Abiding in the Mind's Transcendent Horizon

Apparently these are tricky ideas we've been discussing. I was reading another review of  All Things Are Full of Gods, in which the reviewer confesses to being "lost in all the arguments Hart presents. To say that this book broke my brain would be an understatement."

Although the book isn't breaking my brain it does sometimes try my patience, because these important ideas need to be expressed more clearly, concisely, and systematically. But how many philosophers in general do that? Prolixity is an occupational hazard.

The idea that does not win over in twenty lines does not win over in two thousand pages.

A challenge: can we get this done in twenty lines, or at least twenty short paragraphs? I doubt it, because that would require more time than blogging permits.

Let's begin with the idea that being is intelligible -- that "being and intelligibility are conceptually indistinguishable." Or as we like to put it, the universe is endlessly intelligible to intelligence, which implies a meta-cosmic ground of intellect. In short, 

If the physical order can't be the ground of mind, mind must be the ground of the physical order.

Now, this intelligible order persists no matter how deeply we pursue it:

no matter how relentless our quest for an ever deeper coincidence between the being of the world and our mental agency, there's always more rational content available to our intellects. 

This ordering of intellect to intelligibility demands a sufficient reason, for it is "anything but intuitively obvious that the... structure of rational thought should correspond so fruitfully to the structure of the world," or that thought and being "should somehow be fitted to one another."

As we always say, revelation is the poetry of metaphysics, so to say that man is the image and likeness of the Creator is to articulate the very principle that accounts for both the rationality of the world and our access to that rational structure. 

But some people -- Kant and his acolytes -- say that reality isn't actually intelligible, but that there is an ontological division "between an unknowable objective realm and an illusory -- useful, that is, but still illusory -- subjective realm."

But no one lives this way, or could live this way, least of all the scientist who relies upon "the power of the mind to penetrate the nature of things" and to "draw upon a potentially inexhaustible wellspring of objective truth in order to learn more and more about the contours of the real." 

And "this can only be because you [or scientists] presume an original harmony and connaturality" between mind and reality:

If you believe the structure of reality can truly be mirrored in the structure of your thinking, then you must also believe that there's an ideal or abstract or purely intelligible dimension of reality that truly corresponds to the concepts that allow you to understand the world.

And if you believe that, then it is no leap to say that "intelligibility and intelligence are simply one actuality," or two sides of a single act. Thus "the world continually yields itself to mind and mind opens itself to the world," in a kind of in-spiraling mutual indwelling: the mind penetrates 

more deeply into the mystery of being, and as being continues to shine forth more radiantly within the mystery of mind, you continue to amass concrete evidence that this coincidence between mind and world is real, that being is essentially intelligibility, and that... knowing and being known are one inseparable act of manifestation -- one act of reality.  

I mean, how much more evidence do you need?  

the structure of your mind's ascent into ever greater knowledge of the truth reveals the structure of being's descent in its ever greater manifestation of truth... 

What else could account for this mysterious identity of being and mind but... an identity of being and mind? 

Is this too much of a leap? "The very structure of knowledge is a primordial relation of the mind to God. The very end of all knowledge is God."

But this is just a repackaging of classical metaphysics for our Age of Stupidity:

Intellect is the first author and mover of the universe.... Hence the last end of the universe must necessarily be the good of the intellect. This, however, is truth. Hence truth must be the last end of the whole universe (Thomas). 

At this point Hart does in fact bring in the Catholic philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan, whose Big Idea was that "the very search for understanding" -- this "insatiable desire to know why and why and why" -- 

discloses the reality of what he calls the "unrestricted intelligibility" of being, and thereby the reality of God as the one "unrestricted act of understanding." 

Works for me: the "transcendent horizon" "abides, as the absolute or divine dimension of depth in our... rational vista": 

Reality gives itself to the mind as mental content because mental content is the ground of reality. 

In the ground of being -- in God, if you like -- pure intelligence and pure intelligibility "are no longer distinguishable." We implicitly know that "the human mind can be a true mirror of reality because we're also assuming that all reality is already a mirror of the mind." 

Hart starts to repeat himself, but perhaps it's required in order to get it through our thick skulls:

The marvelous reciprocal relation of our power to understand and being's power to be understood... unremittingly indicates an ultimate identity between reason and being in their transcendent origin and end. 

Or again, just say man is the image and likeness of the Creator.