This is the next section of Book I of The Cosmotheandric Trilogy: The Cosmos. I don’t know what to do about the length of these posts. I realize there are other blogs to read and podcasts to hear, and you don’t have all day. If you want to just get to the bottom line, I recommend reading the half-dozen or so paragraphs at the end:
Such metaphysical non-starters as the denial of noncontradiction [discussed in yesterday’s post] constitute the Index of Forbidden Ideas, as they begin with unjustifiable assumptions and end in contradiction and absurdity. Our list is not intended to be complete or exhaustive, rather, mostly to have a little fun busting the balls of our rivals.
Each of them will be further addressed throughout, but just about any -ism you can name makes the list, from the cancer of subjectivism to the tyranny of relativism to the vacuity of emotivism. Frankly, any -ism you can name imprisons the Anthropos within one of his own constructs, and how stupid is that? Why would you build your own intellectual prison and then condemn yourself to a life sentence within it?
Does the phrase “poisoning the well” mean anything to you?
Yes, but cosmotheandrism is the antidote to the poison, for every other -ism violates one or more of our Axioms, especially numbers 3 (openness) and 9 (the One Free Miracle required for them to get off the ground and out of their absurcular goround).
Deconstruction goes big and denies Axiom 1 (the certitude of objective truth), while scientism especially denies Axioms 2 (openness to transcendence) and 5 (verticality). Most traditional theologies violate Axioms 3 (primordial complementarity in the Theos) and 8 (the un-word), thus habitually reducing the Theos to human terms and confusing theological language with that to which it points. This is quintessentially true of religious fundamentalism and fideism, which veritably oust the intellect from the domain of religion. Which is grossly unfair to the intelligent, for In clumsy hands theology becomes the art of making mystery ridiculous.
Empiricism forgets all about Axiom 4, relational interiority. Most any ideology conflates ultimate and ultimacy (Axiom 6), while atheism is founded on the denial of numerous Axioms, especially 7, theomorphism. The denial of teleology contravenes Axiom 8, the ascending spiral of dynamic becoming, while logical atomism is the denial of Axiom 11, substance-in-relation.
Psychologism reduces objective metaphysical or logical truths to mere products of human psychology or evolutionary biology, while conveniently making exceptions for the person positing them. Utilitarianism reduces the Anthropos to a tool for the sake of some unemployable theater kid’s idea of the common good, such that man is no longer vertically ordered to the transcendent pole of being.
The most thoroughly destructive of forbidden ideas is the irrational and self-contradictory assertion that our thoughts cannot disclose reality, so that truth is therefore inaccessible to us. Is this true? If so, it is false. More generally, there is a lived contradiction between affirming theoretically that the cosmos is unintelligible and continuing to behave as if it were. If we cannot know reality, then please be consistent and start acting that way, like any other histrionic theater kid.
Which is what makes deconstruction not just wrong but a fatal mind virus. If every truth is just a power relation in disguise, then I suggest we deploy the power of truth to deconstruct these nihilistic cultists and send them packing, for deconstruction allows a talentless imbecile to destroy in a single vacuous paper what it took millennia to construct. But as Dávila says, There has not been an illustrious corpse that some cretin at some point did not disdain.
Another blacklisted idea is the existentialist notion that there is no such thing as human nature. But human nature includes the possibility of denying its own existence. Dogs cannot deny their canine nature, so how do we get to deny ours? Whence this transcendental escape from nature unless it is in the nature of the Anthropos to transcend ourselves? My dog cannot resist a treat, but I do so every day because I am a type I diabetic. If I didn’t resist treats, I would have been dead or worse a long time ago.
Relativism is forbidden because – you will have noticed – it simply sneaks in its own absolute through the back door (i.e., the performative contradiction of absolute relativism). In reality, to say relative is to say absolute, and vice versa. Can it be absolutely true that nothing but the relatively true exists? One might just as well say that there is no such thing as language.
Subjectivism? Verboten! Like absolute and relative, subject and object constitute an irreducible primordial complementarity. Are there objects? Of course. Who says? A subject to whom the object reveals its intelligibility. Try as you might, you cannot escape from this complementarity without reducing yourself to a nobody who knows nothing or exalting yourself into a somebody who thinks he knows everything. By definition, only a human subject can be objective.
Nominalism is the unacknowledged philosophical grandpappy of most every modern error on the list, for it is the denial of essences, so universal concepts are just arbitrary names we invent rather than real structures of Being. If nominalism is true, then there is no such thing as the Anthropos, only individual units that we arbitrarily group together. It necessarily obliterates the link between intelligence and intelligibility, leaving us in a fragmented cosmos of discrete particulars. Science itself could never function under such constraints, since there can be no science of the utterly unique.
Some -isms are scarcely worth the trouble of refuting, such as historicism, which essentially ties truth to the calendar, so it is only as good as its expiration date. It assumes that human consciousness is entirely trapped inside the moving train of history, unable to look out the window at the permanent truths of the vertical landscape. If historicism is correct, then our greatest thinkers are just museum pieces of cultural anthropology. But like all other ideologies, it claims its own One Free Miracle, in that it pretends to sit on an ahistorical perch while declaring that everyone else is confined to history.
Determinism? Its very assertion is its denial, because if it is true it is false. Do determinism and necessity exist? Certainly. But knowledge of necessity is itself a form of freedom, or we couldn’t know it. In truth, both Anthropos and Cosmos are woven of determinism and indeterminism, of necessity and freedom, of predictability and novelty, of constraint and creativity.
Iron law and ironic surprise.
Not one of your better ones, but we’ll allow it. Dávila has a better quip: To please the determinist we say that there is no action without a cause. To annoy him we say that there is no cause without an action, the deeper point being that a person is someone capable of freely initiating an action from within.
I’m a little suspicious. These are pretty flippant dismissals of controverted philosophical positions.
I am aware of that. This is just a breezy prelude, not a scholarly evisceration. The obiectio of these non-starters deserves a more thoroughgoing respondeo, which is Latin for beatdown. Don’t worry, there will be plenty of philosophical mayhem throughout.
But every single one of these -isms represents a way the modern mind constructs a false and simplistic clarity by isolating a single slice of reality and reifying it into the whole. They are all, in their own ways, petty fascist magistrates that police what the Anthropos is permitted to think, and thereby close off major sectors of reality.
It sounds like you’re saying everyone is wrong and everything is untrue except for cosmotheandrism, but how is this not just another -ism?
Because it is the cure for ism-ism, since it proposes to be a science of the whole. We will know we’ve located the Cosmic Area Rug when it accounts for everything while leaving nothing out – little things like the truth of reality and our ability to know it.
The problem, really, is ideology per se, which inevitably encloses reality in a more or less restricted idea about reality. From here it is but one small step to idolatry, or G3AOA.
∞
Properly understood, science is an unparalleled approach to unpacking the intelligibility of the world, only becoming the ideology of scientism when it pretends the scientific method is the only way to truth, and that anything not subject to science is unreal. So, kudos to Richard Feynman, who “learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
Which calls to mind the story of Lord Kelvin’s guided tour through an electrical appliance factory. After patiently listening to the foreman explaining the characteristics of electricity such as voltage, resistance, and what not, Lord Kelvin asked the man what electricity actually is. “The young man fell silent. The great scientist patted his back and said: ‘No matter, that is the only thing about electricity which you and I do not know’” (in Jaki).
Nor is it just electricity, for man has a name for pretty much anything and everything, and yet, doesn’t completely know what a damn thing is. What is matter? Congealed energy. Okay, but what is energy? Uncongealed matter. But what is the nature of the isness beneath this tautological business? Being surely is, but what is that?
Which goes to the enduring dispute between nominalists and realists, the former arguing that universals are simply names or labels we use to group similar individual things. But if there are no universals, how can we even say there exist nominalists? If nominalism is true and universals don’t exist, how can we use a universal term like “nominalist” to designate this category of misguided people?
They’re telling us the word “dog” doesn’t refer to dogs? Even a toddler knows that dogs exist, and that they aren’t binkies or toasters.
This is the very soul of common sense, for if we cannot know universals, then truly truly, we cannot claim to know anything -- anything beyond the raw perceptions furnished by the senses. Thus, nominalism is the principle of no principles, and therefore forbidden. It is not only the opposite of philosophy but its negation, for it redounds to a literal dis-integration of Cosmos and Anthropos, for the link between them is rendered null and void. No longer is there a discoverable objective order in the world, rather, only the one we impose on phenomena, like a self-enclosed darkness ordered to the dark. There are no real natures of things, rather, every thing is a unique instance of itself. The Beatles decompose into their constituent parts, and we know how that worked out.
No way in the world would John Lennon have permitted the Beatles to record Ebony and Ivory.
∞
In truth, the nominalist, like anyone else, must clearly recognize the existence of dogs in order to deny their real existence. A consistent nominalist (like an animal) would be incapable of recognizing universals to begin with, so the world would be sealed in unintelligibility. We would be barred entry into the realm of universals, from math, to the laws of physics, to animal species, thus rendering us less than human. If there are no real universals, our ability to think, reason, and make sense of the world collapses. A thoroughgoing nominalism that denies the very mental concepts of universals is a form of philosophical suicide.
Granted, there are nominalists who do not take this extreme position, but it is only because they wisely recognize the reductio absurdum it entails, similar to how a philosophical materialism that denies minds and their ability to posit and understand material reality can only be affirmed by an immaterial mind capable of understanding reality.
Similarly, if we know only our own mental constructs (a la Kant), how do we know this? In other words, wouldn’t we have to view our constructs from a position transcending them? If we were truly sealed in intracranial concepts, we would be like a fish who can know nothing about water, because there would be no transcendent position from which to view it. This again highlights the centrality of real transcendence, for how otherwise can a mind understand its own limitations or the nature of its own concepts if it cannot step outside of itself to observe them?
What is their major malfunction! Did mommy and daddy not show them enough attention when they were children?
Take it easy, Petey. No need to ad more hominem than is necessary. We are not taking sides, but rather assuming a middle position between them: not either/or but both/and. It’s a big Cosmos, so there’s plenty of room for both immanent matter and transcendent intellection. Human experience and understanding reside in the dynamic interplay between the poles of immanence and transcendence, and the intellect is the link between them.
The Anthropos is indeed the vertical bridge between absolute and relative, immanence and transcendence, time and eternity, subject and object, spirit and matter, Creator and creation, form and matter, etc., etc., etc. The Anthropos is a two-faced rascal, always looking in both directions at once. The human experience cannot be reduced to one side or the other, but abides in the dynamic tension between these fundamental complementarities. You can pretend to stuff language into a biological box, but the box itself is already made of the language it is trying to contain. Nor do we need to reach for transcendence, since it always reaches into us.
Which, in another context, reminds me of something John Coltrane once said about his improvisational style: I start in the middle and move in both directions at once.
Same.
∞
Now, what do these forbidden ideas share in common? Quite simply, each can be reduced to the denial of verticality, which is to say its collapse into horizontality and homogeneity -- or subject to object, essence to existence, form to matter, absolute to relative, quality to quantity, formal and final to material and efficient causes, etc. Each of the former terms is complementary to the latter, but of the two, one must be ontologically prior.
Huston Smith suggests that “The modern West is the first society to view the physical world as a closed system.” And if it is a closed system, then there is obviously no vertical escape hatch out of it such that we can comprehend it from outside or above. But with this one neat trick -- recognizing the open Cosmos and its vertical structure -- we eliminate a host of absurdities, aporias, scotomas, and intellectual nul de slacks that can never be resolved on their own level. Nor does this negate the horizontal, rather, complements it. It is simply the larger metaphysic in which physics and biology -- and all other disciplines -- are situated.
More generally, it is again always advisable to pay attention to what philosophers do before taking seriously what they say. And what they are doing – one hopes – is being open to truth and conveying it to other minds. In the words of Schindler, this is what “all the great thinkers have recognized as reason’s defining feature: an eros ordered to the ultimate, original [as in origin], and the comprehensive,” which is to say, the Absolute, the Ground, and the Totality. Thus, any closed philosophy of pure immanence must be self-refuting, because in knowing anything about the horizontal, we have transcended it.
One way to conceptualize verticality is to see that immanence and transcendence are perpendicular to one another, and we always partake of both. This is not a dualism, rather, a consequence of the principle of creation, which is but the doctrine of vertical causation writ large. But this encroaches on Book III, and we don’t want to yet make any important announcements about the Theos until then. Suffice it to say at this juncture that the Cosmos itself is open to something that is not the Cosmos. And the Anthropos, being the microcosmos, is likewise open to what transcends it, whatever this turns out to be. Again, let’s not call it deity, rather O.
This is not to say that things aren’t mysterious down here. Indeed, it is precisely why things are mysterious, i.e., simultaneously imbued with the glow of an incandescent intelligibility while enshrouded in a “higher darkness,” so to speak. This is why we can know so much while knowing so little: the circle of knowledge is always expanding, but this only means that the area of darkness beyond the circle grows with it.
Imagine a band of primitive humans at night surrounding a campfire, which only illuminates the immediate area. Over the past 50,000 years the fire has grown into science and its various disciplines that extend the reach of the light, but ideology of any kind – including scientism – pretends the area illuminated by the fire is all there is. But there is always more, because verticality shades off into the Infinite. Thus, to pretend that reality can be enclosed in science is to imagine that our little campfire not only illuminates the world but is the world. Thus spaketh the aphorist: He who understands the least is he who insists on understanding more than what can be understood.
So, titanic scientism isn’t unsinkable?
No, because science is always already meta-science, which is one of the implications of Gödel’s theorems -- that man qua man has access to a transcendental realm of unprovable (by science) truths. These truths are apprehended in a direct and unmediated way by the intellect which “sees” and understands, not by the reason that merely knows in a contingent and conditional manner.
One of the myths of our age is that heliocentrism and Darwinism have exiled man from the center of existence. But these doctrines could only be known by an intelligence that is itself central to the Cosmos, if viewed vertically.
Evolution, of course, takes time, but we are partly outside time, hence our access to timeless and universal truths that could not arise from below. But in jettisoning the infinitely larger Cosmos of which the horizontal world is but a comparative shadow, it is as if we are compressed or flattened from a three dimensional image onto a two dimensional plane.
Ouch. I hate when that happens.
And well you should. It hurts to have vital limbs amputated just so we can fit into someone else’s ideological bed.
The most complete explanation of the How will tell us nothing whatsoever about the Why. To even ask Why? is ultimately a vertical matter. Math is silent on the question of why there are mathematicians. As we have said, their very existence is wholly unreasonable, unless they are the entailment of a higher reason, a prolongation from the Logosphere. Even the Theos – supposing it exists – is certainly an impressive mathematician, but not only a mathematician.
Our only escape – or inscape, rather – is through the ceiling, never the floor. In order for science to function at all, it must borrow tools from the metaphysician’s toolbox, but without ever returning them. Science cannot use the scientific method to prove the scientific method is valid – that would constitute a circular argument that can never rise from the floor.
In other words, we can agree that empiricism discloses the floor of the Cosmos, but to even know of the floor we must assume it is intelligible, logical, mathematical, etc. And yet, this empirical reality cannot be a closed, recursive loop, because here we are, unpacking its intelligibility. If we were merely cogs in a deterministic, empirical clockwork, we would have no vantage point from which to observe the gears. The measurability of the world cannot be measured, let alone the measurer.
Obviously information is everywhere, from physics to chemistry to the genome to the immaterial laws governing the macrocosmos, and everything in between. And all of this information is intelligible to us, at every level, which I find... odd.
Can the mind that comprehends the world be reduced to one of the things it comprehends? Does it really make sense to reduce man to animal, animal to genes, genes to chemistry, and chemistry to physics? That’s one way for you to go about it, but like Plotinus, you can’t be there to understand it.
There’s a name for this: intellectual cluelesside. For the intellect is the very locus of intelligibility in the Cosmos, nor should you settle for anything less. And whatever else reality is, it is always more than we think it is, and you can take that to the bank, for being itself is beyond being.
Care to explain that one?
Not really, so I will allow Thomas Torrance to do so:
The universe that is steadily being disclosed to our various sciences is found to be characterized throughout time and space by an ascending gradient of meaning in richer and higher forms of order. Instead of levels of existence and reality being explained reductionistically from below in materialistic and mechanistic terms, the lower levels are found to be explained in terms of the higher, invisible, intangible levels of reality.
This goes to the openness, transcendence, and verticality that apply to the Cosmos as a whole and to everything within it. Not to mention everyone, for cosmotheandrism does not arbitrarily — and absurdly — exclude man from the universe. And not just our mere material presence, rather, it situates our immaterial knowing of the Cosmos
within the full process of its reality; it is the cosmos of created being in which the relation between knowing and being falls within being. Thus the knowing of being is to be acknowledged as an operation of being itself, for it is through being known that the structure of the universe manifests itself.
So, being includes the possibility of being-known, even while it can never be enclosed in the latter, since the Cosmos itself is open to what transcends it. As per Gödel, “no axiomatic system of ideas can have ultimate meaning if it is closed in upon itself,” rather, only in relation to a higher frame of reference.
