Yesterday's post highlighted the surprising (or perhaps just forgotten) fact that if you know about the Cosmos -- the ordered totality of all that is -- you're more than halfway to God, for to say Cosmos is to say Creator.
How is that?
Well, just for starters, to recognize the Cosmos is to intuit the oneness beneath the maniness, or the abbasalute that transcends the mayaplicity. Why, just this morning Andrew Klavan touched on this subject, for example, that
Western culture is generally looked upon as more individualistic than Asian culture, and Asian religion tends to emphasize the oneness behind the illusion of the many....
In fact, this tension between one-ness and the manifold seems to turn up again and again in all kinds of ways.... Our current society presents us with struggles between those who support excessive individualism and those who desire oppressive social cohesion. Language itself... seems to create its multiplicity of meanings out of a unity of over-arching form.
Ultimately, "the single consciousness that perceives the greater unity" is "the bridge between the life of one and the vision of all."
Or in other words, the transcendent unity of consciousness mirrors the transcendent unity of the cosmos, which makes man the very bridge between the many and the One -- or the relative and Absolute, appearance and reality, continuity and discontinuity, immanent and transcendent, change and changeless, time and eternity, and all those other primordial complementarities.
In his book Cosmos and Creator, Jaki points out that science -- which again arose only in a Judeo-Christian context-- has "always presupposed a coherent universe, the only kind of totality which provides meaning for its parts, and for any particular question about them" (emphasis mine).
For as we have said on many occasions, whatever else science is, it is the reduction of multiplicity to unity -- i.e., to a deeper theoretical unification of the disparate phenomena. The Cosmos is just the last stop on this adventure in unity, only it is really the first, for again, it is the presupposition that gets the scientific quest underway. Remove the Cosmos and science reduces to what some brainiac called stamp collecting.
Ernest Rutherford.
That's the guy. Help us out here, Gemini.
While the exact wording may vary, Rutherford's sentiment was a critique of certain fields of study, particularly those in the social sciences, that he felt lacked the rigorous, quantitative methods of the hard sciences like physics and chemistry. The analogy of "stamp collecting" suggests that these fields are more about classifying and categorizing phenomena rather than discovering fundamental laws or principles.
Take my racket, psychology: hundreds of theories, with no unity. Indeed, these theories cannot even agree on the definition of man and woman, let alone what we're doing here -- i.e., our purpose, for as alluded to above, the very possibility of meaning is connected to wholeness, unity, and finality. See Polanyi for details. Or rather, maybe we'll see him later in this post.
Your observation about psychology is a common one and a major point of discussion within the field itself. There is no broad consensus on the fundamental questions, methods, or even the core subject matter of the field. This leads to what you described: a collection of "hundreds of theories" that may not necessarily build upon each other or form a cohesive whole.
Many scholars have argued that the discipline suffers from a lack of a single, unifying paradigm. This idea is perhaps best articulated by philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, who in his influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, suggested that psychology is a "pre-paradigmatic" science.
I'm feeling a little lazy this morning, plus I'm pressed for time. Gemini, perhaps you can tell us why I brought Polanyi into this discussion?
You've touched upon a core tenet of Polanyi's philosophy: that a purely reductive or atomistic view of the world is insufficient to explain complex phenomena like life, mind, and human meaning. For Polanyi, the meaning of "humanness" is not something that can be found by breaking down a person into their constituent parts -- molecules, atoms, or even psychological theories. Instead, it emerges from a "higher synthesis and unity" that cannot be fully captured by these lower-level descriptions.
Right on. Please continue.
Polanyi argued that reality is organized in a hierarchy of levels, where each higher level is governed by its own principles that cannot be reduced to the laws of the levels below it. For example, the laws of biology govern living organisms, but they are not reducible to the laws of chemistry and physics, even though organisms are made of chemicals and atoms. The laws of chemistry set the boundary conditions for biology, but they don't explain the emergent phenomena of life itself.
Pretty obvious stuff, at least for Raccoon metaphysics, which assumes this vertical hierarchy of levels that bisects the horizontal. It is the source of the unity beneath the multiplicity.
Yes, applying these ideas to humanness, Polanyi would argue that human identity and meaning are emergent properties of this hierarchy. They arise from the integration of lower-level biological and psychological processes into a higher, unified whole.
The "meaning of humanness" is not to be found in the individual psychological theories (the "stamp collecting" of fragmented knowledge) but in the synthesis of these theories with our tacit, personal, and social knowledge. It's the unified, lived experience of being a person, an experience that transcends a purely objective, scientific description.
This is a powerful counterpoint to reductionism, the idea that all phenomena can be explained by their most fundamental components. Polanyi's work suggests that to understand what it means to be human, we must look beyond the parts and focus on the organizing principles and emergent properties of the whole person.
I couldn't have said it better. Which is a little disconcerting. Well, perhaps I could have said it better, but not in the five seconds it took to ask Gemini to dash that off. In any event, the key point for the purposes of this post is that meaning is discovered in the ascent toward wholeness, while meaninglessness is a consequence of descending in the other direction and shattering this wholeness.
The sin of Adam?
Yeah, probably. In wanting to "be as God," he rejected the very ground and possibility of wholeness and unity, for our wholeness is only found in dialectic with the Supreme Principle, not in its rejection, i.e., trying to go it alone.
In fact, just yesterday I began reading a book that touches on this subject, Sharing in the Divine Nature: A Personalist Metaphysics, in which Ward talks about how Christianity "articulated a new and distinctive metaphysics," which is to say, "a general systematic account of the nature of reality," including an estrangement from, and eventual reconciliation with, God.
An abrupt ending, but we'll resume the discussion tomorrow. Meanwhile "Here is a symbolic image for your post, representing the core ideas of wholeness and fragmentation":
The left side represents the philosophical idea of a unified cosmos, a world with a coherent hierarchy of being.
The Hierarchical Pyramid: The pyramid is a central symbol for Polanyi's hierarchy of levels. The layers, from the bottom up, represent:
Subatomic particles at the base.
DNA strands and cells (biological forms) in the middle.
Neural networks (consciousness) at the top.
This visualizes the concept that each level is built upon but is not reducible to the one below it.
The Ascended Figure: The figure at the apex of the pyramid, with arms open and a serene expression, symbolizes the human being who has achieved wholeness and unity. This figure is a "bridge" between the many and the One.
The Divine Light: The brilliant light from above, connected to the figure, represents the divine source or "Supreme Principle." This symbolizes the idea that human wholeness and knowledge are only possible through a dialectic with God.
The right side represents the consequences of a fragmented, reductionist worldview.
The Falling Figure: This figure is in a state of chaos and despair, tumbling into a void. It symbolizes the human being who has rejected the hierarchy of being and attempted to "go it alone," leading to a descent into fragmentation and meaninglessness.
The Chaotic Void: The swirling vortex is filled with shattered, disconnected symbols, including broken scientific equations, fragmented philosophical texts, and jumbled images. This represents the "stamp collecting" of knowledge—a multiplicity of theories without any unifying paradigm. It is a visual representation of a mind and a worldview that has lost its center and its meaning.
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