Reductionism, Materialism, and Other Forms of Magic

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book. --Dávila

As we've been saying, some things are irreducible to anything less, e.g., consciousness, experience, interiority, and free will, but this hardly stops some thinkers from trying. 

Hart spends a lot of time arguing with these folks, but the arguments can have no traction in the face of an absolute faith-based commitment to reductionism and to a causally closed physical universe. 

I'm also reading a book by Schuon which is about a quarter of the length of All Things Are Full of Gods.  One reason for the comparative brevity is that Schuon can't be bothered to argue with these metaphysical yahoos and their "pseudo-mythologies." Rather, he

distills the quintessence of traditional wisdom without paying sustained attention to all those false and fraudulent philosophies that might hitherto have occluded our view.

Schuon's approach here is more "like that of the poet: to find simple, direct, and resonant statements" of the unchanging truths, recalling what we said the other day about "precision poetry."

In any event, the book is a pleasant diversion from Hart's turgid tome. 

Speaking of a reductively closed universe, Schuon makes precisely the opposite point but doesn't deign to try to persuade the unpersuadable: 

To say that man is endowed with a sensibility capable of objectivity means he possesses a subjectivity not closed in on itself, but open to others and unto Heaven.

Boom. This goes to the conclusion of yesterday's post. As the Aphorist says,

To admit the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.

So, if I'm wrong about the existence of free will, it only proves I am right, and it's an open cosmos after all, in which freedom cannot be reduced to anything less. 

In the same essay Schuon puts it out there that

An incontrovertible proof of God is that the human spirit is capable of objectivity and transcendence, transcendence being the sufficient reason of objectivity.

One can try to eliminate transcendence and reduce it to immanence, but out goes man:

Without objectivity and transcendence there cannot be man, there is only the human animal; to find man, one must aspire to God. 

There is an outward man and an inward man, corresponding to horizontal and vertical (or immanence and transcendence) respectively, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it except to accept this truth, regardless of how pleasant.

Back to Hart, those committed to reductionism "speak as if, in principle, all events at higher levels of physical organization must be reducible without remainder to lower" causes. It's just "a preposterous presumption and nothing more," and not even an interesting one. Unless maybe you're on the spectrum. Which is no joke, but let's not get snidetracked.

Hart claims that there exists a "basic, original, natural intentionality of the mind toward" a "transcendent end that makes all other mental actions possible." He also speaks of "that constant natural orientation of the will toward its transcendent horizon," which is certainly consistent with Raccoon orthodoxy. 

The "inner man" alluded to above is ordered to this transcendent (or vertical) horizon, and this is precisely where all the cosmic action takes place. Again, to eliminate it is to eliminate man and clear the way for the human animal.

I'm tempted to bring in Voegelin for back-up, as he talks about the paradoxical structure of "intentionality and luminosity," and of how language participates in this paradox by illuminating the in-between.  

Lots more arguing back and forth in the next chapter, but as the Aphorist says,

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

So, 

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time.