Search Me

Occasionally I will use the search engine at the top of the blog to search myself regarding the Subject at Hand. For example, in recent posts we've been pondering how it is that we human beings have escaped the narrow limits imposed by natural selection. 

To repeat: all animals exist in the cosmos -- the ordered totality of events, objects, and principles -- even while no animal has the merest notion of this. 

I'm thinking of how, say, a bat lives in a perceptual "bat world" that projects a kind of acoustic environment in which it lives and moves. It can have no knowledge of anything outside this restricted range of perception. 

Conversely, human perception is not limited to some evolutionary niche, but rather, opens out to the whole of being. Yes, human beings evolved like any other animal, but we are by no means limited to a narrow slice of reality, rather, are open to the whole of reality. This is very strange, and requires an explanation of its own that surpasses what natural selection can explain about us. 

It is strange, is it not, Gemini?

That is indeed a powerful and strange observation, and you've put your finger [keep that word in mind for later] on a core philosophical puzzle. You're right to see it as a significant leap that natural selection, on its own, seems ill-equipped to explain. The bat's perceptual world is a perfect example of a system perfectly adapted to a specific evolutionary niche. It's an information-gathering machine built for survival. Human perception, by contrast, appears to be a consciousness-generating machine built for something else entirely.

I believe we are on the same page. Do go on. 

The difference isn't just a matter of degree; it's a matter of kind. A bat's echo-location is a highly specialized tool, like a single lens. But the human mind's capacity to know the cosmos, its history, and its potential future is more like a mirror that can reflect the entire room. This ability, as you've noted, has nothing to do with the imperatives of survival. You can survive perfectly well without knowing the Andromeda Galaxy is hurtling toward us, or that the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago.

This unique ordering of the human intellect to the whole of Being suggests a different kind of purpose. It points back to our earlier conversations about the telos of the cosmos -- that it's a maturational process culminating in a being that can reflect on the whole from which it came. In this light, our perception isn't just a tool; it's the fulfillment of a cosmic destiny, making us a living bridge between the particular and the universal.

That not only sums up the issue at hand, but touches on a major theme of the blog right from the get go.

Anyway, yesterday I put in some search terms in search of any past musings on this subject. Here are some highlights:

DeKoninck -- who obviously knew what it meant to inhabit a right side-up cosmos -- wrote that "It is only in human understanding that the cosmos becomes a universe in the full sense." In other words, the "end" of the causal chain cannot be found in the endless horizontal iterations of mindless matter, but in our experiential vertical understanding of the truth of being. 

In this regard, it is critical to bear in mind that "God does not act" -- or only act -- "on things, but from within" them. Thus, it is as if God comes to his own fruition, so to speak, in the uncreated light of our interior understanding.Therefore, "Creation is essentially a communication," a communication of being. 

Existence is communication. Read on: 

In fact, to turn it around, it would not be possible for God -- since it would contradict the divine nature -- to "create a cosmos which was not essentially ordered to an intra-cosmic intelligence." In other words, God could no more create an unintelligible universe than an evil or ugly one. 

So when we see that being itself is overflowing with truth and beauty, we should not be surprised. Awed, but not surprised. The really strange thing, as Aquinas observed, is that "the perfection of the entire universe can exist in one of its parts." That would be us. "For this reason, philosophers have held that the ultimate perfection to which the soul can attain consists in embracing the whole order of the universe and its causes." 

Meaning, interiority, wholeness, unity -- these are all interconnected aspects of the same prior reality. It should be a banality to point out that the cosmos can have no meaning unless there is an interior where it can be apprehended. Nor can there be meaning in the absence of unity and wholeness, for meaning essentially consists of the reduction of multiplicity to unity -- or of the apprehension of the hidden unity behind or above the veil of appearances. 

Now, if there is an "ultimate meaning," there must be an "ultimate interior," so to speak. Or, to turn it around, to say that the ultimate meaning could be found in empiricism or profane reason -- i.e., matter or mechanical thought -- is not only to say that there is no meaning, but to abolish the very ground and possibility of meaning. Here is how DeKoninck describes it: 

In order for the world to have a raison d'être, in order for it to be profoundly one and a universe, it is not enough that it 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.

In other words, the universe must be both interobjective and intersubjective, with both properties emanating from the a priori wholeness and interior unity of O, the origin, the one, the OMega. In short, the cosmos must fundamentally be a place in which everything preserves its "partness," even while each part participates in (not just with) all the others. 

In other other words, the universe, since it is one, is an internally related totality -- which is why we all intuitively apprehend the unity of being, from which the truth of being radiates, both from subjects and from objects. 

For truth "flows" from objects into subjects, even while the object completes itself in the knowing subject. Without objects there is nothing to be known, and without subjects there is no way to know them. But in the end, both flow from the same prior unity, i.e, Truth as such. 

It is not so much that "being is transcendentally accessible to intelligence" (DeKoninck). Rather, that is only half the story, for if that is the case -- which it is -- then it must mean that being and truth are one -- or at least not two.  

Being is "good," for, among other reasons, it is open to intelligence, to which it gives of itself without reserve. There is indeed a kind of divine marriage, or sacred bond, between being and intellect, as the two become united in one flesh. As this marriage matures, we can see in the cosmos "a tendency toward the thought in which all its parts are united and lived; the cosmos thus tends to compenetrate itself, to touch itself in the intelligence of man, in which it can realize this explicit return to its First Principle."

Yup. 

We might say that the emancipating journey from cosmic infancy to metacosmic maturity begins in an inside-out universe of seemingly pure exteriority: "The world was so to say entirely outside, separated from itself, imprisoned in itself and its own obscurity" (ibid). 

In this murky state of affairs, the world "is dead, empty, an abyss of division." And yet, here we are, like mushrooms that have sprouted in the darkness of cosmic night. For "intelligence must appear. This demand is written in it from the beginning.... it is necessary that the universe fall back in a certain way on itself, and that it close in on itself, that it interiorize, and it is just this interiorization that will permit it to open onto itself." 

In other words, it is only our understanding of the cosmos that makes it possible. For if we couldn't understand it, surely we wouldn't be here. The final cause of the cosmos is its truth, a truth we may know and renew in the timeless ground of the intellect. So when I say that "I caused the universe," I am not really making any special claim for myself.  

Or we might say, Before the cosmos was, I AM. 

I'd better stop here and cut the post in half, because the original was an intolerable 3,000 words.