Person, Light, and Presence

To reset: we've been talking about an autobiographical essay by Norris Clarke, in which he discusses six themes that "have dominated my metaphysical reflection over the last 50 years" and "are central in my philosophical vision of the universe." We've saved the last for last, which is 

the person, or the universe as radically personalized, from and for persons as the supreme value in the universe.

You know the drill: last in execution is first in intention, all other metacosmic intentions being #2 or lower. Persons are not only open to the purpose of the cosmos, they are that purpose. But only if understood in a certain way, since the wrong way leads to cosmic narcissism, solipsism, nihilism, and even progressivism, which, you might say, is the sum of all metaphysical heresies and misguided intentions. 

By the way, I don't have any idea what Clarke is about to say, having not read the book in many years. But since we think alike, I trust that we'll get a post out of it.

He starts with Thomas' claim that the person is "that which is most perfect in all of nature," but of course this is mostly in the form of potential. Other animals are limited by the potential to fulfill their genetic program, but the span of human potential is vertically unlimited at both ends, from saint to psychopath, or from wisdom to tenure.

While tracking down the source of that quote, I found some other relevant observations by the T-man, for example, 

The further a being is distant from that which is Being itself, namely God, the nearer it is to nothingness. But the nearer a being stands to God, the further away it is from nothingness. 

Which goes to the vertical spectrum in which man qua man is always -- and cannot not be -- situated. This means that if we could travel back in time and track down the first man... 

Well first of all, for reasons we'll probably get into later, it would have to be the first men, since a radically individual person is a cosmic impossibility, a metaphysical nonstarter. Supposing such a being, how would he go about ushering the other men into the vertical world of the very intersubjectivity that defines man? 

It would be exactly like, say, trying to teach language to an ape. No matter how hard you try, the ape will still be enclosed in a slightly larger apehood. I won't belabor the point, but you will have noticed that God says, and I quote, Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, which is what I would call a Pretty Big Hint about our nature. 

Moreover, male and female he created them, which implies that otherness and relation are built into the human cake. Just like inside God's own cake. 

In the later version, God literally fashions woman from man, which I take as a mythopoetic way of saying that they share the same substance -- or substance-in-relation, as we will later elaborate. Horizontally speaking, man refers to woman, and vice versa, each being a vertical prolongation of God's own interior relationality.

The classic definition of man is the "rational animal," but prior to this he must be the relational animal, otherwise he could never be reasonable, since reason would be unrelated to the world or to anything else. Reasoning is always about. 

Here's another good one by Thomas, going to the telos of creation (and why #6 is really #1, as per the above):

The highest step in the whole process of generation of creatures is the human soul, towards which matter tends as its ultimate form.... Man is therefore the end [i.e., telos] of all generation (emphasis mine).

Here again, matter is first in execution, but only a materialist would say that it is the end of things. There are things higher than matter, otherwise to hell with it. Turns out

it is possible for the perfection of the whole universe to have its existence in one single being.... the ultimate perfection to which the soul can attain is that in it is reflected the whole order of the universe and its causes.

It seems that the existence of a single Perfect Man is the whole durn point of the Cosmos, or of what this is all leading up to. Let's hold that thought in abeyance and get back to Clarke. He asks "What is so special about the person that situates it at the apex of the order of being," hmm?

We can't just say the Bible says so, because the Bible is not self-authenticating. Rather, for us, it must be true by virtue of the standards of truth. 

Of course, it reveals certain truths that we could not know in the absence of their revelation to us, but once known, they make a heckuva lot of sense, which in turn tends to authenticate the text, or in other words, how could such primitive people know such timeless truths about human nature without a little vertical assistance?

What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?

Exactly what powers distinguish us from the beasts and nihilists? I would say two things -- not the two you're thinking of, but rather, Truth and the Freedom to know it. 

Now, I believe in natural selection as much as the next ape, but it can in no way account for its own truth and our freedom to know it. And this truth-freedom reduces to the immaterial intellect, which obviously cannot be explained by any material process. 

Here again, intellect is related to the world, but with a big difference. Lower animals are also related to the world, but only in an exterior sense. They cannot know interiors, that is, essences. My dog can pee on a tree, but knows nothing about the concept of treeness. 

Conversely, man is related to the interiority of things, beginning with the interior of other people, AKA intersubjectivity. It's how we are even having this conversation.

The luminous presence of human interiority. Absent this interiority, there would be no place for the light to shine. In Voegelin's terms, the light shines in the space between the poles of immanence and transcendence, and here we are. 

But what is the source of this mysterious light that bathes the intellect? Rabbi Leonard says There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in," but that makes it sound like an accident, when it's really Voegelin's metaxy, 

the experience of human existence as "between" lower and upper poles: man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on.

For Clarke,

Personal being is nothing but being itself, freed from the limits of material modes of existence that hold it down in the darkness of un-self-conscious lack of self-presence, being itself allowed now to take on the full dimensions of what it is meant to be... 

The alternative -- your choice -- is what Voegelin calls scotosis, i.e., "Darkening, turning toward darkness. Voluntary ignorance," or the "eclipse of reality."

How to escape this self-inflicted blindness? Periagoge, 

Turning around, conversion. Plato's term for the cognitive and moral reorientation toward the True and the Good as such (Webb). 

Through such a metaphysical metanoia, we are, in Clarke's words, able 

to realize the full "nature" of being as presence, tending toward the ideal fullness, found only in God, of total luminous presence.... To be without restrictions, therefore, necessarily means to be personal.

That seems like a jump. Could you say a little more? 

[T]he unrestricted dynamism of the mind is a mystery of light, of super-personal being, rather than the darkness of infra-personal being.

Go on.

Not only must the ultimate Source of the universe be personalized being..., the rest of the universe derives from personal being.... for the universe to make full sense it would have to include personal created beings within it -- in a word, it would have to be for persons.

Put conversely, 

What could possibly be the point of a created universe entirely plunged in the darkness of unconsciousness, unable to know or appreciate that it is there at all? 

Hmm? It reminds me of Voegelin's QUESTION, which is his term for 

the tension of existence in its aspect as a questioning unrest seeking not simply particular truth, but still more the transcendental pole of truth as such: "not just any question but the quest concerning the mysterious ground of all being" (Webb). 

Truly truly, this puts the quest into the question, or the deustination into the journey, for if the Cosmos

were totally unconscious there would be no way for it to complete its return to God in the Great Circle of Being as we shall see in a moment when dealing with the universe as Journey. 

That's way over 1,000 words already, so that moment will have to await the next post.