Book II: Anthropos

The one who is the riddle is trying to solve the riddle. –Rabbi Lawrence Kushner

If man were to be classified according to his psychological instead of mainly morphological traits, man would have to be considered a separate phylum or even kingdom. –Theodosius Dobzhansky

[L]ife poses the most serious kinds of challenges to physics itself.... More specifically, the expectation that phenomena of life or mind could be assimilated directly into physics as merely a minor technical bubble, of no conceptual significance, was mistaken. –Robert Rosen

The person is ultimately the key to why there is anything at all and not rather nothing. –Norris Clarke

∞

How to begin... How about this: riverrun, past Adam and evolution, from swerve of space to twist of time, brings us by an immelodious ruckus of anthropulation…

Worst. Opening. Ever.

Let’s reset. When last we spoke in Book I, we had completed our description of the cosmic venue. It is now time to move on to the fella I want to tell you about in Book II, fella by the name of Homo sapiens sapiens, the anthropic actor who struts onto the cosmic stage some 300,000 years ago, but only begins fretting about it long afterwards.

We say this because there’s a lot of dead time in the script until as recently as 50,000 years ago, with what is called the Upper Paleolithic Revolution or “Great Leap Forward,” when we see a sudden explosion in cultural complexity, including more sophisticated tools and social structures, new technologies such as seafaring and food storage, musical instruments and magnificent cave paintings, and obvious evidence of abstract thought and greater self-awareness, all laying the foundation for the later emergence of complex civilizations. Only with this cultural Big Bang do we see behaviorally modern humans as opposed to merely anatomically correct ones. It is as if we possessed the anthropic form but not yet the human substance, then, boom! Here Comes Everybody, ready to rumble.

I wonder what happened. Some kind of inciting incident in the plot?

Yes, why the lag? There are numerous theories for why these drastic changes came about. For 80% of its time on earth the Anthropos is still a quasi-animal, and then suddenly unambiguously human. These unfortunate predecessors don’t seem to be human in the true sense of the word, e.g., Homo habilis (2.5 mya) and Homo erectus (1.9 mya). During all that time, pretty much the best they could come up with was the hand axe, which is to say, a sharpened rock. No offense… I mean you have to start somewhere, but how do our original Finnegans wake from being a quhare soort of a mahan slaking nuncheon out of some thing’s brain pan to someone a bitskin more wiseable?

In cosmic terms, the intermission between Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago and Homo sapiens sapiens 50,000 years ago is quite brief, but the subsequent act is of infinite consequence. For it is at once an exterior explosion of cultural artifacts mirroring an interior implosion into a subjective space stuffed with an unlimited supply of them. In this regard it is much like the scene in the film 2001, when a bone aimed at someone’s head transforms into a starship headed for Jupiter

Could there be a genetic explanation for this astoneaging leap from archaic flintknappers chipping stones, to Wilma Flintstone shopping at the Safestone? For the discontinuous leap from horizontal subsistence to transcendence and verticality? Is there a gene for escaping genetic determinism, as it were? Or could it be due to a top-down vertical ingression, like the in-breathing of an intensive whosit into an extensive whatchamacallit?

In any event, the Anthropos rushes on stage full of questions about everything, including himself: truly, we are Homo quaerens.

You’re queer ‘uns alright.

Yes, because we awaken to an inexhaustibly intelligible Cosmos, so there is always more to be known. As per Gödel, although there are limits to rational knowledge, this is not to say there is no knowledge of the Limitless. Thus we will never run out of questions, and I wonder why?

Why questions?

Yes, why why? Questioning is a two-way process: on the one hand, we interrogate nature in order to seek answers. On the other hand, nature interrogates us, as if to say: You sure about that? In other words, reality is always a critique of our models of reality. I don’t always agree with Schopenhauer, but he’s not wrong in affirming that “Subjects and objects are able to exist only as correlates of each other.” This famously sourkraut essentially argued that the anthropic subject provides the only direct and immediate access to the inner nature of the Cosmos. There is the object-world we experience through our senses, the world of phenomena, always complemented by the interior experience of the human subject, which he unfortunately reduced to pure impersonal will.

In reality, we ourselves are the gateway to the noumenon, to the fundamental reality of the Cosmos. It is through this interior window of the anthropic subject that the Cosmos itself is unveiled. For we are not separate from or exterior to the world, but rather, the most adequate exemplification of its ultimate character. We are the most promising lead for why there is a Cosmos to begin with, the answer to the question of how and why subjectivity could ever arise in a purely objective reality – for how an inside has gotten inside the universe.

Promising lead, eh? Let’s get the boys down at the Crime Lab right on it.

You’re not listening: how does this interiority gather itself into the concentrated and organized form of an individual self, each one being unique? One’s cosmo-anthropology must therefore make room for this notion of “subjective uniqueness.” In what kind of Cosmos can such one-of-one weirdities as you and I occur? The short answer is in a personal Cosmos. We’ll expand upon this as we proceed, but if we start with a foundation of person rather than matter (our ultimate Axiom), a lot of things begin to make sense -- including matter. For surely matter cannot make sense of itself.

As we saw in Book I, the Cosmos at once points to a transcendent source and to immanent minds that are reflections of this source. We are the message and messengers of something transcending both. For the intelligence of man is potentially total, “and this totality is explained only by a transcendent reality to which the intelligence is proportioned” (Schuon).

There is the Cosmos, the total order of interacting objects, events, and processes; and there is the Anthropos, the most astonishing and unexpected fact within this cosmic order. Both are in need of explanation, but perhaps the same principle accounts for each. Looked at this way, matter cannot “contain” the Cosmos — let alone Anthropos — because it is the contained.

Moreover – and this should be soph-evident – the fact of the Anthropos is prior to philosophy, such that we always escape any philosophy we put forth. In the words of Berdyaev, “Man always precedes philosophy” and “is the prerequisite of all philosophic knowledge.” Thus one cannot derive or deduce man from science or philosophy, rather, the Anthropos is the condition through which these activities are possible, while truth is the necessary condition without which they are impossible. Truth requires the Anthropos to discover and communicate it, but truth does not depend on us in order to be true.

This is obviously the case in science, which can never enclose the Anthropos in one or another of its disciplines or departments. For example, – take my word for it – a psychologist who is only a psychologist isn’t even that. As Berdyaev explains, “The knowledge of man rests upon the supposition that man is cosmic in his nature, that he is the centre of being. Man existing as a closed-off individual would have no means of knowing the universe.” Thus “In his essence man is a break in the world of nature” who “cannot be contained within it.” While the Anthropos is the most consequential fact in the Cosmos, he cannot be reduced to a fact of the Cosmos. In other words, the Anthropos cannot be understood as but one of the objects understood by the Anthropos, otherwise we willfully enclose ourselves in a meaningless absurcularity, which is to say, a bad finite.

Here we agree with philosopher Tom Cheetham, who writes of an “an anthropo-cosmology so grand in its conception, so all-encompassing in its vision that little in modern thought can rival it.” Or, to be exact, nothing can rival it – except of course cosmotheandrism – because all of the alternatives are either intellectually or spiritually crippling, and usually both, for a merely “scientific or rationalistic context for the events of the soul is insufficient at best and damaging at worst” (ibid.).

Why damaging? Because such intellectual folk remedies begin with the “implicit presumption that the prison in which the soul is trapped is the whole of reality.” In other words, they -- by which I mean our competitors -- first place us in a prison and then pretend to sell us the key. But in reality these are just fellow prisoners with their own dreams and delusions of escape.

Thus, philosophers wonder about the nature of the prison, while artists decorate its walls and scientists study the composition of its bars. Medicine secures a long life in prison, while the conventionally religious try to pray them bars away. But this purely material Cosmos has a floor and a perimeter, but no roof or doors, so stop banging your head against the walls. For Cheetham, “persons, even finite, limited ones, through their likeness to the Divinity are not things at all,” but rather, “unending determinations of the Plenitude of Being.” And it is through this vertical attractor that the Anthropos “falls upward in an unending series of theophanies” -- which is why, in this ascending spiral, the world is simultaneously the Same As It Ever Was and Different From How It Has Ever Been. In other words, novelty is a function of being and becoming, or of the play of Absolute and Infinite (Axiom 2).

One might say that the soul of the world resides in the world of the soul. “Outside” the latter, the so-called exterior world is reduced to a mere husk: literal, quantitative, and flat, with neither depth nor interiority. Thus the world becomes epistemologically clear at the price of its ontological closure. More problematically, the world (or rather our idea of the world) becomes an idol instead of an icon; we look at the former but through the latter. The chimpanzee manichees who ridicule the second Commandment are simply bereft of insight into their own idolatry.

Cosmotheandrism runs counter to the cartesian metaphysic of modernity, which starts by severing knowledge from being, and then superimposing the former on the latter, thus reducing our hyperdimensional cosmic pneumagraph to a simplistic two-dimensional map they call reality. Then, what is is conflated with what can unambiguously be said about it, such that quantity is elevated over quality and the interior horizon is squeezed out of the equation entirely. The result is the sprawling but tedious Kognitive Kansas of the ignorantia, which permits any movement except up.

Importantly, it not only permits downward flight, but truly requires it, which is precisely how these brute factsimians make a monkey of man, or worse, an imbecile. Indeed, according to philosopher Georges Bernanos, “the intellectual is so frequently an imbecile that we should always take him to be such until he has proved to us the contrary” (in Cheetham). This all-too-common type of tenured mediocrity or hired pundit is “particularly at home in the modern world of technology and numbers,” because “in such a world he can climb to a very high position without giving away his half-culture.” He is “informed about everything and hence condemned to understand nothing.”

You sound like some embittered reactionary who thinks the premodern world was some kind of paradise.

You know better than to say that. Rather, we just want to properly situate the miracle of science, which is much more than mere science, ultimately because being is always already more than being. In short, being is beyond being, hence its endless fruitfulness. In his Mind, Value, and Cosmos, Andrew Davis agrees that we should “not simply see ourselves and our experiences as separate from or outside the universe, but, rather, as shocking exemplifications (in some sense) of its nature and character.” Thus, “human existence and experience is a clue to the goings-on of the universe as a whole -- its reason, nature, and character…” Therefore, “Whatever this bizarre and beautiful universe is up to, we are part of it and it is part of us. Such a conviction, in fact may be the first step in mapping the nature of ultimacy.”

“Both in its ultimate origin and in its final consummation,” writes Ward,” the physical universe points beyond itself to a cosmic Mind that is its origin, basis, and destiny,” and it is toward that destiny that we will proceed with an open mind as we ascend to Book III, Theos.

But first we must deal with what is known of and by the Anthropos.

In Conclusion...

Bottom line: there is no naturalistic way to get from the restricted intelligence of animals to the open and unrestricted intelligence of the Anthropos, for again, nature is already supra-natural. Science surely requires faith, but it is hardly irrational, rather, supra-rational, which is to say “faith that the human mind is something more than a product of natural selection and is actually made to know the truth of things…” (Betz). Which “undermines every notion of the closed universe of modern science, however quantitatively infinite.... For the moment we see that being cannot contain itself but points analogically beyond itself, all immanence is exploded” (ibid.).

Speaking of explosions, the anthropic intellect is like another big bang, only this time toward the source of the first one. If the first bang was an expansion outward into exteriority, multiplicity, and physical space-time, the Anthropos is an inward and upward bang into interiority, unity, and meaning. And again, last in execution is first in intention.

Cooking the Books: Postmodern Clowns and Reductive Jokers

Nearly every idea is an overdrawn check that circulates until it is presented for payment. –Dávila

Before banging off into Book II, let us recall that truth presupposes a relationship between two very different orders, on the one hand, the intellect, on the other, intelligible being. But in reality there must always be three, since relationship itself is equally primordial. Time out for Poetry Corner:

Who is the third who walks always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you.

Who is that masked pandit? The one gliding along with you wrapt in the fashionable mantle — the mysterious third which joins every two? Just try communicating anything about anything without a relationship between words and things or words and other minds, and you will find that it cannot actually be done. Therefore, we’ve already eliminated one possibility.

I suppose it’s a question of banking. Everyone spends money with the implicit faith that it is a symbol for actual wealth that has to exist somewhere. Of course, when the money detaches from real wealth we have inflation, but it’s the same with philosophy. When words are detached from reality, we have postmodernism, which is to say, an intellectual hyperinflation caused by torrents of words with no actual value.

Philosopher George Steiner wrote that “It is this break of the covenant between word and world which constitutes one of the very few revolutions of spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself.” He maintained that until the late 19th century, “even the most radical of skeptics remained committed to language, to a belief in intelligibility.”

Interesting words there, covenant and commitment, adverting to something sacred, almost like a marriage.

Almost?

Let’s call it a marriage of mind and world, or speech and thing, or Cosmos and Anthropos. Whatever it is, it is such a valued property that it is literally invaluable, since without it there is nothing to tie the world together. But postmodern nihilists have essentially stolen the Cosmic Area Rug by positing an absolute – note the word – fissure between words and the objects and events they are supposed to represent, with no compensation in return.

They problematize everything!

But isn’t reality a difficult enough problem without making it an impossible one? For if these nihilists were correct, we could no longer even say that reality is, much less what it is. These linguistic larcenists decree that meaning itself is over the line, so cosmotheandrism would be construed as a kind of tyrannical absolutism, even though they are the ones who place an absolute limit on what we can know. For them, speech is purely rhetorical and no longer representational, and therefore not about reality, only about itself. Thus, it is ultimately about nothing at all.

I’m old enough to remember when reality was the arbiter of speech. Now speech is the arbiter of a reality that is ruled out of bounds.

Speak for yourself!

You can’t do that either, because the author no longer speaks the language, rather language speaks the author. Gone is the logosphere, because that is maligned as a totalizing prison instead of the means out of it. Speech itself is bankrupt, rendering any metaphysical enterprise utterly impossible.

At antipodes to postmodernism are reductive thinkers who pretend to own the intellectual treasury but are counterfeiters issuing metaphysical funny money that is not backed by the full faith and credit of the First Bank of Reality. These scammers pass off a worldview using a currency (e.g., genetics and physical law) that only has value because the intellect authorized it in the first place.

I’m just gonna find a cash machine.

It’s not as simple as that, because the most important principles are what back the money to begin with. It is like putting a price on value itself and then selling it for something less valuable. You’re ultimately pretending it can be meaningful to exchange meaning for meaninglessness.

For example, the reductionist might exchange your one and only body for the chemical elements of which it is composed, which comes to about ten dollars or less. Of course, you could fetch $100,000 for a kidney, and much more than that for your heart. In fact, the value of a human body for the purpose – note the word – of transplant and tissue donation comes to a cool $5,000,000.

What about the value of your mind? Well, you can take it to the neurology department in exchange for a brain, but that is a rather Faustian bargain. In fact, the Neurology Savings & Loan can only issue you a check for consciousness that can’t be cashed back into its reality. Like the government, they owe money all over town, and always want more, but has it ever occurred to you that the promissory note says they are certain about naturalism or eliminativism, but when you ask for the gold backing – the proof that consciousness is just matter by another name – the check bounces? The whole thing stinks to high heaven.

Where’s the gold?! It’s all a goddamn fake.

Yes, it reveals the ultimate intellectual liquidity crisis for the secular worldview. Nor are these victimless intellectual crimes, rather it affects us all. Here we are, standing at the teller window attempting to make a withdrawal, only to find out that they practice a fractional reserve scheme with no baksheesh on hand to pay us what we’re owed – which is to say, an explanation of how anyone can even be standing in line at the Eliminativist Credit Union. Turns out they’ve lent huge sums of scientistic currency to the public, but have only a handful of physicalist pennies in the vault to back up the existence of the very customers who are not supposed to exist. The check bounces the moment they try to account for the immaterial mind of the physicist instead of just the material physics.

In short, they’ve run up a sizable debt spending conscious capital they haven’t earned to pay for a physicalist lifestyle no one can actually afford. To strain the metaphor another way, the numbers just don’t add up to the possibility of understanding them. To paraphrase Steiner, if all of the religious loans made to science were called in at once, there would be no science left standing. Most notably, science cannot operate without the principles of transcendent truth and the intellect capable of knowing it.

I think a metaphysical audit is in order for this Ponzi scheme. Somebody needs to call the Intellectual Revenue Service. Show us the books!

Yes, the fraud is indeed simple: promissory materialism takes the full value of conscious experience and deposits it into their vault. Then they lend it back to us in the form of biochemical or neurological explanations. But just try to convert that paper back into the actual experience of being alive, and they start to look suspiciously nervous. Turns out they simply don’t have the bones or clams or whatever you call them to account for you or for a world you can actually live in. They’ve already spent all the money, meanwhile issuing a perpetual IOU.

Time to foreclose on these fraudsters. They can’t balance the books. I suggest a cosmotheandric citizen’s arrest to stop these people before they rip off another generation!

I’m hoping that won’t be necessary. Why don’t we just write another book that will help the Anthropos from being defrauded in the first place by showing what he really is? For if you know who you are, no one can sell you a bill of goods claiming you’re something you’re not — for example, a wet bag of chemicals, or a transient and epiphenomenal nonentity, or a headful of ideas that are driving you insane about a reality you can never know, or an annoying questioner with no answer.

For to reduce the higher to the lower is much like trying to live inside your bank account, or to avoid starvation by eating money. And in the case of deconstruction, it is the mind trying to survive by eating itself.

Charles DeKoninck essentially deconstructs deconstruction in affirming that “It is only in human understanding that the cosmos becomes a universe in the full sense.” In other words, the end of the causal chain cannot be found in the horizontal iterations of mindless matter, but in our vertical understanding of the Cosmos. Thus, in our subsequent installment we will explain how and why it is only in cosmotheandric understanding that we become human in the full sense.

I guess we can close the file on this one.

And open a file on the enigmatic character who is mixed up in this murky cosmotheandric business. It’s time to put the Anthropos under the lights and find out what he knows.

And what is known about him.

Which poses an interesting dilemma, because the suspect we want to interrogate is the very one who is conducting the interrogation.

A conflict of interest?

It certainly could be, unless our witness can view himself objectively from a transcendent position and give us some promising leads. For we are essentially trying to act as our own private snoop – to look at the Anthropos while looking through the Anthropos, so isn’t our best composite sketch going to be a bit sketchy?

The only way out of this self-referential loop would be if we could both enter into and rise above the subject, like the omniscient narrator of a novel. How could this be possible unless, as Dobzhansky says, “biological evolution has transcended itself in the human ‘revolution,’” such that “A new level or dimension has been reached”? Which implies that biocosmic evolution has fomented an anthropic revolution in which we are the unlikely participants. As a result of this unprecedented event, a trans-dimensional subjective space is suddenly refracted through the unlikely lens of a primate brain – an infinite landscape unmappable by science and unexplainable by natural selection.

Well, that about wraps her all up for now…