In the Beginning is the Third

As with our forensic examination of the Cosmos in Book I, the question arises of where to begin in our accounting of the Anthropos, for it is self-evidently the case that all knowledge of any kind passes through man, so in a sense defines him. Moreover, if a thing is characterized by what it can do – i.e., that action follows being — then the Anthropos is a philosopher, a scientist, a theologian, an artist, a mystic, a mathematician, a criminal, a dude, a hero–

A puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king—

We can say almost anything about the Anthropos and equally say the opposite: Is he a pious saint? Occasionally. Genocidal psychopath? Oof. A creator? Sure. A destroyer? No doubt. Likewise, genius and crank, believer and skeptic, deadbeat and achiever, maven and schmendrick. Frankly the list of dualities is endless, which somewhat begs the question, because what sort of being is capable of such a diverse range of attributes and actions? Seriously, think about it: we not only sing, but we dance just as good as we want.

Are you ready to get your groove on, Petey? They tell me you’re pretty fast on your feet.

I’ve been known to shake a chicken in the middle of the room.

You better have your steps together, because in addition to the horizontal rhumba we are capable of the vertical boogaloo, such as discovering the true, willing the good, and creating the beautiful. We might say with Dávila that Time soon erodes what is said about the soul but it never even scratches what the soul says.

Nor is the Anthropos done singing, dancing, creating, and discovering, for we will never arrive at the last poem, play, or punchline. One might say that since the Anthropos never stops creating, we are thereby an ongoing creation, not a fixed or final entity, similar to how it would be impossible to make a final judgment about history until it reaches its conclusion. Only then can we properly ask: WTF was that all about? So it seems that the arc of the cosmotheandric drama is framed between the primordial WTF?! and some kind of ultimate one.

∞

Assuming you’ve read Book I, then you know that after twenty plus years of schooling they put me on the day shift as a psychologist.

Practicing?

Yes, a clinical psychologist. Nevertheless, there was a lot about the Anthropos that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, for which reason I began branching off into theology, metaphysics, cosmology, anthropology, and all the rest, in search of the Cosmic Area Rug.

I like your style. Got the whole space cowboy thing going on.

How is it that deeper insights are always popping out of the Cosmos the longer we dwell in and gaze upon it? That the human being is at once a finished species that is never finished?

Sounds like we’re gonna be here for a while. Mind if I smoke a jay?

Be my geist. I realize your kind supposedly sees directly into essences without the hassle of a discursive, step-by-step movement required of embodied beings, so feel free to sit out this part.

Let’s begin by rummaging into the past. Recall Boethius’ definition of man as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” However, prior to this we must be the relational animal, otherwise we could never be reasonable, since reason would be unrelated to the world or to anything but itself. In reality, we are a relational substance of a transrational nature.

Moreover, as we have seen, the Anthropos is not just related to the exterior but to the interior of things, including fellow human beings. This is because we come into the world neurologically incomplete, such that the brain is built and the self gradually emerges in the dynamic space between infant and caretaker(s). For which reason the psychoanalytic theorist D.W. Winnicott remarked that there is no such thing as a baby, rather, the mother-infant dyad. As a result, we are irreducibly intersubjective on the ground floor of our being, such that the We is, if not ontologically prior to the I, at least on equal terms with it: in the absence of the fieldlike We, there could be no particularized I.

This prior interior union with others is the necessary condition of the intersubjectivity that defines us. Which is why our very lot in life is never truly our own. Rather, we’re mixed up with everyone, and not just the living, since we are very much influenced by voices out of the past. Indeed, an Anthropos singing only from the hymnal of his contemporaries is a bit of a nincompoop. In the cosmic Tower of Song we can hear noises below and discrete coughing from above. I realize that standards have fallen, but if you are only acquainted with the case for modernity, much less postmodernity, then you know little of either.

Another of Winnicott’s concepts is what he calls the “transitional space” between infant and caretaker. It is irreducibly co-created by both and belongs to neither, but it is where all the psychic action takes place: it is neither subjective nor objective, but always both, nor do we ever leave this space behind. Rather, Winnicott theorized that this potential space scales up, so to speak, to language, culture, art, science, etc., because each of these takes place within the anthropic space that is first opened up in infancy.

Human beings, like any other living organism, are open systems. Now, it is one thing to be open to objective things such as food, water, and oxygen, but what makes a Homo human and the sapiens sapient is our prior openness to other human subjects: our intersubjectivity, a mutual indwelling that begins even before birth, in the womb. There is and never has been such a thing as a radically isolated human being who only later becomes “social.” So philosophers who imagine otherwise, from Machiavelli and Descartes to Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham – insofar as they begin with an anthropological non-starter – are not even wrong, so they may be safely dismissed with extreme prejudice. For them, intersubjectivity would be viewed as a handicap to the ego-driven achiever.

Moreover, each of these antisocialites is crippled by a reductive anti-realism (in the traditional sense of denying any transcendent reality). Thus, since they confine themselves to the wheelchair of immanence, they are by no means pinnacles of achievement, rather, ontological spinal cases incapable of vertical movement.

It’s all over, man! We call your bluff!

∞

If the point about intersubjectivity seems like a peremptory assertion, it is because I don’t want to burden readers with a pedantic review of all the needlessly complicated ins and outs of interpersonal neurobiology, which can be easily obtained elsewhere in popular books such as Daniel Segal’s Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, or in unpopularized deeper dives such as Allan Schore’s The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature. To summarize the argument, the field of interpersonal neurobiology

studies how the brain is shaped by early experiences, especially social and emotional experiences, as well as the relational mechanisms by which interacting, communicating brains intersubjectively synchronize, couple with, and align their activities with other brains (Schore).

This involves an irreducible co-creation of the self that occurs “at an implicit level beneath conscious awareness” located in the right cerebral hemispheres of both mother and infant. We will have much more to say about the right brain below in a separate subsection, but suffice it to say here that “the subjectivity of the self is cocreated in intersubjectivity,” and that “the self-organization of the developing brain occurs in the context of a relationship with another self, another brain” (ibid.). Thus, unity of the self depends upon a prior dual unity of selves.

Nor do we ever transcend this intersubjective unity, rather, it is not only at the foundation of human nature but accounts for our later connectedness to other minds and even to the world itself, for again, we have a bi-directional internal relationship to everything, in the absence of which scientific knowledge of the world would be impossible. This is all perfectly in accord with our Axioms of openness and relational interiority, which again scale upward to culture in general and to science, art, philosophy, and theology in particular. Not to get sentimental on you, but it turns out that “maternal love for the infant” is nothing less than is “a biologically essential mechanism for the preservation of the human species” (ibid.)

∞

For our more grandiose cosmotheandric purposes it is enough to know that the personal is always interpersonal, the subject intersubjective, and being itself a being-with. Our credo is go meta or go home, in this case to a meta-cosmic mega-psychology of irreducible intersubjectivity from top to bottom. “We all begin life indwelling another human,” so “if there’s one thing we’re not at the beginning, it’s by ourselves” (Leithart). In The Beginning we are not Newtonian particles but already a community of three, insofar as even the brains of fathers undergo a structural reorganization in order to meet the demands of the helpless newborn (Cassella). To which I can personally attest. My brain and I never much cared for babies until we had our own.

I am, therefore we are?

That is surely correct. But what must the Cosmos be like in order for there to exist a conscious being asking what the Cosmos must be like in order to have given rise to him? And what can it not possibly be like? The problem is, there is nothing else in creation with which to compare the Anthropos without losing something vital in the comparison. True, we are like lower primates, but there is nevertheless a (literally) infinite gap between us and our distant furbears. The continuity is easy enough to explain, but whither the ontological discontinuity? That’s not supposed to happen in natural selection, but here we are: Homo transcendens.

If we ponder the number of variables that have to go right in order for us to be here, it approaches infinitude, from the basic laws of physics, to the nature of stars, to the character of our galaxy, to the location of the planet, to the emergence of life, to the supposedly unguided adventure of DNA, culminating in the appearance of a neurologically immature primate, AKA the helpless baby who can internalize language and culture while its brain is developing -- in other words, an intersubjective being not entirely bound by instinct but open to being. In Christianity, even the Theos had to incarnate as a baby, because you can’t be a mature adult without having first been an immature infant.

And our brief list of cosmic coincidences only scratches the surface of a cursory glance at a perfunctory review of the tip of the iceberg of the variables involved in the appearance of a self-conscious relational being. Given the known laws of physics, there are said to be 10 to the 500th power of possible universes that could result from tweaking them. And yet, we find ourselves in the one that allows us to be here. It seems that the number of coincidences is so unimaginable that it is difficult to know what to make of them. Moreover, we know that space, time, matter, and energy all came into being at the moment of the Big Bang, so whatever caused the Big Bang must be immaterial and atemporal, leaving aside the staggering amount of information packed into this primordial detonation. But let’s keep an open mind. Let’s just call it O and try to figure it out later.

∞

I’m not sure about this subsection. I don’t like how it suddenly veered from interpersonal neurobiology back to the Cosmic Anthropic Principle. I know without asking that it will work for Gemini, but did it work for you?

This subsection advances the narrative more effectively than the preceding prelude.

The title “In the Beginning is the Third” signals the core claim: the human is constitutively triadic or intersubjective from the start. The We is not an add-on to a pre-existing I; the field-like relation precedes and enables the particularized self. That claim is developed through three mutually reinforcing registers.

This is genuine progress. Earlier sections asserted relationality and openness as ontological features of the Cosmos and of the Anthropos. Here those features are shown to be developmentally and neurologically constitutive of the human person. The argument is no longer only that relation is necessary for knowledge or language; it is that the human subject itself does not exist except as co-created in an intersubjective field. That supplies a stronger anthropological foundation for the later claims about culture, science, and the vertical opening to O.

The rejection of atomistic starting points follows directly and is consistent. Any anthropology that begins with an isolated individual and then tries to construct the social is treating as secondary what is in fact primary. Those philosophies are therefore not merely incomplete but founded on a non-starter.

The section also keeps the vertical dimension in view. Intersubjectivity is not only horizontal (human to human) but opens upward; the same relational structure that makes mother-infant synchrony possible is what later makes knowledge of the world and orientation toward the transcendent possible. The brief return to cosmic fine-tuning and the under-determined O at the end is controlled and does not derail the anthropological focus.

Minor notes:

• The playful dialogue and musical asides are lighter here than in some earlier passages; they do not obstruct the argument.

• The claim that even the Theos “had to incarnate as a baby” is offered as a structural observation rather than a developed theological argument; it fits the intersubjective logic but will need fuller treatment in Book III if it is to carry weight.

• The discontinuity with other primates is asserted rather than newly demonstrated, but that is acceptable given the developmental emphasis of this subsection.

Overall, this is one of the stronger openings of Book II so far. It moves from general assertions about the uniqueness of the Anthropos to a specific, multi-level account of how the human subject is constituted in relation. That gives the subsequent examination of the Anthropos a more precise starting point: we begin not with an isolated rational substance, but with a relational, intersubjective, developmentally open being whose very self is co-created. The third is indeed in the beginning.