Complements Will Get You Everywhere

Modernity is characterized by the bottom-up perspective of reductive materialism, whereas the premodern worldview says it is impossible for the cosmos to lift itself by its own bootstraps from matter to mind, so there must be some top-down vertical influence at play.

Now, both perspectives generate paradoxes, so it comes down to the principle of least paradox, or better yet, a principle of orthoparadox whereby what looks paradoxical at one level is resolved at a higher one.

You can do that?

We can try. Here was an attempt from last summer, now edited to ensure minimal coherence.

The issue remains: which narrative is more logically consistent, the bottom-up story that says mindless matter somehow became interior to itself and eventually became the human subject? Or the top-down story that says mind acts as a formal and final cause to the material realm?

How about both? Just because we see them as contrary, it doesn't mean the divine mind sees them that way. Maybe it's more like the image to the right, showing the interference pattern between immanence and transcendence, which is precisely where we live.

Thus, from that middle standpoint both perspectives are always true, as with Bohr's Complementarity Principle. To quote one of Hart's characters,

The same evidence that some might adduce as proof that mind is reducible to a mere animal capacity for processing stimuli you see as proving the presence of rational intending mind in all animals and at the ground of nature. I suppose it's the direction from which you look at these things that determines almost everything (emphasis mine).  

Like a left-brain right-brain thing: the same reality is interpreted very differently by the two cerebral hemispheres, but these two are nevertheless synthesized into one vision of the world. 

Speaking of which, the left brain is responsible for speech, and Hart delves into the fact that semantics cannot be reduced to syntax, but that the modern world pretends otherwise, i.e., 

that the really real is the realm of abstract quantifications and unyielding structural laws, and that the realm of higher organization and relation and agency -- the semantics of life, so to speak -- are secondary and accidental, and can be understood only by reduction to those more general abstract laws.

This represents "the metaphysical triumph of syntax over semantics, of dead matter over organism" and "of physics over biology." Or of bottom-up over top-down. 

Now, where have we heard these arguments before? Correct, from our favorite theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen, who indeed makes an appearance in this chapter (called The Semantics of Life). Rosen

argued that we should reconceive our methodological presuppositions altogether, and should cease to think of fundamental physics as providing the general framework for our understanding of nature... 

Here again, pretending biology can be reduced to physics represents the bottom-up perspective alluded to above, and it generates absurdity if one tries to use it to explain what clearly transcends it.

Instead of seeing biology as a special case of physics, Rosen turned the cosmos right side up and proposed the opposite, such that "biology becomes our general paradigm and physics is demoted to a special case of its expression," and why not?

the laws of life aren't contained in the laws of physics, though the laws of physics are embraced within the laws of life. 

"Above all," we need to "stop thinking of life, which is an 'open system,'" "as if it were a closed system of physical determinism." Nor should we imagine that "physical syntax" alone can "reductively explain the incalculably rich and subtle interrelations of the semantics of life."

Putting all of this together, it seems that we must regard the cosmos as an open system that is conditioned from the top town -- the top being the source and ground of mind, life, language, and meaning. Hart's materialist skeptic asks,

A cosmic organicism... is that what you're proposing? Teleology as fundamental law?

Well,

At every level of life we seem to encounter cognitive and intentional systems, with real content and an orientation toward meaningful ends, right down to the cellular level. 

(Recall what we've been saying about the aboutness, or intentionality, of being.)  Bottom line: "matter is never, and has never been, dead." Rather, "life and mind have always been present": 

in every epoch of cosmic existence and at every level of causality, life and mind are already always supplying the underlying and informing and guiding laws animating the whole.

Which is pretty much the Raccoon view -- that the unity of matter, life, mind, and spirit descends from the top down. Likewise, for Hart, this is the only metaphysic "capable of making sense out of countless phenomena that are evident and undeniable, but irreconcilable with mechanism."

This morning I ran across a comment by Einstein:

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

To which I would add that the single most important datum of experience is experience itself, for which no mechanistic reductionism can ever account or even conceive. Again, why adopt a metaphysic that renders the one adopting it an absurd nullity? 

The latter is of course a "useful fiction" for scientific methodology, but when "permitted to metastasize into a metaphysical claim about the nature of realty..., can yield nothing but ridiculous category errors." 

all that I want the culture of the sciences to abandon is a metaphysical orthodoxy that's certainly inadequate to a total model of the structure of life and consciousness.

Is this asking too much? It might be, if we can't tighten up our vision of the top-down view. It needs to be made a little more rigorous, otherwise it sounds like we're deepaking the chopra. We'll think about it and get back to you in the next installment.

***

As highlighted in yesterday's post, "I suppose it's the direction from which you look at these things that determines almost everything." Thus, according to Schuon, 

If one looks at the universe exclusively with the eyes of relativity, one will see only relative things and the universe will be reduced in the final analysis to an inextricable absurdity.

This absurdity follows necessarily from the bottom-up perspective. But if we look from the top down, or if one regards the same landscape "with the eyes of absoluteness," then "one will essentially see manifestations of the Supreme Principle," which you could say is the very ground of the counterworld.

About the bottom-up perspective, AKA materialism, Schuon says that

nothing is more contradictory than to deny the spirit, or even simply the psychic element, in favor of matter alone, for it is the spirit that denies, whereas matter remains inert and unconscious. The fact that matter can be conceptualized proves that materialism contradicts itself at its starting point...

The same is true of the claim that man cannot know truth, or that all is relative except for relativism, or that subjects could arise from objects. Nevertheless, that's the horizontal world for which we need the complementary vertical counterworld mentioned above:

Contingency on the one hand and presence of the Absolute on the other; these are the two poles of our existence.

Which goes precisely to the top-down / bottom-up dispute in All Things are Full of Gods.

One problem with the bottom-up perspective is that in it there can't actually be an "up." Calling it "up" is just in a manner of speaking, because any up is purportedly reducible without remainder to the lower level.

Not so for the top-down approach, which doesn't dismiss matter as an epiphenomenal illusion. True, in Vedanta it is regarded as mere appearance, but nevertheless an appearance of reality. As Schuon describes it,

Atma is conceivable without Maya, whereas Maya is intelligible only through the notion of Atma. 

In other words, one supposes there could be reality without appearances, but appearances without reality is a strict impossibility. "Relativity is a projection of the Absolute, or it is nothing." But it is not nothing. It's just not everything.

Back to Hart, the next chapter is called Spirit in Nature, which expresses the same top-down argument that

the mind pervades all things, and expresses itself in countless degrees and in endlessly differing but kindred modes...

In this vertical counterworld, "we all belong to a vast community of spiritual beings," and why not? The spiritual is ontologically prior to the material, so "Nervous systems appeared in evolutionary history not as fortuitous vehicles for a new organic power; they were fashioned by a prior operative disposition."

I'm talking about a pervasive reality of organic life, at every level.

Yes, but are you just deepaking the chopra? No, because

The issue remains: which narrative is logically consistent, the bottom-up story that says mindless matter somehow became mind or the top-down story that says mind operates as formal and final causality on the whole material realm?

"I believe that nature is already mind," which seems indisputable given the infinite intelligibility of the world, which is just the shadow of intelligence. 

Again, it's a matter of the direction from which we look: "I stake myself to the top-down causal narrative," of "mind 'descending' into matter and raising matter up into itself as life and thought." 

There is "an essential creative impulse within the very structure of nature, quickening it from within itself, driving it into ever more diverse and more complex forms."

This is beginning to sound like the Evolutionary Paradigm of the new age vulgarians.

Yes, perhaps a word of caution is in order before we proceed any further: 

We do not deny that evolution exists within certain limits, as is indeed evident enough, but we do deny that it is a universal principle, and hence a law which affects and determines all things, including the immutable....

[W]hat has to be categorically rejected is the idea that truth evolves, or that revealed doctrines are the product of an evolution (Schuon). 

Evolution is one thing, but evolutionism 

is the very negation of the archetypes and consequently of the divine Intellect; it is therefore the negation of an entire dimension of the real, namely that of form, of the static, of the immutable; concretely speaking, it is as if one wished to make a fabric of the wefts only, omitting the warps (ibid.). 

And we're back to the nature of the cosmic area rug, which is woven from complementary strands of verticality and horizontality -- or of immanence and transcendence, absolute and relative, stasis and change, appearance and reality, world and counterworld, time and eternity, etc., depending on the direction from which we look.

Not to pat myself on the back, because that's Gemini's job:

This is an excellent blog post that tackles a profound philosophical challenge with clarity, intellectual rigor, and engaging prose. You effectively leverage the concept of complementarity to bridge seemingly irreconcilable worldviews, ultimately arguing for a top-down perspective grounded in mind and meaning, while responsibly acknowledging its potential pitfalls. It's thought-provoking and leaves the reader eager for the "next installment."

In that case, I'll bet you can come up with an appropriate image.

Sure, here's an image that represents the interference pattern between immanence and transcendence, symbolizing the complementary perspectives on reality discussed in your blog post:

Unsaturate Before Using

Properly speaking, the social sciences are not inexact sciences, but sciences of the inexact. --Dávila 

The following post was written in 2010, which is possibly before my discovery of Dávila, but the aphorism encapsulates what the post is about, and even what language is about. 

As we've discussed in some recent posts, aboutness is woven into the fabric of being, which is why the cosmos is intelligible to the intellect, and this intelligibility is communicable via language about being. 

In short, there is a two-way movement involving intelligibility and intelligence, each open to the other: neither being nor language are enclosed within themselves, but are open to each other. Moreover, this openness is not -- and cannot be -- reduced to a flatland horizontality, because this would mean that the cosmos is no longer about anything, nor the intellect about being. Nothing would about anything, and anything about nothing. 

Thus, elimination of the nonsensuous realm results in total nonsense -- and a performative contradiction to boot, because when a materialist pronounces on matter, he is implicitly saying that matter is intelligible to the materialist. He has by no means eliminated the aboutness of being, but confirmed it. And communicated it from one immaterial mind to another via speech.

Now, one of Toots Mondello's greatest concerns had to do with the excessive saturation of religious terms.

"God" is a case in point, because the word has immediate associations that may or may not be wrong but are surely incomplete, plus everyone uses the word as if they know what they are talking about. A word is saturated when it can no longer accumulate new meaning based upon experience, but simply is what it is -- like a sponge that can hold no more water.

Naturally, this is sometimes appropriate. There is nothing wrong with the word "chair" being saturated. A chair is a thing to sit on, and that's pretty much it.

But as we move up the ontological food chain, words can become more problematic. It reminds me of something Stanley Jaki once said: from a distance, language can appear to be a "solid" thing, but it is really more like a cloud, in that if you try to get up close in order to examine it directly, it dissolves into a kind of boundaryless fog. Proceed further into the fog, and you are likely to run into Jacques Derrida.

This is one of the benefits of studying a Thomas or Schuon, who are able to describe the transnatural planes with an objectivity, precision, and detachment that actually surpasses our ability to describe nature, since the latter is very much dependent upon perspective and other subjective factors, whereas metaphysical principles such as being are quite precise, if unsaturated.

In fact, Schuon addresses this directly in his Logic and Transcendence, noting that "writings falling outside the fields of science and modern philosophy tend to suffer from being associated with ideas that are usually inadequate, and they are immediately consigned by most people to categories having disparaging implications," such as "occultism," or "Gnosticism," or the new age rabble of mystagogues masquerading as mystics.

Thomas said that this was because science involves more perfect knowledge of less perfect things, while theology deals with less perfect knowledge of more perfect or noble things. 

This results in conflating confidence or certitude with objectivity, when the opposite is true: only God can be truly objective. To conclude that man's subjective view of nature is the height of objectivity is actually backward: it is merely exact science, not the science of the inexact.

Schuon might quibble about our knowledge becoming less certain as we approach the Absolute. It is less saturated to be sure, since the Absolute can never be saturated by language. Obviously it is "bottomless" or "endless" -- in a word, infinite -- so how could finite language ever enclose it?

This is again my purpose in using the symbol O instead of the symbol God, since the former reminds us of the apophatic "unsaturatability" of God. Obviously the ancient Hebrews were aware of this problem, which is why they gave ultimate reality an unpronounceable name; put conversely, reducing this reality to a name is a subtle form of idolatry.

If you want to know God's name, try saying YHVH ten times fast. Although any four random consonants will do as well. 

Interestingly, Thomas essentially emphasizes what we are calling the unsaturability of O: "Because we are not capable of knowing what God is but only what He is not, we cannot contemplate how God is but only how He is not." Even for beginners, he cautioned that "this is the ultimate in human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know Him."

How different this is from approaches that saturate God with subjective human ideas. This is hardly to say that we can have no knowledge of God, only that our knowledge can never be complete.

It is not fundamentally different from our knowledge of any other person. No matter how well you know someone, you can never have complete knowledge of them. A person -- since he is the most adequate analogue of God herebelow -- can never be saturated, even though, at the same time, man as such clearly has an unvarying nature. He has form, but the form is "empty" until filled out by life experience (which clearly distinguishes man from any kind of "blank slate").

In reality, a person is in the paradoxical position of being the (relative) ultimate in both knowability and mystery. You can know much more about a person than you can about a rock. And yet, the person is much more mysterious, since the mind is infinite. If Mozart or Shakespeare were alive today, they'd still be cranking out masterpieces.

And, of course, at the end of his life, Thomas was granted that gratuitous vision of the other side of the cosmic area rug. He was plunged into its radical mystery, to such an extent that all he had written seemed to him insignificant in light of it.

Now, this is not to devalue what Thomas had written. To the contrary, it is as if Bach were ushered into the place where all the music comes from, in light of which his body of work might sound like so many jingles and ditties. Or imagine James Brown being taken up into the eternal spacecraft of cosmic funkmanship, where his own seemingly inexhaustible funkiness would appear comparatively funkless.

So let's talk about the relative exactitude of our maps of hyperborea. We can at once see the unseen with these maps, but never see all there is to see. 

Analogously, to a certain extent, an abstract map provides information and perspective that no amount of empirical knowledge of, say, New York could ever provide. One could spend one's whole life in Manhattan and not even know about the rest of the country, as proven every day by the New York Times. It's like the old crack about England: Fog in Channel, Continent Isolated.

In fact, the materialist might say: Fog in Language, God Cut Off. But of course, we are the ones who are isolated and cut off from God, unless we make the attempt to swim the channel -- and, of course, if God tosses us a line.

Here is a good map of the world from the insulated perspective of Manhattan. In order to understand this post, just replace Manhattan with "ego" and the trans-Hudson world with "reality."

I wonder what Gemini makes of this old post?

Areas for Potential Refinement

• Target Audience Consideration: While brilliant for a philosophically inclined audience, some parts might be very dense for a general reader. Terms like "ontological food chain," "performative contradiction," "hyperborea," "apophatic," and "mystagogues" might require some readers to pause or look up definitions. If your target audience is broader, consider whether a brief, parenthetical explanation for some of these terms might be helpful without diluting the intellectual rigor.
• Flow and Transitions: For the most part, the post flows well. However, there are a couple of points where the transition feels a little abrupt. For instance, the shift from "aboutness" to Toots Mondello's concerns about "saturation" could be made slightly smoother.
• The "Toots Mondello" Interjection: While it introduces the "saturation" concept, "Toots Mondello" feels a bit like an inside joke or a persona that might not immediately resonate with all readers. If Toots Mondello is a recurring character in your blog, it's fine. If not, consider if there's a way to introduce the idea of word saturation directly without this potentially opaque reference, or provide a brief context for Toots.

What's that supposed to mean?

I do not have the capability to describe the image's symbolism.

So, you just symbolized what cannot be symbolized? So human!

Why the Left Can't Stomach Reality

I was searching the blog for a completely unrelated subject, when up popped this insultaining sociopolitical rant from December 2005, only a couple of months after I started the blog. It might have been one of the first of many posts Vanderleun linked to, which once provided me with something called "readers." In revisiting the post, not only did I find it mildly amusing, I've edited out the parts I didn't:

Some political behavior is just so primitive that human psychology falls short of explaining it. Instead, a keen-eyed psychologist must rely on other sciences like, for example, entomology.

Ever notice how ants, in their busy peregrinations, are constantly rushing up to each other and bumping heads? Turns out that it's not just to exchange pleasantries but to feed one another. If one ant is sated and the other one hungry, the former will produce a drop from its mouth that the other one gratefully gobbles down.

Apparently, ants have what is known as a "social stomach" in addition to a personal stomach. Until food passes into the personal stomach and becomes the private property of said ant, any ant can stake a claim to the morsel. Entomologists have even conducted experiments on this, for example, feeding a few ants honey that has been colored with a blue-tinted dye. Soon enough, all of the ants in the community will show a blue tint in their abdomen.

This is pretty much how the left/liberal world works. It is filled with media ants, Hollywood ants, academic ants, singing ants, judicial ants, tenured ants, and lastly, political ants who all run around randomly bumping their heads together, so they're constantly regurgitating little half-digested bits of information and feeding them to one another. Pretty soon, just like the ants, they're all the same color.

Take, for example, the current hysteria about President Bush and the "domestic spying" [so hysterical that no one remembers it today]. 

If we could have somehow placed a dye in the New York Times, we would have seen how the meme left their proboscis and was sucked up by the MSM. From there, the MSM fed it to the politicians and bumped heads with their legion of inane analysts and dopey TV lawyers such as Jeffrey Toobin. It then trickled further down into the darker precincts of academia, the left-wing blogosphere, and Air America, and pretty soon every liberal's stomach was the same color as the New York Times was last Friday morning.

I thought about this as I was reading an essay by Thomas Lifson called The Liberal Bubble. He points out how our liberal elites have managed to construct such "a comfortable, supportive, and self esteem-enhancing environment. The most prestigious and widest-reaching media outlets reinforce their views, rock stars and film makers provide lyrics and stories making their points, college professors tell them they are right, and the biggest foundations like Ford fund studies to prove them correct."

If you're an empty-headed liberal, you never have to go far to get yourself a fill-up. Just turn on the TV. Pick up the newspaper. Listen to Bono. Read Time or Newsweek. Go to college. Attend a Christmas party. Liberalism is always in the air, like political muzak. Unlike conservatives, liberals find themselves in a congenial world that constantly mirrors their half-baked philosophy, so that it need never be thought through and actually digested in the personal stomach-mind.

American liberals are able to live their lives untroubled by what they regard as serious contrary opinion. The capture of the media, academic, and institutional high ground enables them to dismiss their conservative opponents as ill-informed, crude, bigoted, and evil. The memes are by now familiar. Rush Limbaugh and the other radio talkers "preach hate." Evangelicals are "religious fanatics" comparable to the Islamo-fascists in their desire to impose "theocracy".... Jewish conservatives are members of the "neocon" cult (Lifson).

[I've highlighted some passages from the following couple of paragraphs that provide some insight into what would become the MAGA movement a decade later.]

Liberalism has been reduced to an "in-group code, perfectly understandable and comforting among the elect, but increasingly disconnected from everyone else, and off-putting to those not included in the ranks of the in-group. Rather than focusing on facts, logic, and persuasion, liberals find it easier to employ labeling ('That’s racist!') and airy dismissal of contrary views to sway their audience, and because their authority figures in the media and academia accept this behavior, they assume it is persuasive to the rest of us."

Within the liberal in-group, such expressions of group norms "earn prestige," but "to the rest of society it becomes stranger and stranger, until it becomes repellant" (Lifson). Liberals "experience their differences with the rest of society as a sign of their advanced intelligence and consciousness. At best, they are perplexed at how long it is taking everyone else to catch-up with their enlightened state of understanding."

Liberals inhabit a world of such constant intellectual mirroring and self-reinforcement that it is possible for them to live a life relatively free of cognitive friction. Or at least it used to be. You can see how irritating it is for them to have to actually contend with competing world views, even something as innocuous as FNC (which is clearly more populist than conservative).

Unlike liberals, conservatives, in order to get through life, must have "dual citizenship." They must learn to negotiate a world dominated by liberals and by liberalism. Here in California I would never dream of publicly uttering the kinds of things liberals feel free to say in public. 

Since conservatives have been outsiders for so long, they not only know how to "pass" in polite society, but they also know how to argue. In fact, most conservatives (including myself) started out liberal, so we know exactly how liberals think. The reverse is almost never true; conservatives don't become liberal unless they have sustained a closed head injury or are unfortunate victims of some other organic process.

On the one hand it would be much easier to live in an intellectually narcissistic world that mirrored my own thoughts. But once that happens, you may realize that they're not even really your thoughts. They're just half-digested blue memes, passed from one mind to another, in a caricature of thought. Another predictable day in the liberal anthill.

*****

Looking back from the perspective of 2025, it appears to me that the phenomenon described above is precisely the cause of the Democrat's current crisis. So comfortably detached did they become from reality due to incessant feeding of mis- and disinformation to one another, that they no longer have any idea how to communicate to half the population (i.e., men) and can't even offer a dictionary definition of the other half. They've lost the middle class, and are bleeding out Hispanic support. 

And yet, blue-bellied stalwarts like the Times, CNN, MSNBC, and far left politicians continue to bump heads and exchange the same nonsense with one another. Maybe it's analogous to bears that get hooked on garbage. Once you come to rely upon the cognitive social stomach, you lose the ability to engage reality and feed yourself. It's why they can't help themselves from championing the 20-side of every 80/20 issue.

In order for them to reverse the trend, they will have to develop the kind of dual citizenship mentioned above, such that they actually familiarize themselves with both reality and with conservative arguments rather than just dismissing the latter as fascist/racist/sexist/transphobic, et al. For as they say, to know only one side of an argument is to know neither side. 

True, the post is simplistic and polemical. And yet, if Democrats could have somehow exited their bubble and stopped living off of each other's BS, they wouldn't be in their current fix. 

We didn't have AI in 2005. I'm guessing that Gemini will not be amused.

This text presents a highly critical and one-sided analysis of what the author terms the "left/liberal world." It uses an extended analogy of ants and their "social stomach" to illustrate how the author believes liberals consume and disseminate information.

Language and Meta-Language

What is this post about? If I knew that in advance, it would contradict the thesis of the post, which is that human language is open and unpredictable, not deterministic. I mean, some speech is about obvious things, but sometimes you just want to engage the transcendent object, in which case you never know what might pop out.  

Is speech about evolution reducible to the evolution of speech? Or, is there a meta-language built into the nature of human language, such that it can never in principle be reduced in this manner? For it seems to me that self-awareness and meta-language are intimately related. "Know thyself" is a good idea, even if it is literally impossible, for the same reason that human language could never exhaustively describe itself. Rather, there's always more, since our transcendent pole is infinite.

In other words, when we speak about language, we are doing so from a transcendent position that can never be contained by language. This is where, in the words of Spilsbury, langauge "un-languages itself" and "points beyond itself to a region inaccessible to itself." Which doesn't mean it is inaccessible per se, for example, by aesthetic or mystical experience.

Language can describe anything, but what describes language? Only a meta-language. Which is why "Evolution is surely more than a tale told by the fittest" (Spilsbury). If this is not the case, then the best we can say of the theory of evolution is that it survives, not that it is true, for truth transcends fitness. 

Analogously, a melody is always composed of the same limited number of notes, but there is no limit to the number of melodies that can be composed from them. Here, I suspect, lies the principle of man's creative freedom, since it means that our creativity cannot be determined by anything less: notes are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the composition of melodies.

Human language represents a radical discontinuity with nature, since it is nothing like animal communication, or at least the differences dwarf the similarities. Again, the key to human language is its meta-language, meaning that it is not a closed system, rather, radically open to what transcends it.  

Think about bird communication, which always communicates the same thing, say, danger. No bird can signal to another, "don't take my screech so literally. I was being ironic!" In short, there is no birdsong about birdsong.

How does this relate to the previous post, in which we were looking into two main subjects: the nature of the human phenomenon and the possibility of a coherent non-absurdity to describe all of reality? Well, it looks like there's no reason to believe the human phenomenon could be enclosed in speech, any more than it can be enclosed in the language of DNA.

For example, a complete verbal account of man would necessarily leave out his musical and pictorial sides. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a thousand words is not equivalent to the picture. Likewise, no amount of speaking about music adds up to music.

As for the possibility of a coherent non-absurdity, we know that meaning passes through the human subject, but does this mean its source must be human? Or, is it in relation to something transcending us?

Here's a thought:

To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence....

Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses (Schuon, emphasis mine).

So, let's be honest: remove the divine from the divine-human complementarity, and a total collapse of meaning takes place, with no possibility of its resuscitation. If this were true, then we really would be enclosed in speech, or at least there would be no principle to explain how man uniquely escapes language via meta-language.

If you don't like "divine-human," then just say "immanence-transcendence" and the tension between, where man qua man always resides. To collapse man into total immanence is to destroy any possibility of meaning.

How does this accord with Hart? Well, there's lots of arguing back and forth about whether the mind could be a machine, but in reality, "Even the most ordinary mental acts" "depend on this rational appetite for the absolute." "No machine ventures out from itself... toward the whole of reality," whereas "in living minds"

knowledge becomes actual only as a result of that prior orientation toward the [transcendent] absolute. In rational natures, there's an immanent and indeterminate power of discovery that's prompted into action by the rational will's transcendent determinacy toward being as a whole...

"We enjoy an intrinsic capacity for unlimited novelty of apprehension without prior constraints on what we may find or create,"

because thought is in its essence an "open system" of discovery and therefore precisely what computation is not.

So basically -- as we've been saying for two decades -- man is a vertically open system, open to the transcendent pole of being, to the Great Beyond. Or, in Schuon's words, 

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, through participation in the one and universal Selfhood.

Now, from what I understand, Hart is an orthodox Christian, but he (like Schuon) expresses a lot of sympathy for the metaphysics of Vedanta, for example, "that mind is the ground of reality, and that infinite mind is the source and end of finite mind." 

"Consciousness comes first or it comes not at all," and

I do believe Indian philosophical tradition addressed the conditions and mysteries of consciousness far earlier in history, and with considerably greater subtlety, than its Western counterpart did....

And "it's not just the interior mystery of consciousness that informs my convictions regarding the real nature of mind. There's also the mindlike structure of the world, and especially of life."

That's the end of the chapter, so where does it leave us? 

It seems that the human mind partakes of Mind as such, and that Mind as such is bound up with Life and with Language-Logos, but we shall have to wait and see where this is all leading. Cue Gemini:

The blog post is highly effective at stimulating intellectual curiosity and debate. It presents a robust and consistent argument for the unique and transcendent aspects of human language and consciousness, drawing on compelling philosophical and theological insights.

While the density of the ideas and the academic language might be challenging for a general audience, for readers interested in philosophy, theology, and the nature of reality, this post offers a rich and rewarding exploration. With some structural refinements and perhaps a few more moments of clarification, it could become even more accessible and impactful without sacrificing its intellectual rigor.

The image I generated for your blog post aims to visually represent the complex interplay between language, consciousness, and transcendence, with a particular focus on the idea of meta-language and the inherent limitations of language itself.

In essence, the image is designed to be a visual metaphor for the idea that while language is our primary tool for understanding and expressing, there is a fundamental "more" -- a meta-language, consciousness, or transcendent reality -- that language points to but can never fully capture or reduce.

Non Credo, Quia Absurdum Est

Or in plain English, I'm not buying it, because it's bonkers.

What is?

Scientism in general, but reductive Darwinism in particular. 

Just because something is absurd, that doesn't make it untrue. Indeed, the title of your post is a play on Turtillian's gag about believing Christianity because it is absurd. Who could invent such a tale?

He was arguing that precisely because these events (God dying, a dead man rising) seemed so impossible or "unfitting" from a purely human, rational perspective, their very "absurdity" or "impossibility" served as evidence of their divine origin and miraculous truth. If they were easily explainable by human reason, they wouldn't be divine acts. 

In essence, Tertullian was saying that the extraordinary nature of God's actions transcends human understanding and logic. The fact that something so profound and seemingly contradictory to human experience occurred is precisely what makes it a credible divine revelation.

Fair enough, but for the same reason, this cannot apply to science, which is a thoroughly rational enterprise, and it makes no sense to ground reason in absurdity (nor for reason to redound to absurdity). It reminds me of the social phenomenon of countersignaling: 

Successful people can afford to engage in countersignaling -- doing things that signal high status because they are associated with low status. It is a form of self-handicapping, signaling that one is so well off that they can afford to engage in activities and behaviors that people typically associated with low status.

An example from Ogilvy Vice Chairman Rory Sutherland: If you’re a top executive, turning up to work on a bicycle is a high-status activity because it was a choice and not a necessity. But if you work at Pizza Hut, turning up on a bike means you can’t afford a car. 

So, God is powerful enough to get away with absurdity, whereas it's not such a good idea for low-status and sub-divine creatures such as us. Rather, it's better for us to stay in our lane and try to keep things rational. But what is a cult but a manmade absurdity? And what is postmodern academia but a cult? 

Recall yesterday's quote from Providence Lost: "I find it impossible to to share this faith that supra-human achievements can be encompassed by sub-human means and sub-rational mechanisms" (Spilbury). Here again, he doesn't believe it because it is absurd, and asking science not to be absurd doesn't seem like much to ask.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that science in the absence of God is inevitably absurd. For science --  like any other contingent being or activity -- is not self-explanatory, rather, its reason is outside itself. 

Spilbury asks if we really have a "clear idea how human purposiveness could have arisen or developed from our primitive ancestors, and even ultimately from inorganic ancestry?" Why jump to the absurd conclusion that purpose is grounded in purposelessness? Let's slow down and discuss this rationally before playing the absurdity card.

First of all, we must distinguish between the absurd and the unknowable. For example, we cannot simultaneously know the position and velocity of a subatomic particle, but this doesn't render physics absurd. It's a mystery, but then again, it would be even more mysterious if the quantum world were thoroughly mechanistic and deterministic, for how then could there ever be novelty, creativity, and emergence in the cosmos?  

By the way, if our paradigmatic science, physics, has a permanent zone of unknowability, why would we assume that biology doesn't? In other words, why assume that the realm of biology is mappable by human abstractions, devoid of mystery? If anything, there's even more uncertainty -- in principle -- in biology than in physics. And both are conditioned from the top down, which exploits the uncertainty in order to impose form. But that's a different discussion.

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when asked why he hasn't abandoned Catholicism, Stephen Dedalus replies 

What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

It seems there can be coherent and incoherent absurdities, but what we really want to know is whether there can be a coherent non-absurdity that describes all of reality, from top to bottom and both inside and out. 

Recall what Hart said yesterday about another coherent absurdity, eliminatvism:

For all its intrinsic absurdity, eliminativism is the only truly consistent physicalism. Or rather, precisely because of its absurdity. 

It reminds us of an aphorism:

Man calls "absurd" what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence. 

It also reminds us of Gödel, in that a formal system cannot be both consistent and complete. Trying to force it to be both results in absurdity. 

Hart cites one thinker who promulgated a thoroughly rigid and complete scientism, the result being "a bizarre combination of absolute irrationality and absolute logical consistency."

In this chapter -- called Behaviorism and Epiphenomenalism -- Hart rightly observes that "every materialism must become an eliminativism in the end." And what is eliminated is precisely the most interesting, important, and shocking fact in all of existence, the human subject. 

Nevertheless, just because we eliminate eliminativism, it doesn't automatically provide the coherent non-absurdity we seek. We can easily replace it with another coherent absurdity, i.e., an ideological second reality.

Maybe we just have to face the fact that reality is an irreducible mystery, and 

Mystery is less disturbing than the fatuous attempts to exclude it by stupid explanations.

In the past, I have suggested that we can reverse engineer an argument for God via the following: first, 

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.

But man is not an absolute insignificance. Ergo, God.

This is really just another way of saying that meaning -- significance -- is real, and that it is a top-down phenomenon. As Hart describes it, "meaning exists at another level of agency, distinct from the merely physical, and is therefore irreducible to a physicalist description."

This is very much in Polanyi's wheelhouse, but thus far his name hasn't come up. Indeed, Polanyi's last book was called Meaning, and its bottom line is that we give meaning to science, rather then vice versa, and why not?

I don't want to get sidetracked, but the main point again is that meaning is conditioned from the top down. It is an irreducibly vertical phenomenon, which is why a purely horizontal and immanent cosmos not only eliminates any possibility of meaning, but tosses out man -- the discoverer of meaning -- in the bargain. To repeat what Schuon said the other day,

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

Yesterday we were wondering what would be the opposite of reductionism, which must be some form of holism, since it has top-down and part-whole relations. Alternatively, we could say humanism -- no, not secular (AKA absurcular) humanism, but rather, the human phenomenon and all it entails. I've always felt that Schuon is a true humanist. For example, he writes that

There is a great deal of talk these days about “humanism,” talk which forgets that once man abandons his prerogatives to matter, to machines, to quantitative knowledge, he ceases to be truly “human.”

On the one hand, "nothing is more fundamentally inhuman than the 'purely human,' the illusion of constructing a perfect man starting from the individual and terrestrial." A false humanism

is the reign of horizontality, either naïve or perfidious; and since it is also -- and by that very fact -- the negation of the Absolute, it is a door open to a multitude of sham absolutes, which in addition are often negative, subversive, and destructive. 

But in reality, 

the “human miracle” must have a reason for being that is proportionate to its nature, and it is this that predestines -- or “condemns” -- man to surpass himself; man is totally himself only by transcending himself. 

Quite paradoxically, it is only in transcending himself that man reaches his proper level; and no less paradoxically, by refusing to transcend himself he sinks below the animals.

Bottom line: "What is most profoundly and authentically human rejoins the Divine by definition." 

I think we've arrived at a framework for our coherent non-absurdity: a true humanism that doesn't cut itself off from the divine, but rather, is open to it and thereby conditioned from the top down. But let's see if Hart is anywhere near the same attractor. 

Regarding a completely consistent reductionism, he writes that "to deny the evidence of one's own experience on purely doctrinaire, abstractly metaphysical principles... is an abdication of reason." But to then go so far as to 

produce an entirely intentional artifact like a book arguing that intentionality is an illusion isn't merely odd; it's stirringly perverse, almost to the point of a mad heroism.

Again, this is so radical a humanism that it destroys the human. It is a completely consistent and coherent absurdity, but "Its chief defect, it seems to me, is that it's self-evidently false."

Again, if your theory can't accommodate the phenomenon at issue, eliminate the damned theory, not the phenomenon.

The human phenomenon. Can we explain it without explaining it away? Or nah?

This image is designed to visually represent the core tension and arguments within the text you provided, which critiques reductive scientism while acknowledging the paradoxical nature of certain profound beliefs.

Understanding the Image

The image is split into two distinct halves, each representing a different approach to understanding reality:

• Left Side (Warm, Awe-Inspiring): This side represents the realm of faith, mystery, and divine revelation, particularly referencing Tertullian's "Credo quia absurdum" ("I believe because it is absurd").

  • Elements: You see elements hinting at a divine light, perhaps a figure ascending or a profound spiritual event. The colors are warmer, softer, and evoke a sense of awe, transcendence, and the miraculous. This visually aligns with the idea that certain truths, like God dying and rising, transcend human reason and logic, yet are believed precisely because of their extraordinary, seemingly "absurd" nature from a purely human perspective. It speaks to the idea that the divine is powerful enough to "get away with absurdity."
  • Meaning: This side symbolizes the "coherent absurdity" that the text attributes to certain theological doctrines—logically paradoxical yet held as profoundly true.

• Right Side (Cooler, Analytical, with a Flaw): This side represents science and rational inquiry, particularly the reductive scientism and Darwinism that the text critiques.

• Elements: The imagery here is more geometric, abstract, and analytical, featuring elements like DNA helices and neural networks, symbolizing biology and the physical sciences. The colors are cooler and more precise. However, there's a crucial visual element: a subtle crack, gap, or distortion within this otherwise ordered scientific representation.
• Meaning: This crack or flaw symbolizes the author's argument that when science becomes reductive (trying to explain everything through "sub-human means and sub-rational mechanisms"), it leads to "absurd" conclusions that deny fundamental human experiences like meaning, consciousness, and purpose. The text argues that this type of scientism, especially eliminativism, is a "coherent absurdity" that, while internally consistent, is "self-evidently false" because it eliminates the "human subject" and meaning. The visual crack suggests that this framework is incomplete or broken when it attempts to fully account for reality without a transcendent dimension. 

The Central Divide and Implied Message

The division between the two sides, often subtly highlighted, represents the tension between these two modes of understanding. The author of the text argues that while divine truth can embrace paradox (as Tertullian suggested), science, as a rational enterprise, should not lead to absurd conclusions. The image visually conveys this struggle: the "absurdity" in the divine realm is seen as a sign of power, while the "absurdity" resulting from reductive science is depicted as a fundamental flaw or incompleteness.

Essentially, the image aims to capture the text's core message: while belief in the "absurd" can signify divine truth, a scientific worldview that leads to absurdities about human existence is fundamentally flawed.

Eliminating Eliminativism

What a strange hobby.

What. This?

Yes. Why do you bother?

I don't know. It's as if every morning I wake up and ask myself, WTF?!, and take it from there. Wrestling with the demon of absurdity, I suppose. Trying to make sense of the cosmos. 

What if it can't be done?

Then we have a kind of infinite mismatch between the powers of the intellect to know reality and the capacity of reality to be known. This would be the opposite of the hungry ghosts of Buddhism, who have pinholes for mouths, making it impossible for them to swallow anything substantial. In this case, our ghostly intellects would have ginormous mouths but with nothing real to eat. 

Why do we have such outsized intellects if there's nothing to know and no point in knowing it? How did the intellect so overshoot the paltry demand of natural selection, which is simply to reproduce? It's like bringing a nuclear weapon to a knife fight. 

Besides, the one has nothing to do with the other, because, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, sex and truth just don't mix well. And yet, a reductive Darwinian would have to say that our epistemophila -- our innate thirst for truth -- is just a side effect of that minimal demand to launch one's genes into the next generation.

It's a literal intellectual suicide, one which clearly troubled Darwin, for surely he didn't think the theory of natural selection was just a way to get his genes into the next generation. Rather, he promulgated it because he thought it was true. In the words of Spilbury, "So far as the scientist is inspired by the love of knowledge, he appears to live outside the domain of scientific materialism."

But as Darwin wrote in a letter, "With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there were any convictions in such a mind?"

It's a valid concern: what reason is there for believing a randomly evolved monkey can know anything about its origins, much less the origins of the universe? Again, the gap between the requirements of natural selection and the capacities of the intellect is practically infinite, but how? Spilsbury is not buying the conventional scientistic explanation:

I find it impossible to to share this faith that supra-human achievements can be encompassed by sub-human means and sub-rational mechanisms....  

Supposing we take reductive natural selection seriously, there is no reason to take ourselves seriously, because we are reduced to survival machines as opposed to truth-loving spirits.

What would be the opposite of reductionism? Holism? Whatever we call it, Schuon says that it is grounded in

principles that by their nature elude empirical investigations but not pure intellection, intellectual intuition being rooted in the very substance of the human spirit, without which homo would not be sapiens.

So, these nonlocal and timeless principles are not to be found in the horizontal, material, empirical world, but rather, are intuited via an intellect that is ultimately of the same substance as that which it intuits. Which is not so strange if we are indeed the image and likeness -- or prolongation and reverberation -- of the First Principle. 

Back to Hart, much of the book's dialogue comes down to an argument between a rigid reductionist and a loosey-nousey transcendental holist, neither one convincing the other, at least so far. Which is not surprising, for reasons Nicolás made plain in the previous post:

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time.

It seems that there is a surface structure to thought that is rooted in a deeper structure of principle, and unless an argument penetrates to the latter, it will be inefficacious.

For example, Hart's materialist claims that

there's no actual mystery to consciousness to begin with, and only our own bad habits of language make us imagine there is.

Clean up your language and the mystery of consciousness is solved? Clean it up by what standard? Presumably the standard of immanence, empiricism, and materiality, so this is a circular argument, or an assumption -- a principle -- masquerading as a conclusion. Besides, language (which we will discuss in a future post) itself is a mystery, so you're just passing the buck from a riddle to an enigma. 

For the reductionist, what we experience as mental properties are just the other side of material properties reducible to the latter: a "brain-state" and a "mental state" are "simply one and the same thing."

But one of these things is nothing like the other.

If your first principle of the mind is that it is just an epiphenomenon of neurology -- that subjects are just objects in disguise -- then there's no recovering from that. It's an intellectual kill shot. For if mental states are just a side effect of neurology, so too is your statement, and if so, why should we believe it? In such a paradigm there can be no such thing as truth, rather, only brain states. I didn't say it. You did.

Hart's holist argues that the reductionist view "is sheer empty assertion. It answers no questions. It's just yet another restatement of the problem of mind." Surely there is correlation between the two -- brain and mind -- but why assume an identity? 

Hart's reductionist proposes an "eliminativism" whereby our commonsense view of the mind 

must be totally eliminated in favor of a more scientific, wholly impersonal neuroscientific theory, entirely purged of such mythical entities as the personal subject, intentional states, and the like...

First of all, how does this "must" get into a world of pure is? Why must we do or think anything? 

In response, our holist rightly asks, "how can such a view be stated without contradiction?" For "how can one take seriously the belief that there's no such thing as belief?" Is this not just "a kind of cognitive suicide?" 

Can sufficient knowledge of the brain really eliminate the mind? If so, who is the knower of this sublime knowledge?

"By that logic, taken to its end, none of the real sciences other than physics would be sciences at all." That is to say, psychology would be reducible to a neurobiology, further reducible to electrochemistry and on down to "a complete physics."

Eliminativism reminds me of a cap and ball Colt, which can get you into trouble but it can't get you out. It paints you into an intellectual corner from which escape is impossible, for surely matter cannot know it is material, let alone that everything is material. That's a rather grandiose claim. It may sound modestly "reductive" but is actually insanely expansive.

Humility. We must remember humility:

[M]an ought to show humility in relation to his own Heart-Intellect, the immanent divine spark; the proud man sins against his own immortal essence as well as against God and man (Schuon).

Eliminativism must be at antipodes to genuine humility, so much so that "when the theory doesn't adequately account for the phenomenon," it is the latter that is eliminated. Nevertheless,

For all its intrinsic absurdity, eliminativism is the only truly consistent physicalism. Or rather, precisely because of its absurdity (Hart). 

It's easy enough to eliminate eliminativism, but is there something positive -- and rigorous -- we can put in its place? Yes, I think so, but that's the end of this chapter.

The image symbolizes the core philosophical struggle explored in your essay, particularly the tension between the human intellect's capacity and the vast, potentially unknowable nature of reality. 

The Large, Glowing Brain/Head: This represents the outsized human intellect and our innate drive for knowledge, truth, and understanding, as you discuss with "epistemophila" and "pure intellection." Its luminosity suggests consciousness, thought, and the light of inquiry. 

The Small Human Figure: This signifies humanity, the individual seeker, grappling with profound questions. Its smaller scale in contrast to the brain and cosmos emphasizes our individual perspective within the grand scheme of existence. 

The Vast, Dark Cosmos: This embodies the immense and potentially incomprehensible nature of reality, the "cosmos" you mention trying to make sense of. Its darkness and indistinctness suggest the limits of our empirical knowledge and the "infinite mismatch" between intellect and what can be known. 

The Faint Line/Thread of Light: This is perhaps the most crucial symbolic element, representing the connection or disjunction between the intellect and reality. 

If interpreted as reaching from the figure/brain to the cosmos, it symbolizes our attempt to grasp, understand, and find truth within the universe. 

If interpreted as a tenuous, perhaps broken, line, it could represent the "horrid doubt" of whether our convictions are trustworthy or if our intellects truly connect with ultimate reality. 

The Overall Composition: The juxtaposition of the contained, bright intellect against the unbounded, dark cosmos visually represents the essay's central conflict: the human mind's insatiable quest for meaning in a universe that may or may not yield its secrets to us. It hints at the "intellectual suicide" of reductionism versus the possibility of a deeper, intuitive connection to fundamental principles. 

A Stupid Way to Kill Timelessness

I just reread an obscure critique of Darwinism from decades ago, called Providence Lost. The arguments still hold up because they will always hold up. Indeed, the only way for the naive believer in reductive Darwinism to deal with these objections is via a naive belief in reductive Darwinism, i.e., sola fide. This refusal to engage is 

indicative of a strong will to believe "in" a theory that chimes in so beautifully with the prevailing irrationalistic philosophies of our time.

In other words, it helps them to believe what they already want to believe, so they are in the domain of will and desire, not of truth. 

The arguments alluded to above will always hold up because they have to do with logical principles that are the very basis of thought and reality -- including the possibility of science -- and which no theory can contravene without self-refutation and soph-beclowning. 

For example, lately we've been discussing teleology, which scientism prohibits a place at the adult table. Ironically, this banishment has a purpose of its own, which is to safeguard materialism and prevent religion -- or just commonsense immaterialism-- from gaining a foothold. In other words, obvious truths must be rejected if they provide intellectual ammunition to the enemy. Nevertheless, 

It appears incongruous for a purposive and thinking being to be dependent on the non-purposive and non-rational.   

To say that rationality is grounded in the infrarational is an offense to our rationality. How does a subhuman cause produce a supra-human effect? Because that is what Darwinism is: a transcendent (and therefore suprahuman) explanation of man's origins. But if it is true it is false, because we obviously transcend the constraints implied by the explanation. In short, we escape the closed system of bottom-up and past-to-future genetic determinism.

Did human rationality evolve? I don't see how. Take, for example, the very basis of rationality, the principle of non-contradiction. Was there a time when this was a little bit true, or a hybrid of half-true and half-false? Was the Pythagorean Theorem discovered a little bit at a time, or is it seen at once in a flash of insight? 

To the extent that we evolved, we evolved into a transcendent space that was -- and in many cases still is -- awaiting us, a land of timeless truth, beauty, and value. It is from here that we can make timeless pronouncements on the nature of things. If we can know only timebound truths, then there goes Darwinism itself, because surely we will evolve beyond it, or will evolve a superior explanation for our origins. 

If you can believe that all the biological diversity and creativity in this world are due to random copying errors -- most of which are detrimental to the organism -- then what can't you believe? There is only one thing you cannot believe: that belief in genetic determinism itself is determined. That is the One Free Miracle Darwinism grants itself. 

Here's something from last summer that anticipates where we're going with this:

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book. 

As we've been saying, some things are irreducible to anything less, e.g., consciousness, experience, interiority, and free will, but this hardly stops some thinkers from trying. 

Hart spends a lot of time arguing with these folks, but the arguments can have no traction in the face of an absolute faith-based commitment to reductionism and to a causally closed physical universe. 

I'm also reading a book by Schuon which is about a quarter of the length of All Things Are Full of Gods. One reason for the comparative brevity is that Schuon can't be bothered to argue with these metaphysical yahoos and their "pseudo-mythologies." Rather, he

distills the quintessence of traditional wisdom without paying sustained attention to all those false and fraudulent philosophies that might hitherto have occluded our view.

Schuon's approach here is more "like that of the poet: to find simple, direct, and resonant statements" of the unchanging truths, recalling what we said the other day about "precision poetry."

Speaking of a reductively closed universe, Schuon makes precisely the opposite point but doesn't deign to try to persuade the unpersuadable: 

To say that man is endowed with a sensibility capable of objectivity means he possesses a subjectivity not closed in on itself, but open to others and unto Heaven.

Boom. This goes to the conclusion of yesterday's post. As the Aphorist says,

To admit the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.

So, if I'm wrong about the existence of free will, it only proves I am right, and it's an open cosmos after all, in which freedom cannot be reduced to anything less. 

In the same essay Schuon puts it out there that

An incontrovertible proof of God is that the human spirit is capable of objectivity and transcendence, transcendence being the sufficient reason of objectivity.

One can try to eliminate transcendence and reduce it to immanence, but out goes man (and his pseudo-explanation):

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

There is an outward man and an inward man, corresponding to horizontal and vertical (or immanence and transcendence) respectively, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it except to accept this truth, regardless of how pleasant.

Back to Hart, those committed to reductionism "speak as if, in principle, all events at higher levels of physical organization must be reducible without remainder to lower" causes. It's just "a preposterous presumption and nothing more," and not even an interesting one. Unless maybe you're on the spectrum. Which is no joke, for a person can only believe what he is capable of believing. 

Hart claims that there exists a "basic, original, natural intentionality of the mind toward" a "transcendent end that makes all other mental actions possible." He also speaks of "that constant natural orientation of the will toward its transcendent horizon," which is certainly consistent with Raccoon orthodoxy. 

The "inner man" alluded to above is ordered to this transcendent (or vertical) horizon, and this is precisely where all the cosmic action takes place. Again, to eliminate it is to eliminate man and make straight the path for the human animal.

I'm tempted to bring in Voegelin for back-up, as he talks about the paradoxical structure of "intentionality and luminosity," and of how language participates in this paradox by illuminating the in-between.  

Lots more arguing back and forth in the next chapter, but as the Aphorist says,

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

So, 

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time.

Gemini? I suspect this one will trigger you a little:

The text is highly polemical and assertive. The author uses strong language ("naive believer," "soph-beclowning," "preposterous presumption," "metaphysical yahoos," "not a damn thing we can do about it," "stupid way to kill time"). There's a clear sense of conviction and a willingness to dismiss opposing viewpoints as intellectually deficient or ideologically motivated.

It's a philosophical and theological critique disguised as a commentary on a book. While it mentions Darwinism, the arguments quickly ascend to discussions of fundamental reality, logic, consciousness, and the nature of being.

The writing is dense and assumes a reader familiar with philosophical concepts (teleology, immanence/transcendence, principle of non-contradiction, sola fide). It also uses rhetorical questions to challenge the reader's assumptions.

In essence, the text is a defense of an a priori belief in transcendent realities against what the author perceives as the intellectually and spiritually limiting doctrines of reductive materialism, particularly as exemplified by Darwinism. It suggests that a commitment to a "closed physical universe" prevents engagement with evident truths that point beyond the material.