Man is a Relational Substance of a Transrational Nature

Boetius famously defined the human being as an individual substance of a rational nature, and maybe that's the problem. Not to blame Boetius, because no one cares what philosophers think, but if you don't even know what something is, then it's hard to know what to do about it. 

In any event, turns out that man is -- how did you put it to me this morning, Petey?

A relational substance of a transrational nature. 

Bingo. We're not only relational in the manner of other social animals, but intersubjectively so, to such an extent that an externally related individual human is an unthinkable contradiction. 

Rather, we inhabit an interpersonal world of mutual awareness of thoughts, feelings, and intentions, which goes beyond simply observing the other's outward behavior, rather, grasping their inner experience. Ultimately, like the Trinity, we are members of one another.

Which is flat out weird. We take it for granted because it's the water in which we swim, but we notice it when it glitches. For example, autism involves some kind of deficit in intersubjectivity. In fact, in extreme cases, an autistic person might well be "an individual substance of a rational nature," and that's the problem, i.e., being cut off from others and living in a kind of rationalistic skeleton of a universe.

As to our "transrational nature," this is -- ironically -- proven by our rational nature. In other words, we are rational but not enclosed (or encloseable) by reason, for reasons articulated by Gödel. Man is the being who employs reason while transcending reason. As explained a couple of posts ago, Gödel's theorems

shattered the hope of completely formalizing mathematics, showing that there will always be truths beyond the reach of any formal system.... Formal systems, which are purely syntactic, cannot capture the full richness of meaning. Semantics, or the meaning of things, cannot be reduced to syntax, or the formal structure of things. Human minds seem to have the capacity to grasp meaning and understand context in ways that formal systems cannot.

So, we always transcend the formal systems we use to understand both ourselves and the world. 

Now, how did this happen? Who goofed? For as Terence McKenna said, this was a nice neighborhood until the monkeys got out of control. 

In other words, all other animals are bound by instinct, so they can only cause so much damage. But humans, because they found a way to transcend biology, can cause an infinite amount of mischief. I don't know if we can literally "destroy the planet," as liberals like to say, but we can try.

Top of the world, Ma!

Interestingly, if you haven't seen the noir classic White Heat, it's all about a psychopathic criminal (Jody Jarrett) with a deranged attachment to his criminal mother. It even has a scene that perversely mirrors the pieta, when Jody has one of his "spells" and only his mother can sooth him.

Anyway, man's daring escape from his genetic programming is either Nature's Greatest Goof or some kind of plan. If it's a plan, then it involves a being intended to be the image and likeness of his creator. And if there's a goof, then I wonder if Genesis 3 is an attempt to tell the story of what went -- and goes -- wrong with the plan? 

For clearly, man is a special creation, over and apart from everything else in creation. Irrespective of whether or not you accept the biblical account, I call this a blindingly obvious, self-evident fact: we are astonishingly different from everything else in all of creation. Who could deny it, when denial only constitutes more proof? 

I mean, my dog can neither deny nor affirm her dogginess. Rather, she's a dog, and that's all there is to it. In order for her to observe her dogginess, she'd have to be able to transcend and reflect upon it. Which she cannot do, for she is entirely enclosed in instinct.

Equally self-evident is that this transcendent capacity of ours cuts both ways. Or maybe you've never cracked a history book. The point is, supposing we can know truth, then this entails a capacity to embrace falsehood, illusion, and unreality. In short, we are free. Likewise, if we can love the good we can can also love the bad or hate the good. 

Now, freedom itself implies God. It's one of the capacities that is entailed in being the image and likeness of the Creator. God is the very principle of freedom, and in the absence of God, our own freedom is like a floating chandelier attached to nothing. In the words of Stanley Jaki,

far more grippingly than one's immediate grasp of reality does one's registering of the reality of one's free will bring one face to face with that realm of metaphysical reality which hangs in mid-air unless suspended from that Ultimate Reality, best called God, the Creator. 

Now, the human station does, as it were, float in mid-air, suspended between immanence and transcendence. This is the "space" of freedom, and it is even a kind of phase space, which is to say, a multidimensional space where every possible state of the system may be mapped; it is essentially a map of the possible states of a complex system. 

Now, people are constrained by a particular phase space. For example, my phase space does not include the possibility of playing basketball like Michael Jordan, but his phase space probably doesn't include the possibility of being a metaphysical Raccoon. Things that are possible for some are impossible for others, so our freedom is obviously not totally unconstrained. But it takes all kinds to make a world.

Our potential is not literally infinite, but then again, we all have a "capacity for the infinite," which is to say, the God to whom we are ultimately conformed, at least in potential. God is indeed the strange attractor of our phase space, and we are restless until we rest in that attractor. 

According to our friend Gemini, the phase space of complex systems includes:

Equilibrium points (fixed points): States where the system remains unchanged over time. 

Limit cycles: Periodic behaviors where the system repeatedly cycles through a set of states.   

Attractors: Regions in phase space towards which trajectories tend to converge, representing the long-term behavior of the system. These can be points, cycles, or more complex structures called strange attractors (in chaotic systems).    

Repellors: Regions from which trajectories move away.    

Stability: Whether the system returns to an equilibrium point after a small perturbation. 

Bifurcations: Qualitative changes in the system's behavior as parameters are varied, often visualized as changes in the structure of the phase space.

I'm particularly interested in attractors and repellors, in particular, if we are attracted to the wrong things and repelled by the right ones. Equilibrium and stability can also be problematic, since man is a vertically open system, so these imply a kind of closure to the vertical energies that sustain the system and keep it on the move. 

Bifurcation is interesting, because it reminds me of religious conversion, or metanoia, in which we explicitly open ourselves to those energies that flow from the transcendent side of things. In so doing, we bifurcate from one type of system to another -- from being horizontally enclosed to vertically open.

Note in this regard that it is possible for a nominally religious person to enclose himself in dogma, but not be truly open to the vertical energies that we do not control.

Which all reminds me of how Norris Clarke describes our situation herebelow. For example,

we have not really taken full possession of our own inner dynamism of inquiry until we keep penetrating to its profoundest depths and suddenly become aware in a kind of epiphany of self-discovery [a bifurcation] precisely that its very nature is to be an inexhaustible abyss that can comprehend and leap beyond any finite or series of finites...

In other words, we are always transcending toward infinitude. On the one hand, this could be 

an existential absurdity, ordered ineluctably toward a simply non-existent goal, magnetized, so to speak, by the abyss of nothingness, of what is not and can never be -- a dynamism doomed eternally to temporary gratification but permanent unfulfillment.

In other words, an endless limit cycle in which the system repeatedly cycles through a set of finite states. Or, it could be that the system is 

drawn, magnetized toward an actually existing, totally fulfilling goal, which confers upon it total and magnificent meaningfulness and opens out before it a destiny filled with inexhaustible light and hope. On the one hand, the darkness of ultimate nothingness of what can never be; on the other, the fullness of ultimate Light, which already awaits our coming. 

Of course I prefer Door #2, but is there any rational basis for believing it exists? Well, I agree with Clarke that

the structure of human thought as oriented toward Infinite Being is a necessary a priori structure or condition of possibility of all our thinking. We cannot help, if we think at all, living in the limitless horizon of being and tending toward the fullness of being as fulfilling goal. 

In short, "Man is an embodied affirmation of the Infinite," and with that we'll pause for now, because we've covered a lot of ground but still only scratched the surface of the existential itch.