The Eternal Man: Do As I Do, Not As I Say

Eckhart ran into some trouble when the authorities began looking into what he was saying as opposed to how he was saying it. They were especially concerned with its potential effect on the unlearned, who might not know the difference. In the parlance of cosmotheandrism, he was very much speaking to and from the RH. Reduced to LH propositions, there was bound to be misunderstanding, analogous to the difference between dream logic and wideawake consciousness.

Note that it is rare to know a dream from within the dream (AKA lucid dreaming). Rather, we only know of dreams a posteriori, when we consciously recall them. Whenever we think about a dream, the thinking actually takes place in a dialectical space between two different modes of thought. One might say that this space is a “third” between the first two (i.e., between RH and LH). Here it is the betweenness that counts: this space is the cosmotheandric how between the two whats.

Note that the Anthropos is always the link between two whats, whether it is between other persons, between mind and Cosmos, or between Anthropos and Theos. What is the nature of this ambiguous space between whats? Whatever it is, it is not just another what. So what is it?

It is impossible to describe without falling into — or ascending upto — paradox, which is not a bug, rather, a feature. Our how is not pre-literacy, nor is it literacy, rather post-literacy; or rather, literacy working over pre-literate material and arriving at something new.

Which actually goes to the existence of newness and novelty per se, because this is how creativity works. The RH ground is always the silent partner in any creative endeavor. Likewise, psychotherapy (my kind) is always a conversation not only involving this third partner, but its point is to enlist this partner as a way of being-in-the-world more generally. It mirrors the trialogue at the edge of the subjective horizon that is always taking place, bringing this flowing con-versation out into the open. For the Third is always there anyway, speaking in various tongues such as somatization, acting out, interpersonal conflict, self-defeating behavior, ideology, etc. In a word, symptoms.

In the book Paradox at Play: Metaphor in Meister Eckhart’s Sermons, Johnson describes it thus: our mysterious maestro

insists that the ground of conceptual thought is not itself conceptual, meaning that our attempts to answer fundamental philosophical questions have not been frustrated because we lack the appropriate conceptual apparatus, but because the questions themselves point to the nonconceptual ground of thinking that makes conceptual thought possible.

In exploring this dynamic — one might say Living — ground,

Metaphors allow us to enter more deeply into a thinker’s imaginative horizon than concepts do because they operate on an aesthetic, preconscious level that springs from the most fundamental metaphysical building blocks of the way we see ourselves and the world.

Show me the metaphor and I’ll show you the man.

Agreed, but the cosmotheandric man takes it one step further and asks: what is a good metaphor for metaphor, or for metaphor as such — a meta-metaphor? We cannot think without metaphor, but what is thinking metaphorically like? Is there a nonconcepual Master Metaphor that is like everything because it is prior to everything?

For Eckhart the master metaphor is the Ground, which is not “like” truth, rather, the prior nonconceptual truth itself. This Ground is like a bubbling spring that boils over into everything; or rather, everything is a consequence of this endless boiling over. To dwell in this Ground is not so much to “live without a why,” rather, to live within the space between the Why and Because. This is the reason why no Because ever exhausts the Why — at least in principle. History is, of course, an endless series of Whys that pretend to enclose us in a Because, from scientism to religionism. The Authorities, whoever they are, always pretend to know the Because.

Because they said so.

Correct. Recall Wittgenstein’s crack that “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” But really the bewitchment is a function of literacy itself, insofar as it encloses us within language, unless language remains open to the poles of immanence and transcendence. Properly functioning language is the liberating tool that links us to these two “grounds,” but in reality there is only the one dynamic Ground in two modes.

∞

With these preluminary murmurandoms out of the way, let’s get down to cases, for example, Berdyaev, because he struggles with the meaning of religion in a most modern — and cosmotheandric — way:

The eternal man, oriented toward eternity and infinity, is at once the eternally new man and an eternal and limitless purpose. The eternal man is not something given once for all: he is not to be comprehended statically. The truly new man is a realization of the eternal man, bearing in himself the image and likeness of God.

So, it’s a process. In Orthodox Christianity our theomorphism is a given, except to say that the image is one thing, the likeness another: the meaning of life is for the potential of the image to be actualized in the likeness. Thus, “The new man must be creative, and hence he must look toward the future, toward that which has never been. This is the answer to the call of God,” God being none other than the Great Attractor that draws the image toward the likeness. Even so, “Man is a riddle in this world, perhaps the supreme riddle.”

I would go further, and say: no man, no riddle — that man and riddle co-arise. Again, there were no riddles or questions of any kind until we showed up and began asking What the flip?

Riddle, riddled, and riddler rolled into one?

Man simultaneously embodies both riddle and solution, question and answer, why and because. But we can in no way be the answer to the riddle that we are. Rather, any answer must result from a dynamic engagement with the Transcendent Real, so to speak, which is again the very function of a functioning religion.

For Berdyaev, “Man may know himself from above or from below, from his own light, from the divine element in him, and he may know himself from his darkness..., from the demonic element within himself.” And

he may do this because he is a dual and a contradictory being, a being polarized to the highest degree, god-like and beast-like, high and low, free and slave, capable of rising to the heights or of falling, capable of great love and sacrifice or of great cruelty and limitless egotism.

We rate this passage 100% nihil bobstat, or free of philosophical BS. Rather, Berdyev tells it like it is (or us like we are): we are always polarized within the tension of immanence and transcendence.

But how did we get into this existential pickle? And what does it all mean?

Let’s say there is a no-man’s land between meaning and meaninglessness. Except to say that this is every man’s land — not to mention a knowing man’s land — in that this is the dynamic space in which all men live and know: “Man is the point where two worlds intersect, he belongs to two orders. Here lies the infinite complexity and difficulty of human life. There is the spiritual man and the natural man, and one man is both” (ibid.).

One person and two natures?

That rings a bell... But in any event, “the existence of personality presupposes the existence of God,” and “If God does not exist, as the source of super-personality values, then personality is valueless.”

In short, No meaning for you! Even so, the meaning is not given in the manner of an unambiguous concept or proposition, nor is this meaning transferable, i.e., my neighbor’s meaning isn’t my meaning. Rather, Petey was on to something with his crack about The religion the Almighty and me works out betwixt us, because the Great Betwixt is precisely where the meaning arises.

Which raises a host of potential problems, depending on the number of human beings at any given time. Let’s call it The Anthropic Incompleteness Principle: human beings are necessarily incomplete but ordered to our own completeness, which can only be found “in God” — or in O, if you like. In short, no God, no possibility of completeness.

And even then, what are the chances of our finding any straight-up meaning given the twisted wreckage of mankind? Schuon speaks of four inevitable infirmities to which man is heir. To begin at the top, it should go without saying that we are “creature, not Creator,” which is to say, “manifestation and not Principle or Being.” Or, just say we are contingent and not necessary or absolute.

Can’t argue with that.

Second, we are human beings and all this implies, situated somewhere between absolute and relative, God and animal — somewhat like a terrestrial angel or a celestial ape. So we are human, and you can’t get worse than that, at least potentially, since we run the gamut from Mary Magdalene, first witness to the Resurrection, to Magda Goebbels, first lady of the Third Reich.

Third, we are all different, which is to say, individuals, and there can be no science of the utterly unique and unrepeatable.

Lastly, there are human differences that are indeed contingent and not essential or providential. These include negative things such as neurotic conflicts and mind parasites that result from the exigencies of childhood, but also the accidental aspects of genetics, temperament, culture, language, and history. In order to exist at all, we must surely exist in a specific form and a particular time and place.

Our earthly experiences are woven with contingency and chance, but it is difficult to imagine who we would concretely be in the absence of these contingencies. Given different experiences, we would be very different versions of ourselves — for example, if we had had different parents. I can think of a great number of people without whom I can’t imagine who I’d be, which goes again to the principles of both contingency and intersubjectivity.

Can there be a one size fits all cure for these infirmities — for the existential maladies of the finite, human, individual, and contingent? No, it seems that each of us is a unique problem of God, and doesn’t a unique problem require a unique treatment tailored to the individual person? But what even is a person?

Berdyaev is raising his hand again. I think he has impulse control issues.

Yes, Nick? Is there something you’d like to share with the group?

A person is never a completed datum: it is the task, the ideal, of man. The ideal of man is a perfect unity, the integrity of personality.

So, we’re always on the way to who we already are?

“No man can say he is fully a person,” because “The personality must produce itself, enrich itself, fill itself with universal content, attain unity in integrity, throughout the whole extent of its life.”

Berdyaev is essentially saying that personality is indeed a “joint effort” worked out — not determined — betwixt man and God, who is the very principle of creativity in whom we uniquely participate, making us “co-creators” of both the Cosmos and Anthropos, both of which are necessarily “works in progress.” Thus, “The essence of life is this striving of all being toward eternity.”

This almost sounds like it makes us “co-creators” of God, at least in some sense?

Shh! Don’t scare off the remaining reader(s). 

You’re Never Alone With a Tri-vidual

So: any denial of God presupposes a godlike ability to pronounce on the godless nature of reality. Which in the end is just the same old immanence overplaying its hand and denying transcendence even while indulging in it — or thoughts denying the very thinker who is always situated between the poles of immanence and transcendence.

Go on.

I’m thinkin’...

‘Bout what?

About this troublesome business of fallenness and the thorny problem of evil and suffering. For cosmotheandrism the traditional explanations just don’t cut it, hence, one of the appeals of Schuon’s approach: “If the world is the world, this is because it is not God; unable to be either Absoluteness or Infinity, it is relative and finite — hence the presence of evil…”

So, it’s nobody’s fault. Or, it’s everybody’s fault, to the extent that everybody I know is finite and relative. Hence, “If there is a cosmos, a universal manifestation, there must also be a fall or falls, for to say ‘manifestation’ is to say ‘other than God’ and remotion” (ibid.).

It seems that the whole Garden of Eden thing is intended to convey this ineveateapple metaphysical truth. Which makes sense, for if the creation is a kind of radiation of, or projection from, God, “to say radiation is to say distance, hence alienation or impoverishment: the solar rays dim and become lost in the night of space. From this arises, at the end of the projection, the paradoxical phenomenon of evi” (ibid.).

Looked at from a different angle, Schuon writes that

Infinitude, which is an aspect of the Divine Nature, implies unlimited Possibility and consequently Relativity, Manifestation, the world. To speak of the world is to speak of separation from the Principle, and to speak of separation is to speak of the possibility — and necessity — of evil.

Thus

The nature of evil, and not its inevitability, constitutes its condemnation; its inevitability must be accepted, for tragedy enters perforce into the divine play, if only because the world is not God; one must not accept error, but one must be resigned to its existence.

The point is that God can still have a plan — this being in the order of a final cause, not an efficient one — but he has given man the power to mess up the plan. Sayeth Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face. This being the case, then history is one endless roundhouse punch to the face of God.

I don’t mean to interrupt your wayward vertical meandering, but the subject was atheists and how they get that way. The question before the Cosmos is, Is atheism even possible?

Of course it is possible, otherwise there would be no atheists, the question being whether it is rational or ordered to truth. It is certainly rational in the narrow sense of rendering conclusions from its own premises, but again, there is no logical operation that can furnish its own premises, so atheism, just like theism, implicitly supposes an ability on man’s part to exit the circle of reason and to freely choose one’s premises. Thus, it should not surprise us in the least that a person who begins with scientistic or materialistic assumptions has predetermined his conclusions.

This is not what we are doing here. Rather, we are not making any presuppositions about God, rather, beginning with the same world as the atheist and seeing where it leads or what it implies — what it means. Which leads directly to our next subject:

Modern Man’s Relentless Search for Meaninglessness

The first question is whether there could be meaninglessness in the absence of meaning. For isn’t this analogous to having chaos with no order, relative with no Absolute, falsehood with no truth, appearances with no reality, or shadows with no light? In each case, the former term is parasitic on the latter.

Nevertheless, some people not only insist that life has no intrinsic meaning but derive meaning from being just this kind of person — the kind of stunningly brave fellow who can stare into the abyss staring right back at him and conclude that life is a mutual reflection of nobody and nothing.

Although an intrinsically meaningless Cosmos could never account for meaning, the converse is not true: the existence of meaning necessarily entails the possibility of meaninglessness.

Certainly one of the problems with finding meaning is the affluence that is a relatively new phenomenon, even in the modern West. After all, if you’re thirsty and hungry, the meaning of life is pretty simple: finding suitable refreshments and grabbing a bite. Prior to modernity, the principal occupation of the great majority of mankind was the production of food. So, life essentially meant agriculture. I’m only one generation away from this, in that my father grew up on a small farm in the south of England.

It has only been a hundred years or so since the majority of Americans became urban dwellers. According to historian David Kennedy, over half the states and nearly half of American citizens “still counted as rural in 1930,” with a way of life that “moved between birth and death to the ancient rhythms of sun and season,” which is to say more cyclical than linear.

And for these people, dark meant dark, for few rural dwellers had electricity, thus the difficult choice of either sitting in the dark and not knowing what was crawling on you, or firing up the lantern or candle and attracting even more mosquitoes and other pests.

And of course, city life was no bargain either. Although industrial workers earned more than farmers, “Not until 1923 did United States Steel Corporation grudgingly abandon the twelve-hour day,” nor had the two-day weekend yet been discovered by the early explorers of Slack.

Perhaps Marx was right about one thing — about how mechanized factory work robbed labor of any intrinsic meaning.

There is also the fact that meaning existed more in the collective than the individual for most of man’s history. In his outstanding Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, Siedentop writes of how individualism and unique identity didn’t happen overnight but were the work of centuries. Explaining how this evolved would require a book of its own, which I don’t need to write, since Siedentop has already written it. The end result is that we are now called upon to discover life’s meaning on our own, and that’s a big responsibility.

Above we alluded to Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, the thesis of which being that a primary motivational force in human beings is precisely this search for meaning. It was here just a few centuries ago. Where did it go? Having been a concentration camp survivor, he believed that the worst forms of suffering could be endured if the individual could preserve some sense of meaning. In this regard, he claims that nihilists were less equipped to endure the unendurable, quoting Nietzsche to the effect that He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. Which is ironic coming from a guy who declared that the ultimate source of meaning was deceased.

In any event, it seems that affluence both giveth and taketh away. In other words, while it opens a space for potential meaning, it cannot provide that meaning. Rather, finding meaning is now a kind of lifelong existential do-it-yourself project. This I know because every working psychotherapist knows it. In the modern world the search for meaning is a retail industry, in contrast to premodern times, when meaning was more of a wholesale product provided by religion.

Social psychologist Rob Henderson discusses how the existence of even relatively meaningless work still provides a great deal of meaning for most people, so think twice before retiring unless you have something more meaningful with which to fill your time, such as using all your skills to search for the Cosmic Area Rug. Henderson writes that “people are more likely to experience ‘flow’ at work than during leisure,” which “is the state of full focus on a task; you lose track of time. When in a flow state, the challenge in front of you matches your abilities such that you feel both effective and competent.” And “people reported feeling flow far more often at work than in leisure.”

So, “Be careful what you wish for,” because “those who lose their jobs are more likely to kill themselves compared with those who had not lost their jobs.” Not every dude is cut out to simply abide: “Free time sounds appealing, but it has no built-in structure,” so “most people let time pass them by rather than use it to cultivate their skills, talents, or interests.” In the West, we actually have more free time — more slack — than ever, but instead of using it “to learn new skills or build something meaningful,” it is mostly spent watching TV or scrolling.

Free peoples’ asses, and their minds don’t follow?

I’m afraid not. There is the Maslowian notion that “once basic material needs are met, people will use their free time to seek meaning and fulfillment. Unshackled from the burden of work, they will thrive.” Some people of course do thrive, but not most. Rather, “they do not spend their days painting or sculpting or learning another language,” let alone searching for the Cosmic Area Rug, but just playing video games, or worse, becoming mischievous political activists to make up for the absence of meaning. Thus “A society that removes the need to work risks removing one of the main sources of meaning in life.”

As recently as a century ago our Big Box religions still provided a kind of ready-made, prefabricated, off-the-shelf meaning for our lives. But who can deny that this prefab meaning no longer speaks to mostuvus?

Well, for Schuon, the general purpose of religion as such is to facilitate “discernment between the Real and the illusory, or between the Permanent and the impermanent, and the essential function of the will is attachment to the Permanent or to the Real. This discernment and this attachment are the quintessence of all spirituality.”

This goes back to the boat and the shore, the purpose of the former being to reach the latter. It can be a magnificent yacht or a humble dinghy, so long as it gets you to the other side. For Schuon, what he calls the perennial religion “is fundamentally this,” that

the Real entered into the illusory so that the illusory might be able to return into the Real. It is this mystery, together with the metaphysical discernment and contemplative concentration that are its complement, which alone is important in an absolute sense from the point of view of gnosis.

So, to the extent that a religion “works,” this is the principle of why it works. Put another way, this is its meaning and purpose:

First, religion is essentially discernment. It is discernment between God and the world, between the Real and the unreal, or between the Everlasting and the ephemeral. Secondly: religion is union. It is union with God, the Great Spirit. Everything in religion has its foundation in one of these two elements: in discernment or in union.

So really it comes down to full participation in the participatory reality of cosmotheandrism, or of the anthropic individual realizing the dynamic tri-viduality between man, world, and God. Nor are we the first to arrive at this theoria, which is to say, vision. For example, there is Meister Eckhart, whose rhetoric focuses on the then new conception of the individual as something significant and apart from our immersion in the mythos of the collective:

Though it is not often given enough attention when telling the story of Western intellectual history, we can explain why many philosophical and intellectual movements arose when they did if we look at changes in our conception of what an individual is in relation to other individuals, to nature, and to the divine (Clint Johnson, emphasis mine.)

In other words, the dynamic and irreducible relations between the anthropic subject, other subjects (intersubjectivity), Cosmos, and Theos.

How is Atheism Possible?

Cosmotheandrism proposes an irreducible interior relationship between Cosmos, Anthropos, and Theos. This being the case, its null hypothesis would be that there are no such relationships, or that one of our three terms does not actually exist. We needn’t detain ourselves arguing over whether the Cosmos or Anthropos exist, nor whether they are related. The question is whether these two are related to the Theos, and whether the latter even exists. Thus, we could say that one null hypothesis of cosmotheandrism is atheism, the latter assumed to be true unless our theory can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that atheism is incorrect or even impossible.

There also exist religious “null hypotheses,” in the sense that one can prefer one religion over another, and insist that the truth of one entails the falsehood of all the others. However, such a preference cannot ultimately be based on scientific or philosophical objections, even though some religions are more philosophically coherent and plausible than others.

However, a-theism is the null hypothesis of all gods and all religions, such that no religion of any kind is even possible, much less plausible and coherent. Rather, religion explains nothing, and nothing explains religion except perhaps ignorance, stupidity, gullibility, mimesis, social contagion, mental illness, etc. Some even propose the existence of a “God gene,” in which case the atheist is evidently some kind of genetic mutant with a birth defect. But once one traverses down that path, there is no true or false anyway, just self-interested genes, whether those genes are interested in theism or atheism.

How is Atheism Possible?

We have already established that God is possible, or at least not impossible. The question is, is godlessness possible? The philosopher Charles Taylor correctly affirms that secularism is not just a matter of “less religion,” but essentially the displacement of one metaphysic for another. He refers to an implicit worldview as a “social imaginary,” but a secular social imaginary is no less imaginary than a religious one.

Specifically, the social imaginary is defined as the manner in which “ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings.” In the ancient world the collective social imaginary made atheism seem impossible, whereas in our day the social imaginary of vulgar scientism seems to render theism untenable, at least among secular sophisticates.

Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers no doubt felt a certain frisson at the prospect of breaking free of the existing socio-religious imaginary. However, it is anachronistic to characterize these thinkers as secular in the modern sense. Rather, most of them remained thoroughly religious but merely wanted to expand and supplement the religious social imaginary with discoveries from the new science. Only later did man begin imagining a social imaginary devoid of God.

But again, if Voegelin is correct, man qua man is always situated in the space between immanence and transcendence. We can pretend to flee this space in either direction, but the result will be another more or less adequate imaginary existing between these poles. For example, naturalism is a totally inadequate imaginary, in that it collapses the very space in which the Cosmos becomes luminous to itself.

Imagine no imaginary. It isn’t hard to do.

Actually, it is impossible to do — like trying to define “experience” in the absence of experience. We can imagine that we are free of any implicit imaginary, but that’s just another imaginary.

One of the first binary choices confronting the Anthropos is whether the Cosmos is a dynamically open system or self-enclosed and self-explanatory — in other words, whether its sufficient reason exists within or outside itself. There is no third option, so either we exist in a contingent Cosmos open to something transcending it, or in a self-sufficient universe reducible to the necessity of immanent matter in motion.

One of the most consequential differences between the two is that any form of ultimate meaning is strictly impossible in the case of a closed and necessary universe: if the latter is the sole reality, then it can have no significance. Only if the Cosmos is the appearance of a deeper reality can it acquire meaning and significance, in that it implies and “refers” to this more real reality. Is this latter possibility capable of disproof? If so, how is it that one is arguing from beyond a Cosmos that has no beyond? As we know from our Gödel, one can only pronounce upon a system from outside the system. As a result, we can only pretend to eliminate transcendence from any explanation of the Cosmos.

So atheism is a mug’s game?

Well, it is up to them to explain how to pull oneself up by the genes in order to know about our genes, or how to pull an immaterial intellect out of a material hat. How does one even speak of matter without transcending it? Good luck with that. We are all dealt a hand of genes, but to reduce truth to biology is overplaying our hand.

They want to sell us a bridge to reality while blowing up the bridge.

Either that or a bridge to unreality.

Which is not to say that religionists do not overplay their hands, because they almost always do, insofar as they absolutize their religion.

Nevertheless there is a bridge, specifically the one between intellect and intelligibility. Here again, science assumes the existence of this bridge, in the absence of which science itself is strictly impossible. So if one could disprove the existence of this bridge, then this would surely entail disproof of cosmotheandrism. It could also be disproved if this immaterial bridge can be explained from within the material universe.

Now, no one can conceive the inconceivable or imagine the unimaginable. However, sometimes a thing can be so inconceivable that we slide right over its inconceivability and imagine we have conceived it, often because we have a word for it — the quintessential case being the word “God,” which can imply that we know what we’re talking about just because we have the word. But the same is true of the word “Cosmos,” since we can again never know in advance what this temporally unfolding event has in store for us and what secrets it will reveal. And of course the same applies to the Anthropos, both in general and in particular, i.e., the bottomlessness of our own selves.

And toplessness.

Correct: can’t have one without the other.

∞

It comes back to principles: atheism cannot be its own first principle, because it is in principle not possible unless we have free will, or in other words, unless human beings are somehow liberated from necessity and ordered to truth.

The intellect must also be immaterial, since belief of any kind is a spiritual act. But if it is a spiritual act, then... well, it doesn’t necessarily prove the existence of the Theos, only of an immaterial soul-thingy, as stipulated above.

But what is that, and how does it get here? What is its sufficient reason, since matter cannot be the cause of the immaterial. Put conversely, in what world does it make sense for spirit to disprove the existence of spirit?

Let’s think this through. Certainly we can stipulate that human beings have the capacity or potential for atheism. Like anyone else atheists have the freedom to know truth, both knowledge and freedom being ineluctably immaterial. No animal could be a theist or atheist, due to the absence of a spiritual intellect with its immaterial faculties.

So, there is no way around the conclusion that only a human being is capable of atheism, because lower animals lack the freedom and intelligence to be capable of it. Therefore, it seems that belief in atheism requires a little intelligence, but not too much, otherwise it will recognize the performative contradiction it entails.

But that’s not entirely fair, since there are plenty of highly intelligent atheists with IQs that dwarf mine, for example, Stephen Hawking, who comes in at 160. On the other hand, Einstein’s IQ is estimated to have been as high as 190, and he was not an atheist (although not a conventional believer).

So, if intelligence neither supports nor refutes atheism, what does?

Two words: vertical closure. For a self-enclosed person can reach no telos beyond himself, and the atheist would say that this is because there is no telos. But what if there is a terminus — a transcendent telos — beyond ourselves?

Thanks to Freud, we know all about repression, which is of the “lower vertical” content of the unconscious. But if verticality extends upward to, and downward from, the source or ground of the Cosmos, then there could also be a kind of upper vertical repression, and why not? If so, it would account for how people can become enclosed in their absurcularity. In a way, their worldview is complete (on its own level), and yet, it is radically incomplete (with regard to the whole).

∞

Now, can an atheist actually be a philosopher? For it seems that atheism is not a theory, rather, a necessary consequence of some prior ontological commitment such as metaphysical naturalism. Atheism is not even a belief (or unbelief), rather, just the entailment of a prior principle of vertical closure.

The question is, how did the atheist arrive at this principle, and why is he committed to it? For the first seems arbitrary, the second subjective. And arbitrary + subjective = crazy in most any other context.

It also ignores the question of why there should be metaphysical principles from which entailments logically follow, and how man could ever know them, supposing he is a wholly immanent and naturalistic being.

In other words, if man were a wholly material phenomenon, then by definition he could never know it. Whatever else a principle is, it isn’t material. Nor is the intellect that knows and accedes to the principle something material.

In short, we can know we are material, which means we can’t be. That is to say, there is something that transcends materiality in the merest knowledge of matter. Immanence can deny transcendence, but in so doing affirms it.

Atheists like to think of themselves as highly rational, but reason cannot furnish the premises upon which it operates. Rather, we must choose the premises on some other nonrational — which is not to say irrational — basis. It can be intuition, or authority, or common sense, or some kind of tacit knowing a la Polanyi, etc.

Take the classic example: all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, ergo Socrates is mortal. The form of the syllogism is prior to what we plug into it. Now, what if man has an immortal soul? Obviously the syllogism can’t tell us one way or the other.

But if the human soul is immaterial and the immaterial isn’t subject to decay or decomposition, then we’ve used another syllogism to disprove the first, and prove that Socrates isn’t mortal after all.

Besides, Socrates certainly didn’t think so — rather, he believed in the soul’s immortality — so he would be the first to disagree with the conclusion of any syllogism that uses logic to deny his own transcendental condition.

But in olden times, an atheist was someone who didn’t believe in and honor the local gods. By this criteria I am atheist, since I don’t believe in secular materialism, eliminativism, determinism, or other tall tales of the tenured.

Certainly atheism supposes a godlike ability to pronounce on the nature of reality. But in the end it’s just the same old immanence denying transcendence, or thoughts denying the thinker — the thinker again being situated between the poles of immanence and transcendence. Atheism is another social imaginary imagining its own consistency and completeness.

Three, Two, One, We Have Cognition: Lift-Off!

The first part of this post was written fresh this morning in a somewhat wild & wooly manner. The book resumes after the ∞:

I don’t like to mix it up with atheists — or anyone else, for that matter — because few people ever change their minds as a consequence of mere facts and logic. No one arrives at atheism from a chain of reasoning, since the conclusions of reason are preordained by its premises. Thus, the only way to really change minds — beginning with one’s own — is to change principles. And even then, has the mind really changed or only re-cognized what is always already the case? Analogously, supposing you are viewing a landscape through a fog, and the fog clears, has the landscape changed?

For which reason cosmotheandrism is more akin to cleaning windows than manufacture or glazing. For what is the Cosmos but the biggest landscape imarginable, and what is the Anthropos but a whom with a view? Perception allows the outside in, while intellect penetrates further inside what is perceived, in an endless spiral. But what is the Principle of this endless spiral of cognition proceeding from surface to depth? Each surface is a new abyss and each summit a new horizon, but how? And why?

Curious minds want to know. Incurious ones stop at atheism — or at ideology, religionism, or ismism more generally.

In any event, there can be no answer to the question in a closed Cosmos, much less a closed Anthropos. We know that these two are open to one another — hence science and any other form of knowledge — the question being whether these two are open to a third.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

Good question: I count you and I together, but if I look closely there is always an invisible third.

How can you look closely at the invisible?

Have you been listening to the story, Petey?

Intermittently.

Some third you are. Perhaps you missed Axiom 4, which says that relationality is woven into the nature of things, on equal terms with the existence of things. In short, reality is constituted of things-in-relation. These relations are not imaginary — just in our heads — rather, are as real as reality itself. They are constitutive of what anything is, thus for cosmotheandrism they are “onto-relations,” since they are as real as that which they relate.

So, that right there is our invisible third, which is always implicitly present in knowledge of any kind. This principle self-evidently applies to the Anthropos, because intersubjective relations also define what a person is: an isolated person devoid of interior relations would be less than a person. To review:

Reality is not the sum of extrinsically related things (à la Newton) but their intrinsically related unity (as per relativity), which is why this is a Cosmos — a dynamic whole — and not a collection of scattered parts.

This relational unity is among the most consequential facts of existence, for it is a necessary condition of everything else, including the possibility of philosophy — or of any other kind of knowing, for that matter. Everything is in relation, such that relation is an ontological primitive, not something superadded. It is only for this reason that Cosmos can be interiorly related to Anthropos, and vice versa, hence its intelligibility to our intelligence. One might think of the Cosmos as having a dual reality, much like a Möbius Strip or Klein Bottle, in which the inside is the outside, and vice versa.

Thanks to Axiom 4, what is otherwise a paradox — like Escher’s hand drawing itself — is an orthoparadox, because there is a relation between the two hands and a third hand belonging to Escher. One might say that the third hand exerts downward causation on the other two, but there must also be a kind of upward causation or feedback from below that informs the artist. One might say that the Theos is that artist who draws hands capable of drawing other hands, which is to say, a Creator who creates creators, each open and related to the others: Creator, creation, creativity, in an endless spiral. Which is the pattern of everything, or the dynamic substance of the Cosmic Area Rug.

Every ideology has a blind spot, as it always makes an exception for the ideologue who is not enclosed in his ideology: the secular gnostic who knows the hidden truth of reality. Insofar as it concerns the atheist, the blind spot is a little thing called reality itself, since reality is open and relational before it is anything else, even intelligible. Being is an intelligible text, and the text no more wrote itself than Escher’s hand drew itself. Remember, the Anthropos is at once medium and message, since we are the medium through which all messages pass, even the message of atheism. But messages are only possible in an open and relational Cosmos.

∞

The Intellect is precisely that sense which allows us to intuit the suprasensible to which it is both a prolongation and adequation.

In some religions — e.g. Christianity — the metaphysical vision is more or less veiled, while in others, such as Vedanta, it is quite direct and unadorned, without so much as a fig leaf of mythopoetry.

Central to Schuon’s metaphysic is the distinction between Being and Beyond-Being. The former is the highest metaphysical level in exoteric monotheisms, with its Personal Creator God. But even some Christians go one step further, for example, Eckhart. His impersonal “ground” is analogous to the Nirguna Brahman of Vedanta, the unqualified Absolute, or the supraformal form beyond form.

The secret name of God that only He knows.

Everyone has a secret name. Our given name is just a word superimposed on a mystery. I am Bob, but there seems to be no bottom to Bobness. As part of my training I spent years in therapy, but never got to the bottom of me. I continued for a few years thereafter, but the floor turned out to be no floor at all, rather, more like the implicate quantum world of pure potential awaiting explication. This was actually the subject of my doctoral dissertation, for what it’s worth.

Okay Deepak.

You might say I got a Ph.D. in Bob, but I’m pretty sure Bob is everybody, unless they just stamp their John Hancock on the mystery and ignore the watery abyss below the dry name.

Above we alluded to another important distinction, that between the form and substance of religion. Revelation provides us with adequate forms to render the suprasensible intelligible, but the form is again not the substance, which is supraformal and hence formally inexhaustible.

In itself, this is actually not so far from Christian orthodoxy, which maintains that — and this should again be self-evident — no finite image of the Theos can adequately represent him, for “Whatever is comprehended by a finite being is itself finite” (Thomas), the result being that “every image [of the Absolute] is at the same time true and false” (Schuon).

And yet, Thomas implies that there is indeed something in us that is conformed to the Infinite, similar to what Eckhart says to the effect that “There is something in the soul which is uncreated and uncreatable,” this being none other than the nous, or Intellect properly so called.

Likewise, for Thomas “The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing other than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light,” and “the light of our intellect... is nothing other than an imprint of the first truth.”

Moreover, “Our intellect is understanding extended to infinity,” and this “ordering of the intellect to infinity would be vain and senseless if there were no infinite object of knowledge.” “Hence the Philosopher [Aristotle] says that the soul is in a certain manner all things.”

So, the Intellect is “the faculty which perceives transcendence”; it “receives intuitions and apprehends realities of a supra-phenomenal order.” “This transcendent faculty, capable of direct contact with Reality, is to be found, under various names, in all traditions” (Oldmeadow).

Having said that, it’s a good nous/bad news situation. I’ll let Schuon give you the lowdown on the lowdown Anthropos:

Fallen man, and thus average man, is as it were poisoned by the passional element, either grossly or subtly; from this results an obscuring of the Intellect and the necessity of a Revelation from outside.

Here again this is problematic, because it seems to imply that there are superior men whose intellects are not subject to the fall — which sounds like ideological gnosticism, i.e., the obnoxious and heretical kind of secret knowledge. However, Schuon is quick to point out that a merely intellectual understanding of metaphysics is not enough, and that the spiritual life “is concerned with cleansing the subjective psyche” and with integrating and assimilating the Divine Message. Which is simply our dynamic orientation to the transcendent pole, fundamentally no different than our orientation to the immanent pole, in which case science involves cleaning windows at the lower end of the Cosmos. Which has no solid floor, any more than the top end does. Frankly, we only recognize being insofar as it becomes, so we might say that Cosmos and Anthropos are likewise names we clamp down on an endlessly intelligible mystery.

Atheists and How They Get That Way, Part One

A science of God? Pff.

It’s in the word: theo-logy, the Logos of the Theos. Except to say that the Theos is the Logos, the very Reason that bifurcates into anthropic intelligence and cosmic intelligibility and thus renders science itself possible. For again, the scientific catechism begins and ends — or stands and falls — with this principle. It is the necessary precondition that must be fulfilled in order for scientific investigation to be possible. Since science is obviously possible, its a priori foundation necessarily exists: science is contingent upon this all-pervasive Logos, and is that so bad?

Do I not fill heaven and earth?

That’s more like it.

Every medium requires a mediator, which is to say Cosmos and Anthropos, respectively. Except to say that man is the mediator between the poles of immanence and transcendence, thus creating the conditions for a dynamic adventure in both directions: science at one end, theology at the other. One might say that the latter is “logology,” the systematic study of a Logos that bursts into a whole spectrum of ologies first delineated by Aristotle, not excluding all-encompassing ones such as ontology and teleology. Metaphysics is really meta-ology, or in our terms logology. Which means that the Anthropos is pre-adapted to an invisible world of necessary principles that render both himself and the Cosmos possible. The Anthropos is a possibility of the Theos, but the Theos is a necessity of the Anthropos, or what are we even talking about (i.e., using the medium of language to explore and map the invisible Cosmos)?

The physicist and philosopher of science Henry Margeneau had the right attitude when he wrote that the scientist “holds with the fervor of a religious conviction” the belief that the world is lawful and intelligible — “that the search for truth is a never-ending quest, yet I pledge myself to seek it.” Nothing is in principle “closed to inquiry or understanding,” so what looks like “a mystery is but a challenge.”

Challenge accepted.

We believe the scientific belief described by Margenau is thoroughly justified, except no belief is self-justifying, rather, must appeal to a higher principle which renders the belief believable. Which is where cosmotheandrism barges in, since it renders scientific faith entirely rational. In the cosmotheandric framework science isn’t some miraculous occurrence carried out by an invasive species of damn dirty apes getting their stinking paws on the cosmic blueprints, rather, exactly what we might expect. Thanks to science, we now know that our little planet of the apes is where the Cosmos of the Anthropos is disclosed.

∞

For Whitehead, “faith in the possibility of science” was “derivative from medieval theology,” specifically, “the inexpugnable belief that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled,” derived from the “insistence on the rationality of God.”

Which leads into our next section, called

Atheists and How They Get That Way

We begin this section with a bold and presumptuous claim by Schuon: “Metaphysics cannot be taught to everyone but if it could there would be no atheists.”

It is no knock on the Average Man to say that he is decidedly not a metaphysician, with no interest in such. Nor is this Average Man capable of, or interested in, quantum physics, but this has no bearing on his ability to use and enjoy technologies that rely upon it. Moreover, if we are so inclined, we can also read popularized versions that dumb down the physics for the benefit of those of us who just want the bottom line without having to go to the trouble of obtaining a Ph.D. in physics.

Or even passing 11th grade physics.

You cannot leave that alone, can you? Maybe I had better things to do.

Such as?

Avoiding linear equations and right-triangle trigonometry — whatever they are — is its own reward.

Analogously, the man with no interest in, or aptitude for, metaphysics also has access to popularized versions of it in the form of religion, for every religion discloses a metaphysical vision of reality.

Christianity is Platonism for the masses?

Nietzsche wasn’t entirely wrong there, except to say that Platonism may also be framed as Christianity for the egghead, an insult we will explore later.

We might even think of religion as the “poetry of metaphysics,” which is not a potshot at religion if it is true that, as Shelley said, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. For this would imply that the metaphysical poetry of religion reveals something about the Ultimate Legislator.

The point is, revelation may convey the essential truths of universal metaphysics — or of cosmotheandrism — only clothed in a way that can be assimilated by Joe Sixpack or Jane Winemom. In the words of Kenneth Oldmeadow, “Revelation is the means by which the Absolute is made known to all mankind.” This facilitates “a downward descent of the Divine Principle” and “a vertical ascent back to the Divine” — which goes to a dynamic complementarity of upward and downward energies which disclose the very structure of vertical reality, AKA the metabolism of being.

In this regard, just as with ideology, it is possible to become entrapped and enclosed in a dogmatic matrix as opposed to using it as a means of vertical liberation — a probe as it were. To paraphrase the old Zen saying, the purpose of the boat is to cross the river. Likewise, dogma is not for its own sake, but for the sake of mapping and transporting us somewhere. In short, religion as such is always about — i.e., refers to — something that is not religion. Which is another way of highlighting the rookie error of absolutizing one’s religion instead of using it to engage with what it is pointing toward: the Absolute.

Don’t stare at the finger pointing at the moon.

Correct. Thus,

When a man seeks to escape from dogmatic narrowness it is essential that it be “upwards” and not “downwards”: dogmatic form is transcended by fathoming its depths and contemplating its universal content (Schuon).

Which brings to mind another of Dávila’s translogical zingers worth repeating: Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper — or higher, toward the luminous end of the Primordial Tension between immanence and transcendence.

To repeat what was said above, the supraformal Substance is conveyed by the medium of form; put conversely, no terrestrial form can exhaust the celestial Substance, whether we are speaking of triangles or of God.

For Schuon, “What falsifies modern interpretations of the world and of man at their very base... is their monotonous and obsessive ignorance of the suprasensible degrees of Reality…” Which brings to mind yet another aphorism: We all have a key to the door that opens to the luminous and noble peace of the desert.

Neither math nor logic can get the job done, for reasons etched into the substance of reality by Gödel. Until his theorems are disproven — and don’t hold your breath — logic’s arms may be long enough to spar with God, but never knock him out.

What about a technical knockout?

That is indeed possible via various philosophical techniques, but these also result in rendering the Anthropos unconscious, or at least unintelligent.

Conversely, the Theos can certainly speak with logic, or better, speak logic. Which is why we can say that things are not true because they are logical, rather, logical because true. Math and logic can only “prove” tautologies. They are ultimately circular; we can of course expand the circle, but this hardly means we have left it behind or below. Like astronauts, we can leave the earth behind, but only by taking it — its atmosphere, food, and technology — with us.

Logic is always inside its own circle. In contrast, we are after knowledge from beyond or outside the circle (literally eso-teric). Is this even possible? No, better! It is necessary, or the circle of logic couldn’t exist to begin with. So, how do we exit or see beyond it?

For cosmotheandrism, Subject and Object are not a vicious and sterile dualism but a friendly and fruitful complementarity. The complementary dance between them proceeds all the way up and all the way down. But of the two, the Subject is obviously prior:

The subject as such takes precedence over the object as such: the consciousness of a creature able to conceive the star-filled heavens is greater than space and the heavenly bodies… (Schuon).

Carl Sagan can talk all he wants about those billions and billions of stars, but all of astronomy pales in significance next to the astronomer. Ultimately we are not contained by the galaxies, but rather, vice versa. The Cosmos itself isn’t even big — or small, or anything else — except in reference to us:

Man is situated, spatially speaking, between the “infinitely big” and the “infinitely small”..., so that it is his subjectivity and not a quality of the objective world that creates the line of demarcation. If we have an impression of being tiny in stellar space, it is solely because what is big is far more accessible to us than what is small, which quickly eludes the grasp of our senses (Schuon).

So, man is situated between — and defines — the Very Big and Very Small. And not only. For he is also the vertical “point of junction between two infinitely more important dimensions, namely, the outward and the inward.” Indeed, “it is precisely by virtue of the dimension of inwardness, which opens onto the Absolute and so onto the Infinite, that man is quasi-divine” (Schuon).

So much for not becoming a god to appear worthy of your manhood.

That is not the point, rather, it again adverts to Axiom 7, theomorphism. For there is a world and there are the cosmotheandric witnesses who transcend it: “Where there are objects, there must also be subjects: creatures that are witnesses of things form an indissoluble part of creation,” in the absence of whom the Cosmos “would be an unknown space filled with blind stones and not a world perceived under a multitude of aspects.”

There exist not only “knowable things” but “beings endowed with knowledge in varying degrees.” And whether you like it or not, “the summit-degree is man, at least for our world,” behind or before or beyond which is “the absolute Witness — at once transcendent and immanent — of all things...” There is nothing magical or miraculous per se about this magical and miraculous assertion. Again, it’s just a matter of turning the Cosmos bright-side up.

The Science of God?

The title of yesterday’s post — The Anthropic Medium is the Celestial Message — highlighted the cosmotheandric truism that the Anthropos is the link, or medium, between Cosmos and Theos. This is actually an unavoidable principle for any science, philosophy, or theology whatsoever, for man is the central clearing house of the Cosmos, and that’s all there is to it. Knowledge of any kind passes through us.

As do lies, distortions, half-truths, propaganda—

That is also correct. You may recall that in Eden there are no books, and in fact no media at all, because there is no need for them. Rather, the experience of God is unmediated: he’s right there ambling about in the garden in the cool of the day. In this mythic scenario one might say that the Serpent is the first journalist, as he mediates the breaking news that You Too Can Be a God, and the rest is history.

Literally, for looked at one way, the so-called fall of man may be seen as our entrance into history. At the very least, it means that we leave one mode of being behind and enter a new one. Some have argued that this is symbolic of the transition from orality to literacy, for what is literacy but the exchange of unmediated for mediated reality? It is also in a sense the transition from RH to LH, which is not bad in itself, in fact far from it. So long as we maintain a complementary dynamism between LH and RH — or map and territory, symbol and symbolized, abstract and concrete, primary and secondary reality — we are in for the ride of our lives. Problems only arise insofar as the LH eclipses the RH or bullies it into submission. If we’re not careful, the LH can become the anthropic snake in the cosmic garden.

Which is reminiscent of Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, a more popular version of his neuropsychiatric theories discussed in Book II. To extend our analogy, the LH is the journalist who mediates the primary reality experienced by the RH. Which is fine, so long as we are dealing with an honest and humble journalist devoted to getting the whole story, and getting it right. But what happens when we enter a post-journalistic age full of rage bait, confirmation bias, narcissistic seduction, digital tribalism, fake news, viral plagues, and irony-free ideological fairy tales? Then it is as if the RH is subject to the the biases and propaganda spun by the LH. We are then enclosed in various ideological matrices or silos, from scientism at one end to religionism at the other. Here, even ideological opposites share the common plight of auto-confinement to the leftorium.

Note that our only meaning-full freedom is located in the vertical, since by definition it transcends horizontal enclosure. And one place this freedom manifests is in the space between symbol and symbolized, or again, in the anthropic medium between Cosmos and Theos. LH capture essentially freezes and kills this living, evolving, and ever-deepening link between man and world, in which case we are well and truly f—

Watch the profanity.

Note that with properly functioning bilateral hemispheres, the Anthropos not only discovers the Cosmos but discovers a Cosmos within the Cosmos, and we are that Cosmos. In other words, we are situated in a Möbius reality in which the outside is in and the inside out, in that ever-deepening or ascending spiral just mentioned. Thus the “inward turn” of LH literacy facilitated the upward turn into O, so long as we don’t conflate the spirit with the letter and enclose ourselves in a pneumatically desiccated and braindead letteralism.

Note that there is always a fine line between the media and mediated. Just as in any other intellectual endeavor, the former can never, under any circumstances, enclose the latter. Rather, there’s always more to the story, since reality is more than any story we tell of it. If we are not careful, then what mediates our world can become our world, and then we’re really f—

You heard me.

∞

A brief review: back in Books I and II we discussed Livi’s five primary evidences that constitute common sense, beginning with CS1, “the existence and of the continual becoming of many ‘things,’ identifiable in their identity (differentiable one from another) and in their relative permanence in being from the moment they appear to the moment they disappear…”

So, the first thing a human being recognizes is distinct and identifiable things that come and go, not excluding us.

Stuff happens.

Nor does it ever stop. The second element of common sense is “The evidence of the I as subject” — the relational subject who knows about and can — supposing literacy — reflect upon, all the stuff coming and going.

Although these are seemingly modest assertions, they are at least “endowed with the most absolute certainty: what is affirmed in these [and the three other CS] judgments is necessarily held as true by all.” In other words, “no one is able to think the contrary of what those judgements affirm as absolutely true.”

For example, in order to deny what was just referenced above, one must first recognize them. Likewise, it would require a self in order to deny the self. Moreover, to whom is one addressing the denials? Other selves — which is our third evidence constituting common sense, i.e., intersubjectivity. And if we ought to be honest in our dealings with these others, then we’ve arrived at evidence #4, freedom and responsibility.

Again, the non-truth of these assertions of common sense is absolutely unthinkable. For example, with regard to CS1, “It is not thinkable that the world does not exist as an ordered whole of entities in movement [i.e., change].” Look around and just try to think otherwise. Likewise CS2: just try thinking that your thinking self does not exist, or that you are not thinking. Nor can you think that other subjects don’t exist (CS3). For example, if you’re reading this, you not only know that it came from another mind, but that you understand this other mind. Indeed, if you deny intersubjectivity, to whom are you even denying it? And although it is commonplace for our tenured apes to deny the existence of free will and its attendant responsibilities, it too is unthinkable, because thought itself is the quintessence of freedom. Besides, to comprehend necessity — for example, mathematics — is to have transcended it. We explain math, while math can never explain us.

Having said all this, is CS5 — God, or something like it — a wild leap or but a logical first and last step?

A leap into the wild Godhead?

Why not? For Livi, God’s nonexistence is actually unthinkable, for you, I, or anyone else, this being the conceptually incoherent idea “that there does not exist a First Cause of the world” — the “undeniable evidence of God as invisible Foundation of all that is visible.”

So, atheism is actually unthinkable?

Only if you try to think it through, and supposing you know what thought is — where it comes from and to what (and to whom) it is ordered. Which brings to mind another gold-plated aphorism: Genuine atheism is to man’s reason what the ten-thousand-sided polygon is to his imagination.

It cannot be imagined, similar to how the reality disclosed by quantum physics literally cannot be imagined. Supposing you have a picture of a wave-particle — or wavicle — in your head, the picture is wrong.

For Dávila, The atheist devotes himself not so much to proving that God does not exist, as forbidding him to exist. He forbids God to exist by enclosing himself an imaginary LH metaphysic in which it is actually possible for God not to exist.

But no God, no science. There exist metaphysical necessities for the possibility of science, in the absence of which science itself becomes literally unthinkable.

Thus we know there is a God of science, whether implicit explicit. But can there be a science of God? We believe so. It is called cosmotheandrism.