Intersubjective Meta-Anthropology

Forget about that last post. This one will express the same ideas, only more clearly. They're from a book called The Openness of Being, which had little to do with the subject under discussion until taking a surprising turn in chapter nine -- also called The Openness of Being. 

To review, we are considering the possibility... No, we're way past considering possibilities, rather, are insisting in the most bobnoxious terms that the Cosmos is personal, or that personhood is the ultimate category, bearing in mind that persons are irreducibly substance-in-relation, or, in a word, intersubjective.

And the intersubjectivity starts at the top: metaphysics is meta-anthropology. 

My mother is not here to ask, but probably my first word was something like Mama! Certainly it was my first thought. What it really signified was something like YOU! And therefore ME! Then I started thinking about the space in between, but that wasn't until about thirty years later. I'll spare you a pedantic disquisition on infant development, but just cut to the chase.  

Now, intersubjectivity is a deep mystery, except it's not a mystery at all. For not only is subjectivity unthinkable in the absence of intersubjectivity, the discovery of the (m)Other is developmentally prior to the discovery of the self. Remama? Sure you do.  

We come into the world plunged into a kind of undifferentiated subjectivity, which is analogous to the wavelike field of quantum physics. The ego or self or I is the "particle" that emerges from this field, but in truth, the fluid dialectic between particle and field, or self and ground, is our permanent condition. 

Neurologically speaking it is much like the dialectic between right (wavish) and left (particulate) cerebral hemispheres, or in physicist David Bohm's terms, implicate and explicate orders, respectively.  

Even this post, if we're lucky, will be a crystallization of that dialectic -- similar to the way a dream is the explicate crystallization of implicate subjectivity. We never run out of posts for the same reason we will never run short of dreams. Except to stipulate that 

In other words, free will + implicate creativity = explicate post. Or song, poem, painting, whatever.  

At this point I will hand the wheel of the cosmic bus over to Mascall, and comment along the way like a slackseat driver:

The most terrible example of the incapsulated condition occurs on the human level, if man loses his openness not only to his fellow men but also to God. 

Which is simply say that man is an open system, both horizontally, to other subjects, and vertically, to O, the transcendent ground of subjectivity.

The special feature is that man, as rational and personal being, is capable of actualising his openness to a rational and personal God in a way that is impossible to beings devoid of rational personality.  

Which is to say that man is rational because relational and personal; infrapersonal beings do not reason. Which is not to say they are unreasonable per se, since their behavior makes sense in the context of instinct and environment. But they cannot think about their rational instincts, but rather, are enclosed within them. Conversely, man always transcends any attempt to enclose him in immanence.

Now, the intercourse of personal beings, even on the finite and created level, is characteristically one of conversation, of the mutual communication of thought and knowledge; this is why language plays such an important part in human society.

To con-verse means to "flow together," as you and I are doing at the moment. Which makes our communication -- to the extent it is successful -- deeply interpersonal and intersubjective, interior-to-interior. 

Just as the human baby comes into the world in a condition of neurological immaturity, it turns out that this "incompleteness" is actually our permanent state. Show me a "complete person" and I'll show you a saint or a dead man. Or a president, but that would take us far afraud.

[M]an, as a creature, is fundamentally open to God and capable of receiving fresh and unpredictable influxes of God's creative activity...

Which is to say, O and (↓). 

God and man are personal beings and therefore can enter into the intimacy of self-communication and mutual possession that is proper to persons.

Or not. For

God allows man to raise barricades against the invasion of grace.   

 A barricade at our northern border, so to speak. 

Supernature simply means nature supernaturalised by grace, and the possibility of this supernaturalisation lies in the openness of nature to God.... For a nature which is open in the Christian sense, supernaturalisation means expansion, development, perfection, a realization of hitherto unsuspected potentialities, a new infusion of the creative activity of God.

Well, good. This is different from mere (explicate) "knowledge of God," but rather, is knowing God: "And knowing God is sharing in God's life." God takes the initiative, but it is up to us to cooperate with it:

what makes this possible is the fact that God incessantly energises every finite being and in so doing gives it an openness for further influxes of his creative activity. 

Even better. The best? 

[I]f God became man, man must be the kind of being it was possible for God to become. 

What kind of being might that be? 

Let's leave something for the next unpredictable influx.