We're down to the last of six days of dialogue in All Things Are Full of Gods, and I'm not sure what we've learned thus far except that a bottom-up metaphysic just won't cut it. Which is certainly true.
They used to say that Christianity is Platonism for the masses. In Hart's case, it almost seems that his top-down metaphysic is theology for the embarrassed Christian.
Well, it doesn't matter what religion you practice so long as you're sincerely ashamed of it.
Yes, it seems to be a common enough sentiment:
Today's Christian is not sorry that no one else agrees with him but is sorry that he does not agree with everyone else.
But in reality,
Nothing remains of Christianity when the Christian tries to seem to the world not to be stupid.
Or maybe the only thing that remains is the abstract skeleton of top-down causation. Not much, but something to build on?
In any event, much of this chapter reminds us of Voegelin, for example, that "there's no such thing as mental agency devoid of a transcendental, extra-physical dimension or horizon." Even nature itself "is always exceeding what we think of as nature."
Like Voegelin, Hart posits "two distinct kinds of directedness: one toward the empirical realm and one toward the transcendental." Indeed, "we know reality only as occurring within two encircling horizons."
There's the near or immanent horizon of the realm of finite things, the empirical order..., but, prior to this and encompassing it, there's also a far or transcendent horizon of universal values.... We know and desire that further horizon tacitly in all that we do.
Exactly. Compare to Voegelin's definition of the metaxy (or In-Between):
the experience of human existence as "between" lower and upper poles; man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, the world and the Beyond.
As for this latter -- the Beyond -- it is "That which is ultimate and is itself indefinable because it surpasses all categories of understanding." Nevertheless, it is the telos or "goal of the fundamental tension of existence."
This is Hart, but it could just as easily be Voegelin: "All the mind's operations arise between two poles," one of which being "an irreducibly transcendental realm of absolute values beyond the reach of any of us..."
Or this:
I might almost speak of two "supernatural" poles -- two vanishing points where nature either sinks down into foundations deeper than itself or soars up into an exalted realm higher than itself.
And our consciousness is in between, "always reaching out to something outside us that's more ultimate than the world."
Around here we just call it O, for reasons just stated by Voegelin, i.e., it is indefinable and surpasses all categories of understanding.
The other thinker Hart reminds me of is Bernard Lonergan, and like Voegelin, his name doesn't appear in the book. But this sounds like straight-up Lonergan: our minds are "turned dynamically toward the whole of reality -- the whole of being -- as irresistibly attractive to our minds."
That's what we around here call the Great Attractor to which the mind is ordered. It is why we have "this 'rational appetite' for the ideal intelligibility of things," or the "natural orientation of the mind toward that infinite horizon of being as intelligible truth."
Told you so: we seek nothing short of all there is to know about all there is: we are animated by
an intrinsic purposefulness that stretches out toward the whole of things; every operation of the will and the intellect, however slight, is lured into actuality by a final cause beyond all immediate ends.
Correct: there is a "limitless directedness of consciousness toward that limitless horizon of transcendental aspiration." Indeed, "all of nature is filled with the desire to find that horizon," at least implicitly. I suppose we could say that this implicit drive becomes explicit and self-aware in human consciousness.
Hart keeps repeating himself, but we don't need the repetition. We get it: "All finite longing is a longing deferred toward an infinite end."
End of chapter.
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