The Rediscovery of Reality?

What happened to reality? Where did it go? And why? And how do we get it back?

Excuse me, but I'm a bit of a history buff, and it looks to me like it's never been particularly popular. To put it mildly. 

Well, they say humans have had a tenuous relationship to reality ever since the so-called fall. Or at least "fallenness" is a way of talking about this universal vulnerability: we all fall short of the glory of reality.  

I don't like to blame philosophers, because who even reads them anyway? To the extent that a misguided philosopher is the "spokesman for an era," it's often because the era itself was already off course: in an age dominated by science, you get scientistic philosophers. In a nihilistic age, deconstruction. They don't lead, they follow.

It reminds me of what John Lennon said about the Beatles supposedly being spokesmen of their goofy era:

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow's nest of that ship.

No one would pay attention to deconstruction in an age of common sense realism. Just as no one pays attention to common sense today. 

Sometimes a philosophy arises in opposition to the spirit of the age, like romanticism during the Enlightenment, or existentialism in response to rationalism, or analytic philosophy in response to idealism.

But each is a partial views of total reality -- a reminder that a philosophy is generally true in what it affirms but false in what it denies. 

I myself am a materialist, but surely not only a materialist. If a philosophy isn't capacious enough for both subject and object, empirical and rational, quantity and quality, form and matter, existence and essence, then it's not big enough for me. The Word transcends and includes all of them and more. 

These preluminary thoughts were provoked by a book I'm reading called Physics and Vertical Causation by Wolfgang Smith. In it he fingers Descartes as patient zero, what with his division of the world into matter and thought, with no way to reunite them. But in reality, they are self-evidently united. We just don't know how.

In Descartes' defense, it certainly appears plausible that the material and immaterial are mutually exclusive substances. And yet, every time I decide to move my hand, and it moves, it's proof enough for me of vertical causation -- of mind influencing matter in a top-down manner. 

But I'm a simple man. Unlike Smith, I'm not a physicist. And yet, many of his arguments hearken back to things I've been writing since my doctoral dissertation in the late '80s, which almost makes me think I ought to take myself more seriously. 

For Smith, horizontal causation is temporal and quantitative, best described (or perhaps assumed, rather) by the classical physics of Newton. But vertical causation (VC) "is something by nature invisible to the physicist, and hence proves to be incurably philosophical." It "does not act in time; one can say that it acts instantaneously."

How can it act instantaneously if it is constrained by the speed of light?

That right there is an example of something I addressed in the book -- Bell's theorem, nonlocality, instantaneous communication between subatomic particles, and all that. I even suggested that thought operates in this manner, i.e., faster then the speed of light, but I'm just a psychologist. Stay in your lane, softhead!

But Smith is a hardheaded physicist, and he agrees that VC "proves to be ubiquitous" in the cosmos, and that "nothing whatsoever can in fact exist without being 'vertically' caused." 

Smith takes us through a brief history of quantum physics, but it seems to me that Whitehead grasped the revolutionary metaphysical implications as early as 1925, in his Science and the Modern World. 

It thus came about that the most perfect physics the world had ever seen turned out to be "a sort of mystic chant over an unintelligible universe," in Whitehead's telling words (Smith).

In short, physics left us "with something that can no longer be pictured or conceived at all -- except possibly in mathematical terms" (ibid.). Well, we're gonna need a bigger picture, that's all: "not only a brand new physics that works, but also a new understanding of what physics is: that is to say, how it relates to reality" (ibid.).

Quantum physics is a fine map -- even the best scientific map ever -- but it is not the territory. However, it does prove that the territory is much stranger than we had imagined, ultimately "that ordinary objects must be nonlocal." Specifically, Bell's Theorem "proved -- to everyone's utter amazement! -- that actually there are no local objects. In a word, reality is nonlocal."

Well, either it is or it isn't nonlocal. But if it isn't, then quantum physics makes no sense on its own terms; in other words, nonlocality is required in order for it to make sense, but this in turn makes no sense in a Cartesian universe. 

The bottom line is that ordinary physical objects "must be nonlocal," and thereby "have the capacity... to communicate with other such objects instantaneously." It is only up to us to arrive at a philosophy in which this is conceivable.

It certainly isn't conceivable with the old Cartesian philosophy, which Whitehead called "not only reigning" but "without rival. And yet -- it is quite unbelievable." Smth also quotes Heisenberg to the effect that "today in the physics of elementary particles, good physics is unconsciously being spoiled by bad philosophy."

Today we have the equal and opposite problem, of good science being consciously spoiled by the plague of woo woo philosophies in the name of quantum physics -- of relentless deepaking the chopra. How do we avoid that?

With good philosophy?

Correct. Smith's book is rather brief, but to make a short story even shorter, he essentially argues that the local (or corporeal) is to the nonlocal (or physical) as form is to prime matter. In other words, Aristotle got it right after all. "Everything in creation hinges upon these two complementary principles." i.e., the "foundational duality of form and matter." 

Importantly, however, this is a vertical distinction, with form situated above matter. The merely physical universe of quantity is actually "below" what he calls the corporeal plane of everyday formal objects. Qualities are "from above," and ultimately "transmit the light of supernal essences into this nether world."

So, it's really a tripartite vertically ordered cosmos, with the pure potential of formless quantum potential at the bottom, the corporeal world in the middle, and something like God at the top: expressed visually, something like O <--> (•) <--> ⬤, only in a vertical configuration.

Smith prefers the image "of a circle in which the circumference corresponds to the corporeal world, the center to the spiritual or 'celestial' realm, and the interior to the intermediary" -- maybe something like this?

I'm pretty sure we're only getting started. To be continued.

Adam was Framed

Normally, breaking the fourth wall is inappropriate. Most of the time, in order for art to function as it is supposed to, the frame must be respected. Typically we want to abandon ourselves to the illusion of art, not be reminded that it is an illusion. One of the reasons why breaking the frame can be effective is because of its unexpectedness. If it happened all the time, the novelty would quickly wear off. 

Now, it's not just film that has a frame, but all works of art. Art always involves some kind of boundary separating it from the world, such as a literal frame around a painting. Without the frame, we wouldn't know what to look at.  

In the case of the Incarnation, what's the frame? Off the top of my head, it seems there are multiple frames, from the literal to the psychological to the cosmic and more. I've been watching a series on the Daily Wire in which Jordan Peterson and a diverse group of eight co-panelists analyze and discuss the gospels, interpreting them from a multitude of hermeneutical standpoints.

At the very least, there are the traditional four senses of scripture, the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical. Peterson often comes at it from a Jungian/archetypal perspective, while others do so from the standpoint of philosophy, cognitive science, Judaism, and more. 

But God shatters all our forms, hence the Resurrection, which must be the last word in breaking the frame. Didn't see that one coming! It reminds me of Eliot's description of how "Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden" -- the burden or describing what is beyond words, or even the very source of words, AKA the Word.  

Back to the frame of the Incarnation. In the most obvious and literal sense, the frame is a particular man named Jesus. However, this man is embedded in a particular tribe, but also within a narrative that goes back to the creation of man and even to creation itself. 

But as we said a few posts back, we're not just talking about a new creation within the old, but the transformation of the old one into something entirely new, such that the comic frame itself is transformed. Which is a little difficult to wrap our minds around.

Now, no one has to reinvent the telephone or computer every time we use them, but that's not the way it is with regard to art or scripture, which necessitate a personal engagement on our part. There is a passive element, as in suspending disbelief, but also an active one, as per all the hermeneutical frameworks referenced above.

In the case of both art and scripture, the purpose of the frame is to convey something that is beyond the frame, just as, on a more mundane level, we use words to convey a meaning not reducible to the words themselves. Which is why a literal interpretation of scripture defeats its purpose, for it reverses the vector flow of meaning -- like focusing on the finger instead of that to which the finger is pointing. 

Now, if man is created, this implies that he is analogous to a work of art with multiple levels of meaning. But he will ultimately point to his creator, just as Macbeth points to Shakespeare or the Mona Lisa to Rembrandt. 

Bob, this post is all over the place. What are you trying to say?

Well, first of all, that man as such breaks the frame of the cosmos, and cannot be contained by it. Or, we have one foot in the cosmos and one foot out. We are existentially amphibious, which is to say, material and spiritual. On the sixth day God says "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness," so the image is reflected in matter. 

But matter cannot literally contain the soul, rather, vice versa: the soul -- again, literally -- contains the body, which means that it transcends the material. It is only in this transcendent "space" where  (↑) meets  (↓) -- where intelligence meets intelligibility, where mind encounters truth, where the soul perceives beauty, and where revelation makes sense. 

This is another way of saying that this is an open cosmos, open to its transcendent source. And that we in turn are uniquely open at our end, in that the very principle of being is reflected in us. Conversely,

If man is the sole image of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors. 

In that case the cosmos is indeed enclosed within itself, and man cannot be "about" anything transcending himself. He can be about "selfish genes," or neural activity, or class warfare, or a blind will to power, but these reduce to the empty mirrors referenced above. Then, 

Man is an animal that imagines itself to be Man.

This being the case because if man has no essential -- i.e., created -- nature, then we can never know ourselves, because doing so "presupposes that there is such a thing as a universal human nature" (Kreeft).

The ultimate frame for our drama is the one set out in Genesis, in which we are in open communion with the source of our being. The story about the temptation and fall of man is ultimately about rejecting this frame in favor of our own, in which case we are well and truly framed by the serpent, AKA Satan.

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

I love science, but left to its own resources,

Science can do no more than draw up the inventory of our prison. 

Thus,

Man often believes he is exchanging a fable for a truth when he is merely exchanging one fable for another. 

Kreeft describes the consequences: "Thus, we have wild and mad philosophies of man that are much wilder and madder than any of the many philosophies of God."

Some say that man is a god with amnesia. Some say that man is the inventor of illusions like mind or thought or spirit; the thinker that thinks up myths like the reality of thinkers and thinking.... Some say man is simply the cleverest animal, with a brain that is "a computer made of meat." Some say that man is simply a complex machine or a chemical equation.... Some say man is a cosmic evolutionary accident. Some say that man is whatever he wants to be, dreams of being, or thinks he is.

All a consequence of a bad philosophical anthropology that follows Adam being framed in the likeness of his own image (those two empty mirrors referenced above). The result is an empty man in a hollow cosmos. Or a man who is so full of himself that there's no room for God.

Which reminds me of C.S. Lewis's crack about hell -- that it's really just God saying to man, Thy will be done. We can't break out because God can't break in. Until he does, big time.

When God Breaks the Fourth Wall

Hmm. Every religion in some sense involves God breaking the fourth wall, as when an actor addresses the audience in a play or movie. There are degrees of breakage, from flashing a covert Halpert look at the camera:

To jumping out of the film altogether, as in The Purple Rose of Cairo:

Yes, and what has this to do with yesterday's post?

Well, recall where the post ended, with the aphormation that Creation is the nexus between eternity and history. This being the case, history is full of knowing winks, ironic smiles, and mischievous glances that speak to us of the author of history -- or in other words, break through our walls of space and time.

Truth is in history, but history is not the truth.

History commits suicide by denying all transcendence. For history to be of concern to us, there must be something that transcends it: there must be something in history more than history.

But how? We supposedly live in a four-dimensional world, but are we actually bound by these dimensions? If we were, then we could never know a timeless truth, perceive transcendent beauty, or undertake a virtuous act, for each of these involves perception of something beyond the walls of history.

Values are not citizens of this world, but pilgrims from other heavens.

So, if we can break the fourth wall, it must be because God does it first.

In certain moments of abundance, God overflows into the world like a spring gushing into the peace of midday.

Not to abuse his name again, but Gödel's theorems imply that man qua man uniquely breaks through the walls of logic, reason, and formal systems. That was his opinion, anyway -- that we have access to unprovable truths. Some folks think otherwise, but like anybody could even know that if he is confined to reason.

As for God making the first move, ancient Judaism maintained that the temple was where God liked to dwell, while for Christians we have the Incarnation. More generally, religions have their sacred mountains, forests, rivers, and objects, each communicating something of what is beyond them.

There are, of course, religions of pure transcendence -- e.g., Gnosticism -- in which the point is to flee immanence and ascend into a better world for better people. Pantheism is the opposite, conflating God and cosmos. One might say the former involve pure (↑), the latter unalloyed (↓).

In Surprised by Hope, Wright references a play by Oscar Wilde, in which Herod demands to know "Where is this man?," referring to Christ. "He is in every place, my lord, but it is hard to find him," wink wink.

If he's in every place, it's not so much a matter of looking for God as a way to look -- for example, with aesthetic eyes:

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says. 

Indeed,  

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

A footprint implies a foot. One might say that God is the necessary condition of beauty, while we are the sufficient condition:

The work of art is a covenant with God. 

It sounds a tad pretentious to say these little posts are a covenant with God, but they are at least collaboration with O. This is true of any creative activity, in which there is a mysterious x factor that makes the transcendent whole greater than the sum of the immanent parts. In art, 2+2 is always > 4. In bad art, 2+2 = 4 or even less. 

The other night I saw a movie in which the script sounded like it was generated by AI. It was perfectly competent, but let's just say that nowhere in it did God break the fourth wall. 

I am especially intrigued by certain songs that never bore me, no matter how many times I've listened to them. To be perfectly accurate, it is more the performance than the song, but what accounts for this? How does the song break through its own confines into something that transcends the music?

The other day I read a book called The Gospel According To the Beatles. Discussing it would take us down an endless rabbit hole, but each of them got their gospel from a previous gospel that had penetrated them to the core, e.g., Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, et al. 

Many pathetic fanboy boomers like me recall seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and the world suddenly turning from black & white to color. Similarly, when John Lennon first heard Elvis, "me whole life changed from then on, I was just completely shaken by it." "It was just the experience of hearing it and having my hair stand on end." I heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight.

God speaks through Elvis? You're gonna die on that hill?

Or not die. When Sam Phillips (who first recorded Elvis) heard the voice of Howlin' Wolf, he said, "this is where the soul of man never dies."

Not to conflate the sacred and secular, but if it is true that Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says, then it's a case of certain aesthetic experiences shattering the fourth wall and initiating us into a larger transcendent dimension. That's how it is for me: music is a language and means of transcendence. 

But it would be an error to turn music into a substitute religion. George Harrison found out early enough -- by the age of 21 -- that neither it nor money and fame were enough, so he developed a lifelong fascination with Vedanta. And later he put the Vedanta into the music, as in My Sweet Lord.

Let's reset. Schuon writes that 

The whole existence of the peoples of antiquity, and of traditional peoples in general, is dominated by two key-ideas, the idea of Center and the idea of Origin.

Now, each of these involves something in space and time pointing to what is beyond them. For example, the "sacred Center" is "the place where Heaven has touched the earth," where "God has manifested Himself in order to pour forth His grace." In short, it's a place where the breakthrough of (↓) is particularly noticeable. 

Likewise, the Origin "is the quasi-timeless moment when Heaven was near and terrestrial things were still half-celestial." Or, "in the case of civilizations having having a historical founder," it is "the period when God spoke," which is to say, broke the fourth wall -- for example, vis-a-vis Abraham, Moses, Mary, the Prophets, etc. 

A comment from the Aphorist:

Christ was in history like a point on a line. But his redemptive act is to history as the center is to the circumference.

The still point of the turning world? Incoming from the Poet:

A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time. 

A moment in time but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning. 

Otherwise -- absent the vertical bisecting and transecting of (↓) -- 

Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep 

I hate it when that happens. Who can breathe in such a place?

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things.

The transcendence of things is the salt that seasons their blandness.

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

The waters of the West are stagnant, but the spring is unpolluted.

“Intuition” is the perception of the invisible, just as “perception” is the intuition of the visible.

Hell is any place from which God is absent.

Each of these goes to both God and man breaking the fourth wall. And let's not even talk about the meaning of Christmas, but there it is, right Gemini?

In the context of Christmas, the story of Jesus' birth is often viewed as a divine intervention into human history. While this narrative can be seen as a supernatural event, it's not typically interpreted as a conscious act of breaking the fourth wall in the same way a theatrical character might.

Okay Scrooge.

Bah humbug!

A New Creation?

As mentioned yesterday, I recently read a book called Surprised by Hope, although I don't recall why. Probably just the usual cosmic randomness. Dávila says something to the effect that chance determines most of what we read, while we can choose only what is worthy of rereading, the latter constituting a fraction of the former.

While I won't be rereading this one, it did touch on a subject worthy of some head-scratching, although we won't know if it's deserving of a post until the post is written. Or ends in a train wreck. All aboard!

For Dávila,

Only ancient writings have a cure for the modern itch.

I don't go quite that far, so long as the modern writer is mindful of the ancient, which is to say, the perennial and timeless.

Anyway, this book got me thinking about the whole subject of creation, which is not a one-and-done matter, rather, a temporal unfolding of the timeless principle of creation. 

For example, in my book I highlighted several abrupt and discontinuous events of irreducible creativity, the first being existence itself. Science, of course, traces the universe back to the Big Bang, but the creativity hardly ends there. The next bang occurs with the emergence of the animate from the inanimate, and then the "special creation" of human persons from the matrix of pre-personal life.

We concluded -- spoiler alert -- that the principle of mind, life, and being must be located above, not below. Each of these is at once distinct, but a kind of fractal of the creative principle itself, which operates in a top-down manner.  

Today we shall explore the proposition that Christianity represents another distinct and discontinuous bang, which is to say, a new creation amidst the existing one. It is not only related to the earlier ones (existence, life, and mind) but their consummation. In this regard, it is a much more radical metaphysic than the one to which I was exposed in Sunday school. Which was no metaphysic at all. 

Rather, it was something that was true on Sunday but impossible to reconcile with the Monday-through Saturday-metaphysic of rationalistic scientism. 

I should emphasize that there have been any number of smaller creative bangs within the bigger ones -- for example, from single celled prokaryotes to nucleated eucaryotes, or reptiles to mammals. There were also many subdivisions of the big bang itself, in which the universe took on new properties.

Regarding the human dimension, we could point to the emergence of Neolithic peoples out of the Paleolithic, or to the Axial Age, when Here Comes Everybody rather suddenly discovered the (or a) nonlocal principle of everything:

The Axial Age is the period when, roughly at the same time around most of the inhabited world, the great intellectual, philosophical, and religious systems that came to shape subsequent human society and culture emerged.... during this period there was a shift away from more predominantly localized concerns and toward transcendence.

Say what you want about the Axial Age, but Christianity represents a new creation out of this prior development. In one sense this is obvious, i.e. Christianity emerges out of its Jewish matrix, but it is also something much more radical and discontinuous than that.

Which is one reason why, when he walked the earth, it was impossible to understand Christ within the existing framework. Indeed, his closest disciples hadn't a clue, and one of Wright's central themes is that most of the restavus still don't get it.

What part of Creation do you not understand?

Something like that, for it is indeed a question of an entirely novel development:

Jesus of Nazereth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation (Wright). 

That's pretty radical -- not just another charter member of the Axial Club, but something that emerges out of it: "If a new creation is really on the loose, the historian wouldn't have any analogies for it..." 

In other words, radically new, not assimilable to existing categories. Is this a problem? Yes and no. No, in the sense that everything that happens has never happened before. History is full of unlikely events, from the calling of Abraham to the Annunciation to the American Revolution, and that's just some of the A's.

Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable.... History is full of unlikely things that happened once and once only, with the result that the analogies are often at best partial.

Sometimes humans are confronted with something that "if they accept it, will demand the remaking of their worldview." For example, physicists were initially quite reluctant to accept evidence of the Big Bang, because it implied things they didn't wish to entertain. Christianity "poses that kind of challenge to the larger worldview of both the historian and the scientist":

The challenge is in fact the challenge of new creation.

The resurrection "is not an absurd event within the old world but the symbol and starting point of the new world." It remains to us to "lay out the worldview within which it makes sense." A new paradigm for a new ontology, which is what science does when confronted with anomalous facts that don't fit into the old one.

Again, the anomalous fact of the Resurrection is not "a highly peculiar event within the present world... it is, principally, the defining event of the new creation, the world that is being born with Jesus."

Now, the early Christians "believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter." Which is a rather wild claim, but there it is. "The coming of Jesus emerges as the moment all creation had been waiting for." "Progress, left to itself, could never have brought it about," for 

This is no smooth evolutionary transition, in which creation simply moves up another gear into a higher mode of life.

Rather, it is a "transformation of the whole cosmos."

Now, I surely don't know what to make of that, but let's try to figure out what's going on here. In order to do so, we need a more capacious framework in which to situate it. Like so:

Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. 

It will have to wait until tomorrow, as this post has gone on long enough. However, this might be a clue:

Creation is the nexus between eternity and history.