The Intentional Cosmos

There is "no more conspicuous example of teleology in nature" than in "the directedness of mind and will toward an end" (Hart). 

At least there can no more self-evident example, since it is our moment to moment experience, and who are you gonna believe, some tenured determinist or your own lying I?

They say reason cannot prove the existence of free will. On the other hand, Schuon says "reason becomes an infirmity" when reduced to "abusive speculation by the ignoramus who pretends to knowledge." 

Elsewhere he suggests that "The purpose of freedom is to enable us to choose what we are in the depths of our heart," and why not? 

But let's get back to Hart. Consciousness is always about something, which is the meaning of "intentionality." Now, nothing was about anything in this cosmos until suddenly it was, but how?

[L]ike consciousness, intentionality is either there or it isn't. Where and how was that abyss leapt over? At what point was there suddenly, as there had never before been, mental agency interpreting the world...?

This is really just another way of asking how subjects suddenly appear in a heretofore objective universe, or how exteriority somehow becomes interior to itself. 

Now, language -- the subject of the next chapter -- is shot through with intentionality, as its whole purpose is to be "about" something other than itself. But -- and this is me talking, not Hart -- the whole cosmos itself is permeated with aboutness, in the sense that it never stops communicating to us about itself. 

In other words, the cosmos is intelligible to our intelligence. We can learn "about" things because those things are about -- or ordered to -- the intellect. This is very strange. Let's see where Hart goes with it.

Language is "a world alongside the world, so to speak, or a plane of reality continuously hovering above the physical plane, a place in which meaning is generated and shared entirely by meaning." 

Yes, but again, the world is also a linguistic contraption that constantly speaks to us via some kind of language, from math to logic to beauty. So human language "hovers above the physical," while nature's language is embedded in the physical, just waiting for us to unpack it.

An immanent and transcendent Logos?

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Rather, let Schuon do it. The Logos

presents himself either objectively as “Divine Image,” in which case he is transcendent in relation to ordinary men, or subjectively as the Intellect, in which case he is immanent; he is then like the door towards the Divine Self, the immanent Divine Subject in our immortal substance.

So, the intellect is the immanent Divine Image in man, but also the doorway back to God? Hold that thought.

One point that I think needs to be emphasized is the intrinsic "openness" of things at both ends. In other words, we are open to a cosmos that opens itself up to us, in a kind of spiraling movement. Again, very strange.

That was a short chapter. The next one is on Concepts and Reason, which rightly affirms that

a merely mechanical material system could never, out of some pre-conceptual void, produce so much as a single abstract concept. There's no feasible series of steps..., even over vast epochs of time... that could cause conceptual abstractions to arise from concrete sensory encounters.

So, how do abstract and immaterial concepts get into a concrete and material cosmos? 

Here again, they must somehow be implicit in the cosmos, just waiting for intellects to come along and explicate them: "the mind is capable of really interacting with these strictly immaterial entities," e.g., mathematical and logical principles, "none of which can be grounded" in the physical. 

Nevertheless, here they are, various necessary truths that are "true in every possible reality, and would be true if there were no physical reality at all."  The simplest mathematical equation or syllogism is "utterly unlike any kind of physical event." 

I guess we have time for one more chapter, this one on Free Will and Purpose. How did these get into the cosmos?  Free will is always ordered to a purpose, but the skeptic in Hart's dialogue calls this "the oldest illusion of all." 

We say, if man weren't free he could never know it. In other words, supposing we don't have free will, this would constitute knowledge of a truth that transcends physical cause and effect, and thereby prove the existence of free will. Or, expressed more pithily,

If determinism is real, if only that can happen which must happen, then error does not exist.

Thus, 

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.

What's with this "arbitrary fundamentalist belief in the causal closure of the physical?" For it is "a purely metaphysical commitment, with no logical or empirical warrant, or any warrant at all other than want of imagination." This takes us into the next chapter, so we'll save it for tomorrow.