The Human Phenomenon and the Transcendent Logos

Just a short post. To reset, we're looking into two main subjects: the nature of the human phenomenon and the possibility of a coherent non-absurdity to describe all of reality. 

But these two are deeply related, because if the human phenomenon is itself absurd, then so too is everything else. 

To put it another way, the possibility of non-absurdity -- of meaning -- passes through the human subject.

Here's a thought:

To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence....

Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses (Schuon, emphasis mine).

So, let's be honest: remove the divine from the divine-human complementarity, and a total collapse of meaning takes place, with no possibility of its resuscitation.  

If you don't like "divine-human," then just say "immanence-transcendence" and the tension between, where man qua man always resides. To collapse man into total immanence is to destroy any possibility of meaning.

How does this accord with Hart? Well, there's lots of arguing back and forth about whether the mind could be a machine, but in reality, "Even the most ordinary mental acts" "depend on this rational appetite for the absolute." "No machine ventures out from itself... toward the whole of reality," whereas "in living minds"

knowledge becomes actual only as a result of that prior orientation toward the [transcendent] absolute. In rational natures, there's an immanent and indeterminate power of discovery that's prompted into action by the rational will's transcendent determinacy toward being as a whole...

"We enjoy an intrinsic capacity for unlimited novelty of apprehension without prior constraints on what we may find or create,"

because thought is in its essence an "open system" of discovery and therefore precisely what computation is not.

So basically -- as we've been saying for two decades -- man is a vertically open system, open to the transcendent pole of being, to the Great Beyond. Or, in Schuon's words, 

The animal cannot leave his state, whereas man can; strictly speaking, only he who is fully man can leave the closed system of the individuality, through participation in the one and universal Selfhood.

Now, from what I understand, Hart is an orthodox Christian, but he (like Schuon) expresses a lot of sympathy for the metaphysics of Vedanta, for example, "that mind is the ground of reality, and that infinite mind is the source and end of finite mind." 

"Consciousness comes first or it comes not at all," and

I do believe Indian philosophical tradition addressed the conditions and mysteries of consciousness far earlier in history, and with considerably greater subtlety, than its Western counterpart did....

And "it's not just the interior mystery of consciousness that informs my convictions regarding the real nature of mind. There's also the mindlike structure of the world, and especially of life."

That's the end of the chapter, so where does it leave us? 

It seems that the human mind partakes of Mind as such, and that Mind as such is bound up with Life and with Language-Logos, but we shall have to wait and see where this is all leading...