If There's No Self, Who Says So?

Yesterday I watched an interview of someone named Annika Harris on Alex O'Connnor's podcast. She is the wife of the stubborn atheist Sam Harris, and like him is a materialist, even though, at the same time, she argues that the ground of reality is consciousness. She also argues that there's no such thing as a self. 

If the ground of reality is consciousness, this consciousness is either personal or impersonal, and which is more plausible? The following post from last summer may provide some clues, for, according to Bob,

It seems that man is the clue he is looking for. 

In other words, we must turn the homoscope around and examine the examiner, for we at once see and know "through" the human state, but we are also uniquely capable of looking at this state from a transcendent position that is partially "outside" or "above" this very state. 

Am I wrong? Or is man incapable of introspection and self-awareness?

Now for Schuon, "Man -- insofar as he is distinct from other creatures on earth -- is intelligence." And "if nothing proves that our intelligence is capable of adequation," then "there is likewise nothing to prove that the intelligence expressing this doubt is competent to doubt."

What this means is that logic is perfectly consistent only when surpassing itself.

And we're back to Gödel -- to the direct perception of trans-logical truth.

That's a bold claim, but it is implied in the name: Homo sapiens sapiens, the double-wise homo. 

We've spoken in the past of the proper ensoulment of man some 60 to 75,000 years ago, coinciding with the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens. (Or at least the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for ensoulment.)

Prior to this is mere Homo sapiens: intelligent but not the double intelligence that both turns upon itself -- hence objectivity -- and knows the Absolute -- hence transcendence.

What distinguishes man from animals is not knowledge of a tree, but the concept -- whether explicit or implicit -- of the Absolute (ibid.).

Resetting the stage, we left off with the question of whether human intelligence is essentially no different from the intelligence of animals, or whether there is something absolute, unlimited, and transcendent about it. 

First, is this a false binary? Could there be a third kind of intelligence that doesn't fall into these two categories?

You can't be a little bit unlimited.

Not so sure about that, because it seems the human spirit is a tapestry of limit + unlimited. Only God -- supposing he exists -- would be Unlimited as such, without qualification:

the same intelligence that makes us aware of a superiority, also makes us aware of the relativity of this superiority and, more than this, it makes us aware of all our limitations (ibid.). 

And "Man, like the Universe, is a fabric of determination and indetermination; the latter stemming from the Infinite, and the former from the Absolute" (ibid.). 

Nevertheless, 

What is most profoundly and authentically human rejoins the Divine by definition. 

Argument from authority.  

Maybe, but let's consider a few additional authoritative claims: the Intellect is

At once mirror of the supra-sensible and itself a supernatural ray of light. 

And

Man is first of all characterized by a central or total intelligence, and not one that is merely peripheral or partial; secondly he is characterized by a free and not merely instinctive will; and thirdly by a character capable of compassion and generosity, and not merely of egoistic reflexes.

On the other hand, animals "cannot know what is beyond the senses" and cannot transcend themselves:

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.... There lies the mystery of the human vocation...

 Put another way, it may also be said of man 

that he is essentially capable of knowing the True, whether it be absolute or relative; he is capable of willing the Good, whether it be essential or secondary, and of loving the Beautiful, whether it be interior or exterior. In other words: the human being is substantially capable of knowing, willing and loving the Sovereign Good. 

Now, where does this leave us vis-a-vis man being the very clue he seeks? 

Well, to say man is to say intellect ordered to truth or to the Real (as opposed to appearances); a disinterested will ordered to the good; and sentiment ordered to objective beauty. 

Or let us say intelligence-freedom-creativity, ordered to the true, good, and beautiful, which are at once "transcendent" but the very substance of which we are made. In other words, going back to what Schuon says above,  

What is most profoundly and authentically human rejoins the Divine by definition.

*****

To pick up where yesterday's post began: It seems that man is the clue he is looking for. This is such an important point that it's worth even a second post. 

How, you (or I) may ask, did I end up a psychologist? Partly because one morning, more or less, I woke up and found myself interested in everything, and how everything relates to everything else. 

Well?

Now clearly this Question of questions involves a lotta in, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you's, and a whole lotta strands to keep together and synthesize in the old Bobber's head. 

Problem is, the old Bobber's head -- among other issues -- is only so big. New writ is always coming to light, which then has to be integrated with the old writ. Hence the 5,000+ posts. Will it ever end? Are we getting anywhere? Or are we always beginning Where We Left Off, like old Sisyphus? 

And how is this essentially different from what a dung beetle does? "One morning, after troubled dreams, Bob woke up and found himself transformed into an insect rolling another pile of BS into a post."

The human has the insignificance of a swarm of insects when it is merely human. 

Still, I dream of rolling those 5,000 into one compact ball. Could there be some secret formula to boil them all down? This has been my summer project, but truly truly, it's an endless summer. 

Back to our story, at the same time, I noticed that all of This -- everything -- runs through man. Take man out of the equation, and there's just nothing and nobody to know it. About this Kant is correct, as far as he goes, which is simultaneously too far and not far enough:

If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must vanish, as this world is nothing but the phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of our own subject...

The Aphorist says something similar but deeper, 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. 

We might go so far as to say

That which is not a person is not finally anything. 

Stalin was right about one thing: no man, no problem. 

So the nature of this subject -- man, the human subject -- is pretty, pretty important, so important that everything else hinges on it. To study anything requires a human being, but what is that? Answer: psychology. Or rather, surely psychology would provide me with some answers? If not, what is it good for? 

So I became a psychologist in order to get some answers about the nature of this entity through whom everything runs and without whom there isn't anything at all. Truly truly, it all goes back to the perennial question,

In the course of this frantic search I went through various phases, from existentialism to psychoanalysis to evolutionary psychology to Vedanta, but -- to advert to a title of one of Schuon's books -- it's like one big Play of Masks. But who is this masked man, beneath the masks? Or is it masks all the way down?

That would be absurd. Which doesn't rule out absurdity being the Answer. But we still have the problem of the man who dons the mask of absurdity. Who is this man? And is absurdity just another mask he may choose to wear?

Choose? How did that get here? Supposing we can choose absurdity, then man must first be free to choose it, but how? What is the sufficient reason of freedom?

Time out for aphorisms:

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

Man is the animal that imagines itself to be Man.

When it finishes its "ascent," humanity will find tedium waiting for it, sitting at the highest peak.

In a word, existentialism: "let us take note of that suicide of reason -- or 'esoterism of stupidity' -- which is existentialism in all its forms; it is the incapacity to think erected into a philosophy" (Schuon).

Noted. Also noted:

Modern man treats the universe like a lunatic treats an idiot.

At the same time, the modern universe of scientism treats man like an idiot treats an absurdity. 

In reality, remove the mask, and 

the object of his existence is to be in the middle: it is to transcend matter while being situated there, and to realize the light, the Sky, starting from this intermediary level. 

It is true that the other creatures also participate in life, but man synthesizes them: he carries all life within himself and thus becomes the spokesman for all life, the vertical axis where life opens onto the spirit and where it becomes spirit.

A bold claim, which reminds me of another aphorism:

We cannot escape the triviality of existence through the doors, but only through the roofs. 

Man has a skylight? Through which the light of truth, beauty, and freedom streams? 

Hold that question.

*****

Once things in my head began to settle down a bit, I became fixated on the subject of subjects, which are literally the last thing you'd expect to pop up in a universe with nothing but objects for 10 billion years. Suffice it to say, it is an enduring mystery how to squeeze a subject out of an object.  

Which is one of the themes of the book we will soon be discussing, supposing it draws me in, which it may or may not do. I can't say I care for his -- what's the word?

Hoity toity? Highfalutin?  

Whatever you call it, his pompous prose doesn't meet the down-to-earth standards of the Raccoon Style Guide, but who does? Some have the style but not the substance, while some have the substance but not the style.  

Ian McGilchrist -- whose latest book we spent a month reviewing last year -- likes the book, even calling Hart "one of the greatest living writers on theology and the cosmos," but we'll be the judge of that. 

He goes on to call it "a telling counter-argument  to reductionist materialism" that is "subtle, imaginative, beautifully written -- and highly original."

But we'll be the judge of that.

Who are we to judge? By what authority? Who died and left us in charge of cosmic theology?

No one did. It's just that so few writers were engaging in it to our satisfaction, we just claimed the mantle for ourselves. Doing a job earthlings don't want.  

Alfred North Whitehead was one of the last serious thinkers to elucidate a grand cosmic metaphysical scheme of everything. Credit for trying -- and we don't hesitate to plunder him for all he's worth -- but we have some serious issues with process theology, full stop. It doesn't work for me to say that God exists, only not yet. 

For me this paradox of Being and Becoming is ultimately resolved via the triune Godhead, but that's a different post.

Back to this question of Authority. We know from our Gödel that any formal system cannot be both consistent and complete, but will contain truths which the system cannot justify. 

So right away we are faced with a choice: either we can, or cannot, know Truth itself. There is no system that can get us there. Rather, we either see it or we don't (or see it via "faith").

Which goes to one of the purposes of revelation, which is to convey truths that are otherwise inaccessible to us. Such truths can never be proved from our side of the veil, but must be accepted on faith. Faith in an authority.

Now, at the same time, I'm re-re-reading one of Schuon's last works, in which he -- as is his custom -- makes many authoritative statements seemingly backed up by nothing more than his own authority.  

But his type of authority strikes me as fundamentally different from Hart's kind, which is thoroughly conventional. He wants to be taken seriously by all the right people, whereas Schuon just dismisses the right people as hopelessly wrong and hardly worth refuting. Let the dead bury the tenured. 

From the foreword: "metaphysics aims in the first place at the comprehension of the whole Universe, which extends from the Divine Order to terrestrial contingencies." 

Boom. No apologies, no reservations, and no attempt to justify this view before the tribunal of Right People. The latter are not to be taken seriously except as a serious distraction, for "we live in a world wherein the abuse of intelligence replaces wisdom," and you can say that again.

We won't start our formal review of The Play of Masks this morning, but just highlight the first (authoritative) sentence of the book: 

Total intelligence, free will, sentiment capable of disinterestedness: these are the prerogatives that place man at the summit of terrestrial creatures. 

Take it or leave it. Supposing you take it, read on:

Being total, the intelligence takes cognizance of all that is, in the world of principles as well as that of phenomena; being free, the will may choose even that which is contrary to immediate interest or to what is agreeable; being disinterested, sentiment is capable of looking at itself from without, just as it can put itself in another's place.

"Every man can do so in principle, whereas animals cannot."

So, there is a fundamental and ineradicable difference between man and animal, and that's all there is to it. And man in principle "possesses a subjectivity not closed in on itself, but open to others and unto Heaven." Similar to what we wrote in yesterday's post,

Total intelligence, free will, disinterested sentiment; and consequently to know the True, to will the Good, to love the Beautiful.

Horizontal and Vertical: the former "concerns the cosmic, hence phenomenal, order," the latter "the metaphysical, hence principial, order." 

Now, Schuon may be an authority, but supposing one understands what he just said, it is thanks to a kind of "inner authority" that assents to self-evident truth. We just need a little reminder. 

And not to get ahead of ourselves, but revelation functions as just such a vertical reminder -- again, emanating from "outside" the cosmic system but by no means contrary to it or to reason. Indeed, "Human intelligence is, virtually and vocationally, the certitude of the Absolute." 

At least when you think about what thinking is. Remove the Absolute and it is nothing, reducing to that shrunken world mentioned above, "wherein the abuse of intelligence replaces wisdom." 

Fasting forward to the last sentence of this essay,

Without objectivity and transcendence there cannot be man, there is only the human animal; to find man, one must aspire to God.

Again, authoritative, but with the purpose of awakening or resonating with the inner authority that is Intelligence itself.