In Conclusion...

Bottom line: there is no naturalistic way to get from the restricted intelligence of animals to the open and unrestricted intelligence of the Anthropos, for again, nature is already supra-natural. Science surely requires faith, but it is hardly irrational, rather, supra-rational, which is to say “faith that the human mind is something more than a product of natural selection and is actually made to know the truth of things…” (Betz). Which “undermines every notion of the closed universe of modern science, however quantitatively infinite.... For the moment we see that being cannot contain itself but points analogically beyond itself, all immanence is exploded” (ibid.).

Speaking of explosions, the anthropic intellect is like another big bang, only this time toward the source of the first one. If the first bang was an expansion outward into exteriority, multiplicity, and physical space-time, the Anthropos is an inward and upward bang into interiority, unity, and meaning. And again, last in execution is first in intention.

Cooking the Books: Postmodern Clowns and Reductive Jokers

Nearly every idea is an overdrawn check that circulates until it is presented for payment. –Dávila

Before banging off into Book II, let us recall that truth presupposes a relationship between two very different orders, on the one hand, the intellect, on the other, intelligible being. But in reality there must always be three, since relationship itself is equally primordial. Time out for Poetry Corner:

Who is the third who walks always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you.

Who is that masked pandit? The one gliding along with you wrapt in the fashionable mantle — the mysterious third which joins every two? Just try communicating anything about anything without a relationship between words and things or words and other minds, and you will find that it cannot actually be done. Therefore, we’ve already eliminated one possibility.

I suppose it’s a question of banking. Everyone spends money with the implicit faith that it is a symbol for actual wealth that has to exist somewhere. Of course, when the money detaches from real wealth we have inflation, but it’s the same with philosophy. When words are detached from reality, we have postmodernism, which is to say, an intellectual hyperinflation caused by torrents of words with no actual value.

Philosopher George Steiner wrote that “It is this break of the covenant between word and world which constitutes one of the very few revolutions of spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself.” He maintained that until the late 19th century, “even the most radical of skeptics remained committed to language, to a belief in intelligibility.”

Interesting words there, covenant and commitment, adverting to something sacred, almost like a marriage.

Almost?

Let’s call it a marriage of mind and world, or speech and thing, or Cosmos and Anthropos. Whatever it is, it is such a valued property that it is literally invaluable, since without it there is nothing to tie the world together. But postmodern nihilists have essentially stolen the Cosmic Area Rug by positing an absolute – note the word – fissure between words and the objects and events they are supposed to represent, with no compensation in return.

They problematize everything!

But isn’t reality a difficult enough problem without making it an impossible one? For if these nihilists were correct, we could no longer even say that reality is, much less what it is. These linguistic larcenists decree that meaning itself is over the line, so cosmotheandrism would be construed as a kind of tyrannical absolutism, even though they are the ones who place an absolute limit on what we can know. For them, speech is purely rhetorical and no longer representational, and therefore not about reality, only about itself. Thus, it is ultimately about nothing at all.

I’m old enough to remember when reality was the arbiter of speech. Now speech is the arbiter of a reality that is ruled out of bounds.

Speak for yourself!

You can’t do that either, because the author no longer speaks the language, rather language speaks the author. Gone is the logosphere, because that is maligned as a totalizing prison instead of the means out of it. Speech itself is bankrupt, rendering any metaphysical enterprise utterly impossible.

At antipodes to postmodernism are reductive thinkers who pretend to own the intellectual treasury but are counterfeiters issuing metaphysical funny money that is not backed by the full faith and credit of the First Bank of Reality. These scammers pass off a worldview using a currency (e.g., genetics and physical law) that only has value because the intellect authorized it in the first place.

I’m just gonna find a cash machine.

It’s not as simple as that, because the most important principles are what back the money to begin with. It is like putting a price on value itself and then selling it for something less valuable. You’re ultimately pretending it can be meaningful to exchange meaning for meaninglessness.

For example, the reductionist might exchange your one and only body for the chemical elements of which it is composed, which comes to about ten dollars or less. Of course, you could fetch $100,000 for a kidney, and much more than that for your heart. In fact, the value of a human body for the purpose – note the word – of transplant and tissue donation comes to a cool $5,000,000.

What about the value of your mind? Well, you can take it to the neurology department in exchange for a brain, but that is a rather Faustian bargain. In fact, the Neurology Savings & Loan can only issue you a check for consciousness that can’t be cashed back into its reality. Like the government, they owe money all over town, and always want more, but has it ever occurred to you that the promissory note says they are certain about naturalism or eliminativism, but when you ask for the gold backing – the proof that consciousness is just matter by another name – the check bounces? The whole thing stinks to high heaven.

Where’s the gold?! It’s all a goddamn fake.

Yes, it reveals the ultimate intellectual liquidity crisis for the secular worldview. Nor are these victimless intellectual crimes, rather it affects us all. Here we are, standing at the teller window attempting to make a withdrawal, only to find out that they practice a fractional reserve scheme with no baksheesh on hand to pay us what we’re owed – which is to say, an explanation of how anyone can even be standing in line at the Eliminativist Credit Union. Turns out they’ve lent huge sums of scientistic currency to the public, but have only a handful of physicalist pennies in the vault to back up the existence of the very customers who are not supposed to exist. The check bounces the moment they try to account for the immaterial mind of the physicist instead of just the material physics.

In short, they’ve run up a sizable debt spending conscious capital they haven’t earned to pay for a physicalist lifestyle no one can actually afford. To strain the metaphor another way, the numbers just don’t add up to the possibility of understanding them. To paraphrase Steiner, if all of the religious loans made to science were called in at once, there would be no science left standing. Most notably, science cannot operate without the principles of transcendent truth and the intellect capable of knowing it.

I think a metaphysical audit is in order for this Ponzi scheme. Somebody needs to call the Intellectual Revenue Service. Show us the books!

Yes, the fraud is indeed simple: promissory materialism takes the full value of conscious experience and deposits it into their vault. Then they lend it back to us in the form of biochemical or neurological explanations. But just try to convert that paper back into the actual experience of being alive, and they start to look suspiciously nervous. Turns out they simply don’t have the bones or clams or whatever you call them to account for you or for a world you can actually live in. They’ve already spent all the money, meanwhile issuing a perpetual IOU.

Time to foreclose on these fraudsters. They can’t balance the books. I suggest a cosmotheandric citizen’s arrest to stop these people before they rip off another generation!

I’m hoping that won’t be necessary. Why don’t we just write another book that will help the Anthropos from being defrauded in the first place by showing what he really is? For if you know who you are, no one can sell you a bill of goods claiming you’re something you’re not — for example, a wet bag of chemicals, or a transient and epiphenomenal nonentity, or a headful of ideas that are driving you insane about a reality you can never know, or an annoying questioner with no answer.

For to reduce the higher to the lower is much like trying to live inside your bank account, or to avoid starvation by eating money. And in the case of deconstruction, it is the mind trying to survive by eating itself.

Charles DeKoninck essentially deconstructs deconstruction in affirming 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 horizontal iterations of mindless matter, but in our vertical understanding of the Cosmos. Thus, in our subsequent installment we will explain how and why it is only in cosmotheandric understanding that we become human in the full sense.

I guess we can close the file on this one.

And open a file on the enigmatic character who is mixed up in this murky cosmotheandric business. It’s time to put the Anthropos under the lights and find out what he knows.

And what is known about him.

Which poses an interesting dilemma, because the suspect we want to interrogate is the very one who is conducting the interrogation.

A conflict of interest?

It certainly could be, unless our witness can view himself objectively from a transcendent position and give us some promising leads. For we are essentially trying to act as our own private snoop – to look at the Anthropos while looking through the Anthropos, so isn’t our best composite sketch going to be a bit sketchy?

The only way out of this self-referential loop would be if we could both enter into and rise above the subject, like the omniscient narrator of a novel. How could this be possible unless, as Dobzhansky says, “biological evolution has transcended itself in the human ‘revolution,’” such that “A new level or dimension has been reached”? Which implies that biocosmic evolution has fomented an anthropic revolution in which we are the unlikely participants. As a result of this unprecedented event, a trans-dimensional subjective space is suddenly refracted through the unlikely lens of a primate brain – an infinite landscape unmappable by science and unexplainable by natural selection.

Well, that about wraps her all up for now…