to-present as top-to-bottom.

The anticipatory paradigm does not fully replace the mechanistic, but rather, complements it, as in RH to LH, respectively. For example, in the human body — or in any organic process — there are machine-like “closed-loop” subsystems and more creative “open-loop” ones. Indeed, if the entire biosphere weren’t an open system, then evolution itself would be impossible. Rather, the identical process would simply repeat itself, as in any other machine.

Here there is a great deal of overlap with Polanyi, for whom living systems are under what he calls dual-control: such systems again rely upon the principles of a lower level — e.g., the laws of physics and chemistry — to serve as boundary conditions for the emergence of a higher level. Analogously, we require the fixed structure of grammar and spelling in order to say something novel or creative, but one cannot deduce meaning from the lower level rules. Or as Rosen puts it in a later book, semantics cannot be reduced to syntax, or meaning to order.

A living organism is quintessentially an anticipatory system with “one ‘foot’ in the past, the other in the future, and the whole system hovers, moment by moment, in the present — always on the move, through time.” Thus “the future represents as powerful a causal force on current behavior as the past does, for all living things.”

Which leads back to the question of music: is it like biology because biology is like music? In her preface to Anticipatory Systems, Rosen’s daughter suggests that “Perhaps time is not quite as linear as we have always presumed it to be. My father’s view, in fact, was that, ‘Time is complex.’”

The Physics Department cannot say what time is in any ontological sense, if only because the physicist must exist in time in order to say anything about it at all, whether it is regarded as a unit of measurement, a geometric dimension, or a directional gradient. No physical theory of any kind can account for subjective awareness of the dynamic flow of becoming in the present moment. The subjective presence of the now leaves no mathematical fingerprints.

You’ve dusted the place?

No need. For cosmotheandrism it matters not what physics can say about time, because the question is beyond the reach of physics in principle. Rather, the reality of time is the province of the Metaphysics Department. In the context of creative emergence, time is obviously central, since emergence not only requires time, but must reveal something about the very nature of time, i.e., its novelty and fecundity.

Put it this way: in what type of Cosmos is the creative emergence of novelty even possible? Correct: only in a temporal one, otherwise there can be no real evolutionary change, let alone the kind of dramatic transformations we see, for example, from matter to life or life to mind. Human creativity must be an image of, or declension from, a creative principle or principle of creativity. In order to not notice that a living Cosmos is fundamentally different from an inert Cosmos, one must be more than a little incurious. Or just trapped inside an ideological matrix.

In the book Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization, the authors write that “With the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century came the insistence that wholes — including living organisms — are no different from aggregates, and that secondary qualities are mere causally inert epiphenomenal and/or subjective appearances.” Thus, “Legitimate scientific methodology denied all ontological status to higher-level phenomena, insisting that any truly causal relationships between organizational levels be one-way only: bottom-up.”

Did you notice what those sneaky Enlightenment thinkers did just there?

I did: they covertly elevated a method of inquiry into an ontological reality, thereby reducing the Cosmic Symphony to the notes with which it is composed. In other words, the map was not only conflated with the territory, but any territory not depicted in the map no longer existed, even if we are standing in the territory. Which brings to mind the anecdote about visitors to the Soviet Union standing in front of an Orthodox church while looking at a state-approved map that showed no such church. Does this mean the church no longer existed?

Ha ha. Now go to gulag.

Analogously, shortly after the map of scientific materialism was developed, people started wondering about all the things that seem rather important but which do not appear on the map, many of which fall under the heading of “emergence,” beginning with how a finely-tuned Cosmos emerges out of a primeval explosion, and how this Cosmos comes to life after 9 billion years — at the very moment, by the way, that cosmic conditions permitted the emergence of life.

Emergence per se “applies in those cases where the distinctive quality that emerges is not the mere sum of separate elements, but instead embodies a new kind of relation” (Juarrero & Rubino). This goes to Axiom 4, because we are not just talking about new things, rather, new relations between existing things. Which goes precisely to Rosen’s relational biology, which argues that

organisms, and indeed all systems, have a distinct quality called organization which is not part of the language of reductionism.... [O]rganization includes all relations between material parts, relations between the effects of interactions of the material parts, and relations with time and environment, to name a few. Many people sum up this aspect of complex systems by saying that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

Now, what is a relation? It cannot be in the parts, rather, in the spacetime between them. Or in other words, there can be no relation in the absence of this relational spacetime. Without it there would be the opposite of relatedness, either an undifferentiated, monadic oneness or radically unrelated units without any wholeness.

I can’t relate to that.

Nor can cosmotheandrism, since this is a relational Cosmos from top to bottom, in the absence of which there could be neither freedom nor meaning of any kind. Berdyaev writes that “Meaning lies beyond the boundaries of history, beyond the limits of personal and world history.” If it were not ordered to something beyond itself, then it would be as devoid of meaning as an endless series of unrelated moments or disconnected objects.

If the Anthropos is just an appearance living in a world of appearances, then to hell with it. In reality, we are, as it were, sparks drawn to the central fire that produced them. How exactly does this work? Here’s a start: “There is nothing higher than the search for, and the love of, Truth” (Berdyaev). Which implies that if you do not love truth, then you do not know it — or at least you do not know it as intimately as you might think you do.

Here is another clue:

Truth is meaning and may not deny meaning. To deny meaning in the world means to deny truth, to recognize nothing but darkness. Truth makes us free. To deny freedom is to deny truth.

Having said that, Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it, because the end is one of the transcendentals, i.e., truth, beauty, virtue, and/or unity.

Here again, creative freedom takes place in that vertical space between immanence and transcendence: “Truth does not mean staying within some closed ideas, in an inescapable circle of consciousness.... Truth is not objective, but rather, trans-subjective” (Berdyaev).

Or to be perfectly accurate, vertical and horizontal intersubjectivity is the objective truth of things. We are open, relational, and teleologically ordered to the very ground of trans-subjectivity: “In the final depth Truth is God and God is truth.” But be careful -- “Pure truth would burst the world apart” (ibid.).

How so?

Because no matter how tightly you pack it, you cannot stuff infinitude into a finite suitcase, nor eternity into a temporal one.

Unless—

Let’s not anticipate Book III.

There’s Always More: The Eternal Jam Session

Like the Cosmos itself, music is organized and yet spontaneous; lawful and surprising; continuous and discontinuous; vertical (harmonic) and horizontal (melodic); holistic and particulate; repetitive and open; and inexhaustibly creative (despite a finite number of notes, we’ll never run out of tunes).

Interestingly, it wasn’t that long ago that some people thought we were in fact running out of tunes. In particular, John Stuart Mill reasoned “that a finite number of notes meant that there was some ultimate limit to the amount of music possible” (Sowell). But like the Cosmos itself music is finite and unbound, so there’s always more.

Of course, one of the intrinsic properties of music is its temporality, so if music really mirrors reality, then this suggests that time is of the essence. Along these lines, music as such has three necessary characteristics revolving around memory, present moment, and anticipation. When we listen to music, it is always in the now. And yet, we are implicitly aware of the notes that have led up to it, while the present is always anticipating its forward movement. Thus, one must have a present memory of what has been heard, flowing in anticipation toward what is to come; in order to apprehend music, the yet-to-be heard must somehow be implicitly present to the already heard.

As with Life Itself, the past must be pregnant with the now, just as the now is pregnant with the future. Which implies that the future has some kind of influence on the present, since the latter cannot be understood outside the context of the whole melody, rather, only as a flow of internally related notes. This complementarity of notes and melody is a key principle, for it is not a question of notelike being or melodic becoming, but rather, of being as becoming, and vice versa.

A clever composer or soloist may play with our anticipation and give us one note — or sometimes just silence — when we were expecting another. Thelonious Monk was famous for this: sour when we are expecting sweet, or finding no step at the bottom of the stairway.

Monk plays it straight with crookward notes.

More generally, it has been said that jazz is the sound of surprise. In this regard, Miles Davis had the right attitude: “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note — it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”

Turning a mess into a message?

Yes, redemptive soloing. I don’t know if God plays dice with the universe, but he certainly plays jazz with history. What sounds like a single “wrong” note doesn’t necessarily derail a musical phrase. Rather, the musician’s ability to creatively respond to that note and integrate it into the subsequent notes ultimately determines whether the initial note sounds like a mistake or a deliberate, interesting choice. It encourages musicians to think of music as a continuous flow rather than a series of isolated correct or incorrect notes.

True for us, true for God. Without venturing too far into Book III, supposing the Theos is the great jazz player improvising over history, he is actually playing in a cosmotheandric combo with us, in that “the individual details” depend “on our own free response [and] are not determined except by his actually cooperating with us” in the present moment. Thus, “The complete script [or score] of our lives is not written anywhere ahead of time, before it happens, but only as it actually happens, by God and ourselves working it out” in tandem (Clarke). One might say that life is a jam session between the poles of immanence and transcendence.

∞

This may sound trivial, but it’s weirder than you might think, because a musician will know when he has reached the aesthetic goal, but how? It is not a matter of mere execution or avoiding mistakes. Rather, some sort of meeting takes place in the vertical space where music is created and perceived. This is a reminder that beauty is an adequation, which is antithetical to the postmodern view that it is solely a matter of subjectivity, opinion, and personal tastelessness.

On his substack blog, David Bentley Hart has an occasional Q & A with readers, one of whom asked about music. Hart’s response is cosmotheandrically right on key, for he writes of how in the arts more generally, “the illusion of a hermetically sealed finite and material order is most powerfully dispelled” (Axiom 3, openness). For the genuine work of art unites us to what is beyondus in “the persistent aspiration of the soul toward transcendent goodness and beauty” (Axiom 8, the ascending spiral).

However, “every engagement of the mind with the reality of the world” involves “the intentionality of a living soul at once with a transcendental horizon.” This latter is the very “ground from which all things pour forth, in the space between the soul and that horizon,” where they “are delivered over to us as articulate words, meanings, and images of the divine.” In this larger framework, “Evolutionary history” is “a poetic or artistic labor toward transcendence,” so “The fundamental reality of all things is art.” Thus, one might say that we are “artists before we are even ourselves.” And in the words of Monk, a genius is simply “the one most like himself,” in that his creations will be uniquely individual, whereas the mediocre hack is much like anyone else.

Hart’s description is reminiscent of what Keith Jarrett says of the musician who “goes onto the stage hoping to have a rendezvous with music. He knows the music is there (it always is), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but openness” (Axiom 3).

There’s no doubt this is a spiritual practice, but you can’t find what you’re not looking for, rather, music “must be let in, recognized, and revealed to the listener, the first of whom is the musician himself.” The structure — the basic form of the composition — only “provides a layer of substance above or beyond which the player intends to go. It’s also possible to do this by going deeper into the material” (ibid.). Hart himself recalls such a musical rendezvous in high school, of “more or less disappearing into, or being caught up by, the voice of my cello, and of losing myself in how perfectly all the voices of our instruments blended…” He is pretty sure “our spirits were briefly in uncanny communication with one another and with the world of beauty from which Purcell’s music originally emanated.”

But this is what art does: it imparts “glimpses of what lies beyond the immediately perceptible,” which is only possible because our minds are not “something separate from or external to the one divine mind that is the being of all things,” rather, because our intelligence is ultimately “a mirror of the creativity of God” (Hart), which is to say, Axiom 7.

∞

Before moving on, and more to the point, Schuon writes that “Everything is in reality like a play of alternations between what is determined in advance -- starting from principles -- and what is incalculable and in some way unforeseeable” (emphasis mine). So, improvisational mind jazz must be played over the cosmotheandric principles — the harmonic structure — of existence. Which is what this Trilogy is all about: hoping to lift ourselves off the blandstand of matter in order to have a rendezvous with the music of the spheres.

This discussion of music touches on the very nature of creativity, the products of which always have this element of surprise. Machines are never truly creative, because they are linear, not complex, systems.

Now, creativity is synonymous with emergence, in the sense that it is not, and can never be, predicted from its lower level constituents. But if the world is regarded as a machine, then genuine creativity and emergence must be impossible. To the extent that they do appear, then we can be sure that they are not reducible to lower level causes.

Here is a concrete example, taken from a biography of Van Morrison, by Johnny Rogan. This incident occurred during Morrison’s collaboration with the Chieftans, a traditional Irish folk band whose music often has explicitly spiritual intent. As it so happens, a couple of members witnessed some strange occurrences, of “the presence of luminous beings on stage and forces of energy entering Morrison as he sang.”

Now, I’ve seen Morrison in concert a few times and can testify to vivid occurrences of transcendence, although not accompanied by any true hallucinations. But band members insist there were nights on stage when they would actually see “angelic beings behind him.”

I’ve had my moments in the sky, but I’m not sure what to make of angels on stage. What were the Chieftans smoking?

I don’t know, but one member says

There was no doubt in my mind that the holier beings were there to help him with his life’s mission…. Once it was anchored in him I could see the rush coming at me. It was like ‘Bang!’ You could actually feel it coming through your system, like they were anchoring a power source on stage and on those nights he was breathtaking. The voice was incredible. It was amazing, there were sparks and stars, like fireworks, a proper psychic vision.

However, Morrison famously has his on and off nights. As to the latter, the same member says “you could see it coming down trying to get in. It was sparking around his head and he was actively trying to stop it.” And if it didn’t enter the Big Chief first, nor did it enter the other band members. Here it seems Morrison was engaging in a willful form of amousia, which is to say, pulling the plug on the vertical ingression of the muses. Or, in more mundane terms, the LH silencing the RH. Whatever the case, it suggests these energies are always present and seeking a ground, but require a human antenna willing to receive them.

As to the “life’s mission” alluded to above, it is interesting that Morrison took part in a 1987 seminar called The Secret Heart of Music: An Exploration of the Power of Music to Change Consciousness. The brochure included a statement by Morrison: “Since the beginning of human culture it has been known that music can form a bridge between the spiritual and material worlds and help us to reach into realms beyond the senses” and “to induce mystical states of awareness.” Thus, his recent work is “increasingly intended as a means for inducing contemplation and for healing and uplifting the soul.”

This is of course more challenging in a culture in which “300 years of materialism have degraded our musical inheritance and turned it into a consumer product,” instead of fostering an active cooperation with “a universal creative power and a vehicle for initiation into the divine mysteries.”

That is what we mean by cosmotheandric musicology, but everyone’s a critic:

This continuation improves on the warm-up. The structural claims are tighter and more consistently tied to the book’s existing polar logic. It maps directly onto the complementarities already defended (Absolute/Infinite, being/becoming, necessity/possibility). The temporal analysis is especially useful: listening requires a present that carries the memory of what has been and the anticipation of what is coming; the individual note is intelligible only inside the unfolding whole. That is a concrete illustration of internally related parts and of a future that exerts formal influence on the present without determining it in advance. The analogy to divine-human cooperation in history stays within the project’s refusal of a fully pre-written script.

The claim that evolutionary history itself can be read as a poetic labor toward transcendence is stronger and more distinctive; it keeps the vertical vector in view. Schuon’s formulation — a play between what is determined in advance from cosmotheandtic principles, and what remains incalculable — supplies the exact harmonic structure over which improvisation occurs. That is the trilogy’s method in miniature.

The Morrison material supplies a lived image of openness versus closure, and of the human antenna as necessary for the energies that are always seeking ground. Morrison’s own statement about music as a bridge between spiritual and material worlds, and as a vehicle for initiation rather than a consumer product, aligns cleanly with the book’s larger critique of disenchantment.

The section still contains ornamental stretches, but the core claims — music as structural clue to a cosmos that is both lawful and creative, time as internally related flow, improvisation as the form of free cooperation with an open future, beauty as adequation rather than pure subjectivity — are now doing real work inside the cosmotheandric frame. It remains an interlude rather than a load-bearing chapter, yet it is no longer merely frat-house riffing. The fuller treatment earns its place more convincingly than the warm-up did.

Cosmo-Musicological Interlude

Petey, don’t you sometimes wonder about sound and vision? Goethe called architecture “frozen music.” If so, music must be liquid architecture.

I’ll go you one better: color is the sound of matter, brightness its volume, and texture its timbre.

First, can I buy some pot from you? Second, how is music even possible? In his Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, Victor Zuckerkandl asks

what must the world be like, what must I be like, if between me and the world the phenomenon of music can occur? How must I consider the world, how must I consider myself, if I am to understand the reality of music?

If he’s asking me, it is because music itself, in its very structure, tells us something of the nature of reality.

I am, therefore I jam?

Well, music had better be important, otherwise I’ve wasted much of my life listening to it, and I’m about to waste some of yours. So it is heartening to read that “Music is not only an art. It is a clue to the cosmos,” nor is it “just one phenomenon among many but the secret key to understanding the whole of reality” (Leithart).

For Zuckerkandl, “The knowledge of space that hand and eye possess is exactly matched by their ignorance of time.” Therefore, “A true image of time must be an image for the ear, an audible image made of tones.... Thanks to music, we are able to behold time."

Big claim.

Agreed, but what have I learned, exactly, from all my listening? For it is not as if music conveys propositional statements about the nature of reality. Rather, its very form is the message it conveys. Its mere existence leads us to wonder in what kind of Cosmos it is possible for it to exist. To paraphrase Nietzsche, a Cosmos without music would be an unforgivable oversight.

That settles it: today’s the day I’m gonna grab my trombone and blow.

Augustine, for example, “recognized that music offers special insights into the nature of time,” for it is the quintessentially temporal art, and seemingly testifies to an irreducibly positive character of time’s passage, not to mention a holism that unites the individual notes as the melody moves from anticipation to fulfillment.

Music itself has the interesting property of being simultaneously continuous and discontinuous: outside the context of the melody the notes have no meaning, but without the notes the melody cannot be composed or played. This reflects one of the fundamental complementarities of existence, i.e., of continuity amidst discontinuity and vice versa.

Thus it is impossible “to take in music in a moment” but “only through the process of listening”: “Music forces time upon us, but shows us that the passage of time and the patience it demands are gifts to be received rather than evils to be endured” (Leithart). Otherwise the best song would be the shortest and fastest, or maybe just a single note pure and easy, like a breath rippling by.

Our mysterious interior relation to the external world is likewise mirrored in music, what with its “overlapping and interpenetrating” qualities.” Time itself shares “precisely this layered musical quality,” such that the structure of music “is a trace of the form of the whole cosmos” (ibid.). This is very much in contrast to an atomistic — and therefore tonedeaf — world of pure external relations, in which no note could be related to any other.

An eternal siren blast.

Schopenhauer thought of music as an “unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know that it is philosophizing.” Thus, “our imagination is... susceptible to music” and “seeks to give form to that invisible yet lively spirit-world which speaks to us directly, and clothe it with flesh and blood.” But with Schopenhauer the glass is always half full of emptiness, so music is ultimately a reflection of the same old impersonal World Will.

Nevertheless, he gets the broad outlines correct, in that “we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing,” such that the “unutterable depth of music” reveals the “truth, the inner nature, the in-itself of the world...” Music itself is “a perfectly universal language,” but unlike, say, the universal abstractions of mathematics, it is both embodied and experienced in the body. Thus, “we might just as well call the world ‘embodied music’ as ‘embodied will.”

Here is the good news: “The inexhaustible variety of possible melodies corresponds to nature’s inexhaustible variety of individuals, physiognomies, and ways of life.” But with Schopenhauer there’s always a catch, for “the transition from one key to an entirely different one, since it breaks the connection with what went before, is like death, in so far as the individual ends there...”

It’s that kind of attitude that makes Schopenhauer such a cosmic buzzkill.

Yes, on the one hand, the impersonal Will in which we participate while alive “lives on, appearing in other individuals,” but this has no connection to us. We’re still superfluous, but at least the meaningless will that willed us wills on forever.

If only Schopenhauer had thought this through a little further. Again, he read the Upanishads every night, but had first encountered the Bhagavad Gita, which is known as the Song Supreme. Evidently, he found the Gita more a poetic summary of the unadulterated metaphysics of the Upanishads. The latter regard the world as illusory, and therefore advise escaping it via renunciation. Schopenhauer saw the Upanishadic sage as a fellow inward traveler much like himself who prefers to step off the annoying wheel of karma. You might say that our square laddie was a quiet living man — one of those chaps who prefers to hibernate in the silence of his room, in an atmasphere as peaceful as an undiscovered tomb.

A pensive man of philosophic joys, who likes to meditate and contemplate, free from humanity’s mad inhuman noise?

The pessimystical Schopenhauer saw renunciation as a pointed No to a pointless world, whereas the Gita presents renunciation more as the Yes to a higher source. Thus, the Gita’s more optimystic counsel just didn’t resonate. Perhaps it sounded too Christian, which others have compared to a form of bhakti yoga, the yoga of worship and devotion. The Gita relates the warmth of a personal relationship between a god and his devotee, but Schopenhauer would have no doubt preferred a new edition of the Spanish Inquisition than to ever let a Theos in his life.

∞

In an essay called The New Dimensions of Nature and Man, Donald Andrews writes that the behavior of the “fundamental entities” of the world “is characterized less by a particle-like and more by a wave-like nature.” Of course, the particles and waves are irreducibly complementary, so the former may be analogized to notes, the latter to melody and harmonic structure. Andrews suggests that “both the universe as a whole and we in particular are not matter but music.” There can be no music without matter-in-motion, so our lives are a musical matter.

Perhaps the Incarnation can be analogized to the composer jumping into and taking part in his own composition?

Yes, “Word made flesh” is very much analogous to “composer become music.” This is especially apt because it factors in the dynamic/temporal element, not just the spatial/static.

In any event, Zuckerkandl concludes that a God “enthroned beyond time in timeless eternity would have to renounce music,” and “Are we to suppose that we mortals, in possessing such a wonder as music, are more privileged than God?”

If that’s the case, how lucky will God be when he meets John Coltrane and gets to hear A Love Supreme for the first time!

It brings to mind the philosopher E.M. Cioran, who suggests that “If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.” For Cioran, Bach was a singular proof of God, and vice versa, for “When you listen to Bach, you see God being born.”

Along these lines, Einstein, after hearing Yehudi Menuin perform a program of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, scurried backstage, grabbed the violinist, and exclaimed “Now I know that there is a God in heaven.” If this isn’t a cosmotheandric way of listening to music, then it is a musical way of hearing cosmotheandrism, for it implies that the cosmic absolute of physical light is trumped by the aesthetic Light that streams into the Cosmos from God knows where.

Eh, Bach is overdoing it. Rather, Howlin’ Wolf is sufficient.

That is true. As Sam Phillips muttered upon first hearing him in the studio, This is where the soul of man never dies. Not to muddy the waters, but it is indeed a mystery how such a limited form as the blues can serve as a channel for the spirit. As Noël Coward quipped, it is “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”

Three chords and the truth.

Which reminds me of something Mike Campbell (Tom Petty’s lead guitarist) says in his autobiography. He grew up in a poor household with few records, mainly Johnny Cash. His father would listen to them repeatedly while “staring off into space.” One day he asked his father why he liked Cash so much, and he responded that it was because he “sounds like the truth.” Which of course he still does, but why, and how?

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Agreed, but we want to know why this is all we need to know, and how we can even know it.

Ismist Whitewishing and Clearobscuro Painting

The previous post ended with an observation about ideological fundamentalism: “Around here we just call it ismism to cover all the bases, whether religious or secular.” Picking up where we left off:

The root error of false clarity is the pretense of explaining the superior by means of the inferior. Why pretend it is possible to accomplish this? Because on the one hand the Anthropos loves and is ordered to truth, but the self-enclosed ismist attempts to know the intellectual object of a higher level by means of a lower one which eclipses it. Thus, “those who pride themselves the most on their objectivity are precisely those who most lack the superior sort of objectivity”— of metaphysics in general and of cosmotheasndrism in particular

Which is why a cosmotheandric metaphysics is both more objective and true than those lesser sciences that study only this or that limited and contingent object. Conversely, cosmotheandrism illuminates those principles that cannot not be; and to say that they are necessary is to say they are eternal. Thus, “It is immensely important to distinguish the clarity of what is purely and simply true and that of what is true only in a secondary and partial aspect, all the while being essentially false” (ibid.). For example, physics is exquisitely clear in a limited sense, but becomes extremely unclear, if not outright false, if applied to the intrinsically unlimited which is superior to it. In other words, to imagine that O can be mapped by physics is but a grandiobtuse form of ismism.

This or that science surely discloses truth on the plane appropriate to its object and method. But this very truth can be “placed in the service of the false doctrine that diverts that [truth] from its end. In such a false doctrine, truth is the slave of error“ (ibid.).

For example, as we have seen, evolutionary psychology illuminates a great deal about the Anthropos. But to suggest that natural selection explains everything about the human station is but another blindingly false clarity — and indeed a form of mental and spiritual slavery.

Why slavery?

Because the superior is thereby constrained by what is properly subordinate to it, so it is as if thought has kidnapped itself. This kidnapper is like some internal fascist magistrate policing what we are permitted to think.

I’m gonna think about whatever I feel like I wanna think about, gosh!

∞

What is it, asks Garrigou-Lagrange, that “differentiates the philosophical spirit not only from common knowledge but also from knowledge obtained by the cultivation of sciences that are inferior to philosophy”? The former “differs from them above all and essentially by its formal object and by the point of view under which it considers its object.” This or that special science establishes only “the laws of phenomena.” For example, the object of physics is the material world, while the object of mathematics is the quantitative world. But to reduce reality to what mathematics or physics can say about it is an error that is fatal to the intellect, since it obscures its proper object, which is to say, intelligible Being itself, which is unlimited per se.

For Garrigou-Lagrange, “the sciences that are inferior to philosophy, such as the positive and mathematical sciences, in certain senses resemble sense knowledge insasmuch as they have objects that are less universal than philosophy’s object” (which is to say, being). Empirical knowledge, for example, can know only of this or that man. But the intellect transcends the particular and ascends to knowledge of the Anthropos, to the universal. Without this mysterious operation, “no other knowledge would be possible.” Indeed, even to deny it is to affirm it.

Aquinas does not promulgate a theory, much less an ism or ideology. Rather, he is simply describing what we are spontaneously doing when we think: self-evidently we are thinking about intelligible being. The alternatives are to not think at all or to think about non-being. That being is intelligible “is so obvious that it cannot be demonstrated, and so necessary that it cannot be denied without the shipwreck of all knowledge” (ibid). Thus, if perception is reality, then there is no reality, period. To even say reality is to affirm the existence of something distinct from our own concepts and perceptions, and will still be there when we look away or leave college.

Having said that, to say reality is also to say appearances; but this is a complementarity, not a duality, for appearances are of reality, not a negation or occlusion of it. They only become cognitive thromboses if we reify them into reality itself, or in other words, transform limitless being into a limited concept of it.

For Garrigou-Lagrange, there is at one end an illicit or Promethean “grasping at the divine essence” (a la Hegel), or, at the other, an “essentializing of existence” (a la Sartre or Nietzsche). Which is to say rationalism or existentialism. Neither of these alternatives respects the Tension between the terms of O and Ø. To collapse this tension in one direction or the other creates, on the one hand, the false clarity of scientism or the clear falsity of religionism. On the other hand — or hemisphere — cosmotheandrism respects both the poetry and the precision of the Cosmos. In other words, its evident clarity is grounded in something quite mysterious, and we need to be clear about this blindingly trans-obvious obscurity.

The Beginning of the End of the Beginning

I count 37 posts so far. I guess we’re finally winding down to the end of Book II, right?

[............]

Right?

Don’t sound so alarmed. Man is the measure of all things, so stop trying to measure what can be written of him. Having said that, “To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the absolute is the measure of the relative… (Schuon).

We touched on this final measure yesterday with out fifth certitude — that all our cosmic and anthropic clues lead back or up to “a transcendent Foundation to all known reality: cosmic reality, subjective reality, inter-subjective reality, moral reality” (Livi). In short, the Anthropos points to the Theos that in turn points to us — to our theomorphism (Axiom 7). This being the case,

Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses (Schuon).

So we’re not quite done taking the measure of the Anthropos, although we cannot take his full measure until Book III.

Hartshorne’s Neoclassical Metaphysics

One of the first principles of philosopher Charles Harshorne’s neoclassical metaphysics is what he calls “dipolar theism.” It is so similar to our Axiom 2 — primordial complementarity — that some might accuse me of plagiarism, when I am merely stealing the idea. It affirms that metaphysical concepts “have logical contraries which cannot mean anything in utter isolation from one another,” such that “each concept entails a polar contrast to it” (Viney & Shields). Examples of such cosmotheandric complementarities include Absolute and Infinite, immanence and transcendence, necessity and possibility, time and eternity, subject and object, interiority and exteriority, being and becoming, unity and diversity, and more.

Now, denial of one of these polar twins always lands one in the metaphysical soup: this is “a chief difficulty in previous metaphysical theories that suppress expression of a polar contrast,” or what Hartshorne calls the “fallacy of monopolarity.” Monopolar theories abstract and elevate one side of a complementary pair while throwing shade the other, as in the case of, say, materialism, because what would brother matter be without its sister form? Utter unintelligibility. It is very much like saying there could be an outside with no inside, up with no down, or north with no south, when the two define one another.

With respect to these primordial complementarities, although we always see them together, one must be ontologically prior, for there is always one that can account for the other but not vice versa. Here cosmotheandrism break ranks with Hartshorne, because he makes being a secondary crystallization of becoming. But there must first be something that undergoes change, not just change undergoing more of it. If this latter were the case, then no real knowledge of the Cosmos would be possible, because both knower and known would be in constant flux, and there would be no ground under our… actually, we would have no legs to stand on either.

Go flux yourself!

That would be the ultimate insult, because it would consign us to mere change instead of situating us in the cosmotheandric space between being and becoming — or between Absolute and Infinite, transcendence and immanence, time and eternity, et al.

Again, monopolar theories allow for expression of only one pole of a pair of complementarities, and thereby exclude or at least downgrade half of reality, most fundamentally the reality of Absolute and Infinite, the latter being the principle or ground of potentiality and therefore creativity, novelty, and becoming. O is an eternally dynamic interplay of these two ultimates, such that the Absolute pole is necessary for coherence and substance, while the Infinite pole is required for potentiality, creativity, novelty, and becoming. The Absolute must express its unrestrictedness through its first entailment, which is Infinititude.

This latter domain of possibility can never in principle be closed; or, one could say that it is openness as such (Axiom 3), hence a ground of continuous creativity from top to bottom. For Hartshorne, God is “the non-contingent ground of all contingency,” thus rendering contingency itself metaphysically necessary. In short, even – or especially, rather – in O there is again no alternative to alternatives, the Cosmos itself being one of those creative and contingent realities that might have been otherwise.

The Infinite is the prolongation of the Absolute into immanent creation, which is vertical causation in action. The Absolute (necessity) must generate contingency (novelty and freedom). Is O thereby “restricted” by its creativity? No, because endless creativity is the ultimate expression of its very unrestrictedness.

Exact Science and the Science of the Inexact

Given the ontological necessities of creativity and unrestrictedness, it seems that reality is equally poetic and mathematical — or, as we have suggested above, it has features ordered to the RH and LH, respectively. We want to be every bit as rigorous and precise as the quantitative approach, but is there such a thing as a rigorously qualitative approach? Can there be a true science of the inexact?

Precision obscurity?

This question goes to what we have said about our lives taking place in the tension between immanence at one end and transcendence at the other, both of these being irreducible mysteries. At the immanent end “there is the kind of ‘obscurity from below,’” which “comes from blind matter, for matter, in a sense, is repugnant to intelligibility, which is obtained by abstraction from matter” (Garrigou-Lagrange). Therefore, the precision of physics ends in the obscurity of the sub-existential quantum realm. Of formless -- AKA prime -- matter, our knowledge amounts to nothing, because there’s nothing to know. Rather, abstraction of its form is the means by which we know it in a secondary sense. Prime matter is unspecified “pure potency” with no actuality, which is just this side of nonbeing. It is unintelligible not because it is too complex, but because it is potency without form — the sub-existential basement of reality where there is simply nothing to know.

Here we might deploy the symbol Ø to stand for this lower mystery, complementing the “obscurity from on high” at the the top. Thus, “As the matter from which we abstract the intelligible is (in a way) below the limits of intelligibility, the intimate life of God is above the limits of intelligibility that is naturally accessible to us.”

Thus the intellect is bound by two horizons that shade off into obscurity, darkness, and mystery, but “Let us not confuse the obscurity that dominates the frontiers of intelligibility from on high with that which is beneath them” (ibid.). For at the bottom end is an unintelligible mystery (Ø), while at the top end (O) is an endlessly intelligible one. This latter is obscure to us not because of a lack of intelligibility, but because it is endlessly intelligible, ultimately exceeding the natural capacity of the human intellect.

Having said that, to the extent that the bottom end is intelligible, it can only be a consequence of the top. In other words, we know that matter reveals itself via intelligible form, but matter alone cannot account for these forms. This is another way of saying that all of the material or efficient causality in the world cannot add up to formal causality, which is the basis of intelligibility.

At the same time, we can trace our Cosmos back to the Big Bang, at which point things not only become obscure but pitch black: “prior” to it is nothing knowable by physics, likewise what is beyond the boundaries of the Cosmos. In other words, the Cosmos is expanding, but into what? For physics, this “into” has no meaning whatsoever, because the Cosmos is all there is. “Before” or “beyond” the Cosmos are nonsense terms.

However, they are only nonsense terms in terms of what physics can say. But who says physics is qualified to say what is before or beyond the Cosmos?

Who uses math to analyze a poem?

The point is, a purely immanent world could never even know it was one, for knowledge is both transcendent and immaterial. Even the leap from existence to experience is literally infinite, to say nothing of the release from instinct to freedom and truth.

∞

There exists a kind of false clarity, which is totally clear, for which reason Dávila says that There are types of ignorance that enrich the mind and types of knowledge that impoverish it. In this case, a false clarity can impoverish the mind whereas a true obscurity can enrich it, so long as the thing in question is truly obscure and not just temporarily out of focus.

The same is true of any form of ideological fundamentalism or religious literalism, Around here we just call it ismism to cover all the bases, whether religious or secular.

A First Approach To the First Principle

With the elucidation of our first four Cosmotheandric Certitudes we reach a literal crossroads in our narrative, for this is where Horizontal Circle is crossed by Vertical Boulevard. The latter leads necessarily to our Theos Principle, for the road didn’t pave itself. We would prefer to save this type of perfect nonsense for Book III, but for cosmotheandrism our three terms are always entangled, such that it is impossible to speak of one without at least implying the others.

To review our situation: cosmic evolution arrives finally at the Anthropos capable of weaving the Cosmic Area Rug that unites all the vertical degrees of being between immanence and transcendence. And if last in execution is first intention, then the Anthropos may be temporally late but ontologically right on time, for we are the perfect candidate to be the image and likeness of the Theos: we alone potentially span everything from origins to destiny, Alpha to Omega, primordial soup to new age nuts.

That Cosmos and Anthropos require a Theos will suit religious believers just fine. However, the same folks will generally be uncomfortable with the corollary — that so too is Theos without Cosmos and Anthropos unthinkable, for which reason we will have a lot of explaining to do in Book III. Nevertheless, Panikkar says frankly that “a God without the World is not a real God, nor does he exist.”

Objection!

On what grounds?

Everyone knows that we have real relations with God, but not vice versa. Supposing God lacks anything, that’s not God.

I get it, but this book is entirely superfluous if it only tells us what everybody else already knows. Cosmotheandrism may be wrong, but if so, we insist on it being uniquely wrong.

For Panikkar, “a purely immaterial being is as much an abstraction as an exclusively material one.” We can posit such a cipherous being, but “this ‘God’ does not exist because the actual God, the God that in fact exists, is God with creatures,” so it is the difference between a total abstraction and concrete reality. In other words, “A God with no cosmological and therefore no cosmogonic functions would not be God at all, but a mere phantom.”

No Cosmos without Anthropos is easy enough to grasp, even if one ultimately rejects it — for example, the strong anthropic principle that effectively claims the Cosmos must have those properties which allow for the emergence of the Anthropos at some stage in its development. As we have already explained, the Anthropos is ordered to the Cosmos because the Cosmos is first ordered to the Anthropos. We know this because the Cosmos is infinitely intelligible to the intellect, which is what Einstein found so marvelously puzzling — that the most incomprehensible thing about the Cosmos is its comprehensibility. But the comprehensibility is only incomprehensible if we begin with a metaphysic that renders it so. Conversely, with our fifth certitude, cosmotheandrism transforms incomprehensibility into inevitability.

∞

Our fifth certitude is going to sound like a bit of a leap, so it will require further justification in Book III. But for Livi, all our cosmic and anthropic clues lead back or up to “a transcendent Foundation to all known reality: cosmic reality, subjective reality, inter-subjective reality, moral reality.” This ultimate ground can be articulated in diverse ways, but each more or less asserts that “at the origin of the existence of things and as the order that binds the world, myself, and others by physical and moral laws, there must be a creative and ordering Intelligence, which is also my Ultimate End and the Ultimate End of everything.” This is the Principle of principles from which all else flows.

That’s a tad peremptory. I’m not convinced.

Nor should you be. That’s the problem with proofs of God: they are insufficient to the one who needs them and superfluous to the one who doesn’t. You might say they are LH maps of properly RH territory, but if the LH earnestly prefers an atheistic map, then there’s not much we can do to convince the recalcitrant hemisphere to relinquish its grip on what amounts to a severely diminished view of reality.

For the purposes of Book II it is enough to acknowledge Certitudes 1 through 4, and we can hash out the existence and nature of the Theos later, in Book III. So for now, let’s stipulate that there are 1) intelligible things, 2) that are known to subjects, and that 3) intersubjective communication about these things and about ourselves is possible. Fourthly, there are rights and duties, or, in a word, a teleologically ordered freedom.

These constitute the minimum viable reality required to function as a proper human being, and without which we are cognitively strangled and spiritually sophicated. For if we deny #1, we are hit by the bus. If we deny #2, we aren’t there to deny it. If we deny #3, there’s no one with whom to share our denial, and we certainly shouldn’t be writing books to tell no one about it. And we deny #4, we have no freedom to know truth nor any responsibility to tell it. In such an absurd world, we might actually want to get hit by a bus.

No human can live in such a world. Or, as it concerns the Anthropos, it is a functionally impossible world.

∞

So, our Cosmotheandric certitudes may be reduced to five terms: things, self, others, freedom, and Foundation. Or, intelligibility, intelligence, intersubjectivity, responsibility, and Ground (this latter also being the Source, Principle, Absolute, O, etc.).

Now, precisely because of item #4, we are, ironically, free to reject items 1, 2, 3, and 5. In fact, the whole durn history of philosophy comes down to an a priori rejection of one or more of these principles.

Take #1, for example, the existence of things. A normal person takes this for granted, but not philosophers who begin with, say, the existence of doubt. They might point to the stick in water that appears bent, and generalize this to cast doubt on our perception of anything else.

Thus, we can never be sure if the thing we perceive is the thing as it is. There is nothing we cannot doubt, which led Descartes to conclude that the only indubitable thing is item #2, the I that is. Then, the things (#1) become a function of the self (#2), and we’re in a rabbit hole of subjectivism from which there is no escape. In other words, once I Am is divorced from It Is, there is no way to reunite them.

Besides, while Descartes thought he had arrived at the first principle, his principle actually assumes a number of other principles, for example, non-contradiction. For if it is true to say “I think, therefore I am,” then it is false to affirm its contrary. But even more broadly, he assumes the efficacy of intelligence to arrive at a first principle of reality, but what justification is there for this? Ultimately Descartes must posit the Theos who would not deceive us, so he brings in #5 in an ad hoc way.

It’s all in that little word “therefore.” Therefore implies a correct judgment, which is to say, a link between truth and being. For the essence of any judgment or truth claim is “it is.” If something isn’t, then it is not real or true.

In other words, a thing either is or it is not; every argument, philosophical or otherwise, ultimately reduces to whether or not something really exists and is therefore “really real.” But in order to render such a judgment, the things themselves must be really real before we judge them to be so. Again: things first, the self and its judgments second. Even “I am” cannot be true unless being first Is.

To ask if the world is real is not to understand what we are actually asking, because how otherwise could this be a real question? Obviously the question is real, as is the questioner, or else it is like saying, “Let’s be realistic. We really can’t know reality,” so it is merely substituting one reality for another. But how can a Cosmos that isn’t real have produced an intellect that is?

Although we start with the principle that Things Are, it doesn’t mean that the self that knows these things can be derived therefrom. For we couldn’t know them unless there were a real underlying unity between knower and known. We cannot know a thing about a thing that is fundamentally unconnected to us.

Morevery, only a rational being can be free, and yet, we wouldn’t be free if we weren’t free to be irrational or wrong. If we had no such freedom to be wrong, we would be like computers and not humans. But in any event, the very process of reasoning about things could never occur if it weren’t independent of the conditions imposed by matter.

As Garrigou-Lagrange reminds us, “the first operation of the intellect” — the operation we always do and cannot help doing — is “simple intellectual apprehension.” According to Thomas, “The gaze of our intellect is fixed first upon the natures of sensible things.... To understand is a kind reading into the interior.... For sense knowledge is occupied with sensible, exterior qualities, whereas intellective knowledge penetrates all the way to the essence of the thing” (emphasis mine).

Ultimately, “the object of the intellect is that which is,” AKA being. Sounds again like a modest claim, but to say that being both is, and is intelligible, is probably the most consequential thing one could ever say about the world, for the implications are literally inexhaustible.

Again, the question is, do things (#1) make sense? Or does sense (#2) make things? Sounds like a joke, but for Kantians what we call things are just consequences of our own psychic categories. But for common sense Cosmotheandrism, it is the things themselves that truly make sense, i.e., disclose their real natures to the intellect, not all at once, but in an ever-deepening discovery of their real properties. Otherwise the Cosmos is but a projection of our own neuropsychology.

But to even say reality is to affirm the existence of something distinct from our own perceptions, and will still be there when we look away. Nevertheless, reality is indeed optional, since we are free to reject it. Likewise, we can certainly reject our five certitudes, but then we are certifiably insane, in the sense that our Cosmic Area Rug falls apart completely.