The Great Attractor Over the Subjective Horizon

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.

Exact Science and Science of the Inexact

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance. --Dávila 

Schuon speaks of a "defect of imagination" whereby "One tries to explain 'horizontally' that which is explainable only 'in a vertical sense.'" 

Via a kind of reductive reversal, the very science which only man can conceive presumes to enclose and explain man. Which I suppose is one of the themes of Frankenstein, a manmade creation who turns on the man who created him. 

Anthony Fauci famously proclaimed that I AM THE SCIENCE. Maybe, but I AM is inherently beyond the reach of science, which is limited to IT IS. As the Aphorist reminds us, 

If good and evil, ugliness and beauty, are not the substance of things, science is reduced to a brief statement: what is, is.

And 

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but unable to explain the consciousness that explains it, will not have explained anything.

So, consciousness explains science but science doesn't explain the consciousness that explains science. 

Well, so what. At least science tries to solve the mystery.

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.

And this mystery is indeed insoluble in fact and in principle via scientific assumptions and methods. It's like trying to measure beauty with calipers, or understand a text by analyzing the ink with which it is composed. There are higher levels of meaning that are irreducible to the lower. 

Nothing proves more the limits of science than the scientist's opinions about any topic that is not strictly related to his profession.

So we just give up?

No, but maybe try a new approach, one that isn't doomed to absurdity from the start. 

There are actually certain intrinsic limits at both ends of the immanent-transcendent tension. For example, science can no more say what energy is than it can say what consciousness is. For Voegelin, the immanent and transcendent poles are more directions than destinations, and again, bestwecando is live in the tension between them. Nor can one be reduced to the other. 

There are a number of principles that we -- meaning I -- cannot do without, two of which are verticality and openness. Or just say "openness to the transcendent," which is of course one of the main functions of religion, i.e., to maintain this vertical openness via meditation, contemplation, prayer, ritual, sacrament, et al.

But in reality every remotely normal person is always open to the transcendent in some form or fashion. Language itself becomes incomprehensible without this transcendent pole. 95% of speech is about something abstract, immaterial, and transcendent. Trying to eliminate transcendence from one's vocabulary would reduce one to animality. 

So, language is pretty, pretty important, and how convenient that it's the subject of the next chapter, Language, Code, and Life. Let's see if it gets us any closer to the mystery. We'll start with an aphoristic benediction:

Poetry is God's fingerprint in human clay.

Indeed, "surely you must grasp that language is the very epitome of top-down causation" (Hart), and what is at the top? You don't have to say God, but certainly it involves vertical openness to the transcendent pole mentioned above. 

Whatever the case may be, the "entire substance" of language "lies beyond the physical altogether." It is semantics that conditions syntax from above: "meaning depends wholly upon the irreducibly higher level of symbolic thought." Regarding the language of life,

The physical syntax simply can't generate the semantical meanings; rather, the top-down causality of the semantic level determines the physical ordering that embodies it....

In short, "Life is a semantic structure that colonizes and informs its physical syntax," which is no different from human speech, which uses syntactical structure to convey meaning. And let's be honest,

meaning, intention, semantic content, finality -- all of this has its real existence solely in the realm of mind. If life is code, then life subsists only in mind; but life is code...

Therefore, fill in the blank. 

Life is always already mind? 

That's a bingo. "Mind as such" is

the essential finality, purposiveness, intentionality, cognitive depth, and pervasive consciousness that underlies all nature...

I see. We have a saying around here: Can I buy some pot from you? 

The irreducibility of mind and life and language seems to me all so very obvious that to resist its implications strikes me as sheer perversity.

Yes, but surely a little pot can't hurt?  

[S]ince mind really does exist, in all its evident dimensions and powers, and since it's obviously part of nature, it's well past time.... [to cease] attempting to mechanize the mental and begin instead to undertake the far more scientific and rational task of exploring the mental dimension of nature in the full range of its expressions, and most especially in the structure of life.

Sounds like we're gonna need a bigger science -- or at least a bigger philosophy of science:

the triumph of the mechanistic philosophy and the dismissal of form and finality as figments of a superseded science were decisions not only concerning method..., but also concerning what would henceforth be regarded as fundamental... to our picture of reality.

Analogously, "One can reduce a house to heaps of bricks and lumber and so forth in the hope of understanding its architecture," but "little has been learned except how to destroy a house." 

In conclusion, "The great act of rational intelligibility that runs through all of nature" is just the other side of an "actual intelligence -- even if of a kind we can't imagine." 

Oh, but we can:

The imagination is not the place where reality is falsified, but where it is fulfilled. 

Hmm. Can you say a little more?

Science cannot do more than draw up the inventory of our prison.

But 

Imagination is the capacity to perceive through the senses the attributes of the object the senses do not perceive.

Like God's fingerprint in the clay of human language?

Metaphysical Yada Yada and Reductive Belowviation

Continuing with yesterday's theme of the 2,500 year argument clinic, Schuon writes that 

Plato represents the inward dimension, subjective extension, synthesis and reintegration, whereas Aristotle represents the outward dimension, objective extension, analysis and projection....

Elsewhere he suggests that 

Platonism, which is as it were “centripetal” and unitive, opens onto the consciousness of the one and immanent Self; on the contrary, Aristotelianism, which is “centrifugal” and separative, tends to sever the world -- and with it man -- from its divine roots.

So, in one metaphysical corner we have inward, subjective, unitive, synthetic, and centripetal; in the other, outward, objective, separative, analytic, and centrifugal. Or interior Self and exterior World.

Now, how could we ever really do without a metaphysic that is itself a synthesis of both? Nothing short of this can describe our predicament. We don't want to exclude anything, let alone on an a priori basis.

This next chapter -- Metabolism and Mind -- mainly bats down some apparently eminent contemporary philosophers who try to do what we just said one should never do. Such approaches try to sneak in things like purpose and value through the side door, but come across as fancier modes of the same old reductionism. 

They also yada-yada over some rather important steps along the way, prompting one character to ask

Can we really move that easily from metabolism to consciousness and then to symbolic thought?

The whole scheme "could be taken to mean that life is a purely structural amplification of the laws of physics, and mental agency a purely structural amplification of the laws of life thus generated." 

But again, why even imagine that subjects could ever be reduced to objects, when in reality, this is about the most implausible thing imaginable? The project fails because it cannot overcome "any of the explanatory gaps -- or, rather, abysses" it "sets out to bridge." And why? Same old reason: it stills proceeds "in only one direction: from below to above." 

But in this world there is always (↑) and (↓), am I wrong? For that matter, there is always O, the transcendent object toward which (↑) is ordered. But we still need the immanent horizon (↓) as well for a total map of the Real.

"Once again, direction is all." The bottom-up project fails "precisely because it's an attempt to yet again ground the mental in the physical rather than the reverse," thus foundering "on all the same causal aporias that plague the mechanistic model."

If interiority isn't irreducible, than nothing is:

And the interiority of organism proceeds from mind, not the reverse.... mental interiority is the source and rationale, rather than merely the result, of metabolism.

For me, this mystery of interiority is the mystery. How does a universe of pure exterior relations -- of unalloyed outsideness -- suddenly gain an inside view of itself? Not just an interior perspective, but again, interiority as such. Truly truly, WTF?!

The next chapter slaps down another reductionist or three, but all "want to suggest that the reflective interiority and self-awareness of mind is just a structural elaboration or continuation" of lower material processes. "We never really come nearer to life or mind" via such reductive belowviating. 

The thing is, "mind isn't actually a structurally spatial interiority," rather, it's immaterial, so it makes no sense to say that some self-organizing physical structure like a whirlpool or tornado just one day developed an inside and decided to go on being. Again, there is a radical discontinuity between any mere dissipative structure and the merest organism.     

No, mind is before all and in all, shaping matter into living organisms; matter is always being raised up into life, and life is always being raised up into mind, and mind is always seeking a transcendental end...

(Raised up. This reminds us of mind being further "teleologically" raised up into Christ, but that's a squirrel we'll have to chase down later.)

Put conversely,

It can't really be a matter of the miraculous appearance of teleological activity within the originally atelic dynamisms of material processes. 

Again, you can't just yada yada over something as important and fundamental as interiority -- a subjective horizon oriented to a transcendent telos -- as if to say "Something very, very significant happened at this point, but let's not dwell on it." To re-belabor the point, this is "a qualitative abyss that can't be crossed from below." 

The next chapter is called Creative Evolution, but we are in need of no convincing on this score, since creativity is one of our top five transcendental categories. Indeed, it is the first thing we know about God -- that he creates, so creative evolution isn't a problem for our metaphysic, rather, what we expect of the cosmos (and of the being made in the image of this creative principle).

2,500 Year Argument Resolved by Obscure Blogger

Well, not exactly. Or not yet, anyway, but we're getting closer.

This question of a top-down vs. bottom-up metaphysic reminds me of the famous painting of Plato and Aristotle, the former pointing vertically to the heavens, the latter making a horizontal gesture. 

Is that all this is, the same old argument in new terms?

In his book The Cave and the Light, Herman articulates Plato's "most fundamental idea,"

that man is destined by his creator to find a path from the dark cave of material existence to the light of a higher, purer, and more spiritual truth. It's when we rise above the merely human..., and enter the realm of the "everlasting and immortal and changeless" that we achieve wisdom.

But for Aristotle,

There is no cave; only a world made of facts and things. "The fact is our starting point," he once said...

This is no doubt oversimplifying, but 

For  the next two thousand years Aristotle would become the father of modern science, logic, and technology. Plato, by contrast, is the spokesman for the theologian, the mystic, the poet, the artist.

People tend to choose sides, but as we've been saying, it's not a matter of either-or but both-and. However, as in all primordial complementarities one must be prior, and in this case it's the top-down perspective. As one of Hart's characters puts it,

Direction is all. What from below are untraversable abysses are, from above, merely junctures where ladders must be let down. 

Later in the chapter, the same character -- who seems to stand for Hart's more poetic side -- says that

mind informs life, life informs matter; life is always already mind, rising into fuller consciousness as it's formed from above, and matter is always already life, rising into fuller complexity and vitality and autonomy as it's formed from above.  

Mind cannot in principle arise from the mindless, so the bottom-up view is a metaphysical nonstarter. But placed in the larger context of the top-down perspective, we see that the abysses between matter and life, or life and mind, may "close of their own accord":

Matter intends life, life intends mind, which is to say that life and mind are final causes belonging to the structure of reality from the first.  

Well, good. This certainly echoes the Raccoon perspective. But again, can we tighten it up a little more? Hart's skeptic is uncomfortable with the whole idea of transcendental teleology: "I always find the word 'transcendental' rather murky, to be honest."

To which another character replies that "you shouldn't," because "You couldn't possibly be a rational agent if there weren't a realm" "toward which your intellectual appetites are all naturally oriented."

Here again, very Platonic: the mind by its nature is ordered to a higher level of transcendental truth, and "this infinite purposiveness of your mind is what equips you with finite purposes. Without that index of values, all your acts would be arbitrary, prosecuted without real rational judgments."

So, freedom is a consequence of being a rational agent ordered to teleological ends. The alternative -- the bottom-up view -- only generates contradiction and absurdity, like "a lunatic who denies his own existence or who claims to be dead." For

the very act of affirming mechanism to be true is an admission of a prior directedness toward truth as an ideal, utterly beyond the sphere of the mechanical, and so just another confirmation of antecedent finality. 

The skeptic complains that "just where some dry and sober precision is most needful," we are instead plunged into "metaphysics and mysticism." But

If mind isn't the product of mindless matter -- and it clearly isn't -- then what other narrative of the mind's origin remains?

More arguing back and forth, because it seems the mechanists just won't give up their quest for a bottom-up explanation. Which makes me suspect that perhaps one is a born Platonist. Religiosity more generally is said to be heritable, so why not? Ironically, this would be a bottom-up explanation for top-down people.

The next chapter is called Information and Form, and it is indeed a mystery where all this information comes from. Information is "at the origin," but how? Our poetic character raves that "life is language, and  language is mind, and mind is life" before the skeptic cuts him off. 

Nevertheless, "Information isn't merely mindlike; it subsists only in mind." Keep digging, and we find "a level more fundamental than the physical," a reality that starts to look very much "like infinite mind." 

That's the end of the chapter. The ball's in Aristotle's court. Or in Plato's cave, depending on how you look at it.

Vertical Rawdoggin' in the Counterworld

Word of the day: rawdoggin'. The term

has been hilariously repurposed by the internet to describe submitting to grueling life experiences without the benefit of modern distractions, luxuries, technology, and conveniences. 

The meme seems to have been popularized by a fellow

who posted TikToks of himself on 15-hour flights doing nothing but staring straight ahead at the flight map on the screen in front of him; no headphones, earbuds, phone, laptop, movies, music, books, or magazine. Not even a crossword puzzle.

"Extreme rawdoggers will even forgo food and water during the flight." 

I guess I like to think of these posts as a form of vertical rawdoggin': just staring straight ahead at the screen and seeing what kind of religion the Almighty & me works out betwixt us this morning.   

Aw, who am I kidding? I'm usually interacting with another text, while real vertical rawdoggin' is Abraham dropping everything and taking off for parts unknown, or Moses going alone up the mountain, or Jesus in the desert, or the apostles lighting out for the territories with nothing but a pair of flip flops, or the desert fathers leaving everything behind....

Then again, 

We all have a key to the door that opens to the luminous and noble peace of the desert.

And Schuon says that "man's vocation and duty is to become what he is, precisely by freeing himself, inwardly, from the encroaching shadows of this contingent, imperfect, and transitory world."

Therefore, the luminous and noble peace of the desert must have something to do with leaving the contingent, imperfect, and transitory for the necessary, perfect, and permanent. A reminder that 

The Church's function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld to the world.   

This counterworld needn't be a literal desert. Rather, as mentioned in a different context in yesterday's post, "I suppose it's the direction from which you look at these things that determines almost everything." Thus, according to Schuon, 

If one looks at the universe exclusively with the eyes of relativity, one will see only relative things and the universe will be reduced in the final analysis to an inextricable absurdity.

This follows necessarily from the bottom-up perspective. But if we look from the top down, or if "one sees it with the eyes of absoluteness," then "one will essentially see manifestations of the Supreme Principle," which you could say is the very ground of the counterworld.

About the bottom-up perspective, AKA materialism, Schuon says that

nothing is more contradictory than to deny the spirit, or even simply the psychic element, in favor of matter alone, for it is the spirit that denies, whereas matter remains inert and unconscious. The fact that matter can be conceptualized proves that materialism contradicts itself at its starting point...

The same is true of the claim that man cannot know truth, or that all is relative except for relativism, or that subjects could arise from objects. Nevertheless, that's the horizontal world for which we need the vertical counterworld mentioned above:

Contingency on the one hand and presence of the Absolute on the other; these are the two poles of our existence.

Which goes precisely to the top-down / bottom-up dispute in All Things are Full of Gods.

One problem with the bottom-up perspective is that in it there can't actually be an "up." Calling it "up" is just in a manner of speaking, because any up is reducible without remainder to the lower level.

Not so for the top-down approach, which doesn't dismiss matter as an epiphenomenal illusion. True, in Vedanta it is regarded as mere appearance, but nevertheless an appearance of reality. As Schuon describes it,

Atma is conceivable without Maya, whereas Maya is intelligible only through the notion of Atma. 

In other words, there can be reality without appearances, but no appearances without reality. "Relativity is a projection of the Absolute, or it is nothing." But it's not nothing. It's just not everything.

Back to Hart, the next chapter is called Spirit in Nature, which expresses the same top-down argument that

the mind pervades all things, and expresses itself in countless degrees and in endlessly differing but kindred modes...

In this vertical counterworld, "we all belong to a vast community of spiritual beings," and why not? The spiritual is ontologically prior to the material, so "Nervous systems appeared in evolutionary history not as fortuitous vehicles for a new organic power; they were fashioned by a prior operative disposition."

I'm talking about a pervasive reality of organic life, at every level.

Yes, but are you just deepaking the chopra? No, because

The issue remains: which narrative is logically consistent, the bottom-up story that says mindless matter somehow became mind or the top-down story that says mind operates as formal and final causality on the whole material realm?

"I believe that nature is already mind," which seems indisputable given the infinite intelligibility of the world, which is just the shadow of intelligence. 

Again, it's a matter of the direction from which we look: "I stake myself to the top-down causal narrative," of "mind 'descending' into matter and raising matter up into itself as life and thought." 

There is "an essential creative impulse within the very structure of nature, quickening it from within itself, driving it into ever more diverse and more complex forms."

This is beginning to sound like the Evolutionary Paradigm of the new age vulgarians.

Yes, perhaps a word of caution is in order before we proceed any further: 

We do not deny that evolution exists within certain limits, as is indeed evident enough, but we do deny that it is a universal principle, and hence a law which affects and determines all things, including the immutable....

[W]hat has to be categorically rejected is the idea that truth evolves, or that revealed doctrines are the product of an evolution (Schuon). 

Evolution is one thing, but evolutionism 

is the very negation of the archetypes and consequently of the divine Intellect; it is therefore the negation of an entire dimension of the real, namely that of form, of the static, of the immutable; concretely speaking, it is as if one wished to make a fabric of the wefts only, omitting the warps (ibid.). 

And we're back to the nature of the cosmic area rug, which is woven from strands of verticality and horizontality -- or immanence and transcendence, absolute and relative, stasis and change, appearance and reality, world and counterworld, etc., depending on the direction from which we look.

In any event, that's the end of the chapter.

Bottom-Up or Top-Down?

Here's where we are:

The issue remains: which narrative is logically consistent, the bottom-up story that says mindless matter somehow became mind or the top-down story that says mind operates as a formal and final causality on the whole material realm?

How about both? Just because we see them as two, it doesn't mean the divine mind sees things that way. Maybe it's more like the image to the right, showing the interference pattern between immanence and transcendence, which is precisely where we live.

Thus, from that middle standpoint both perspectives are always true. As one of Hart's characters says,

The same evidence that some might adduce as proof that mind is reducible to a mere animal capacity for processing stimuli you see as proving the presence of rational intending mind in all animals and at the ground of nature. I suppose it's the direction from which you look at these things that determines almost everything (italics mine).  

Like a left-brain right-brain thing: the same reality is interpreted very differently by the two cerebral hemispheres, but these two are nevertheless synthesized into one vision of the world. 

Speaking of which, the left brain is responsible for speech, and Hart delves into the fact that semantics cannot be reduced to syntax, but that the modern world pretends otherwise, i.e., 

that the really real is the realm of abstract quantifications and unyielding structural laws, and that the realm of higher organization and relation and agency -- the semantics of life, so to speak -- are secondary and accidental, and can be understood only by reduction to those more general abstract laws.

This represents "the metaphysical triumph of syntax over semantics, of dead matter over organism" and "of physics over biology."

Now, where have we heard these arguments before? Why, from our favorite theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen, who indeed makes an appearance in this chapter (called The Semantics of Life). Rosen

argued that we should reconceive our methodological presuppositions altogether, and should cease to think of fundamental physics as providing the general framework for our understanding of nature... 

Here again, this latter represents the bottom-up perspective alluded to above, and it generates absurdity if one tries to use it to explain what clearly transcends it.

Instead of seeing biology as a special case of physics, Rosen turned the cosmos right side up and proposed the opposite, such that "biology becomes our general paradigm and physics is demoted to a special case of its expression," and why not?

the laws of life aren't contained in the laws of physics, though the laws of physics are embraced within the laws of life. 

"Above all," we need to "stop thinking of life, which is an 'open system,'" "as if it were a closed system of physical determinism." Nor should we imagine that "physical syntax" alone can "reductively explain the incalculably rich and subtle interrelations of the semantics of life."

Putting all of this together, it seems that we must regard the cosmos as an open system that is conditioned from the top town -- the top being the source and ground of mind, life, language, and meaning. Hart's materialist skeptic asks,

A cosmic organicism... is that what you're proposing? Teleology as fundamental law?

Well,

At every level of life we seem to encounter cognitive and intentional systems, with real content and an orientation toward meaningful ends, right down to the cellular level. 

Bottom line: "matter is never, and has never been, dead." Rather, "life and mind have always been present": 

in every epoch of cosmic existence and at every level of causality, life and mind are already always supplying the underlying and informing and guiding laws animating the whole.

Which is pretty much the Raccoon view -- that the unification of matter, life, mind, and spirit takes place at top. Likewise, for Hart, this is the only metaphysic "capable of making sense out of countless phenomena that are evident and undeniable, but irreconcilable with mechanism."

This morning I ran across a comment by Einstein:

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

To which I would add that the single most important datum of experience is experience itself, for which no mechanistic reductionism can ever account or even conceive. Again, why adopt a metaphysic that renders the one adopting it an absurd nullity? 

The latter is a "useful fiction" for scientific methodology, but when "permitted to metastasize into a metaphysical claim about the nature of realty..., can yield nothing but ridiculous category errors." 

all that I want the culture of the sciences to abandon is a metaphysical orthodoxy that's certainly inadequate to a total model of the structure of life and consciousness.

Is this asking too much? It might be, if we can't tighten up our vision of the top-down view. It needs to be made a little more rigorous, otherwise it sounds like we're deepaking the chopra. We'll think about it and get back to you tomorrow.

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...