No Telos, No Problem... For Awhile

Continuing with yesterday’s post on the nature of objectivity, it does not and cannot exist outside the subject, but that doesn’t render it merely subjective. You might be tempted to imagine that, prior to the emergence of life some 4 billion years ago, there was nothing but objects in the universe.

Which is clearly impossible, since there were no subjects to perceive and experience them. 

Rather, the emergence of life ultimately represented a kind of “inward turn” from pure exteriority to the beginnings of interiority as such (leaving aside the question of the divine Subject who cannot not be). 

In an organism, matter turns back upon itself, creating a loop that conserves itself by importing energy and information from the environment while dissipating energy into it. There is now a tension between inside and outside. You will have noticed that to live is to live in and with this tension. 

My point is that this is a fractal cosmos, so the same process recurs at every level of the biosphere, becoming more complex and interrelated along the way. 

Something similar occurs on the human plane, only vertically and immaterially, since self-consciousness is a looping-back of consciousness upon itself, precisely; and it is this immaterial looping-back of the subject upon itself that creates the possibility of objectivity. 

We -- that is to say, human beings -- aren’t always very good at this, to put it mildly. Viewed in a larger cosmic context, it happened just yesterday, so it is very much a work in progress. In fact, not only is it a w. i. p., but it must be recapitulated in every little human being who comes into the world, and there are forces conspiring from the get-go to pull the child back into the vortex of subjectivity. 

Yesterday we alluded to the field of developmental psychology, but lucky for you, showed great self-restraint in suppressing the impulse to show off our vast erudition. However, we will say this: human development either has a telos, or it hasn’t. Just be consistent: if it has no telos, then there is no point to existence, nor is anyone normal or abnormal, mature or immature, achievers or eight year olds, dude.

I will now show even greater self-restraint in eschewing the temptation to explain how convenient it is for the left to embrace a metaphysic that reframes abnormality as normal. 

Back to the question of whether there is a telos to human development. In Insight, Lonergan describes a three-part sequence to cognition. 

It’s not easy to compress 800 pages into single post, but, paradoxically, there are things a lazy man can do that an obsessive pedant cannot do, and one of them is get to the point. Lonergan is a good man, and thorough. An Achiever, even. But if there’s one thing I learned in ‘Nam, it's that if the explanation gets too complex, something always goes wrong. People will doze off the moment you break out a sentence such as

From the viewpoint of the logical ideal, every term has one and only one precise meaning, every relation of every term to every other term is set down in an unequivocal proposition, the totality of propositions is neatly divided into primitive and derived, the derived may all be obtained by the rules of inference from a minimum number of primitive propositions, no proposition contradicts any other, and finally the employment of the principle of the excluded middle does not introduce undefined or false suppositions, as does the question, Have you or have you not stopped beating your wife? (Lonergan).

My dear reader, you will never know the suffering I have endured to bring these crisp and concise posts to you, each one fortified by a guffaw-HA! experience or two. 

So, let’s summarize the three stages of knowing something to be objectively true: first there is the registration of sense data, which we share with the other animals. It discloses a world of “biological extroversion” about which only man not only has a question or two, but never stops questioning. 

In other words, this reflection is literally a re-flection, a looping-back upon the data of the senses, which is where the insight occurs; here again, this is a literal in-sight, or “seeing within.” 

And what do we see? To simplify, we see a concept, e.g., treeness in the tree or dogginess in the dog. 

After the concept comes the judgment, which always comes down to: really? Does it or does it not really exist? So there is data, there are reflections (questions), and there are judgments: Is it? Followed by It is or It is not. 

How simple is that?

Now, back to the telos of human development. I don’t know about you, but I want my child to have good judgment. That would be the point. And if you don’t believe me, try raising a child with poor judgment and see how that works out. That’s when you’ll find out the hard way what the point was.

My son is, of course -- like all of us -- a work in progress. He’s only 17. But when I compare his judgment to the judgment I possessed at age 17, it is... sobering, which, come to think of it, is the one thing I wanted to avoid at age 17, both literally and figuratively. 

For it seems that my friends and I had a single purpose -- or anti-telos -- and that purpose was to extend adolescence and avoid adult responsibility for as long as possible and by any means necessary, which is to say, no matter how much beer was required.

I want to say that the telos of human development eventually becomes conspicuous in light of its absence, and that what begins as fun ends up looking pathetic. 

I was lucky, in that I recovered my telos relatively quickly. But in the meantime, our culture may well not survive its rejection of the human telos, because with it goes maturity, judgment, prudence, responsibility, objectivity -- in a word, reality. 

Aphorisms (which incidentally touch on why the left will always have a lock on the Youth Vote, and why they would reduce voting age to 12 if they could):

To praise youth is to forget our former idiocy.

Young people believe that youth is a destination, when it is merely a provincial bus stop.

Whoever fights against the process of aging merely ages without ever maturing.