Cosmotheandrism: The Bitter Medicine for Darwin’s Horrid Doubt

That is the ironic title of the next subsection, but it is nearly 7,000 words long, so I’ll have to break it down into more bitesized posts:

We believe in natural selection as much as the next ape, but in no way can it account for its own veracity nor our freedom to know it, let alone the intersubjective communication of its truth from mind to mind. And this truth-freedom-intersubjectivity speaks to an immaterial and relational intellect that in principle cannot be reduced to any material process in the absence of an impressive performative contradiction. Here we are, having escaped the Darwinian zoo, but some other primates want to stick us back into the genetic cage from which we have fled! This only begs the question of what kind of dim chimpsky writes a book about how he is one. The story is ludicrous.

Look at the big shot who thinks he’s so humble!

Yes, the irony-deficient claim that “I’m just a humble product of my genes.” But as Dávila says, Each one clings to the snobbery that he can, status seeking primates being what they are.

I’m no park ranger or zoo-keeper, but having monkeyed around with evolutionary psychology, I know that sub-cosmotheandric sociobiological accounts of the Anthropos cannot be the truth, full stop, for the conceptual system cannot generate from its own resources (immanent genes) the principle that makes its truth-claims possible (the transcendent Logos discussed above). Thus the theory requires its own One Free Miracle -- a gratuitous, unearned exemption from its own necessary entailments – which is fundamentally incoherent.

Conversely, our cosmotheandric approach reconciles the partial truths of Darwinism within the larger framework of a truth-bearing primate dwelling in a logospheric Cosmos. Only in this way can we embrace the factual findings of genetic science without succumbing to its inherent metaphysical limitations. We must always bear in mind that Ideas tyrannize the man who has few. Or, recalling the scholastic wisecrack, Timeo hominem unius libri: “I fear the man of one book.” Especially a book that makes writing it impossible.

For if something is possible in fact, it was possible in principle, and what is the principle that accounts for man’s transcendence of his genes? Is there a gene for transcendence? If so, it is only the illusion of transcendence, as suggested by sociobiological accounts of man’s morality or religiosity, i.e., the so-called “God gene.” But to suggest there is a God gene is to not know what the Theos Principle is or what genes are.

In other words, it is to covertly redefine both terms, for it at once attempts to squeeze the transcendent principle into one of the things it entails, while conferring magical powers on the immanent which are beyond the powers of immanence. The fact is, 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. Which does not imply that the Cosmos is but a projected form of our Anthropic categories, rather, that we explain it, not vice versa. How is this even controversial? Cosmotheandrism does not tell scientists what to do, rather, tells them what they’re always already doing.

Back off man, I’m a metaphysician!

Well, irrespective of the science, the ability to articulate the truth of our genes – insofar as it is a truth – proves we are participating in a higher, non-genetic principle. Pick one: the illusion of transcendence or the transcendence of illusion, the latter involving a seeing beyond or within the surface of appearances and the acquisition of objective truth, precisely. Which is not in any way to deny or denigrate the truth of Darwinism, rather, to explain in an intellectually consistent manner how it or any other truth is even possible for the Anthropos to acquire. I respect my genetic inheritance, but I don’t worship it. I’m not renting it shoes or buying it a beer, and I’m sure as hell not giving it veto power over my intellect.

Is it even metaphysically possible that we are enclosed in our selfish genes? If so, how could we even know of them, knowledge again transcending the object of knowledge? What is the nature of a being who transcends his so-called selfish genes and whose mind is free to conform to the truth of reality? For the Anthropos is quintessentially capable of disinterested knowledge, or in other words, of objectivity.

For example, even – or perhaps especially – a Richard Dawkins would presumably insist that his theory of selfish genes is the objective fact of the matter. If so, how does this disinterested objectivity arise from genes that are selfish, which is to say, self-interested and therefore not remotely interested in anything transcending their narrow self-interest?

Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!

How is it that we are interested in anything that doesn’t interest our selfish genes, whose only interests are survival and reproduction?

Why should any animal care about logical coherence, external validity, and intellectual honesty, anyway?

That’s a good point, because monkeys obviously don’t care, but a properly functioning intellect not only cares but is troubled by logical inconsistencies, cognitive dissonances, performative contradictions, gratuitous miracles, and flat-out absurdities.

Note, for example, that genes are already transcendent in the sense that they are by definition “about” something that is not themselves, i.e., the organism and environment. This elevates the status of the gene from a mere material particle to a relational, meaning-bearing entity that inherently points beyond itself. The gene exhibits a form of transcendence because its existence is fundamentally defined by what it is about: a gene is not merely a string of molecules, rather, it is information. And information by its very nature is intentional -- it refers to something outside or beyond itself. In this case, the genome is essentially bi-relational, pointing at once to the organism’s phenotype and to the environment to which it is adapted. In the absence of this prior ontological principle of aboutness, neither our genes nor our intellect can be about anything, so the Cosmic Area Rug falls apart and our Great Conversation can never even get underway. Rather, we are reduced to the genetic small talk of instinctual barking and bleating.

We can be certain that intelligence exists. But by virtue of what principle? And can this principle be less than intelligent? Or less than personal? What is it that makes an otherwise intelligent man want to argue that the true miracle of intelligence can be grounded in the absence thereof, or in unintelligent matter?

I recall a discussion between Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins touching on the existence of God. Probably if you asked Dawkins, he would say that he is not only motivated by the disinterested pursuit of truth, but much more so than the next (religious) guy. The problem is, his metaphysic can account for neither truth nor the beings capable of pursuing and knowing -- not to mention loving -- truth. It wasn’t so much that they were talking past each other, rather, more as if Peterson were conversing with an autistic person about the nature of empathic attunement.

Peterson obviously senses -- and wrestles with, as per the title of one of his books -- God, while Dawkins senses nothing. He still wrestles, but with the people who sense what he doesn’t. Broadly speaking, “religion” is a way of talking about and aligning oneself with a deeper reality that transcends appearances. But Dawkins approaches this reality in a way that is more literal than the most concrete literalist. He is very much like the Flatlander who insists that spheres are just fantasies of circles. Which recalls a passage by Schuon:

Rather than to yield to the obvious fact of the Spirit, proud reason will deny its own nature which nonetheless enables it to think.... tons of intelligence are wasted to circumvent the essential while brilliantly proving the absurd, namely to prove that the spirit sprung in the end from a clod of earth -- or, we could say, from an inert substance…

Seems like a good place to stop