The Unfinished Animal

Here is the next subsection, which is probably more transitional than substantive, although I always try to at least make such passages amusing. Perhaps good enough for blogging, but I don’t know if it meets the standards of a book. Then again, since we are the unfinished — which is to say, transitional — animal, perhaps we can say that in the Cosmos it is transitions all the way down — and up:

So, the helpless baby is indeed the fulcrum of human development, a portal through which the Anthropos emerges. This vertical birth canal is a necessary condition, or condition without which we couldn’t be here enjoying – supposing you are enjoying it – this mind-to-mind transmission. Even the most detailed neuroscientific account can only illuminate the objective factors that permit subjectivity, while remaining silent on the nature of subjectivity itself -- much as how natural selection can help to explain the evolution of life but not its origins or essential nature.

Mind, brain, and relationships represent their own irreducible trinity, in that you can’t have one without the others. An isolated brain is just the hardware, while an enclosed self devoid of intersubjectivity isn’t really a self at all.

In The Brain: The Story of You, Eagleman – whom I did not intend to suggest is wrong about everything – writes of how “At birth we are helpless. We spend about a year unable to walk, about two more before we can articulate full thoughts, and many more years unable to fend for ourselves. We are totally dependent on those around us for our survival.”

No offense to my son, but is there anything more functionally useless than a baby, especially under the precarious conditions in which we evolved? 

Children are our future. Unless we stop them now!

And not just useless, but a great burden to even keep alive: “Dolphins, for instance, are born swimming; giraffes learn to stand within hours; a baby zebra can run within forty-five minutes of birth. Across the animal kingdom, our cousins are strikingly independent soon after they’re born.”

How did the Anthropos escape the circle of instinct, of neurologically imprinted and preordained patterns of behavior? Nor can other animals survive outside the narrow niche to which they are adapted, which is why we don’t see polar bears in North Hollywood or kangaroos in ‘Nam. “In contrast, humans are able to thrive in many different environments, from the frozen tundra to the high mountains to bustling urban centers.”

How? All because “the human brain is born remarkably unfinished”: “Instead of arriving with everything wired up -- let’s call it ‘hardwired’ -- a human brain allows itself to be shaped by the details of life experience. This leads to long periods of helplessness as the young brain slowly molds to its environment. It’s ‘livewired.’”

Very free-spirited.

And even then, the brain isn’t just molded to its external environment. Rather -- and this is key -- it must be adapted to other minds, which is to say, the “interior environment” of intersubjectivity. Infants raised without this intimate connection to other subjects are left with permanent fragilities and emotional problems, because certain experiences must occur when the infant brain is so open and unformed. Still, this intersubjective environment goes only to the necessary conditions of the human subject. What is its sufficient condition, the condition with which humanness is possible? Is subjectivity reducible to anything less than itself? Is it even conceivable that a material object -- a three pound slab of meat called the brain -- could conjure subjectivity?

The so-called hard problem.

Yes, but perhaps the problem is only hard because some people just don’t like the solution, which has to do with the ontological priority of relational interiority. Philosopher Hans Jonas, in The Phenomenon of Life, wrote of how early man tended to “mentalize” everything, whereas modern man defaults in the opposite direction, “objectivizing” everything: for the former the Cosmos is a crystallization of transcendent spirit, while for the latter spirit is an illusory side effect of immanent matter.

Jonas suggests that “When man first began to interpret the nature of things -- and this he did when he began to be man -- life was to him everywhere, and being the same as being alive.” Thus, “Animism was the widespread expression of this stage.... Soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all things. Bare matter -- that is, truly inanimate, ‘dead’ matter, was yet to be discovered -- as indeed its concept, so familiar to us, is anything but obvious.”

Is it really so obvious that things are not in some attenuated sense “alive,” or imbued with a kind of life? I suspect this is partly a matter of left-brain capture of the right (much more on which below), in that it is through the RH that we are in touch with the holistic and organismic nature of a Nature that speaks to us of its transcendent life, truth, and beauty, for in the words of Dávila, Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

Indeed, the objects surrounding us are not mute at all, but incredibly chatty. In his identically titled The Phenomenon of Life, the architect Christopher Alexander – whom we met in Book I – speaks of our “loss of the ability and desire to discern aliveness” in things. In his view, what we call “aliveness” is again a primordial category of everything, not only of biological life. Moreover, this aliveness exists on a spectrum, such that things – and people – can be more or less alive. If we turn the Cosmos back right side up, then we might honestly say that Feelings are attributes of the object, as are sensations. This is another way of affirming that our recognition of beauty, for example, is an adequation, not just an opinion. Or that some things are literally interesting, others objectively boring and tedious. Everybody knows this, but they pretend it’s not objectively knowable.

But such things are knowable because of the intersubjectivity of a human self that is forged in infancy. This same intersubjectivity is what allows us to discern the life in things, not to mention the light; or to see what is beyond sight, hear what is beyond sound, touch what is beyond the surface, etc. If we couldn’t do these things, we would scarcely be deserving of the title human. Rather, we would be confined to surfaces only, with no intuition of interesting and fruitful problems, and it should be self-evident that if there were no problems there would be no solutions. Science begins with the recognition of promising problems — or of problems that promise solutions, even when the problems are embedded in matter. Nevertheless, There are individuals who treat the universe with professorial smugness, or like a lunatic treats an idiot.

Near as I can tell you’re throwin’ rocks, but one can’t help noticing that you folks are also the irrational animal, the only ones capable of reason but who nevertheless think and behave in ways contrary to it. To put it mildly.

Dr. Zaius from Planet of the Apes agrees: “From the evidence, I believe [human] wisdom must walk hand and hand with his idiocy. His emotions must rule his brain. He must be a warlike creature who gives battle to everything around him, even himself.”

We touched on this problem in Book I, in that the cosmotheandric imperative, or Prime Directive, is to fully become who we already are in potential, one of these potentials being the attainment of Reason in the fullest sense of the word. To paraphrase Miles Davis, it takes a lot of practice to sound like yourself. Likewise, unlike hypothetical angelic intelligences, it takes awhile for us to become — or to start becoming, rather — ourselves. We are surely the only animal that can transcend ourselves, which we do even in knowing ourselves via self-consciousness.

Prepositions again.

Yes, relational links, for to be conscious of oneself means that the relationality of things applies even to our own interior. This verticality implies that we live in a two-way telovator, so we can both transcend and fall beneath ourselves. There can be no possibility of success without the possibility of failure to achieve it, even if failure can put us in the position of being lower than the lowest animal, for example, treating objects like women, and vice versa. It is not just a figure of speech to say that Hitler was infinitely worse than his dog Blondi.

Nazis. Nothing ever changes.

Yes, the all-too-human easily becomes the less-than-human, and for this reason only engagement with the supra-human renders us properly human. Metaphysics itself is a freewheeling conversation about things superior to the Anthropos, in the absence of which we couldn’t even be the Anthropos. If this isn’t yet fully clear, I can only promise to shed more obscurity on the subject as we proceed.

∞

The larger point of my story is this: that intelligence is one thing, communion and communication another. Even free speech itself would be meaningless in the absence of the freedom and willingness to listen and respond, or in short, to converse on a level playing field about truths that surpass both parties. It has been noted by wiser fellas than myself that the whole Western tradition is one Great and Endless Conversation, which makes it more of a dynamic partnership than a dry, onesided lecture.

But how is this two-way exploration of truth possible? In the West we call it the Logos, which connotes three terms, a rational subject, an intelligible object, and the connective tissue between mind, world, and other folks. So, there is a single rational-relational principle that makes reality a trialogue at the edge of the subjective horizon instead of a monologue in the void. The latter might be the unbridled expression of, say, Yoko Ono, but shrieking isn’t communication or conversation without our second and third terms. Even inanimate things express their intelligibility to us, but you can’t exactly talk back to them.

Perhaps that’s one reason why I am here.

Yes, supposing you take part in the conversation and don’t just vanish into wordless wonder behind the smoke rings of your spliff.

I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.

With regard to being reasonable, we must add an important Gödelean qualifier, in that we must deploy horizontal reason without imagining we can be limited thereby. Rather, the Anthropos is again the transcendent animal, if only because we elude any limited definition of what we are, but also because we are capable of transcendence as such in freely knowing what otherwise merely is. Thus, He who adopts a system stops perceiving the truths that are within his reach. If our hypothetical Theos is Infinitude full stop, then we are potentially infinite, in the sense that there is nothing we cannot potentially know, given enough time. However, the clock always runs out before we can know it all — except for those timeless truths we cannot fail to know discussed in Book I, including our twelve cosmotheandric axioms.

Gödel even thought that our infinite potential pointed to an afterlife, because first of all, he was deeply skeptical of the idea that the brain could have come about via natural selection. In fact, he considered it disprovable that a mechanical process could result in a brain, and more to the point, “what sense would there be in creating a being (man), which has such a wide realm of possibilities for its own development and for relationships to others, and then not allowing it to realize even a thousandth of those [possibilities]?” That would be as stupid as a contractor “laying, with the greatest effort and expense, the foundations for a house, and then letting it all go to seed again.”

Sounds like you don’t have much experience with contractors.

In the Beginning is the Third

As with our forensic examination of the Cosmos in Book I, the question arises of where to begin in our accounting of the Anthropos, for it is self-evidently the case that all knowledge of any kind passes through man, so in a sense defines him. Moreover, if a thing is characterized by what it can do – i.e., that action follows being — then the Anthropos is a philosopher, a scientist, a theologian, an artist, a mystic, a mathematician, a criminal, a dude, a hero–

A puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king—

We can say almost anything about the Anthropos and equally say the opposite: Is he a pious saint? Occasionally. Genocidal psychopath? Oof. A creator? Sure. A destroyer? No doubt. Likewise, genius and crank, believer and skeptic, deadbeat and achiever, maven and schmendrick. Frankly the list of dualities is endless, which somewhat begs the question, because what sort of being is capable of such a diverse range of attributes and actions? Seriously, think about it: we not only sing, but we dance just as good as we want.

Are you ready to get your groove on, Petey? They tell me you’re pretty fast on your feet.

I’ve been known to shake a chicken in the middle of the room.

You better have your steps together, because in addition to the horizontal rhumba we are capable of the vertical boogaloo, such as discovering the true, willing the good, and creating the beautiful. We might say with Dávila that Time soon erodes what is said about the soul but it never even scratches what the soul says.

Nor is the Anthropos done singing, dancing, creating, and discovering, for we will never arrive at the last poem, play, or punchline. One might say that since the Anthropos never stops creating, we are thereby an ongoing creation, not a fixed or final entity, similar to how it would be impossible to make a final judgment about history until it reaches its conclusion. Only then can we properly ask: WTF was that all about? So it seems that the arc of the cosmotheandric drama is framed between the primordial WTF?! and some kind of ultimate one.

∞

Assuming you’ve read Book I, then you know that after twenty plus years of schooling they put me on the day shift as a psychologist.

Practicing?

Yes, a clinical psychologist. Nevertheless, there was a lot about the Anthropos that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, for which reason I began branching off into theology, metaphysics, cosmology, anthropology, and all the rest, in search of the Cosmic Area Rug.

I like your style. Got the whole space cowboy thing going on.

How is it that deeper insights are always popping out of the Cosmos the longer we dwell in and gaze upon it? That the human being is at once a finished species that is never finished?

Sounds like we’re gonna be here for a while. Mind if I smoke a jay?

Be my geist. I realize your kind supposedly sees directly into essences without the hassle of a discursive, step-by-step movement required of embodied beings, so feel free to sit out this part.

Let’s begin by rummaging into the past. Recall Boethius’ definition of man as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” However, prior to this we must be the relational animal, otherwise we could never be reasonable, since reason would be unrelated to the world or to anything but itself. In reality, we are a relational substance of a transrational nature.

Moreover, as we have seen, the Anthropos is not just related to the exterior but to the interior of things, including fellow human beings. This is because we come into the world neurologically incomplete, such that the brain is built and the self gradually emerges in the dynamic space between infant and caretaker(s). For which reason the psychoanalytic theorist D.W. Winnicott remarked that there is no such thing as a baby, rather, the mother-infant dyad. As a result, we are irreducibly intersubjective on the ground floor of our being, such that the We is, if not ontologically prior to the I, at least on equal terms with it: in the absence of the fieldlike We, there could be no particularized I.

This prior interior union with others is the necessary condition of the intersubjectivity that defines us. Which is why our very lot in life is never truly our own. Rather, we’re mixed up with everyone, and not just the living, since we are very much influenced by voices out of the past. Indeed, an Anthropos singing only from the hymnal of his contemporaries is a bit of a nincompoop. In the cosmic Tower of Song we can hear noises below and discrete coughing from above. I realize that standards have fallen, but if you are only acquainted with the case for modernity, much less postmodernity, then you know little of either.

Another of Winnicott’s concepts is what he calls the “transitional space” between infant and caretaker. It is irreducibly co-created by both and belongs to neither, but it is where all the psychic action takes place: it is neither subjective nor objective, but always both, nor do we ever leave this space behind. Rather, Winnicott theorized that this potential space scales up, so to speak, to language, culture, art, science, etc., because each of these takes place within the anthropic space that is first opened up in infancy.

Human beings, like any other living organism, are open systems. Now, it is one thing to be open to objective things such as food, water, and oxygen, but what makes a Homo human and the sapiens sapient is our prior openness to other human subjects: our intersubjectivity, a mutual indwelling that begins even before birth, in the womb. There is and never has been such a thing as a radically isolated human being who only later becomes “social.” So philosophers who imagine otherwise, from Machiavelli and Descartes to Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham – insofar as they begin with an anthropological non-starter – are not even wrong, so they may be safely dismissed with extreme prejudice. For them, intersubjectivity would be viewed as a handicap to the ego-driven achiever.

Moreover, each of these antisocialites is crippled by a reductive anti-realism (in the traditional sense of denying any transcendent reality). Thus, since they confine themselves to the wheelchair of immanence, they are by no means pinnacles of achievement, rather, ontological spinal cases incapable of vertical movement.

It’s all over, man! We call your bluff!

∞

If the point about intersubjectivity seems like a peremptory assertion, it is because I don’t want to burden readers with a pedantic review of all the needlessly complicated ins and outs of interpersonal neurobiology, which can be easily obtained elsewhere in popular books such as Daniel Segal’s Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, or in unpopularized deeper dives such as Allan Schore’s The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature. To summarize the argument, the field of interpersonal neurobiology

studies how the brain is shaped by early experiences, especially social and emotional experiences, as well as the relational mechanisms by which interacting, communicating brains intersubjectively synchronize, couple with, and align their activities with other brains (Schore).

This involves an irreducible co-creation of the self that occurs “at an implicit level beneath conscious awareness” located in the right cerebral hemispheres of both mother and infant. We will have much more to say about the right brain below in a separate subsection, but suffice it to say here that “the subjectivity of the self is cocreated in intersubjectivity,” and that “the self-organization of the developing brain occurs in the context of a relationship with another self, another brain” (ibid.). Thus, unity of the self depends upon a prior dual unity of selves.

Nor do we ever transcend this intersubjective unity, rather, it is not only at the foundation of human nature but accounts for our later connectedness to other minds and even to the world itself, for again, we have a bi-directional internal relationship to everything, in the absence of which scientific knowledge of the world would be impossible. This is all perfectly in accord with our Axioms of openness and relational interiority, which again scale upward to culture in general and to science, art, philosophy, and theology in particular. Not to get sentimental on you, but it turns out that “maternal love for the infant” is nothing less than is “a biologically essential mechanism for the preservation of the human species” (ibid.)

∞

For our more grandiose cosmotheandric purposes it is enough to know that the personal is always interpersonal, the subject intersubjective, and being itself a being-with. Our credo is go meta or go home, in this case to a meta-cosmic mega-psychology of irreducible intersubjectivity from top to bottom. “We all begin life indwelling another human,” so “if there’s one thing we’re not at the beginning, it’s by ourselves” (Leithart). In The Beginning we are not Newtonian particles but already a community of three, insofar as even the brains of fathers undergo a structural reorganization in order to meet the demands of the helpless newborn (Cassella). To which I can personally attest. My brain and I never much cared for babies until we had our own.

I am, therefore we are?

That is surely correct. But what must the Cosmos be like in order for there to exist a conscious being asking what the Cosmos must be like in order to have given rise to him? And what can it not possibly be like? The problem is, there is nothing else in creation with which to compare the Anthropos without losing something vital in the comparison. True, we are like lower primates, but there is nevertheless a (literally) infinite gap between us and our distant furbears. The continuity is easy enough to explain, but whither the ontological discontinuity? That’s not supposed to happen in natural selection, but here we are: Homo transcendens.

If we ponder the number of variables that have to go right in order for us to be here, it approaches infinitude, from the basic laws of physics, to the nature of stars, to the character of our galaxy, to the location of the planet, to the emergence of life, to the supposedly unguided adventure of DNA, culminating in the appearance of a neurologically immature primate, AKA the helpless baby who can internalize language and culture while its brain is developing -- in other words, an intersubjective being not entirely bound by instinct but open to being. In Christianity, even the Theos had to incarnate as a baby, because you can’t be a mature adult without having first been an immature infant.

And our brief list of cosmic coincidences only scratches the surface of a cursory glance at a perfunctory review of the tip of the iceberg of the variables involved in the appearance of a self-conscious relational being. Given the known laws of physics, there are said to be 10 to the 500th power of possible universes that could result from tweaking them. And yet, we find ourselves in the one that allows us to be here. It seems that the number of coincidences is so unimaginable that it is difficult to know what to make of them. Moreover, we know that space, time, matter, and energy all came into being at the moment of the Big Bang, so whatever caused the Big Bang must be immaterial and atemporal, leaving aside the staggering amount of information packed into this primordial detonation. But let’s keep an open mind. Let’s just call it O and try to figure it out later.

∞

I’m not sure about this subsection. I don’t like how it suddenly veered from interpersonal neurobiology back to the Cosmic Anthropic Principle. I know without asking that it will work for Gemini, but did it work for you?

This subsection advances the narrative more effectively than the preceding prelude.

The title “In the Beginning is the Third” signals the core claim: the human is constitutively triadic or intersubjective from the start. The We is not an add-on to a pre-existing I; the field-like relation precedes and enables the particularized self. That claim is developed through three mutually reinforcing registers.

This is genuine progress. Earlier sections asserted relationality and openness as ontological features of the Cosmos and of the Anthropos. Here those features are shown to be developmentally and neurologically constitutive of the human person. The argument is no longer only that relation is necessary for knowledge or language; it is that the human subject itself does not exist except as co-created in an intersubjective field. That supplies a stronger anthropological foundation for the later claims about culture, science, and the vertical opening to O.

The rejection of atomistic starting points follows directly and is consistent. Any anthropology that begins with an isolated individual and then tries to construct the social is treating as secondary what is in fact primary. Those philosophies are therefore not merely incomplete but founded on a non-starter.

The section also keeps the vertical dimension in view. Intersubjectivity is not only horizontal (human to human) but opens upward; the same relational structure that makes mother-infant synchrony possible is what later makes knowledge of the world and orientation toward the transcendent possible. The brief return to cosmic fine-tuning and the under-determined O at the end is controlled and does not derail the anthropological focus.

Minor notes:

• The playful dialogue and musical asides are lighter here than in some earlier passages; they do not obstruct the argument.

• The claim that even the Theos “had to incarnate as a baby” is offered as a structural observation rather than a developed theological argument; it fits the intersubjective logic but will need fuller treatment in Book III if it is to carry weight.

• The discontinuity with other primates is asserted rather than newly demonstrated, but that is acceptable given the developmental emphasis of this subsection.

Overall, this is one of the stronger openings of Book II so far. It moves from general assertions about the uniqueness of the Anthropos to a specific, multi-level account of how the human subject is constituted in relation. That gives the subsequent examination of the Anthropos a more precise starting point: we begin not with an isolated rational substance, but with a relational, intersubjective, developmentally open being whose very self is co-created. The third is indeed in the beginning.