Consequences Flowing from the Mystery of Subjectivity

That's the title of an essay by Schuon, but one could equally say "miracle of subjectivity." Because what, after all, is a miracle? It is something that deviates from the known laws of nature, and you tell me: what law of physical nature accounts for the existence of immaterial knowers of the laws of nature? 

Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be (Schuon).

Nevertheless, here it is. Nor do we say that evolution plays no role, except that a material process cannot be the sufficient reason for an immaterial reality; this is quite literally inconceivable, while the converse is not. That is to say,

If one starts from the recognition of the immediately tangible mystery that is subjectivity or intelligence, then it is easy to understand that the origin of the Universe is not inert and unconscious matter but a spiritual Substance... (ibid.).

Still mysterious but at least not impossible. What does Sherlock Holmes say? "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." 

But is an intelligent Creator -- or rather, let's just say Intelligence -- really that improbable? That intelligence exists we can be certain. But by virtue of what principle? And can this principle be less than intelligent? Or less than personal? 

"It will be objected that there is no proof of this." Well, for starters, intelligence "comprises this proof precisely." In other words, there is no intelligent way to disprove the existence of intelligence, let alone an unintelligent way. 

What is it, anyway, that makes an otherwise intelligent man want to argue that "the miracle of consciousness" can "spring from a pile of earth or stones, metaphorically speaking"? 

A love of truth?

Ironically, yes. Intelligence is ordered to truth. If it isn't, then truly truly, the hell with it. 

The other day I caught a bit of a discussion between Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins touching on the existence of God. Probably if you asked Dawkins, he would say that he is not only motivated by the disinterested pursuit of truth, but much more so than the next (religious) guy. 

Problem is, his metaphysic can account for neither truth nor the beings capable of pursuing and knowing -- not to mention loving -- truth. It wasn't so much that they were talking past each other, rather, more like conversing with an autistic person about the nature of empathic attunement. 

Intelligence is guided more by sympathies and by aversions than by reasonings.

Including an irrational aversion to religion.

Broadly speaking, "religion" is a way of talking about and aligning oneself with a deeper reality that transcends appearances. But Dawkins approaches this reality in a way that is more literal than the most concrete literalist. He is very much like the Flatlander who insists that spheres are just fantasies of circles.

But to repeat something from a few posts ago, The Church -- I would say religion more generally -- gives us not a system, but a key. The question is, does the key work? Does it "unlock" something? If so, what?  

Given the existence of many religions, there is more than one key. Man cannot not be religious, in the sense that he cannot exist separate from the ground or source of his being. He can pretend to so exist, but this has no effect on the source. "Even prior to symbols, doctrines, and rites, our very subjectivity"

points as clearly as possible to our relationship with the Spirit and the Absolute; were it not for the absolute primacy of Spirit, relative subjectivity would be neither possible nor conceivable, it would be like an effect without a cause.  

The Aphorist reminds us that 

In order to abolish all mystery, it is enough to view the world with the eyes of a pig.

And

A fool is he who thinks that what he knows is without mystery.

But 

When the authentic mystery is eclipsed, humanity becomes drunk on imbecilic mysteries.

Let's not do that. Rather, let's remain focused on the authentic mystery -- the mystery of subjectivity alluded to in the title. "The primacy of the Invisible" is "natural to man" -- unless this invisible transcendent reality is viewed through the eyes of something less than a man, say, a pig. 

"What is natural to human consciousness"

is distinguished from animal consciousness by its objectivity and its totality -- its capacity for the absolute and the infinite (Schuon).

Again, "the reason for the existence of intelligence is its adequation to the real," just as "the wings of birds prove the existence of air." And "there is no more argumentative a reasoner than a negator of intellectual efficacy," who is like someone who argues that birds can't fly since air is invisible.

Nevertheless,

Rather than to yield to the obvious fact of the Spirit, proud reason will deny its own nature which nonetheless enables it to think.... tons of intelligence are wasted to circumvent the essential while brilliantly proving the absurd, namely to prove that the spirit sprung in the end from a clod of earth -- or, we could say, from an inert substance...

Nicolás, play us out: 

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition; it is perception of a special order of realities. 

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. 

Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper. 

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

The Cosmos is an Inside Job

Yesterday's post reflected on the idea that it takes a cosmos to raise a man. Which reminds us of the old adage that First in intention is last in execution. Looked at this way, the purpose of creation is the existence of self-conscious beings capable of knowing and returning to their creator. 

We know that the possibilities of life and mind are encoded into the big bang, and that if just one of the many parameters of the big bang were changed one iota, then we wouldn't be here.

This could, of course, be a coincidence, but what a coincidence! In philosophical terms its called the cosmic anthropic principle, of which there are weak and strong forms. I suppose we're advocating for the strongest possible form, since we mean it quite literally: again, that man is the raison d’être of the cosmos.

Come to think of it, if man isn't the raison, then I can think of any other possible raison. It reminds me of when the biologist J.B.S. Haldane was asked what nature reveals about God: that The Creator must have an inordinate fondness for beetles.

But there is quantity and there is quality. Sure, God makes a lot of beetles, but so what. He also made entomologists, and the gap between insects and people capable of knowing and reflecting upon them is literally infinite. 

Yada yada, the Strong Anthropic Principle:

"The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history." 

"There exists one possible Universe 'designed' with the goal of generating and sustaining 'observers'" (Wikipedia).

The previous two posts touched on the part-whole structure of the cosmos, without which the world wouldn't be intelligible to intelligence. Which in turn reminds me of what Norris Clarke writes about ours being a participatory cosmos, knowledge of reality being an especially intimate case of participation. 

By participation, Clarke means "the basic ontological structure of sharing in the universe." Again, each thing participates in the All, as part to whole; or, as Whitehead put it,

We habitually speak of stones, and planets, and animals, as though each individual thing could exist, even for a passing moment, in separation from an environment which is in truth a necessary factor in its own nature.

Thus, to repeat what was said in the previous post,

Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical, nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms. Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms.

But "participation" already hints at personhood, since it is an entailment of persons, and persons are by definition irreducibly intersubjective.

For Whitehead, the doctrine of evolution "cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature." In other words, if organism is fundamental and not just epiphenomenal, then neither biology nor physics are what we (they) think they are.

Can't get more participatory than this: "in a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus, every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world" (ibid.).

Knowledge of anything presupposes the existence of that single thing under investigation. But the investigation also presupposes a single mind capable of knowing this one thing it has selected or abstracted from the whole. 

And the unification of these two -- intelligible object and intelligent subject -- presupposes a higher unity that is the source of both, i.e., the unity of the object (that which makes it one) and the unicity (i.e., interior oneness) of the subject.

In short, "To be is to be together." And in the end, "psyche mirrors nature and nature mirrors psyche, each in its own way" (Clarke). This is not a metaphor; rather, it is why metaphor exists, or even why language itself exists: everything is at once outside and inside everything else.

I suspect we're arguing for a right-brain perspective to supplement the left-brain view, the former being more organic, processual, participatory, and context bound. But that's it for this morning. 

It Takes a Cosmos

We're toying with the idea that man is the raison d’être of the cosmos -- that the cosmos exists for the sake of man, rather than vice versa. On the one hand this seems crazy, but on the other, it does illuminate a number of otherwise impenetrable mysteries, in particular, the mystery of subjectivity:

The first thing that should strike man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the incommensurability between the miracle of intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- and material objects, whether a grain of sand or the sun, or any creature whatever as an object of the senses (Schuon).

Now, as mentioned a post or two ago, the Universe is by no means "an object of the senses," rather, of the intellect. The senes alone tell us nothing about the the ordered totality of objects and events that is the Universe. 

Then again, how do we come to know of the existence of the Universe if we do not begin with the senses? This leads us to suspect that the order of the cosmos is analogous to a hologram, whereby the whole is somehow present in each part. 

Yesterday's post ended with the idea that "creation is essentially a communication." Well, perhaps each part of the cosmos speaks of the whole, which is to say, contains information about it -- which is precisely how holography works:

When a photograph is cut in half, each piece shows half of the scene, but when a hologram is, the whole scene can still be seen in each piece. This is because, whereas each point in a photograph only represents light scattered from a single point in the scene, each point on a holographic recording includes information about light scattered from every point in the scene (Wiki).

Which very much reminds us of what Whitehead says about the cosmos, based on the then new ideas of quantum physics:

each volume of space, or each lapse of time, includes in its essence aspects of all volumes of space, or all lapses of time.... in a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus, every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.

Says Prof. Wiki, 

The physical universe is widely seen to be composed of "matter" and "energy".... a current trend suggests scientists may regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals. Bekenstein asks "Could we, as Blake memorably penned, 'see a world in a grain of sand,' or is that idea no more than poetic license?," referring to the holographic principle.

If we can see the world in a grain of sand, it is because we can see the whole in the part. Certainly this is true of organisms, each part of which contains genetic information about the totality. 

And to bring Whitehead back into the discussion, he remarked that "Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms." Which implies that cosmology must be the study of the largest organism. Or second largest.

In order for this to be a proper universe and not just a giant pile of random and unrelated stuff, it isn't sufficient for it to 

be composed of parts and that these parts physically constitute a whole; it is also necessary that all the individual parts be oriented toward that one in which all together can exist, that each of the principal parts of the universe should be the entire whole, that each of these universes be in some fashion all the others (De Koninck).

We know that DNA contains the blueprint for the entire organism. But the very possibility of DNA is rooted in the part-whole structure of the cosmos. In the absence of this prior implicit structure, biology itself would be impossible. 

Although life has only existed for four billion years or so, thanks to the part-whole structure of being, we have access to events that long precede this -- even to the very origins of the cosmos, in the form of light vibrations that have traveled billions of years to arrive at the back of the human eyeball.

In other words, an event that happened billions of years ago is not only entangled in the now, but is decoded via the intellect.

This goes back to the idea of creation as communication. From and to whom? To us, obviously. The question is, "from whom?" 

Let's think this through. Here's a thought:

Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others.

Which I suspect goes back to a trinitarian metaphysic, in that the Son-Word is a kind of metaphor of the Father. But we're out of time, so, to be continued... 

The Message of the Cosmos

Let's follow up on De Koninck's idea that man is the raison d’être of the whole of nature: if true, it explains a lot of things that are otherwise inexplicable, for example, our immaterial transcendence of the physical cosmos.

That is to say, knowledge of material reality presupposes our transcendence of it. By way of analogy, suppose you are confined to a two-dimensional Flatland. First, how could you ever know that reality is a two-dimensional plane, since you are restricted to those same two dimensions? 

Second, how could you know whether Flatland is closed and self-sufficient, or whether it is open to a higher dimension (i.e., the sphere)? 

Of course, we live in a 3D world, 4D if we throw in time. But even then, although we are in 4D, we cannot be of 4D, or we couldn’t be having this conversation. Rather, we are open to higher dimensions of truth, understanding, meaning, unity, beauty, et al. 

Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Way begins with a passage by a Fr. Georges Florovsky: "The Church gives us not a system, but a key.” Oh? A key to what? 

Well, first of all, it’s a key, not to be confused with the world opened up by the key -- any more than we should confuse eyeglasses with what they permit us to see through them. The point is, the key opens us to a higher dimension of reality.

Referring back to Flatland, note that a third dimension doesn’t have to move in order to be in constant contact with the lower two. A single sphere can incorporate an infinite number of circles without ever changing. 

Analogously, we could say that God is both infinitely distant -- in that higher dimension -- but infinitely close -- right here in these ones as well; and, as with the sphere, without having to undergo change.

Now, what is interiority as such but another dimension? The question is, is it just an inexplicable bump on the exterior surface of matter, or is it more like a descent from -- and in contact with -- something above? 

Back to De Koninck. He writes that “It is only in human understanding that the cosmos becomes a universe in the full sense.” 

Likewise, it is only in human understanding that our little circle can be seen as a declension from the sphere. 

“It is important to note,” writes De Koninck, “that God does not act on things, but from within.” Which is one reason why we can say that man contains the cosmos and not vice versa: 

Intellectual natures have a greater affinity to the whole than other beings; for every intellectual being is in a certain manner all things...

Our intellect in understanding is extended to infinity.... In its active nature the intellect is therefore capable of knowing everything that exists.... [T]he ultimate perfection to which the soul can attain is that in it is reflected the whole order of the universe and its causes (Thomas Aquinas).

Or, in the words of De Koninck, "Already in man the world is bent in on itself, and in God its extremes touch." Which reminds me of Schuon's claim that 

Fundamentally there are only three miracles: existence, life, intelligence; with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite.

Moreover, 

To the question of knowing why man has been placed in the world when his fundamental vocation is to leave [i.e., transcend] it, we would reply: it is precisely in order that there be someone who returns to God.

Bottom line for today: we agree with De Koninck that "Creation is essentially a communication." Which implies messenger, message, and recipient, each entailing the others. Now, supposing man is the most important message of creation...

Hold that thought. We'll continue down this avenue in the next post...

The Reason for the Cosmos

I'm still waiting for Edward Feser's Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature, which I'm hoping will provide blogworthy material, but it is on backorder. 

Meanwhile, I've been scouring the hull of the arkive for something worth reposting, but my standards are too high for the likes of me. This one, however, maintained my interest. It's actually two posts edited and woven into one:

Why a cosmos? Seems like an awful lot of trouble. But what if it takes a cosmos for man -- self-conscious persons -- to exist, and man is the point -- the telos -- of the whole existentialada?

According to Charles De Koninck, 

Man is manifestly the raison d’être of the whole of nature. Moreover, nature could not be ordered to God except through man. God being the end of the universe, it is necessary that the universe be capable of a return to the Universal Principle…. But only an intellectual creature is capable of such a return.

In other words, man as such is the missing link in existence. After all, the material world is self-evident, and the existence of the Absolute, the Universal Principle, isn’t far behind. Where's the connection? 

What else could it be but Man, since 1) we are the only creature that comes equipped with matter and an immaterial rational soul that is open -- both vertically and horizontally -- to the totality of existence, and 2) we have the entirely credible testimony of literally countless mystics, saints, and acidheads who have completed this cosmic roundtrip. 

I might add that in the absence of this roundtrip, our existence makes no sense whatsoever, for it would be analogous to a wire through which electricity passes but which is plugged into nothing, a skyscraper with no top floor, an endless joke with no punchline, or just a bad infinite in general. 

I would also say that our own self-consciousness is a circle that finds its principle in the circularity of God, not just in the extroverted sense of creation returning to itself, but in the interior sense of the Son returning to the Father via the Holy Spirit. But we’ll deal with this question later.

In any event, “only rational created nature is immediately ordered to God.” And if you don’t like that latter word, just say that the intellect is ordered to a metacosmic Truth without which it is little more than a cancer on the surface of being. 

Which, come to think of it, it all too often is: because we can know truth, we can know and even love falsehood. Things can only go wrong if it is possible for them to go right.

Lesser animals “do not attain the universal but only the particular.” But our rational intellect,

because it knows the universal formality of the good and of being is thereby ordered immediately to the universal principle of being. 

In other words, only a creature capable of making a tour of being can rejoin the source of being.

This is where things get a little obscure even for Petey, but it seems that man was originally plugged into the Vertical Socket, so to speak, but for reasons we won’t argue about unplugged himself from the source and decided to go it alone, which resulted in a kind of vertical blackout with intermittent and unreliable reception.

I mean, there’s still plenty of electricity down here, even if its rather weak, like static electricity compared to current electricity. The Great Electrician created both, but supposing he comes down and repairs the line, such that the current once again flows all the way to the top? I AM, a lineman for the cosmos.

2

We left off pondering the sort of creature capable of making a roundtrip tour of the cosmos and rejoining the source of being. Some people deny this possibility: call them flat earthers universers. 

Last I heard, any straight line in our universe ends up where it originated. Does this mean that if we could only see far enough, we’d see our own backside? 

Could the universe actually loop back on itself? And if you traveled far enough in a straight line, would you eventually return to your starting point, just as if you traveled in any one direction for long enough on the surface of the Earth? 

While it’s easy to see how a positively-curved space can be finite and closed, it’s a little less intuitive to realize that a flat space could be finite and closed as well, but that’s also the case. To understand, simply imagine a long, straight cylinder, and then bending that cylinder into a donut-like shape until the two ends connect. This shape -- known as a torus -- is both spatially flat and also finite and closed. 

Well, that's a relief. I always suspected the cosmos resembles a donut, hence the ʘin ONE CʘSMOS.

Let’s jump to the bottom line: in theory a straight line would return to itself, but there hasn’t been enough time for it to do so:

The Universe may, on some very grand cosmic scale, truly be finite in nature. But even if it is, we’ll never be able to know. While we can travel through space as far as we like, as fast as we can, for as long as we can imagine without end..., there is a cosmic horizon that limits how far we can travel through the expanding Universe, and for objects more than ~18 billion light-years away at present, they’re already effectively gone (ibid.).

Yes, but there is a real world from which the world of physics is but an abstraction. This latter is what De Koninck refers to as "the hollow universe." And even though it is hollow, no one could actually live inside it:

The objects available to us in experience are much richer than those described in modern mathematical physics…. Mathematical physics deals, literally, with abstractions and there is a tendency to take these abstractions for the whole of reality. The result is what De Koninck meant by the expression “hollow universe” (Armour).

Remember: it is always we who understand the cosmos, not the cosmos that comprehends us. It reminds me of a somewhat cryptic utterance by the Aphorist, that

The world is explicable from man; but man is not explicable from the world. Man is a given reality; the world is a hypothesis we invent.

The point is, we begin with the concrete reality of our own existence, which includes an intellect capable of unpacking the intelligibility of the world via abstract concepts. This doesn’t mean we can begin at the other end, as if we could somehow deduce our existence from our own abstractions -- including the abstraction of materialism:

Of all the vicious circles one could imagine, that in which the materialist encloses himself is the most primitive, restrictive, and binding (De Koninck).

We've belabored this before, but consider the fact that if we are able to explain natural selection, then natural selection is unable to explain us. In other words, we transcend the mechanism that supposedly explains us. Conversely, it it were an exhaustive explanation, we could never know it, because truth transcends the mechanism.

Which is a convenient place to insert De Koninck’s bottom line:

Every natural form tends toward man…. in this perspective, subhuman forms are much less states than tendencies.

Things are not opaque, but rather, transparent to our intelligence, which, to paraphrase Einstein, is the most surprising fact of our universe. Everything “speaks,” but only with the arrival of man is it “heard.” 

For example, the universe was shouting about how E = mc² for billions of years before Einstein came along and heard it. Likewise, it was raving about Gödel’s theorems before Gödel took the time to listen.

So, the universe literally tends toward man, i.e., has the homosapiential tendencies alluded to above. We literally complete a circle that otherwise makes no sense without us, for the message presupposes a sender and a recipient. 

This is the concrete and dynamic circle in which we always find ourselves -- and in which God finds us:

the cosmos is open to another world which acts on it. And this cause can only be a living being; it is necessarily a pure spirit, a transcosmic being.  

Good place to pause. Meanwhile, Google Gemini, create an image: